0:00

Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This

0:02

is Philosophize This. philosophizethis.org

0:05

is the website. For an ad-free experience of

0:07

the show go to patreon.com Philosophize

0:10

This. Hope you love the show today. So

0:13

last episode was a bit of a challenge to be

0:15

able to write. There was a lot of

0:17

stuff that needed to get talked about, a lot of

0:20

core ideas from anarchist thought that needed to be explained,

0:22

to be respectful to the people who came to the

0:24

episode not knowing anything about anarchism yet. But

0:26

it was a challenge because we had to talk

0:28

about all these core ideas without saying too much

0:30

about anarchism in general. Because look,

0:32

it's a fact of the universe. You say anything

0:35

about anarchism, a beacon goes up

0:37

into the sky. Anarchists start crawling

0:39

out of the trees all over the world.

0:41

And no matter what it is, there's

0:43

gonna be some anarchists somewhere in the world that

0:45

doesn't agree with what's being said because it doesn't

0:47

correspond with their version of anarchism, of which there

0:49

are many. Now lucky for me, I

0:52

can start talking about individual thinkers today. Also

0:55

kind of lucky for me, I guess, is that

0:57

the philosopher we're talking about today didn't get too

0:59

caught up in labels like anarchism. Seemed

1:01

a bit silly to him to be doing that. What he

1:03

cared about is whether the substance of the ideas were there.

1:06

But as though I learned nothing in my life, as

1:08

though I really am, you know, top five dumbest people

1:10

on planet Earth, I'm gonna try it again today, at

1:12

least here at the beginning of the episode. Because

1:15

to anybody coming to this podcast today in good

1:17

faith, you know, you're trying to learn more about

1:19

anarchism. You're trying to place it in the greater

1:21

historical context of what you already know. I

1:24

personally think that if you're trying to do

1:26

that, that taking a step back and looking

1:28

at anarchism from more of a panoramic view

1:30

is helpful. Because I think it sets us

1:32

up for the rest of this episode where

1:34

we're gonna be seeing exactly how an anarchist

1:36

perspective can start to look when it's directly applied

1:38

to what many consider to be one of the

1:40

biggest issues facing the human species today. What

1:43

I mean is, you know, it's been said

1:45

that if the world we live in today

1:47

ceases to exist somehow, like

1:49

if you could get in a time machine, go into the future 500

1:52

years, you arrive in that world, you look around

1:54

you, and it's obvious that civilization has collapsed at

1:56

some point between now and then. If you

1:58

found yourself in that spot, There were a

2:01

few things that are going on in 2024

2:03

that could have been responsible for that collapse.

2:06

Nuclear proliferation, our

2:08

toxic relationship with the natural

2:10

world, various forms of social

2:12

unrest. We got fascism, mental

2:14

illness, addiction, socioeconomic turmoil, religious

2:16

fighting of any type, not

2:19

the least of which are the political religions that people are a

2:21

part of today. The list goes on. Take

2:23

your pick. But the point is that an anarchist might ask

2:25

the question here, are these all

2:27

completely separate phenomena that are totally unrelated

2:29

to each other? Or

2:31

might there be something more fundamental that's

2:33

going on, where all these things are

2:35

just different symptoms of the same sickness

2:37

that's overcome society? What

2:40

they'd be alluding to is what if

2:42

our blind acceptance of involuntary hierarchical authority,

2:45

our obsession with constantly looking at everything

2:47

around us in terms of superiority and

2:49

inferiority, what if that was

2:51

directly responsible for a lot of these problems, or

2:54

all of these problems? The

2:56

philosopher we're talking about today is Murray

2:58

Bookchin. And while he's considered by many to

3:00

be one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the recent past,

3:03

he himself, again, didn't get too caught

3:05

up on the label of anarchist. In

3:09

fact, anarchism, as far as he saw

3:11

it, was not some recent breakthrough in

3:13

political philosophy, you know, some radical entirely

3:15

new set of ideas. To

3:18

him, what people in the modern world often

3:20

call anarchism is really just the natural progression

3:22

of a tendency in human thought that's been

3:24

going on since the beginning of civilization as

3:27

we know it. More specifically, since

3:29

about 5,000 years ago, when we

3:31

started structuring things in terms of forced hierarchical

3:33

authority. As Murray Bookchin

3:35

says, Sitting Bull and Crazy

3:37

Horse, the great Native American leaders of

3:39

the resistance against colonial domination from Europe,

3:43

Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were

3:45

anarchists to him. Now, if

3:47

you said to either Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse, you're

3:49

an anarchist, they'd look

3:51

at you like you just lost your mind. They

3:53

wouldn't know what you were talking about with the

3:55

specific label of anarchist. But if

3:57

you told them about the anarchist values that

4:00

we talked about, last time of liberty, equality,

4:02

and solidarity. These two people,

4:04

to Murray Bookchin, would understand exactly

4:06

what you mean. They would certainly understand

4:08

the concept of liberty and resistance to

4:10

involuntary authority that's being imposed upon them

4:12

from the outside. They

4:14

definitely understand the concept of equality among the

4:16

members of their tribe and how people ultimately

4:18

complement each other within a group. They,

4:21

of course, saw solidarity with their immediate community

4:23

as an important part of how society should

4:25

be structured. So again, labels

4:27

aside to Murray Bookchin, call it anarchism, call

4:30

it whatever you want, but

4:32

the Native American resistance against

4:34

colonial domination represented a very

4:36

human tendency that keeps on repeating

4:38

itself throughout human history, a tendency

4:41

to demand when it's possible greater

4:43

levels of liberty, equality, and solidarity

4:46

than former societies have had before.

4:49

Christianity is an example of this to Bookchin,

4:51

with the second coming of Christ as a

4:54

sociological story created by human beings to express

4:56

it, where after the end times

4:58

it is said, the wolves shall lay with

5:00

the lambs, the false prophets and

5:02

unjust authorities on earth will be abolished, and

5:05

everybody will live together equally under the eyes

5:07

of God. This is an example

5:09

to Bookchin of this tendency in people's thinking

5:11

that in more modern times we might otherwise

5:13

call anarchist. More examples

5:15

of this throughout history, though. How about the

5:18

American Revolution? You know, taxation without

5:20

representation from King George, a

5:23

focus on the solidarity of regional

5:25

communities rather than colonial rule. There

5:27

came a point where people were

5:29

unwilling to live under this unjustified

5:31

authoritarian regime, and they decided

5:33

to do something about it. What would

5:35

you call that tendency? Is it a

5:37

totally isolated event? Since

5:39

this is a philosophy podcast, to give an

5:42

example Bookchin mentions from the history of philosophy,

5:44

how about the Enlightenment that we've talked about

5:46

extensively on this show? You know, when Immanuel

5:48

Kant writes his famous essay in 1784 called

5:51

What is Enlightenment? And he says that to

5:53

be enlightened we got to remove ourselves of

5:55

our self-imposed tutelage of the past, to him

5:58

meaning the needless authority of religious thought. And

6:00

then when he says that moving forward, we

6:02

should be using reason as a more reliable

6:04

guide for structuring the systems in our world,

6:07

when Kant writes that. That is him and

6:09

many others existing in a society where they

6:11

look around them and obviously feel like something's

6:13

very wrong about the way things are. And

6:16

it's them standing up to the authority

6:18

of religious claims to truth and demanding

6:20

greater levels of liberty, equality, and solidarity

6:22

for people in the process. Now,

6:25

there are a hundred more examples I could

6:27

give of moments that Murray Bookchin believes are

6:29

examples of this human tendency repeating itself. The

6:31

historical rule seems to be that when a

6:33

high enough percentage of people look around them

6:36

and they realize something's wrong with how things

6:38

are set up, they will

6:40

eventually get tired of it and demand

6:42

greater levels of this liberty, equality, and

6:44

solidarity. Is it crazy to

6:46

think that we might have one of these

6:48

moments of progress again? I

6:51

mean, ask yourself, have we experienced the last time

6:53

that the average person gets an upgrade in the

6:55

quality of their life in these areas? Probably

6:57

not. And how close we are

6:59

to another one of those moments occurring is

7:02

probably correlated with what percentage of people in

7:04

a given time are looking around them and

7:06

thinking, wow, things are really messed up when

7:08

it comes to how we're doing X thing.

7:11

So enter Murray Bookchin's primary area of

7:13

expertise, the field he dedicated most of

7:15

his life to. I'm talking about the

7:17

human species and its relationship to the

7:19

natural world. Again, this is one

7:22

of those major issues that is going on today

7:24

that entertaining an anarchist perspective on it might give

7:26

us an interesting new angle. Murray

7:28

Bookchin saw himself fundamentally as

7:30

a social ecologist. Now, most

7:32

people hear that term, social

7:34

ecologist, and no doubt know that

7:36

it must have something to do with the environment. And

7:39

that's true. But to understand

7:41

fully what social ecology is, it's

7:44

important to understand how it differs from

7:46

more popular strategies in today's world of

7:48

solving our environmental problems. Picture

7:50

somebody that cares about the environment a

7:52

lot, totally well-intentioned,

7:54

well-educated. This person recycles.

7:57

They compost. They even

7:59

got a little fight. plan that they named

8:01

Hubert. He sits on the windowsill every day

8:03

smiling out at the world. This person's incredible.

8:06

And this person, whenever they leave their apartment to

8:08

go and vote every couple years, they show up

8:10

to the ballot box and they do their part

8:13

there as well. They support the bills to help

8:15

the environment. They voted for a ban on single-use

8:17

plastics last time they went. It's nice. They

8:19

supported a bill to plant trees in urban

8:22

communities. They volunteered to pick

8:24

up trash on the beach during their off

8:26

time. They donate to green charities. They buy

8:28

from green companies whenever they can. By one

8:31

standard of definition, they are

8:33

the picture of an environmentally conscious person.

8:36

But all this effort, no matter how well-intentioned

8:38

it is to a social ecologist like Murray

8:40

Bookchin, this is all, when

8:42

it comes down to it, pretty superficial if

8:45

we're just being honest. What does

8:47

he mean? Well, banning single-use plastics, for example. You

8:49

know, you buy something, it comes due in a

8:51

plastic package, you throw the packaging away, and then

8:53

it sits in a landfill for a million years.

8:56

That's a problem. And getting rid of that

8:58

plastic certainly may clear up a bit of space in

9:00

our landfills, for sure. But it

9:02

does absolutely nothing to fix the true

9:05

cause of single-use plastics being a thing

9:07

in the first place. Because

9:09

single-use plastics are just one iteration,

9:12

one symptom, of the toxic

9:14

way that we set things up in our

9:16

social and economic institutions. Social ecologists like Murray

9:18

Bookchin think that what people typically think of

9:21

is purely ecological problems. You know, something that's

9:23

just a problem when it comes to the

9:25

environment. In reality, these things are often caused

9:27

by horrible ways that we set up the

9:30

relationships between fellow human beings. In

9:32

fact, even saying it the way I just did

9:34

there, where there's some obvious distinction between where other

9:36

people out there end and the

9:38

natural world begins, that's

9:40

a false distinction to a social ecologist.

9:43

No, as human beings, civilization isn't separate

9:45

from the natural world. We are a

9:48

part of the natural world. As

9:50

Murray Bookchin says, we are also an

9:52

animal species living in an ecosystem on

9:54

this planet that's worthy of respect. And

9:57

when you look out at the world and you see

9:59

things like pollution... and overfishing and deforestation

10:01

and resource depletion. These tangible effects

10:03

on the natural world are a

10:05

direct reflection of our social and

10:07

economic relationships, and our attitude towards

10:09

nature directly reflects our attitude towards

10:11

other people. A social ecologist is

10:13

just somebody that's fine with recognizing

10:15

that reality, and then tries their

10:17

best in their free time to

10:19

figure out how anybody else could

10:22

possibly see this otherwise. To

10:24

Murray Bookchin, we are on a

10:26

sinking ship here. We have a

10:28

sick global society, where the accepted

10:30

economic arrangement is that some countries

10:32

are winners and other countries are

10:34

losers. It's an arrangement where

10:36

countries like the United States or England can

10:38

get off the sinking ship and find a

10:40

lifeboat, while other countries, whose populations feel the

10:42

direct impact of the way things are set

10:44

up, these people are just left to

10:47

suffer. People justify it by saying

10:49

it's either just bad luck for them, or

10:51

they use some sort of Darwinian argument that

10:53

only the strong survive, whatever it is, the

10:56

larger horror of it all to Murray Bookchin,

10:58

is that all throughout this entire process, almost

11:00

no one out there is even interested in

11:03

asking why the ship is sinking in the

11:05

first place. To continue the metaphor,

11:07

they just want to paddle on their lifeboat and find

11:09

another ship that's doomed to sink, and then as the

11:11

ship starts to sink, they'll just take a bucket and

11:13

start dumping buckets of water over the side like they're

11:15

Bugs Bunny, you know, try to make the problem not

11:18

seem so bad. It's almost like

11:20

we're dealing with people who are immersed in a religion. If

11:23

you remember our episode we did on the

11:25

philosopher Guy de Boer, in his book, The

11:27

Society of the Spectacle, then you already know

11:29

some of the arguments for how capitalism, in

11:31

particular, can not only serve as a religion

11:33

for people to participate in, but

11:35

it has a special ability to mask the

11:38

fact that you're part of a religion when

11:40

you're in it. And more than that, oftentimes

11:42

when you show someone how similar their commodity

11:44

fetishism is to a religion, they

11:46

don't even usually care that much on the other side of it.

11:49

To Murray Bookchin, people have been conditioned

11:51

into a society where they are practically

11:53

obsessed with hierarchy, to the point they

11:55

barely notice the problematic hierarchies of capitalism

11:57

all around them. Again, to many

11:59

people, brought up in this world, almost

12:01

everything they see is viewed through the

12:03

lens of superiority and inferiority. Am

12:06

I better or worse than this other person?

12:08

Is my stuff better or worse than their

12:10

stuff? Even people who are

12:12

oppressed by hierarchical structures in the world

12:14

will often compare their level of oppression

12:16

to some other group's level of oppression

12:18

and ask whose oppression is superior to

12:20

whose. Who wins the gold medal

12:22

for being the biggest victim? Pymuri Bookchin

12:25

just playing into the hands in his eyes

12:27

of the people who are making billions of

12:29

dollars off people continuing to be divided and

12:31

just keeping the very hierarchy alive that many people say

12:34

is the cause of a lot of social problems. This

12:36

type of person turns themselves, he

12:39

says, into a mere conservationist, meaning

12:42

all your effort is just conserving the

12:44

current economic and political model by continuing

12:46

to preserve its sentiment. And

12:49

the same thing goes, by the way,

12:51

for the well-intentioned environmentalists that we talked

12:53

about before. The environmentalists may think, Murray

12:55

Bookchin says, that fossil fuels and carbon

12:57

in the atmosphere are a problem. So

12:59

what they're going to do is they're going

13:01

to support a bill that bans the production

13:03

of gas-powered automobiles and then retrofits all these

13:05

auto-making factories and uses the buildings to produce

13:07

solar panels now. Sounds great in

13:09

theory. But as great as that sounds

13:11

to Murray Bookchin, what you end

13:13

up doing, again, is turning yourself into

13:15

merely a conservationist of the status quo.

13:17

Because regardless of whether that factory is

13:19

producing cars or solar panels, those solar

13:22

panels are still being produced by a

13:24

workforce of people that are being exploited

13:26

in the name of profit and constant

13:28

growth. It's too superficial. It's putting

13:30

a band-aid on a gaping wound, and it

13:32

deflects the true social problem that may actually

13:34

have led to real progress in the world

13:37

if looked at differently. This

13:39

is a hallmark of capitalism to

13:41

Murray Bookchin. And this

13:43

imperative towards constant growth within capitalism,

13:46

this desire to out-compete all your fellow

13:48

human beings, a structure to society where

13:50

people are atomized and turned into objects

13:53

rather than subjects, this not only

13:55

allows for people to be viewed primarily as these

13:57

objects that are to be manipulated for the sake

13:59

of their lives. whatever is economically best for

14:01

a society. But he says that it

14:03

also puts people into a position where they have to

14:05

be directly at odds with nature if they ever want

14:07

to be able to make a living. What he

14:09

means is you have to participate in whatever

14:11

the company is doing to the natural world

14:14

just to be able to keep your job.

14:16

And this treatment of the natural world as

14:18

simply a warehouse full of raw materials, this

14:20

bleeds into the way that people view ecological

14:22

issues outside of work. In

14:24

fact, what we do primarily in modern Western

14:26

economies, he says, is we

14:28

take organic living beings from the

14:30

natural world and we process them

14:32

into inorganic consumer goods. We

14:35

take a tree, for example, that's been alive for

14:37

hundreds of years, and then we

14:39

process it down into toilet paper to cleanse

14:41

our butts with. That's what we do. We

14:44

take these trees and we turn them into paper

14:46

advertisements, trying to get people to buy some other

14:48

product, junk mail, right? I mean,

14:50

ironically, if you just use the junk mail as

14:52

toilet paper, you know, you'd be getting some kind

14:55

of use out of it. Sign

14:57

me up for that service, by the way. But

14:59

to Murray Bookchin, the thing

15:01

the Western world produces the most of, he

15:03

says, is trash, courtesy,

15:06

he says, of again, this constant imperative

15:09

towards growth. You know, once

15:11

people have been properly sedated by consumer culture,

15:13

buying all kinds of stuff to make them

15:15

temporarily feel good. But we

15:17

need people to keep buying stuff to keep the economy

15:19

going. We just can't have people

15:22

stop buying stuff, guys. What are you doing? So

15:24

to Bookchin, what you get are things like

15:27

planned obsolescence. You buy a phone and in

15:29

a few years, whether you've taken good care

15:31

of it or not, the mandatory software update

15:33

makes your phone practically unusable. It's

15:35

so annoying people end up spending 500 bucks on

15:38

another one just to get on with their life. A

15:40

typical house today is built out of materials

15:42

and with construction that maybe is going to

15:44

last a few decades before it needs some

15:46

major repairs, maybe 100 years before it needs

15:48

to be totally replaced. Again, the

15:51

economy needs to keep going under capitalism.

15:54

But what if, I mean, imagine if we built

15:56

things that were designed to last a really long

15:58

time, like far more than ever. beyond your lifetime

16:00

kind of long. Something like a

16:02

gothic cathedral that's built to last thousands of

16:04

years. Something like a good

16:06

cast-iron pan. The only sort

16:09

of world where people would see this kind of

16:11

longevity as a bad thing is in a world

16:13

where things need to be constantly harvested, used up,

16:15

spent, and then sent off to a landfill so

16:17

that people can keep buying the next thing made

16:20

out of the organic natural world. And

16:22

just so we don't kind of interrupt the podcast at any

16:24

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to the podcast. To

20:17

Murray Bookchin, is there any point where we

20:19

all take a step back and ask what's

20:21

the endgame here? Far from the

20:23

first time this point has been made, but it still rings

20:25

true. We have a seemingly

20:27

infinite capitalist imperative towards growth and a

20:29

finite number of resources in the natural

20:32

world. Isn't it just crazy for

20:34

someone to not expect this to go bad for us

20:36

at some point? With the growing number of

20:38

people that are looking around them and feeling weird about all

20:40

this, is that just a growing number

20:42

of realists that actually want to ask what's causing this

20:44

ship to sink in the first place? Well,

20:47

there's definitely responses to these sorts of

20:49

questions, common attitudes in today's world, for

20:51

example. Understand that capitalism's

20:53

always trying to grow, but are

20:55

we just going to ignore the fact that technology

20:57

is a thing? Are we just going

20:59

to ignore that greater levels of technology will make

21:01

it more efficient to harvest these resources from the

21:03

planet, and maybe even make it where we barely

21:05

have to use resources from the natural world at

21:07

all? We can ignore that? I mean,

21:10

more generally, hasn't this always been the

21:12

story of humanity at other points in time? Haven't

21:14

we before gotten to a place where it

21:17

seems like all the chips are stacked against

21:19

us, but some genius invents something, technology comes

21:21

along, and it ends up saving us? Well,

21:23

this type of thinking is along

21:25

the lines of another common strategy in the

21:28

modern world to get rid of these ecological

21:30

problems, what Murray Bookchin often calls futurism, or

21:32

the type of person who's always willing to

21:34

write off our environmental responsibility right now and

21:37

then rely on some techno Jesus that's going

21:39

to descend from the clouds and hypothetically going

21:41

to save us all in the future at

21:43

some point. Murray Bookchin would say, look, you

21:45

can always say that technology is going to

21:48

save us no matter how bad things have

21:50

gotten around you, but people have

21:52

been saying that kind of stuff for decades and

21:54

it hasn't solved the problem yet. How

21:56

long do we wait around until we start considering

21:59

other options besides? technology. But

22:01

no, no. To the people sufficiently

22:03

committed to this religious savior relationship

22:05

between us and technology, they

22:08

will start to become what Murray Bookchin calls a

22:10

futurist. Where in the 1970s, 50 years ago, Murray

22:14

Bookchin talks about how quickly these futurists

22:17

are gonna start talking about colonizing the

22:19

moon or colonizing Mars as a grand

22:21

solution to our environmental problems. These

22:24

futurists will talk about Earth as though it's

22:26

this giant spaceship as a metaphor. What

22:28

they will talk about is simply exporting

22:30

the fundamentally flawed social institutions and relationship

22:32

with nature and shipping it off to

22:35

another planet where it can take hold

22:37

there. Again, the futurist

22:39

becomes a lot like the environmentalist of

22:41

Bookchin. They simply become a conservationist

22:43

of the status quo. They have effectively given

22:45

up on planet Earth all around them and

22:48

they want to move on to some other

22:50

planet. And as Bookchin says, anybody

22:52

coming from the angle of a social

22:54

ecologist just sees this whole situation from

22:56

a totally different perspective. To

22:58

a social ecologist, it is not

23:00

humanity's job to be good stewards

23:02

of nature or to just

23:05

be good self-appointed managers of nature. To

23:07

a social ecologist, what we should be aiming for

23:09

is to be living in harmony with nature. His

23:12

reasons for believing this come in part

23:14

from evolutionary biology. He says from the

23:17

first time there was an amoeba, that amoeba

23:19

had a certain way that it was to

23:21

be an amoeba. That amoeba

23:23

relied on its environment to be able to live. It

23:25

needed to live in water, for example. That

23:27

amoeba adapted to its environment when that

23:30

water changed temperature. And when you watch

23:32

as life evolves over millions of years into

23:34

more complex forms of life, the adaptations that

23:36

the life forms make in relation to their

23:38

environments start to become more complex as well.

23:41

This process goes on long enough you

23:43

start developing consciousness. Then you start to

23:45

see intelligence emerge. Eventually, animals like beavers

23:47

start to adapt in constructive ways. They

23:49

start to make dance. Chimpanzees will start

23:51

to use sticks to get ants out

23:53

of an ant hill. In other words,

23:55

eventually what starts to evolve is a

23:58

creative capacity towards a creature's environment. One

24:00

that goes beyond just simply adapting to your environment

24:02

to a type of existence where you start creating

24:04

things. And the point is, this is part of

24:07

what we do as human beings. Now

24:09

to be entirely clear here, Tamari Bookchin,

24:11

the natural world, was obviously not created

24:13

exclusively for human beings. I don't want

24:15

anyone to misunderstand that. But

24:17

what he does say is that when you consider the

24:19

type of creature we are, one that's evolved within an

24:22

environment, and when you consider our capacity

24:24

to reason and our ability to be self-aware of

24:26

the things we create and how they impact the

24:28

environment, even if this Earth

24:30

wasn't made just for us, Tamari

24:33

Bookchin, to deny that we have a special

24:35

kind of responsibility to the natural world, is

24:37

just to deny the type of creatures that we are.

24:40

We are the type of creatures that intervene in the natural world.

24:42

We have to. The

24:45

question for him is not whether we should

24:47

intervene, but how should we intervene in a

24:49

way that's as harmonious as possible? The

24:51

place our thinking should be starting from then is not

24:54

how do we continue doing exactly what we're doing, but

24:57

just do it in a way where it doesn't spiral out of control so fast. The

24:59

thing we should be asking is how do we

25:01

find a way to complement this delicate ecosystem that

25:04

we're a part of? How

25:06

do we use these big brains that we have to

25:08

find a way to grow, as life forms do, to

25:11

nurture human potential and human spirit, but

25:14

do it in a way where we're not destroying the environment

25:16

we need to survive in the process? This is

25:18

a very different way of seeing our place in the natural

25:20

world. And what comes along with that,

25:22

if that was the way you saw things, it's

25:25

a certain amount of respect for the

25:27

immediate environment that you're living in. Because

25:29

if the Earth is not just a warehouse full

25:31

of resources that was put here so we can

25:34

make a bunch of stuff for people to be

25:36

able to buy, then the Earth now becomes something

25:38

that you more see as your

25:40

home or your oikos, to use

25:42

a Greek term that Bookchin really liked. When

25:44

you consider the futurist strategy, that the goal is to

25:46

get on a rocket ship, leave the planet, and have

25:49

a clean start on some other planet out there, a

25:51

social ecologist might ask the question, doesn't any

25:54

strategy of living in harmony with an environment

25:56

that's actually going to work out, doesn't

25:58

that ultimately have to happen? start from a place

26:01

where this planet is your home and that you love

26:03

this place and you want to find a way to

26:05

preserve it because it actually means something to you. Should

26:08

we be treating the planet like it's a

26:10

bathroom at a bus station where dudes are

26:12

literally arcing their pee into the urinal from

26:14

five feet back like they're Steph Curry because

26:16

nobody really cares about this bathroom everybody's on

26:19

their way to somewhere else it's actually their

26:21

home. See the Bookchin, a

26:23

futurist talks a big game about having

26:25

these cosmic communities in space these galactic

26:27

villages where we're all working together in

26:30

harmony but we don't even

26:32

have those sorts of harmonious communities on our own planet

26:34

what makes you think we're gonna have them there? Bookchin

26:37

thinks that technology should never be thought of

26:39

as some sort of religious savior or as

26:41

something that allows us to write off our

26:43

immediate responsibility to our environment but

26:46

what technology absolutely should be thought of he

26:48

thinks is something that always

26:50

at any moment in history has the

26:52

ability to liberate people and make human

26:54

life a whole lot better than what

26:56

it is. See this is one of those directions

26:58

people will go in when they hear these sorts of

27:00

ideas that if what this dude's saying is that we

27:02

all just need to live in harmony with nature man

27:05

that what he must be saying there is that we all need to

27:07

go back to the Stone Age reject

27:09

any progress that's been made in the last few

27:12

thousand years and just sleep happily on a pile

27:14

of leaves that you've fashioned into a mattress on

27:16

the floor of a cave somewhere. But

27:19

again this is not what Bookchin is saying in

27:21

fact given how hardwired it sometimes seems to be

27:23

into human beings to just keep trying to make

27:25

better and better stuff that makes people's lives better

27:28

technology should be something we're all celebrating when

27:30

it comes to making progress but

27:33

he'd say in practice in the real world celebration

27:35

is not always how it

27:38

goes down under a capitalist socioeconomic model.

27:41

To explain what he means take one of

27:43

the most potentially world-changing tech advances in the

27:45

recent past developments in the field of artificial

27:47

intelligence and all that may be possible if

27:49

intelligence was actually something that could be automated

27:51

at scale. Now regardless of

27:53

whether artificial general intelligence ever becomes a

27:56

real thing when you consider

27:58

just a conservative estimate of the... types

28:00

of jobs AI is going to be able to do better than

28:02

a person within the next 50 years. People

28:05

living in some alternate universe where their

28:07

everyday life isn't just to be a

28:09

worker and consumer under capitalism, in that

28:11

alternate universe, those people might be taken

28:13

to the streets celebrating, throwing their hands

28:16

up in the air, just weeping towards

28:18

the sky, confetti goes off behind them.

28:21

You know, thank you, technology. Because

28:23

of you, now millions of people out there

28:25

won't have to do these menial, boring, soul-draining

28:28

jobs anymore. And now, just

28:30

like at other points throughout history, the average human

28:32

life can now be something that looks very different

28:34

than it did before. Maybe people will spend more

28:36

time with their families now, maybe they

28:38

could get to know their neighbors better, be part of

28:40

an immediate community. In this fantasy

28:42

world, the sky's the limit. If technology can

28:45

free people up to do other things, then

28:47

why wouldn't we use technology to get the

28:49

necessary work done? But that's

28:51

not what goes on in a capitalist

28:53

society. See, in our world,

28:56

we're seeing this exact same amazing breakthrough

28:58

in technology of AI, and

29:00

instead of celebrating, a lot of people

29:02

are terrified. Terrified they're going

29:04

to be unemployed when AI replaces them. Sad

29:07

that what they went to school for for years is now

29:09

a body of knowledge that can be replaced by an app

29:11

on your cell phone. Scared you're going

29:13

to go to school for something now that'll be completely

29:16

obsolete by the time you graduate. Why

29:18

is such an incredible technological breakthrough being

29:20

seen as something that's going to hurt

29:22

people? To Murray Bookchin, this

29:24

situation could only go on in the

29:26

type of society where scarcity is something

29:28

that is enforced. He says 100

29:31

years ago, scarcity was something that had to

29:33

be endured. In today's world, it's something that's

29:35

enforced. What did he mean by that? But

29:37

what he means is that in theory, we have

29:40

the technology and the resources to be able to

29:42

produce enough for everyone on this planet where nobody

29:44

needs to be stuck on that sinking ship from

29:46

before without a lifeboat. We have the

29:49

ability to treat our fellow human beings as though

29:51

they're an animal in this ecosystem that's worthy of

29:53

respect. And yes, people in

29:55

former societies had to endure scarcity when there

29:57

wasn't enough food, shelter, or medicine to go

29:59

around. for everyone. But in today's

30:01

world, the only thing stopping these basic

30:04

resources from being distributed to people is

30:06

an enforcement by a centralized authority that

30:08

needs scarcity to continue to exist so

30:11

that people will keep on working and

30:13

producing at an ever-increasing rate to be

30:15

able to keep this economy going. So

30:18

a totally reasonable question to be asking here when

30:20

you hear this sort of critique about so many

30:23

sweeping aspects of society is to ask the question,

30:25

so what should we do about it then, Mr.

30:27

Bookchin? Or as I like to call him, Uncle

30:29

Murray? What do we do about it? And

30:32

the good thing about Uncle Murray is that he's

30:34

not shy at all about giving answers to that

30:36

question. He'll tell you exactly what he thinks needs

30:38

to be done, and it starts to sound very

30:40

similar to the federated network of communities that we

30:42

talked about last episode. He is

30:44

very much a fan of local community

30:46

involvement in multiple different domains. He's a

30:49

fan of food cooperatives, affinity groups, non-hierarchical

30:51

voluntary neighborhood associations, town meetings. So in

30:53

other words, in a very broad sense,

30:56

Murray Bookchin was a fan of starting

30:58

small, where the people that are living

31:00

in a sick society like this can

31:02

start to rediscover what it's like to

31:04

participate and have a relationship with other

31:06

people that is on a human level

31:08

of scale. See, this is one

31:10

of the big problems to him with how society is currently

31:12

set up. It's too big.

31:15

Our cities, he said, have become nations. And he says that

31:17

when you go to New York City and you stand on

31:19

top of the World Trade Center and you look out at

31:21

the horizon, obviously his example didn't

31:23

age the best year, but his point is that

31:25

when you're in a high place and you look

31:27

out at the horizon and it's 40 miles across

31:29

with a sprawling metropolis of millions of people between

31:31

you and the horizon, how

31:33

in the world can any single person

31:36

possibly hope to understand human life at

31:38

that scale? How can you

31:40

ever be informed enough to understand the problems

31:43

of millions or billions? More

31:45

than that, how can anyone who's been

31:47

elected to govern society at that scale

31:49

possibly comprehend the level of bureaucracy that's

31:51

required for a centralized authority to keep

31:53

all those people well managed? No,

31:55

what Uncle Murray says is that much like every other

31:57

creature in nature that needs to learn to live within

31:59

its immediate nature, immediate environment in a harmonious way. If

32:02

we could start small, just in our

32:05

own communities, if we could just take

32:07

responsibility for how our immediate surroundings are,

32:09

that might be one small step in the right direction

32:11

towards a better world. See, one

32:14

small step at a time is

32:16

okay to a lot of revolutionary thinkers. In

32:18

fact, dare I say to most revolutionary

32:21

thinkers at this point, incremental progress may

32:23

actually be the only way. Nobody

32:25

hears talking about some violent bloody revolution

32:28

that takes place overnight. There's

32:30

good reason to believe that when it comes to anarchism,

32:33

nothing even remotely like that could ever work in

32:35

the real world for many of the same reasons

32:37

that Marxist revolutions have failed in the past. That

32:39

you can't just take people that from the moment

32:41

they're born are conditioned to see their whole life

32:44

through the lens of being a worker and consumer.

32:46

You know, alienated labor at a company by day,

32:49

Netflix at night to ease the pain. You can't

32:51

take people from a culture that's like that. Start

32:54

a revolution one day, transplant them into

32:56

a society where their life is completely different and then

32:58

expect them to be a functional happy person on the

33:00

other side of it. Again, revolution

33:02

to many thinkers needs to be done

33:04

slowly. Because the only way you

33:06

ever bring about these sorts of ideas in a

33:08

way that's enduring is if the sensibility of the

33:10

society changes to the point that a different structure

33:12

is demanded from within. So when we've

33:14

talked recently about the work of Byung-Chul Han

33:17

and Foucault and Agamben and many others, and

33:19

the feeling at the end of the episodes can be one where

33:21

it's like, okay, the world's obviously not a

33:23

great place for everyone right now. Clearly

33:26

what it is to be a person on this planet can be better

33:28

for a lot more people out there. But

33:30

how do we actually get that done? This

33:33

is a social ecologist like Murray Bochkin saying

33:35

that the true underlying cause of all that

33:37

has to do with our relationships to each

33:39

other as people. That our

33:41

social problems are in fact ecological problems

33:44

as well. And that to fix

33:46

them instead of planting a little ficus reapin on

33:48

your kitchen counter, claiming at Hubert, and then thinking

33:50

that you and Hubert are out there saving the

33:52

world together. Maybe the more productive way

33:54

to fix some of these problems is to stop thinking on

33:56

the scale of hundreds of millions of people for a second.

33:59

And instead, Instead, take a page out of the book of an

34:01

amoeba. Start small. Try

34:03

for a bit just to heal the relationship you

34:06

have with yourself and your immediate environment. Then

34:08

maybe try to expand that to your family, then into

34:10

your community. I mean, these local

34:12

communities with a bottom-up power structure can exist in

34:14

the world right now if people wanted to build

34:16

them. There's nothing illegal about

34:18

it. But to Uncle Murray, the ultimate

34:21

hope would be that as people participate

34:23

within these communities and rediscover what it's

34:25

like to actually be involved in a

34:27

decision-making process, the hope would be that

34:29

through entirely peaceful methods, the sensibility of

34:31

society would gradually change over time. And

34:34

then at that point, these communities could

34:36

be in communication with each other, networked

34:38

together regionally, nationally, and then maybe internationally.

34:41

The hope would be that this would peacefully

34:43

turn into another one of these moments from

34:45

history where people demanded this greater level of

34:47

freedom, equality, and solidarity for the structure of

34:49

society more broadly. Now

34:51

there were a lot of questions sent in after

34:53

last episode asking how any of these bottom-up ways

34:56

of organizing the world could ever work in practice.

34:59

There were some recurring ones, questions like

35:01

how does an anarchist society protect itself

35:03

if some other powerful country decides to

35:05

engrade? How do you stop

35:07

internal organizations from gaining influence among these communities

35:09

and trying to take things over? What

35:12

do we do if one of these little federated communities

35:14

you're talking about decides that their mission statement that they

35:16

want to hang up on the wall is,

35:18

hi, we're all murderers and rapists in

35:20

this particular community. Looks like we gotta

35:22

respect our ability to govern ourselves, right? More

35:26

than that, people have asked, when have any of

35:28

these ideas ever worked well in the past anyway?

35:31

Have they? Is there any form of

35:33

government that exists today that even remotely resembles any

35:35

of the stuff we've been talking about? These

35:38

are not only some of the most common questions I

35:40

received after last episode. They're some of

35:42

the most common questions asked of anarchists because they're the

35:44

first place an intelligent person's brain goes when they hear

35:47

these ideas for the first time. And because

35:49

they're among the most asked questions, they're among

35:51

the most answered questions by anarchists as well.

35:54

We're gonna hear the answers to all these

35:56

questions among other things next episode. If

35:58

you have any other burning questions, if not, I'll be right back. about since last

36:00

episode, please send them my way. Be happy to read

36:02

them. Thank you to everybody, by the

36:04

way, that leaves comments and gets a conversation about this

36:06

stuff going. Could never do this

36:08

without your help. And as always, thank you

36:10

for listening. Talk to you next time.