Speaker 1: Call zone media.
Speaker 2: Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were
Speaker 2: learning about growing up?
Speaker 3: Oh man, so many. I guess I enjoyed like Celtic
Speaker 3: things because that's like part of the world I'm from.
Speaker 2: I wasn't even that Celtic. I think she was Celtic,
Speaker 2: like a Celtic warrior queen. Bodicia.
Speaker 3: Bodicea is how people used to say it. Boudica, I think,
Speaker 3: is more accurate.
Speaker 2: That speed. Like she was someone who had resisted the
Speaker 2: Roman invasions, right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. Where my dad lives is like where
Speaker 3: the Romans built their border wall called Hadrian's Wall. And
Speaker 3: it's just kind of cool to be like, you know,
Speaker 3: the Romans brought their colonialism to all of Europe and
Speaker 3: they got here and I can't fucking do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It might've been, it might've been, they got to that
Speaker 3: part of the world and they were like, it's raining
Speaker 3: so fucking much. I want to go back to Italy. But, uh, yeah,
Speaker 3: it was just, it was always interesting to me to
Speaker 3: think of like, you know, the, the amount of, uh,
Speaker 3: modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization and then
Speaker 3: these people who were able to resist it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I remember as a child, I was a really
Speaker 2: big fan of Egypt, of course, I guess, classic.
Speaker 1: Of course.
Speaker 2: Greece, you can't go wrong. Yeah. Babylon. Big fan. I
Speaker 2: like the beards. Yeah. You know, very cool. Yeah. As
Speaker 2: someone who, you know, I grew up like with a
Speaker 2: voracious appetite for those living long ago, how people live
Speaker 2: in the past, like historical books, how people dressed, what
Speaker 2: they eat, how they live day to day. And a
Speaker 2: lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me as
Speaker 2: humanity's great achievements. You know, the magnificent architecture, the advances
Speaker 2: in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on.
Speaker 2: But as I got older and I started reading more
Speaker 2: history from below, rather than history through the lens of
Speaker 2: kings and empires, I learned more about life before civilization
Speaker 2: and outside of empire, and I really enjoyed became less
Speaker 2: interested in civilization as something to be held up as
Speaker 2: the pinnacle of what he wants to keep below. Although
Speaker 2: I am still very much interested in it as an idea,
Speaker 2: and how we think about and talk about it as
Speaker 2: an idea. And so this is It Could Happen Here.
Speaker 2: I am Andrew Sage, or Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by... James.
Speaker 3: People have already heard me sounding off, but yeah, it's
Speaker 3: nice to be here again.
Speaker 2: Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice. Yeah. And
Speaker 2: I want to talk about the meaning of civilization. If
Speaker 2: I were to ask you if you were civilized, how
Speaker 2: would you respond?
Speaker 3: I think I aspire not to be, but like, I
Speaker 3: have been raised in a society which very much proposed
Speaker 3: this binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized, right.
Speaker 3: I guess savage is a word you could use if
Speaker 3: you were looking at how that society portrayed it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: And like, even though I think British education and stuff
Speaker 3: wouldn't use that word anymore, it says a lot about
Speaker 3: like the state and its desire to shape narratives in
Speaker 3: its favor. Uh, so I think I would aspire to
Speaker 3: de-civilize myself, I guess. I'm not like anti-civ. in like
Speaker 3: big scheme of things but i think in the in
Speaker 3: the way that it's often used to describe indigenous peoples
Speaker 3: or peoples who are not under control of the state
Speaker 3: i don't like that very much.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's interesting to me because if you ask most
Speaker 2: people they'll probably just be like yes they would say
Speaker 2: yes without hesitation sure you know obviously we're not most
Speaker 2: people yeah yeah but You know, as you mentioned, like
Speaker 2: the alternative being, you know, the savage, that is something
Speaker 2: that has kind of fallen out of fashion. You know,
Speaker 2: that exact binary of civilized and savage is not in vogue,
Speaker 2: you know, it's not treated as something that you see.
Speaker 2: And yet we maintain one half of the binary as
Speaker 2: something to uphold. So we still say, you know, we
Speaker 2: are civilized, this is civilization, but you wouldn't as much
Speaker 2: see descriptions of the alternative, of the barbarian, the uncivilized,
Speaker 2: the savage, the primitive. I think you can ask people, like,
Speaker 2: what is civilization? What do you mean by being civilized?
Speaker 2: And it's a bit shaky. You know, it's one of
Speaker 2: those concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced,
Speaker 2: that not many people stop to interrogate it. You know,
Speaker 2: we throw the word around all the time and it
Speaker 2: can mean cities or technology or modernity or law or
Speaker 2: culture or the state or simply not being barbaric. Historically,
Speaker 2: it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks,
Speaker 2: I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone
Speaker 2: who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian. You know, China
Speaker 2: infamously treated... everything outside of China as barbarian.
Speaker 3: Yeah, isn't it like literally an onomatopoeia? Like, people are saying, like, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
Speaker 2: I think I've heard that story as well, yeah. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure how true it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not super familiar with, like, the sourcing on
Speaker 3: that one, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but, you know, the distinction of the civilized and
Speaker 2: barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history to
Speaker 2: justify conquest and colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the human race.
Speaker 2: White man's burden, quote unquote, was to bring civilization to
Speaker 2: the less advanced people. Yeah. Civilization being, of course, the
Speaker 2: most advanced stage of human social and cultural development, which
Speaker 2: to me is itself a hubris because I think that
Speaker 2: presumption that we made it, you know, we reach where
Speaker 2: we go and, you know, what we figured out here,
Speaker 2: this is it. Yeah. You know, I think that is
Speaker 2: a very damaging way of thinking. Definitely. And it's something
Speaker 2: that I think is embedded into a very popular perception
Speaker 2: of what civilization is. You know, usually, historically, civilization has
Speaker 2: also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, social
Speaker 2: stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture, and of course,
Speaker 2: the state. Yeah. Buried in many of these associations is
Speaker 2: the assumption that hierarchy is advanced, that this way of
Speaker 2: structuring human society is the destination we're always headed to.
Speaker 2: You know, we have this term in anthropology, stateless. The
Speaker 2: presumption being that lacking a state is itself, you know,
Speaker 2: something that perhaps needs to be rectified. I'm not saying
Speaker 2: that every anthropologist takes this perspective, but the words that
Speaker 2: we use carry certain connotations. And I think that for
Speaker 2: some people, particularly people raised in a civilization context, it's like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, they haven't reached where we have reached yet.
Speaker 2: They haven't gotten there yet. They haven't evolved to a
Speaker 2: point where they've developed a state yet. But that is
Speaker 2: the trajectory that they are on or are supposed to
Speaker 2: be on. The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and
Speaker 2: institutions your society has, the more advanced it is presumed
Speaker 2: to be. And then, of course, you have people like
Speaker 2: Samuel Huntington, who used civilization in this very broad sense
Speaker 2: as cultural identity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington
Speaker 3: as a human being and as a theorist, but.
Speaker 2: As do I, I mean.
Speaker 3: I think we all do.
Speaker 2: To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam...
Speaker 2: as a civilization, Hinduism as a civilization, Orthodoxy as a civilization.
Speaker 2: And then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is
Speaker 2: just one civilization, Tim. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I love that, like, Islam is a civilization and also, like,
Speaker 3: south of the Sahara is a civilization as if never
Speaker 3: the two shall meet, right? Like, famously, there were no
Speaker 3: Muslims in Africa. It's just like a.
Speaker 2: The maps that I've seen, he does have, like, Islam
Speaker 2: in Africa as well. If you ever look up the map,
Speaker 2: the map is awful. The map is just awful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the map, like, gives me fucking... Yeah, like, admittedly,
Speaker 3: it's been a long time since I've engaged. Yeah, Muslim
Speaker 3: and African. I guess, yeah, he includes a horn of
Speaker 3: Africa in Muslim. Fucking unbelievable. Yeah, Confucian... Japan just exists as, like, a...
Speaker 3: Like every other culture is like massively homogenized and then
Speaker 3: Japanese is like completely unique and it's a little bit
Speaker 3: in this little bubble.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. This is, that's such like, I'm sorry. Like
Speaker 2: that's so weeb coded to me. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged with
Speaker 3: the world coded, you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh yeah. The entire continent of Africa. Sure. Fine. Whatever.
Speaker 2: That's that's Africa. japan though like this japan is distinct
Speaker 2: from korea from china from the philippines from all of
Speaker 2: asia japan has its own thing yeah.
Speaker 3: From these places it's had exchange with for centuries yeah
Speaker 3: and then like the entirety of north america greenland western
Speaker 3: europe and australasia is just western the indigenous peoples there
Speaker 3: don't exist right like like are the the differences in
Speaker 3: those cultures yeah.
Speaker 2: Well western is code for white so yeah it's not
Speaker 2: surprising yeah that's that's definitely what he's doing there his
Speaker 2: famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated on
Speaker 2: clashes between these civilizations hence clashes civilizations be in The
Speaker 2: title of his book.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't find it very convincing. I don't think you
Speaker 2: do either. Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I'm not buying it, to be honest.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It treats these big cultural blobs as if they're
Speaker 2: unified entities and discrete entities when, you know, history has
Speaker 2: been a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence, migration,
Speaker 2: and transformation. Yeah. Yeah. Finally, for another perspective, I want
Speaker 2: to share on the subject of civilization. We have David Wengru,
Speaker 2: who many of you may know as the co-author of
Speaker 2: The Dawn of Everything. And for him, he argued that
Speaker 2: if we're going to keep using the word civilization, we
Speaker 2: should think of it as a product of interaction between societies.
Speaker 2: So through trade and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration,
Speaker 2: Civilization is like an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I
Speaker 2: think that is a somewhat idiosyncratic, but still compelling and
Speaker 2: somewhat familiar approach to the idea. Typically, people do think
Speaker 2: of civilizations as discrete entities, though. Yeah. At least in
Speaker 2: Lehman's perspective. But the field of anthropology and historical research
Speaker 2: I know is rife with comparative studies. And, you know,
Speaker 2: investigations of those very exchanges between societies. So as he
Speaker 2: is speaking from an anthropological perspective, I see why he
Speaker 2: would want to put forward that reframing. And the thing
Speaker 2: about definitions of words and connotations and stuff is none
Speaker 2: of it is really objectively correct. They're all just pointing
Speaker 2: to different things. And the way that we use language
Speaker 2: is always going to be subject to debate. I think
Speaker 2: the fact that we can't even agree on what civilization
Speaker 2: exactly is should probably make us a bit more cautious
Speaker 2: in how we make sweeping claims about it. And really,
Speaker 2: I feel I've heard about many of the words that
Speaker 2: we throw around so casually. But one consistency I've seen
Speaker 2: across most definitions of civilization is this packaging with, of course,
Speaker 2: the city, but also with ideas of advancement and development,
Speaker 2: which of course begs the question, advanced according to whom?
Speaker 2: measured by what standard? How do you actually quantify how
Speaker 2: much more advanced one society is compared to another? If
Speaker 2: the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies or
Speaker 2: industrial output, then yeah, sure, modern states score very highly
Speaker 2: in terms of advancement. But then we can ask, why
Speaker 2: should those be the specific metrics we use? Why not
Speaker 2: measure the advancement of a society according to how much
Speaker 2: leisure its members enjoy? or by how equal they are,
Speaker 2: or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem that
Speaker 2: they're embedded in, or by how much freedom regular people
Speaker 2: have over their own lives. You know, we can pick
Speaker 2: different measuring sticks and get different winners and losers in
Speaker 2: this competition of advancement. But the measuring stick we're working
Speaker 2: with when we speak of civilization clearly isn't very helpful
Speaker 2: for many of us. All societies are not working with
Speaker 2: the same measuring stick. despite the efforts to impose this capitalist,
Speaker 2: neoliberal measuring stick on everybody. You know, we have countless
Speaker 2: experiments and examples of different ways of organizing life across history,
Speaker 2: some lasting for centuries, others millennia, some expanding into empires,
Speaker 2: others staying small, some prioritizing equality, others prioritizing hierarchy, accumulation
Speaker 2: versus mobility. You know, we can't assume that All of
Speaker 2: humanity is trying to reach the same predetermined destination. So
Speaker 2: the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really
Speaker 2: cut it for me. But the language of civilization does
Speaker 2: work for the people that it serves. The people who
Speaker 2: see their society as the highest stage of human development,
Speaker 2: which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest
Speaker 2: and so on to bring development. And the same attitude
Speaker 2: which is extended to people by European colonial powers to
Speaker 2: invade these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them,
Speaker 2: to treat them as a lesser on the ladder of
Speaker 2: human development, that very same attitude extends beyond people to
Speaker 2: nature itself as something vile and unproductive and waiting to
Speaker 2: be mastered by civilisations. But one thing that's really stuck
Speaker 2: with me in reading, for instance, James E. Scott, which
Speaker 2: he talks about this in Against the Green, is just
Speaker 2: how fragile and not inevitable this civilizational development was, you know?
Speaker 2: These early states very often collapsed, very often fragmented. And
Speaker 2: for many people in those contexts, the collapse, quote unquote,
Speaker 2: was an escape to freedom. You know, it was something
Speaker 2: that gave them an opportunity to disperse and to create
Speaker 2: smaller communities and to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations
Speaker 2: to rulers. And so with all that history in mind,
Speaker 2: I find the concept of civilization, you know, something to
Speaker 2: think about, but certainly not something to idealize. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Something that just came to my mind is a speech
Speaker 3: that Daruti gave to the cops yesterday. On the eve
Speaker 3: of the Catalan revolution, right? So 19th of July. So
Speaker 3: the cops have been sent, right? They know that the
Speaker 3: military is going to rise up against them, right? They
Speaker 3: know that in the coming days that they will either
Speaker 3: have to fight their own military or accept the end
Speaker 3: of this like liberal democracy in Spain, right? This republic
Speaker 3: in Spain. The Catalan government has still sent the police
Speaker 3: to seize weapons from the anarchists, right, who are the
Speaker 3: most capable people of fighting this coup. They would rather
Speaker 3: state than no state, I guess, right? The state's always
Speaker 3: going to have more solidarity with the state than its constituents.
Speaker 3: And he says to the cobs, sometimes when we're given
Speaker 3: an order, we have to disobey it. And even if
Speaker 3: the order comes from a very big and important person,
Speaker 3: to translate, obviously, and paraphrase to, we civilize ourselves with disobedience.
Speaker 3: It's a really interesting phrase, right? To him, I guess,
Speaker 3: the concept of civilization is dignity and autonomy. The person
Speaker 3: who has given up their autonomy to the state is
Speaker 3: not civilized because they have given up that autonomy and
Speaker 3: allowed the state to be the one that makes their
Speaker 3: decisions for them, right? It's an alternative use.
Speaker 2: It's like an invasion, basically.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Like he's taken that term and said, like, it's fundamentally
Speaker 3: uncivilized of you to allow the state to be the
Speaker 3: one that makes the choices for you. It's just a
Speaker 3: really interesting, yeah, inversion of the terminology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I think it's curious because when I look at,
Speaker 2: for instance, there's this book, Civilized Death by Christopher Ryan,
Speaker 2: and he uses this concept of human domestication. Okay. And
Speaker 2: he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively bred
Speaker 2: and conditioned animals to fit into environments that we designed
Speaker 2: for our own purposes, civilization shaped us to fit the
Speaker 2: needs of these large hierarchical systems. Okay. You know, with
Speaker 2: sort of routines and obedience and punctuality for activity, dependence
Speaker 2: on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting to
Speaker 2: me that, you know, by Durruti's Freeman, the domestication of
Speaker 2: civilization is precisely what makes us uncivilized.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like the forced pacifism, I don't know how to
Speaker 3: say it, is what makes us uncivilized, it makes us undignified.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I guess that is another use or connotation
Speaker 2: associated with civilization that he's utilizing there, which is civilization
Speaker 2: as dignity.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: As being upright or dignified as a person. To be
Speaker 2: civilized is to be you know, a certain standard or
Speaker 2: caliber of person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly that, yeah.
Speaker 2: And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting
Speaker 2: that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions
Speaker 2: over which we have very little control over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like an interesting, like, inversion. I'm not sure
Speaker 3: how useful it is. Like, I'm not sure if it's
Speaker 3: a term anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting, you know.
Speaker 2: First thing, even if I find that an invasion is
Speaker 2: not necessarily practical in terms of day-to-day communication, I think
Speaker 2: playing with concepts, tinkering with concepts, invoking them, I think
Speaker 2: it's still useful in better grasping them. Yes. In better
Speaker 2: formulating our sense of what they are and what they
Speaker 2: are not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. Like the meaning of a word is something
Speaker 3: we co-create over time.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It's not like a, a fixed thing. And obviously we
Speaker 3: have these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words,
Speaker 3: but like language is just a way of communicating concepts.
Speaker 3: And so like we can, we co-create that meaning as
Speaker 3: we redefine those concepts.
Speaker 2: Exactly. so much of modern civilized life clearly isn't good
Speaker 2: for us i say that after stretching my back with
Speaker 2: you know great futility as i spent most of my
Speaker 2: day sitting yeah working at a desk You know, a
Speaker 2: lot of people are working jobs they find meaningless simply
Speaker 2: because they need the income to survive. You know, they
Speaker 2: are spending most of their working hours indoors, unexposed to
Speaker 2: fresh air. Yeah. If they even have fresh air outdoors
Speaker 2: because many of us live in urban environments where the
Speaker 2: standards of air quality are not the best. You could
Speaker 2: also speak of the rates of stress and loneliness and
Speaker 2: anxiety and depression and burnout. that have continued to rise
Speaker 2: even as our material wealth as societies, not necessarily as individuals,
Speaker 2: but as societies and our technological capabilities have both increased.
Speaker 2: I don't think you have to be a primitivist and
Speaker 2: advocate for some return to prehistory to recognize the negatives,
Speaker 2: the real same. And while I think many technological developments
Speaker 2: associated with civilization have genuinely improved people's lives, You know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes,
Speaker 2: the internet, especially for disabled people and those medical conditions
Speaker 2: that would otherwise be untreatable.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, these are very beneficial innovations. Yeah. I just
Speaker 2: don't think that civilization as we have structured and conceived
Speaker 2: of it has a monopoly on innovation. In his book,
Speaker 2: Wild Thoughts, Claude Lévi-Strauss had made the point that many
Speaker 2: of humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication,
Speaker 2: they were developed long before we conventionally think of as civilization.
Speaker 2: Human beings have always been creative, we've always experimented, we've
Speaker 2: always invented, and we always will. Everything that we can
Speaker 2: or should go back, because I mean, there are billions
Speaker 2: of us now, mostly in cities that are far from
Speaker 2: ecologically sustainable. But I think if we keep the history
Speaker 2: of our diverse social forms in mind, then as we
Speaker 2: go forward, we can try to preserve what genuinely enriches
Speaker 2: human life while leaving behind the institutions and assumptions that
Speaker 2: no longer do. By the way, do you by chance
Speaker 2: have a blueprint? for the future of our species?
Speaker 3: No, I don't think I do, other than working it
Speaker 3: out together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, me neither. Hoping someone might. I guess we'd have
Speaker 2: to figure that out together. Exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Maybe that is the blueprint.
Speaker 2: Exactly. I'm really not interested in seeing that there's one
Speaker 2: correct society that everybody has to adopt. Yeah. I think
Speaker 2: we can learn something from the incredible diversity of human
Speaker 2: societies that have existed And we can use that not
Speaker 2: for mimicry, but for inspiration. You know, to realize that
Speaker 2: we too can pursue these uncharted territories and develop something new.
Speaker 2: Or to take old concepts and stretch them into new forms.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2: The author Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael, had made
Speaker 2: a point that tribes... can be defined not by hunting
Speaker 2: and gathering or ethnicity, but as a social organization that
Speaker 2: allows people to make a living together. And so by
Speaker 2: this definition, people still today create tribal forms of organization
Speaker 2: all the time, whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups,
Speaker 2: intentional communities, wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs
Speaker 2: and shared purposes. One thing Quinn emphasizes is that these
Speaker 2: kinds of societies can be very flexible. You know, when
Speaker 2: these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can
Speaker 2: change them. We can walk away from them. We're not
Speaker 2: tied to them in the way that we are basically
Speaker 2: bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social
Speaker 2: contract with today. And so really, for me, that's what
Speaker 2: I want to focus on, a world where people have
Speaker 2: greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation, a
Speaker 2: world where organizations are things that people can freely join
Speaker 2: and reshape and split and leave, and they're no longer
Speaker 2: saving their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and,
Speaker 2: you know, megacity concentrations. I just want to know, you know,
Speaker 2: how we get from here to there together. And to me,
Speaker 2: that is something that requires... as I've said many times
Speaker 2: before on this podcast and on my YouTube channel, it
Speaker 2: requires opposition to systems of domination through confrontation and non-cooperation,
Speaker 2: through things like strikes and boycotts and other forms of resistance.
Speaker 2: And it also requires, on the other end of that equation,
Speaker 2: that we prefigure the world we want to live in
Speaker 2: by promoting certain ideas and philosophies. But more so by
Speaker 2: building the actual relationships and institutions we want to live
Speaker 2: in and be a part of. And I think that
Speaker 2: these are two processes that will reinforce each other. You know,
Speaker 2: people will see and experience different ways of organizing their lives,
Speaker 2: and that informs their ideology. They become more confident that
Speaker 2: these alternatives are possible, and it drives them to push
Speaker 2: them in new directions. So I say all that to
Speaker 2: say that The idea of civilization had its place and
Speaker 2: has had its time. But I think that we can
Speaker 2: let go of that old idea. You know, that we
Speaker 2: don't have to assume that there is no other alternative.
Speaker 2: And I think that requires not just a rejection, but
Speaker 2: an act of replacement. To make the cracks of the
Speaker 2: old order apparent... And to make the idea, the omni-idea
Speaker 2: of liberalism, capitalism, and civilization unconvincing by the presentation of
Speaker 2: this other alternative. I know some people might call that
Speaker 2: next thing a better civilization, but I would prefer there be,
Speaker 2: you know, didn't bind ourselves to that old terminology. At
Speaker 2: least that's how I try to approach it. And what
Speaker 2: about you? Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't think we should be beholden to these things
Speaker 3: that can hold us back. And as you say, we
Speaker 3: should be more focused in building the world that we
Speaker 3: want to live in and not so much building the
Speaker 3: world we've been told we should want to live in.
Speaker 3: Language can turn into a way of seeing the world.
Speaker 3: And I think we need to be careful of letting
Speaker 3: language determine how we see the world in a way
Speaker 3: that inherently limits our ability to create a better one.
Speaker 3: And I think this is a concept that we need
Speaker 3: to be very careful of like when, when it, when
Speaker 3: it comes to that and just like the inherent bigotry
Speaker 3: that came, came with a lot of civilization narratives.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I do like the idea that Scott talks about
Speaker 3: this a little bit, right. But like, in fact, it
Speaker 3: is people in states who are domesticated and they were
Speaker 3: domesticated by grain crops. Grain crops brought those people in,
Speaker 3: forced them to live in a certain place, forced them
Speaker 3: to live in a certain way, also so they could
Speaker 3: tend and care for grain crops.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think maybe flipping that around might help people understand
Speaker 3: a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a... I forget the name of
Speaker 2: the book. Is it Botany of Desire?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I read that a couple of years ago. And
Speaker 2: I think it was on that very subject. The idea
Speaker 2: that the plans that we've raised have in some ways
Speaker 2: domesticated us. Right. Just as we have domesticated them, it's
Speaker 2: been a reciprocal process.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like that idea.
Speaker 2: That, I think, was like a theme or an element
Speaker 2: of that book, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 3: Okay, nice, yeah.
Speaker 2: Or maybe it's a theme that I read into it.
Speaker 3: Right, either way, I think it's sometimes a useful way
Speaker 3: of seeing the world.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well.
Speaker 2: Play around with concepts, tinker with them, flip them upside down.
Speaker 2: And I think that is also how we innovate, how
Speaker 2: we create new things, new meaning. You know, there is this,
Speaker 2: I think it's a proverb, or it might be an Ecclesiastes,
Speaker 2: but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun. So
Speaker 2: it's like, creativity is just the ways that we repurpose
Speaker 2: what already exists. We build upon everything that came before.
Speaker 2: And we have to be willing to play around with
Speaker 2: it if we want to get to that point of Innovator. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's pretty much what I have for today. All power
Speaker 2: to all the people. Peace.
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