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Speaker 1: welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison, and today
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be talking about some really big things and ideas,
Speaker 1: but hopefully I'll be talking with them in a way
Speaker 1: that contextualizes them and makes you remember that despite their magnitude,
Speaker 1: there's still very real things that you can interact with. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I'll 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 longer,
Speaker 1: serving that it's empty and out of date, an abandoned mall,
Speaker 1: or cheery birthday party room at an arcade photographed desolate
Speaker 1: and in the dark. There's two other aspects of liminal
Speaker 1: space photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned. Usually
Speaker 1: they have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality,
Speaker 1: like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting, and even
Speaker 1: when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like
Speaker 1: a Windows computer screen saver. 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. Almost 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 an 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: of 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
Speaker 1: change can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere, or
Speaker 1: the solar system. But hyper objects don't need to be
Speaker 1: just massive celestial things. They can also be the sum
Speaker 1: total of all nuclear materials on Earth, or the very
Speaker 1: long lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as all
Speaker 1: of the styroform of plastic bags in the world. It
Speaker 1: can also be the sum of all the worlding machinery
Speaker 1: of capitalism or the state. Hyper objects, then, are hyper
Speaker 1: just in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly
Speaker 1: manufactured by humans or not, And hyper objects aren't just collections, systems,
Speaker 1: or assemblages of other objects. They are things in their
Speaker 1: own right, and they affect more than just humans. They
Speaker 1: don't come into being just because humans notice them. They
Speaker 1: will have effects on the world whether or not they
Speaker 1: are observed. One of the more obvious differences between hyper
Speaker 1: objects and ordinary objects that you can't ever actually see
Speaker 1: a hyper object in its totality. You can only ever
Speaker 1: 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 there. Now, the difference is that hyper
Speaker 1: 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 want 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 multiple 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, tsunami's, tornadoes, and earthquakes have terrified humans.
Speaker 1: In the past, meteors and comets were known as disasters. 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 worries 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 then 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: in texts about hyper objects. When I turned the key
Speaker 1: in the ignition of my car, I am relating to
Speaker 1: global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration to Mars,
Speaker 1: they are relating to global warming. I am one of
Speaker 1: the entities caught in the hyper object that I hear
Speaker 1: call global warming. Different hyper objects have numerous properties in common,
Speaker 1: but for our purposes we're going to discuss the five
Speaker 1: main points of similarity. Hyper Objects are viscous, meaning they
Speaker 1: stick to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal,
Speaker 1: in other words, and any local manifestation of the hyper
Speaker 1: object is not directly the hyper object. They involve very
Speaker 1: different temporalities than the human scale ones that were used
Speaker 1: to In particular, some very very large hyper objects have
Speaker 1: a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate space time vortexes due
Speaker 1: to general relativity, and hyper objects occupy a higher dimensional
Speaker 1: phase space that results in their being invisible to humans
Speaker 1: for stretches of time, and they exhibit their effects inter objectively.
Speaker 1: That is, they can be detected in a space that
Speaker 1: consists of inter relationships between ascetic properties of objects. The
Speaker 1: hyper object is not just a function of our knowledge.
Speaker 1: It is also hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultra
Speaker 1: violet rays as well as humans. Now, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: into the five different points of similarity in more detail
Speaker 1: to kind of help flesh out what these things hyper objects,
Speaker 1: what they are, and how they might actually be a
Speaker 1: useful way to think about really big stuff. So, first off,
Speaker 1: viscous hyper objects adhere to any object they touch, no
Speaker 1: matter how hard the objects tries to resist. In this way,
Speaker 1: hyper objects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an
Speaker 1: object tries to resist a hyper object, the more glued
Speaker 1: to the hyper object it becomes. Now, the more you
Speaker 1: learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up
Speaker 1: noticing it in the world. This is the law of synchronicity.
Speaker 1: But the more you know about climate change, the more
Speaker 1: you realize how perversive it is. The more you discover
Speaker 1: about evolution, the more you realize how much our entire
Speaker 1: physical being is caught in its mesh work. Immediate intimate
Speaker 1: symptoms of hyper objects are very real, vivid, and often painful,
Speaker 1: yet they carry with them this trace of unreality. A
Speaker 1: good example of hyper object viscosity would be radioactive materials.
Speaker 1: The more you try to get rid of them, the
Speaker 1: more you realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion
Speaker 1: of a way there is no away. Flushing vomit down
Speaker 1: the toilet doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way
Speaker 1: to the ocean or the water treatment facility, and and
Speaker 1: eventually just back to us again. I'll quote from the
Speaker 1: book hyper Objects quote late itself is the most viscous
Speaker 1: thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation
Speaker 1: is Sartra's jar of honey par excellence, a luminous honey
Speaker 1: that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us. Again,
Speaker 1: it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into
Speaker 1: the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it.
Speaker 1: This is it, folks, This is the ecological interconnectedness. Come
Speaker 1: in and join the fun. But I see that you're
Speaker 1: already here unquote. Yeah, that is a that's fun. The
Speaker 1: next point of similarity, we're to discuss is the molten
Speaker 1: or Gaussian quality. Hyper Objects are time stretched to such
Speaker 1: an extent that they become impossible to hold in the mind.
Speaker 1: Hyper objects are so massive that they refute the idea
Speaker 1: that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. The size of
Speaker 1: hyper objects can make them basically invisible just because they're
Speaker 1: so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in southern Oregon,
Speaker 1: one of the deepest lakes in the world. But it's
Speaker 1: not just deep, it's also very very clear. So the
Speaker 1: water is so deep yet so clear. It's like you're
Speaker 1: swimming in the sky. It's like you're swimming in nothing.
Speaker 1: It would be like if you approach an object and
Speaker 1: more and more objects emerge because we can't see the
Speaker 1: end of them. Hyper objects are necessarily uncanny. They have
Speaker 1: to be. Just like my favorite liminal space photos. Hyper
Speaker 1: objects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us
Speaker 1: realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of
Speaker 1: being caught in hyper objects is precisely a feeling of
Speaker 1: strange familiarity and a familiar strangeness. Next up is nonlocality.
Speaker 1: Hyper Objects are massively distributed in time and space, such
Speaker 1: as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality
Speaker 1: of the hyper object. For example, climate change is a
Speaker 1: hyper object that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations.
Speaker 1: Objects don't feel climate change, but instead experience tornadoes as
Speaker 1: they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the
Speaker 1: manner in which a hyper object becomes more substantial than
Speaker 1: the local manifestations that they produce, putting moreton again. For
Speaker 1: a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade
Speaker 1: of red. Global warming for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes.
Speaker 1: Plastic for the bird, strangles it as it becomes entangled
Speaker 1: in a set of six pack rings. What we are
Speaker 1: really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that
Speaker 1: are directly causal. The octopus of the hyper object amits
Speaker 1: a cloud of ink as it withdrawals from access. Yet
Speaker 1: this cloud of ink is a cloud of its effects
Speaker 1: and effects these phenomenon themselves are not global warming or radiation.
Speaker 1: Action at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the
Speaker 1: map with the territory. Hyper Objects cannot be thought up
Speaker 1: as occupying a series of now points in time or space.
Speaker 1: They confound the social and psycho instruments we use to
Speaker 1: measure them. Even digital devices have trouble. Global warming is
Speaker 1: not just a function of our measuring devices yet, because
Speaker 1: it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's hard to
Speaker 1: see it as a unique entity. And yet there it
Speaker 1: is raining down on us, burning down on us, quaking
Speaker 1: the earth, spawning giant hurricanes. Global warming is an object
Speaker 1: of which many things are distributed pieces the rain drops
Speaker 1: falling on my head in northern California, the tsunami that
Speaker 1: pours through the streets of Japanese towns, the increasing earthquake
Speaker 1: activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor like
Speaker 1: a moving illusion picture. Global warming is real, but it
Speaker 1: involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift for us to see it.
Speaker 1: Convincing some people of its existence is like convincing some
Speaker 1: two dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based
Speaker 1: on the appearance of a morphing circle oular shape in
Speaker 1: their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So our
Speaker 1: sense of being in a time and inhabiting a place
Speaker 1: depends on forms of regularity, the periodic rhythms of day
Speaker 1: and night, the sun coming up. Only now we know
Speaker 1: that it doesn't really come up. It's now common knowledge
Speaker 1: that the Moon's phases are just the relationship between the
Speaker 1: Earth and the Moon as they circumnavigate to the Sun.
Speaker 1: Hyper objects seem to phase in and out of the
Speaker 1: human world. They occupy a higher dimensional phase space that
Speaker 1: makes them impossible to see as a whole on our
Speaker 1: regular three dimensional human scale basis, but they might appear
Speaker 1: differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view. We
Speaker 1: can only see pieces of a hyper object at a time.
Speaker 1: The reason why they appear non local and temporarily for
Speaker 1: shortened is precisely because of this trans dimensional quality. We
Speaker 1: can only see pieces of them at once, like a
Speaker 1: tsunami or a taste of radiation sickness. If an apple
Speaker 1: were to invade a two dimensional world, first the stick
Speaker 1: people would see some dots as the bottom of the
Speaker 1: apple touched their universe, and then a rapid succession of
Speaker 1: shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting circular blob,
Speaker 1: diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point, and then disappearing.
Speaker 1: That's why you can't directly see climate change. You would
Speaker 1: need to occupy some higher dimensional space to see the
Speaker 1: hyper object unfolding explicitly. Like the people in the two
Speaker 1: dimensional flat land. We can only see brief patches of
Speaker 1: this gigantic object as it intersects with our world. The
Speaker 1: brief patch called hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans.
Speaker 1: The brief patch called drought burns the planes of Russia
Speaker 1: and the midwestern United States to a crisp our bodies
Speaker 1: itch we yesterday's sunburn, But don't relegate hyper objects as
Speaker 1: a simple abstract notion. Thinking hyper objects as transdimensional real
Speaker 1: things is valuable. Global warming is not simply a mathematical
Speaker 1: abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world. Hyper Objects
Speaker 1: don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or
Speaker 1: out there. They are real objects that affect other objects.
Speaker 1: We tend to only think about hyper objects as they
Speaker 1: phase in and connect to other, more static objects. This
Speaker 1: is a mistake and contributes to non action. Whether or
Speaker 1: not we perceive objects and hyper objects connecting doesn't affect
Speaker 1: the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyper object.
Speaker 1: What we experience as the slow periodic re occurrence of
Speaker 1: a celestial event such as an eclipse or a comet,
Speaker 1: is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on
Speaker 1: our social and cognitive space for a while. The gaps
Speaker 1: I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware
Speaker 1: of the hyper object and moments at which it isn't
Speaker 1: do not matter in relation to the hyper object itself. Okay,
Speaker 1: and now onto our final point of similarity. Inter Objective
Speaker 1: hyper objects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently,
Speaker 1: objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint
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 see 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
Speaker 1: things and interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless
Speaker 1: transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences.
Speaker 1: When an object is born, it is instantly a meshed
Speaker 1: into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The
Speaker 1: mesh isn't inside of all things, but it's on the
Speaker 1: edge or floats on top of all things. Inter objective
Speaker 1: mesh is the extra connecting layer between the mass and
Speaker 1: the 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: hole 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 in our ordinary models of thought are
Speaker 1: just inadequate. You can also reconcile the opposing views that
Speaker 1: cast climate change as the very real series of disasters
Speaker 1: or a complicated, interlocking mess of systems that can feel
Speaker 1: very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as
Speaker 1: abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the
Speaker 1: real world impacts things like hyper objects can cause. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we forget that climate change is a thing we interact
Speaker 1: with every day and can inform choices we make. Now
Speaker 1: the almost impossible to comprehend totality of our situation. It's
Speaker 1: not great for mental well being. You can end up
Speaker 1: tail 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 marketing 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 prom us to make a reality even more real
Speaker 1: and immersive than our status quo. The Internet itself is
Speaker 1: another hyper object, and all this extra reality can take
Speaker 1: a strain on the human mind. De realization, the perception
Speaker 1: that actual waking reality is an artificial construct. The feeling
Speaker 1: of being de attached from your surroundings, like the world's
Speaker 1: made of cardboard, or you're looking at everything through a
Speaker 1: cloud of fog, is becoming more and more common, especially
Speaker 1: among so called Gen Z, the generation that drew up
Speaker 1: with the Internet being a staple of life. Now. How
Speaker 1: we got here is a disassociation between humans and what
Speaker 1: we call nature or the environment. The problems are getting
Speaker 1: fixed because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as
Speaker 1: the effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of
Speaker 1: all things makes this worse. All of the worst effects
Speaker 1: that timate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds
Speaker 1: of years. And that is a weird feeling, that is
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance that I don't know how to understand that,
Speaker 1: and that makes making decisions about our situation now feel
Speaker 1: distant yet also urgent. It's both and it's neither, and
Speaker 1: it's confusing. The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse.
Speaker 1: It 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 anthroprasyne
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 Morton's branch of philosophy, reification, the making of a
Speaker 1: thing into a thing, is precisely the reduction of a
Speaker 1: real object to its sensual appearance. For another object, reification
Speaker 1: 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: most of our modern political discourse can be boiled down
Speaker 1: to what things are real and what things are not.
Speaker 1: Hyper 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 denial. You can't point to something like rising sea
Speaker 1: levels and say that is climate change, because yeah, that
Speaker 1: isn't climate change. The hyper object rising sea levels are
Speaker 1: just an environmental effect, and since the effects are so
Speaker 1: disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of room
Speaker 1: for cognitive dissonance. When people point at extreme weather and
Speaker 1: call it something else. It's our lack of ecology. Are
Speaker 1: seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestation, missing
Speaker 1: the fact that almost all of our problems don't have
Speaker 1: a shared root cause, but instead are just part of
Speaker 1: a massive, shared bungee cord like mesh network. When so
Speaker 1: many local manifesting problems and actual disasters are blamed on
Speaker 1: climate change, even if you believe climate change is the cause,
Speaker 1: which you know it is, it still feels weird because
Speaker 1: climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's such an
Speaker 1: amorphous shape shifting time traveling idea that for the climate
Speaker 1: denier or climate skeptic, seeing very real physical effects be
Speaker 1: blamed on such an abstract thing is hard for them
Speaker 1: and their understanding of reality. For many people, rejecting hyper
Speaker 1: objects is a lot easier than thinking about them, because
Speaker 1: once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to problems
Speaker 1: so displaced in time it's not only difficult but encourages procrastination.
Speaker 1: The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the air right
Speaker 1: now won't reach their full effects for decades and centuries.
Speaker 1: That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem. In fact,
Speaker 1: that should make the problem more urgent. The cause is
Speaker 1: our brief luxury, and the effect is terror forming the world.
Speaker 1: And we are right now caught in between the uncanny
Speaker 1: hyper object of all liminal spaces. The end of the
Speaker 1: world has already happened. We are on the path and
Speaker 1: about to enter a new world. We are in the
Speaker 1: liminal space hallway of all liminal space hallways. The door
Speaker 1: behind us is closed, and at the other end of
Speaker 1: the hallway is a black hole. We cannot backtrack and
Speaker 1: re enter the door behind us. Already are we getting
Speaker 1: sucked forward into the hallway, But there are many doors
Speaker 1: ahead of us, and we get to choose which one
Speaker 1: to open. At this point, we have passed some of
Speaker 1: the pretty doors, but don't be tricked into thinking that
Speaker 1: there are none left. We must not focus on preserving
Speaker 1: an old way of life, but instead need to carefully
Speaker 1: carve out our new reality. We need to pick our
Speaker 1: new door. Well. That is my essay. Read thing episode
Speaker 1: amalgamation about hyper objects, liminal spaces, and our new reality.
Speaker 1: I hope you found some of the ideas useful um
Speaker 1: despite their kind of abstract and anti abstract nature. If
Speaker 1: you want to learn more about this, I would recommend
Speaker 1: reading Timothy Morton's book hyper Objects Um. It is an
Speaker 1: academic read, but it's not that bad. I would I
Speaker 1: would recommend picking up if you want to learn more
Speaker 1: about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them more
Speaker 1: in the future. Thank you for listening. Everybody see you
Speaker 1: on the other side. Raffie is the voice of some
Speaker 1: of the happiest songs of our generation. Baby So who
Speaker 1: is the man behind Baby Bluga? Every human being wants
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Speaker 1: things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new
Speaker 1: Dad and host of Finding Raffie, a new podcast from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio and Fatherly Listen every Tuesday on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Look at your children's eyes to see the true magic
Speaker 1: of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You
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Speaker 1: could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless
Speaker 1: guide to this fascinating world. Find a forest near you
Speaker 1: and start exploring it. Discover the Forest dot Org. Brought
Speaker 1: to you by the United States Force Service and the
Speaker 1: AD Council. I'm Jake Halbern, host of deep Cover. Our
Speaker 1: new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob
Speaker 1: run Chicago. We controlled the courts, we controlled absolutely everything.
Speaker 1: He broughbed judges and even helped a hit man walk free,
Speaker 1: until one day when he started talking with the FBI
Speaker 1: and promised that he could take the mob down. I've
Speaker 1: spent the past year trying to figure out why he
Speaker 1: flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective,
Speaker 1: Bob was too good to be true. There's got to
Speaker 1: be something wrong with this I wouldn't trust the guy.
Speaker 1: He looks like a little scum, big lawyer, stool pidgeon.
Speaker 1: He looked like what he was or at. I can
Speaker 1: say with all certainty I think he's a hero because
Speaker 1: he didn't have to do what he did, and he
Speaker 1: did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around
Speaker 1: the first time, my life was over. If it ever
Speaker 1: got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen
Speaker 1: to deep Cover on the I Heart radio app, Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to it
Speaker 1: could happen here podcast. I'm Robert Evans. So is that it?
Speaker 1: I'm fortunately, I'm so sorry. All right, well I just
Speaker 1: apologize really quick. If that's a lot to take in. No,
Speaker 1: that was a good introduction. That was a good introduction.
Speaker 1: We got across the gist. Who else is here with you? Robert,
Speaker 1: that's a great question. Is Garrison here? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: they're here? Is Chris here? Is st Andrew here? I
Speaker 1: am indeed excellent. Um, why don't you take over and
Speaker 1: do and do my job for me? That sounds actually
Speaker 1: good idea, fantastic. It was hopping and everybody, I M say,
Speaker 1: I'm true. Back to guest host yet again. Um. Last
Speaker 1: time we spoke about you know, soft climate change Nile
Speaker 1: and continue the theme of me talking about whatever I
Speaker 1: want to talk about. As for contractual obbligation, UM, today,
Speaker 1: I wanted to explore a concept that I brought up
Speaker 1: one of my recent videos, UM, self and community actualization.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, So first we need to get in some context,
Speaker 1: of course. UM. I mean when most people hear self actualization,
Speaker 1: they probably think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, the
Speaker 1: famous permit that management uh staff tend to use up
Speaker 1: in their offices and such Los Angeles yoga ladies. Uh.
Speaker 1: The context in which I've heard self actualization the most. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that whole group kind of you know yea. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so self actualization mass' 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 preters of his work ran with and popularized. UM.
Speaker 1: And so that as a result of that pyramid, 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 do you'll think you'll are on
Speaker 1: the pyramid right now? Just for posterity sake, Oh, right
Speaker 1: up 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 any better than that, including one absolute unit.
Speaker 1: He's fucking massive. He's a chunky buddy. What about Karen? Yes,
Speaker 1: I really don't know. I don't. I don't spend too
Speaker 1: much time thinking about models like this, especially around kind
Speaker 1: of my own my own goals, um and like where
Speaker 1: I see myself. Um, but I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm doing like him. I'm I'm relatively stable
Speaker 1: with my like actual physical needs. Um, so I guess yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to figure out what I actually want
Speaker 1: out of life. Like a lot of younger people, do.
Speaker 1: I guess right, right, So I guess that's more on
Speaker 1: the um esteem, yes, autization side of things. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it's harder because you can say, like, well, within the
Speaker 1: context of like what is possible, I'm I'm I'm aware,
Speaker 1: I want to be and I'm doing stuff that I
Speaker 1: want to be doing, but also everything feels like a
Speaker 1: disaster around me all the time because the time simon,
Speaker 1: which makes it difficult to be is right. I was
Speaker 1: about to say, is anybody really on the safety needs
Speaker 1: category of of the pyramid? I mean some people like absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: but this group, I mean yeah, like we we we are, right,
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 around on in like the larger sphere. That's fair. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a very good way of thinking about it.
Speaker 1: Is like, yeah, my immediate needs are met. Am I
Speaker 1: very concerned that large chunks of the places I love
Speaker 1: will be unlivable and you know, there will be that
Speaker 1: we're kind of staring in the face of a variety
Speaker 1: of calamities that that could uh make everything worse for
Speaker 1: me and everybody I care about. Absolutely, but I can't
Speaker 1: do anything about that, right. The other thing I was
Speaker 1: going to point out is that with like with like,
Speaker 1: the physio needs is that includes sleep. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: who you're talking about, being the sun shining down on
Speaker 1: the pyramid and he gets up there, you know, the sleep.
Speaker 1: The sleep scientists have had their pockets in big bed
Speaker 1: for far too long, the cozy industrial complex problem. It's fine.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say something relatively. I was going
Speaker 1: to see that, Um, you know, the pyramid, as we
Speaker 1: are discovering in this conversation doesn't really accurately map out,
Speaker 1: you know, me and human psychology really because I mean
Speaker 1: not just because our brains aren't shaped like pyramids, but
Speaker 1: also because at any point in time we can be
Speaker 1: struggling multiple um sections and parts of the needs. So
Speaker 1: for example, we could all be breathing air and drinking
Speaker 1: water and having our food and stuff met right now. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, you might be like really respected and
Speaker 1: stuff in your field. Um, and you might have a
Speaker 1: certain could sense of self esteem and stuff. But then
Speaker 1: at the same time, you know you're not in a
Speaker 1: safe place, or you may be dealing with like a
Speaker 1: debilitating health condition, or you maybe lack in certain resources
Speaker 1: that you need to like thrive, right, So and then
Speaker 1: or maybe you know you have here food, water, shelter, sleep,
Speaker 1: all that, and you know you're secure and you have
Speaker 1: what you need and whatever, but you have no friends.
Speaker 1: You know, you have no intimacy, no family sense, a
Speaker 1: connection with other people. So you're kind of like living
Speaker 1: in this bubble, just floating through life, you know. I
Speaker 1: mean your bubble is say, if it has what you need,
Speaker 1: but there's not that social aspect. And I think what's
Speaker 1: interesting about this is because as we start to talk
Speaker 1: about massive hierarchy of needs, we start to see the
Speaker 1: structural and societal um impact on you know, our psychology
Speaker 1: and on our needs. Right, Because if you want to
Speaker 1: talk about our safety needs, for example, well let's get
Speaker 1: to stay to the to the bottom, to the basic.
Speaker 1: If you wanna talk about physiological needs, what is now
Speaker 1: a package and commodified product. Right. Food is something that
Speaker 1: is inaccessible to many, not because we don't have enough food,
Speaker 1: but because the distribution of it to meet the needs
Speaker 1: of all. It's not what's prioritized on the capitalism, right,
Speaker 1: there are people who are lacking in shelter, you know,
Speaker 1: um and a lot of people are sleep deprived by
Speaker 1: the systems we're living in. Yeah, m hmm. And the
Speaker 1: same thing with safety. You know, we have based literally
Speaker 1: threatened by climate change, and you know, we are atomized
Speaker 1: from our relationships and stuff because so much of so
Speaker 1: many of us have to work so hard, you know,
Speaker 1: every day, five days a week or more, eight hours
Speaker 1: or more, pretty and it really just strips us of
Speaker 1: our social connections. And there's our esteem needs were sort
Speaker 1: of stripped of that by you know, these commercial messages
Speaker 1: that we get about, like you're not this unless you
Speaker 1: have this, and bye bye bye kind of thing, right,
Speaker 1: And in self actualization isn't even really what's for a
Speaker 1: lot of people because they're still busy trying to reach
Speaker 1: all those other things um or don't even have the
Speaker 1: time to think about or they can become who they
Speaker 1: are um and we get intoide a bit more later
Speaker 1: on in this discussion, But they don't really have the
Speaker 1: time of the sense to think about that because they've
Speaker 1: been so restricted by their circumstances, right, and on top
Speaker 1: of that, restricted by like the messages that they would
Speaker 1: have gotten, you know, whether it be in the school
Speaker 1: system or through ads or whatever. The case may be,
Speaker 1: so I think looking at the pyramid, of course it's
Speaker 1: incomplete and the issues with it, but it does illuminate
Speaker 1: some interesting things that you know we're dealing with right now.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I definitely it's easier to self actualize
Speaker 1: and have esteem once your needs are met. But I
Speaker 1: think definitely there's an ability to jump around, especially when
Speaker 1: you know you have like a large scale depression and
Speaker 1: alienation and disassociation. It is to weird since where you
Speaker 1: can kind of hop around the pyramid quite quite often.
Speaker 1: Even if you have certain things met, this doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean you have something you know above or below. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I I I when it comes to like actual
Speaker 1: people that I associate with, you know, all of whom
Speaker 1: are folks who have to, like I have to work
Speaker 1: in order to live. I don't think I've ever heard
Speaker 1: anyone talk about happiness in terms of like self actualization.
Speaker 1: It's always in terms of like when I get my
Speaker 1: student loans paid off, you know, when I get my
Speaker 1: when I'm able to take care of this health problem
Speaker 1: that I have, Like when I have enough money. It's
Speaker 1: basically everything boils down to for most people, when I
Speaker 1: have enough money to not be as suffering as much
Speaker 1: from this specific thing, or to not be scared about
Speaker 1: not having enough money, um, which is I think more
Speaker 1: would I get from people when they're talking about like
Speaker 1: aspirational goals than I would like to do this thing
Speaker 1: that that fulfills me as a person. Um. Yeah. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: It's like like any any kind of actual self actualization
Speaker 1: becomes this not just a luxury, but a luxury that's
Speaker 1: just unimaginable. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Some people can't even imagine.
Speaker 1: I know people who have just basically given up on
Speaker 1: like ever being able to repay their loans, right Like
Speaker 1: they've just resigned themselves like this is my life now,
Speaker 1: all the tunity, this is this is it, you know,
Speaker 1: and I can't blame them. Who can really blame them?
Speaker 1: When that is the reality, you know for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, taking themselves out to debt is not possible
Speaker 1: even if they did get a whole bunch of the
Speaker 1: money or able to like pay off a bit more
Speaker 1: PU month. You know this love interest rates that're just
Speaker 1: like so badly exploitative that they're basically suits for the
Speaker 1: rest of lives. Of course, we had to have that
Speaker 1: brief moment of Damn the system sucks. As is typical
Speaker 1: on it could happen here. But I want to switch
Speaker 1: shift attention now to another society and another culture that
Speaker 1: has approached this human needs and human psychology and human
Speaker 1: society thing differently. Right. Um, what's been coming to a
Speaker 1: lot more people's attention lateally is that Abraham Maslow, Um
Speaker 1: he was actually partially inspired to develop his theory by
Speaker 1: his stay with the Six Seek of Blackfoot. And I
Speaker 1: went into some of the details on the video on
Speaker 1: my channel, um rethinking Maslow's hierarchy of needs psycho bit
Speaker 1: more in there, but basically, um, what he discovers what
Speaker 1: I get to in that video is that, well, firstly,
Speaker 1: some cultures us as being one self actualized, right like
Speaker 1: the Six Seek of Blackfoot, meaning that's the Blackfoot just
Speaker 1: for a little bit of context, or and indid in
Speaker 1: this people, I think confederation is how they tend to
Speaker 1: refer to themselves in like Montana, I think Idaho, Um yeah,
Speaker 1: up in Canada, Yeah, I kind of like Idaho, Montana
Speaker 1: and parts of Canada, Um, like that's that's Blackfoot territory.
Speaker 1: They were also Maslow spent time with them. L Run
Speaker 1: Hubbard lied about having spent a lot of time with
Speaker 1: the Blackfoot. So I didn't know that. I don't know. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of scientology law if you have to
Speaker 1: catch up one yeah, but um yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: with Maslow's model, self auctionalization is essentially, you know, self fulfillment, right,
Speaker 1: the tendency for the individual to become more and more
Speaker 1: what one is and to become everything that one is
Speaker 1: capable of becoming. So us like fulfilling your potential as
Speaker 1: a person, as a partner, as a parent, I talent,
Speaker 1: as a artists, as a whatever, just fulfilling your potential
Speaker 1: as a person. Right. But to say that we are
Speaker 1: born self actualized, um, that framing will looks too seeing
Speaker 1: us each as born in the world with a spark
Speaker 1: of divinity, because of course this is tied into their spirituality. Um,
Speaker 1: born for the spark of divinity and with a great
Speaker 1: purpose embedded in us. And what self actualization is linked
Speaker 1: to in these cultures inextricably linked to that is is
Speaker 1: community actualization. Right. So community actualization is a concept that
Speaker 1: places the actualized individual in the context of community. So
Speaker 1: instead of just upholding the individual alone, which Maslow's hierarchy
Speaker 1: has been critiqued for sort of doing. Community actualization incorporates
Speaker 1: the web of relationships that supports each of us as individuals. Basically,
Speaker 1: it recognizes that we cannot be self actualized solely as
Speaker 1: individuals if there's not like a broader network over at,
Speaker 1: a web that is supports us. You know, we're not
Speaker 1: islands standing, you know. Yeah, yeah, we were, we were.
Speaker 1: We were touching on on on that point a bit,
Speaker 1: a bit previous, but less eloquently. Um, how yeah, it is,
Speaker 1: it is. It's it's it's much easier to have the
Speaker 1: ability to actualize your goals into into actions when you
Speaker 1: are less alienated and you have and you have all
Speaker 1: these other things around around a community. Yeah exactly. Is that.
Speaker 1: I think like the lack of community self actualization is
Speaker 1: kind of what we were talking about in terms of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: things are seeing things are great for me inasmuch as
Speaker 1: things are great, you know, in the system we live in,
Speaker 1: But I I don't feel that, you know, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can look outside and you're like everything is actually really bad.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of in my little bubble and I'm
Speaker 1: trying to expand my bubble to be around you know,
Speaker 1: and to help more people, but it can be overwhelming sometimes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's only so much one person could do.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the whole point of community, right.
Speaker 1: Our community supports our basic needs and basically equips us
Speaker 1: to manifest our purpose. So it's a community would be
Speaker 1: there too, for example, and we can get into this
Speaker 1: a bit more designer model of education that supports us
Speaker 1: in expressing our unique gifts. Right. Another part of the
Speaker 1: Six Secret Black philosophy involves cultural perpetuity, where there's an
Speaker 1: important consideration of those who came before and those who
Speaker 1: are coming after, seven generations forward and seven generations backward,
Speaker 1: as I had it explained to me. So that is
Speaker 1: something that I think it would have been useful when
Speaker 1: it came to discussions of um, you know, climate change.
Speaker 1: And it's very relevant now because we are seeing the
Speaker 1: older generations basically struggling and being like, you know, um,
Speaker 1: well it's ends problem now you could take care of it.
Speaker 1: You're in the future kids, all right? Well that yeah,
Speaker 1: when they're basically on the download saying fuck them kids,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, 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 in society that values
Speaker 1: community actualization. UM. I mean, and I'm just speaking from
Speaker 1: my experience here. Of course, you're a 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 sort of
Speaker 1: approach to like basically trading us from like an early
Speaker 1: age to learn to cooperate and work with people as
Speaker 1: people and as comrades, you know, although 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 undercuted 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 that
Speaker 1: being in school or like wherever. Because yeah, that was
Speaker 1: that was definitely my experience, even even like in private
Speaker 1: school in Canada a long time ago. And I know
Speaker 1: that's that's the thing across you know, across the ocean
Speaker 1: 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 look at like childhood and education and
Speaker 1: stuff in society there would value community actualization. Um, what
Speaker 1: sort of things do you guys think we would be
Speaker 1: seeing in that sort of society? What sort of approaches
Speaker 1: 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 tremendously 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
Speaker 1: that 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, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 1: the implix is being directed somewhere currently. This isn't a
Speaker 1: thing you have to This isn't a thing you have
Speaker 1: to like splice in the kids little brains to make
Speaker 1: them want to do it. Kids love making ship exactly.
Speaker 1: Like if you give a child an opportunity and sort
Speaker 1: of facility that like, they a very a lot of them.
Speaker 1: I can't really generalize because I know some kids were
Speaker 1: like you do what you had to do. I want
Speaker 1: to stay in my corner but there a lot of
Speaker 1: kids as well who would be like very very willing
Speaker 1: to be helpful, you know, they really like they just
Speaker 1: a door being a helper and being someone who can support,
Speaker 1: whether it be in the kitchen, you know, with like
Speaker 1: a little broom or whatever, sweeping, whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1: There some my kids don't want to be part of
Speaker 1: a community, you know, because we are social atomos um.
Speaker 1: It's just that right now it's directed at like minecraft,
Speaker 1: supers or whatever. Yeah, I think one of the things
Speaker 1: that I would really focus on, because this is just
Speaker 1: kind of in my experience, is teaching young kids how
Speaker 1: to cook, um and then having them cook or at
Speaker 1: least help cook food for other people. I think it's
Speaker 1: a really great kind of skill to learn. But also
Speaker 1: it it does this weird thing to your brain when
Speaker 1: you do. That's like you you get very happy when
Speaker 1: you cook food for for other people. And I think
Speaker 1: it's it's a really good kind of emotional impulse to
Speaker 1: give kids. It's like, hey, this is you can make
Speaker 1: people feel good by doing things for them, um, And
Speaker 1: because that makes you feel good and it makes them
Speaker 1: feel good, and then that really builds that whole sense
Speaker 1: of community. So yeah, I see. Yeah, yeah, some kids
Speaker 1: could be like but like both self lessness, but it
Speaker 1: also teaches you to like do stuff for yourself as well. Right,
Speaker 1: it's 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 personally, UM,
Speaker 1: I develop an aneurism whenever anyone's in the kitchen with me. Yes,
Speaker 1: I there is definitely moments where if there's too many
Speaker 1: people in a kitchen, that is frustrating. But if if
Speaker 1: you do it right, you can get you can get
Speaker 1: a thirteen year old cooking you an entire like really
Speaker 1: really nice holiday dinner. Um, which is which is what
Speaker 1: I was doing when I was thirteen. I was cooking
Speaker 1: all of the holiday dinners for my entire family, um,
Speaker 1: because I just I wanted to learn cooking. So it's
Speaker 1: it's definitely possible if you're a parent and you want
Speaker 1: less time in the kitchen, uh, teach your kid how
Speaker 1: to cook. I mean I come from a family of
Speaker 1: child cooks, right, I remember um, this one time, I
Speaker 1: think I was making like a cart cake with my
Speaker 1: mom um. But I was used to like licking my
Speaker 1: fingers when you know, you make that cookie cookie dough
Speaker 1: and stuff. But I licked my fingers when the when
Speaker 1: I cracked the egg, she was like, stuff, you can't
Speaker 1: do that, you know, So I just remember that was
Speaker 1: one of the experiences in the kitchen ready stood out
Speaker 1: to me. Lessons lessons will be learned about, like bacteria, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it'sience, knives you get get to learn how
Speaker 1: to use knives, get to learn about heat. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of a lot of good lessons you
Speaker 1: can learn inside. I can get firing safety, chemistry, you know,
Speaker 1: of stuff all mixed in there, you know, even math,
Speaker 1: even absolutely fractions. It's one of the only times I
Speaker 1: use fractions is in cooking and baking. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: as embarrassing as it is, I use Google when I
Speaker 1: want to confute measurements still, but I mean it's just there.
Speaker 1: It's more convenient. But yeah, I absolutely agree that example,
Speaker 1: you know, like the use of like cooking lessons and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing to support um, to support like
Speaker 1: kids self actualization. At also the community actualization because of
Speaker 1: my experience, and the thing I default to is different
Speaker 1: versions of like the youth liberation argument. But because of
Speaker 1: how people have been using that term on Twitter right now,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk about it because it's been
Speaker 1: causing a lot of like really dumb fighting about what
Speaker 1: that term actually means and who coined it and like
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. But that's kind of where I
Speaker 1: default to in terms of like what self actualization could
Speaker 1: be in a community setting. Youth liberation is one of
Speaker 1: those things that I'm really passionate about UM, and I
Speaker 1: honestly don't know who coined it or what discourse stopped
Speaker 1: and about it right now, but it definitely UM informs
Speaker 1: my approach and ends up influence and like a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that I discuss, Like when if I
Speaker 1: talk about like an issue or whatever UM in society,
Speaker 1: a lot of times it really boils down or starts
Speaker 1: from an early age, it starts through the education system,
Speaker 1: or it's foster there or incubated there. So I think UM,
Speaker 1: a lot more discussion should be happening about, you know,
Speaker 1: the place of young people and the education system and
Speaker 1: stuff UM, alongside, of course all the other struggles and
Speaker 1: discussions and discourses about struggles we've been happen. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to view like anarchistic like liberatory frameworks. It's like
Speaker 1: trying to achieve that self actualization and to some degree
Speaker 1: like the the like a steam level, and then also
Speaker 1: like the community and belonging level. Um, even if you
Speaker 1: don't have all of your physical needs met all the time,
Speaker 1: is how these types of frameworks can be can almost
Speaker 1: just like jump around that and be like, despite me
Speaker 1: not having all of these base needs met, if I
Speaker 1: if I have like a radical model of the world,
Speaker 1: I can still try to achieve that type of freedom
Speaker 1: because I 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, is at least
Speaker 1: on you know, like a like a like whether it
Speaker 1: be like a youth lib framework or just like general
Speaker 1: like radical anarchism in general. Yeah, And I mean parts
Speaker 1: of thinking outside the box involves, you know, looking at
Speaker 1: other people who have thought outside of the box, who
Speaker 1: have reinvented and reconsidered and sort of transformed their approach
Speaker 1: to things like education, 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 send to think a
Speaker 1: lot about, you know, all the things we can do
Speaker 1: to not fit into into capitalist smooths. You know, it's
Speaker 1: really facilitate folks potential, not just really cooking classes for example,
Speaker 1: but even through you know, workshops and field trips. I
Speaker 1: mean field trips. Now, we're just kind of like this
Speaker 1: saying that you know, kids go to from time to
Speaker 1: time and they after walking a single fire line and
Speaker 1: all these different things. But what I envision when I
Speaker 1: think of you know, learning is something walk into, Like
Speaker 1: less restriction to just the four walls of a classroom
Speaker 1: and more the whole world is your classroom. You know,
Speaker 1: the whole world is a place where you know, you
Speaker 1: can explore, and you can room and you can develop yourself.
Speaker 1: You know, with out all these barriers and controls replace on,
Speaker 1: kids end up suffocating their imagination of what things can be.
Speaker 1: And I mean when you have that sort of educational
Speaker 1: model where you know, the youth are able to explore
Speaker 1: different avenues and direct their own education, routes. You know,
Speaker 1: you also end up, which is what has happened in
Speaker 1: education models that we've seen throughout many different cultures of
Speaker 1: the world. You see that it facilitates relationships with the
Speaker 1: community members, right, and everybody benefits because you have, for example,
Speaker 1: becausn't exactly something like apprenticeships, and you have you know,
Speaker 1: for example, people getting support from the kids in the
Speaker 1: kitchen or you know, in the workshop or in library
Speaker 1: or whatever the case may be. And not only the
Speaker 1: kids about paying their skills, but they're also developing relationships
Speaker 1: with different members of the community with different backgrounds, with
Speaker 1: different experiences. And it released serves almost as I see
Speaker 1: it as a way to God against um, this sort
Speaker 1: of style of parenting where that we just kind of
Speaker 1: seeing popularized lately, where like the child is basically the
Speaker 1: exclusive property of the parents and you can't tell anybody
Speaker 1: how to raise their child and the parent always knows best,
Speaker 1: and that kind of approach. I think it's a good
Speaker 1: and to do to that because the child being exposed
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: course a total transmission. But you know, no proposal could
Speaker 1: really be approach and isolation. Yeah, and it's it's easier
Speaker 1: to achieve when you around other right, It's it's easier
Speaker 1: to once if if you are already in a community
Speaker 1: where these things can be fostered, then it's a lot
Speaker 1: you know, it's a lot less of a lofty goal. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that there's a kind of interesting I don't
Speaker 1: know if case studies the right word, but there's part
Speaker 1: of Italy that had a really really long running like
Speaker 1: anarchist education experiments, and so they're basically able to sort
Speaker 1: of refund local school systems and it worked. But you know,
Speaker 1: and they produced a bunch of really good schools, and
Speaker 1: you know, the schools are based in sort of like
Speaker 1: cooperative learning etcetera, etcetera, And you know, I mean the
Speaker 1: model still exists today. But and you know, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they made some of the best schools in Europe, but
Speaker 1: the society around them didn't change, and so sort of bizarrely,
Speaker 1: they ended up making these schools that like produced you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're very good schools. They produced extremely good students,
Speaker 1: but then they also like produced an extremely you know,
Speaker 1: well educated and good like capitalist candre basically. And so
Speaker 1: I think I think there's a sort of you know,
Speaker 1: if if we go back to sort of the community
Speaker 1: aspect of this is like, yeah, there's there's a sense
Speaker 1: to which even even if you have you know, you
Speaker 1: get some form of self actualization, you get some form
Speaker 1: of sort of you know, community and cooperative like education
Speaker 1: for children and stuff like that, the whole society has
Speaker 1: to move with it or otherwise you just wind up
Speaker 1: sort of feeding the beast more effectively. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that is that you you also see that kind
Speaker 1: of problem with like the we wred guys, right, the
Speaker 1: Adam Newman and and and h the two co founders
Speaker 1: of that came out of an Adam's case at kibbutz
Speaker 1: in Israel, which you know started with from kind of
Speaker 1: socialist foundations, and the other founder had grown up in
Speaker 1: like a commune in rural or again. Uh, and they
Speaker 1: both wound up making like this ultra capitalist real estate company.
Speaker 1: So yeah, if you it's it's you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot that's said, and there's there's a lot of value
Speaker 1: and kind of like carving out sections of culture for
Speaker 1: the things you believe in to try to um get
Speaker 1: shelter from the storm. But yeah, as you were kind
Speaker 1: of noting, Chris, UM, it does. It does also just
Speaker 1: wind up kind of reinforcing the dominant social system. UM.
Speaker 1: If there's not a kind of more basic upheaval of
Speaker 1: the way things work. Yeah, if there's no you know,
Speaker 1: political philosophy and your goodness and there's no connection with
Speaker 1: you know, broader social movements and sort of confederation with
Speaker 1: other projects, you know, it could very easily be coopted,
Speaker 1: you know, in isolation. And I guess I guess that's
Speaker 1: you know, like that that's what happened to self actualization
Speaker 1: is a concept for the most part, is that it
Speaker 1: got taken over by kind of weird grifters and yeah,
Speaker 1: like self care. Yeah yeah, and take these concepts and
Speaker 1: there's sort of twisted and transformed into um, you know,
Speaker 1: capitalists hands it's even something like um like with there's
Speaker 1: been some interesting discussions happening surrounding like luxury and what
Speaker 1: luxury means around certain within certain circles on Twitter UM
Speaker 1: and Kim Kimberly Foster from for Harriet Excellent YouTube channel UM.
Speaker 1: She mentioned that to her at least is long but
Speaker 1: really good video. She spoke about how lux read to
Speaker 1: who is basically, um, you know, finding the ability to
Speaker 1: rest where you need to rest and to be able
Speaker 1: to be supported. Um, whereas luxury now, but luxury has
Speaker 1: quite popular understanding, it is more so about consumption and consumerism.
Speaker 1: So even when you have something where like and this
Speaker 1: is specific to um, the black experience of course, because
Speaker 1: for a long time, you know, black women have been
Speaker 1: expected to, like um, toil and labor and support not
Speaker 1: only the communities but also engineer as slavery also you know,
Speaker 1: their white masters and that kind of thing. Um, there's
Speaker 1: there was a push for the Black women Luxury movement
Speaker 1: to sort of reclaim you know, a space for black
Speaker 1: women to just be able to enjoy themselves and you know,
Speaker 1: be themselves. But that quickly became something that it's just like,
Speaker 1: you know, just get the bag. Um, just the sort
Speaker 1: of hyper capitalists, hyper consumerist, bougie kind of approach to luxury,
Speaker 1: where the original route to the movement, which was about
Speaker 1: finding rest, sort of lost. And I mean that's a
Speaker 1: bit of a tangent. So I'll try to connect that
Speaker 1: back to what we're saying. Um. I think when it
Speaker 1: comes to things like rest and the ability to rest. UM,
Speaker 1: I think that that's can only really be found in community,
Speaker 1: and if there's a lack of communit 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: need to recharge UM. Barring that, of course, resheople can
Speaker 1: pay for a sort of a full community in a
Speaker 1: sense of having you know, nannies and maids and butlers
Speaker 1: and tutors and all these people to basically support their
Speaker 1: lifestyles and support their freedom. But most people lack that.
Speaker 1: And so I think part of stypt of actualization, as
Speaker 1: you're mentioning earlier, UM, it's ability to rest, and I
Speaker 1: see that as linked with community. Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: think that definitely ties into our recent discussions on anti
Speaker 1: work and how anti work is a lot more feasible
Speaker 1: if you are in a community support like network and
Speaker 1: right and you have people to rely on. UM and
Speaker 1: definitely like you know, self actualization as the ability to
Speaker 1: like to just rest when you want to, it's a
Speaker 1: very uh, it's very powerful thing and very enticing, and
Speaker 1: that definitely plays into the whole like anti work like
Speaker 1: idea I guess yeah. I mean to connect the anti
Speaker 1: thing to just general you know, unonization and striking efforts.
Speaker 1: Right Like, I was seeing people calling for a general
Speaker 1: strike the other day, um, as if we haven't been
Speaker 1: a lesson, but um they were calling for that, But
Speaker 1: what they were not realizing was that without these structures
Speaker 1: in place to support striking efforts, it's not gonna be enough.
Speaker 1: You know, if people cannot support themselves and their families,
Speaker 1: the strike cannot last. You know, it's only with this
Speaker 1: community and the community coming together to support people can
Speaker 1: they you know, not just fight for the rights in
Speaker 1: the striking and unization context, but also you know, to
Speaker 1: be able to find leisure, to find rest, as with
Speaker 1: the anti work discussion, and so sort of turn this
Speaker 1: to a discussion on organizing more generally. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: we are, at the end of the day, a very
Speaker 1: communal ape and if we were to just focus on
Speaker 1: ourselves as individuals, um, I think as capitalism, in its
Speaker 1: anti social nature exp access to I think we would
Speaker 1: all suffer as a result. You know, our goal as people,
Speaker 1: as any one person, should be not just to you
Speaker 1: knowles ourselves, but also to enrich the worlds of those
Speaker 1: around us, and to cultivate the community that as we
Speaker 1: support they you know, will support us. And I mean
Speaker 1: as we prefigure this sort of you know culture of support,
Speaker 1: of you know, care and of empathy and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Um, I think our organizing efforts would as
Speaker 1: a results be a lot more powerful, be a lot
Speaker 1: more potent, um, be a lot more enriching, and a
Speaker 1: lot more imaginative. So and I sending any of you
Speaker 1: have anything else to see, um to sort of bring
Speaker 1: this to a close. Um, I just want to leave, um,
Speaker 1: leave us with some food for thought in terms of
Speaker 1: how we can incorporate community actualization in action, right, Because
Speaker 1: it's one thing to say it will be wonderful to
Speaker 1: have a community to support you in that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But you know, um, how do people pretty isolated and stuff?
Speaker 1: Right now? Um? So I guess I actually put it
Speaker 1: into sort of five stage kind of approach, starting with
Speaker 1: firstly facilitating collective belonging among diverse groups. Right, So we
Speaker 1: want to look at bringing people together. Obviously they would
Speaker 1: have different backgrounds and different needs, different ones, different personalities,
Speaker 1: but bring people together, um, whether it be at work
Speaker 1: or on the block, or at school or whatever. The
Speaker 1: case we just for a cook cote or for align
Speaker 1: or any kind of party or interaction. Obviously, depending on
Speaker 1: where you are that that may not be the safest
Speaker 1: thing to do, um, considering COVID and everything. But just
Speaker 1: bring people together, not even necessary to proselytize to them
Speaker 1: about anarchism or socialism or whatever, but at the very
Speaker 1: least start connecting the nodes and start connecting the different
Speaker 1: 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. That'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 world. But I think whether
Speaker 1: it be with disasterly funds or solarity strikes and protests,
Speaker 1: or you know with basic mutually support you know, whether
Speaker 1: it's material or emotional solidarity in struggle. I think that
Speaker 1: is another crucial part in you know, building community and
Speaker 1: incorporating eventually community actualization, because what that does is it
Speaker 1: 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 have 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 their time of need, that is powerful. You know,
Speaker 1: not maing 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 helping hand. You
Speaker 1: start with money if people need it, UM, and then
Speaker 1: from there, you know, you get into the realm of
Speaker 1: community achievements, where your community is collectively able to celebrate
Speaker 1: the things that we have accomplished together, you know, whether
Speaker 1: it be establishing community garden that is able to supplement
Speaker 1: people's um fresh produce supply, or whether it be that
Speaker 1: you know, community has come together and they've fixed something
Speaker 1: that was broken on the street, or even that they've
Speaker 1: come together and we're able to train people with like
Speaker 1: some really helpful skills where they're now able to support
Speaker 1: themselves and bring other things to the table as well.
Speaker 1: And then from there, I think that sort of approach
Speaker 1: would foster fulfillment in community and the figures community 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 a 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 like and we really have to be we really
Speaker 1: got to figure this this out. This is this is
Speaker 1: 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 groups,
Speaker 1: in terms of the things in terms of like like
Speaker 1: you know, like connecting nodes and all like the steps
Speaker 1: that we can do to have there be like more
Speaker 1: like more connecting branches of the tree and how to
Speaker 1: 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 plugables. Yeah, pab St Andrew Yes,
Speaker 1: of course. Um, well, you can follow me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at underscore Scene true and of course on YouTube seeing andreids.
Speaker 1: Um check my stuff. You know, I have the video
Speaker 1: on rethinking masters, hierarchy of needs um and some other
Speaker 1: fun practice see things as well. Check it out. Check
Speaker 1: it out, um, and uh uh, stay thinking about stuff.
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Speaker 1: Welcome that Could Happen Here a podcast about things falling
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Speaker 1: This is again another mostly things fall Apart episode. UM
Speaker 1: Here with Me is Garrison. Hello, hello, and joining us
Speaker 1: today 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 an a socially professor of history
Speaker 1: at Arizona stat University and has written several very very
Speaker 1: good articles that I've read recently. Um Alex, how are
Speaker 1: you doing doing great? Thank you so much for having
Speaker 1: me on. Yeah, thank you, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Um So, I wanted to start by talking about an
Speaker 1: article that you has come fairly recently. Uh, that is
Speaker 1: about essentially the transition, particularly in Guerrero from I guess
Speaker 1: the sort of sixties seventies dirty war in Mexico two
Speaker 1: the drug war, and I guess I wanted to start
Speaker 1: from because I don't I don't think it's a issue
Speaker 1: that's particularly well known. Um. I want to, I guess,
Speaker 1: start with sort of an overview of how we got
Speaker 1: into the sort of dirty war in Mexico in the sixties,
Speaker 1: because I think I don't know, like I think if anyone,
Speaker 1: if people know stuff about this, it tends to be
Speaker 1: the very dramatic sort of like massacre in eight but
Speaker 1: it's been it went on for longer than that, and
Speaker 1: as a sort of deeper history. So can you bring
Speaker 1: us into that, Yeah, for sure. So I'll start off
Speaker 1: by saying that generally, if when most people think about
Speaker 1: dirty wars and and and Cold War Latin America, Mexico
Speaker 1: is probably the last country that they think be one, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's a certain exceptionalism that Mexico has enjoyed until relatively
Speaker 1: recent and relatively recently UM amongst academics and especially historians
Speaker 1: right where we're in the last ten twenty years, we
Speaker 1: started to uncover Mexico's own version of a dirty war
Speaker 1: that we are more familiar with in other places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etcetera.
Speaker 1: UM Mexico's dirty war though, and if people know a
Speaker 1: little bit about this period, like as you mentioned right,
Speaker 1: they know about the infamous student massacre that the local
Speaker 1: in October two ninety eight. But you know, my my
Speaker 1: research focuses on on this the southern state of Guerrero.
Speaker 1: It's on the Pacific coast. It's made famous by the
Speaker 1: resort city of Akapunco. And I wrote a book in
Speaker 1: twenty four published a book in twenty fourteen that really
Speaker 1: traced the emergence of armed resistance in the state of
Speaker 1: Guerrero during the nineteen sixties and seventies. And that was
Speaker 1: my entrance into this idea of of a Mexican dirty war,
Speaker 1: of the Mexican state practice seeing systematic state terrorism against
Speaker 1: political dissidents and in my case, armed guerilla dissidents who
Speaker 1: enjoyed the backing of dozens of rural communities. UM and
Speaker 1: even urban poor working class neighborhoods in places that in
Speaker 1: the late sixties and in early nineteen seventies. That's a
Speaker 1: very regional story, right. That's another thing that kind of
Speaker 1: distinguishes the Mexican Dirty War from from other Latin American
Speaker 1: cases is that the Dirty War was localized to a
Speaker 1: few major cities and then to two very specific locales
Speaker 1: in the countryside, Garretro 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.
Speaker 1: UM and you know, 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
Speaker 1: governors um a police violence, army violence, economic injustice. In
Speaker 1: the sixties, they followed the rules and they followed the laws,
Speaker 1: and each time that they did so, they experienced pretty
Speaker 1: horrific instances of both state violence exercised by the military
Speaker 1: and the police, but also everyday forms of violence practiced
Speaker 1: by 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 guerrilla 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 to
Speaker 1: two hundred. But the key is that in coastal Guerrero
Speaker 1: and then some of the mountains mountain communities of the Garto.
Speaker 1: They 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 rural theater. Its main
Speaker 1: rural theater was in a place like Garrido where you
Speaker 1: we think there was almost a thousand disappearances from nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine up until the early nineteen eighties. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: are the things that they interested me a lot sort
Speaker 1: of reading through this was that it's sort of weird
Speaker 1: for an insurgency, and that you get aspects of both
Speaker 1: kind of the kind of like classical seventies urban Gurilla movement,
Speaker 1: but it's also it's very much a real movement you have,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, like one of one of the
Speaker 1: stories you're telling this is about like a group of
Speaker 1: a group of people who did one of the you know,
Speaker 1: like the classic urban seventies thing, which is that you
Speaker 1: know they did they did a bank robbery, and then
Speaker 1: two the people get tortured and the rural guerrilla sort
Speaker 1: of get hunted down. And I was I was wondering
Speaker 1: about the dynamics of this because it seems like like
Speaker 1: there there's it seems like you have these groups that
Speaker 1: are kind of unusually moving back and forward between like
Speaker 1: having bases and cities and having bases in these rural areas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the So usually when when when folks
Speaker 1: think about these these guerrilla movements, and in the sixies
Speaker 1: and seventies, they think of them primarily as as a
Speaker 1: as a you know, very fairly typical rural guerrilla movements
Speaker 1: as you just described. But these two movements, one led
Speaker 1: by as the Party of the Poor, the other one
Speaker 1: by Hanada Baska is the a CNRC. From the very onset,
Speaker 1: they tried to connect the rule to the city UM,
Speaker 1: whether it was cities in in Guerrero like UM the
Speaker 1: resort city of Acapulco, particularly working class neighborhoods on the
Speaker 1: outside of the city, or the state capital in Chilpan
Speaker 1: Single which housed the state university. Right, So both of
Speaker 1: these movements made pretty substantial inroads into that community and
Speaker 1: then also into Mexico City. So they tried. Their idea
Speaker 1: was not necessarily to start as a strictly as a
Speaker 1: strictly rural movement, but their idea was always to expand
Speaker 1: because I think to the cities, and I think quite
Speaker 1: rightly they they perceived that what the Mexican state was
Speaker 1: going to do to them was trying to corral them
Speaker 1: in the state of Guerrero and prevent them from logistically
Speaker 1: and politically expanding beyond that. And in the end they
Speaker 1: were That's exactly what happened, um. And that's how these
Speaker 1: movements were ruthlessly crushed. That and it took a lot
Speaker 1: of terror to to separate these armed movements from their
Speaker 1: popular base of support. But a lot of this has
Speaker 1: to do with the fact that both Vaskis and Colonias
Speaker 1: were school teachers and they were involved in union movements
Speaker 1: that were national in scope. Um, they were in moved,
Speaker 1: they were in you know, Luss was in the next
Speaker 1: Communist Party, right, so he had extensive urban experiences and
Speaker 1: networks throughout the country. So their perspective was always to
Speaker 1: connect the rule to the urban particularly because Mexico by
Speaker 1: the seventies was a rapidly urbanizing country, right it was
Speaker 1: going it becomes for the first time and assist well
Speaker 1: first time as his post colonial history, it becomes primarily
Speaker 1: an urban country. So um, So they tried these really
Speaker 1: interesting experiments to try to connect the two theaters. But
Speaker 1: as you as you mentioned, right, they did that typical
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies thing of robbing banks, and their terminology was expropriation, right, um.
Speaker 1: But that that then exposed them to police actions and
Speaker 1: and any time any of their militants were captured, they
Speaker 1: were immediately tortured information you know, that they were interrogated horrifically,
Speaker 1: and that and from intel was used to to hunt
Speaker 1: down their their their their comrades up in the mountains.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's a good place to move
Speaker 1: towards sort of the other side of this, which is
Speaker 1: partially the Mexican state response. But the part, the part
Speaker 1: of it that was really interesting to me was about
Speaker 1: how you know, so so part part part part of
Speaker 1: what these groups are fighting are these sort of very
Speaker 1: very local like to landed elites, and I wonder if
Speaker 1: you could talk a little bit about how these sort
Speaker 1: of local elites merger, are able to merge with and
Speaker 1: sort of like co opt in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: that the military units that are deployed. Yeah, that's one
Speaker 1: of the biggest So let me see how I can
Speaker 1: answer this question, because there's there's so what I what
Speaker 1: I tried to do in this article, and it's part
Speaker 1: of my broader ongoing research, is to kind of connect
Speaker 1: the violence, the state violence of the Mexican Dirty War
Speaker 1: as it as as it happens and get around the
Speaker 1: seventies with with with something else that's happening simuel taneously,
Speaker 1: which is like the so called drug war and the
Speaker 1: exponentially increasing cultivation of drugs in a place like Gereto,
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 agrarian reform
Speaker 1: efforts that that occurred in the 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 of Guerrero is that, uh,
Speaker 1: how you can tell who's in power by just by
Speaker 1: almost by looking at their last name. Because there's this
Speaker 1: remarkable continuity in the state of who has 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 thou fifteen, it was in the top three in
Speaker 1: Mexico for opium and heroin 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 fiefdom 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 guerrero 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: as a balloon effect. Uh, it just displaces the drug
Speaker 1: production somewhere else because the demand in the US is
Speaker 1: still there. And that because in that creates in Mexico
Speaker 1: the number one provider of narcotics by the mid nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and that then has an impact locally in the place
Speaker 1: of Guerrero, which is again simultaneously experiencing a grill insurgency,
Speaker 1: a dirty war, and then also the ramping up of
Speaker 1: drug product shoot. One of the most interesting parts of
Speaker 1: this that I didn't know about was about how, I
Speaker 1: mean they're like how how explicitly because I've read a
Speaker 1: lot of while not a lot, but I've read about
Speaker 1: a lot of how, particularly like after like when when
Speaker 1: the sort of after sort of the various up people
Speaker 1: in two thousands six in Mexico with the Wahaka uprising
Speaker 1: with the Zapatuita is making a bunch of moves and
Speaker 1: the CPO presidential election, about how you get the drug
Speaker 1: war is this sort of like military solution to these
Speaker 1: electist movements, But I was interested in how I mean,
Speaker 1: incredibly explicit they are about this, Like the anti guerrilla
Speaker 1: operations are, like they don't call them mentic thriller operations.
Speaker 1: They talk about like bandits and like they they they're
Speaker 1: they're explicitly like no, no, no, this is an anti
Speaker 1: narco operation, even though you know they're going and massacurring
Speaker 1: like essentially peasants and occasionally guerillas, but just a bunch
Speaker 1: of just random like campusinos. Yeah. Yeah, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a great quote that I got from for in this article. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, this is wonderful researcher in Mexico, Carlos Flordesho,
Speaker 1: was a really good book on kind of like the
Speaker 1: failed state in Mexico and drugs and military and in
Speaker 1: that steady he managed to interview a military participant in
Speaker 1: the Dirty War in the nineteen seventies and he has
Speaker 1: this great quote that I included in this essay which
Speaker 1: he says, this military guy says basically, look, with the
Speaker 1: marijuana growers, we had no problem, we had no beef.
Speaker 1: But with the guerrillas, we had to fuck them up.
Speaker 1: And for me, like that, that direct quote kind of
Speaker 1: encapsulates like what the drug war in Mexico has been
Speaker 1: historically and in this current form. Like and this is
Speaker 1: something that I learned from people like sociologists and journalists
Speaker 1: Don Paley, right, like the war on drugs, the war
Speaker 1: on poor people, um. And and it it becomes in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, it becomes a really useful cover for
Speaker 1: the type of horrific violence that the state is practicing
Speaker 1: in a place like against these popularly supported insurgencies so
Speaker 1: publicly and to the international audience and to its own
Speaker 1: domestic national audience. And the Mexican state is saying, look,
Speaker 1: we're not waging a dirty war, We're not waging a
Speaker 1: counter insurgency. We're fighting a war against cattle wrestlers, against
Speaker 1: cattle thieves, and against criminals, against drug dealers, um. When
Speaker 1: in reality they're waging a war against poor people who
Speaker 1: are supporting these different guerrilla insurgencies led by these rural
Speaker 1: communist school teachers. Um. So that's and that's in the
Speaker 1: rural theater, right. It's it's really interesting when you think
Speaker 1: about how the Mexican state in the seventies will criminalize
Speaker 1: urban guerrilla movements. You know, Mexico had like thirty eight
Speaker 1: guerilla movements in the nineties, sixies and seventies. That's just
Speaker 1: like people don't really recognize that, right, like thirty eight
Speaker 1: to forty different rural and urban guerilla organizations. The big
Speaker 1: urban one that managed to create i don't know, ten
Speaker 1: to twelve different uh focals or folks uh pols i
Speaker 1: Um was the LEA, the Communist League of the September Um.
Speaker 1: They became such a big threat in the urban theater
Speaker 1: that the Mexican president, and we said Cheveria devoted his
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four State of the Union, basically the Mexican
Speaker 1: version of the State of Union, he devoted a pretty
Speaker 1: good chunk of it to these quote unquote terrorists, right,
Speaker 1: So for the urban guerrillas, he referred to them as terrorists,
Speaker 1: and then he does this thing where he says, you know,
Speaker 1: most of these terrorists are unpatriotic. They and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: paraphrase some of his language, they reveal high indices of homosexuality,
Speaker 1: of like just basically mothering them to the point that
Speaker 1: they're seen as like the most despicable other in Mexico,
Speaker 1: in Mexican society. And that then opens them up to
Speaker 1: getting wiped out, um, which is fulfills a similar function
Speaker 1: as calling the rural guerillas nothing more than cattle wrestlers,
Speaker 1: cattle thieves, and narcos. Right, So it's all this counterinsurgency
Speaker 1: like discursive strategy that that justifies the elimination of these people.
Speaker 1: But at bottom, these are just wars against the drug
Speaker 1: wars a war against poor people. And and you see
Speaker 1: that to this day, you see that, you know most
Speaker 1: one of the things that really animates my research about
Speaker 1: the history of drug wars in Mexico is that I
Speaker 1: really want to push back against you know, journalistic treatments
Speaker 1: that that will say, look, Mexico's war on drugs began
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six when President Felipe Leon wait,
Speaker 1: you know, launched the military against the different drug trafficking organizations.
Speaker 1: And you know, historians, um, like like myself will work
Speaker 1: on this. We're like, wait, no, Mexico has had a
Speaker 1: series of drug wars right that. There's a historian Alec
Speaker 1: Dawson who talks about has a really excellent book on Payote,
Speaker 1: and he talks about how the war on drugs begins
Speaker 1: in like the colonial era, right in terms of how
Speaker 1: the Spanish colonial state criminalized uh indigenous consumption of drugs
Speaker 1: like payote for for their own ritualistic cultural practices. Um.
Speaker 1: The nineteen seventies is another moment where you have a
Speaker 1: form of drug war that the Mexican state exercises. But
Speaker 1: from my perspective, it's just it's almost like a cover
Speaker 1: as a way to wage war against political dissidents and
Speaker 1: an armed guerrilla challenges to its rule in Mexico. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that's a that's a iportant of looking
Speaker 1: at it also as just a way to understand stand why,
Speaker 1: you know, like if if you're looking at it from
Speaker 1: the inspective of like a policy makers like oh, well,
Speaker 1: we spent all the time during the War on drugs,
Speaker 1: like why are there more drugs? And it's like, well yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean, the point isn't really about like I mean,
Speaker 1: I think, okay, I want to make a caveat here,
Speaker 1: which is like it's not like there's such a thing
Speaker 1: as like a quote unquote good war on drugs that
Speaker 1: you could wage like there there's no there isn't a
Speaker 1: version of this that's like oh no, if if if
Speaker 1: we actually just try to like focusing on stopping these people,
Speaker 1: it would work, but it's like no, But simultaneously, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that the goal isn't really about like it's not
Speaker 1: about drugs, it's just about killing poor people. And I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I 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. Well, I mean 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 antidrug units that are you know,
Speaker 1: incredibly specialized, They get a bunch of money, and then
Speaker 1: they immediately trying to round start and start like just
Speaker 1: do like just enter into the drug trade. And so
Speaker 1: I was one of the other things, Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: just been interested in this just about there's there's seems
Speaker 1: to be these these very these these very interesting sort
Speaker 1: of alliances between paramilitaries, cartels, the police in the military
Speaker 1: that open up and this is this I know this
Speaker 1: is an incredibly broad like it's a question you can like,
Speaker 1: you know, devote academic disciplines too, But I was wondering
Speaker 1: how you look at the states in the context in
Speaker 1: a context like this, because yeah, I mean in a
Speaker 1: context where you know, it's not the state doesn't really
Speaker 1: have monopoly on violence, right, Yeah, No, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a huge question. And there's how you I mean, essentially,
Speaker 1: the question is like what is the state? Which is 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
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 used to work for landed elagues
Speaker 1: will now serves not just gun slingers for land of
Speaker 1: elages who are terrorizing campesinos, but now they're also gonna
Speaker 1: 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 co opt
Speaker 1: to buy off you know, military units that are stationed
Speaker 1: at the local level, police units that are stationed at
Speaker 1: the local level, local judges, local magistrates, local political officials,
Speaker 1: and and it it creates a very um dense network
Speaker 1: at the local level of people who are working together,
Speaker 1: uh to maintain power, but at the same time make
Speaker 1: sure that this really profitable political economy of narcotics is
Speaker 1: going to thrive. And this is at the very local level, right,
Speaker 1: So in some in some ways those local interests of
Speaker 1: the quote unquote the state are will conflict with the
Speaker 1: state in Mexico City and how to resolve those tensions
Speaker 1: and becomes a big deal. So the the guy that
Speaker 1: the military participant that I referenced earlier, he was he
Speaker 1: was actually sent in from outside of Garredo into Geo
Speaker 1: to wage counterinsurgency. And you know, he talks in this
Speaker 1: book about how they didn't know what to do when
Speaker 1: they see their soldier comrades, uh, you know, obviously collaborating
Speaker 1: with local narticles even though the over this guy in
Speaker 1: his unit have been sent in to wipe out the naticles.
Speaker 1: So what ends up happening is that the goal is
Speaker 1: never to eradicate the from a national level. From a
Speaker 1: state national level, the goal is never to eradicate the
Speaker 1: drug trade in Mexico in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
Speaker 1: The goal is to rash realize that the goal is
Speaker 1: to control it and and the goal is for the
Speaker 1: state to be able to maintain power over it. And
Speaker 1: this is leads us to what you know, some scholars
Speaker 1: were referred to as a plasa system, right, that that
Speaker 1: that different narcotic organ traffic organizations will control different parts
Speaker 1: of Mexico, but the overall power, you know, they have
Speaker 1: to kick back to is our different state officials. Um.
Speaker 1: And that there's a recent book, really great book by
Speaker 1: Ben Smith called The Dope that just came out, really
Speaker 1: like the first really good English language big history of
Speaker 1: of the Mexican drug trade. And and he essentially he
Speaker 1: says that like, the Mexican state is a racket. It's
Speaker 1: a racket, and it's ensuring that this drug trade exists,
Speaker 1: and it's centralized and it's rationalized in the sixties, seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties, um. But by the nineties it starts to
Speaker 1: lose control as the state itself is neoliberalized and becomes
Speaker 1: smaller and its capacity to control these different groups becomes
Speaker 1: uh weekend. So so that's like the big national level, right,
Speaker 1: and then we think that takes us to the scale
Speaker 1: of the international which is a whole another thing. But
Speaker 1: at the very local level, what does this look like.
Speaker 1: It looks like if you're a drug farmer, right, because
Speaker 1: another thing in Garreto is that these drug farmers are
Speaker 1: like small scale right there. They're small scale, they have
Speaker 1: a little bit of autonomy, but they're small scale. But
Speaker 1: they're selling their product to these traffickers. And these are
Speaker 1: the traffickers usually that will have connections to local landed families,
Speaker 1: who have connections to military, to police, to politicians, um.
Speaker 1: That will ensure that this economy will will have will
Speaker 1: continue to thrive in a in a profitable way by
Speaker 1: the late seventies. And this is something else I think
Speaker 1: that I need a little bit more research on. But
Speaker 1: you see it happened elsewhere in Mexico, and especially in
Speaker 1: the northwest, in a place like Sinaroa, which is usually
Speaker 1: seen as the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. But
Speaker 1: I think in the late seventies, both in sin and
Speaker 1: the Dirty War and and the and the sending of
Speaker 1: the military and mass in a place like Garreto, it
Speaker 1: not only takes out armed resil into the Mexican state,
Speaker 1: but it will also take out small scale narco traffickers
Speaker 1: who don't want to play. They don't like the rules
Speaker 1: that the Mexican state is imposing upon them in order
Speaker 1: to make money and traffic drugs. Um. So I've seen
Speaker 1: a couple of documents where, um, you know, secret police,
Speaker 1: spy agent documents where they say, Okay, yes, you know
Speaker 1: 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 inca
Speaker 1: in the late seventies when something called Operation Condor gets
Speaker 1: launched and you get thousands of troops and federal police
Speaker 1: who go up there, and instead of eradicating the drug
Speaker 1: trade and getting rid of these different traffickers, what they
Speaker 1: do is they centralize it, they rationalize it, um, they
Speaker 1: make it more efficient, um. And that actually it's so
Speaker 1: it's in in a counterintuitive way, it's state violence that
Speaker 1: actually leads to the formation of things that we think
Speaker 1: about as cartels and not the other way around, right,
Speaker 1: because the very trade begins within the confines of the
Speaker 1: Mexican state. And 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 pera 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
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Speaker 1: get your podcasts. This is it could Happen Here, a
Speaker 1: podcast that is often in today about state and paramilitary violence.
Speaker 1: And we're back with part two of her interview with
Speaker 1: Alexander Vina about the state and paramilitary violence in the
Speaker 1: cartels in Mexico. The immediate thing I was thinking about
Speaker 1: this was it reminds me a lot of uh, some
Speaker 1: stuff I've read a while back about like smuggling people
Speaker 1: over the border and about how the American militarization of
Speaker 1: that like destroyed because it used to like as as
Speaker 1: the US tries to like make the border more and
Speaker 1: more unsafe, if it becomes harder and harder, and it
Speaker 1: means that like the people who can actually do it,
Speaker 1: like you know, you need to have access to more
Speaker 1: resources and more like technical capability. And that's sort of
Speaker 1: like and that that also in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: help the cartels because you know it, well, it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: so who actually has a bunch of organizational expertise with
Speaker 1: smuggling routes and a lot of money And it's it's
Speaker 1: and I think that's like it is it's an interesting
Speaker 1: way of looking at what the national application of state
Speaker 1: power in these like it does, which is that like
Speaker 1: it's it seems almost like what's happening is that so
Speaker 1: when when you get these massive exertion to state power,
Speaker 1: it's not that they like flatten like you know, it's
Speaker 1: not that they just sort of wipe out out resistance.
Speaker 1: What they do is they yeah, it's what you were saying,
Speaker 1: is like they centralize the drug trip, but they also
Speaker 1: they centralize the sort of violent apparatus. And it means
Speaker 1: that like yeah, if if, if you're going to survive
Speaker 1: that you have to be like incredibly efficient, incredibly violent.
Speaker 1: You have to also sort of start like you you
Speaker 1: have to start playing with it, like playing by the
Speaker 1: 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 it's 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 counter our catics forces in
Speaker 1: Mexico to to do what you just describe, but then
Speaker 1: also to sow 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 cartelntil recently,
Speaker 1: like he was giving up people. He was giving information
Speaker 1: on rivals to the d A and to other other
Speaker 1: counting arcotics forces, right, And that's part of the strategy.
Speaker 1: The strategy is to fragment these groups. Um. And that
Speaker 1: only concreases the violence. And and you see that violence
Speaker 1: at the very localized level. Um. And this is what
Speaker 1: Geretto suffering from right now. Right, Gretto for a long
Speaker 1: 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: Chapabuzman's family. They had a falling out and they made
Speaker 1: two thousands and they and they went to war. And
Speaker 1: I had disastrous consequences for the people of Guereto because
Speaker 1: it fragmented the drug trafficking organizations and it forced different
Speaker 1: local groups to take sides, um. And And that's kind
Speaker 1: of how I am 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: and and communities suffer greatly. Um. And that's also a
Speaker 1: consequence of like the kingpin strategy, right, Like this idea
Speaker 1: that if you take down the perceived leader of a
Speaker 1: drug trafficing organization, that's somehow going to have an impact
Speaker 1: on drug production. You know, what actually happens that it
Speaker 1: fragments the organization 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 thinks 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 spur 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 at all, Right, they're producing
Speaker 1: winter crops for the American market or winter fruit for
Speaker 1: the American market. Right, So in the absence of like
Speaker 1: meaningful state support for small holding agriculture, that small holding
Speaker 1: agricultural sector that is meant to feed Mexico. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: some of these these farmers in a place like call
Speaker 1: you and they'll say, Okay, well, we were growing this
Speaker 1: thing that the the Agricultural Bank is telling us to
Speaker 1: grow sesame, but we're not making lot of money off
Speaker 1: of it. But on the other hand, by the late sixties,
Speaker 1: they see that marijuana production is is really increasing due
Speaker 1: to 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: agricultural fields in northern Mexico or even into the United States.
Speaker 1: So because it's a 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 gold in
Speaker 1: the late sixties. Um, and you have uh, you know
Speaker 1: North Gengo traffickers coming into get Ready with new seeds. Um.
Speaker 1: Or you have set a lewnce is coming into your
Speaker 1: state saying, you know, grow these here are some marijuana
Speaker 1: sees grow that strain um, you know, and they can
Speaker 1: buy off you know, local politicians and soldiers and police.
Speaker 1: That's that's one of the ways that you get the
Speaker 1: emergence of industrial proportion production of marijuana and and opium
Speaker 1: poppies and garred in the sixties and seventies and again
Speaker 1: at the same time that this massive dirty war is
Speaker 1: being waged against two different peasant guerrilla movements. Right, So
Speaker 1: it's like a really messy like social matrix that's occurring
Speaker 1: at the same time. I guess one everything I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about was about how the political parties sort
Speaker 1: of work into this, because I guess, like my experience
Speaker 1: with this sort of like the 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 base outside of
Speaker 1: like like the Green Gang, but like the k MT,
Speaker 1: it's like like this is basically just a like like
Speaker 1: this like this is this is just like an arco
Speaker 1: organization with like a flag planted on it. And I'm
Speaker 1: I'm wondering how like on what end of the scale
Speaker 1: we're working with with the p R and also also
Speaker 1: like with with the other Mexican parties, because it seems
Speaker 1: like there are like parts of like a functional state
Speaker 1: app like a party state appartus or like a party apparatus,
Speaker 1: and then parts of it that are just like this
Speaker 1: is a cartel. Yeah, it's it's that's a huge question.
Speaker 1: It's it's um yes, I resistant 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 would.
Speaker 1: And again it goes back to the question of what
Speaker 1: is the state, right, Like the questions drive like just
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 two. But this guy,
Speaker 1: Mario Costao, he was like the main counterinsurgent, theorist and
Speaker 1: and and and bright mind of the Mexican military that
Speaker 1: gets sent to get right on the seventies to wipe
Speaker 1: out these different guerrilla movements. But he's after they wipe
Speaker 1: out the gerrilla movements, he stays on. He serves as
Speaker 1: as a kind of like the leader of the state
Speaker 1: police forces. And what do he starts to do. He
Speaker 1: starts to buy up land allegedly that will start producing
Speaker 1: opium poppies and marijuana. And this guy from the late
Speaker 1: seventies up until he's arrested in two thousand, it's pretty
Speaker 1: clear that had he had been collaborating with different narco
Speaker 1: trafficking organizations. He gets arrested by his own military um
Speaker 1: in two thousand because he it was pretty clear that
Speaker 1: he had been protecting and collaborating with this You have
Speaker 1: Guada's cartel and I'm a Lookio fuentis Um, so you
Speaker 1: know one of these like anti anti guerrilla, anti nautical
Speaker 1: nauticles that will you know, actually get go to jail
Speaker 1: for about six years, UM, because it was pretty apparent
Speaker 1: that he had been for long time collaborating and protecting
Speaker 1: the different narco trafficking organizations. Right. So that's the military.
Speaker 1: Then you have like the secret police that gets formed
Speaker 1: in Mexico, the DFS, and with the help of the FBI, UM,
Speaker 1: the DFS becomes like this political police that the Mexican
Speaker 1: president can use to tamp down on political descent. They're
Speaker 1: the ones, you know spine surveillance by the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: are also torturing, disappearing, and with that level of impunity
Speaker 1: and power, they also get into the drug game. By
Speaker 1: the seventies and eighties. Um, you have the federal judicial Police.
Speaker 1: They're the ones who control for this during the fifties, sixties,
Speaker 1: and seventies. Really they're the ones who are controlling, um,
Speaker 1: the kickbacks that they're receiving from narco traffickers until the
Speaker 1: military moves in the seventies and takes over for them. Right.
Speaker 1: So the repressive apparatus is within the Mexican state of
Speaker 1: the twentie century play a really key role, if not
Speaker 1: the role and helping foster create this this political economy
Speaker 1: of narcotics. Now, how do how do we view that
Speaker 1: in relation to the p r I right, the party
Speaker 1: that emerges from the Mexican Revolution, the party that will
Speaker 1: rule Mexico generally will say, from the late twenties up
Speaker 1: until the year two thousand, Well, you have pretty important,
Speaker 1: you know, political officials within the party throughout the twinute
Speaker 1: century that are directly linked to narco traffickers and directly
Speaker 1: linked to military officials who are obviously involved in the
Speaker 1: game as well. But at no level can we say
Speaker 1: it's a narco state because the n arcos having captured
Speaker 1: the state. It's actually the other way around. It's the
Speaker 1: Mexican post revolutionary state that's trying to get its hands
Speaker 1: around this thing that's growing within its own confines, and
Speaker 1: and and by and they lose control of it. Like
Speaker 1: by the late eighties and nineties, they've effectively lost control
Speaker 1: of this thing. And that's when you see the rise
Speaker 1: of these um highly centralized drug trafficking organizations like this.
Speaker 1: You have uttest cartel that's making a ton of money
Speaker 1: off the cocaine. So I guess it seems like it's
Speaker 1: almost like you're dealing with from from from the very
Speaker 1: very local level where you have these sort of landed
Speaker 1: elites and their gun slingers. It's like it's this almost
Speaker 1: sort of like like miniaturized, fractal version of the state
Speaker 1: where's like you're getting these like very very small sort
Speaker 1: of like uh you know, like almost like fetal domains
Speaker 1: and that they sort of expand upwards and stand upwards.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and I guess the interesting part to me
Speaker 1: is is how like the paramilitary dynamics of that, and
Speaker 1: how how the power of these sort of land at
Speaker 1: least into power, Like how how it's like like the power,
Speaker 1: like the the use of power from the top seems
Speaker 1: to strengthen them. Where you know, if if you're looking
Speaker 1: at this from like like how how this is supposed
Speaker 1: to work in theory, if you're someone who actually like
Speaker 1: trying to eliminate the drug trade, you think would be
Speaker 1: the way around that, like the application of power would
Speaker 1: shatter but it sort of doesn't. It causes these like
Speaker 1: these these build ups, these apparatus is and then they
Speaker 1: fragment and they rebuild again. But it's you're not ever
Speaker 1: actually dealing with these sort of like micro state like yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly where and if anything, the paramilitarization
Speaker 1: is also like a like a long it's a process, right,
Speaker 1: So like the first if we can use this term,
Speaker 1: the first paramilitaries were used to wipe out a gray
Speaker 1: and reform minded Campasinos in the thirties and forties. Um,
Speaker 1: but you don't really have like a paramilitarization of of
Speaker 1: of the drug trade in Mexico to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: because you have the military and the police to do
Speaker 1: your dirty work. Right if you're a nautical UM. That's
Speaker 1: a more recent phenomenon that you start to see in
Speaker 1: the nineties and especially in the two thousand's. So right
Speaker 1: that the case that everyone points to are these the
Speaker 1: elite of the elite in the Mexican military. The gossis
Speaker 1: these guys are like the Navy seals of the Special Force,
Speaker 1: you know, the Army rangers the Mexican military. A bunch
Speaker 1: of these guys in the mid to late nineties decide,
Speaker 1: you know what, we don't want to work for the
Speaker 1: Mexican military. We're just gonna We're gonna dessert and we're
Speaker 1: gonna go hire ourselves out to the Gulf cartel. And
Speaker 1: they become really the first like paramilitary wing of a
Speaker 1: major drug trafficking organization. And these are guys, some of
Speaker 1: which probably most likely were trained at school the Americas
Speaker 1: or received American specialized training, now switching sides and and
Speaker 1: and protecting a pretty powerful drug trafficking organization, like at
Speaker 1: the time in the nineties that was the Gulf Cartel.
Speaker 1: And these are the infamous set Us, right, these are
Speaker 1: the zs um. They're called the set Us because that
Speaker 1: was like their military code. There was always a Z
Speaker 1: in front of a number. UM, so Z one was
Speaker 1: kind of like the leader, the first guy who took
Speaker 1: twelve or thirteen guys with him to desert and they
Speaker 1: hired themselves out to this drug trafficking organization and they
Speaker 1: become like the paramilitary unit. The rest of the group
Speaker 1: see that and they're like, oh ship, Like we gotta
Speaker 1: catch up, right because these like and these guys the
Speaker 1: god is you know, they have counter andsurgency experience. You know,
Speaker 1: they were the ones who were fighting against US and
Speaker 1: chiapas in the early nineties, right, they were the ones
Speaker 1: that they were sending to ye. They were the ones
Speaker 1: who were fighting against the new cycle of guerrillas that
Speaker 1: emerging get in the mid nineties that e p R.
Speaker 1: And then when they're used for counting our context operations,
Speaker 1: they look at the situation they say, you know what,
Speaker 1: we're not going to fight on the side of the military.
Speaker 1: We're gonna hire ourselves out to these this golf cartel.
Speaker 1: We're gonna make a ton of money. Um. But they
Speaker 1: have a lot of skills, right. So the rest of
Speaker 1: the 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. But 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: Guatemalan conflict of the of the of the seventies and eighties. Um,
Speaker 1: My families from Meat, which is a state north of Gerrito.
Speaker 1: And I remember when probably two thousand five, six or seven,
Speaker 1: I was down there doing research and Disney family, and
Speaker 1: they reported on the arrest of to Guatemalans and two
Speaker 1: Colombians in this random of far off part of Meat.
Speaker 1: And You're like, what were these two Colombians and two
Speaker 1: Guatemalans doing there? While they were most likely like special
Speaker 1: X special forces in those countries, militaries who had been
Speaker 1: hired by local organizations to train their their their soldiers,
Speaker 1: to train their their paramilitaries. Um. So that that's I
Speaker 1: think that has driven a lot of the violence, right,
Speaker 1: And you see it's in terms of techniques they use,
Speaker 1: the weapons, the armament, the logics of of how to
Speaker 1: take down their enemies. Yeah. I remember I read an
Speaker 1: article like, okay, I've literally lost all at the time,
Speaker 1: I think it was like mid last year about a
Speaker 1: cartelogist basically running a military operation just shutting like shutting
Speaker 1: down the city. Um. Yeah, that was pre pandemic. That
Speaker 1: was when it was a pre pandemic. Oh my god, yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember, because that was on the day and the
Speaker 1: day after it happened. I think I spent way too
Speaker 1: much time on Twitter talking to people. Um. That was
Speaker 1: when I think you're referring to when the UH detachment
Speaker 1: from the Mexican military um in the city of Koya Khan,
Speaker 1: which is the capital of Sinaloa. Kulakhan is seen as
Speaker 1: like sina is the cradle of the Mexican drug trade,
Speaker 1: 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 Koyakan, and you
Speaker 1: had hundreds of of nauticles or paramilitaries who came down
Speaker 1: and essentially forced, um forced the military area in the
Speaker 1: state to hand over at the chapel's son to them
Speaker 1: and and for and the reason why I was like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, spent way too much time on social media
Speaker 1: going after people because people said, oh, this is an
Speaker 1: example of a failed state. Oh, look at the new
Speaker 1: president of Mexico and he's lost control of the of
Speaker 1: the state, like he's taw tawing too nauticles And it
Speaker 1: was much more complicated than that, And something similar had
Speaker 1: already happened um in the previous administration where these different
Speaker 1: like particularly in the city of of Gadajada, where they
Speaker 1: even shot down a military helicopter or police helicopter and
Speaker 1: they and they essentially um shut down the entire city
Speaker 1: because one of their leaders have been captured. Okay, so
Speaker 1: what are what are the things the things you talked
Speaker 1: about the end of the article was about these this
Speaker 1: environmentalist group that gets like they all get arrested while
Speaker 1: like their their lawyer gets killed. After we starts talking
Speaker 1: about like connections between business owners and the party and
Speaker 1: the archo trades, I guess what do you how do
Speaker 1: you sort of like like how how do you left
Speaker 1: movements sort of navigate this space because you have it
Speaker 1: seems like you have on the one hand, you know,
Speaker 1: you have all these paramilitaries and then you also have
Speaker 1: a state that is like incredibly violently hostile to you
Speaker 1: and I guess I don't know, Like I guess you
Speaker 1: sort of have the Zapatista model of this combination of
Speaker 1: sort of like arm struggle and social pressure. But I guess, like,
Speaker 1: how how how do people navigate this sort of like
Speaker 1: it seems like like a really disastrous like a place
Speaker 1: to be trying to do leftist politics, And yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's really difficult, right, And I think that's again going
Speaker 1: back to the thesis that the war on drugs is
Speaker 1: actually 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, it's these movements that have
Speaker 1: provided I think the the most accurate like X ray
Speaker 1: analysis of what the state is at the local level. Right. So, um,
Speaker 1: this this guerrilla leader that I talked about in the article,
Speaker 1: Commandant Ramido, who who was around in the late two thousand, seven,
Speaker 1: dozen eight, does nine like based on his travels in
Speaker 1: the mountains of Guerrero and kind of like the actions
Speaker 1: that he was engaged in. For him, it was very
Speaker 1: clear that the military was collaborating with all a narco
Speaker 1: trafficking organizations, not just the one, not just like the
Speaker 1: most powerful one, right. So at the national level, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of discourse of well, this start drug
Speaker 1: trafficking organization is going at it with this one in
Speaker 1: a place that Garrido, this guerrilla leader, looks at the situation.
Speaker 1: He's like, actually, they're all working together. And not only that,
Speaker 1: but they have the police in the military, and what
Speaker 1: are they doing. They are um going after poor communities
Speaker 1: up in the mountains who don't want to grow opium
Speaker 1: poppies or who want to organize a different way, an
Speaker 1: alternative model of of of living, of social reproduction. Um.
Speaker 1: What they'll say is, you know, uh, the what the
Speaker 1: military is doing in terms of drug interdiction is the
Speaker 1: only and and and burn some opium poppy fields and
Speaker 1: not others. And that's because the owner of that walled
Speaker 1: popium poppy feel that they burn didn't pay up um.
Speaker 1: So you know, now, current movements in Gueretro particing the
Speaker 1: indigenous moves and there's a recent report that that an
Speaker 1: indigenous group just put out and they're linked to the
Speaker 1: Congress Congress the c and I can remember the acronym
Speaker 1: um where they talk about a criminal state existing in
Speaker 1: in the in the part of Guerrero as Montana, which
Speaker 1: is a heavily indigenous area on the border on the
Speaker 1: eastern part of the state. And what they say is
Speaker 1: what we see here is uh an alliance between nauticles UM,
Speaker 1: political parties, military detachments and transnational corporations UM and so
Speaker 1: and and in Gerello, those transnational corporations are usually have
Speaker 1: something to do with mining and they're usually Canadian UM.
Speaker 1: So how do you navigate that? Like that is like
Speaker 1: like the correlation of forces, if we want to use
Speaker 1: that kind of terminology, like from a perspective of a
Speaker 1: of a group that that wants to resist this, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's damn near impossible, right, Like you have everything
Speaker 1: going against you, and yet people are still resisting. Right.
Speaker 1: You have the students of ayot Napa, They're still protesting,
Speaker 1: they're still organizing, even after the disappearance of their forty
Speaker 1: three comrades back in September, and we still don't have
Speaker 1: a clear answer as to what happened. Um, you still
Speaker 1: have you know, you have the model of of a
Speaker 1: timy that like that that certain indigenous communities, like the
Speaker 1: community in Chadan and ch have have practice which is
Speaker 1: essentially they kick out all political parties, they kick out
Speaker 1: all police officers, and they self organized at the communal level,
Speaker 1: almost like a community police force. And you see that
Speaker 1: in Guerrero as well. There's all you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: challenges with that. There's a that usually brings on a
Speaker 1: lot of violence. And the people of Chadan have really
Speaker 1: suffered for for trying to go this, for trying to
Speaker 1: protect themselves, right, they've they've suffered a lot of casualties. Um.
Speaker 1: And there you have a uh, this combination of like
Speaker 1: nauticals and illegal logging, right and and so the community
Speaker 1: there on the one hand is trying to protect their ecology,
Speaker 1: but they're also trying to defend themselves from nauticles who
Speaker 1: have taken over local political parties and they don't want
Speaker 1: them in their in their town. In Guereto, you have
Speaker 1: community police forces and you've had them since the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties and nineteen nineties, um. But that's raised a lot
Speaker 1: of issues in terms of you know, what happens when
Speaker 1: one community police force gets cooputi or or co oputive
Speaker 1: or corrupted by a political party or by even a
Speaker 1: nautical and then that that group is used to hit
Speaker 1: against other community groups who are who are still trying
Speaker 1: to organize for for for a radical alternative. So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's on one level, it's really depressing, right, because
Speaker 1: everything is stacked against groups and communities and organizations in
Speaker 1: a place like Gueretta who want a better world, who
Speaker 1: want to create a better world. But in the longer
Speaker 1: scope of Guerretto'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 is one of the lessons that
Speaker 1: we definitely get from a place like um or a
Speaker 1: place like Chiapa's right with the with the Sabasas who
Speaker 1: are still there, who have still managed to read I mean,
Speaker 1: they've managed to reproduce themselves generationally, which is really difficult
Speaker 1: for an armed um Uh insurrectionary group. Right, Like, they've
Speaker 1: managed to do that, and and and and to carve
Speaker 1: out at great costs as well. Right they're currently right
Speaker 1: now suffering. They've been suffering for for more than a
Speaker 1: decade of low intensity warfare that's been waged by the
Speaker 1: military and their paramilitaries. But they're still there with their example, right,
Speaker 1: And I think part of the power of them and
Speaker 1: the people in gro is their example alone is threatening
Speaker 1: to power to the powers that be, and and that's
Speaker 1: why that there's always an effort to exterminate them. So
Speaker 1: 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 by 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 like I mean explicitly
Speaker 1: like the way they brought you know, like social movements
Speaker 1: from 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're exchanging that they like. Like they they set off
Speaker 1: like a wave of revolt that lasted for like I
Speaker 1: don't know if you started in like like the end
Speaker 1: of it's like six yes, yeah it was. It was incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no they I think they there and even if you
Speaker 1: want to go this might take us off topic a
Speaker 1: little bit, right, but like scholars who focus on like
Speaker 1: Venezuela would say, actually, the first one was the Cata
Speaker 1: Castle right in the late eighties, when you have a
Speaker 1: popular rebellion in Catas, Venezuela against neoliberalism, against the liberal
Speaker 1: starity measures, right, and then so I've had that, I've
Speaker 1: had a you know talk to friends, I'll be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: were the first ones. They're like no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: It started in Karakas eight nine I think is the
Speaker 1: ka Castle. But yeah, no, I think they're 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 grogg y, uh celebrate New Year's
Speaker 1: and my parents turned on the TV to see Mexico
Speaker 1: City news, and there was moracles right, and there were
Speaker 1: the Sapatista'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 came out of Mexican
Speaker 1: politicians in in response to this movement. Yum was was
Speaker 1: super high, right, but I remember I wasn't doing your
Speaker 1: high and I remember seeing it and I'm just like,
Speaker 1: there has to be something wrong for these people to
Speaker 1: do this right. And that just led me to what
Speaker 1: to do more research and to do more reading, and
Speaker 1: that I think is really powerful. I think I still
Speaker 1: think it's really powerful. So the more we can get
Speaker 1: the word out about these movements and in other parts
Speaker 1: of Latin America, I think, I think it's still really important.
Speaker 1: And I think, especially today, we really we do need
Speaker 1: a bit more hope in these dark pandemic times. I
Speaker 1: was trying to figure out a speaking of hope segue
Speaker 1: and I couldn't. I couldn't quite get it. Do you
Speaker 1: do you have anything that you want to plug? Where
Speaker 1: can people find you? Yeah? Well, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for having me on this was This is a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. Um. You can find me on God like
Speaker 1: 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'll be able
Speaker 1: to get the link to the to the article that
Speaker 1: we've been talking today UM about about the drug from
Speaker 1: dirty war to drug war into UM. I recently published
Speaker 1: a book review of this really fascinating book on the
Speaker 1: connection between the Israeli arms industry and like Cold War
Speaker 1: 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 finish this damn book on the drug wars,
Speaker 1: have me back on And yeah, definitely thin tangible to
Speaker 1: the plug right now. It's just short little articles. Oh,
Speaker 1: thank thank you again for coming on the show. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this is this has when they could happen here.
Speaker 1: You can find us in the usual places. If do
Speaker 1: you want to venture on social media for some reason,
Speaker 1: please don't. It's it's a bad place. But yeah, thank
Speaker 1: you and goodbye everyone. Hey, we'll be back Monday with
Speaker 1: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 1: of the universe. It could happen here is a production
Speaker 1: of cool Zone Media. Or more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
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