Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Hey, welcome to it could
Speaker 1: happen here. I'm Garrison, and today I'm gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about some really big things and ideas, but hopefully I'll
Speaker 1: be talking with them in a way that contextualizes them
Speaker 1: and makes you remember that despite their magnitude, there's still
Speaker 1: very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll
Speaker 1: get started and eventually it will kind of make sense.
Speaker 1: So right now we are all living in one massive
Speaker 1: liminal space. For those less online than I am, I'll
Speaker 1: explain what I mean. Liminal spaces became an online meme
Speaker 1: around late twenty nineteen as a term to describe a
Speaker 1: certain type of picture that features architecture or like just
Speaker 1: a place that looks off familiar, eerie, lonely, yet mesmerizing
Speaker 1: and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on the liminal
Speaker 1: space subredit for a while now, and there's an undeniable
Speaker 1: allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and rooms and
Speaker 1: the effect that they have on me. Describing what makes
Speaker 1: a liminal space photo a liminal space photo as opposed
Speaker 1: to just any other regular photo of a building or
Speaker 1: a room can be tricky because, in part the point
Speaker 1: is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking too much
Speaker 1: about the why they're not spooky or scary in the
Speaker 1: traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space photo and
Speaker 1: where it gets its name liminality, is a good place
Speaker 1: to begin to understand what type of feelings these pictures
Speaker 1: are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a transitional phase
Speaker 1: and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being inside of
Speaker 1: a threshold, not on either one side, per se, but
Speaker 1: somewhere in between. Now, that threshold can be many things.
Speaker 1: A literal transitionary threshold between certain places is a common one.
Speaker 1: This can include stuff like hallways and airports. One of
Speaker 1: my favorites, though, is a threshold between time, an ambiguous,
Speaker 1: unspecific nostalgia. You can't quite place, but it feels awfully familiar,
Speaker 1: like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird indoor, squishy
Speaker 1: playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a
Speaker 1: threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room
Speaker 1: designed for a very specific special purpose but now no
Speaker 1: longer serving that it's empty and out of date, an
Speaker 1: abandoned mall, or cheery birthday party room at an arcade
Speaker 1: photographed desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects
Speaker 1: of liminal space photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned.
Speaker 1: Usually they have no visible people, and there's a sense
Speaker 1: of artificiality, like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting,
Speaker 1: and even when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake,
Speaker 1: like a Windows computer screensaver. One of the most popular
Speaker 1: liminal space photos is of an underground bunker in Las
Speaker 1: Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's
Speaker 1: outside despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such
Speaker 1: a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a
Speaker 1: certain type of cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of
Speaker 1: synchronicity that is difficult to describe otherwise. Almos never is
Speaker 1: quote unquote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly
Speaker 1: exclusively focus on very human constructs, particularly ones that no
Speaker 1: longer serve their intended use or maybe never did in
Speaker 1: the first place. So what do I mean by we're
Speaker 1: all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we
Speaker 1: are in between a historic economic and technological boom, one
Speaker 1: that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old. But
Speaker 1: on the other side of this valley is global climate
Speaker 1: catastrophe and destruction and change, the likes of which humans
Speaker 1: have possibly never seen or at least remembered. We're in
Speaker 1: the transitionary period between these two states, and that disassociation
Speaker 1: and not being fully in either one, that that cognitive
Speaker 1: dissonance can be kind of mind boggling. It's like the
Speaker 1: nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak,
Speaker 1: or that weird feeling of being alone in an empty
Speaker 1: church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate
Speaker 1: change transcends a regular perception of time space, and with
Speaker 1: that cause and effect, it's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon,
Speaker 1: or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher Timothy
Speaker 1: Morton dubbed these massive space time altering objects as hyper objects. Now,
Speaker 1: Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly,
Speaker 1: so really the only way to discuss it or get
Speaker 1: into the topic is to orbit around it, associating with
Speaker 1: adjacent ideas or words to get close enough to the
Speaker 1: topic to partially understand it, even if you can't get
Speaker 1: quite there. Other possible examples of hyper objects besides climate change,
Speaker 1: can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere, or the
Speaker 1: solar system. But hyper objects don't need to be just
Speaker 1: massive celestial things. They can also be the sum total
Speaker 1: of all nuclear materials on Earth, or the very long
Speaker 1: lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as all of
Speaker 1: the styroform of plastic bags in the world. It can
Speaker 1: also be the sum of all the whirling machinery of
Speaker 1: capitalism or the state. Hyper objects, then, are hyper just
Speaker 1: in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly manufactured
Speaker 1: by humans or not. And hyper objects aren't just collections,
Speaker 1: systems or assemblages of other objects. They are things in
Speaker 1: their own right, and they affect more than just humans.
Speaker 1: They don't come into being just because humans notice them.
Speaker 1: They will have effects on the world whether or not
Speaker 1: they are observed One of the more obvious differences between
Speaker 1: hyper objects and ordinary objects that you can't ever actually
Speaker 1: see a hyper object in its totality. You can only
Speaker 1: ever witness a small extension or piece of a hyper object. Now,
Speaker 1: this makes thinking about them kind of intrinsically tricky. It's
Speaker 1: like only seeing a fragmented shadow of a thing and
Speaker 1: the effects that that thing has on all other things. Now,
Speaker 1: the more contrarian listeners might protest that we never see
Speaker 1: all of any object, even ordinary ones. Now, it's obviously
Speaker 1: true that everything we see has a negative side, the
Speaker 1: part behind that we can't actually always look at, but
Speaker 1: can reasonably assume is there. Now, the difference is that
Speaker 1: hyper objects transcend not only a regular conception of physical reality,
Speaker 1: but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a
Speaker 1: coffee monk and rotate it around in a pretty short
Speaker 1: amount of time and witnessed each side and angle, Or
Speaker 1: if you wanted to get really fancy, you could make
Speaker 1: a three sixty scan so you can see a projected
Speaker 1: version of the entire object, Or you know more, simply
Speaker 1: just get three people in a room to all look
Speaker 1: at different sides of the mug, thus forming a consensual
Speaker 1: reality based understanding of the whole object. Now, not only
Speaker 1: can you not hold a hyper object, but even if
Speaker 1: you could, the temporal effects would make it impossible to
Speaker 1: rotate it around to witness the totality of what's being held,
Speaker 1: and it would be way too big for multip people
Speaker 1: to ever witness all sides of the thing. Quoting from
Speaker 1: Morton's book hyper Objects, The Philosophy and Ecology After the
Speaker 1: End of the World, quote, consider raindrops. You can feel
Speaker 1: them on your head, but you can't perceive the actual
Speaker 1: raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive your particular
Speaker 1: anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar to the
Speaker 1: rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head,
Speaker 1: and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns
Speaker 1: of weather, but the entire system. I can think of
Speaker 1: an compute climate in this sense, but I can't directly
Speaker 1: see or touch it. The gap between the phenomenon and
Speaker 1: the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my sense of presence
Speaker 1: and being in the world. Humans have been aware of
Speaker 1: enormous entities, some realism imagined for as long as we
Speaker 1: have existed, but this book is arguing that there is
Speaker 1: something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate.
Speaker 1: These entities directly cause us to reflect on our very
Speaker 1: place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is
Speaker 1: the most fundamental issue. Hyper objects seem to force something
Speaker 1: on us, something that affects some core idea of what
Speaker 1: it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is.
Speaker 1: There's no doubt that cosmic phenomenon such as meteors and
Speaker 1: blood red moons, tsunamis, tornadoes, and earthquakes have terrified humans.
Speaker 1: In the past, meteors and comets were known as does asters. Literally,
Speaker 1: a disaster is a fallen, dysfunctional, or dangerous or evil
Speaker 1: star disaster. But such disasters take place against a stable backdrop.
Speaker 1: There is the Ptolemaic Aristolian machinery of the stars, which
Speaker 1: hold fixed stars in place. It seems as if there's
Speaker 1: something about hyper objects that is more deeply challenging than
Speaker 1: these disasters. The worry is not whether the world will end,
Speaker 1: as in the old models of the disaster, but whether
Speaker 1: the end of the world is already happening, or whether
Speaker 1: perhaps it might have already taken place. A deep shuttering
Speaker 1: of temporality than occurs. For one thing, we are inside
Speaker 1: hyper objects like Jonah in the Whale. This means that
Speaker 1: every decision we make is in some sense related to
Speaker 1: hyper objects. These decisions are not merely limited to sentences
Speaker 1: and to be about hyper objects. When I turned the
Speaker 1: key in the Ignition of my Car, I am relating
Speaker 1: to global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration
Speaker 1: to Mars, they are relating to global warming. I am
Speaker 1: one of the entities caught in the hyper object that
Speaker 1: I here call global warming. Different hyper objects have numerous
Speaker 1: properties in common, but for our purposes we're going to
Speaker 1: discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyper Objects are viscous,
Speaker 1: meaning they stick to beings that are involved with them.
Speaker 1: They are nonlocal, in other words, and any local manifestation
Speaker 1: of the hyper object is not directly the hyper object.
Speaker 1: They involve very different temporalities than the human scale ones
Speaker 1: that were used to In particular, some very very large
Speaker 1: hyper objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate space
Speaker 1: time vortexes due to general relativity, and hyper objects are
Speaker 1: ocupy a higher dimensional phase space that results in their
Speaker 1: being invisible to humans for structures of time, and they
Speaker 1: exhibit their effects inter objectively. That is, they can be
Speaker 1: detected in a space that consists of inter relationships between
Speaker 1: aesthetic properties of objects. The hyper object is not just
Speaker 1: a function of our knowledge. It is also hyper relative
Speaker 1: to worms, lemons, and ultra violet rays as well as humans.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to go into the five different points
Speaker 1: of similarity in more detail to kind of help flesh
Speaker 1: out what these things hyper objects, what they are, and
Speaker 1: how they might actually be a useful way to think
Speaker 1: about really big stuff. So, first off, viscous hyper objects
Speaker 1: adhere to any object they touch, no matter how hard
Speaker 1: the objects tries to resist. In this way, hyper objects
Speaker 1: overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries
Speaker 1: to resist a hyper object, the more glued to the
Speaker 1: hyper object it becomes. Now, the more you learn about
Speaker 1: any big topic, the more you'll end up noticing it
Speaker 1: in the world. This is the law of synchronicity. But
Speaker 1: the more you know about climate change, the more you
Speaker 1: realize how perversive it is. The more you discover about evolution,
Speaker 1: the more you realize how much our entire physical being
Speaker 1: is caught in its meshwork. Immediate intimate symptoms of hyper
Speaker 1: objects are very real, vivid, and often painful. Yet they
Speaker 1: carry with them this trace of unreality. A good example
Speaker 1: of hyper object viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more
Speaker 1: you try to get rid of them, the more you
Speaker 1: realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion of a
Speaker 1: way there is no away. Flushing vomit down the toilet
Speaker 1: doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way to the
Speaker 1: ocean or the water treatment facility, and eventually just back
Speaker 1: to us. Again. I'll quote from the book hyper Objects
Speaker 1: quote late itself is the most viscous thing of all,
Speaker 1: since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartra's jar
Speaker 1: of honey par excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our
Speaker 1: bone structure as it seeps around us. Again, it's not
Speaker 1: a matter of making some suicidal leap into the honey,
Speaker 1: but discovering that we are already inside it. This is it, folks,
Speaker 1: This is the ecological interconnectedness. Come in and join the fun.
Speaker 1: But I see that you're already here. Unquote. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: is a that's fun. The next point of similarity where
Speaker 1: to discussed, is the molten or Gaussian quality. Hyper Objects
Speaker 1: are time stretched to such an extent that they become
Speaker 1: impossible to hold in the mind. Hyper objects are so
Speaker 1: massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete,
Speaker 1: and consistent. The size of hyper objects can make them
Speaker 1: basically invisible, just because they're so big. It's like swimming
Speaker 1: in Crater Lake in southern Oregon, one of the deepest
Speaker 1: lakes in the world. But it's not just deep, it's
Speaker 1: also very very clear. So the water is so deep
Speaker 1: yet so clear. It's like you're swimming in the sky.
Speaker 1: It's like you're swimming in nothing. It would be like
Speaker 1: if you approach an object and more and more objects
Speaker 1: emerge because we can't see the end of them. Hyper
Speaker 1: objects are necessarily uncanny. They have to be. Just like
Speaker 1: my favorite liminal space photos. Hyper objects seem to beckon
Speaker 1: us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already
Speaker 1: lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in hyper
Speaker 1: objects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and a
Speaker 1: familiar strangeness. Next up is non locality. Hyper objects are
Speaker 1: massively distributed in time and space, such as any particular
Speaker 1: local manifestation never actually reveals the totality of the hyper object.
Speaker 1: For example, climate change is a hyper object that impacts
Speaker 1: meteorological conditions, such as tornado formations. Objects don't feel climate change,
Speaker 1: but instead experienced tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus,
Speaker 1: nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyper object becomes
Speaker 1: more substantial than the local manifestations that they produce, putting
Speaker 1: moreton again. For a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves
Speaker 1: a strange shade of red. Global warming for the tomato
Speaker 1: farmer rots the tomatoes. Plastic for the bird, strangles it
Speaker 1: as it becomes entangled in the set of six pack rings.
Speaker 1: What we are really dealing with here are just the
Speaker 1: aesthetic effects that are directly causal the octopus of the
Speaker 1: hyper object amidst a cloud of ink as it withdrawals
Speaker 1: from access. Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud
Speaker 1: of its effects and effects. These phenomenon themselves are not
Speaker 1: global warming or radiation. Action at a distance is involved.
Speaker 1: It's like confusing the map with the territory. Type of
Speaker 1: objects cannot be thought up as occupying a series of
Speaker 1: now points in time or space. They confound the social
Speaker 1: and psychic instruments we use to measure them. Even digital
Speaker 1: devices have trouble. Global warming is not just a function
Speaker 1: of our measuring devices. Yet, because it's distributed across the
Speaker 1: biosphere and beyond, it's hard to see it as a
Speaker 1: unique entity. And yet there it is raining down on us,
Speaker 1: burning down on us, quaking the earth, spawning giant hurricanes.
Speaker 1: Global warming is an object of which many things are
Speaker 1: distributed pieces, the rain drops falling on my head in
Speaker 1: northern California, the tsunami that pours through the streets of
Speaker 1: Japanese towns, the increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure
Speaker 1: on the ocean floor like a moving illusion picture. Glibal
Speaker 1: warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective
Speaker 1: shift for us to see it. Convincing some people of
Speaker 1: its existence is like convincing some two dimensional flatland people
Speaker 1: of the existence of apples based on the appearance of
Speaker 1: a morphing circular shape in their world. Next point of
Speaker 1: similarity is phasing. So our sense of being in a
Speaker 1: time and inhabiting a place depends on forms of regularity,
Speaker 1: the periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun coming up.
Speaker 1: Only now we know that it doesn't really come up.
Speaker 1: It's now common knowledge that the moon's phases are just
Speaker 1: the relationship between the Earth and the Moon as circumnavigate
Speaker 1: to the Sun. Hyper objects seem to phase in and
Speaker 1: out of the human world. They occupy a higher dimensional
Speaker 1: phase space that makes them impossible to see as a
Speaker 1: whole on our regular three dimensional human scale basis, but
Speaker 1: they might appear differently to an observer with a higher
Speaker 1: dimensional view. We can only see pieces of a hyper
Speaker 1: object at a time. The reason why they appear non
Speaker 1: local and temporarily for shortened is precisely because of this
Speaker 1: trans dimensional quality. We can only see pieces of them
Speaker 1: at once, like a tsunami or a taste of radiation sickness.
Speaker 1: If an apple were to invade a two dimensional world,
Speaker 1: first the stick people would see some dots as the
Speaker 1: bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then a
Speaker 1: rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding
Speaker 1: and contracting circular blob, diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly
Speaker 1: a point, and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly
Speaker 1: see climate change. You would need to occupy some higher
Speaker 1: dimensional space to see the hyper object unfolding explicitly. Like
Speaker 1: the people in the two dimensional flat land, we can
Speaker 1: only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it
Speaker 1: intersects with our world. The brief patch called hurricane destroys
Speaker 1: the infrastructure of New Orleans. The brief patch called drought
Speaker 1: burns the plains of Russia and the Midwestern United States
Speaker 1: to a crisp our. Bodies itch with yesterday's sunburn. But
Speaker 1: don't relegate hyper objects as a simple abstract notion. The
Speaker 1: game of hyper objects as transdimensional real things is valuable.
Speaker 1: Global warming is not simply a mathematical abstraction that doesn't
Speaker 1: really pertain to this world. Hyper Objects don't just inhabit
Speaker 1: some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They
Speaker 1: are real objects that affect other objects. We tend to
Speaker 1: only think about hyper objects as they phase in and
Speaker 1: connect to other, more static objects. This is a mistake
Speaker 1: and contributes to non action. Whether or not we perceive
Speaker 1: objects and hyper objects connecting doesn't affect the existence and
Speaker 1: the inevitable effects of the hyper object. What we experience
Speaker 1: as the slow periodic re occurrence of a celestial event
Speaker 1: such as an eclipse or a comet, is a continuous
Speaker 1: entity whose imprint simply shows up on our social and
Speaker 1: cognitive space for a while. The gaps I perceive between
Speaker 1: moments at which my mind is aware of the hyper object,
Speaker 1: and moments at which it isn't do not matter in
Speaker 1: relation to the hyper object itself. Okay, and now onto
Speaker 1: our final point of similarity. Inter Objective hyper objects are
Speaker 1: formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects
Speaker 1: are only able to perceive the imprint or foot print
Speaker 1: of a hyper object upon other objects revealed as information.
Speaker 1: It's all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and inter objectivity.
Speaker 1: For example, climate change is formed by interactions between the sun,
Speaker 1: fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet
Speaker 1: climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes,
Speaker 1: and the sea level rising, making it seem as if
Speaker 1: global warming is a product of scientific models rather than
Speaker 1: connected to an object that predates its own measurement. Hyper
Speaker 1: Objects exist in and between objects and things we deal
Speaker 1: with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic
Speaker 1: bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined.
Speaker 1: Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a
Speaker 1: shadow like local manifestation of it. A mesh consists of
Speaker 1: relationships between criss crossing strands and the gaps between strands.
Speaker 1: Meshes are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things,
Speaker 1: and interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission
Speaker 1: of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences.
Speaker 1: When an object is born, it is instantly meshed into
Speaker 1: a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The mesh
Speaker 1: isn't inside of all things, but it's on the edge
Speaker 1: or floats on top of all things. Inter objective mesh
Speaker 1: is the extra connecting layer between the mass and the
Speaker 1: mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia.
Speaker 1: Inter objectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front
Speaker 1: of objects in which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness
Speaker 1: and distribution of hyper objects simply force us to take
Speaker 1: note of this fact. Hyper objects provide great examples of
Speaker 1: inter objectivity, namely the way in which nothing has ever
Speaker 1: experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in
Speaker 1: some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself,
Speaker 1: only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees.
Speaker 1: This means that for every objective system, there is at
Speaker 1: least one entity that is withdrawn from the relationship. We
Speaker 1: see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient
Speaker 1: rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaur's
Speaker 1: reality exists inter objectively. There is some form of shared
Speaker 1: space between the rock, ourselves, and the dinosaur, even though
Speaker 1: the dinosaur isn't there directly. The print of a dinosaur's
Speaker 1: foot in the mud is seen as a foot shaped
Speaker 1: whole in a rock by humans sixty five million years later.
Speaker 1: There is some sensuous connection then, between the dinosaur, the rock,
Speaker 1: and the human, despite their vastly differing time scales. The
Speaker 1: dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather,
Speaker 1: the footprint is a trace of the hyper object evolution
Speaker 1: that joins me, the dinosaur, and the mud together, along
Speaker 1: with the intentional act of holding them in the mind.
Speaker 1: I found the hyper object banner as a useful tool
Speaker 1: to help my brain think about things that are just
Speaker 1: too big, things that have effects so spaced out in
Speaker 1: time that using our ordinary models of thought are just inadequate.
Speaker 1: You can also reconcile the opposing views that cast climate
Speaker 1: change as the very real series of disasters or are
Speaker 1: a complicated, interlocking mess of systems that can feel very
Speaker 1: unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as abstract
Speaker 1: systems has the habit of divorcing you from the real
Speaker 1: world impacts things like hyper objects can cause. Sometimes we
Speaker 1: forget that climate change is a thing we interact with
Speaker 1: every day and can inform choices we make. Now the
Speaker 1: almost impossible to comprehend totality of our situation. It's not
Speaker 1: great for mental well being. You can end up tail
Speaker 1: spinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping, denial,
Speaker 1: and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into
Speaker 1: a void of negation. Things that are hyper objects fundamentally
Speaker 1: break our conception of reality temporality and cause an effect.
Speaker 1: And it's already a really weird time to try to
Speaker 1: suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and
Speaker 1: services trying to usurp the real That's what Mark Kotting is.
Speaker 1: You know, first we had the Internet with its limitless
Speaker 1: possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world
Speaker 1: of social media with all of its fractured and fractal realities.
Speaker 1: There's a massive gaming and the allure of getting lost
Speaker 1: within thousands of unique worlds. And now we have VR
Speaker 1: a R and the metaverse, more layers of digital fabrication
Speaker 1: trying to be passed off as an almost hyper reality,
Speaker 1: a promise to make a reality even more real and
Speaker 1: immersive than our status quo. The Internet itself is another
Speaker 1: hyper object, and all this extra reality can take a
Speaker 1: strain on the human mind. De realization, the perception that
Speaker 1: actual waking reality is an artificial construct. The feeling of
Speaker 1: being de attached from your surroundings, like the world's made
Speaker 1: of cardboard, or you're looking at everything through a cloud
Speaker 1: of fog, is becoming more and more common, especially among
Speaker 1: so called gen Z, the generation that drew up with
Speaker 1: the Internet being a staple of life. Now. How we
Speaker 1: got here is a disassociation between humans and what we
Speaker 1: call nature or the environment. The problems aren't getting fixed
Speaker 1: because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as the
Speaker 1: effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of all
Speaker 1: things makes this worse. All of the worst effects the
Speaker 1: climate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: And that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance
Speaker 1: that I don't know how to understand that, and that
Speaker 1: makes making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet
Speaker 1: also urgent. It's both and it's neither, and it's confusing.
Speaker 1: The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. It
Speaker 1: produces this lack of immediate and close and proximity consequences.
Speaker 1: We must purposely remove these layers of separation and abandoned
Speaker 1: our anthropocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature,
Speaker 1: It's the same thing. We are all part of this
Speaker 1: big mesh. This, this sacred idea of nature isn't natural
Speaker 1: and can never be naturalized. We have to learn how
Speaker 1: to have an ecology without nature, with without nature as
Speaker 1: a separate thing. To have a genuine ecological view, we
Speaker 1: must relinquish this idea that nature being separate from us,
Speaker 1: once and for all. We have to kill the anthroprosyne
Speaker 1: in our own head. A quote from one of Morton's
Speaker 1: other books titled Ecology Without Nature. Putting something called nature
Speaker 1: on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for
Speaker 1: the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of a woman.
Speaker 1: It's a paradoxical act of sadistic, possessive admiration unquote. So
Speaker 1: within more, in branch of philosophy, reification, the making of
Speaker 1: a thing into a thing is precisely the reduction of
Speaker 1: a real object to its sensual appearance for another object.
Speaker 1: Reification is reduction of one's entity to another's fantasy about it.
Speaker 1: Nature is a realification in this sense, and that's why
Speaker 1: we need an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn
Speaker 1: nature into something more fluid, it might work. Now, most
Speaker 1: of our modern political discourse can be boiled down to
Speaker 1: what things are real and what things are not. Hyper
Speaker 1: objects and climate change don't just play into this debate,
Speaker 1: but crash into it, decimating all the other toys in
Speaker 1: this sandbox. As Morton says, the threat of global warming
Speaker 1: is not only political but also ontological. The threat of
Speaker 1: unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And oh boy,
Speaker 1: do we be experiencing this simultaneous disillusionment of reality and
Speaker 1: the overwhelmingly real presence of hyper objects which stick to us,
Speaker 1: which are us. The worry is not whether the world
Speaker 1: will end, but whether the end of the world is
Speaker 1: already happening, or whether perhaps they might have already taken place.
Speaker 1: The idea of the end of the world is very
Speaker 1: active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind
Speaker 1: of fosters its own negation. The end of the world
Speaker 1: is coming idea is not really effective, since to all
Speaker 1: types of purposes, the being that we are supposed to
Speaker 1: feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone.
Speaker 1: This does not mean that there's no hope for ecological
Speaker 1: politics and ethics and a better future. Far from it.
Speaker 1: In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly
Speaker 1: held belief that the world's about to end unless we
Speaker 1: act now is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors
Speaker 1: that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here
Speaker 1: on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyper object concept
Speaker 1: is to then awaken us from this dream that the
Speaker 1: world's about to end, because action on Earth, like the
Speaker 1: real Earth, depends on it, the end of the world
Speaker 1: has already happened. Using the hyper object idea helps sort
Speaker 1: out these overly systematic things into a package that I
Speaker 1: can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language
Speaker 1: for a feeling, being able to name it that is
Speaker 1: empowering a way of finding handhold in the dim light
Speaker 1: of confusion, rather than scrambling around in the dark. So
Speaker 1: how would you convince two dimensional flatland people of the
Speaker 1: existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of
Speaker 1: a morphing circular shape in their world. Now, hyper objects
Speaker 1: can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around to
Speaker 1: climate and a nial. You can't point to something like
Speaker 1: rising sea levels and say that is climate change, because yeah,
Speaker 1: that isn't climate change. The hyper object rising sea levels
Speaker 1: are just an environmental effect, and since the effects are
Speaker 1: so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of
Speaker 1: room for cognitive dissonance. When people point at extreme weather
Speaker 1: and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology.
Speaker 1: Are seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations,
Speaker 1: missing the fact that almost all of our problems don't
Speaker 1: have a shared root cause, but instead are just part
Speaker 1: of a massive, shared bungee cord like mesh network. When
Speaker 1: so many local manifesting problems and actual disasters are blamed
Speaker 1: on climate change, even if you believe climate change is
Speaker 1: the cause, which you know it is, it still feels
Speaker 1: weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's
Speaker 1: such an amorphous shape shifting time traveling idea that for
Speaker 1: the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing very real physical
Speaker 1: effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard.
Speaker 1: For them and their understanding of reality. For many people,
Speaker 1: rejecting hyper objects is a lot easier than thinking about them,
Speaker 1: because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to
Speaker 1: problems so displaced in time it's not only difficult but
Speaker 1: encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the
Speaker 1: air right now won't reach their full effects for decades
Speaker 1: and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem.
Speaker 1: In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The
Speaker 1: cause is our brief luxury, and the effect is terror
Speaker 1: forming the world. And we are right now caught in
Speaker 1: between the uncanny hyper object of all liminal spaces. The
Speaker 1: end of the world has already happened. We are on
Speaker 1: the path and about to enter a new world. We
Speaker 1: are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal space hallways.
Speaker 1: The door behind us is closed, and at the other
Speaker 1: end of the hallway is a black hole. We cannot
Speaker 1: backtrack and re enter the door behind us. Already are
Speaker 1: we getting sucked forward into the hallway. But there are
Speaker 1: many doors ahead of us, and we get to choose
Speaker 1: which one to open. At this point, we have passed
Speaker 1: some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked into
Speaker 1: thinking that there are none left. We must not focus
Speaker 1: on preserving an old way of life, but instead need
Speaker 1: to carefully carve out our new reality. We need to
Speaker 1: pick our new door. Well, that is my essay. Read
Speaker 1: thing episode amalcamation about hyper objects, liminal spaces, and our
Speaker 1: new reality. I hope you found some of the ideas useful,
Speaker 1: um despite their kind of abstract and anti abstract and nature.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about this, I would
Speaker 1: recommend reading Timothy Morton's book hyper Objects Um. It is
Speaker 1: an academic read, but it's not that bad. I would
Speaker 1: I would recommend picking up if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them
Speaker 1: more in the future. Thank you for listening. Everybody, see
Speaker 1: you on the other side. Hey, yeah, welcome to it
Speaker 1: Could Happen Here podcast. I'm Robert Evans. So is that it?
Speaker 1: I'm fortunate. I'm so sorry. We just apologize really quick.
Speaker 1: That's a lot to take in. No, that was a
Speaker 1: good introduction. That was a good introduction. We got across
Speaker 1: the gist. Who else is here with you? That's a
Speaker 1: great question. Is Garrison here? Yeah? I think they're here.
Speaker 1: Is Chris here is saying Andrew here, I am indeed excellent. Um,
Speaker 1: why don't you take over and do and do my
Speaker 1: job for me? That sounds awesome, actually good idea, fantastic,
Speaker 1: it was happening everybody, I am saying Andrew back to
Speaker 1: guest host yet again. Um, last time we spoke about
Speaker 1: you know, uh soft climate change, Nile and continue at
Speaker 1: the theme of me talking about whatever I want to
Speaker 1: talk about as food contractual obblication. Um. Today I wanted
Speaker 1: to explode a concept that I brought up one of
Speaker 1: my recent videos, UM, self and community actualization. Yeah right,
Speaker 1: So first we needs getting some context, of course. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean when most people hear self actualization, they probably
Speaker 1: think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, the famous permit
Speaker 1: that management uh staff tend to use up in their
Speaker 1: offices and such Los Angeles yoga ladies. Uh. The context
Speaker 1: in which I've heard self actualization the most Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: that whole group kind of you know yeah. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: so self actualization massve hierarchy of needs, the old psych
Speaker 1: one on one stuff, you know. I mean, it's traditionally
Speaker 1: represented as a pyramid, but it was never how Maslow
Speaker 1: himself actually depicted it. Um. It was actually something that
Speaker 1: later in two parts of his work, ran with and popularized. UM.
Speaker 1: And so that as a result of that pramid, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of you know, critiques of Master's theory
Speaker 1: that don't quite engage with his theory, would rather engage
Speaker 1: with like interpretations of his theory by other people. But um,
Speaker 1: you know, I think it's still an interesting way to
Speaker 1: depict human needs. And I think it's a good launching
Speaker 1: point to start thinking about and start discussing, you know,
Speaker 1: human needs. Um what you'll think you'll are on the
Speaker 1: pyramid right now, just for posterity's sake, Oh, right up
Speaker 1: on the tippy top. I mean, I'm like I've been.
Speaker 1: I've been. I've been very lucky to do exactly like
Speaker 1: what I want to do for a living most of
Speaker 1: my life. And and now I own goats. So it
Speaker 1: doesn't get anything that including one absolute unit. He's fucking massive.
Speaker 1: He's a chunky buddy. What about Karen. Yes, I really don't, No,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't spend too much time thinking about
Speaker 1: models like this, especially around kind of my own my
Speaker 1: own goals, um, and like where I see myself. Um, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I'm i'm I'm doing like
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm relatively stable with my like actual physical needs. Um,
Speaker 1: so I guess yeah, I'm just trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what I actually want out of life, like a lot
Speaker 1: of younger people do. I guess, right, right, So I
Speaker 1: guess that's more on the m esteem or yes, self
Speaker 1: asunization side of things. Yeah, And it's harder because you
Speaker 1: can say, like, well, within the context of like what
Speaker 1: is possible, I'm I'm I'm aware, I want to be
Speaker 1: and I'm doing stuff that I want to be doing,
Speaker 1: but also everything feels like a disaster around me all
Speaker 1: the time because yeah, the time simon, which makes it
Speaker 1: difficult to be is right. I was about to say,
Speaker 1: is anybody really on the safe he needs category of
Speaker 1: of the pyramid? I mean some people like absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: but this group, I mean yeah, like we we we are.
Speaker 1: There's like a weird there's like a weird disassociation between
Speaker 1: what's actually going on and what we know could be
Speaker 1: going on in like the larger sphere. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's a very good way of thinking about it. Is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: my immediate needs are met, am I very concerned that
Speaker 1: large chunks of the places I love will be unlivable,
Speaker 1: and you know there will be that we're kind of
Speaker 1: staring in the face of a variety of calamities that
Speaker 1: that could uh make everything worse for me and everybody
Speaker 1: I care about, absolutely, but I can't do anything about that, right.
Speaker 1: The other thing I was going to point out is
Speaker 1: that with like with like, the physio needs is that
Speaker 1: includes sleep. Okay, well, this is who you're talking about,
Speaker 1: being the sun shining down on the pyramid and it
Speaker 1: gets up there, you know, the sleep. The sleep scientists
Speaker 1: have had their pockets in big bed for far too long,
Speaker 1: exactly the cozy industrial complex problem. It's fine, I was
Speaker 1: just gonna say something else, So I was gonna say that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the pyramid, as we are discovering in this
Speaker 1: conversation doesn't really accurately map out you know, needs and
Speaker 1: human psychology really because I mean not just because our
Speaker 1: brains aren't shaped like pyramids, but also because at any
Speaker 1: point in time, we can be struggling multiple um sections
Speaker 1: and parts of the needs. So, for example, we could
Speaker 1: all be breathing air and drinking water and having enough
Speaker 1: food and stuff met right now, um. And you know,
Speaker 1: you might be like really respected and stuff in your field. Um,
Speaker 1: and you might have a certain could let sense of
Speaker 1: self esteem and stuff. But then at the same time,
Speaker 1: you know you're not in a safe place, or you
Speaker 1: may be dealing with like a debilitating health condition, or
Speaker 1: you maybe lack in certain resources that you need to
Speaker 1: like thrive, right so and then or maybe you know
Speaker 1: you have your food, water, shelter, sleep, all that, and
Speaker 1: you know you're secure and you have what you need
Speaker 1: and whatever, but you have no friends. You know, you
Speaker 1: have no intimacy, no family sense a connection with other people.
Speaker 1: So you're kind of like living in this bubble, just
Speaker 1: floating through life, you know. I mean, your bubble is safe,
Speaker 1: it has what you need, but there's not that social aspect.
Speaker 1: And I think what's interesting about this is because as
Speaker 1: we start to talk about matters hierarchy of needs, we
Speaker 1: start to see the structural and societal um impact on
Speaker 1: you know, our psychology and on our needs. Right because
Speaker 1: if you want to talk about our safety needs, for example,
Speaker 1: but let's get to stay to the to the bottom,
Speaker 1: to the basic. If you wanna talk about physiological needs.
Speaker 1: Water is now a package and commodified product. Right, food
Speaker 1: is something that is inaccessible too many, not because we
Speaker 1: don't have enough food, but because the distribution of it
Speaker 1: to meet the needs of all it's not what's prioritized
Speaker 1: on the capitalism right. There are people who are lacking
Speaker 1: in shelter, you know, um, And a lot of people
Speaker 1: are sleep deprived by the systems we're living in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: m hmm. And the same thing with safety, you know. UM,
Speaker 1: we have based literally threatened by climate change, and you know,
Speaker 1: we are atomized from our relationships and stuff because so
Speaker 1: much so many of us have to work so hard,
Speaker 1: you know, every day, five days a week or more,
Speaker 1: eight hours or more, pretty and it really just strips
Speaker 1: us of our social connections and that's our ste meats
Speaker 1: were sort of stripped of that by you know, these
Speaker 1: commercial messages that we get about like you're not this
Speaker 1: unless you have this, and bye bye bye kind of thing. Right.
Speaker 1: And in self actualization isn't even really a thought for
Speaker 1: a lot of people because they're still busy trying to
Speaker 1: reach all those other things um or don't even have
Speaker 1: the time to think about how they can become who
Speaker 1: they are. UM. And we get into that a bit
Speaker 1: more later on in this discussion, but they don't really
Speaker 1: have the time of the sense to think about that
Speaker 1: because they've been so restricted by their circumstances, right, and
Speaker 1: on top of that, restricted by like the messages that
Speaker 1: they would have gotten, you know, whether it be in
Speaker 1: the school system or through ads or whatever the case
Speaker 1: may be. So I think looking at the pyramid, of
Speaker 1: course it's incomplete and the issues with it, but it
Speaker 1: does illuminate some interesting things that you know, we're dealing
Speaker 1: with right now. I mean, yeah, like if it definitely
Speaker 1: it's easier to self actualize and have esteem once your
Speaker 1: needs are met. But I think definitely there's an ability
Speaker 1: to jump around, especially when you know you have like
Speaker 1: a large scale depression and alienation and disassociation. Think it,
Speaker 1: it's a weird sense where you can kind of hop
Speaker 1: around the pyramid quite quite often, even if you have
Speaker 1: certain things met. This doesn't necessarily mean you have something
Speaker 1: you know above or below. Yeah, Like I I I
Speaker 1: when it comes to like actual people that I associate with,
Speaker 1: you know, all of whom are folks who have to,
Speaker 1: like I have to work in order to live. I
Speaker 1: don't think it I've ever heard anyone talk about happiness
Speaker 1: in terms of like self actualization. It's always in terms
Speaker 1: of like when I get my student loans paid off,
Speaker 1: you know, when I get my when I'm able to
Speaker 1: take care of this health problem that i have, Like
Speaker 1: when I have enough money. It's basically everything boils down
Speaker 1: to for most people, when I have enough money to
Speaker 1: not be as suffering as much from the specific thing,
Speaker 1: or to not be scared about not having enough money. Um,
Speaker 1: which is I think more would I get from people
Speaker 1: when they're talking about like aspirational goals than I would
Speaker 1: like to do this thing that that fulfills me as
Speaker 1: a person. Um yeah, yeah, yes. It's like like any
Speaker 1: any kind of actual self actualization becomes this not just
Speaker 1: a luxury, but a luxury that's just unimaginable. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1: Some people can't even imagine. I know people who have
Speaker 1: just basically given up on, like ever being able to
Speaker 1: repay their loans, right Like they've just resigned themselves like
Speaker 1: this is my life now, all the tunity, this is
Speaker 1: this is it, you know, and I can't blame them.
Speaker 1: Who can really blame them? When that is the reality.
Speaker 1: You know, for a lot of people, taking themselves out
Speaker 1: to debt is not possible even if they did get
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of the money or able to like
Speaker 1: pay off a bit more per month. You know, this
Speaker 1: love interest rates that just like so badly exploitative that
Speaker 1: they're basically suits for the rest of lives. Of course,
Speaker 1: we had to have that brief moment of damn, the
Speaker 1: system sucks, as is typical on it could happen here.
Speaker 1: But I want to shift attention now to another society
Speaker 1: and another culture that has approached this human needs and
Speaker 1: human psychology and human society thing differently. Right, Um, what's
Speaker 1: been coming to a lot more people's attention lateally is
Speaker 1: that Abraham Maslow Um he was actually partially inspired to
Speaker 1: develop his theory by his stay with the Six Seek
Speaker 1: of Blackfoot. And I went into some of the details
Speaker 1: on the video on my channel, um rethinking master was
Speaker 1: hierarchy of needs, psycho bit more in there, but basically, um,
Speaker 1: what he discovers, what I get to in that video
Speaker 1: is that well, firstly, some cultures of us as being
Speaker 1: one self actualized, right, like the six Seek of Blackfoot,
Speaker 1: meaning and that's the Blackfoot just for a little bit
Speaker 1: of context, or an indigenous people, I think confederation is
Speaker 1: how they tend to refer to themselves in like Montana.
Speaker 1: I think Idaho. Um yeah, up in Canada. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: kind of like Idaho, Montana and parts of Canada. Um
Speaker 1: like that's that's Blackfoot territory. They were also Maslow spent
Speaker 1: time with them. L Ron Hubbard lied about having spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time with the Blackfoot. So I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. I don't know. Yes, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: scientology law if you have to catch up on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but um, yeah, so you know, with Maslow's model, self
Speaker 1: actualization is essentially, you know, self fulfillment, right, the tendency
Speaker 1: for the individual to become more and more what one is,
Speaker 1: and to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
Speaker 1: To us, like fulfilling your potential as a person, as
Speaker 1: a partner, as a parent, as a talent, as a artist,
Speaker 1: as a whatever. Just fulfilling your potential as a person. Right.
Speaker 1: But to say that we are born self actualized, um
Speaker 1: that freeming will looks too, seeing us each as born
Speaker 1: in the world with a spark of divinity, because of
Speaker 1: course this is tied into their spirituality. Um, born for
Speaker 1: the spark of divinity and with a great purpose embedded
Speaker 1: in us. And what self actualization is Link two in
Speaker 1: these cultures inextricably link to that is is community actualization. Right, So,
Speaker 1: community actualization is a concept that places the actualized individual
Speaker 1: in the context of community. So instead of just upholding
Speaker 1: the individual alone, which Maslow's hierarchy has been critiqued for
Speaker 1: sort of doing, community actualization incorporates the web of relationships
Speaker 1: that supports each of US's individuals. Basically, it recognizes that
Speaker 1: we cannot be self actualized solely as individuals if there's
Speaker 1: not like a broader network over a web that is
Speaker 1: supporting us. You know, we're not islands standing alone, you know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we were. We were. We were touching on on on
Speaker 1: that point a bit, a bit previous, but less eloquently. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is, it is. It's it's much easier to have
Speaker 1: the ability to actualize your goals into into actions when
Speaker 1: you are less a needed and you have and you
Speaker 1: have all these other things around around a community. Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: Is that. I think like the lack of community self
Speaker 1: actualization is kind of what we were talking about in
Speaker 1: terms of like, yeah, things are things are great for me.
Speaker 1: Inasmuch as things are great you know in the system
Speaker 1: we live in, but I I don't feel that, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can look outside and you're like everything is actually
Speaker 1: really bad. I'm just kind of in my little bubble
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to expand my bubble to be around,
Speaker 1: you know, and to help more people. But it can
Speaker 1: be overwhelming sometimes. Yeah, I mean it's so needs, so
Speaker 1: much one pooson could do. And that's kind of a
Speaker 1: point of community, right A community supports our basic needs
Speaker 1: and basically equips us to manifest I would poop us.
Speaker 1: So it's a community would be there to for example,
Speaker 1: and we can get into this a bit more design
Speaker 1: a model of education that supports us in expressing a
Speaker 1: unique gifts. Right now, the part of the six philosophy
Speaker 1: involves cultural perpetuity, where there's an important consideration of those
Speaker 1: who came before and those who are coming after seven
Speaker 1: generations forward and seven generations backward, as I had it
Speaker 1: explained to me. So that is something that I think
Speaker 1: it would have been useful when it came to discussions
Speaker 1: of um, you know, climate change, and it's very relevant
Speaker 1: now because we are seeing the older generations basically struggling
Speaker 1: and being like, you know, um well it's jen Z's problem.
Speaker 1: Now you could take care of it. You're in the
Speaker 1: future kids, all right, Well that yeah, when they're basically
Speaker 1: on the download saying fuck them kids, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but can I say that or yes? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know you can always say them kids. I say
Speaker 1: that to Garrison all the time. All right, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: But speaking of kids, UM, I think we could compare
Speaker 1: and contrast basically how childhood is approached in our society
Speaker 1: versus how it would be approached and in society that
Speaker 1: values community actualization. UM. I mean, and I'm just speaking
Speaker 1: from my experience here. Of course, you're free talk about
Speaker 1: your own. UM. I from like primary school and stuff.
Speaker 1: I remember it's constantly feeling like I had to compete
Speaker 1: with my fellow um classmates. I mean, you know, I
Speaker 1: was friendly and stuff with everybody and stuff, but since
Speaker 1: I was like usually at or close to the top
Speaker 1: of my class, I always felt this kind of pressure
Speaker 1: to just beat them out and continue to be the
Speaker 1: best gifted kid ever. You know. So there was a
Speaker 1: sense of like constant competition with others that wasn't really
Speaker 1: balanced out with a kind of um collaborative sorts of
Speaker 1: approach to like basically trading us from like an early
Speaker 1: age too into cooperate and work with people as people
Speaker 1: and as comrades, you know, a little comrade is a
Speaker 1: way way to put it. But yeah, I just remember
Speaker 1: there was a sort of sense of sort of atomization
Speaker 1: that's undercooded that sort of educational approach. I I feel
Speaker 1: like that's pretty yuh universal and a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of parts of our modern world. We definitely really
Speaker 1: embed that sense of competition into very young kids, whether
Speaker 1: that being in school or like wherever. Because yeah, that
Speaker 1: was that was definitely my experience, even even like in
Speaker 1: private school in Canada a long time ago. And I
Speaker 1: know that's that's the thing Fross, you know, across the
Speaker 1: ocean as well, on on the other side of the pond. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we are back. That doesn't sound like us are we are?
Speaker 1: We really back? Sorry it's ten am um, all right.
Speaker 1: So when we're to look at like childhood and education
Speaker 1: and stuff in society that would value community actualization, Um,
Speaker 1: what sort of things do you guys think we would
Speaker 1: be seeing in that sort of society. What sort of
Speaker 1: approaches do you think would be embedded from an early age.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to put it into words, So kind of
Speaker 1: one of the things I'm I'm currently in a living
Speaker 1: situation right where I have. I'm working with a group
Speaker 1: of people on a chunk of land and so every
Speaker 1: week we do projects on it to make it better, um,
Speaker 1: which is tremendous satisfying. And I think in a in
Speaker 1: a society where that kind of self actualization like you've
Speaker 1: been talking about was more common, kids would feel that
Speaker 1: way about doing things, um that improve their community like that,
Speaker 1: that that that take care of the people around them,
Speaker 1: that make you know, wherever they live a better place
Speaker 1: to live, Like that would be that would be in
Speaker 1: the same way that like I go out each weekend
Speaker 1: thinking that will be a fun thing to do to
Speaker 1: like to improve the place that I'm living. I think
Speaker 1: that would be kind of, um a common feeling like
Speaker 1: that would be a common activity as a kid to
Speaker 1: go engage in projects like that. Yeah. And I mean
Speaker 1: we already see children doing that, right except they do
Speaker 1: it in minecraft. Yes, Yeah, Like the impulse is being
Speaker 1: directed somewhere currently. This isn't a thing you have to
Speaker 1: This isn't a thing you have to like splice into
Speaker 1: kids little brains to make them want to do it.
Speaker 1: Kids love making ship exactly, Like do you give a
Speaker 1: child opportunity and sort of facility that like they a
Speaker 1: very a lot of them. I can't really generalize because
Speaker 1: I know some kids were like, you do what you
Speaker 1: have to do. I want to stay in my corner.
Speaker 1: But there a lot of kids as well who would
Speaker 1: be like very very willing to be helpful. You know,
Speaker 1: they really like they just a door being a helper
Speaker 1: and being someone who can support, whether it be in
Speaker 1: the kitchen, you know, with like a little broom or whatever, sweeping,
Speaker 1: whatever the case may be. So some my kids don't
Speaker 1: want to be part of a community, you know, because
Speaker 1: we are social animals. Um, it's just that right now
Speaker 1: it's directed at like minecraft, severs or whatever. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that I would really
Speaker 1: focus on, because this is just kind of in my experience,
Speaker 1: is teaching young kids how to cook, um and then
Speaker 1: having them cook or at least help cook food for
Speaker 1: other people. I think it's a really great kind of
Speaker 1: skill to learn. But also it me it does this
Speaker 1: weird thing to your brain when you do That's like
Speaker 1: you you get very happy when you cook food for
Speaker 1: for other people. And I think it's it's a really
Speaker 1: good kind of emotional impulse to give kids. It's like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is you can make people feel good by doing
Speaker 1: things for them, um And because that makes you feel
Speaker 1: good and it makes them feel good, and then that
Speaker 1: really builds that whole sense of community. So yeah, II
Speaker 1: se yeah, yeah, some kids could be ego man like
Speaker 1: but like both self lessness, but it also teaches you
Speaker 1: to like do stuff for yourself as well. Right, It's
Speaker 1: a good skill to be self also be self sustaining.
Speaker 1: So I think that's that's why I really enjoy teaching
Speaker 1: kids cooking. Um I used to I I used to
Speaker 1: be a culinary instructor because I'm really just passionate about
Speaker 1: that specific thing. Yeah, I mean for me perasonally, Um,
Speaker 1: I develop an aneurism whenever anyone's in the kitchen with me. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's definitely moments where if there's too many people in
Speaker 1: a kitchen, that is frustrating. But if if you do
Speaker 1: it right, you can get You can get a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old cooking you an entire like really really nice
Speaker 1: holiday dinner, um, which is which is what I was
Speaker 1: doing when I was thirteen. I was cooking all of
Speaker 1: the holiday dinners for my entire family. Um, because I
Speaker 1: just I wanted to learn cooking. So it's it's definitely
Speaker 1: possible if you're a parent and you want less time
Speaker 1: in the kitchen. Uh, teacher kid how to cook. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I come from a family of child cooks, right.
Speaker 1: I remember, Um, this one time I think I was
Speaker 1: making like a card cake with my mom. Um. But
Speaker 1: I was used to like licking my fingers when you know,
Speaker 1: you make that cookie cookie do and stuff. But I
Speaker 1: licked my fingers when the when I cracked the egg,
Speaker 1: she was like, stuff, you can't do that, you know.
Speaker 1: So I just remember that was one of the experiences
Speaker 1: in the kitchen already stood out to me. Lessons lessons
Speaker 1: will be learned about, like bacteria, Yeah, you know, it's experience.
Speaker 1: Knives you get, get to learn how to use knives,
Speaker 1: get to learn about heat. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of good lessons you can learn inside.
Speaker 1: I get firing, safety, chemistry, you know, just stuff all
Speaker 1: mixed in there. You know, even math, even absolutely fractions.
Speaker 1: It's one of the only times I use fractions is
Speaker 1: in cooking and baking. Yeah, I mean, as embarrassing as
Speaker 1: it is. I use Google when I want to confute
Speaker 1: measurements still, but I mean it's just there. It's more convenient.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I absolutely agree that example, you know, like
Speaker 1: the use of like cooking lessons and that sort of
Speaker 1: thing too. Support UM to support like kids self actualization.
Speaker 1: I also the community actualization because of my experience, and
Speaker 1: the thing I default too is different versions of like
Speaker 1: the youth liberation argument. But because of how people have
Speaker 1: been using that term on Twitter right now, I don't
Speaker 1: want to talk about it because it's been causing a
Speaker 1: lot of like really dumb fighting about what that term
Speaker 1: actually means and who coined it and like that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. But that's kind of where I default to
Speaker 1: in terms of like what self actualization could be in
Speaker 1: a community setting. Youth liberation is one of those things
Speaker 1: that I'm really passionate about UM, and I honestly don't
Speaker 1: know who coined it or what discussed AFT and about
Speaker 1: it right now, but it definitely UM informs my approach
Speaker 1: and ends up influence and like a lot of the
Speaker 1: things that I discuss, like when if I talk about
Speaker 1: like an issue or whatever UM in society, A lot
Speaker 1: of times it really boils down or starts from an
Speaker 1: early age. It starts through the education system. Was foster
Speaker 1: there or incubated there. So I think, um, a lot
Speaker 1: more discussions should be happening about, you know, the place
Speaker 1: of young people and the education system and stuff um
Speaker 1: alongside of course, while the other struggles and discussions and discourses,
Speaker 1: which struggles we've been happen. Yeah. I'm trying to view
Speaker 1: like anarchistic like liberatory frameworks is like trying to achieve
Speaker 1: that self actualization and to some degree like the the
Speaker 1: like a steam level, and then also like the community
Speaker 1: and belonging level. Um, even if you don't have all
Speaker 1: of your physical needs met all the time. Is how
Speaker 1: these types of frameworks can be can almost just like
Speaker 1: jump around that and be like, despite me not having
Speaker 1: all of these base needs met, if I if I
Speaker 1: have like a radical model of the world, I can
Speaker 1: still try to achieve that type of freedom because I
Speaker 1: can work outside the box to get it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that that that's kind of what I
Speaker 1: was I was trying to get at at least on
Speaker 1: you know, like a like a like whether it be
Speaker 1: like a youth lib framework or just like general like
Speaker 1: radical anarchism in general. Yeah, and I mean parts of
Speaker 1: thinking outside the box involves, you know, looking at other
Speaker 1: people who have thought outside of the box, who have
Speaker 1: reinvented and reconsidered and sort of transformed their approach to
Speaker 1: things like education and child care and really all the
Speaker 1: aspects of society that we take for granted as you know,
Speaker 1: just being a certain way. You know, um, when we
Speaker 1: talk about things like education and childhood in the place
Speaker 1: that plays and community actualization, I seem to think a
Speaker 1: lot about, you know, all the things we can do
Speaker 1: to not fit into cap into capitalist smooths. You know,
Speaker 1: it's really facilitate folks potential, not just really cooking classes
Speaker 1: for example, but even through you know, workshops and field trips.
Speaker 1: I mean field trips now are just kind of like
Speaker 1: this thing that you know, kids go to from time
Speaker 1: to time and they have to walk in a single
Speaker 1: fire line and all these different things. But what I
Speaker 1: envision when I think of you know, learning is something
Speaker 1: work into like less restriction to just the four walls
Speaker 1: of a classroom and more the whole world is your classroom.
Speaker 1: You know. The whole world is a place where you know,
Speaker 1: you can explore and you can room and you can
Speaker 1: develop yourself. You know, without all these barriers and controls
Speaker 1: replace on, kids end up suffocating their imagination of what
Speaker 1: things can be. And I mean when you have that
Speaker 1: sort of educational model where you know, the youth are
Speaker 1: able to explore different avenues and direct their own education routes,
Speaker 1: you know, you also end up which is what has
Speaker 1: happened in education models that we've seen throughout many different
Speaker 1: cultures of the world. You see that it facilitates relationships
Speaker 1: with the community members, right, and everybody benefits because you have,
Speaker 1: for example, becasn't exactly something like apprenticeships, and you have
Speaker 1: you know, for example, people getting support from the kids
Speaker 1: in the kitchen or you know, in the workshop or
Speaker 1: in library or whatever the case may be. And not
Speaker 1: only the kids about paying their skills, but they also
Speaker 1: developing relationships with different members of the community with different backgrounds,
Speaker 1: with different experiences. And it released suits almost as I
Speaker 1: see it as a way to God against um this
Speaker 1: sort of style of parenting where that we just kind
Speaker 1: of seeing popularized lately, where like the child is basically
Speaker 1: the exclusive property of the parents and you can't tell
Speaker 1: anybody how to raise their child and the parent alwaysnews
Speaker 1: best in that kind of approach. I think it's a
Speaker 1: good and to do to that because the child being
Speaker 1: exposed to a lot more of life and of people. Um.
Speaker 1: I think that, to me, um is the sort of
Speaker 1: youth liberation route that I see developing. It requires, of course,
Speaker 1: total transmission, but you know, no proposal really be approach
Speaker 1: and isolation. Yeah, and it's it's easier to achieve when
Speaker 1: you're around other right, It's it's easily once if if
Speaker 1: you are already in a community where these things can
Speaker 1: be fostered, then it's a lot you know, it's a
Speaker 1: lot less of a lofty goal. Yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: there's a kind of interesting I don't know if case
Speaker 1: studies the right word, but there's part of Italy that
Speaker 1: had a really really long running like anarchist education experiment
Speaker 1: and so they're basically able to reform local schools is
Speaker 1: TIMS and and it worked. But you know, and they
Speaker 1: produced a bunch of really good schools, and you know,
Speaker 1: the schools are based on sort of like cooperative learning etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean the model still exists today,
Speaker 1: but and you know it's like, yeah, they made some
Speaker 1: of the best schools in Europe, but the society around
Speaker 1: them didn't change, and so sort of bizarrely, they ended
Speaker 1: up making these schools that like produced you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're very good schools. They produced extremely good students, but
Speaker 1: then they also like produced an extremely you know, well
Speaker 1: educated and good like capitalist cadre basically. And so I
Speaker 1: think I think there's a sort of you know, if
Speaker 1: if we go back to sort of the community aspect
Speaker 1: of this is like, yeah, there's there's a set to
Speaker 1: which even even if you have you know, you get
Speaker 1: some form of self actualization, you get some form of
Speaker 1: sort of you know, community in cooperative like education for
Speaker 1: children and stuff like that, the whole society has to
Speaker 1: move with it or otherwise you just wind up sort
Speaker 1: of feeding the beast more effectively. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that is that you you also see that kind of
Speaker 1: problem with like the we work guys, right, the Adam
Speaker 1: Newman and and and uh, the two co founders of
Speaker 1: that came out of an Adams case, a kibbutz in Israel,
Speaker 1: which you know, started with from kind of socialist foundations,
Speaker 1: and the other founder had grown up in like a
Speaker 1: commune in rural or again, uh, and they both wound
Speaker 1: up making like this ultra capitalist real estate company. So yeah,
Speaker 1: if you it's it's you know, there's a lot that's said,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of value and kind of
Speaker 1: like carving out sections of culture for the things you
Speaker 1: believe in to try to, um, get shelter from the storm.
Speaker 1: But yeah, as you were kind of noting, Chris, um,
Speaker 1: it does. It does also just wind up kind of
Speaker 1: reinforcing the dominant social system. Um. If there's not a
Speaker 1: kind of more basic upheaval of the way things work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if there's no you know, political philosophy and the goodness
Speaker 1: and there's no connection with you know, broader social movements
Speaker 1: and sort of confederation with other projects, you know, it
Speaker 1: could very easily be coopted you know, in isolation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I guess that's you know, like that That's
Speaker 1: what happened to self actualization as a concept for the
Speaker 1: most part, is that it got taken over by kind
Speaker 1: of weird grifters and yeah, like self care. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and take these concepts and there's sort of twisted and
Speaker 1: transformed into um, you know, capitalists ends. It's even something
Speaker 1: like um like with there's been some interesting discussions happening
Speaker 1: surrounding like luxury and what luxury means around sitting within
Speaker 1: certain circles on Twitter UM and Kim Kimberly Foster from
Speaker 1: for Harriott excellent YouTube channel UM. She mentioned that to
Speaker 1: her at least is long but really good video. She
Speaker 1: spoke about how lux read to her is basically, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, finding the ability to rest where you need
Speaker 1: to rest and to be able to be supported. UM.
Speaker 1: Whereas luxury now, but luxury as quite popular understanding is
Speaker 1: more so about consumption and consumerism. So even when you
Speaker 1: have something where like and this is specific to um,
Speaker 1: the black experience of course, because for a long time,
Speaker 1: you know, black women have been expected to, like um,
Speaker 1: toil and labor and support not only the communities but
Speaker 1: also engineer as slavery also you know, their white masters
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. Um. There's there was a
Speaker 1: push for the Black women luxury movement to sort of
Speaker 1: reclaim you know, a space for black women to just
Speaker 1: be able to enjoy themselves and you know, be themselves.
Speaker 1: But that quickly became something it's just like you know,
Speaker 1: just get the bag, um. Just the sort of hyper capitalists,
Speaker 1: hyper consumerist, bougie kind of approach to luxury, where the
Speaker 1: original route to the movement, which was about finding rest,
Speaker 1: was sort of lost. And I mean that's a bit
Speaker 1: of a tangent. So I'll try to connect that back
Speaker 1: to what we're saying. Um, I think when it comes
Speaker 1: to things like rest and the ability to rest, um,
Speaker 1: I think that that can only really be found in community.
Speaker 1: And if there's a lack of commune community support to
Speaker 1: you know, pick up the slack when you need to
Speaker 1: rest and you need to revive yourself and you just
Speaker 1: to recharge. UM. Barring that, of course, reshipple can pay
Speaker 1: for a sort of a full community in a sense
Speaker 1: of having you know, nannies and meads and butlers and
Speaker 1: tutors and all these people to basically support their lifestyles
Speaker 1: and support their freedom. But more people lack that. And
Speaker 1: so I think protostyph actualization as you're mentioning earlier, UM,
Speaker 1: it's ability to rest, and I see that as linked
Speaker 1: with community. Yeah, I think that definitely ties into our
Speaker 1: recent discussions on anti work and how anti work is
Speaker 1: a lot more feasible if you are in a community
Speaker 1: support like network and right and you have people to
Speaker 1: rely on um and definitely like you know, self actualization
Speaker 1: as the ability to like to just rest when you
Speaker 1: want to. It's a very uh, it's a very powerful
Speaker 1: thing and very enticing, and that definitely plays into the
Speaker 1: whole like anti work like idea. I guess yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean to connect the anti work thing to just general
Speaker 1: you know, unonization and striking efforts. Right Like I was
Speaker 1: seeing people calling for a general strike the other day, um,
Speaker 1: as if we haven't learned a lesson, but they were
Speaker 1: calling for that, But what they were not realizing was
Speaker 1: that without these structures in place to support striking efforts,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be enough. You know, if people cannot
Speaker 1: support themselves and their families, the strike cannot last. You
Speaker 1: don't surely with this community and the community coming together
Speaker 1: to support people and they you know, not just fight
Speaker 1: for the rights in the striking and unization context, but
Speaker 1: also you know, to be able to find leisure, to
Speaker 1: find rest, as with the you know, anti work discussion,
Speaker 1: and to sort of turn this to a discussion on
Speaker 1: organizing more generally. Um, you know, we are, at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, a very communal ape and if
Speaker 1: we were to just focus on ourselves as individuals. Um.
Speaker 1: I think as capitalism in its anti social nature expects
Speaker 1: us too, I think we would all suffer as a result.
Speaker 1: You know, our google as people, as any one person
Speaker 1: should be not just to you know, ult ourselves, but
Speaker 1: also to enrich the worlds of those around us and
Speaker 1: to cultivate the community that as we support they you know,
Speaker 1: will support us. And I mean as we prefigure this
Speaker 1: out of you know, culture of support, of you know,
Speaker 1: care and of empathy and that sort of thing. Um,
Speaker 1: I think our organizing efforts would as a results be
Speaker 1: a lot more powerful, be a lot more potent, um,
Speaker 1: be a lot more enriching, and a lot more imaginative.
Speaker 1: So unless any any of you have anything else to see, um,
Speaker 1: to sort of bring this to a close, um, I
Speaker 1: just want to leave, um, leave us with some food
Speaker 1: for thought in terms of how we can incorporate community
Speaker 1: actualization in action, right Because it's one thing to say,
Speaker 1: what will be wonderful to have a community to support
Speaker 1: you in that kind of thing, But you know, um,
Speaker 1: how do people a pretty isolated and stuff right now? Um?
Speaker 1: So I guess I actually put it into sort of
Speaker 1: five stage kind of approach, starting with firstly facilitating collective
Speaker 1: belonging among diverse groups. Right, so we want to look
Speaker 1: at bringing people together. Obviously they would have different backgrounds
Speaker 1: and different needs, different ones, different personalities. But bring people together, um,
Speaker 1: whether it be at work or on the block, or
Speaker 1: at school or whatever the case be, just for a
Speaker 1: cookote or for align or any kind of party or interaction. Obviously,
Speaker 1: depending on where you are that that may not be
Speaker 1: the safest thing to do, um, considering COVID and everything.
Speaker 1: But just bring people together. Not even necessary to proselytize
Speaker 1: them about anarchism or socialism or whatever. But at the
Speaker 1: very least start connecting the nodes and start connecting the
Speaker 1: different parts that can eventually come together to become something greater,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, you don't need to wait for
Speaker 1: a calamity. There's onything to happen. But of course we
Speaker 1: have seen as well where natural disasters have broad communities
Speaker 1: together that wouldn't together before. Um. I think, however, it
Speaker 1: would be better to like not wait for that kind
Speaker 1: of thing to happen, and to just you know, bring
Speaker 1: people together from now, start some conversations, get things going right,
Speaker 1: and then from there you want to be facilitating solidarity
Speaker 1: in struggle. Right, So whether it be in the solidarity
Speaker 1: is a bit of a buzz would now or at
Speaker 1: least it become a buzz would. But I think whether
Speaker 1: it be with disaster rely funds or so arity, strikes
Speaker 1: and protests, or you know, with basic mutually support, you know,
Speaker 1: whether it's material or emotional solidarity in struggle, I think
Speaker 1: that is another crucial part in you know, building community
Speaker 1: and incorporating eventually community actualization, because what that does is
Speaker 1: it shows others that I have your back and you know,
Speaker 1: others able to see that you know, they can have
Speaker 1: mine as well. Um, it helps to build that sense
Speaker 1: of trust you also want to sort of cultivated probably
Speaker 1: a sense of community pride and a sense of being
Speaker 1: able to rely on community networks. You know, we spoke
Speaker 1: about mutulate networks, but also things like UM skill shares
Speaker 1: or workshops, so um material support. You know, if somebody
Speaker 1: needs food, being able to support for them to know
Speaker 1: that they have people they can go to to support
Speaker 1: them in a time of need, that is powerful. You know,
Speaker 1: not maning people forget that. Not maning people forget the
Speaker 1: time that they were at their most dire point, and
Speaker 1: you know, the community stepped up to support them. You know,
Speaker 1: if you want to see UH insurrection in our lifetimes, Um,
Speaker 1: you don't start guns blazing. You know, you start with
Speaker 1: a creative food, You start with a help in hand,
Speaker 1: You start with money if people need it, um. And
Speaker 1: then from there, you know, you get into the realm
Speaker 1: of community achievements, where your community is collectively able to
Speaker 1: celebrate the things that we have accomplished together. You know,
Speaker 1: whether it be establishing community garden that is able to
Speaker 1: supplement people's um fresh produce supply, or whether it be
Speaker 1: that you know, community has come together and they've fixed
Speaker 1: something that was broken on the street, or even that
Speaker 1: they've come together and we're able to train people with
Speaker 1: like some really helpful skills where they're now able to
Speaker 1: support themselves and bring other things to team as well.
Speaker 1: And then from there, I think that sort of approach
Speaker 1: would foster fulfillment in community and the figures immunity actualization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and this is this is all. It's a
Speaker 1: big topic, UM, And it's a much bigger topic than
Speaker 1: just like what are what do you what changes do
Speaker 1: you want to make around the edges? Like what things
Speaker 1: should people advocate for or even just like advocating that
Speaker 1: that the system be torn down, like as as was
Speaker 1: kind of evident when you asked, how could we build
Speaker 1: a community in which like kids feel more self actualization
Speaker 1: from engaging in the community. Um, And there was that
Speaker 1: kind of blank moment, the when you actually talking talk
Speaker 1: about like reconfiguring society at such a fundamental level. Um.
Speaker 1: It's it's a big topic. Um. And it's it's one
Speaker 1: that I think it's important to introduce to people the
Speaker 1: idea that like, hey, we really have to be we
Speaker 1: really got to figure this this out. This is this
Speaker 1: is important to like everything we we say we believe. Um.
Speaker 1: Answering this question is going to be key. Uh and
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a tough one. UM. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes uh people come into episodes we do
Speaker 1: on stuff like this like looking for Okay, well, how
Speaker 1: how are you what's your suggestion for how to do that?
Speaker 1: And at the moment, like I agree with the how
Speaker 1: imperative this is? Um, But in terms of actionable stuff, it's, um,
Speaker 1: this is a big open ended question in my head.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I think Andrew laid out a
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff that we've we've talked about both,
Speaker 1: like you know, with within our kind of own community
Speaker 1: groups in terms of the things in terms of like
Speaker 1: like you know, like connecting nodes and all like the
Speaker 1: steps that we can do to have there be like
Speaker 1: more like more connecting branches of the tree and how
Speaker 1: to strengthen those. I think that it's it's a good Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like we can't we don't know what your community
Speaker 1: is like or what your what your situation is. All
Speaker 1: we can really say is here's the broad things that
Speaker 1: that you can try or have worked for other people
Speaker 1: in the past, and then based on what your situation is,
Speaker 1: you can apply those plug plugables. Yeah. St Andrew, Yes,
Speaker 1: of course. Um well you can follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at a discore scene. True and of course on YouTube
Speaker 1: st Andrew's um my stuff. You know, I have the
Speaker 1: video on rethinking master was Hierarchy of needs, um on
Speaker 1: some other on practice see things as well. Check it out,
Speaker 1: check it out. Um and uh uh stay thinking about stuff.
Speaker 1: It's thinking is good. Yeah, thinking is good. Welcome that
Speaker 1: could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and
Speaker 1: sort of how you can put them back together. This
Speaker 1: is again another mostly things fall apart episode. UM Here
Speaker 1: with Me is Garrison. Hello, Hello, and joining us today
Speaker 1: to talk about well, a pretty wide range of things,
Speaker 1: but about the drug war in Mexico, about primorialitaries, and
Speaker 1: I guess also I guess about the Narco state. Is
Speaker 1: Alex Vinia, who is in a socially fessor of history
Speaker 1: at Arizona'stat University and has written several very very good
Speaker 1: articles that I've read recently. Um, Alex, how are you
Speaker 1: doing doing great? Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you for joining us. UM. So I
Speaker 1: wanted to start by talking about an article that you
Speaker 1: has come out fairly recently, uh, that is about essentially
Speaker 1: the transition particularly in Guerrero from I guess the sort
Speaker 1: of sixties seventies dirty war in Mexico two, the drug war,
Speaker 1: and I guess I wanted to start from because I
Speaker 1: don't I don't think it's a issue that's particularly well known. UM.
Speaker 1: I want to, I guess, start with sort of an
Speaker 1: overview of how we got into this sort of dirty
Speaker 1: war in Mexico in the sixties, because I think I
Speaker 1: don't know, like I think, if anyone, if people know
Speaker 1: stuff about this, it tends to be the very dramatic
Speaker 1: sort of like massacre in eight but it's it went
Speaker 1: on for longer than that and as a sort of
Speaker 1: deeper history. So can you bring us into that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. So I'll start off by saying that generally,
Speaker 1: if when most people think about dirty wars and and
Speaker 1: and Cold War Latin America, Mexico is probably the last
Speaker 1: country that they think of having one, right, Like, there's
Speaker 1: a certain exceptionalism that Mexico has enjoyed until relatively recent
Speaker 1: and relatively recently um amongst academics and especially historians right
Speaker 1: where we're in the last ten twenty years, we started
Speaker 1: to uncover Mexico's own version of a dirty war that
Speaker 1: we are more familiar with in other places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etcetera. Um,
Speaker 1: Mexico's dirty war though, and if people know a little
Speaker 1: bit about this period, like as you mentioned, right, they
Speaker 1: know about the infamous student massacre that the local in
Speaker 1: October two. But you know, my my research focuses on
Speaker 1: on this the southern state of Guerrero. It's on the
Speaker 1: Pacific coast. It's made famous by the resort city of Akapunco.
Speaker 1: And I wrote a book in two published a book
Speaker 1: in fourteen that really traced the emergence of armed resistance
Speaker 1: in the state of Guerrero during the nineteen sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: And that was my entrance into this idea of of
Speaker 1: a Mexican dirty war, of the Mexican state practicing systematic
Speaker 1: state terrorism against political dissidents and in my case, armed
Speaker 1: guerilla dissidents who enjoyed the backing of dozens of rural communities,
Speaker 1: um and even urban poor working class neighborhoods in places
Speaker 1: like in the late sixties and in early nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: That's a very regional story, right. That's another thing that
Speaker 1: kind of distinguishes the Mexican Dirty War from from other
Speaker 1: Latin American cases is that the dirty war was localized
Speaker 1: to a few major cities and then to two very
Speaker 1: specific locales in the countryside, Geretro being the most bloody theater. Um.
Speaker 1: The way that these girla movements emerged, they really began
Speaker 1: as these popular, civic minded social movements in the late fifties,
Speaker 1: early nineteen sixties, and and they protested things like political
Speaker 1: authoritarianism and economic injustice, but they did so essentially within
Speaker 1: the confines of the Mexican Constitution. They followed the law. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, Mexico has the the you know that that
Speaker 1: the characteristic in Latin America of having the first great
Speaker 1: social revolution of the twentieth century. Um, you do have
Speaker 1: a post revolutionary government that emerges from the nineteen nineteeent
Speaker 1: revolution that has to pay list service to the radical traditions,
Speaker 1: to the revolutionary traditions that came out of that that
Speaker 1: that movement, and for that reason, the Mexican Constitution that
Speaker 1: was passed in nineteen seventeen in its time was the
Speaker 1: most radical social democratic even constitution in the Western hemisphere. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, the peasant communities compassing the communities in
Speaker 1: the state of believed the letter of the law. So
Speaker 1: when they started to protest, you know, an authoritarian state governors, um,
Speaker 1: a police violence, army violence, its economic injustice. In the sixties,
Speaker 1: they followed the rules and they followed the laws, and
Speaker 1: each time that they did so, they experienced pretty horrific
Speaker 1: instances of both state violence exercised by the military and
Speaker 1: the police, but also everyday forms of violence practiced by
Speaker 1: you know, gun slingers who were working for landed elites,
Speaker 1: and that then radicalized some of these social movements into
Speaker 1: two separate guerilla movements that were led by rural communist
Speaker 1: school teachers and not ask and movement in particular the
Speaker 1: Party of the Poor. They ended up creating a guerilla
Speaker 1: force of about the high estimates about three hundred fighters.
Speaker 1: A more realistic estimate is somewhere from one fifty or
Speaker 1: two hundred. But the key is that in Coastal Guerrero
Speaker 1: and then some of the mountains mountain communities of they
Speaker 1: obtain a lot, a pretty substantial amount of popular support,
Speaker 1: which then leads the Mexican government that had been you know,
Speaker 1: ruled by the p r I, and it was ruled
Speaker 1: in Mexico was ruled by the p r I for
Speaker 1: like eight years. Uh. They sent in the military and
Speaker 1: they waged this pretty horrific counter insurgency that that did
Speaker 1: things like disappear people, torture, rape, um. You know, they
Speaker 1: raised entire communities um. And that's generally what's known as
Speaker 1: the Dirty War in Mexico. It's a rural theater. Its
Speaker 1: main rural theater was in a place I get at
Speaker 1: all where you we think there was almost a thousand
Speaker 1: disappearances from nineteen sixty nine up until the early nineteen eighties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And one of the things that they interested me a
Speaker 1: lot sort of reading through this was that it's sort
Speaker 1: of weird for insurgency, and that you get aspects of
Speaker 1: both kind of the kind of like classical seventies urban
Speaker 1: grilla movement, but it's also it's very much a real
Speaker 1: movement you have, you know, I mean, like one of
Speaker 1: one of the stories you're telling this is about like
Speaker 1: a group of a group of people who did one
Speaker 1: of the you know, like the classic urban seventies thing,
Speaker 1: which is that you know they did they did a
Speaker 1: bank robbery, and then two the people get tortured and
Speaker 1: the rural grillas sort of get hunted down. And I
Speaker 1: was I was wondering about the dynamics of this, because
Speaker 1: it seems like like there's it seems like you have
Speaker 1: these groups that are kind of unusually moving back and
Speaker 1: word between like having bases and cities and having bases
Speaker 1: in these rural areas. Yeah, that's one of so usually
Speaker 1: when when when folks think about these these guerrilla movements
Speaker 1: in Guerrero during the sixties and seventies, they think of
Speaker 1: them primarily as as a as a you know, very
Speaker 1: fairly typical rural guerrilla movements as you just described. But
Speaker 1: these two movements, the one led by lu As the
Speaker 1: Party of the Poor, the other one by Hannaro Baska
Speaker 1: is the a CNRS. From the very onset, they tried
Speaker 1: to connect the rule to the city um, whether it
Speaker 1: was cities in in Guerrero like um the resort city
Speaker 1: of Acapulco, particularly working class neighborhoods on the outside of
Speaker 1: the city, or the state capital in Chilpancingo, which housed
Speaker 1: the state university. Right, so both of these movements made
Speaker 1: pretty substantial inroads into that community and then also into
Speaker 1: Mexico City. So they tried. Their idea was not necessarily
Speaker 1: to start as a strictly as a strictly rural movement,
Speaker 1: but their idea was always to expand because I think
Speaker 1: to the cities, and I think quite rightly they they
Speaker 1: perceived that what the Mexican state was going to do
Speaker 1: to them was trying to corral them in the state
Speaker 1: of Guerrero and prevent them from logistically and politically expanding
Speaker 1: beyond that. And in the end they were that's exactly
Speaker 1: what happened, um, And that's how these movements were ruthlessly crushed.
Speaker 1: That and it took a lot of terror to to
Speaker 1: separate these armed movements from their popular base of support.
Speaker 1: But a lot of this has to do with the
Speaker 1: fact that both Vaskis and Klanas were school teachers and
Speaker 1: they were involved in union movements that were national in scope. Um.
Speaker 1: They were in moved, they were in you know, LUs
Speaker 1: was in the Mexic Communist Party, right, so he had
Speaker 1: extensive urban experiences and networks throughout the country. So their
Speaker 1: perspective was always to connect the rule to the urban,
Speaker 1: particularly because Mexico by the seventies was a rapidly urbanizing country,
Speaker 1: right it was going it becomes for the first time
Speaker 1: and assists well first times his post colonial history. It
Speaker 1: becomes primarily an urban country. So um, So they tried
Speaker 1: these really interesting mix speriments to try to connect the
Speaker 1: two theaters. But as you as you mentioned, right, they
Speaker 1: did that typical nineteen seventies thing of robbing banks and
Speaker 1: their terminology was expropriation, right, um. But that that then
Speaker 1: exposed them to two police actions and and any time
Speaker 1: any of their militants were captured, they were immediately tortured information.
Speaker 1: You know, that they were interrogated horrifically and that and
Speaker 1: from intel was used to to hunt down their their
Speaker 1: their their comrades up in the mountains and ye, and
Speaker 1: I think that that's a good place to move towards
Speaker 1: sort of the other side of this, which is partially
Speaker 1: the Mexican state response. But the part, the part of
Speaker 1: it that was really interesting to me was about how,
Speaker 1: you know, so so part part part, part of what
Speaker 1: these groups are fighting are these sort of very very
Speaker 1: local like to landed elites. And I wonder if you
Speaker 1: could talk a little bit about how these sort of
Speaker 1: local elites merged, are able to merge with and sort
Speaker 1: of like co opt in a lot of ways that
Speaker 1: the military units that are deployed. Yeah, that's one of
Speaker 1: the biggest So let me see how I can answer
Speaker 1: this question, because there's there's so it's what what I
Speaker 1: what I try to do in this article, and it's
Speaker 1: part of my broader ongoing research is to kind of
Speaker 1: connect the violence, the state violence of the Mexican Dirty
Speaker 1: War as it as as it happens and get around
Speaker 1: the seventies with with with something else that's happening simultaneously,
Speaker 1: which is like the so called drug war and the
Speaker 1: exponentially increasing cultivation of drugs in a place like Getto,
Speaker 1: particularly marijuana and then opium poppies that are used to
Speaker 1: produce heroin. UM. So what I try to do in
Speaker 1: the article that that you're referencing is kind of the show.
Speaker 1: There's a longer history and Guerrero of of how power
Speaker 1: is exercise at the local level and how some of
Speaker 1: these local landed elites are able to weather the nineteen
Speaker 1: ten Mexican Revolution, They're able to weather the grain and
Speaker 1: reform efforts that that occurred in nineteen thirties and forties UM.
Speaker 1: And and really these these families. One of the things
Speaker 1: that that captures my attention of Guerrero is that, uh power.
Speaker 1: You can tell who's in power by just by almost
Speaker 1: by looking at their last name, because there's this remarkable
Speaker 1: continuity in the state of who has it managed to
Speaker 1: exercise power at the local level political, social, economic power
Speaker 1: um for decades now for generations, um. And you can
Speaker 1: track how power works by looking at families. And in
Speaker 1: what I do in this article is to look at
Speaker 1: a couple of landed elite families that had managed to
Speaker 1: stay in power for decades um. So there's certain at landed.
Speaker 1: In this article, I focus on one municipality called which
Speaker 1: is in the hot Lands region of Guerrero um During
Speaker 1: you know, probably from about two thousand and eight to
Speaker 1: two thift it was in the top three in Mexico
Speaker 1: for opium and and harom production. So it becomes this
Speaker 1: massive drug producing region. So I go back in time
Speaker 1: and I kind of trace like who was in power
Speaker 1: in this region, who owned land, who owned the resources
Speaker 1: throughout the twentieth century, and how they were responsible for
Speaker 1: essentially creating this little narco fifedom as it currently exists,
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out which families were involved. So
Speaker 1: on the one hand, you have these families that have
Speaker 1: been in power from like the nineteen twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: and are still exercising power. And then when we get
Speaker 1: to the nineteen seventies and you have this this horrific
Speaker 1: dirty war, this counterinsurgency that the state in the military
Speaker 1: waging against communities and Gerreo. That opens up new possibilities
Speaker 1: for new families to come in and to ally themselves
Speaker 1: with locally stationed UH military units and they work together
Speaker 1: to wipe out guerillas and guerilla supporters at the and
Speaker 1: at the same time they start to you know, kind
Speaker 1: of dip their toe into this this world of narcotics production.
Speaker 1: Because really in Mexico in the nineteen seven especially by
Speaker 1: the night mid nineteen seventies, it becomes a number one
Speaker 1: prior of of marijuana and heroin to the United States. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is part of just a broader global history
Speaker 1: of narcotics. Right there's US lad drug interdiction efforts in
Speaker 1: places like Turkey, Afghanistan and in the in Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: and efforts to suppress the drug drug production there creates
Speaker 1: this you know what, what what people usually refer to
Speaker 1: is a balloon effect. It just displaces the drug production
Speaker 1: somewhere else because the demand in the US is still there.
Speaker 1: And that because and that creates in Mexico the number
Speaker 1: one provider of narcotics by the mid nineties seventies, and
Speaker 1: that then has an impact locally in the place of Guerrero,
Speaker 1: which is again simultaneously experiencing a grill insurgency, a dirty war,
Speaker 1: and then also the ramping up of drug production. One
Speaker 1: of the most interesting parts of this that I didn't
Speaker 1: know about was about how I mean they're like, how
Speaker 1: how explicitly because I've read a lot of well not
Speaker 1: a lot, but I've read about a lot of how,
Speaker 1: particularly after like when when the sort of after sort
Speaker 1: of the various up people of two thousands six in
Speaker 1: Mexico with the Wahaka uprising with the Zapatis is making
Speaker 1: bunch of moves and the CP presidential election, about how
Speaker 1: you get the drug war is to sort of like
Speaker 1: military solution to these leftist movements. But I was interested
Speaker 1: in how, I mean, incredibly explicit they are about this,
Speaker 1: Like the anti gorilla operation are like they don't call
Speaker 1: them antic thriller operations. They talk about like bandits and
Speaker 1: like they they they they were they were explicitly like,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, this is an anti narco operation even
Speaker 1: though you know they're going and massacurring like essentially peasants
Speaker 1: and occasionally guerrillas, but just a bunch of just random
Speaker 1: like capusinos. Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a great quote
Speaker 1: that I got from for in this article. Um, you
Speaker 1: know this is wonderful researcher in Mexico. Carlos Flordes was
Speaker 1: a really good book on kind of like the failed
Speaker 1: state in Mexico and drugs and military And in that
Speaker 1: steady he managed to interview a military participant in the
Speaker 1: dirty war in the nineteen seventies, and he has this
Speaker 1: great quote that I included in this essay which he says,
Speaker 1: this military guy says basically, look, with the marijuana growers,
Speaker 1: we had no problem, we had no beef. But with
Speaker 1: the guerrillas, we had the fuck them up. And for me,
Speaker 1: like that, that direct quote kind of encapsulates like what
Speaker 1: the drug war in Mexico has been historically and in
Speaker 1: this current form. Like and this is something that I
Speaker 1: learned from people like sociologists and journalists Don Paley, right,
Speaker 1: like the war on drugs, the war on poor people,
Speaker 1: um and and it it becomes in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: it becomes a really useful cover for the type of
Speaker 1: horrific violence that the state is practicing in a place
Speaker 1: like Gero against these popularly supported guerilla insurgencies. So publicly
Speaker 1: and to the international audience and to its own domestic
Speaker 1: national audience, the Mexican state is saying, look, we're not
Speaker 1: waging a dirty war, We're not waging a counter insurgency.
Speaker 1: We're fighting a war against cattle wrestlers, against cattle thieves,
Speaker 1: and against criminals, against drug dealers, um, when in reality
Speaker 1: they're waging a war against poor people who are supporting
Speaker 1: these different guerilla insurgencies led by these rural communist school teachers. UM.
Speaker 1: So that's and that's in the rural theater, right. It's
Speaker 1: it's really interesting when you think about how the Mexican
Speaker 1: state in the seventies will criminalize urban guerrilla movements. You know,
Speaker 1: Mexico had like thirty eight guerilla movements in the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixies and seventies. That's just like people don't really recognize that, right,
Speaker 1: like thirty eight to four different rural and urban guerilla organizations.
Speaker 1: The big urban one that managed to create i don't know,
Speaker 1: ten to twelve different uh focals or folsa of posa
Speaker 1: UM was the leg the communist legue of the September Um.
Speaker 1: They became such a big threat in the urban theater
Speaker 1: that the Mexican president devoted his nineteen seventy four State
Speaker 1: of the Union basically the Mexican version of the State
Speaker 1: of Union. He devoted a pretty good chunk of it
Speaker 1: to these quote unquote terrorists. Right, So for the urban guerrillas,
Speaker 1: he referred to them as terrorists, and then he does
Speaker 1: this thing where he says, you know, most of these
Speaker 1: terrorists are unpatriotic. They and I'm gonna paraphrase some of
Speaker 1: his language, they reveal high indices of homosexuality, of like
Speaker 1: just basically mothering them to the point that they're seen
Speaker 1: as like the most despicable other in Mexico, in Mexican society,
Speaker 1: and that then opens them up to getting wiped out. Um,
Speaker 1: which is fulfills a similar function as calling the rural
Speaker 1: guerillas nothing more than cattle astlers, cattle fees, and narcos. Right.
Speaker 1: So it's all this counterinsurgency like discursive strategy that that
Speaker 1: justifies the elimination of these people. But at bottom, these
Speaker 1: are just wars against the drug wars, a war against
Speaker 1: poor people. And and you see that to this day,
Speaker 1: you see that, you know most one of the things
Speaker 1: that really animates my research about the history of drug
Speaker 1: wars in Mexico is that I really want to push
Speaker 1: back against, you know, journalistic treatments that that will say, look,
Speaker 1: Mexico's war on drugs began in two thousand and six
Speaker 1: when President Felipe own Way, you know, launched the military
Speaker 1: against these different drug trafficking organizations, and you know, historians
Speaker 1: um like like myself will work on this. We're like, wait, no,
Speaker 1: Mexico has had a series of drug wars right that
Speaker 1: the There's a historian Alec Dawson who talks about has
Speaker 1: a really excellent book on Payote, and he talks about
Speaker 1: how the war on drugs begins in like the colonial era,
Speaker 1: right in terms of how the Spanish colonial state criminalized
Speaker 1: uh indigenous consumption of drugs like payote for for their
Speaker 1: own ritualistic cultural practices. Um. The nineteen seventies is another
Speaker 1: or moment where you have a form of a drug
Speaker 1: war that the Mexican state exercises. But from my perspective,
Speaker 1: it's just it's almost like a cover as a way
Speaker 1: to wage war against political dissidents and an armed guerrilla
Speaker 1: challenges to its rule in Mexico. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: that's a that's an important of looking at it also
Speaker 1: as just a way to understand why, you know, like
Speaker 1: if you're looking at it from the inspective of like
Speaker 1: a policy makers, like oh, well, we spent all the
Speaker 1: time during the War on drugs, like why are there
Speaker 1: more drugs? And it's like, well, yeah, because I mean,
Speaker 1: the point isn't really about like I mean, I think, okay,
Speaker 1: I want to make a caviat here, which is like
Speaker 1: it's not like there's such a thing as like a
Speaker 1: quote unquote good war on drugs that you could wage
Speaker 1: like there there's no, there isn't a version of this
Speaker 1: that's like, oh no, if if if we actually just
Speaker 1: try to like focusing on stopping these people, it would work.
Speaker 1: But it's like no. But simultaneously, yeah, it's that the
Speaker 1: goal isn't really about like it's not about drugs, that
Speaker 1: just about killing poor people. And I said, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that that's that's a good way of framing it.
Speaker 1: And I think also it's an interesting way of looking
Speaker 1: at why you start to see these sort of supposedly
Speaker 1: like anti narco units just immediately start doing like getting
Speaker 1: to the trade. Yeah yeah, well I because they're like
Speaker 1: their position to make a ton of money off of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's yeah, they're not dumb. Yeah yeah. And I
Speaker 1: think I don't know, this is an interesting question about
Speaker 1: like the structure of the state here too, because you know,
Speaker 1: look like in Chicago, this is another like this is
Speaker 1: the thing that happens all the time, is yeah, you
Speaker 1: get these you get these anti drug units that are
Speaker 1: you know, incredibly specialized to get a bunch of money,
Speaker 1: and then they immediately trying to round start and start
Speaker 1: like just do like just enter into the drug trade.
Speaker 1: And so I was one of the other things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was just been interested in this just about there's
Speaker 1: there's seems to be these these very these these very
Speaker 1: interesting sort of alliances between paramilitaries, cartels, the police in
Speaker 1: the military that open up and this is this I
Speaker 1: know this is an incredibly broad like it's a question
Speaker 1: you can like, you know, devot academic disciplines too. But
Speaker 1: I was wondering how you look at the states in
Speaker 1: the context in a context like this, because yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean in a context where you know, it's not the
Speaker 1: state doesn't really have monopoly on violence, right, Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a huge question. And there's how you
Speaker 1: I mean, essentially the question is like what is the state? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that question always terrorizes me. And how you answer that
Speaker 1: question then leads has consequences to how we think about
Speaker 1: things like the drug war or you know, violence in
Speaker 1: Mexico or a variety of different things. Right. But so
Speaker 1: what I what I do in this article is uncle you,
Speaker 1: is to just simply look at what the state looks
Speaker 1: like at the local level, right, Um, particularly like it's
Speaker 1: repressive apparatus is and what you see in a place
Speaker 1: like because yeah, you see kind of like it's a
Speaker 1: multi scale er issue, right where you have generations of
Speaker 1: conflicts over land and land tenure and who gets to
Speaker 1: control rural markets, who gets to control access to rural
Speaker 1: markets and rural production. Right, So there's already like a
Speaker 1: built in structure that's exploitative, that has somehow managed to
Speaker 1: weather a big social revolution and a grand reform effort.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, then in the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: you get uh, you know, industrialized narcotics production placed on
Speaker 1: top of this pre existing structure. Right, So it's should
Speaker 1: be no, it's almost like no surprise then that you know,
Speaker 1: the gun slingers that you still work for Land of
Speaker 1: Elagues will now serves not just gun slingers for Land
Speaker 1: of elages who are terrorizing campesinos, but now they're also
Speaker 1: gonna work with like local narcotic Uh, you know, narco farmers,
Speaker 1: drug farmers, and and traffickers, and then at the same
Speaker 1: time they're going to do their best to coopt to
Speaker 1: buy off you know, military units that are stationed at
Speaker 1: the local level, police units that are stationed at the
Speaker 1: local level, local judges, local magistrates, local political officials, and
Speaker 1: and it it creates a very um dense network at
Speaker 1: the local level of people who are working together to
Speaker 1: maintain power but at the same time make sure that
Speaker 1: this really profitable political economy of narcotics is going to thrive.
Speaker 1: And this is at the very local level, right, So
Speaker 1: in some in some ways those local interests of the
Speaker 1: quote unquote the state are will conflict with the state
Speaker 1: in Mexico City and how to resolve those tensions and
Speaker 1: becomes a big deal. So the the guy that the
Speaker 1: military participant that I referenced earlier, he was he was
Speaker 1: actually sent in from outside of Gereo into GEO to
Speaker 1: wage counterinsurgency. And you know, he talks in this book
Speaker 1: about how they didn't know what to do when they
Speaker 1: see their soldier comrades, you know, obviously collaborating with local nauticles,
Speaker 1: even though the over this guy in his unit have
Speaker 1: been sent in to wipe out the nuticles so it
Speaker 1: ends up happening. Is that the goal is never to
Speaker 1: eradicate the from a national level, from a state national level,
Speaker 1: the goal is never to eradicate the drug trade in
Speaker 1: Mexico in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the goal is
Speaker 1: to rationalize it. The goal is to control it, and
Speaker 1: and the goal is for the state to be able
Speaker 1: to maintain power over it. And this is leads us
Speaker 1: to what you know, some scholars will refer to as
Speaker 1: a plasta system, right, that that that different narcotic organ
Speaker 1: traffic organizations will control different parts of Mexico, but the
Speaker 1: overall power, you know, they have to kick back to
Speaker 1: is our different state officials. UM. And that there's a
Speaker 1: recent book, really great book by Ben Smith called The
Speaker 1: Dope that just came out, really like the first really
Speaker 1: good English language big history of of the Mexican drug trade.
Speaker 1: And and he essentially he says that like the Mexican
Speaker 1: state is is a racket. It's a racket, and it's
Speaker 1: ensuring that this drug trade exists, and it's centralized and
Speaker 1: it's rationalized in the sixties, seventies and eighties. UM. But
Speaker 1: by the nineties, it starts to lose control as the
Speaker 1: state itself is neoliberalized and becomes smaller and its capacity
Speaker 1: to control these different groups becomes, uh weakened. So so
Speaker 1: that's like the big national level, right, and then we
Speaker 1: think that takes us to the scale of the international
Speaker 1: which is a whole another thing. But at the very
Speaker 1: local level, what does this look like. It looks like
Speaker 1: if you're a drug farmer, right, Because another thing in
Speaker 1: Garretos that these drug farmers are like small scale right there.
Speaker 1: They're small scale. They have a little bit of autonomy,
Speaker 1: but they're small scale. But they're selling their product to
Speaker 1: these traffickers. And these are the traffickers usually that will
Speaker 1: have connections to local landed families, who'll have connections to military,
Speaker 1: to police, to politicians, um. That will ensure that this
Speaker 1: economy will will have will continue to thrive in a
Speaker 1: in a profitable way by the late seventies. Way, and
Speaker 1: this is something else I think that I needed a
Speaker 1: little bit more research on. But you see it happened
Speaker 1: elsewhere in Mexico and especially in the northwest, in a
Speaker 1: place like Sinaloa, which is usually seen as the cradle
Speaker 1: of the Mexican drug trade. But I think in the
Speaker 1: late seventies, both in Sin and the Dirty War, and
Speaker 1: and the and the sending of the military and mass
Speaker 1: in a place like Garreto, it not only takes out
Speaker 1: armed resistance to the Mexican state, but it will also
Speaker 1: take out small scale narco traffickers who don't want to play.
Speaker 1: They don't like the rules that the Mexican state is
Speaker 1: imposing upon them in order to make money and traffic drugs.
Speaker 1: Um So, I've seen a couple of documents where, um,
Speaker 1: you know, secret police, spy agent documents where they say, Okay, yes,
Speaker 1: you know these these campesinos who are accused of being guerillas, Yes,
Speaker 1: we are disappearing them. But apparently some small scale drug
Speaker 1: traffickers are also being disappeared because they're not they don't
Speaker 1: want to go along with the rules being imposed by
Speaker 1: the Mexican military. And that's something that you see in
Speaker 1: in Sinaloa in the late seventies, when something called Operation
Speaker 1: Condor gets launched and you get thousands of troops and
Speaker 1: federal police who go up there, and instead of eradicating
Speaker 1: the drug trade and getting rid of these different traffickers,
Speaker 1: what they do is they centralize it, they rationalize it, um,
Speaker 1: they make it more efficient. I mean that actually it's
Speaker 1: so it's in in a counterintuitive way, it's state violence
Speaker 1: that actually leads to the formation of things that we
Speaker 1: think about as cartels and not the other way around,
Speaker 1: right because the very trade begins within the confines of
Speaker 1: the Mexican State. In part two of this interview, we're
Speaker 1: gonna drill deeper into that question and look at how
Speaker 1: the state's attempt to get in on the drug trade
Speaker 1: created the cartels and how they sort of lost control
Speaker 1: of them, leading to an incredible increase in part military
Speaker 1: violence and death and destruction. And on that happy note
Speaker 1: that this has been it could Happen here Join us
Speaker 1: again tomorrow for that and in the meantime, stay safe
Speaker 1: and don't die. If you want to find us, we're
Speaker 1: at Happen Here pot on Twitter, Instagram. You can also
Speaker 1: find other work that we do at cools on media
Speaker 1: on Twitter if for some reason you can, you want
Speaker 1: to continue venturing out of the house sides A way
Speaker 1: this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is
Speaker 1: often in today about state and paramilitary violence. And we're
Speaker 1: back with part two of her interview. With Alexander Vinia
Speaker 1: about the state and paramilitary violence in the cartels in Mexico.
Speaker 1: The immediate thing I was thinking about this was it
Speaker 1: reminds me a lot of uh, some stuff I've read
Speaker 1: a while back about like smuggling people over the border
Speaker 1: and about how the American militarization of that like destroyed
Speaker 1: because it used to like as as the US tries
Speaker 1: to like make the border more and more unsafe, if
Speaker 1: it can, becomes harder and harder, and it means that
Speaker 1: like the people who can actually do it, like you know,
Speaker 1: you need to have access to more resources and more
Speaker 1: like technical capability, and that's sort of like and that
Speaker 1: that also in a lot of ways help the cartels
Speaker 1: because you know it, well, it's like, okay, so who
Speaker 1: actually has a bunch of organizational expertise with smuggling routes
Speaker 1: and a lot of money And it's it's and I
Speaker 1: think that's like it is it's an interesting way of
Speaker 1: looking at what the national application of state power in
Speaker 1: these like it does, which is that like it's it
Speaker 1: seems almost like what's happening is that so when when
Speaker 1: you get these massive exertion to state power, it's not
Speaker 1: that they like flatten, like you know, it's not that
Speaker 1: they just sort of wipe out out resistance. What they
Speaker 1: do is they yeah, it's what you were saying, is
Speaker 1: like they centralize the drug trip. But it also they
Speaker 1: centralize the sort of violent apparatus. And it means that
Speaker 1: like yeah, if if, if you're going to survive that
Speaker 1: you have to be like incredibly efficient and incredibly violent,
Speaker 1: and you have to also sort of start like you
Speaker 1: you have to start playing with it, like playing by
Speaker 1: the rules at the state of exception, which is you know,
Speaker 1: and that's that's like how I guess the violence level
Speaker 1: and the organizational centralization happens. Yeah, I think yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I think you're I think you're right. And I think
Speaker 1: it's also becomes part of the to add I mean,
Speaker 1: so to add you know, fuel to the fire. Even
Speaker 1: more so, it's become a strategy of like the d
Speaker 1: E A and and and counting oar cautics forces in
Speaker 1: Mexico to to do what you just describe, but then
Speaker 1: also to so dissension amongst the different drug trafficking organizations, right,
Speaker 1: so um that then also increases the violence. Right, So
Speaker 1: if you can get you know, it was it was
Speaker 1: pretty well none that the chapel. For instance, the leader
Speaker 1: of the Senetta cartel until well, let's not say leader
Speaker 1: one of the most prominent traffickers of the Senato carteltil
Speaker 1: recently like he was giving up people. He was giving
Speaker 1: information on rivals to the d e A and to
Speaker 1: other other counting arcotics forces. Right. And that's part of
Speaker 1: the strategy. The strategy is to fragment these groups, um.
Speaker 1: And that only concreases the violen and and you see
Speaker 1: that violence at the very localized level. Um. And this
Speaker 1: is what Garretto suffering from right now right for a
Speaker 1: long time, under the control of one single drug trafficking organization,
Speaker 1: slash family from the state of sinaloas right, they used
Speaker 1: they were originally aligned with their actually cousins with the
Speaker 1: Chappa Uzman's family. They had a falling out and they
Speaker 1: made two thousands and they and they went to war.
Speaker 1: And I had disastrous consequences for the people of Guereto
Speaker 1: because it fragmented the drug trafficking organizations and it forced
Speaker 1: different local groups to take sides. Um And And that's
Speaker 1: kind of how I end the article that that you're referencing, right, Um,
Speaker 1: where different local groups start to take sides, and that
Speaker 1: increases the level of violence at the local level and
Speaker 1: in communities suffer greatly. Um. And that's also a consequence
Speaker 1: of like the kingpin strategy, right, like this idea that
Speaker 1: if you take down the perceived leader of a drug
Speaker 1: trafficking organization, that's somehow going to have an impact on
Speaker 1: drug production. You know what actually happens that it fragments
Speaker 1: the organiza ation and it creates more violence at the
Speaker 1: local level. Well, at the same time, it gives a
Speaker 1: chance to like xd agents to go on like you know,
Speaker 1: national media and be like, oh, yes, the capture of
Speaker 1: the chapel is gonna have a great impact the drug trade. No,
Speaker 1: well not like it increases the violence. And I think
Speaker 1: that the thing that that that's very clear from this article.
Speaker 1: And I think it's clear if you you know, if
Speaker 1: you look at the drug trade, is it's like, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's largely economic stuff. And like one
Speaker 1: of the things you're talking about is is you know
Speaker 1: it is that these peasants who are the people who
Speaker 1: have been able to hold onto the collective land basically
Speaker 1: get forced by the Lamb bankes to like produce sesame
Speaker 1: and it's like they can't make any money off of
Speaker 1: it and don't I don't know how directly, it looked
Speaker 1: to me a lot like like that was directly one
Speaker 1: of the things that starts to lead to the shift
Speaker 1: to the drug trade there, because you have all these
Speaker 1: people locked into this crop that like just can't support them. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's just the bigger story there is is
Speaker 1: really the failure of the post revolutionary Mexican state too
Speaker 1: um to really help for agricultural production at the level
Speaker 1: of of these small holding peasants and and these rural
Speaker 1: communities that are these ahelos who have received land from
Speaker 1: the Mexican state. UM. If anything, most of the state
Speaker 1: subsidies in the state structure, state support for agriculture from
Speaker 1: the forties, you know, up until the eighties, that was
Speaker 1: all directed to big agro businesses that were producing export
Speaker 1: crops in places like Sea A, Right, they're producing winter
Speaker 1: crops for the American market or winter fruit for the
Speaker 1: American market. Right. So in the absence of like meaningful
Speaker 1: state support for small holding agriculture, that small holding agricultural
Speaker 1: sector that is meant to feed Mexico um. You know,
Speaker 1: some of these these farmers in a place like you
Speaker 1: and they'll say, okay, well, we were growing this thing
Speaker 1: that the the Agricultural Bank is telling us to grow, sessame,
Speaker 1: but we're not making a lot of money off of it.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, by the late sixties, they
Speaker 1: see that marijuana production is is really increasing due to
Speaker 1: American demand. If I can do both things, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make a lot of money and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: allow my family to make a pretty good living while
Speaker 1: staying in the countryside, while not having to migrate to
Speaker 1: Mexico City, or while not having to migrate to these
Speaker 1: agriculture fields in northern Mexico or even into the United States.
Speaker 1: So because it's like really rational economic response to to
Speaker 1: to a broader macroeconomic situation that has put them in
Speaker 1: that position. The and and you still see this to
Speaker 1: this day, right, these these small farmers, they still own
Speaker 1: their land. They'll grow certain crops on it and it's
Speaker 1: almost serves as a shield for um, you know, the
Speaker 1: opium poppies that they're growing on the same plot of land,
Speaker 1: but in a part that's a little you know, harder
Speaker 1: to access, and it's a little bit more hidden, right, Um,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's trying to find a way at
Speaker 1: a bottom to make a dignifity, you know, how to
Speaker 1: make a life of dignity for your family when you're
Speaker 1: living in the in the countryside, when you're living in
Speaker 1: a place like and then you see that, you know,
Speaker 1: the Getingos are going crazy over a cap goo gold
Speaker 1: in the late sixties. Um, and you have uh, you
Speaker 1: know North Getingo traffic is coming into get Ready with
Speaker 1: new seeds. Um or you have set lewnce is coming
Speaker 1: into your state saying, you know, grow these here are
Speaker 1: some marijuana sees grow that strain um, you know, and
Speaker 1: they can buy off you know, local politicians and soldiers
Speaker 1: and police. That's that's one of the ways that you
Speaker 1: get the emergence of industrial proportion production of marijuana and
Speaker 1: and opium poppies. And in the sixties and seventies and
Speaker 1: again at the same time that this massive dirty war
Speaker 1: is being waged against two different peasant guerilla movements. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's like a really messy like social matrix that's
Speaker 1: occurring at the same time. I guess one everything I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about was about how the political parties
Speaker 1: sort of work into this because I guess, like my
Speaker 1: experience with this sort of like the kind of like
Speaker 1: narco state fusions with like twenties and thirties China and there,
Speaker 1: it's like like you're you're I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: the Communists have an actual independent political outside of like
Speaker 1: like the Green Gang, but like the k MT, it's
Speaker 1: like like this is basically just a like like this
Speaker 1: like this is this is just like an ARCO organization
Speaker 1: with like a flag planted on it. And I'm wondering
Speaker 1: how like on what end of the scale we're working
Speaker 1: with with the p R and also also like with
Speaker 1: with the other Mexican parties, because it seems like there
Speaker 1: are like parts of like a functional state app like
Speaker 1: a party state appartus or like a party apparatus, and
Speaker 1: then parts of it that are just like this is
Speaker 1: a cartel. Yeah, it's it's that's a huge question. It's
Speaker 1: it's um yes, I've really resistant. No, no, no no, it's
Speaker 1: all good. I've I've stopped understanding this within the framework
Speaker 1: of like an ARCO state, right, because to think about
Speaker 1: an ARCO state, you really have to think about how
Speaker 1: a state was captured by these drug trafficking organizations. And
Speaker 1: and I historically and currently, I don't think that describes
Speaker 1: what's what's happening in Mexico. Um, I think what you
Speaker 1: would and it and it goes back to the question
Speaker 1: of what is the state, right, like the questions like
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be thinking about this decade. Right, but because
Speaker 1: you have, you know you have? It depends on what
Speaker 1: part of the Mexican state you're also referring to. Right.
Speaker 1: So if we're talking about the military, the military has
Speaker 1: all segments of the military. I have always had an
Speaker 1: important role to play in the production and trafficking of
Speaker 1: narcotics from Mexico into the US from the from like
Speaker 1: the nineteen tens, right, the military governor of Baja California,
Speaker 1: this guy by the name of Colonel Estevan Kantu. He
Speaker 1: was helping traffic opium um into the United States during
Speaker 1: the Mexican Revolution. Right, And this has been a constant rum.
Speaker 1: The guys that I talked about in my article, this
Speaker 1: guy Um who ends up he he's a general by
Speaker 1: the time he's he's arrested in two dozen two. But
Speaker 1: this guy, Mario Costa, he was like the main counter insurgent,
Speaker 1: theorist and and and and bright mind of the Mexican
Speaker 1: military that gets sent to get right on the seventies
Speaker 1: to wipe out these different guerrilla movements. But he's after
Speaker 1: they wipe out the gerrilla movements, he stays on. He
Speaker 1: serves as as a kind of like the leader of
Speaker 1: the state police forces. And what do he starts to do.
Speaker 1: He starts to buy up land allegedly that will start
Speaker 1: producing opium poppies and marijuana. And this guy from the
Speaker 1: late seventies up until he's arrested in two thousand, it's
Speaker 1: pretty clear they had he had been collaborating with different
Speaker 1: narco trafficking organizations. He gets arrested by his own military
Speaker 1: UM in two thousand because he it was pretty clear
Speaker 1: that he had been protecting and collaborating with this you
Speaker 1: have a guada's cartel and I'm a lookouenti UM, so
Speaker 1: you know one of these like anti anti guerrilla, anti
Speaker 1: nautical nauticles that will you know, actually get go to
Speaker 1: jail for about six years UM because it was pretty
Speaker 1: apparent that he had been for a long time collaborating
Speaker 1: and protecting the different narco trafficking organizations. Right, So that's
Speaker 1: the military. Then you have like the secret police that
Speaker 1: gets formed in Mexico, the DFS, with the help of
Speaker 1: the FBI. Um, the DFS becomes like this political police
Speaker 1: that the Mexican president can use to tamp down on
Speaker 1: political descent. They're the ones, you know spine surveillance by
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies, are also torturing, disappearing, and with
Speaker 1: that level of impunity and power, they also get into
Speaker 1: the drug game. By the seventies and eighties. Um, you
Speaker 1: have the Federal Judicial Police. They're the ones who control
Speaker 1: for this during the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Really they're
Speaker 1: the ones who are controlling, um, the kickbacks that they're
Speaker 1: receiving from narco traffickers until the military moves in the
Speaker 1: seventies and takes over for them. Right. So the repressive
Speaker 1: apparatus is within the Mexican state of the twentieth century
Speaker 1: play a really key role, if not the role in
Speaker 1: helping foster create this this political economy of narcotics. Now,
Speaker 1: how do how do we view that in relation to
Speaker 1: the p r I. Right, the party that emerges from
Speaker 1: the Mexican Revolution, the party that will rule Mexico generally
Speaker 1: will say from the late twenties up until the year
Speaker 1: two thousand, well, you have pretty important, you know, political
Speaker 1: officials within the party throughout the twentie century that are
Speaker 1: directly linked to narco trafficers and directly linked to military
Speaker 1: officials who are obviously involved in the game as well.
Speaker 1: But at no level can we say it's a narco
Speaker 1: state because an archos having captured the state. It's actually
Speaker 1: the other way around. It's the Mexican post revolutionary state
Speaker 1: that's trying to get its hands around this thing that's
Speaker 1: growing within its own confines, and and and by and
Speaker 1: they lose control of it. Like by the late eighties
Speaker 1: and nineties, they've effectively lost control of this thing, and
Speaker 1: that's when you see the rise of these um highly
Speaker 1: centralized drug trafficking organizations like this. You have puttest cartel
Speaker 1: that's making a ton of money off the cocaine. So,
Speaker 1: I guess it seems like it's almost like you're dealing
Speaker 1: with from from from the very very local level, where
Speaker 1: you have these sort of landed elites and their gun slingers.
Speaker 1: It's like it's this almost sort of like like miniaturized
Speaker 1: fractal version of the state where's like you're getting these
Speaker 1: like very very small sort of like uh you know,
Speaker 1: like almost like fetal domains and that they sort of
Speaker 1: expand upwards and stand upwards. But yeah, and I guess
Speaker 1: the interesting part to me is is how like the
Speaker 1: paramilitary dynamics of that, and how how the power of
Speaker 1: these sort of land at least into power, Like how
Speaker 1: how it's like like the power like the the use
Speaker 1: of power from the top seems to strengthen them. Where
Speaker 1: you know, if if you're looking at this from like
Speaker 1: like how how this is supposed to work in theory,
Speaker 1: if you're someone who actually is like trying to eliminate
Speaker 1: the drug trade, you think would be the way around that,
Speaker 1: like the application of power would shatter, but it sort
Speaker 1: of doesn't. It causes these like these these build ups,
Speaker 1: these apparatus is and then they fragment and they rebuild again.
Speaker 1: But it's you're not ever actually dealing with these sort
Speaker 1: of like micro state like yeah, yeah, no, I think
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. And if anything, the paramilitarization is also
Speaker 1: like a like a long it's a process, right, So
Speaker 1: like the first if we can use this term, the
Speaker 1: first paramilitaries were used to wipe out a gray and
Speaker 1: reform minded campasinos in the thirties and forties. Um, but
Speaker 1: you don't really have like a paramilitarization of of of
Speaker 1: the drug trade in Mexico to a certain extent, because
Speaker 1: you have the military and the police to do your
Speaker 1: dirty work. Right if you're a nautical UM. That's a
Speaker 1: more recent phenomenon that you start to see in the
Speaker 1: nineties and especially the two thousands, so right that the
Speaker 1: case that everyone points to, are these the elite of
Speaker 1: the elite in the Mexican military, the gopis. These guys
Speaker 1: are like the Navy Seals or the Special Force, you know,
Speaker 1: the Army rangers, the Mexican military. A bunch of these
Speaker 1: guys in the mid to late nineties decide, you know what,
Speaker 1: we don't want to work for the Mexican military. We're
Speaker 1: just gonna We're gonna dessert, and we're gonna go hire
Speaker 1: ourselves out to the Gulf cartel. And they become really
Speaker 1: the first like paramilitary wing of a major drug trafficking organization.
Speaker 1: And these are guys, some of which probably most likely
Speaker 1: were trained at school the America's or received the American
Speaker 1: specialized training now switching sides and and and protecting a
Speaker 1: pretty powerful drug trafficking organization, like at the time in
Speaker 1: the nineties that was the Gulf Cartel. And these are
Speaker 1: the infamous set us, right, these are the zs UM.
Speaker 1: They're called the set us because that was like their
Speaker 1: military code. There was always a Z in front of
Speaker 1: a number UM. So Z one was kind of like
Speaker 1: the leader, the first guy who took twelve or thirteen
Speaker 1: guys with him to desert and they hired themselves out
Speaker 1: to this drug trafficking organization and they become like the
Speaker 1: paramilitary unit. The rest of the group see that and
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, ship, Like we gotta catch up, right,
Speaker 1: because these like and these guys the gop is, you know,
Speaker 1: they have counter insurgency experience. You know, they were the
Speaker 1: ones who were fighting against US and chiapas in the
Speaker 1: early nineties, right, they were the ones that they were
Speaker 1: sending to. Yeah, they were the ones who were fighting
Speaker 1: against the new cycle of guerrillas that emerging get read
Speaker 1: in the mid nineties, the e p R. And then
Speaker 1: when they're used for counting our context operations, they look
Speaker 1: at the situation they say, you know what we're not
Speaker 1: going to fight on the side of the military. We're
Speaker 1: gonna hire ourselves out to these this golf cartel. We're
Speaker 1: gonna make a ton of money. Um. But they have
Speaker 1: a lot of skills, right. So the rest of the
Speaker 1: so the rest of the drug traffic organizations see that,
Speaker 1: and they're like, we gotta play catch up, and and
Speaker 1: and and you see the paramilitarization of this conflict, and
Speaker 1: and in certain parts that's what's driving UM. I think
Speaker 1: has has played a really big role in driving some
Speaker 1: of the bloodshed and violence that we've seen in Mexico,
Speaker 1: particularly since two thousand six. Right, we can speak of
Speaker 1: probably four hundred thousand homicides since two thousand six, at
Speaker 1: least a hundred thousand disappearances. UM. A lot of that
Speaker 1: has to do with, you know, the people who are
Speaker 1: fighting our our paramilitaries, right, they're receiving training from Colombian
Speaker 1: military advisors, They're receiving training from Israeli military officials, they're
Speaker 1: receiving training from UM. Guatemalan special forces. These guys called
Speaker 1: the Kails, who committed some of the worst atrocities during
Speaker 1: the Guatemalan conflict of the of the of the seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties. Um, my families from men which is the
Speaker 1: state north of Guerto And I remember when probably two
Speaker 1: thousand five, six or seven was down there doing research
Speaker 1: and Disney family and they reported on the arrest of
Speaker 1: to Guatemalans and two Colombians in this random of far
Speaker 1: off part of meat truck. And you're like, what were
Speaker 1: these two Colombians and two Guatemalans doing there? While they
Speaker 1: were most likely like special X special forces in those countries,
Speaker 1: militaries who had been hired by local organizations to train
Speaker 1: their their their soldiers, to train their their paramilitaries. Um.
Speaker 1: So that that's I think that has driven a lot
Speaker 1: of the violence, right, And you see it's in terms
Speaker 1: of techniques they use, the weapons and armament, the logics
Speaker 1: of of how to take down their enemies. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: remember I read an article like okay, I've literally lost
Speaker 1: all since the time. I think it was like mid
Speaker 1: last year about a cartelogist basically running a military operation
Speaker 1: just shutting like shutting down a city. Um yeah, that
Speaker 1: was pre pandemic. That was it was pre pandemic. Oh
Speaker 1: my god. Yeah, I remember because I was on the
Speaker 1: day and the day after it happened. I think I
Speaker 1: spent way too much time on Twitter talking to people. Um.
Speaker 1: That was when I think you're referring to when the
Speaker 1: UH detachment from the Mexican military um in the city
Speaker 1: of Koya Khan, which is the capital of Sinaloa. Kulakhan
Speaker 1: is seen as like Sinaloa is the cradle of the
Speaker 1: Mexican drug trade, then like Kodiakan is the capital of it, right, Um,
Speaker 1: I think I think you're referring to when the Mexican
Speaker 1: military detachment tried to arrest one of the chapel right,
Speaker 1: and they actually found him, they localized it, they located him,
Speaker 1: and they tried to arrest him, and like the hills
Speaker 1: just came down on the city of Koyakon, and you
Speaker 1: had hundreds of of nauticles or paramilitaries who came down
Speaker 1: and essentially forced um, forced the military and the state
Speaker 1: to hand over at Chapel's son to them and and
Speaker 1: for and the reason why I was like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: spent way too much time on social media going after
Speaker 1: people because people said, oh, this is an example of
Speaker 1: a failed state. Oh, look at the new president of
Speaker 1: Mexico and he's lost control of the of the state
Speaker 1: like he's tawtowing too nauticles and it was much more
Speaker 1: complicated than that. And something similar had already happened um
Speaker 1: in the previous administration where these different like particularly in
Speaker 1: the city of of Wadajada, where they even shot down
Speaker 1: a military helicopter or police helicopter and they and they
Speaker 1: essentially um shut down the entire city because one of
Speaker 1: their leaders have been captured. Okay, so what are what
Speaker 1: are the things the things that you you talked about the
Speaker 1: end of the article was about these this environmentalist group
Speaker 1: that gets like they all get arrested while like their
Speaker 1: their lawyer gets killed. After we starts talking about like
Speaker 1: connections between business owners and the party in the archo trades,
Speaker 1: I guess what do you how do you sort of
Speaker 1: like like, how how do you left movement sort of
Speaker 1: navigate this space because you have it seems like you
Speaker 1: have on the one hand, you know, you have of
Speaker 1: these premamilitaries and you also have a state that is
Speaker 1: like incredibly violently hostile to you. And I guess I
Speaker 1: don't know, Like I guess you sort of have the
Speaker 1: Zapatista model of this combination of sort of like arm
Speaker 1: struggle and social pressure. But I guess, like, how how
Speaker 1: how do people navigate this sort of like was it
Speaker 1: seems like like a really disastrous like a place to
Speaker 1: be trying to do leftist politics? And yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: really difficult, right, And I think that's again going back
Speaker 1: to the thesis that the war on drugs is actually
Speaker 1: war on poor people. It's, um, you know, leftist movements,
Speaker 1: dissident movements in Mexico have to well, for while, I'll
Speaker 1: say this in a place like Garrido, it's these movements
Speaker 1: that have provided I think the the most accurate like
Speaker 1: X ray analysis of what the state is at the
Speaker 1: local level. Right. So, um, this this guerrilla leader that
Speaker 1: I talked about in the article, Commandant Ramo, who who
Speaker 1: was around in the late two thousand seven dozen eight,
Speaker 1: does nine like based on his travels in the mountains
Speaker 1: of Guerrero and kind of like the actions that he
Speaker 1: was engaged in for him, it was very clear that
Speaker 1: the military was collaborating with all a narco trafficking organizations,
Speaker 1: not just the one, not just like the most powerful one. Right.
Speaker 1: So at the national level, there was a lot of
Speaker 1: discourse of well, this dark drug trafficking organization is going
Speaker 1: at it with this one in a place that Garrido,
Speaker 1: this guerrilla leader, looks at the situation, he's like, actually,
Speaker 1: they're all working together. And not only that, but they
Speaker 1: have the police in the military, and what are they doing.
Speaker 1: They are, um, going after poor communities up in the
Speaker 1: mountains who don't want to grow opium poppies or who
Speaker 1: want to organize a different way, an alternative model of
Speaker 1: of of living, of social reproduction. Um. What they'll say is,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, the what the military is doing in
Speaker 1: terms of drug interdiction is they'll only go and and
Speaker 1: and burn some opium poppy fields and not others. And
Speaker 1: that's because the owner of that well popiu poppy feel
Speaker 1: that they burn didn't pay up. Um. So you know, now,
Speaker 1: current movements in Garretro partically indigenous moves and Grello. There's
Speaker 1: a recent report that that an indigenous group just put
Speaker 1: out and they're linked to the Congress CO. The C
Speaker 1: and I came the acronym um where they talk about
Speaker 1: a criminal state existing in in the in the part
Speaker 1: of guerreron As, Montana, which is a heavily indigenous area
Speaker 1: on the border on the eastern part of the state.
Speaker 1: And what they say is what we see here is
Speaker 1: uh an alliance between nauticles UM, political parties, military detachments
Speaker 1: and transnational corporations UM and so and and in Gerello.
Speaker 1: Those transnational corporations are usually have something to do with
Speaker 1: mining and they're usually Canadian UM. So how do you
Speaker 1: navigate that? Like that is like like the correlation of forces,
Speaker 1: if we want to use that kind of terminology. Like
Speaker 1: from a perspective of a group that wants to resist this,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's damn near impossible, right, Like you have
Speaker 1: every thing going against you, and yet Ingerero people are
Speaker 1: still resisting, right. You have the students of at Napa,
Speaker 1: they're still protesting, they're still organizing, even after the disappearance
Speaker 1: of their forty three comrades back in September, and we
Speaker 1: still don't have a clear answer as to what happened. Um,
Speaker 1: you still have you know, you have the model of
Speaker 1: of a Tommy that like that that certain indigenous communities,
Speaker 1: like the community in Chadan and have have practice which
Speaker 1: is essentially they kick out all political parties, they kick
Speaker 1: out all police officers, and they self organized at the
Speaker 1: communal level almost like a community police force, and you
Speaker 1: see that in Guerrero as well. There's all you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's challenges with that. There's a that usually brings
Speaker 1: on a lot of violence. And the people of Chadan
Speaker 1: have really suffered for for trying to go this, for
Speaker 1: trying to protect themselves, right, they've they've suffered a lot
Speaker 1: of casualties. Um. And there you have a uh, this
Speaker 1: combination of like narticles and illegal logging, right and and
Speaker 1: so the community there on the one hand is trying
Speaker 1: to protect their ecology, but they're also trying to offend
Speaker 1: themselves from nauticals who have taken over local political parties
Speaker 1: and they don't want them in their in their town.
Speaker 1: In Guereto, you have community police forces and you've had
Speaker 1: them since the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, um. But
Speaker 1: that's raised a lot of issues in terms of you know,
Speaker 1: what happens when one community police force gets cooputive or
Speaker 1: co oputive or corrupted by a political party or by
Speaker 1: even a nautical and then that that group is used
Speaker 1: to hit against other community groups who are who are
Speaker 1: still trying to organize for for for a radical alternative.
Speaker 1: So it's it's it's on one level, it's really depressing, right,
Speaker 1: because everything is stacked against groups and communities and organizations
Speaker 1: in a place like Geretta who want a better world,
Speaker 1: who want to create a better world. But in the
Speaker 1: longer scope of Gueretto's history, they still resist. They still resist.
Speaker 1: And to me, that's one of the things that fascinates
Speaker 1: me about this place and about its people, about its communities,
Speaker 1: that the odds have always been stacked against them, and
Speaker 1: nonetheless they still resist, they still try to um against
Speaker 1: overwhelming odds. They still try to carve out a better,
Speaker 1: more just more dignified existence for them and for their communities,
Speaker 1: even at great risk, you know, for their well being,
Speaker 1: and they're willing to risk everything. So they're still there.
Speaker 1: They're still there, even though the forces that they're facing
Speaker 1: are are extremely powerful. Yeah. I think that's a surprisingly
Speaker 1: hopeful note to end on, which is that, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: even like, you know, places with just incredible concentrations of
Speaker 1: violence and different kinds of power against you, that people,
Speaker 1: people are people continue to fight. Yeah, Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's I think that's one of the lessons that we
Speaker 1: definitely get from a place like get Rid all Um
Speaker 1: or a place like Chiapa's right with the with the
Speaker 1: Abatistas who are still there, who have still managed to
Speaker 1: read I mean, they've managed to reproduce themselves generation only,
Speaker 1: which is really difficult for an armed um Uh insurrectionary group. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: they've managed to do that, and and and and to
Speaker 1: carve out at great cost as well. Right, they're currently
Speaker 1: right now suffering. They've been suffering for for more than
Speaker 1: a decade of low intensity warfare that's been waged by
Speaker 1: the military and their paramilitaries. But they're still there with
Speaker 1: their example, right, And I think part of the power
Speaker 1: of them and the people is their example alone is
Speaker 1: threatening to power to the powers that be, and and
Speaker 1: that's why that there's always an effort to exterminate them.
Speaker 1: So just by virtue of surviving and and and defending themselves, Um,
Speaker 1: that's like a small it seems like a small thing.
Speaker 1: But but they're providing an alternative. And I think that's
Speaker 1: where there their example is really important. And I think
Speaker 1: I think there is I think there's a real argument
Speaker 1: that the whole sort of the whole sort of anti globalization,
Speaker 1: like that wave of struggle like is something that was
Speaker 1: kicked off at the Deputistas and like, and not just
Speaker 1: on the sort of like they were the first people
Speaker 1: to go into revolt, but it's I mean explicitly like
Speaker 1: the way they brought you know, like social movements from
Speaker 1: across the world together and the way they you know,
Speaker 1: the way that they like had they got, the way
Speaker 1: they got people talking, the way they have people training
Speaker 1: each other, the techniques and the sort of ideas that
Speaker 1: they were exchanging that they like, like they they set
Speaker 1: off like a wave of revolt that lasted for like
Speaker 1: I don't know if you started in like nine, like
Speaker 1: the end of it's like two six. Yes, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was incredible. Yeah, no, they I think they there
Speaker 1: and even if you want to go this might take
Speaker 1: us off topic a little bit, right, but like scholars
Speaker 1: who focus on like Venezuela would say, actually, the first
Speaker 1: one was the Karda Castle, right in the late eighties,
Speaker 1: when you have a popular rebellion in Karakas Venezuela against neoliberalism,
Speaker 1: against the liberal starity measures, right, and then so I've
Speaker 1: had that, I've had a talk with friends, will be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: were the first ones? They're like no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it started in Karaka eighty nine, I think is the
Speaker 1: kinda castle. But yeah, no, I think their global example
Speaker 1: it continues to be a really powerful one for me personally.
Speaker 1: It's like I still remember my parents had my parents
Speaker 1: are are migrants from Mexico. They had this this big
Speaker 1: satellite dish in our backyard so we can beam in uh,
Speaker 1: you know, TV stations from Mexico. And I remember January one,
Speaker 1: we woke up right groggy ley, uh, celebrate New Year's
Speaker 1: and my parents turned on the TV to see Mexico
Speaker 1: City news and there was Modocles, right, and there were
Speaker 1: the Sabbatista's um and there were then the Mexican politicians saying, no,
Speaker 1: don't believe what, don't believe your eyes? This isn't You
Speaker 1: had a guy, I remember you had a guy go
Speaker 1: on TV. I think saying something like this is not
Speaker 1: an indigenous movement, because if it was an indigenous movement,
Speaker 1: they would be using machete is not rifles. Something really condescending,
Speaker 1: like the level of racist condescension that came out of
Speaker 1: Mexican politicians and in in response to this movement, yum
Speaker 1: was was super high. Right. But I remember I was
Speaker 1: in junior high and I remember seeing it and I'm
Speaker 1: just like, the has to be something wrong for these
Speaker 1: people to do this right, And that just led me
Speaker 1: to want to do more research and to do more reading,
Speaker 1: and that I think is really powerful. I think I
Speaker 1: still think it's really powerful. So the more we can
Speaker 1: get the word out about these movements and in other
Speaker 1: parts of Latin America, I think, I think it's still
Speaker 1: really important. And I think especially today, we really we
Speaker 1: do need a bit more hope in these dark pandemic times.
Speaker 1: I was trying to figure out a speaking of hope
Speaker 1: segue and I couldn't. I couldn't quite get it. Do
Speaker 1: you do you have anything that you want to plug?
Speaker 1: Where can people find you? Yeah? Well, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for having me on this was This is a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. Um. You can find me on God
Speaker 1: like you can find me on Twitter. I think the pandemic,
Speaker 1: my Twitter consumption has really gone up. It's been powerful.
Speaker 1: But you can find me at Alexander Underscore Avena. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: then I want to plug. No. I think if you
Speaker 1: go on my Twitter page, you'll see you You'll be
Speaker 1: able to get the linked to the to the article
Speaker 1: that we've been talking today, um about about the drug
Speaker 1: from dirty war to drug war into um. I recently
Speaker 1: published a book review of this really fascinating book on
Speaker 1: the connection between the Israeli arms industry and like Cold
Speaker 1: War Latin America, So you can find that on my page.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's I don't really have anything else to plug.
Speaker 1: Whenever I finished his damn book on the drug wars,
Speaker 1: have me back on and yeah, definitely tangible to the
Speaker 1: plug right now, it's just short little articles. Well, thank
Speaker 1: thank you again for coming on the show. Um yeah, this,
Speaker 1: this is, this has when they could happen here. You
Speaker 1: can find us in the usual places. If do you
Speaker 1: want to venture on social media for some reason, please don't.
Speaker 1: It's it's a bad place. But yeah, thank you and
Speaker 1: goodbye everyone. Ye hey, we'll be back Monday with more
Speaker 1: episodes every week from now until the heat death of
Speaker 1: the Universe. It could Happen Here is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. Or more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
Speaker 1: for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool Zone
Speaker 1: media dot com, slash sources, thanks for listening.