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00:07It's really great to be here. I was here five years ago. I think it was five years ago in
00:13the
00:13spring and thank you so much Chiara and also Micah. This in no way would have happened without all
00:22this work and the support of different groups. I spent half of February in Brazil and one of the
00:33booklets that some people there made, Portuguese of course, on the cover had a picture of figures
00:42going up this slope and then going over the edge of this cliff and the caption was, well we've come
00:50this far, we can't go back now. When I was there, I just held it up and I said, this
00:57is the whole
00:58deal. This is pretty much it. By the way, the anarchist thing there is very primitivist,
01:07which I had no idea about, but there's a lot of interesting things going on there.
01:14Oh and I wanted to salute the people, if any of them are here or if they're not here, the
01:19people
01:19that blocked the freeway down there two or three weeks ago, I salute you and I hope you come out
01:27okay on that. Well, I think I'll start. This is a column I wrote very recently. It was in the
01:37Eugene
01:37Weekly. I'm from Eugene, Oregon. It's pretty much just litter to the editor length. I think reading
01:45stuff is boring, but I'm just going to do this as a kind of intro, maybe set the tone a
01:50little bit.
01:50This is something I think about a lot, this topic, and I also talk about it on my radio show
01:57a lot.
01:57Some people say too much, but anyway. They called it Terror of Everyday Life.
02:04It's headline stuff, shocking and confounding, happening more and more,
02:09but no one left to write seems to have much to say on the subject. In the summer of 1966,
02:16Charles Whitman left a suicide note, climbed a tower at the University of Texas, and shot 14 people to
02:22death. In the ensuing years, the term going postal emerged, referring to a slowly rising incidence
02:29of workplace killings. But in the past 10 years, since Kip Kinkle at Thurston in 1998, that's the town next
02:37to ours in Oregon. Suicidal multiple homicides, homicide rampages have become commonplace.
02:46Columbine 99 and a quickening recent string, for example, Cho at Virginia Tech last spring,
02:52the 19-year-old Omaha mall shooter in December, the honor student at Northern Illinois University last
03:00month. Four school shootings in one week in February, in fact. The explanations are so weak
03:08as to be barely even voiced. It's about too many guns. I was brought up in the 1950s in a
03:16household
03:17containing many firearms. No one went to school to shoot other children. Guns have been everywhere in
03:23this culture. But the shootings are a current deepening reality. It's due to the closure of
03:29mental health facilities. As if in the past such individuals would have been institutionalized,
03:34most of these individuals showed no psychotic symptoms at all. If everyone on antidepressants
03:40were suspect, millions would have to be on locked wards. No, there's a pathology abroad that is too much
03:47to contemplate within the dominant discourse. Too much is implicated. So many, many words about
03:54terrorism. All the terrorism, the threat of terror attacks, those Islamic suicide bombers. Hey, let's
04:01not forget those eco-terrorists. Of course, one is far more likely to be a victim of gunfire at a
04:07school,
04:07in a mall, at the workplace, than to be blown up in war on terror hostilities. The real terror
04:14increasingly is that of daily life in mass society. Meanwhile, many are consumed by the
04:21latest cycle of electoral nonsense and manipulation. Can you imagine any politician
04:26touching the shootings epidemic with a thousand-foot pole? Denial still reigns, but is being stalked in
04:33a grisly way. The rot at the core of industrial life is now rotting all the way through. The decomposition
04:39is far advanced and exposed for all to see. What's happening in society is the flip side of the
04:46rapid destruction of the biosphere. There has been a very disturbing jump in the number of parents
04:51killing their own children. On February 18th, the Center for Disease Control reported that the suicide
04:58rate among middle-aged Americans has jumped 20 percent in the last five years. In recent months,
05:04a county in Wales has endured an explosion of teen suicides, and so it goes. Stress, depression,
05:12insomnia, anxiety on the rise. People with no hope are signing out and taking others with them.
05:18The crisis of meaning is not just a postmodern catchphrase. We find ourselves adapting and
05:24justifying as meaning, texture, community, freedom slip away from our lives. Isaac Asimov's
05:31Robots of Dawn describes a technoculture in which the face-to-face has all but vanished. Sound familiar?
05:39Welcome to the dead zone and its no future, where only one of the delusions is that life in this
05:45industrialized technoculture could ever be green, sustainable, or healthy. Time to wake up and
05:50smell the gun smoke. Well, this is a topic that's happening, you know, again, it's pretty much daily.
06:01What happens in the personal and social sphere. And, of course, it deserves attention, I would say.
06:09And the other side of the coin is what's happening with the, in terms of the unfolding
06:16eco-disaster. And, you know, time and time again, not, for instance, this fellow Cho in Virginia, but
06:25you hear this over and over. It's, it's really one of the most frightening things in terms of the
06:31shootings. We could have never imagined that X would have done this. Never, never in a million years.
06:38For example, that honors student who was revered by his teachers, his girlfriend, everybody else
06:43walks up to a lecture stage and, and gun people down in February.
06:48Well, it's, you know, maybe there's a, maybe there's a kind of a parallel, a similarity in terms of
06:55collapsing ecosystems and extinction of species, or at least disappearance of species. You read that.
07:04Uh, I read religiously the science section every Tuesday in the New York Times and
07:10more and more of that. Various frog species and bats was last week and, you know, honeybees, et cetera.
07:19And, uh, and, and so often the same kind of thing. How did that happen? Just poof, you know, where
07:24did
07:24they go? I mean, gee, we don't know. Uh, same kind of incredulity somehow as if it's some kind of
07:29mystery.
07:30Of course, sometimes it's no mystery at all. It's you, you destroy a habitat that takes care of
07:35whatever it is, polar bears or, or whatever it might be. But, but there's also this kind of a mystery
07:40thing. And sometimes the two sides of the coin converge. For example, the, uh, there have been
07:50in this decade already several studies. You might have, you might have heard of, uh, some of them
07:56about, uh, urban water systems and, uh, how much pharmaceuticals of different kinds there is in
08:04the water. Water treatment doesn't screen out the, the amount of drugs that, uh, people take,
08:10for example, antidepressants. So you've got the, uh, battering of, of inner nature
08:20causing more of the battering of outside nature, of, of outer nature. And, and they're,
08:25and they come together in a, in a sad way. And, and this is only growing, you know, this is
08:30only,
08:31uh, this, this continues to go on. Uh, I mean, some of these things though are, are just terribly
08:39obvious. They're just terribly obvious. And the only thing that's lacking is the punchline. The only
08:43thing that's lacking is the, to me, fairly obvious conclusion, the, the consequences.
08:47For example, global warming, the most commonplace part of the crisis, one might say in terms of the
08:53physical environment. Well, this, this, uh, is really, I guess everybody knows this unprecedented,
09:01uh, cycle of global warning. And there have been others in the remote past. Uh, this one started
09:08two hundred years ago. Well, so did an industrial revolution. Got going about two hundred years ago.
09:14And every step of industrialization is a step of global warming. It, it's, it's just an exact
09:20correspondence. So, uh, gee, then, uh, you don't even have to, I mean, the conclusion is there. You
09:28don't even have to say industrialism is, is what, what it is. They're, they're synonymous. But, but not too
09:37many people yet have said, well, hmm, maybe this isn't working out too well, this whole industrial
09:42thing. Uh, and you know, we, we tend to, some of us deal, uh, with social theory or political theory,
09:53or we return to it. We try to get some help there. We try to see what's going on with
09:58that.
09:59And we've noticed, and, and the literature is growing a little bit here in terms of, for example,
10:04the promises of enlightenment, uh, have, they haven't worked out too well. Those claims just
10:10quite, they haven't, uh, really, uh, produced, uh, what they were, what they were supposed to be.
10:18And that's, that too is pretty much, uh, that was concurrent with the beginning of the industrial
10:23revolution. And one of those claims, of course, is that science and technology will give us, uh,
10:30a lovely world will bring us out of superstition and so forth. And it'll be,
10:35they'll be humanistic and, and wise and so on.
10:40And then, so modernity arises at about this time, uh, to be, uh, kind of general about it.
10:49Uh, modernity also very, very commonly referred to by the term civil society.
10:55Any, any theory along these lines, every other term is civil society.
11:00But I think it's, I think it's useful to come back to the point of, of the industrial world,
11:06which is, in this case, why not just call it what it is? Why not get down to the real
11:12stuff,
11:12which is, it is mass society. It's the society of mass production. It is industrial society.
11:17And, and the euphemistic, uh, kind of abstract words don't help us too much. They just continue
11:24to feed us these promises that are so very tarnished, to say the least.
11:30Uh, and, and of course, now we're supposed to believe that it's hard to imagine that we,
11:38that it's a credible idea that we would, but we're, we're in the post-industrial period now.
11:43Uh, we don't have to worry about such things because, uh, let's post everything of course
11:47these days. But, uh, uh, as if, as if the technology comes down from heaven or something
11:53and, and, uh, arrives immaculately or something and isn't, isn't the product of more and more
12:00industrialization. I mean, that's, that's another, uh, that's another truism. There's nothing that could be,
12:08uh, less, less mysterious about that. And, and we have, uh, which no one can miss is China
12:17industrializing like wild and India right on its heels. And so we're getting more of this. Well,
12:24we're getting more technology and, and that's where it comes from. And of course there, as,
12:28as I guess everyone knows, the rivers are being poisoned. Cities in the east, you can barely see
12:33across the street, the summer Olympics, everybody's going to be wearing gas masks.
12:38And thousands of miners die every year. There's blood on that process and on its fruits.
12:44Million ton plumes of pollution now reach Western North America because it's so massive. It's just so
12:49unbelievable. But, uh, and along these lines, I, uh, I recall, and I think this is pertinent here,
12:58a, uh, there was a forum on public television a few years ago, uh, a little diversion, but a digression,
13:09but I don't think it's really a digression. Uh, and the part I remember is dealt with Henry Kissinger,
13:15you know, the Dr. Strangelove of the seventies, the evil, uh, Nixonian guy back then. And, uh,
13:22but he was being interrogated by, uh, by someone who wasn't really talking about,
13:27you could have talked about the millions of Asians killed by US policy, US military.
13:33But instead, this was a very detailed indictment of what the US has done,
13:40what the results have been in terms of, uh, ecological devastation in, in various parts
13:46of the world, specifically Asia, but not just Asia. And so this particular round, this, this guy is just
13:53giving it to him. He's, and he's got it very well, uh, detailed. It's just chapter and verse. It's
13:59just going down the line and, and just giving him this withering blast. Just, you know, you've got
14:05blood on your hands and, and he's just going on and on, not rhetorically, but he's giving the, uh,
14:11he's giving the detailed scholarly, uh, account. And, uh, I think like everybody else, I'm sitting there
14:17thinking, what on earth is this guy going to say? There's no, you got, what, there's no way to go.
14:22I mean, you, uh, I can't imagine what he would say to get out of this. I mean, you, there
14:28he was,
14:28just nailed, uh, one thought. Well, and then, so the guy finally finishes and Kissinger kind of
14:35turns to him as if he was almost dozing through the whole thing, certainly paying attention.
14:40And he says, so, uh, let me get this straight here. Uh, you want to have a credit card and
14:46a car
14:47and, uh, uh, computer maybe, but you don't think that anyone in, uh, India or China should have
14:56the chance to have those things. Is that right? And, and boom, the guy was just flattened. He had
15:01nothing to say, absolutely nothing to say. Well, uh, that's the problem. That's the aporia,
15:07if you will, of this. That's the kind of dead end that you have. If you subscribe to all this
15:12stuff,
15:12then, then what are you left with? What, what is your answer? What is your alternative?
15:17Of course, if you don't want a world of, of cars and credit cards and, and, uh, and Walmart's and,
15:25and computerized life and all the rest of it, then you do have an answer. You don't want it. Not
15:30that
15:30you're not that you're in any position to forbid other people, but when you hear every, everybody
15:36has a right to industrialization, have a right to modernity. Well, it sounds more like they have a
15:41right to suicide. You know, we've, we've got to catch up with the other countries. Well, you do
15:47within the system, but that's just another, it's just another way, maybe a very primary way of
15:53of pointing out what's wrong with the system. And if you don't break with it, yeah, that's the course
15:57you do have to follow. I was in Turkey a couple of weeks ago and, and I heard this guy
16:02saying,
16:02we got a lot of catching up to do. And you, and you look out and see it's already polluted
16:07and
16:08people are miserable in, in lots of ways. Anyway, that's, that's the point, uh, on that one. Uh,
16:15I mean, in other words, that's one argument. You, you, you want it, but you don't want them to have
16:19it because you, you rather not have their pollution blown over here. You forget your own history,
16:25you know, and, uh, anyway. And there's another basic argument that maybe there are more than two,
16:31but the other one, uh, actually heard it phrased this way in Turkey very recently, uh, by someone who
16:38said, you can present this whole case or whatever you want to call it. And the reply can come back
16:47where you might as well, or how was it? But, uh, you can't stop the sun from rising. In other
16:54words,
16:55everything you say might be true. Uh, it doesn't matter though. It's irrelevant because
17:00the physical reality of, of industrialization and technology and so forth, it's an inevitable process.
17:07It's never gone backwards, never going to go backwards. So you can just yammer all you want,
17:13but, uh, that's, that's, that's it. In other words, you don't even, you don't even bother with the
17:19argument. Neither did Kissinger, of course. He, he just, you just changed the subject to, well, what,
17:24where, what are you going to do about it? Or what, what is anybody going to do about it? It's
17:29more like that.
17:31Well, so, okay, there's a lot of truth to that. Uh, and why would this be true? Well, it's true
17:37because so far it hasn't been problematized. It's been treated as an inevitability. It's been treated
17:44as this is all neutral. It's strictly a neutral deal. It's just these discrete things that have
17:49nothing to do with politics or values or anything. It's, it's all in how it's used.
17:55That's the whole ball game. But when you look around, especially now, I think you can see,
18:01you can doubt that proposition, uh, pretty clearly, it seems to me. And I've got two examples here.
18:09Uh, and they both, they both just, they just get to me every time I think of them.
18:14And one was just a photo, a wire photo, uh, in a newspaper a few years ago from Japan,
18:19from a Japanese nursing home. Picture of, uh, an elderly, uh, woman in a contraption.
18:26The contraption looked like a coffin, kind of a metal coffin. And there's a window or an opening by
18:32her face, but it looked like a coffin. Some reading, what, what is, what is she doing in there?
18:37Well, it's a washing machine. You just push the button. No human touch. She's not bathed by another
18:43human being. It's just, it's a washing machine. And that's, and that's how you treat people. That's,
18:47that's the technology that's value free, I guess. Another one, more recent, a year ago,
18:53in Utni Magazine, uh, used to be Utni Reader. I think it's just called Utni now. And this, this,
18:59I can't even believe that this was not a parody, but it wasn't. It was about, uh, virtual bereavement.
19:06In other words, when somebody, for example, somebody you know, maybe they lost their spouse,
19:11or their child, or their mother, or something like that, you don't, it's, it's much better,
19:15it don't go there. You know, don't, don't try to be present for them. Maybe, maybe hug them,
19:21or, you know, try to, try to offer something. No, it's, it's much better to do it online.
19:26Online grieving. You just, you know, that's, that's way better. It's more convenient. You know,
19:31you're not intruding. That's, that's the technology, again, with no values. It's, it's so ghastly that,
19:37how could you make that up? How could you make either of those two things up?
19:41And, and, and keep pretending that it's, uh, that it's neutral. The values aren't embedded
19:47in that technology. And in fact, I, I think that it's always been so. It has always been so.
19:54Back to simple tools. And I think for me, my, my way of looking at this is there's a big
20:00distinction
20:01between tools, uh, especially ones that are, that don't involve much division of labor and systems
20:08of technology. In other words, when, when I use the word technology, I'm not talking about tools.
20:14But for example, simple, like simple stone tools to go way back. I think what they, what the values
20:22there are, are things like autonomy, equality, flexibility, intimacy, things like that.
20:29Anybody could make them. Either gender could make them. You're not reliant on somebody else.
20:36Whereas tech, technological systems to generalize grandly here, the values there are coldness,
20:43distancing, standardization, uh, dependence on experts, a more and more total dependence on experts,
20:50as we, as the days go by. So these are choices. These are values. This, this is political. Even if,
20:57uh, it isn't seen that way or not yet seen that, that way. And we are incessantly told that we
21:04have
21:04to accept the accelerating, uh, direction or imperative of, of, of all this, of this whole technological thing.
21:12And we hear these claims. And very briefly, I think three of the key ones, which are visibly lies,
21:20I would say, uh, you hear them all the time, television commercials and so on. Uh,
21:26technology empowers us. And, but it's strange that the more and more technological society becomes,
21:33the more and more disempowered people are. Another one is all the variety and the richness and the
21:40heterogeneous, heterogeneous, uh, excess and so forth. But as Frederick Jameson said,
21:46we live in the most standardized society that has ever existed. So there's, there's a little loose
21:53fit there, you might say. And the other one is isolation. And this is probably the one, or I'm
21:58connectedness, the claim of connectedness. We're all connected now. We're as wired as we can be and we're
22:04just all connected. And that's probably the most, that's probably the one you hear the most. You can't get
22:10away from that one. But, uh, it's funny that in the real world, single person households just keep
22:18on booming upwards. And there was a very striking study, I thought, in, uh, this is about a year and
22:25a half ago in the American Journal of Sociology. It was a 19 year old, it was a, it was
22:30a study comparing
22:32friends, the number of, uh, uh, friends that, uh, adult Americans have from the mid 80s to, uh,
22:402005, 19 year, uh, timeframe there. And they found that the number of friends was three, meaning, uh,
22:49by the way, uh, some of you confide in. That's, that was their basic definition of a friend.
22:54Not, not a MySpace friend that, you know, that you never met or something like that. But, uh,
22:5819 years later, it was down to two. 50% fewer friends in 19 years. And the number of people
23:04with no friends had tripled. So what is this connectedness? How, how we're all together and
23:10everything, but, uh, only according to the machine, only according to their definition
23:16is that valid, I, I would say. So that's, you know, this is powered by, uh, as I kind of
23:25briefly
23:25maybe alluded to in terms of the difference between tools and technologies by specialization,
23:32by division of labor. That's a common place. It has driven the systems and it drives the modern
23:39world system, the modern economies, just like it did in the beginning. Ask any economist. That's,
23:44that's just well known. There's no, there's nothing tricky about that one.
23:49But the other one, uh, I want to refer to very briefly is domestication or domination of nature. And
23:56that, that is, uh, something that has proceeded apace as well. And that's the shift to control.
24:05That's the shift away from taking what nature supplied to, to the, the, the move to, to extort from
24:14nature, to colonize nature, to, uh, engineer nature, to make, to make nature work. What, uh,
24:22what Jared Diamond called the, uh, worst mistake in human history. Uh, and it starts with domestication
24:29of animals and plants. It starts with agriculture. And then it moves, as we know, it, it goes to cloning,
24:37genetic engineering, nanotechnology, where the control is now down to the atomic level,
24:43the, the, the, the invasiveness, the, the level of control. It's that same logic. Paul Shepard said
24:51that the first step to agriculture contains the other stuff, the, it's implicit. You will get to
24:59the genetic engineering and the total control sooner or later if you don't break that logic, if you don't
25:05do something about that. He, he saw it as an inner logic. And, uh, it's, I think it's kind of
25:11hard to,
25:12kind of hard to dispute that. And now we see, uh, a little more clearly. It's easier to see,
25:18I think, the, the validity of, of that. Um, I don't want to go on and on. I, I, I'd
25:26like to,
25:27oh, well, here's another thing that's kind of a favorite of mine in terms of the domestication thing.
25:32And that's good old Sigmund Freud, the civilization and its discontents.
25:36And he predicted that the more domestication, the more civilization there is, the more neurosis
25:43there is. Because, uh, uh, that's, I'm just isolating this part of, of, of Freud. There's
25:50obviously a lot more that isn't pertinent to this. But he said that it's a wound that doesn't heal.
25:57When you break human beings like you break a horse, they, it, you, that is psychically, uh,
26:04an injury that, that will just continue. The, the state of domestication is not a happy world.
26:11Of course, he, as a good bourgeois, he said, but you don't get people working and you don't get
26:18symbolic culture. You don't get art and so forth unless and until you domesticate people. So he felt
26:24like, oh, that's a terrible price to pay. But, uh, okay, I guess, but at least he was honest enough
26:30to show this is the toll. This is the price that does have to be paid. And that was in
26:351930, I think
26:36it was. And, uh, I think that's, uh, ever more clear what he was saying that, uh, that's, uh, it
26:43is,
26:43it is a painful thing. So we, you know, it's just, how do we, how do we stop things from
26:51just getting
26:52worse? And, uh, I don't want to stand around with the, the end is near sign, but I mean, things
26:57are
26:57getting worse in, in some really frightening ways, frightening in a personal way. To me, I have two
27:03grandkids and I just really, you just think, what's going to be the case here in even five years?
27:10It's, it's, and a lot of people feel that things could just crash. This whole thing could fail for
27:17a number of reasons. And if you ask people that just a few years ago, I think they'd kind of
27:22look
27:22at you like, what are you talking about now? It's amazing to me how many more people and I have
27:27no
27:27polling results or study, uh, uh, figures or anything like that. But I, I've asked this,
27:34I've kicked this around. I've asked people what they think about the response. And it's,
27:39and I, I'm always hearing, it's not a question of, of, uh, if it's a question of when.
27:45So we're, we're going over that cliff and, and, but we keep on hearing, gee, we can't go back now.
27:52We have to just keep on industrializing and keep on with the mass world, mass consumption,
27:57mass culture. It's all been so satisfying. It's, it has something to do with these shootings.
28:03You can't make a world that desolate, empty out all the texture and so forth. And then,
28:09and then be so puzzled as to why you have these awful, uh, awful results. I mean, it's very hard
28:16to
28:16take in. I think it's just very hard to take in, but, but there's some kind of hard questioning that
28:22we got to undertake here. Um, let me just conclude with one other little, uh, story,
28:30which kind of sadly summed up some of this to me. You may be some, some of you may be,
28:36uh,
28:37familiar with the work of Sherry Turkle. She's at MIT. She's not only a pretty expert in, in, uh,
28:43uh, high tech developments, but also she's a psychologist and, uh, she's written several
28:49books about the impact, the, the amount of, uh, anxiety and, and so forth. Uh, the, the,
29:11it was a very moving, eloquent talk. And she, she even said that in some important ways,
29:16her daughter doesn't know the difference between something that's animate, something that's living
29:22and something that isn't. And it, I mean, that was, that's her daughter. She's talking about in,
29:27in terms of the reality of this, this was at the university of Oregon last fall. And then she said,
29:34at the very end, she said, uh, oh, well, that's the price you got to pay. Got to have technology,
29:40got to have the modern stuff. And I was just floored. I mean, I just, I just couldn't,
29:46I couldn't get that. I mean, and I think a lot of people there too. Now it's a little more,
29:52maybe you could get away with that a few years ago, but that's just, that doesn't,
29:57that just doesn't add up ethically or intellectually or any other way. That's, that's,
30:03that can't be true. You know, otherwise you're just saying, oh, well, uh, just, wow,
30:09let's just, uh, sit back and, and, uh, agonize or something, but, but always remember, but we got
30:16to do it. You know, there's just no two ways about it. It's just inevitable. And that was really,
30:21uh, anyway, I'll just leave it at that. And maybe we can, uh, have some discussion if you want.
30:28I think, uh, I think, uh, he was asking whether or not a lot of this isn't just US specific.
30:34And,
30:34uh, and the case of Denmark shows, shows a nicer reality. Uh, well, I, I totally agree. There's,
30:42there's, it's, it's much better. And it's, uh, various Scandinavian countries, I think,
30:46although they do have some problems with suicide and, and, uh, and alcoholism in some of those places.
30:52I'm not an expert on that, but I actually, I was in Turkey with the Danish, uh, couple, uh, just
30:57recently the, the trip I just referred to. And, uh, I learned a little about it, but I think, uh,
31:04you, you can see, but in a, in a certain way, maybe they get a free ride because they don't
31:10have
31:11to have the factories necessarily in Denmark, but somebody does. And so I'm afraid that what is
31:17happening when you look at the most developed countries, the most technologically advanced countries,
31:22like the U S and Japan, you do see pretty scary pathological things. And I don't want to get
31:29into a thing about Japan, but maybe, you know, some of those things are, they're pretty, they're,
31:33they're become science fiction things all right. Like a million people just to mention one thing,
31:39Hiki Komori, it's called where there's a million people, young people who don't leave their rooms.
31:45They just don't, they don't come out for like maybe decades or, you know, it's, there's some very severe
31:52problems. And these, but these are the ones and what I think is going to happen. And I hate to
31:58say
31:58this, but it's going to spread to all these other countries. It just, unless they manage to be an
32:04island, but they, they probably won't be an island for long. I mean, you mentioned gun control and
32:09that's, I mean, I, that's quite so. I mean, this culture is, is crazy with guns. So, but, and that,
32:18so there are exceptions. I don't want to just make it sound like it's just a uniform deal all over
32:22the
32:23world. Cause I agree with you. It's not, but I don't know why this would not be spreading as you
32:29get more and more high tech and, and more of more of what I think as many people have written
32:36about
32:36in different ways, so much as being drained away and just replaced by, by all these mediations and
32:43separations, which is a high tech, uh, the techno culture. And, uh, you know, but again, I agree
32:50with you. I mean, it's, it sounds much nicer in Denmark. They, they don't have, uh, they don't have
32:55these same situations, but, uh, yet they're part of the same world and the acid rain and everything
33:02falls on them too. Whether it comes from China or Germany or whatever, it's, it's, uh, I'm not saying
33:08nothing is happening. I mean, you know, there are, there are some reforms or some partial solutions,
33:14but you know, the, the pro the solution here. And I think elsewhere is, oh yes, we have this crisis.
33:21We have the global warming, blah, blah, but technology is the answer. And it's always more technology,
33:28never wanting people to notice it's technology to just use that catch word. It creates a problem
33:34in the first place. So you want more technology. That's insane. That's not, we, even if we all
33:42want to be in denial and want to believe that's true, that somehow this will be averted by some,
33:48some thing that's, uh, there's, there's no real basis for that in my opinion at all.
33:53And the people that are, by the way, are looking for the green sustainable energy sources to replace
34:00oil, which is rapidly running out. Well, you know, you could say to that, but there's a lot of stuff
34:06that should have never been done in the first place. And you just want to find new means to fuel
34:11the same thing. I mean, Bush wants that. That's, that's doesn't, that doesn't tackle the real,
34:18the qualitative things that are happening. What, what flows from domestication specifically? Why,
34:25why should it be just domestication? Well, I think, uh, my best guess on that is that
34:30it does follow. In other words, the division of labor, the, the specialization was a very,
34:36very slow process before, uh, up until, up into the upper paleolithic before domestication,
34:42in other words. But you were starting to have some, uh, aspects of hierarchy and, and, uh, some negative
34:51estrangements or alienation, some tensions. And I think that it's, it probably makes sense to see
34:57that as setting the stage for domestication. That it couldn't have, it probably wouldn't have started
35:02without that, which is already an erosion of, of a previous state, which, you know, plus and minus,
35:11it didn't, it wasn't doing that. It wasn't going in that direction. And so then, but then domestication
35:18was, uh, you know, a relatively sudden jump off in lots of parts of the world at the same time
35:24and
35:24all that. And I think what connects that is the control aspect. The, the, the heart of it is control.
35:30How do we control the earth? And, uh, but, but I think the two are connected. In fact, uh, I
35:39think
35:39the division of labor divides the self. You could say it divides it into roles, into specific production
35:45roles slowly, but, but back in ancient civilizations too, they had these big workshops, you know,
35:52almost factory like pottery, baking and so forth. There was some of that already, but that, that
35:59divided self almost immediately creates divided society or class society. So the arguments, some
36:07of the arguments we have with Marxists, for example, is we're not, we're, we're interested in that
36:12problem of class society divided society, but we think the roots of it are, are much deeper than
36:18quote capitalism. I mean, capitalism was part of the problem for sure, but what is, what is,
36:24what, what drives it in a more primary sense before that, you know, what, what is creating already
36:29the basis for, for, for the rest of it? How, how to reverse domestication? Well, that's to,
36:37first of all, pose it as a problem, as a, as something to be overcome. And I think some people
36:42are doing it. One of the, one of the key things, of course, is food. How are we going to
36:46eat without,
36:47without, uh, these different things? And that's why some people are exploring permaculture with that
36:53in mind, or, or the, uh, the methods of Fukuoka, the, the, uh, one star revolution, uh, guy, and I
37:02think
37:02he's still alive. Or, or, or, and some people put more emphasis on what did indigenous people eat.
37:08They, they weren't cultivating. Of course, there's a lot more people now. That's, that's another
37:11problem. That's another situation. But, you know, in other words, if you see it as a problem, then,
37:17then you can start addressing it. In other words, I don't think it's foreordained that we're, we're
37:23just locked in. We're locked in as long as we say it's neutral, for example, and just go,
37:28you know, there's nothing you can do about it. It's like the sun coming up. There's,
37:33well, that's a huge one. Overpopulation. Uh, well, it's, I don't know. That's, that's just a really
37:40tough one. It's, but I think that kind of imbalance is, is not a natural, is not a natural occurrence.
37:47And the anthropologists seem to tell us that the, that the population thing started going up with
37:55domestication. So maybe if you, if we were pulling the plug on domestication, maybe some of those,
38:02uh, maybe some of the drive that, that creates the overpopulation will, will recede as well. In
38:09other words, if it's an effect, uh, a symptom more than a cause in itself, then what is causing,
38:17what is causing the symptom and, and domestication may be, uh, may be a big part of that. So that's,
38:25that's kind of, you know, I don't know. That's a little, who knows, but it is true that it didn't
38:31go
38:31up until with, with, because it used to be said mainly that, uh, there was so much population that,
38:39that, you know, you had to have the means of production to feed everybody. So there was agriculture,
38:43but it's really more that the other, it's the other way around. That's when the populations
38:49started up when you get domestication, not, not so much the other way around. Not that there weren't
38:54some population pressures in some places, but that seems to be the consensus I've read.
39:01Well, I, I, uh, what would be the solution? What would be the practical part of it? Uh, if,
39:06if there was some, uh, if there was some, uh, way of, of, uh, tackling this, what would it be?
39:13Well, I mentioned very briefly in passing the food thing that there are practical experiments going on
39:18with, with, uh, uh, non-domesticated, uh, food, you know, that, that sort of thing. But
39:24uh, you know, the, that, I don't know if this is, I don't know if I have a very great
39:31answer for this
39:32one to tell you the two, that's for sure. But, but, uh, but one thing that strikes me,
39:37there are people, there are a lot of people, Noam Chomsky for one, is very fond of saying,
39:43this perspective just means a massive die off. These people want, consciously or unconsciously,
39:49they want billions of people to die. And that's the whole deal. But, but he knows full well,
39:54that nobody, nobody I know anyway, is talking about a sudden overnight shift. Like you could
39:59pull the plug. And of course we couldn't, if we wanted to, but we don't want to. I mean,
40:04uh, you, you go to places like, uh, like it was just in Istanbul and Sao Paulo before,
40:09and it, it's just staggering. If this thing did crash, how many people would be dead in two days?
40:16I mean, there, there's 20 million people in Sao Paulo. They don't, there's no prayer for them.
40:21They don't know how to, they don't, they wouldn't know what to do at this moment.
40:25If, if they fled the cities, if, if all the power stopped and everything else,
40:30it would be just horrendous. Those are the, in other words, the people who want the die off,
40:35are the ones who don't want to face up to what's going on. We're talking about some kind of process
40:41or some kind of transition, not, not to just suddenly apocalyptically, uh, it's so evil.
40:48We're just going to cut it off right now. No, that's, that would be, that would be unthinkable.
40:52It's, it's, it would have to involve all kinds of things to tackle our dependence. And all of us,
40:59including me, very dependent on all this stuff, you know, every, every part of it. And, but once
41:05it's problematized then, and also when, by the way, I think if, and when people begin to think
41:14that this isn't paying off, then people will be engaged in the solution. You know,
41:19how do you start moving away from it instead of continuing to go over the cliff or, or advancing
41:24to the cliff? There was, there's a guy I know who, who said, who chided us. He said, you will
41:31never
41:31make the revolution by promising people less. And we don't use the word revolution much at all,
41:36but, but he made a good point. What do you have to offer? Nothing? I mean, kind of like what
41:42you
41:42said, but, but at a certain point, it seems to me less is more, more of, of taking all kinds
41:50of
41:50anti-anxiety, anti-depressant drugs and having your kids start on them when they're 18 months old
41:55and, and all this unthinkable stuff. And, and you can see the collapse of the ecosystems
42:00is well underway. What, what part of that is more? We want more and, but that's what the left says,
42:07more, this and more. That's the program, this and more. Well, that's, that's just catastrophic,
42:13it seems to me. But, but the question about what do you actually do only becomes real if, if people,
42:20want to go there. And then I think it's not so, I mean, how do people live? I mean, you,
42:26you know,
42:26you talk to kids, and I try to slam kids, but there are a lot of people who think there
42:31was no
42:31life before cell phones or before all this stuff. And I'm thinking, gee, there was something that
42:36happened in the sixties, wasn't there? And people didn't, didn't even have, uh, the internet, you
42:41know? I mean, let's, come on. This stuff is, uh, and how many calls can you make in 30 minutes
42:47to,
42:47to say nothing? I mean, what, what is the point of that? What, what's going on with that? I mean,
42:51that's ridiculous. And cell phones are the most toxic thing ounce for ounce probably in the world,
42:57and they go into the, into the earth thousands of, thousands of them a day. I mean, it's all crazy.
43:03So, I, I mean, I don't have a bill of, uh, a blueprint or, or a list of, we do
43:08X, Y, and Z, but
43:10there's, there's gotta be a reverse of this thing. There's gotta be different ways. That's, because
43:16everything is, is disappearing. Community, a word that's used all the time, especially in America,
43:20every politician and a lot of other people, community, community. Well, what happened to
43:26it? Where is it? Show me the community. Why did it disappear? And what would it take to restore it?
43:32You know, how can we relocalize that sort of thing? Decentralize? That's, that's what we're talking
43:37about. Globalization is another, there's, is a somewhat practical issue, if you will. The, the people
43:44that, the, the anti-globalization movement that was big a few years ago, well, it, it was never anti-globalization.
43:51You can be anti-globalization. You can be literally anti-globalization. But, you know,
43:56during all the big protests, and I was there for some of them, I'm not, I'm not, uh, trashing it,
44:01but, you know, the reporter would always come up to the nearest protestor and, and say,
44:06so why are you against globalization? And they'd always say, we're not against globalization,
44:10but we want the nice kind. We want the bottom up kind, or the, or the, this or that kind,
44:15the warm and fuzzy kind. Well, I mean, to us, you want it, or you don't want it. You, you,
44:20you want the global world, the, the, the grid, the, the, the totalizing, standardizing, homogenizing
44:26thing, you, or not. And they, they never answered that question, and the movement went away. And I
44:30think that's one reason why it did go away. It didn't have a serious answer to that, to that thing.
44:36So, in other words, what, what are we talking about? What, what, uh, if you don't want X,
44:42then what do you want? And then we can spell it out, how you get there, though your question raises,
44:49it's not going to be too easy. We're all so sucked in, in every single way. I was in London,
44:56uh, a few
44:57years ago, and, uh, and this kind of back is jumping up and down saying, did you swim over here?
45:03Did you
45:03swim over here? And no, you're right. I'm a hypocrite. I'm caught in every contradiction like
45:07anybody else. And no, it was a big polluting jet. I didn't swim. I'm not much of a swimmer. And
45:14okay, you know, you got me, but you know, we didn't ask to be born into this, but now we
45:19got to deal
45:20with it. I'm actually pretty optimistic. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty hopeful. I don't think this is
45:27going to last much longer. I think, I really don't. I think there's system has no answers. It really
45:32doesn't. It has no future. Uh, overconsumption is maybe the, the chief, uh, uh, problem to,
45:43well, but you know, when, when the world goes in a certain direction, overcompens, overconsumption,
45:49we might call it, is about all that's left. I mean, that's why it's not to be so totally
45:55deterministic about it, but how do you stop the overconsumption? I mean, that's where freedom
46:01is really. You can choose brand X or brand Y or brand Z, but you don't choose much else
46:07because you've been cut off from, from the land. And you know, and I know there's a lot of different,
46:13there are various views on this for sure. I've, uh, I know people in, in, uh, in other countries that
46:20are not developed who very much would agree with me or I would agree with them. And certainly some don't,
46:26they, they want to develop, they want to, they want to modernize, you know? So, but, but, uh,
46:33that's, that's the question of what is the standard of living? What is the quality of life? I mean,
46:36this is, this is a cultural question, you know, if, if it's to have a Walmart all over or whatever,
46:43have a chain store or, you know, to, I'm just exaggerating, but is that a better standard of
46:48living than indigenous people who actually have a connection to the earth and, and, and, and,
46:54and integrity of their culture and their traditions than their, their, uh, their wisdom,
47:01replace it with the factory? I don't know if that's a better standard of living. I mean,
47:06that's not for me to say, but look, but you can see the trajectory and, uh, you know, and you
47:12know,
47:13the U S government is very fond of the propaganda that, uh, people come here because they all want
47:18credit cards and they, they all want to be happy consumers. Well, everybody knows if you drive people
47:23off the land and that's been happening since the beginning of civilization. Yeah. They're driven
47:28into the cities. It's not exactly necessarily a great free choice that they can't wait to get
47:34away from, from their own lands, from their own, uh, you know, realities or their own everything.
47:41You know, that's, that's some propaganda. I'm certainly not saying you're saying that, but
47:45we, we hear that too, you know, the, the, uh, I think the main question is what would be examples
47:53of,
47:54of, uh, viable, uh, uh, something like, uh, what we're talking about currently or in the past?
48:02Well, sometimes we're fond of referring to the paleolithic as the original anarchy,
48:07where it was banned society, where, where society was like maybe 60 people or something like that.
48:13And, uh, pre-political of course, way before the state, uh, obviously where people took responsibility
48:21for each other. Uh, and there was community, maybe that's, that was the community, the,
48:27the original community. Uh, well, it was the original community, uh, foraging society,
48:32hunter gather society, band societies, all means the same thing. Uh, well, where I guess we get our main,
48:39uh, inspiration is, uh, is trying to learn from indigenous practices and some native americans
48:47now, here and now, who, uh, who are, and, and, and, and there are certainly various, uh, folks there
48:56who, not, and they're not all political by any means, you know, trying to reconnect with their
49:00traditions and teach the young, uh, these things that are, uh, being kind of, uh, getting rid of
49:09these things. Uh, and some, some of these folks call us neo-primitivists that, you know, which,
49:17it seems like a fitting word, I guess. But, uh, I don't think there's much left in the current
49:23world. You know, this is all, it's made to disappear. You know, it's, it's, it's in the way.
49:29That's one of the other losses, you know, along with the biological diversity and, and so many
49:34other things, uh, indigenous cultures, gotta go. And that's, and that's one of the, by the way, I,
49:44some people are very excited about, uh, leftist developments in South America. But I think one of
49:49the problems, one of the, one of the fears that you can have about that is that the left is
49:56doing
49:56a better job of industrializing than, than the neocons and the neoliberal folks down there who had
50:03their chance. And what really has to happen, and so many people have admitted this, you've got to get,
50:10you've got to break the resistance of these indigenous cultures. And they are trying their
50:14best to co-op these. They're trying to turn them into consumers and citizens. They're,
50:19they're not valid as Indians. And that's, uh, that's not where we're at. That's one of the
50:24reasons we're not leftist. So there's, you know, this is a big, uh, the mega machine as Lewis Mumford
50:33called it. It's, it's, it rolls on and it doesn't take any prisoners. In fact, that's what the technology
50:40thing now for a little while has been. The, you know, the major propaganda for the system in a,
50:45in a general sense used to be when, like when I was a kid, the American dream,
50:49it's going to be a greater future. And, or even Reagan, you know, the bright, what it was that the,
50:55the morning in America kind of nonsense, the, well, they all still say that, I guess. But,
50:59uh, uh, now it's more, this is it, get on board, or you're a loser. You're, you're left behind,
51:08you won't have a paddle. I mean, that's really the ads. You can find these ads, you know,
51:14they, they pretty much just say that. We're not promising nothing. We're threatening you.
51:18And, you know, and the people who say you got a choice, that's another part of that. I remember,
51:23uh, back in the early eighties when the PC revolution started, you know, the whole PC explosion.
51:28Uh, the, uh, oh, oh, people would say, well, you don't like it? Don't go there. Don't get a computer.
51:37Don't, don't. But, of course, that's, that's, uh, that's meaningless because you can't go to school
51:43without being wired. And now they're, they're dropping writing classes. No one needs to write
51:49because it's all this. I mean, it's, you, you can, it's, it's absurd to say you have a choice.
51:55It, there's no choice. It's a total thing. Pretty much. I mean, I'm not saying, you know,
52:01absolutely. I mean, you know, we can still think and so forth, but it's not some accident
52:07that these things all work together and, and are producing these results. He's, he's asking,
52:15is it, is it a serious proposition that life would be better as a hunter-gatherer than a modern life,
52:20right? Something like that, right? Well, you know, some of this is stereotypes. I mean,
52:25and if you, you can reach each other and I have friends in different parts of the world. I don't
52:30get to see unless I, you know, get on the internet, but, uh, that's a compensation for, you know,
52:38a world where you don't know your neighbor. I mean, where there used to be a real embodied
52:43connectedness and now there isn't. I mean, I, I mean the, the maybe, you know, if it's the kind of
52:51ultimate goal of, uh, of a world that doesn't, uh, extort from, from the earth or from each other,
52:58that's, uh, it is kind of distant and vague. I mean, again, no way that could happen overnight,
53:05but that's a better direction. It strikes me. And you started mentioning, uh, medicine.
53:11That's not, that, that's probably the strongest one in, in some ways anyway, the strongest case for,
53:18for modernity, but it's starting to fail there too. You know, what about AIDS? What about, I mean,
53:24there's all these things now. There's this, the, uh, amount of, uh, resistance to these antibiotics
53:32is really getting scary. You know, the E. coli and, uh, all these other things. And TB is coming back.
53:39You mentioned TB. They, it's really industrial medicine, even that is, and that's got a somewhat
53:44good record. You know, people do live longer, you know, no doubt about that. But then, but then
53:49they're taking 10 drugs to stay alive and it's going in the water since the, like I mentioned
53:54in the beginning. And, you know, what is the quality of life? I mean, some people would rather
53:59have, uh, a more vivid life, even if there's some dangers there, a direct, unmediated life
54:06than, than living in a kind of, uh, you know, sort of isolated, you know, haze for, for 90 years
54:16or something, you know, maybe, you know, in other words, it's, uh, these, these promises
54:21haven't been all that great. I mean, is it really better to trade reality for virtual reality for,
54:27you know, these, is it really satisfying? Is it making people happy? Then why, why is everybody
54:32so anxious and depressed? And why, why are we having these, these daily shootings? That's just
54:38so incredible, but there it is. It's, it's not going to go away. It's going to get worse.
54:44That's a kind of modern, uh, trope in a way. The, we, we always want to improve things. We always,
54:50technology advances because we're creative, you know, that whole thing. Actually, what, what has
54:55always baffled the archaeologists is why did, why did lithic technology, why did stone tools say almost
55:01exactly the same for a million years? I mean, that's, that's a far case, I realize, but, but they are
55:08not
55:09disputing the fact that they probably had the same intelligence we do and they were cooking with fire
55:14two million years ago and, you know, traveling on the open seas and so forth and so on. I mean,
55:21it wasn't because they were too stupid to do it. Maybe it was because they had a good, viable, uh,
55:27stable system and they didn't see the need to change it. But it, in modern, under civilization,
55:34you can say people always want to change things, but is that an autonomous choice or
55:42is that the system talking in some ways? In other words, it didn't used to be that way.
55:46So why is it now? I mean, it's kind of like just one more, I'm sorry, I'm diverging here a
55:51little bit.
55:51But, you know, the question of human nature, it seems like similar. Isn't it human nature to want to,
55:56as you say, improve things, develop new stuff, you know, do, go to the moon or whatever? Well,
56:02it wasn't human nature for two or three million years. Why is it, why is it in the last 9
56:07,000 years,
56:08it's human nature to, to ruin everything and to make ourselves so unhappy?
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