Episode #193 ...The chief export of the western world is trash. - Anarchism pt. 2 (Bookchin, Social Ecology)

Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West.

This is Philosophize This.

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Hope you love the show today.

So last episode was a bit of a challenge to be able to write.

There was a lot of stuff that needed to get talked about, a lot of core ideas from anarchist thought that needed to be explained, to be respectful to the people who came to the episode not knowing anything about anarchism yet.

But it was a challenge because we had to talk about all these core ideas without saying too much about anarchism in general.

Because look, it's a fact of the universe.

You say anything about anarchism, a beacon goes up into the sky, anarchists start crawling out of the trees all over the world.

And no matter what it is, there's going to be some anarchist somewhere in the world that doesn't agree with what's being said because it doesn't correspond with their version of anarchism, of which there are many.

Now, lucky for me, I can start talking about individual thinkers today.

Also kind of lucky for me, I guess, is that the philosopher we're talking about today didn't get too caught up in labels like like anarchism.

Seemed a bit silly to him to be doing that.

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

But as though I learned nothing in my life, as though I really am, you know, top five dumbest people on planet Earth, I'm going to try it again today, at least here at the beginning of the episode.

Because to anybody coming to this podcast today in good faith, you know, you're trying to learn more about anarchism.

You're trying to place it in the greater historical context of what you already know.

I personally think that if you're trying to do that, that taking a step back and looking at anarchism from more of a panoramic view is helpful because I think it sets us up for the rest of this episode where we're going to be seeing exactly how an anarchist perspective can start to look when it's directly applied to what many consider to be one of the biggest issues facing the human species today.

What I mean is, you know, it's been said that if the world we live in today ceases to exist somehow, like if you could get in a time machine, go into the future 500 years, you arrive in that world, you look around you, and it's obvious that civilization has collapsed at some point between now and then.

If you found yourself in that spot, there are a few things that are going on in 2024 that could have been responsible for that collapse.

Nuclear proliferation, our toxic relationship with the natural world, various forms of social unrest.

We got fascism, mental illness, addiction, socioeconomic turmoil, religious fighting of any type, not the least of which are the political religions that people are a part of today.

The list goes on.

Take your pick.

But the point is that an anarchist might ask the question here, are these all completely separate phenomena that are totally unrelated to each other?

Or might there be something more fundamental that's going on, where all these things are just different symptoms of the same sickness that's overcome society?

What they'd be alluding to is: what if our blind acceptance of involuntary hierarchical authority, our obsession with constantly looking at everything around us in terms of superiority and inferiority, what if that was directly responsible for a lot of these problems?

or all of these problems?

The philosopher we're talking about today is Murray Bookchin.

And while he's considered by many to be one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the recent past, he himself, again, didn't get too caught up on the label of anarchist.

In fact, anarchism, as far as he saw it, was not some recent breakthrough in political philosophy, you know, some radical, entirely new set of ideas.

To him, what people in the modern world often call anarchism is really just the natural progression of a tendency in human thought that's been going on since the beginning of civilization as we know it, more specifically since about 5,000 years ago when we started structuring things in terms of forced hierarchical authority.

As Murray Bookchin says, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the great Native American leaders of the resistance against colonial domination from Europe, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were anarchists to him.

Now, if you said to either Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse, you're an anarchist, They'd look at you like you just lost your mind.

They wouldn't know what you were talking about with the specific label of anarchist.

But if you told them about the anarchist values that we talked about last time of liberty, equality, and solidarity, these two people, to Murray Bookchin, would understand exactly what you mean.

They would certainly understand the concept of liberty and resistance to involuntary authority that's being imposed upon them from the outside.

They definitely understand the concept of equality among the members of their tribe and how people ultimately complement each other within a group.

They, of course, saw solidarity with their immediate community as an important part of how society should be structured.

So again, labels aside to Murray Bookchin, call it anarchism, call it whatever you want.

But the Native American resistance against colonial domination represented a very human tendency that keeps on repeating itself throughout human history, a tendency to demand when it's possible greater levels of liberty, equality, and solidarity than former societies have had before.

Christianity is an example of this to Bookchin.

With the second coming of Christ as a sociological story created by human beings to express it, where after the end times it is said, the wolves shall lay with the lambs, the false prophets and unjust authorities on earth will be abolished, and everybody will live together equally under the eyes of God.

This is an example to Bookchin of this tendency in people's thinking that in more modern times we might otherwise call anarchist.

More examples of this throughout history, though.

How about the American Revolution?

You know, taxation without representation from King George, a focus on the solidarity of regional communities rather than colonial rule.

There came a point where people were unwilling to live under this unjustified authoritarian regime, and they decided to do something about it.

What would you call that tendency?

Is it a totally isolated event?

Since this is a philosophy podcast, to give an example, Bookchin mentions from the history of philosophy, how about the Enlightenment that we've talked about extensively on this show?

You know, when Immanuel Kant writes his famous essay in 1784 called What is Enlightenment?

And he says that to be enlightened, we've got to remove ourselves of our self-imposed tutelage of the past, to him meaning the needless authority of religious thought.

And then when he says that moving forward, we should be using reason as a more reliable guide for structuring the systems in our world, when Kant writes that, that is him and many others existing in a society where they look around them and obviously feel like something's very wrong about the way things are.

And it's them standing up to the authority of religious claims to truth and demanding greater levels of liberty, equality, and solidarity for people in the process.

Now, there are a hundred more examples I could give of moments that Murray Bookchin believes are examples of this human tendency repeating itself.

The historical rule seems to be that when a high enough percentage of people look around them and they realize something's wrong with how things are set up, they will eventually get tired of it and demand greater levels of this liberty, equality, and solidarity.

Is it crazy to think that we might have one of these moments of progress again?

I mean, ask yourself, have we experienced the last time that the average person gets an upgrade in the quality of their life in these areas?

Probably not.

And how close we are to another one of those moments occurring is probably correlated with what percentage of people in a given time are looking around them and thinking, wow, things are really messed up when it comes to how we're doing X thing.

So enter Murray Bookchin's primary area of expertise, the field he dedicated most of his life to.

I'm talking about the human species and its relationship to the natural world.

Again, this is one of those major issues that is going on today that entertaining an anarchist perspective on it might give us an interesting new angle.

Murray Bookchin saw himself fundamentally as a social ecologist.

Now, most people hear that term, social ecologist, and no doubt know that it must have something to do with the environment.

And that's true.

But to understand fully what social ecology is, it's important to understand how it differs from more popular strategies in today's world of solving our environmental problems.

Picture somebody that cares about the environment a lot.

totally well-intentioned, well-educated.

This person recycles, they compost.

They even got a little ficus plant that they named Hubert.

He sits on the windowsill every day smiling out at the world.

This person's incredible.

And this person, whenever they leave their apartment to go and vote every couple years, they show up to the ballot box and they do their part there as well.

They support the bills to help the environment.

They voted for a ban on single-use plastics last time they went.

It's nice.

They supported a bill to plant trees in urban communities.

They volunteer to pick up trash on the beach during their off time.

They donate to green charities.

They buy from green companies whenever they can.

By one standard of definition, they are the picture of an environmentally conscious person.

But all this effort, no matter how well-intentioned it is to a social ecologist like Murray Bookchin, this is all, when it comes down to it, pretty superficial, if we're just being honest.

What does he mean?

Well, banning single-use plastics, for example.

You know, you buy something, it comes to you in a plastic package, you throw the packaging away, and then it sits in a landfill for a million years.

That's a problem.

And getting rid of that plastic certainly may clear up a bit of space in our landfills, for sure.

But it does absolutely nothing to fix the true cause of single-use plastics being a thing in the first place.

Because single-use plastics are just one iteration, one symptom of the toxic way that we've set things up in our social and economic institutions.

Social ecologists like Murray Bookchin think that what people typically think of as purely ecological problems, you know, something that's just a problem when it comes to the environment, in reality, these things are often caused by horrible ways that we've set up the relationships between fellow human beings.

In fact, even saying it the way I just did there, where there's some obvious distinction between where other people out there end and the natural world begins, that's a false distinction to a social ecologist.

No, as human beings, civilization isn't separate from the natural world.

We are a part of the natural world.

As Murray Bookchin says, we are also an animal species living in an ecosystem on this planet that's worthy of respect.

And when you look out at the world and you see things like pollution and overfishing and deforestation and resource depletion, these tangible effects on the natural world are a direct reflection of our social and economic relationships, and our attitude towards nature directly reflects our attitude towards other people.

A social ecologist is just somebody that's fine with recognizing that reality and then tries their best in their free time to figure out how anybody else could possibly see this otherwise.

To Murray Bookchin, we are on a sinking ship here.

We have a sick global society where the accepted economic arrangement is that some countries are winners and other countries are losers.

It's an arrangement where countries like the United States or England can get off the sinking ship and find a lifeboat, while other countries whose populations feel the direct impact of the way things are set up, these people are just left to suffer.

People justify it by saying it's either just bad luck for them, or they use some sort of Darwinian argument that only the strong survive.

Whatever it is, the larger horror of it all to Murray Bookchin is that all throughout this entire process, almost no one out there is even interested in asking why the ship is sinking in the first place.

To continue the metaphor, they just want to paddle on their lifeboat and find another ship that's doomed to sink, and then as the ship starts to sink, they'll just take a bucket and start dumping buckets of water over the side like they're bugs bunny, you know, try to make the problem not seem so bad.

It's almost like we're dealing with people who are immersed in a religion.

And if you remember our episode we did on the philosopher Guy Debo in his book, The Society of the Spectacle, then you already know some of the arguments for how capitalism, in particular, can not only serve as a religion for people to participate in, but it has a special ability to mask the fact that you're part of a religion when you're in it.

And more than that, oftentimes when you show someone how similar their commodity fetishism is to a religion, they don't even usually care that much on the other side of it.

To Murray Bookchin, people have been conditioned into a society where they are practically obsessed with hierarchy, to the point they barely notice the problematic hierarchies of capitalism all around them.

Again, to many people brought up in this world, almost everything they see is viewed through the lens of superiority and inferiority.

Am I better or worse than this other person?

Is my stuff better or worse than their stuff?

Even people who are oppressed by hierarchical structures in the world will often compare their level of oppression to some other group's level of oppression and ask whose oppression is superior to whose?

You know, who wins the gold medal for being the biggest victim?

To Murray Bookchin, just playing into the hands in his eyes of the people who are making billions of dollars off people continuing to be divided and just keeping the very hierarchy alive that many people say is the cause of a lot of social problems.

This type of person turns themselves, he says, into a mere conservationist, meaning all your effort is just conserving the current economic and political model by continuing to preserve its sentiment.

And the same thing goes, by the way, for the well-intentioned environmentalists that we talked about before.

The environmentalists may think, Murray Bookchin says, that fossil fuels and carbon in the atmosphere are a problem.

So what they're going to do is they're going to support a bill that bans the production of gas-powered automobiles and then retrofits all these automaking factories and uses the buildings to produce solar panels now.

Sounds great in theory.

But as great as that sounds to Murray Bookchin, what you end up doing, again, is turning yourself into merely a conservationist of the status quo.

Because regardless of whether that factory is producing cars or solar panels, those solar panels are still being produced by a workforce of people that are being exploited in the name of profit and constant growth.

It's too superficial.

It's putting a band-aid on a gaping wound, and it deflects the true social problem that may actually have led to real progress in the world if looked at differently.

This is a hallmark of capitalism, to Murray Bookchin.

And this imperative towards constant growth within capitalism, this desire to out-compete all your fellow human beings, a structured society where people are atomized and turned into objects rather than subjects.

This not only allows for people to be viewed primarily as these objects that are to be manipulated for the sake of whatever is economically best for a society.

But he says that it also puts people into a position where they have to be directly at odds with nature if they ever want to be able to make a living.

What he means is you have to participate in whatever the company is doing to the natural world just to be able to keep your job.

And this treatment of the natural world as simply a warehouse full of raw materials, this bleeds into the way that people view ecological issues outside of work.

In fact, what we do primarily in modern Western economies, he says, is we take organic living beings from the the natural world and we process them into inorganic consumer goods.

We take a tree, for example, that's been alive for hundreds of years and then we process it down into toilet paper to cleanse our butts with.

That's what we do.

We take these trees and we turn them into paper advertisements trying to get people to buy some other product, junk mail, right?

I mean, ironically, if you just use the junk mail as toilet paper, it you know, you'd be getting some kind of use out of it.

Sign me up for that service, by the way.

But to Murray Bookchin, the thing the Western world produces the most of, he says, is trash.

Courtesy, he says, of, again, this constant imperative towards growth.

You know, once people have been properly sedated by consumer culture, buying all kinds of stuff to make them temporarily feel good.

Well, we need people to keep buying stuff to keep the economy going.

We just can't have people stop buying stuff, guys.

What are you doing?

So to Bookchin, what you get are things like planned obsolescence.

You buy a phone, and in a few years, whether you've taken good care of it or not, the mandatory software update makes your phone practically unusable.

It's so annoying, people end up spending 500 bucks on another one just to get on with their life.

A typical house today is built out of materials and with construction that maybe is going to last a few decades before it needs some major repairs.

Maybe 100 years before it needs to be totally replaced.

Again, the economy needs to keep going under capitalism.

But what if?

I mean, imagine if we built things that were designed to last a really long time, like far beyond your lifetime, kind of long.

Something like a gothic cathedral that's built to last thousands of years.

Something like a good cast iron pan.

The only sort of world where people would see this kind of longevity as a bad thing is in a world where things need to be constantly harvested, used up, spent, and then sent off to a landfill so that people can keep buying the next thing made out of the organic natural world.

To Murray Bookchin, is there any point where we all take a step back and ask, what's the end game here?

Far from the first time this point has been made, but it still rings true.

We have a seemingly infinite capitalist imperative towards growth and a finite number of resources in the natural world.

Isn't it just crazy for someone to not expect this to go bad for us at some point?

With the growing number of people that are looking around them and feeling weird about all this, is that just a growing number of realists that actually want to ask what's causing this ship to sink in the first place?

Well, there's definitely responses to these sorts of questions.

Common attitudes in today's world, for example,

understand that capitalism is always trying to grow, but are we just going to ignore the fact that technology is a thing?

Are we just going to ignore that greater levels of technology will make it more efficient to harvest these resources from the planet, and maybe even make it where we barely have to use resources from the natural world at all?

Are we going to ignore that?

I mean, more generally, hasn't this always been the story of humanity at other points in time?

Haven't we before gotten to a place where it seems like all the chips are stacked against us, but some genius invents something, technology comes along, and it ends up saving us?

Well, this type of thinking is along the lines of another common strategy in the modern world to get rid of these ecological problems, what Murray Bookchin often calls futurism, or the type of person who's always willing to write off our environmental responsibility right now and then rely on some techno-Jesus that's going to descend from the clouds and is hypothetically going to save us all in the future at some point.

Murray Bookchin would say, look, you can always say that technology is going to save us, no matter how bad things have gotten around you.

But people have been saying that kind of stuff for decades and it hasn't solved solved the problem yet.

How long do we wait around until we start considering other options besides technology?

But no, no, to the people sufficiently committed to this religious savior relationship between us and technology, they will start to become what Murray Bookchin calls a futurist.

Where in the 1970s, 50 years ago, Murray Bookchin talks about how quickly these futurists are going to start talking about colonizing the moon or colonizing Mars as a grand solution to our environmental problems.

These futurists will talk about Earth as though it's this giant spaceship as a metaphor.

What they will talk about is simply exporting the fundamentally flawed social institutions and relationship with nature and shipping it off to another planet where it can take hold there.

Again, the futurist becomes a lot like the environmentalist to Bookchin.

They simply become a conservationist of the status quo.

They have effectively given up on planet Earth all around them, and they want to move on to some other planet.

And as Bookchin says, anybody coming from the angle of a social ecologist just sees this whole situation from a totally different perspective.

To a social ecologist, it is not humanity's job to be good stewards of nature, or to just be good self-appointed managers of nature.

To a social ecologist, what we should be aiming for is to be living in harmony with nature.

His reasons for believing this come in part from evolutionary biology.

He says from the first time there was an amoeba, that amoeba had a certain way that it was to be an amoeba.

That amoeba relied on its environment to be able to live.

It needed to live in water, for example.

That amoeba adapted to its environment when that water changed temperature.

And when you watch, as life evolves over millions of years into more complex forms of life, the adaptations that the life forms make in relation to their environments start to become more complex as well.

This process goes on long enough, you start developing consciousness.

Then you start to see intelligence emerge.

Eventually, animals like beavers start to adapt in constructive ways.

They start to make dams.

Chimpanzees will start to use sticks to get ants out of an anthill.

In other words, eventually, what starts to evolve is a creative capacity towards a creature's environment, one that goes beyond just simply adapting to your environment, to a type of existence where you start creating things.

And the point is, this is part of what we do as human beings.

Now, to be entirely clear here, to Murray Bookchin, the natural world was obviously not created exclusively for human beings.

I don't want anyone to misunderstand that.

But what he does say is that when you consider the type of creature we are, one that's evolved within an environment, and when you consider our capacity to reason and our ability to be self-aware of the things we create and how they impact the environment, even if this earth wasn't made just for us, to Murray Bookchin, to deny that we have a special kind of responsibility to the natural world is just to deny the type of creatures that we are.

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

We have to.

The question for him is not whether we should intervene, but how should we intervene in a way that's as harmonious as possible?

The place our thinking should be starting from then is not how do we continue doing exactly what we're doing, but just do it in a way where it doesn't spiral out of control so fast.

The thing we should be asking is how do we find a way to complement this delicate ecosystem that we're a part of?

How do we use these big brains that we have to find a way to grow as life forms do, you know, to nurture human potential and human spirit, but do it in a way where we're not destroying the environment we need to survive in the process?

This is a very different way of seeing our place in the natural world.

And what comes along with that, if that was the way you saw things, is a certain amount of respect for the immediate environment that you're living in.

Because if the Earth is not just a warehouse full of resources that was put here so we can make a bunch of stuff for people to be able to buy, then the Earth now becomes something that you more see as your home or your oikos, to use a Greek term that Bookchin really liked.

And when you consider the futurist strategy, that the goal is to get on a rocket ship, leave the planet, and have a clean start on some other planet out there, a social ecologist might ask the question, doesn't any strategy of living in harmony with an environment that's actually going to work out, doesn't that ultimately have to start from a place where this planet is your home and that you love this place and you want to find a way to preserve it because it actually means something to you?

Should we be treating the planet like it's a bathroom at a bus station where dudes are literally arcing their pee into the urinal from five feet back like they're Steph Curry?

Because nobody really cares about this bathroom.

Everybody's on their way to somewhere else.

It's actually their home.

See, to Bookchin, a futurist talks a big game about having these cosmic communities in space, these galactic villages where we're all working together in harmony.

But we don't even have those sorts of harmonious communities on our own planet.

What makes you think we're going to have them there?

Bookchin thinks that technology should never be thought of as some sort of religious savior or as something that allows us to write off our immediate responsibility to our environment.

But what technology absolutely should be thought of, he thinks, is something that always, at any moment in history, has the ability to liberate people and make human life a whole lot better than what it is.

See, this is one of those directions people will go in when they hear these sorts of ideas, that if what this dude's saying is that we all just need to live in harmony with nature, man, that what he must be saying there is that we all need to go back to the Stone Age, reject any progress that's been made in the last few thousand years, and just sleep happily on a pile of leaves that you've fashioned into a mattress on the floor of a cave somewhere.

But again, this is not what Bookchin is saying.

In fact, given how hardwired it sometimes seems to be into human beings to just keep trying to make better and better stuff that makes people's lives better, technology should be something we're all celebrating when it comes to making progress.

But he'd say in practice, in the real world, celebration is not always how it goes down under a capitalist socioeconomic model.

To explain what he means, take one of the most potentially world-changing tech advances in the recent past.

developments in the field of artificial intelligence and all that may be possible if intelligence was actually something that could be automated at scale.

Now, regardless of whether artificial general intelligence ever becomes a real thing, when you consider just a conservative estimate of the types of jobs AI is going to be able to do better than a person within the next 50 years, people living in some alternate universe where their everyday life isn't just to be a worker and consumer under capitalism.

In that alternate universe, those people might be taken to the streets celebrating, throwing their hands up in the air, just weeping towards the sky.

Confetti goes off behind them.

You know, thank you, technology.

Because of you, now millions of people out there won't have to do these menial, boring, soul-draining jobs anymore.

And now, just like at other points throughout history, the average human life can now be something that looks very different than it did before.

Maybe people will spend more time with their families now.

Maybe they could get to know their neighbors better, be part of an immediate community.

In this fantasy world, the sky's the limit.

If technology can free people up to do other things, then why wouldn't we use technology to get the necessary work done?

But that's not what goes on in a capitalist society.

See, in our world, we're seeing this exact same amazing breakthrough in technology of AI.

And instead of celebrating, a lot of people are terrified.

Terrified they're going to be unemployed when AI replaces them.

Sad that what they went to school for for years is now a body of knowledge that can be replaced by an app on your cell phone.

Scared you're going to go to school for something now that'll be completely obsolete by the time you graduate.

Why is such an incredible technological breakthrough being seen as something that's going to hurt people?

To Murray Bookchin, this situation could only go on in the type of society where scarcity is something that is enforced.

He says a hundred years ago, scarcity was something that had to be endured.

In today's world, it's something that's enforced.

What did he mean by that?

Well, what he means is that in theory, we have the technology and the resources to be able to produce enough for everyone on this planet, where nobody needs to be stuck on that sinking ship from before without a lifeboat.

We have the ability to treat our fellow human beings as though they're an animal in this ecosystem that's worthy of respect.

And yes, people in former societies had to endure scarcity when there wasn't enough food, shelter, or medicine to go around for everyone.

But in today's world, the only thing stopping these basic resources from being distributed to people is an enforcement by a centralized authority that needs scarcity to continue to exist so that people will keep on working and producing at an ever-increasing rate to be able to keep this economy going.

So a totally reasonable question to be asking here when you hear this sort of critique about so many sweeping aspects of society is to ask the question, so what should we do about it then, Mr.

Bookchin?

Or as I like to call him, Uncle Murray, what do we do about it?

And the good thing about Uncle Murray is that he's not shy at all about giving answers to that question.

He'll tell you exactly what he thinks needs to be done, and it starts to sound very similar to the federated network of communities that we talked about last episode.

He is very much a fan of local community involvement in multiple different domains.

He's a fan of food cooperatives, affinity groups, non-hierarchical voluntary neighborhood associations, town meetings.

So in other words, in a very broad sense, Murray Bookchin was a fan of starting small, where the people that are living in a sick society like this can start to rediscover what it's like to participate and have a relationship with other people that is on a human level of scale.

See, this is one of the big problems to him with how society is currently set up.

It's too big.

Our cities, he said, have become nations.

And he says that when you go to New York City and you stand on top of the World Trade Center and you look out at the horizon.

Obviously, his example didn't age the best here, but his point is that when you're in a high place and you look out at the horizon and it's 40 miles across with a sprawling metropolis of millions of people between you and the horizon, how in the world can any single person possibly hope to understand human life at that scale?

How can you ever be informed enough to understand the problems of millions or billions?

More than that, how can anyone who's been elected to govern society at that scale possibly comprehend the level of bureaucracy that's required for a centralized authority to keep all those people well managed?

No, what Uncle Murray says is that much like every other creature in nature that needs to learn to live within its immediate environment in a harmonious way, if we could start small, just in our own communities, if we could just take responsibility for how our immediate surroundings are, that might be one small step in the right direction towards a better world.

See, one small step at a time is okay to a lot of revolutionary thinkers.

In fact, dare I say to most revolutionary thinkers at this point, incremental progress may actually be the only way.

Nobody here is talking about some violent, bloody revolution that takes place overnight.

There's good reason to believe that when it comes to anarchism, nothing even remotely like that could ever work in the real world for many of the same reasons that Marxist revolutions have failed in the past.

That you can't just take people that from the moment they're born are conditioned to see their whole life through the lens of being a worker and consumer, you know, alienated labor at a company by day, Netflix at night to ease the pain.

You can't take people from a culture that's like that, start a revolution one day, transplant them into a society where their life is completely different, and then expect them to be a functional, happy person on the other side of it.

Again, revolution to many thinkers needs to be done slowly, because the only way you ever bring about these sorts of ideas in a way that's enduring is if the sensibility of the society changes to the point that a different structure is demanded from within.

So when we've talked recently about the work of Byung Chil Han and Fukou and Agambin and many others, and the feeling at the end of the episodes can be one where it's like, okay, the world's obviously not a great place for everyone right now.

Clearly, what it is to be a person on this planet can be better for a lot more people out there.

But how do we actually get that done?

This is a social ecologist like Murray Bookchin saying that the true underlying cause of all that has to do with our relationships to each other as people.

That our social problems are in fact ecological problems as well.

And that to fix them, instead of planting a little ficus repin on your kitchen counter, naming it Hubert, and then thinking that you and Hubert are out there saving the world together, maybe the more productive way to fix some some of these problems is to stop thinking on the scale of hundreds of millions of people for a second.

And instead, take a page out of the book of an amoeba.

Start small.

Try for a bit just to heal the relationship you have with yourself and your immediate environment.

Then maybe try to expand that to your family, then into your community.

I mean, these local communities with a bottom-up power structure can exist in the world right now if people wanted to build them.

There's nothing illegal about it.

But to Uncle Murray, the ultimate hope would be that as people participate within these communities and rediscover what it's like to actually be involved in a decision-making process, the hope would be that through entirely peaceful methods, the sensibility of society would gradually change over time, and then at that point these communities could be in communication with each other, network together regionally, nationally, and then maybe internationally.

The hope would be that this would peacefully turn into another one of these moments from history where people demanded this greater level of freedom, equality, and solidarity for the structure of society more broadly.

Now, there were a lot of questions sent in after last episode asking how any of these bottom-up ways of organizing the world could ever work in practice.

There were some recurring ones.

Questions like, how does an anarchist society protect itself if some other powerful country decides to invade?

How do you stop internal organizations from gaining influence among these communities and trying to take things over?

What do we do if one of these little federated communities you're talking about decides that their mission statement that they want to hang up on the wall is, hi, we're all murderers and rapists in this particular community.

Looks like you got to respect our ability to govern ourselves, right?

More than that, people have asked, when have any of these ideas ever worked well in the past anyway?

Have they?

Is there any form of government that exists today that even remotely resembles any of the stuff we've been talking about?

These are not only some of the most common questions I received after last episode, they're some of the most common questions asked of anarchists because they're the first place an intelligent person's brain goes when they hear these ideas for the first time.

And because they're among the most asked questions, they're among the most answered questions by anarchists as well.

We're going to hear the answers to all these questions, among other things, next episode.

If you have any other burning questions you've thought about since last episode, please send them my way.

I'd be happy to read them.

Thank you to everybody, by the way, that leaves comments and gets a conversation about this stuff going.

Could never do this without your help.

And as always, thank you for listening.

Talk to you next time.