It Could Happen Here Weekly 18

happen here. I'm Garrison, and today I'm gonna be talking about some really big things and ideas, but hopefully I'll be talking with them in a way that contextualizes them and makes you remember that despite their magnitude, there's still very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll get started and eventually it will kind of make sense. So right now we are all living in one massive liminal space. For those less online than I am, I'll

explain what I mean. Liminal spaces became an online meme around late twenty nineteen as a term to describe a certain type of picture that features architecture or like just a place that looks off familiar, eerie, lonely, yet mesmerizing and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on the liminal space subredit for a while now, and there's an undeniable allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and rooms and

the effect that they have on me. Describing what makes a liminal space photo a liminal space photo as opposed to just any other regular photo of a building or a room can be tricky because, in part the point is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking too much about the why they're not spooky or scary in the traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space photo and where it gets its name liminality, is a good place to begin to understand what type of feelings these pictures

are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a transitional phase and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being inside of a threshold, not on either one side, per se, but somewhere in between. Now, that threshold can be many things. A literal transitionary threshold between certain places is a common one. This can include stuff like hallways and airports. One of my favorites, though, is a threshold between time, an ambiguous,

unspecific nostalgia. You can't quite place, but it feels awfully familiar, like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird indoor, squishy playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room designed for a very specific special purpose but now no longer serving that it's empty and out of date, an abandoned mall, or cheery birthday party room at an arcade

photographed desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects of liminal space photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned. Usually they have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality, like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting, and even when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like a Windows computer screensaver. One of the most popular liminal space photos is of an underground bunker in Las Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's

outside despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a certain type of cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of synchronicity that is difficult to describe otherwise. Almos never is quote unquote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly exclusively focus on very human constructs, particularly ones that no longer serve their intended use or maybe never did in the first place. So what do I mean by we're

all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we are in between a historic economic and technological boom, one that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old. But on the other side of this valley is global climate catastrophe and destruction and change, the likes of which humans have possibly never seen or at least remembered. We're in the transitionary period between these two states, and that disassociation and not being fully in either one, that that cognitive

dissonance can be kind of mind boggling. It's like the nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak, or that weird feeling of being alone in an empty church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate change transcends a regular perception of time space, and with that cause and effect, it's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon, or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher Timothy

Morton dubbed these massive space time altering objects as hyper objects. Now, Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly, so really the only way to discuss it or get into the topic is to orbit around it, associating with adjacent ideas or words to get close enough to the topic to partially understand it, even if you can't get quite there. Other possible examples of hyper objects besides climate change, can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere, or the

solar system. But hyper objects don't need to be just massive celestial things. They can also be the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth, or the very long lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as all of the styroform of plastic bags in the world. It can also be the sum of all the whirling machinery of capitalism or the state. Hyper objects, then, are hyper just in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly manufactured

by humans or not. And hyper objects aren't just collections, systems or assemblages of other objects. They are things in their own right, and they affect more than just humans. They don't come into being just because humans notice them. They will have effects on the world whether or not they are observed One of the more obvious differences between hyper objects and ordinary objects that you can't ever actually see a hyper object in its totality. You can only

ever witness a small extension or piece of a hyper object. Now, this makes thinking about them kind of intrinsically tricky. It's like only seeing a fragmented shadow of a thing and the effects that that thing has on all other things. Now, the more contrarian listeners might protest that we never see all of any object, even ordinary ones. Now, it's obviously true that everything we see has a negative side, the part behind that we can't actually always look at, but

can reasonably assume is there. Now, the difference is that hyper objects transcend not only a regular conception of physical reality,

but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a coffee monk and rotate it around in a pretty short amount of time and witnessed each side and angle, Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could make a three sixty scan so you can see a projected version of the entire object, Or you know more, simply just get three people in a room to all look at different sides of the mug, thus forming a consensual

reality based understanding of the whole object. Now, not only can you not hold a hyper object, but even if you could, the temporal effects would make it impossible to rotate it around to witness the totality of what's being held, and it would be way too big for multip people to ever witness all sides of the thing. Quoting from Morton's book hyper Objects, The Philosophy and Ecology After the

End of the World, quote, consider raindrops. You can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive your particular anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system. I can think of an compute climate in this sense, but I can't directly

see or touch it. The gap between the phenomenon and the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world. Humans have been aware of enormous entities, some realism imagined for as long as we have existed, but this book is arguing that there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. These entities directly cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is

the most fundamental issue. Hyper objects seem to force something on us, something that affects some core idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomenon such as meteors and blood red moons, tsunamis, tornadoes, and earthquakes have terrified humans. In the past, meteors and comets were known as does asters. Literally, a disaster is a fallen, dysfunctional, or dangerous or evil

star disaster. But such disasters take place against a stable backdrop. There is the Ptolemaic Aristolian machinery of the stars, which hold fixed stars in place. It seems as if there's something about hyper objects that is more deeply challenging than these disasters. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old models of the disaster, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. A deep shuttering

of temporality than occurs. For one thing, we are inside hyper objects like Jonah in the Whale. This means that every decision we make is in some sense related to hyper objects. These decisions are not merely limited to sentences and to be about hyper objects. When I turned the key in the Ignition of my Car, I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration to Mars, they are relating to global warming. I am one of the entities caught in the hyper object that

I here call global warming. Different hyper objects have numerous properties in common, but for our purposes we're going to discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyper Objects are viscous, meaning they stick to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal, in other words, and any local manifestation of the hyper object is not directly the hyper object. They involve very different temporalities than the human scale ones that were used to In particular, some very very large

hyper objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate space time vortexes due to general relativity, and hyper objects are ocupy a higher dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for structures of time, and they exhibit their effects inter objectively. That is, they can be detected in a space that consists of inter relationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyper object is not just

a function of our knowledge. It is also hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultra violet rays as well as humans. Now I'm going to go into the five different points of similarity in more detail to kind of help flesh out what these things hyper objects, what they are, and how they might actually be a useful way to think about really big stuff. So, first off, viscous hyper objects adhere to any object they touch, no matter how hard

the objects tries to resist. In this way, hyper objects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyper object, the more glued to the hyper object it becomes. Now, the more you learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up noticing it in the world. This is the law of synchronicity. But the more you know about climate change, the more you

realize how perversive it is. The more you discover about evolution, the more you realize how much our entire physical being is caught in its meshwork. Immediate intimate symptoms of hyper objects are very real, vivid, and often painful. Yet they carry with them this trace of unreality. A good example of hyper object viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion of a

way there is no away. Flushing vomit down the toilet doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way to the ocean or the water treatment facility, and eventually just back to us. Again. I'll quote from the book hyper Objects quote late itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartra's jar of honey par excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our

bone structure as it seeps around us. Again, it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it. This is it, folks, This is the ecological interconnectedness. Come in and join the fun. But I see that you're already here. Unquote. Yeah, that is a that's fun. The next point of similarity where to discussed, is the molten or Gaussian quality. Hyper Objects are time stretched to such an extent that they become

impossible to hold in the mind. Hyper objects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. The size of hyper objects can make them basically invisible, just because they're so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in southern Oregon, one of the deepest lakes in the world. But it's not just deep, it's also very very clear. So the water is so deep yet so clear. It's like you're swimming in the sky.

It's like you're swimming in nothing. It would be like if you approach an object and more and more objects emerge because we can't see the end of them. Hyper objects are necessarily uncanny. They have to be. Just like my favorite liminal space photos. Hyper objects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in hyper objects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and a

familiar strangeness. Next up is non locality. Hyper objects are massively distributed in time and space, such as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality of the hyper object. For example, climate change is a hyper object that impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formations. Objects don't feel climate change,

but instead experienced tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyper object becomes more substantial than the local manifestations that they produce, putting moreton again. For a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade of red. Global warming for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes. Plastic for the bird, strangles it as it becomes entangled in the set of six pack rings.

What we are really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that are directly causal the octopus of the hyper object amidst a cloud of ink as it withdrawals from access. Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of its effects and effects. These phenomenon themselves are not global warming or radiation. Action at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the map with the territory. Type of objects cannot be thought up as occupying a series of

now points in time or space. They confound the social and psychic instruments we use to measure them. Even digital devices have trouble. Global warming is not just a function of our measuring devices. Yet, because it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's hard to see it as a unique entity. And yet there it is raining down on us, burning down on us, quaking the earth, spawning giant hurricanes.

Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces, the rain drops falling on my head in northern California, the tsunami that pours through the streets of Japanese towns, the increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor like a moving illusion picture. Glibal warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective

shift for us to see it. Convincing some people of its existence is like convincing some two dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So our sense of being in a time and inhabiting a place depends on forms of regularity, the periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun coming up. Only now we know that it doesn't really come up.

It's now common knowledge that the moon's phases are just the relationship between the Earth and the Moon as circumnavigate to the Sun. Hyper objects seem to phase in and out of the human world. They occupy a higher dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on our regular three dimensional human scale basis, but they might appear differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view. We can only see pieces of a hyper

object at a time. The reason why they appear non local and temporarily for shortened is precisely because of this trans dimensional quality. We can only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a taste of radiation sickness.

If an apple were to invade a two dimensional world, first the stick people would see some dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then a rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting circular blob, diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point, and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly see climate change. You would need to occupy some higher

dimensional space to see the hyper object unfolding explicitly. Like the people in the two dimensional flat land, we can only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with our world. The brief patch called hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans. The brief patch called drought burns the plains of Russia and the Midwestern United States to a crisp our. Bodies itch with yesterday's sunburn. But

don't relegate hyper objects as a simple abstract notion. The game of hyper objects as transdimensional real things is valuable. Global warming is not simply a mathematical abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world. Hyper Objects don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects. We tend to only think about hyper objects as they phase in and connect to other, more static objects. This is a mistake

and contributes to non action. Whether or not we perceive objects and hyper objects connecting doesn't affect the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyper object. What we experience as the slow periodic re occurrence of a celestial event such as an eclipse or a comet, is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on our social and

cognitive space for a while. The gaps I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware of the hyper object, and moments at which it isn't do not matter in relation to the hyper object itself. Okay, and now onto our final point of similarity. Inter Objective hyper objects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint or foot print of a hyper object upon other objects revealed as information.

It's all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and inter objectivity. For example, climate change is formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and the sea level rising, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models rather than

connected to an object that predates its own measurement. Hyper Objects exist in and between objects and things we deal with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined. Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a shadow like local manifestation of it. A mesh consists of relationships between criss crossing strands and the gaps between strands.

Meshes are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things, and interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born, it is instantly meshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The mesh isn't inside of all things, but it's on the edge

or floats on top of all things. Inter objective mesh is the extra connecting layer between the mass and the mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia. Inter objectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front of objects in which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness and distribution of hyper objects simply force us to take

note of this fact. Hyper objects provide great examples of inter objectivity, namely the way in which nothing has ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. This means that for every objective system, there is at least one entity that is withdrawn from the relationship. We see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient

rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaur's reality exists inter objectively. There is some form of shared space between the rock, ourselves, and the dinosaur, even though the dinosaur isn't there directly. The print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot shaped whole in a rock by humans sixty five million years later. There is some sensuous connection then, between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human, despite their vastly differing time scales. The

dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather, the footprint is a trace of the hyper object evolution that joins me, the dinosaur, and the mud together, along with the intentional act of holding them in the mind. I found the hyper object banner as a useful tool to help my brain think about things that are just too big, things that have effects so spaced out in time that using our ordinary models of thought are just inadequate.

You can also reconcile the opposing views that cast climate change as the very real series of disasters or are a complicated, interlocking mess of systems that can feel very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the real world impacts things like hyper objects can cause. Sometimes we forget that climate change is a thing we interact with every day and can inform choices we make. Now the

almost impossible to comprehend totality of our situation. It's not great for mental well being. You can end up tail spinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping, denial, and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into a void of negation. Things that are hyper objects fundamentally break our conception of reality temporality and cause an effect. And it's already a really weird time to try to

suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and services trying to usurp the real That's what Mark Kotting is. You know, first we had the Internet with its limitless possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world of social media with all of its fractured and fractal realities. There's a massive gaming and the allure of getting lost

within thousands of unique worlds. And now we have VR a R and the metaverse, more layers of digital fabrication trying to be passed off as an almost hyper reality, a promise to make a reality even more real and immersive than our status quo. The Internet itself is another hyper object, and all this extra reality can take a strain on the human mind. De realization, the perception that

actual waking reality is an artificial construct. The feeling of being de attached from your surroundings, like the world's made of cardboard, or you're looking at everything through a cloud of fog, is becoming more and more common, especially among so called gen Z, the generation that drew up with the Internet being a staple of life. Now. How we got here is a disassociation between humans and what we

call nature or the environment. The problems aren't getting fixed because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as the effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. All of the worst effects the climate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years. And that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance that I don't know how to understand that, and that makes making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet

also urgent. It's both and it's neither, and it's confusing. The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. It produces this lack of immediate and close and proximity consequences. We must purposely remove these layers of separation and abandoned our anthropocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature, It's the same thing. We are all part of this big mesh. This, this sacred idea of nature isn't natural

and can never be naturalized. We have to learn how to have an ecology without nature, with without nature as a separate thing. To have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this idea that nature being separate from us, once and for all. We have to kill the anthroprosyne in our own head. A quote from one of Morton's

other books titled Ecology Without Nature. Putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical act of sadistic, possessive admiration unquote. So within more, in branch of philosophy, reification, the making of a thing into a thing is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sensual appearance for another object.

Reification is reduction of one's entity to another's fantasy about it. Nature is a realification in this sense, and that's why we need an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn nature into something more fluid, it might work. Now, most of our modern political discourse can be boiled down to what things are real and what things are not. Hyper objects and climate change don't just play into this debate, but crash into it, decimating all the other toys in

this sandbox. As Morton says, the threat of global warming is not only political but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And oh boy, do we be experiencing this simultaneous disillusionment of reality and the overwhelmingly real presence of hyper objects which stick to us, which are us. The worry is not whether the world will end, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps they might have already taken place.

The idea of the end of the world is very active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind of fosters its own negation. The end of the world is coming idea is not really effective, since to all types of purposes, the being that we are supposed to feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone. This does not mean that there's no hope for ecological politics and ethics and a better future. Far from it.

In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly held belief that the world's about to end unless we act now is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyper object concept is to then awaken us from this dream that the world's about to end, because action on Earth, like the real Earth, depends on it, the end of the world

has already happened. Using the hyper object idea helps sort out these overly systematic things into a package that I can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language for a feeling, being able to name it that is empowering a way of finding handhold in the dim light of confusion, rather than scrambling around in the dark. So how would you convince two dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of

a morphing circular shape in their world. Now, hyper objects can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around to climate and a nial. You can't point to something like rising sea levels and say that is climate change, because yeah, that isn't climate change. The hyper object rising sea levels are just an environmental effect, and since the effects are so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of room for cognitive dissonance. When people point at extreme weather

and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology. Are seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations, missing the fact that almost all of our problems don't have a shared root cause, but instead are just part of a massive, shared bungee cord like mesh network. When so many local manifesting problems and actual disasters are blamed on climate change, even if you believe climate change is the cause, which you know it is, it still feels

weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's such an amorphous shape shifting time traveling idea that for the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing very real physical effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard. For them and their understanding of reality. For many people, rejecting hyper objects is a lot easier than thinking about them, because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to problems so displaced in time it's not only difficult but

encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the air right now won't reach their full effects for decades and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem. In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The cause is our brief luxury, and the effect is terror forming the world. And we are right now caught in between the uncanny hyper object of all liminal spaces. The end of the world has already happened. We are on

the path and about to enter a new world. We are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal space hallways. The door behind us is closed, and at the other end of the hallway is a black hole. We cannot backtrack and re enter the door behind us. Already are we getting sucked forward into the hallway. But there are many doors ahead of us, and we get to choose which one to open. At this point, we have passed some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked into

thinking that there are none left. We must not focus on preserving an old way of life, but instead need to carefully carve out our new reality. We need to pick our new door. Well, that is my essay. Read thing episode amalcamation about hyper objects, liminal spaces, and our new reality. I hope you found some of the ideas useful, um despite their kind of abstract and anti abstract and nature. If you want to learn more about this, I would

recommend reading Timothy Morton's book hyper Objects Um. It is an academic read, but it's not that bad. I would I would recommend picking up if you want to learn more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them more in the future. Thank you for listening. Everybody, see you on the other side. Hey, yeah, welcome to it Could Happen Here podcast. I'm Robert Evans. So is that it? I'm fortunate. I'm so sorry. We just apologize really quick. That's a lot to take in. No, that was a

good introduction. That was a good introduction. We got across the gist. Who else is here with you? That's a great question. Is Garrison here? Yeah? I think they're here. Is Chris here is saying Andrew here, I am indeed excellent. Um, why don't you take over and do and do my job for me? That sounds awesome, actually good idea, fantastic, it was happening everybody, I am saying Andrew back to

guest host yet again. Um, last time we spoke about you know, uh soft climate change, Nile and continue at the theme of me talking about whatever I want to talk about as food contractual obblication. Um. Today I wanted to explode a concept that I brought up one of my recent videos, UM, self and community actualization. Yeah right,

So first we needs getting some context, of course. Um. I mean when most people hear self actualization, they probably think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, the famous permit that management uh staff tend to use up in their offices and such Los Angeles yoga ladies. Uh. The context in which I've heard self actualization the most Yeah yeah, that whole group kind of you know yeah. Um, but yeah, so self actualization massve hierarchy of needs, the old psych

one on one stuff, you know. I mean, it's traditionally represented as a pyramid, but it was never how Maslow himself actually depicted it. Um. It was actually something that later in two parts of his work, ran with and popularized. UM. And so that as a result of that pramid, there are a lot of you know, critiques of Master's theory that don't quite engage with his theory, would rather engage

with like interpretations of his theory by other people. But um, you know, I think it's still an interesting way to depict human needs. And I think it's a good launching point to start thinking about and start discussing, you know, human needs. Um what you'll think you'll are on the pyramid right now, just for posterity's sake, Oh, right up on the tippy top. I mean, I'm like I've been. I've been. I've been very lucky to do exactly like what I want to do for a living most of

my life. And and now I own goats. So it doesn't get anything that including one absolute unit. He's fucking massive. He's a chunky buddy. What about Karen. Yes, I really don't, No, I don't. I don't spend too much time thinking about models like this, especially around kind of my own my own goals, um, and like where I see myself. Um, well, I don't know. I mean, I'm i'm I'm doing like

I'm I'm I'm relatively stable with my like actual physical needs. Um, so I guess yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what I actually want out of life, like a lot of younger people do. I guess, right, right, So I guess that's more on the m esteem or yes, self

asunization side of things. Yeah, And it's harder because you can say, like, well, within the context of like what is possible, I'm I'm I'm aware, I want to be and I'm doing stuff that I want to be doing, but also everything feels like a disaster around me all the time because yeah, the time simon, which makes it difficult to be is right. I was about to say, is anybody really on the safe he needs category of

of the pyramid? I mean some people like absolutely, yeah, but this group, I mean yeah, like we we we are. There's like a weird there's like a weird disassociation between what's actually going on and what we know could be going on in like the larger sphere. Yeah, yeah, that's

that's a very good way of thinking about it. Is like, yeah, my immediate needs are met, am I very concerned that large chunks of the places I love will be unlivable, and you know there will be that we're kind of staring in the face of a variety of calamities that that could uh make everything worse for me and everybody I care about, absolutely, but I can't do anything about that, right. The other thing I was going to point out is that with like with like, the physio needs is that

includes sleep. Okay, well, this is who you're talking about, being the sun shining down on the pyramid and it gets up there, you know, the sleep. The sleep scientists have had their pockets in big bed for far too long,

exactly the cozy industrial complex problem. It's fine, I was just gonna say something else, So I was gonna say that, um, you know, the pyramid, as we are discovering in this conversation doesn't really accurately map out you know, needs and human psychology really because I mean not just because our brains aren't shaped like pyramids, but also because at any point in time, we can be struggling multiple um sections

and parts of the needs. So, for example, we could all be breathing air and drinking water and having enough food and stuff met right now, um. And you know, you might be like really respected and stuff in your field. Um, and you might have a certain could let sense of

self esteem and stuff. But then at the same time, you know you're not in a safe place, or you may be dealing with like a debilitating health condition, or you maybe lack in certain resources that you need to like thrive, right so and then or maybe you know you have your food, water, shelter, sleep, all that, and you know you're secure and you have what you need and whatever, but you have no friends. You know, you have no intimacy, no family sense a connection with other people.

So you're kind of like living in this bubble, just floating through life, you know. I mean, your bubble is safe, it has what you need, but there's not that social aspect. And I think what's interesting about this is because as we start to talk about matters hierarchy of needs, we start to see the structural and societal um impact on you know, our psychology and on our needs. Right because if you want to talk about our safety needs, for example, but let's get to stay to the to the bottom,

to the basic. If you wanna talk about physiological needs. Water is now a package and commodified product. Right, food is something that is inaccessible too many, not because we don't have enough food, but because the distribution of it to meet the needs of all it's not what's prioritized on the capitalism right. There are people who are lacking in shelter, you know, um, And a lot of people are sleep deprived by the systems we're living in. Yeah,

m hmm. And the same thing with safety, you know. UM, we have based literally threatened by climate change, and you know, we are atomized from our relationships and stuff because so much so many of us have to work so hard, you know, every day, five days a week or more, eight hours or more, pretty and it really just strips us of our social connections and that's our ste meats were sort of stripped of that by you know, these commercial messages that we get about like you're not this

unless you have this, and bye bye bye kind of thing. Right. And in self actualization isn't even really a thought for a lot of people because they're still busy trying to reach all those other things um or don't even have the time to think about how they can become who

they are. UM. And we get into that a bit more later on in this discussion, but they don't really have the time of the sense to think about that because they've been so restricted by their circumstances, right, and on top of that, restricted by like the messages that they would have gotten, you know, whether it be in the school system or through ads or whatever the case

may be. So I think looking at the pyramid, of course it's incomplete and the issues with it, but it does illuminate some interesting things that you know, we're dealing with right now. I mean, yeah, like if it definitely it's easier to self actualize and have esteem once your needs are met. But I think definitely there's an ability to jump around, especially when you know you have like

a large scale depression and alienation and disassociation. Think it, it's a weird sense where you can kind of hop around the pyramid quite quite often, even if you have certain things met. This doesn't necessarily mean you have something you know above or below. Yeah, Like I I I when it comes to like actual people that I associate with, you know, all of whom are folks who have to, like I have to work in order to live. I don't think it I've ever heard anyone talk about happiness

in terms of like self actualization. It's always in terms of like when I get my student loans paid off, you know, when I get my when I'm able to take care of this health problem that i have, Like when I have enough money. It's basically everything boils down to for most people, when I have enough money to not be as suffering as much from the specific thing,

or to not be scared about not having enough money. Um, which is I think more would I get from people when they're talking about like aspirational goals than I would like to do this thing that that fulfills me as a person. Um yeah, yeah, yes. It's like like any any kind of actual self actualization becomes this not just a luxury, but a luxury that's just unimaginable. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Some people can't even imagine. I know people who have just basically given up on, like ever being able to repay their loans, right Like they've just resigned themselves like this is my life now, all the tunity, this is this is it, you know, and I can't blame them. Who can really blame them? When that is the reality. You know, for a lot of people, taking themselves out to debt is not possible even if they did get a whole bunch of the money or able to like

pay off a bit more per month. You know, this love interest rates that just like so badly exploitative that they're basically suits for the rest of lives. Of course, we had to have that brief moment of damn, the system sucks, as is typical on it could happen here. But I want to shift attention now to another society and another culture that has approached this human needs and

human psychology and human society thing differently. Right, Um, what's been coming to a lot more people's attention lateally is that Abraham Maslow Um he was actually partially inspired to develop his theory by his stay with the Six Seek

of Blackfoot. And I went into some of the details on the video on my channel, um rethinking master was hierarchy of needs, psycho bit more in there, but basically, um, what he discovers, what I get to in that video is that well, firstly, some cultures of us as being one self actualized, right, like the six Seek of Blackfoot, meaning and that's the Blackfoot just for a little bit of context, or an indigenous people, I think confederation is how they tend to refer to themselves in like Montana.

I think Idaho. Um yeah, up in Canada. Yeah, I kind of like Idaho, Montana and parts of Canada. Um like that's that's Blackfoot territory. They were also Maslow spent time with them. L Ron Hubbard lied about having spent a lot of time with the Blackfoot. So I didn't know that. I don't know. Yes, there's a lot of

scientology law if you have to catch up on. Yeah, but um, yeah, so you know, with Maslow's model, self actualization is essentially, you know, self fulfillment, right, the tendency for the individual to become more and more what one is, and to become everything that one is capable of becoming. To us, like fulfilling your potential as a person, as a partner, as a parent, as a talent, as a artist, as a whatever. Just fulfilling your potential as a person. Right.

But to say that we are born self actualized, um that freeming will looks too, seeing us each as born in the world with a spark of divinity, because of course this is tied into their spirituality. Um, born for the spark of divinity and with a great purpose embedded in us. And what self actualization is Link two in these cultures inextricably link to that is is community actualization. Right, So, community actualization is a concept that places the actualized individual

in the context of community. So instead of just upholding the individual alone, which Maslow's hierarchy has been critiqued for sort of doing, community actualization incorporates the web of relationships that supports each of US's individuals. Basically, it recognizes that we cannot be self actualized solely as individuals if there's not like a broader network over a web that is supporting us. You know, we're not islands standing alone, you know. Yeah, yeah,

we were. We were. We were touching on on on that point a bit, a bit previous, but less eloquently. Um, yeah, it is, it is. It's it's much easier to have the ability to actualize your goals into into actions when you are less a needed and you have and you have all these other things around around a community. Yeah exactly. Is that. I think like the lack of community self actualization is kind of what we were talking about in terms of like, yeah, things are things are great for me.

Inasmuch as things are great you know in the system we live in, but I I don't feel that, you know. Yeah, you can look outside and you're like everything is actually really bad. I'm just kind of in my little bubble and I'm trying to expand my bubble to be around, you know, and to help more people. But it can be overwhelming sometimes. Yeah, I mean it's so needs, so

much one pooson could do. And that's kind of a point of community, right A community supports our basic needs and basically equips us to manifest I would poop us. So it's a community would be there to for example, and we can get into this a bit more design a model of education that supports us in expressing a

unique gifts. Right now, the part of the six philosophy involves cultural perpetuity, where there's an important consideration of those who came before and those who are coming after seven generations forward and seven generations backward, as I had it

explained to me. So that is something that I think it would have been useful when it came to discussions of um, you know, climate change, and it's very relevant now because we are seeing the older generations basically struggling and being like, you know, um well it's jen Z's problem. Now you could take care of it. You're in the future kids, all right, Well that yeah, when they're basically on the download saying fuck them kids, you know. Yeah, but can I say that or yes? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

you know you can always say them kids. I say that to Garrison all the time. All right, yeah yeah. But speaking of kids, UM, I think we could compare and contrast basically how childhood is approached in our society versus how it would be approached and in society that values community actualization. UM. I mean, and I'm just speaking from my experience here. Of course, you're free talk about your own. UM. I from like primary school and stuff.

I remember it's constantly feeling like I had to compete with my fellow um classmates. I mean, you know, I was friendly and stuff with everybody and stuff, but since I was like usually at or close to the top of my class, I always felt this kind of pressure to just beat them out and continue to be the

best gifted kid ever. You know. So there was a sense of like constant competition with others that wasn't really balanced out with a kind of um collaborative sorts of approach to like basically trading us from like an early age too into cooperate and work with people as people and as comrades, you know, a little comrade is a way way to put it. But yeah, I just remember there was a sort of sense of sort of atomization

that's undercooded that sort of educational approach. I I feel like that's pretty yuh universal and a lot of a lot of parts of our modern world. We definitely really embed that sense of competition into very young kids, whether that being in school or like wherever. Because yeah, that was that was definitely my experience, even even like in private school in Canada a long time ago. And I know that's that's the thing Fross, you know, across the

ocean as well, on on the other side of the pond. Yeah, we are back. That doesn't sound like us are we are? We really back? Sorry it's ten am um, all right. So when we're to look at like childhood and education and stuff in society that would value community actualization, Um, what sort of things do you guys think we would be seeing in that sort of society. What sort of approaches do you think would be embedded from an early age.

I'm trying to put it into words, So kind of one of the things I'm I'm currently in a living situation right where I have. I'm working with a group of people on a chunk of land and so every week we do projects on it to make it better, um,

which is tremendous satisfying. And I think in a in a society where that kind of self actualization like you've been talking about was more common, kids would feel that way about doing things, um that improve their community like that, that that that take care of the people around them, that make you know, wherever they live a better place to live, Like that would be that would be in the same way that like I go out each weekend thinking that will be a fun thing to do to

like to improve the place that I'm living. I think that would be kind of, um a common feeling like that would be a common activity as a kid to go engage in projects like that. Yeah. And I mean we already see children doing that, right except they do it in minecraft. Yes, Yeah, Like the impulse is being directed somewhere currently. This isn't a thing you have to This isn't a thing you have to like splice into kids little brains to make them want to do it.

Kids love making ship exactly, Like do you give a child opportunity and sort of facility that like they a very a lot of them. I can't really generalize because I know some kids were like, you do what you have to do. I want to stay in my corner. But there a lot of kids as well who would

be like very very willing to be helpful. You know, they really like they just a door being a helper and being someone who can support, whether it be in the kitchen, you know, with like a little broom or whatever, sweeping, whatever the case may be. So some my kids don't want to be part of a community, you know, because we are social animals. Um, it's just that right now

it's directed at like minecraft, severs or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things that I would really focus on, because this is just kind of in my experience, is teaching young kids how to cook, um and then having them cook or at least help cook food for other people. I think it's a really great kind of skill to learn. But also it me it does this weird thing to your brain when you do That's like you you get very happy when you cook food for

for other people. And I think it's it's a really good kind of emotional impulse to give kids. It's like, hey, this is you can make people feel good by doing things for them, um And because that makes you feel good and it makes them feel good, and then that really builds that whole sense of community. So yeah, II se yeah, yeah, some kids could be ego man like but like both self lessness, but it also teaches you

to like do stuff for yourself as well. Right, It's a good skill to be self also be self sustaining. So I think that's that's why I really enjoy teaching kids cooking. Um I used to I I used to be a culinary instructor because I'm really just passionate about that specific thing. Yeah, I mean for me perasonally, Um, I develop an aneurism whenever anyone's in the kitchen with me. Yes, there's definitely moments where if there's too many people in

a kitchen, that is frustrating. But if if you do it right, you can get You can get a thirteen year old cooking you an entire like really really nice holiday dinner, um, which is which is what I was doing when I was thirteen. I was cooking all of the holiday dinners for my entire family. Um, because I just I wanted to learn cooking. So it's it's definitely possible if you're a parent and you want less time

in the kitchen. Uh, teacher kid how to cook. Yeah, I mean I come from a family of child cooks, right. I remember, Um, this one time I think I was making like a card cake with my mom. Um. But I was used to like licking my fingers when you know, you make that cookie cookie do and stuff. But I licked my fingers when the when I cracked the egg, she was like, stuff, you can't do that, you know. So I just remember that was one of the experiences

in the kitchen already stood out to me. Lessons lessons will be learned about, like bacteria, Yeah, you know, it's experience. Knives you get, get to learn how to use knives, get to learn about heat. You know, there's a lot of a lot of good lessons you can learn inside. I get firing, safety, chemistry, you know, just stuff all mixed in there. You know, even math, even absolutely fractions. It's one of the only times I use fractions is in cooking and baking. Yeah, I mean, as embarrassing as

it is. I use Google when I want to confute measurements still, but I mean it's just there. It's more convenient. But yeah, I absolutely agree that example, you know, like the use of like cooking lessons and that sort of thing too. Support UM to support like kids self actualization. I also the community actualization because of my experience, and the thing I default too is different versions of like

the youth liberation argument. But because of how people have been using that term on Twitter right now, I don't want to talk about it because it's been causing a lot of like really dumb fighting about what that term actually means and who coined it and like that kind of stuff. But that's kind of where I default to in terms of like what self actualization could be in

a community setting. Youth liberation is one of those things that I'm really passionate about UM, and I honestly don't know who coined it or what discussed AFT and about it right now, but it definitely UM informs my approach and ends up influence and like a lot of the things that I discuss, like when if I talk about like an issue or whatever UM in society, A lot of times it really boils down or starts from an early age. It starts through the education system. Was foster

there or incubated there. So I think, um, a lot more discussions should be happening about, you know, the place of young people and the education system and stuff um alongside of course, while the other struggles and discussions and discourses, which struggles we've been happen. Yeah. I'm trying to view like anarchistic like liberatory frameworks is like trying to achieve that self actualization and to some degree like the the like a steam level, and then also like the community

and belonging level. Um, even if you don't have all of your physical needs met all the time. Is how these types of frameworks can be can almost just like jump around that and be like, despite me not having all of these base needs met, if I if I have like a radical model of the world, I can still try to achieve that type of freedom because I

can work outside the box to get it. Um. Yeah, And I think that that that's kind of what I was I was trying to get at at least on you know, like a like a like whether it be like a youth lib framework or just like general like

radical anarchism in general. Yeah, and I mean parts of thinking outside the box involves, you know, looking at other people who have thought outside of the box, who have reinvented and reconsidered and sort of transformed their approach to things like education and child care and really all the aspects of society that we take for granted as you know,

just being a certain way. You know, um, when we talk about things like education and childhood in the place that plays and community actualization, I seem to think a lot about, you know, all the things we can do to not fit into cap into capitalist smooths. You know, it's really facilitate folks potential, not just really cooking classes for example, but even through you know, workshops and field trips.

I mean field trips now are just kind of like this thing that you know, kids go to from time to time and they have to walk in a single fire line and all these different things. But what I envision when I think of you know, learning is something work into like less restriction to just the four walls of a classroom and more the whole world is your classroom. You know. The whole world is a place where you know, you can explore and you can room and you can

develop yourself. You know, without all these barriers and controls replace on, kids end up suffocating their imagination of what things can be. And I mean when you have that sort of educational model where you know, the youth are able to explore different avenues and direct their own education routes, you know, you also end up which is what has happened in education models that we've seen throughout many different

cultures of the world. You see that it facilitates relationships with the community members, right, and everybody benefits because you have, for example, becasn't exactly something like apprenticeships, and you have you know, for example, people getting support from the kids in the kitchen or you know, in the workshop or

in library or whatever the case may be. And not only the kids about paying their skills, but they also developing relationships with different members of the community with different backgrounds,

with different experiences. And it released suits almost as I see it as a way to God against um this sort of style of parenting where that we just kind of seeing popularized lately, where like the child is basically the exclusive property of the parents and you can't tell anybody how to raise their child and the parent alwaysnews best in that kind of approach. I think it's a good and to do to that because the child being

exposed to a lot more of life and of people. Um. I think that, to me, um is the sort of youth liberation route that I see developing. It requires, of course, total transmission, but you know, no proposal really be approach and isolation. Yeah, and it's it's easier to achieve when you're around other right, It's it's easily once if if you are already in a community where these things can be fostered, then it's a lot you know, it's a

lot less of a lofty goal. Yeah, I think that there's a kind of interesting I don't know if case studies the right word, but there's part of Italy that had a really really long running like anarchist education experiment and so they're basically able to reform local schools is TIMS and and it worked. But you know, and they produced a bunch of really good schools, and you know, the schools are based on sort of like cooperative learning etcetera, etcetera.

And you know, I mean the model still exists today, but and you know it's like, yeah, they made some of the best schools in Europe, but the society around them didn't change, and so sort of bizarrely, they ended up making these schools that like produced you know, they're they're very good schools. They produced extremely good students, but then they also like produced an extremely you know, well

educated and good like capitalist cadre basically. And so I think I think there's a sort of you know, if if we go back to sort of the community aspect of this is like, yeah, there's there's a set to which even even if you have you know, you get some form of self actualization, you get some form of sort of you know, community in cooperative like education for children and stuff like that, the whole society has to move with it or otherwise you just wind up sort

of feeding the beast more effectively. Yeah, yeah, I mean that is that you you also see that kind of problem with like the we work guys, right, the Adam Newman and and and uh, the two co founders of that came out of an Adams case, a kibbutz in Israel, which you know, started with from kind of socialist foundations, and the other founder had grown up in like a commune in rural or again, uh, and they both wound

up making like this ultra capitalist real estate company. So yeah, if you it's it's you know, there's a lot that's said, and there's there's a lot of value and kind of like carving out sections of culture for the things you believe in to try to, um, get shelter from the storm. But yeah, as you were kind of noting, Chris, um, it does. It does also just wind up kind of reinforcing the dominant social system. Um. If there's not a

kind of more basic upheaval of the way things work. Yeah, if there's no you know, political philosophy and the goodness and there's no connection with you know, broader social movements and sort of confederation with other projects, you know, it could very easily be coopted you know, in isolation. Yeah, I guess I guess that's you know, like that That's what happened to self actualization as a concept for the most part, is that it got taken over by kind

of weird grifters and yeah, like self care. Yeah, yeah, and take these concepts and there's sort of twisted and transformed into um, you know, capitalists ends. It's even something like um like with there's been some interesting discussions happening surrounding like luxury and what luxury means around sitting within certain circles on Twitter UM and Kim Kimberly Foster from for Harriott excellent YouTube channel UM. She mentioned that to

her at least is long but really good video. She spoke about how lux read to her is basically, UM, you know, finding the ability to rest where you need to rest and to be able to be supported. UM. Whereas luxury now, but luxury as quite popular understanding is

more so about consumption and consumerism. So even when you have something where like and this is specific to um, the black experience of course, because for a long time, you know, black women have been expected to, like um, toil and labor and support not only the communities but also engineer as slavery also you know, their white masters

and that kind of thing. Um. There's there was a push for the Black women luxury movement to sort of reclaim you know, a space for black women to just be able to enjoy themselves and you know, be themselves. But that quickly became something it's just like you know, just get the bag, um. Just the sort of hyper capitalists, hyper consumerist, bougie kind of approach to luxury, where the original route to the movement, which was about finding rest, was sort of lost. And I mean that's a bit

of a tangent. So I'll try to connect that back to what we're saying. Um, I think when it comes to things like rest and the ability to rest, um, I think that that can only really be found in community. And if there's a lack of commune community support to you know, pick up the slack when you need to rest and you need to revive yourself and you just

to recharge. UM. Barring that, of course, reshipple can pay for a sort of a full community in a sense of having you know, nannies and meads and butlers and tutors and all these people to basically support their lifestyles and support their freedom. But more people lack that. And so I think protostyph actualization as you're mentioning earlier, UM, it's ability to rest, and I see that as linked

with community. Yeah, I think that definitely ties into our recent discussions on anti work and how anti work is a lot more feasible if you are in a community support like network and right and you have people to rely on um and definitely like you know, self actualization as the ability to like to just rest when you want to. It's a very uh, it's a very powerful thing and very enticing, and that definitely plays into the

whole like anti work like idea. I guess yeah. I mean to connect the anti work thing to just general you know, unonization and striking efforts. Right Like I was seeing people calling for a general strike the other day, um, as if we haven't learned a lesson, but they were calling for that, But what they were not realizing was that without these structures in place to support striking efforts, it's not gonna be enough. You know, if people cannot

support themselves and their families, the strike cannot last. You don't surely with this community and the community coming together to support people and they you know, not just fight for the rights in the striking and unization context, but also you know, to be able to find leisure, to find rest, as with the you know, anti work discussion, and to sort of turn this to a discussion on organizing more generally. Um, you know, we are, at the end of the day, a very communal ape and if

we were to just focus on ourselves as individuals. Um. I think as capitalism in its anti social nature expects us too, I think we would all suffer as a result. You know, our google as people, as any one person should be not just to you know, ult ourselves, but also to enrich the worlds of those around us and to cultivate the community that as we support they you know, will support us. And I mean as we prefigure this out of you know, culture of support, of you know,

care and of empathy and that sort of thing. Um, I think our organizing efforts would as a results be a lot more powerful, be a lot more potent, um, be a lot more enriching, and a lot more imaginative.

So unless any any of you have anything else to see, um, to sort of bring this to a close, um, I just want to leave, um, leave us with some food for thought in terms of how we can incorporate community actualization in action, right Because it's one thing to say, what will be wonderful to have a community to support you in that kind of thing, But you know, um, how do people a pretty isolated and stuff right now? Um?

So I guess I actually put it into sort of five stage kind of approach, starting with firstly facilitating collective belonging among diverse groups. Right, so we want to look at bringing people together. Obviously they would have different backgrounds and different needs, different ones, different personalities. But bring people together, um, whether it be at work or on the block, or at school or whatever the case be, just for a

cookote or for align or any kind of party or interaction. Obviously, depending on where you are that that may not be the safest thing to do, um, considering COVID and everything. But just bring people together. Not even necessary to proselytize them about anarchism or socialism or whatever. But at the very least start connecting the nodes and start connecting the different parts that can eventually come together to become something greater, you know. I mean, you don't need to wait for

a calamity. There's onything to happen. But of course we have seen as well where natural disasters have broad communities together that wouldn't together before. Um. I think, however, it would be better to like not wait for that kind of thing to happen, and to just you know, bring people together from now, start some conversations, get things going right, and then from there you want to be facilitating solidarity

in struggle. Right, So whether it be in the solidarity is a bit of a buzz would now or at

least it become a buzz would. But I think whether it be with disaster rely funds or so arity, strikes and protests, or you know, with basic mutually support, you know, whether it's material or emotional solidarity in struggle, I think that is another crucial part in you know, building community and incorporating eventually community actualization, because what that does is it shows others that I have your back and you know, others able to see that you know, they can have

mine as well. Um, it helps to build that sense of trust you also want to sort of cultivated probably a sense of community pride and a sense of being able to rely on community networks. You know, we spoke about mutulate networks, but also things like UM skill shares or workshops, so um material support. You know, if somebody needs food, being able to support for them to know that they have people they can go to to support them in a time of need, that is powerful. You know,

not maning people forget that. Not maning people forget the time that they were at their most dire point, and you know, the community stepped up to support them. You know, if you want to see UH insurrection in our lifetimes, Um, you don't start guns blazing. You know, you start with a creative food, You start with a help in hand,

You start with money if people need it, um. And then from there, you know, you get into the realm of community achievements, where your community is collectively able to

celebrate the things that we have accomplished together. You know, whether it be establishing community garden that is able to supplement people's um fresh produce supply, or whether it be that you know, community has come together and they've fixed something that was broken on the street, or even that they've come together and we're able to train people with like some really helpful skills where they're now able to support themselves and bring other things to team as well.

And then from there, I think that sort of approach would foster fulfillment in community and the figures immunity actualization. Yeah, I mean, and this is this is all. It's a big topic, UM, And it's a much bigger topic than just like what are what do you what changes do

you want to make around the edges? Like what things should people advocate for or even just like advocating that that the system be torn down, like as as was kind of evident when you asked, how could we build a community in which like kids feel more self actualization from engaging in the community. Um, And there was that kind of blank moment, the when you actually talking talk about like reconfiguring society at such a fundamental level. Um.

It's it's a big topic. Um. And it's it's one that I think it's important to introduce to people the idea that like, hey, we really have to be we really got to figure this this out. This is this is important to like everything we we say we believe. Um. Answering this question is going to be key. Uh and it's it's it's a tough one. UM. So I don't know.

I think sometimes uh people come into episodes we do on stuff like this like looking for Okay, well, how how are you what's your suggestion for how to do that? And at the moment, like I agree with the how imperative this is? Um, But in terms of actionable stuff, it's, um, this is a big open ended question in my head.

I mean, I think I think Andrew laid out a lot of the stuff that we've we've talked about both, like you know, with within our kind of own community groups in terms of the things in terms of like like you know, like connecting nodes and all like the steps that we can do to have there be like more like more connecting branches of the tree and how to strengthen those. I think that it's it's a good Yeah. It's like we can't we don't know what your community

is like or what your what your situation is. All we can really say is here's the broad things that that you can try or have worked for other people in the past, and then based on what your situation is, you can apply those plug plugables. Yeah. St Andrew, Yes, of course. Um well you can follow me on Twitter at a discore scene. True and of course on YouTube st Andrew's um my stuff. You know, I have the video on rethinking master was Hierarchy of needs, um on

some other on practice see things as well. Check it out, check it out. Um and uh uh stay thinking about stuff. It's thinking is good. Yeah, thinking is good. Welcome that could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and sort of how you can put them back together. This is again another mostly things fall apart episode. UM Here

with Me is Garrison. Hello, Hello, and joining us today to talk about well, a pretty wide range of things, but about the drug war in Mexico, about primorialitaries, and I guess also I guess about the Narco state. Is Alex Vinia, who is in a socially fessor of history at Arizona'stat University and has written several very very good articles that I've read recently. Um, Alex, how are you doing doing great? Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah,

thank you, thank you for joining us. UM. So I wanted to start by talking about an article that you has come out fairly recently, uh, that is about essentially the transition particularly in Guerrero from I guess the sort of sixties seventies dirty war in Mexico two, the drug war, and I guess I wanted to start from because I

don't I don't think it's a issue that's particularly well known. UM. I want to, I guess, start with sort of an overview of how we got into this sort of dirty war in Mexico in the sixties, because I think I don't know, like I think, if anyone, if people know stuff about this, it tends to be the very dramatic sort of like massacre in eight but it's it went on for longer than that and as a sort of deeper history. So can you bring us into that, Yeah,

for sure. So I'll start off by saying that generally, if when most people think about dirty wars and and and Cold War Latin America, Mexico is probably the last country that they think of having one, right, Like, there's a certain exceptionalism that Mexico has enjoyed until relatively recent and relatively recently um amongst academics and especially historians right where we're in the last ten twenty years, we started to uncover Mexico's own version of a dirty war that

we are more familiar with in other places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etcetera. Um, Mexico's dirty war though, and if people know a little bit about this period, like as you mentioned, right, they know about the infamous student massacre that the local in October two. But you know, my my research focuses on on this the southern state of Guerrero. It's on the Pacific coast. It's made famous by the resort city of Akapunco.

And I wrote a book in two published a book in fourteen that really traced the emergence of armed resistance in the state of Guerrero during the nineteen sixties and seventies, And that was my entrance into this idea of of a Mexican dirty war, of the Mexican state practicing systematic state terrorism against political dissidents and in my case, armed guerilla dissidents who enjoyed the backing of dozens of rural communities, um and even urban poor working class neighborhoods in places

like in the late sixties and in early nineteen seventies. That's a very regional story, right. That's another thing that kind of distinguishes the Mexican Dirty War from from other Latin American cases is that the dirty war was localized to a few major cities and then to two very

specific locales in the countryside, Geretro being the most bloody theater. Um. The way that these girla movements emerged, they really began as these popular, civic minded social movements in the late fifties, early nineteen sixties, and and they protested things like political authoritarianism and economic injustice, but they did so essentially within

the confines of the Mexican Constitution. They followed the law. Um. You know, Mexico has the the you know that that the characteristic in Latin America of having the first great

social revolution of the twentieth century. Um, you do have a post revolutionary government that emerges from the nineteen nineteeent revolution that has to pay list service to the radical traditions, to the revolutionary traditions that came out of that that that movement, and for that reason, the Mexican Constitution that was passed in nineteen seventeen in its time was the

most radical social democratic even constitution in the Western hemisphere. UM. And you know, the peasant communities compassing the communities in the state of believed the letter of the law. So when they started to protest, you know, an authoritarian state governors, um,

a police violence, army violence, its economic injustice. In the sixties, they followed the rules and they followed the laws, and each time that they did so, they experienced pretty horrific instances of both state violence exercised by the military and the police, but also everyday forms of violence practiced by you know, gun slingers who were working for landed elites, and that then radicalized some of these social movements into two separate guerilla movements that were led by rural communist

school teachers and not ask and movement in particular the Party of the Poor. They ended up creating a guerilla force of about the high estimates about three hundred fighters. A more realistic estimate is somewhere from one fifty or

two hundred. But the key is that in Coastal Guerrero and then some of the mountains mountain communities of they obtain a lot, a pretty substantial amount of popular support, which then leads the Mexican government that had been you know, ruled by the p r I, and it was ruled in Mexico was ruled by the p r I for like eight years. Uh. They sent in the military and they waged this pretty horrific counter insurgency that that did things like disappear people, torture, rape, um. You know, they

raised entire communities um. And that's generally what's known as the Dirty War in Mexico. It's a rural theater. Its main rural theater was in a place I get at all where you we think there was almost a thousand

disappearances from nineteen sixty nine up until the early nineteen eighties. Yeah, And one of the things that they interested me a lot sort of reading through this was that it's sort of weird for insurgency, and that you get aspects of both kind of the kind of like classical seventies urban grilla movement, but it's also it's very much a real movement you have, you know, I mean, like one of one of the stories you're telling this is about like a group of a group of people who did one

of the you know, like the classic urban seventies thing, which is that you know they did they did a bank robbery, and then two the people get tortured and the rural grillas sort of get hunted down. And I was I was wondering about the dynamics of this, because it seems like like there's it seems like you have these groups that are kind of unusually moving back and word between like having bases and cities and having bases

in these rural areas. Yeah, that's one of so usually when when when folks think about these these guerrilla movements in Guerrero during the sixties and seventies, they think of them primarily as as a as a you know, very fairly typical rural guerrilla movements as you just described. But these two movements, the one led by lu As the Party of the Poor, the other one by Hannaro Baska

is the a CNRS. From the very onset, they tried to connect the rule to the city um, whether it was cities in in Guerrero like um the resort city of Acapulco, particularly working class neighborhoods on the outside of the city, or the state capital in Chilpancingo, which housed the state university. Right, so both of these movements made pretty substantial inroads into that community and then also into

Mexico City. So they tried. Their idea was not necessarily to start as a strictly as a strictly rural movement, but their idea was always to expand because I think to the cities, and I think quite rightly they they perceived that what the Mexican state was going to do to them was trying to corral them in the state of Guerrero and prevent them from logistically and politically expanding

beyond that. And in the end they were that's exactly what happened, um, And that's how these movements were ruthlessly crushed. That and it took a lot of terror to to separate these armed movements from their popular base of support. But a lot of this has to do with the fact that both Vaskis and Klanas were school teachers and they were involved in union movements that were national in scope. Um. They were in moved, they were in you know, LUs was in the Mexic Communist Party, right, so he had

extensive urban experiences and networks throughout the country. So their perspective was always to connect the rule to the urban, particularly because Mexico by the seventies was a rapidly urbanizing country, right it was going it becomes for the first time and assists well first times his post colonial history. It becomes primarily an urban country. So um, So they tried these really interesting mix speriments to try to connect the

two theaters. But as you as you mentioned, right, they did that typical nineteen seventies thing of robbing banks and their terminology was expropriation, right, um. But that that then exposed them to two police actions and and any time any of their militants were captured, they were immediately tortured information.

You know, that they were interrogated horrifically and that and from intel was used to to hunt down their their their their comrades up in the mountains and ye, and I think that that's a good place to move towards sort of the other side of this, which is partially the Mexican state response. But the part, the part of it that was really interesting to me was about how, you know, so so part part part, part of what these groups are fighting are these sort of very very

local like to landed elites. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how these sort of local elites merged, are able to merge with and sort of like co opt in a lot of ways that

the military units that are deployed. Yeah, that's one of the biggest So let me see how I can answer this question, because there's there's so it's what what I what I try to do in this article, and it's part of my broader ongoing research is to kind of connect the violence, the state violence of the Mexican Dirty War as it as as it happens and get around the seventies with with with something else that's happening simultaneously, which is like the so called drug war and the

exponentially increasing cultivation of drugs in a place like Getto, particularly marijuana and then opium poppies that are used to produce heroin. UM. So what I try to do in the article that that you're referencing is kind of the show.

There's a longer history and Guerrero of of how power is exercise at the local level and how some of these local landed elites are able to weather the nineteen ten Mexican Revolution, They're able to weather the grain and reform efforts that that occurred in nineteen thirties and forties UM. And and really these these families. One of the things that that captures my attention of Guerrero is that, uh power.

You can tell who's in power by just by almost by looking at their last name, because there's this remarkable continuity in the state of who has it managed to exercise power at the local level political, social, economic power um for decades now for generations, um. And you can track how power works by looking at families. And in what I do in this article is to look at a couple of landed elite families that had managed to stay in power for decades um. So there's certain at landed.

In this article, I focus on one municipality called which is in the hot Lands region of Guerrero um During you know, probably from about two thousand and eight to two thift it was in the top three in Mexico for opium and and harom production. So it becomes this

massive drug producing region. So I go back in time and I kind of trace like who was in power in this region, who owned land, who owned the resources throughout the twentieth century, and how they were responsible for essentially creating this little narco fifedom as it currently exists, and trying to figure out which families were involved. So on the one hand, you have these families that have been in power from like the nineteen twenties and thirties

and are still exercising power. And then when we get to the nineteen seventies and you have this this horrific dirty war, this counterinsurgency that the state in the military

waging against communities and Gerreo. That opens up new possibilities for new families to come in and to ally themselves with locally stationed UH military units and they work together to wipe out guerillas and guerilla supporters at the and at the same time they start to you know, kind of dip their toe into this this world of narcotics production. Because really in Mexico in the nineteen seven especially by the night mid nineteen seventies, it becomes a number one

prior of of marijuana and heroin to the United States. Um. And this is part of just a broader global history of narcotics. Right there's US lad drug interdiction efforts in places like Turkey, Afghanistan and in the in Southeast Asia, and efforts to suppress the drug drug production there creates this you know what, what what people usually refer to is a balloon effect. It just displaces the drug production somewhere else because the demand in the US is still there.

And that because and that creates in Mexico the number one provider of narcotics by the mid nineties seventies, and that then has an impact locally in the place of Guerrero, which is again simultaneously experiencing a grill insurgency, a dirty war,

and then also the ramping up of drug production. One of the most interesting parts of this that I didn't know about was about how I mean they're like, how how explicitly because I've read a lot of well not a lot, but I've read about a lot of how, particularly after like when when the sort of after sort of the various up people of two thousands six in Mexico with the Wahaka uprising with the Zapatis is making bunch of moves and the CP presidential election, about how

you get the drug war is to sort of like military solution to these leftist movements. But I was interested in how, I mean, incredibly explicit they are about this, Like the anti gorilla operation are like they don't call

them antic thriller operations. They talk about like bandits and like they they they they were they were explicitly like, no, no no, no, this is an anti narco operation even though you know they're going and massacurring like essentially peasants and occasionally guerrillas, but just a bunch of just random like capusinos. Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a great quote that I got from for in this article. Um, you

know this is wonderful researcher in Mexico. Carlos Flordes was a really good book on kind of like the failed state in Mexico and drugs and military And in that steady he managed to interview a military participant in the dirty war in the nineteen seventies, and he has this great quote that I included in this essay which he says, this military guy says basically, look, with the marijuana growers, we had no problem, we had no beef. But with

the guerrillas, we had the fuck them up. And for me, like that, that direct quote kind of encapsulates like what the drug war in Mexico has been historically and in this current form. Like and this is something that I learned from people like sociologists and journalists Don Paley, right, like the war on drugs, the war on poor people, um and and it it becomes in the nineteen seventies, it becomes a really useful cover for the type of horrific violence that the state is practicing in a place

like Gero against these popularly supported guerilla insurgencies. So publicly and to the international audience and to its own domestic national audience, the Mexican state is saying, look, we're not waging a dirty war, We're not waging a counter insurgency. We're fighting a war against cattle wrestlers, against cattle thieves, and against criminals, against drug dealers, um, when in reality they're waging a war against poor people who are supporting

these different guerilla insurgencies led by these rural communist school teachers. UM. So that's and that's in the rural theater, right. It's it's really interesting when you think about how the Mexican state in the seventies will criminalize urban guerrilla movements. You know, Mexico had like thirty eight guerilla movements in the nineteen

sixies and seventies. That's just like people don't really recognize that, right, like thirty eight to four different rural and urban guerilla organizations. The big urban one that managed to create i don't know, ten to twelve different uh focals or folsa of posa UM was the leg the communist legue of the September Um. They became such a big threat in the urban theater that the Mexican president devoted his nineteen seventy four State of the Union basically the Mexican version of the State

of Union. He devoted a pretty good chunk of it to these quote unquote terrorists. Right, So for the urban guerrillas, he referred to them as terrorists, and then he does this thing where he says, you know, most of these terrorists are unpatriotic. They and I'm gonna paraphrase some of his language, they reveal high indices of homosexuality, of like just basically mothering them to the point that they're seen as like the most despicable other in Mexico, in Mexican society,

and that then opens them up to getting wiped out. Um, which is fulfills a similar function as calling the rural guerillas nothing more than cattle astlers, cattle fees, and narcos. Right. So it's all this counterinsurgency like discursive strategy that that justifies the elimination of these people. But at bottom, these are just wars against the drug wars, a war against

poor people. And and you see that to this day, you see that, you know most one of the things that really animates my research about the history of drug wars in Mexico is that I really want to push back against, you know, journalistic treatments that that will say, look, Mexico's war on drugs began in two thousand and six when President Felipe own Way, you know, launched the military against these different drug trafficking organizations, and you know, historians

um like like myself will work on this. We're like, wait, no, Mexico has had a series of drug wars right that the There's a historian Alec Dawson who talks about has a really excellent book on Payote, and he talks about how the war on drugs begins in like the colonial era, right in terms of how the Spanish colonial state criminalized uh indigenous consumption of drugs like payote for for their

own ritualistic cultural practices. Um. The nineteen seventies is another or moment where you have a form of a drug war that the Mexican state exercises. But from my perspective, it's just it's almost like a cover as a way to wage war against political dissidents and an armed guerrilla

challenges to its rule in Mexico. Yeah, and I think that's a that's an important of looking at it also as just a way to understand why, you know, like if you're looking at it from the inspective of like a policy makers, like oh, well, we spent all the time during the War on drugs, like why are there

more drugs? And it's like, well, yeah, because I mean, the point isn't really about like I mean, I think, okay, I want to make a caviat here, which is like it's not like there's such a thing as like a quote unquote good war on drugs that you could wage like there there's no, there isn't a version of this that's like, oh no, if if if we actually just try to like focusing on stopping these people, it would work.

But it's like no. But simultaneously, yeah, it's that the goal isn't really about like it's not about drugs, that just about killing poor people. And I said, yeah, I think that that's that's a good way of framing it. And I think also it's an interesting way of looking at why you start to see these sort of supposedly like anti narco units just immediately start doing like getting to the trade. Yeah yeah, well I because they're like their position to make a ton of money off of it. Yeah,

like it's yeah, they're not dumb. Yeah yeah. And I think I don't know, this is an interesting question about like the structure of the state here too, because you know, look like in Chicago, this is another like this is the thing that happens all the time, is yeah, you get these you get these anti drug units that are you know, incredibly specialized to get a bunch of money, and then they immediately trying to round start and start like just do like just enter into the drug trade.

And so I was one of the other things. Yeah, I was just been interested in this just about there's there's seems to be these these very these these very interesting sort of alliances between paramilitaries, cartels, the police in the military that open up and this is this I know this is an incredibly broad like it's a question

you can like, you know, devot academic disciplines too. But I was wondering how you look at the states in the context in a context like this, because yeah, I mean in a context where you know, it's not the state doesn't really have monopoly on violence, right, Yeah, No, that's a that's a huge question. And there's how you I mean, essentially the question is like what is the state? Yeah,

that question always terrorizes me. And how you answer that question then leads has consequences to how we think about things like the drug war or you know, violence in

Mexico or a variety of different things. Right. But so what I what I do in this article is uncle you, is to just simply look at what the state looks like at the local level, right, Um, particularly like it's repressive apparatus is and what you see in a place like because yeah, you see kind of like it's a multi scale er issue, right where you have generations of conflicts over land and land tenure and who gets to control rural markets, who gets to control access to rural

markets and rural production. Right, So there's already like a built in structure that's exploitative, that has somehow managed to weather a big social revolution and a grand reform effort. And on top of that, then in the sixties and seventies, you get uh, you know, industrialized narcotics production placed on

top of this pre existing structure. Right, So it's should be no, it's almost like no surprise then that you know, the gun slingers that you still work for Land of Elagues will now serves not just gun slingers for Land of elages who are terrorizing campesinos, but now they're also gonna work with like local narcotic Uh, you know, narco farmers, drug farmers, and and traffickers, and then at the same time they're going to do their best to coopt to

buy off you know, military units that are stationed at the local level, police units that are stationed at the local level, local judges, local magistrates, local political officials, and and it it creates a very um dense network at the local level of people who are working together to maintain power but at the same time make sure that this really profitable political economy of narcotics is going to thrive.

And this is at the very local level, right, So in some in some ways those local interests of the quote unquote the state are will conflict with the state in Mexico City and how to resolve those tensions and becomes a big deal. So the the guy that the military participant that I referenced earlier, he was he was actually sent in from outside of Gereo into GEO to

wage counterinsurgency. And you know, he talks in this book about how they didn't know what to do when they see their soldier comrades, you know, obviously collaborating with local nauticles, even though the over this guy in his unit have been sent in to wipe out the nuticles so it

ends up happening. Is that the goal is never to eradicate the from a national level, from a state national level, the goal is never to eradicate the drug trade in Mexico in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the goal is to rationalize it. The goal is to control it, and and the goal is for the state to be able

to maintain power over it. And this is leads us to what you know, some scholars will refer to as a plasta system, right, that that that different narcotic organ traffic organizations will control different parts of Mexico, but the overall power, you know, they have to kick back to

is our different state officials. UM. And that there's a recent book, really great book by Ben Smith called The Dope that just came out, really like the first really good English language big history of of the Mexican drug trade. And and he essentially he says that like the Mexican state is is a racket. It's a racket, and it's ensuring that this drug trade exists, and it's centralized and

it's rationalized in the sixties, seventies and eighties. UM. But by the nineties, it starts to lose control as the state itself is neoliberalized and becomes smaller and its capacity to control these different groups becomes, uh weakened. So so that's like the big national level, right, and then we think that takes us to the scale of the international which is a whole another thing. But at the very

local level, what does this look like. It looks like if you're a drug farmer, right, Because another thing in Garretos that these drug farmers are like small scale right there. They're small scale. They have a little bit of autonomy, but they're small scale. But they're selling their product to these traffickers. And these are the traffickers usually that will have connections to local landed families, who'll have connections to military,

to police, to politicians, um. That will ensure that this economy will will have will continue to thrive in a in a profitable way by the late seventies. Way, and this is something else I think that I needed a little bit more research on. But you see it happened elsewhere in Mexico and especially in the northwest, in a place like Sinaloa, which is usually seen as the cradle

of the Mexican drug trade. But I think in the late seventies, both in Sin and the Dirty War, and and the and the sending of the military and mass in a place like Garreto, it not only takes out armed resistance to the Mexican state, but it will also take out small scale narco traffickers who don't want to play. They don't like the rules that the Mexican state is imposing upon them in order to make money and traffic drugs.

Um So, I've seen a couple of documents where, um, you know, secret police, spy agent documents where they say, Okay, yes, you know these these campesinos who are accused of being guerillas, Yes, we are disappearing them. But apparently some small scale drug traffickers are also being disappeared because they're not they don't want to go along with the rules being imposed by

the Mexican military. And that's something that you see in in Sinaloa in the late seventies, when something called Operation Condor gets launched and you get thousands of troops and federal police who go up there, and instead of eradicating the drug trade and getting rid of these different traffickers, what they do is they centralize it, they rationalize it, um,

they make it more efficient. I mean that actually it's so it's in in a counterintuitive way, it's state violence that actually leads to the formation of things that we think about as cartels and not the other way around, right because the very trade begins within the confines of

the Mexican State. In part two of this interview, we're gonna drill deeper into that question and look at how the state's attempt to get in on the drug trade created the cartels and how they sort of lost control of them, leading to an incredible increase in part military violence and death and destruction. And on that happy note that this has been it could Happen here Join us again tomorrow for that and in the meantime, stay safe and don't die. If you want to find us, we're

at Happen Here pot on Twitter, Instagram. You can also find other work that we do at cools on media on Twitter if for some reason you can, you want to continue venturing out of the house sides A way this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is often in today about state and paramilitary violence. And we're back with part two of her interview. With Alexander Vinia about the state and paramilitary violence in the cartels in Mexico.

The immediate thing I was thinking about this was it reminds me a lot of uh, some stuff I've read a while back about like smuggling people over the border and about how the American militarization of that like destroyed because it used to like as as the US tries to like make the border more and more unsafe, if it can, becomes harder and harder, and it means that like the people who can actually do it, like you know, you need to have access to more resources and more

like technical capability, and that's sort of like and that that also in a lot of ways help the cartels because you know it, well, it's like, okay, so who actually has a bunch of organizational expertise with smuggling routes and a lot of money And it's it's and I think that's like it is it's an interesting way of looking at what the national application of state power in these like it does, which is that like it's it seems almost like what's happening is that so when when

you get these massive exertion to state power, it's not that they like flatten, like you know, it's not that they just sort of wipe out out resistance. What they do is they yeah, it's what you were saying, is like they centralize the drug trip. But it also they

centralize the sort of violent apparatus. And it means that like yeah, if if, if you're going to survive that you have to be like incredibly efficient and incredibly violent, and you have to also sort of start like you you have to start playing with it, like playing by the rules at the state of exception, which is you know, and that's that's like how I guess the violence level and the organizational centralization happens. Yeah, I think yeah, No,

I think you're I think you're right. And I think it's also becomes part of the to add I mean, so to add you know, fuel to the fire. Even more so, it's become a strategy of like the d E A and and and counting oar cautics forces in Mexico to to do what you just describe, but then also to so dissension amongst the different drug trafficking organizations, right, so um that then also increases the violence. Right, So if you can get you know, it was it was

pretty well none that the chapel. For instance, the leader of the Senetta cartel until well, let's not say leader one of the most prominent traffickers of the Senato carteltil recently like he was giving up people. He was giving information on rivals to the d e A and to other other counting arcotics forces. Right. And that's part of the strategy. The strategy is to fragment these groups, um. And that only concreases the violen and and you see

that violence at the very localized level. Um. And this is what Garretto suffering from right now right for a long time, under the control of one single drug trafficking organization, slash family from the state of sinaloas right, they used they were originally aligned with their actually cousins with the Chappa Uzman's family. They had a falling out and they made two thousands and they and they went to war.

And I had disastrous consequences for the people of Guereto because it fragmented the drug trafficking organizations and it forced different local groups to take sides. Um And And that's kind of how I end the article that that you're referencing, right, Um, where different local groups start to take sides, and that increases the level of violence at the local level and

in communities suffer greatly. Um. And that's also a consequence of like the kingpin strategy, right, like this idea that if you take down the perceived leader of a drug trafficking organization, that's somehow going to have an impact on drug production. You know what actually happens that it fragments the organiza ation and it creates more violence at the

local level. Well, at the same time, it gives a chance to like xd agents to go on like you know, national media and be like, oh, yes, the capture of the chapel is gonna have a great impact the drug trade. No, well not like it increases the violence. And I think that the thing that that that's very clear from this article. And I think it's clear if you you know, if you look at the drug trade, is it's like, no,

it's it's it's it's largely economic stuff. And like one of the things you're talking about is is you know it is that these peasants who are the people who have been able to hold onto the collective land basically get forced by the Lamb bankes to like produce sesame and it's like they can't make any money off of it and don't I don't know how directly, it looked to me a lot like like that was directly one of the things that starts to lead to the shift

to the drug trade there, because you have all these people locked into this crop that like just can't support them. Yeah. Yeah, and it's it's just the bigger story there is is really the failure of the post revolutionary Mexican state too um to really help for agricultural production at the level of of these small holding peasants and and these rural communities that are these ahelos who have received land from

the Mexican state. UM. If anything, most of the state subsidies in the state structure, state support for agriculture from the forties, you know, up until the eighties, that was all directed to big agro businesses that were producing export crops in places like Sea A, Right, they're producing winter crops for the American market or winter fruit for the American market. Right. So in the absence of like meaningful state support for small holding agriculture, that small holding agricultural

sector that is meant to feed Mexico um. You know, some of these these farmers in a place like you and they'll say, okay, well, we were growing this thing that the the Agricultural Bank is telling us to grow, sessame, but we're not making a lot of money off of it. But on the other hand, by the late sixties, they see that marijuana production is is really increasing due to

American demand. If I can do both things, you know, I'm gonna make a lot of money and I'm gonna allow my family to make a pretty good living while staying in the countryside, while not having to migrate to Mexico City, or while not having to migrate to these agriculture fields in northern Mexico or even into the United States. So because it's like really rational economic response to to to a broader macroeconomic situation that has put them in

that position. The and and you still see this to this day, right, these these small farmers, they still own

their land. They'll grow certain crops on it and it's almost serves as a shield for um, you know, the opium poppies that they're growing on the same plot of land, but in a part that's a little you know, harder to access, and it's a little bit more hidden, right, Um, but it's it's it's trying to find a way at a bottom to make a dignifity, you know, how to make a life of dignity for your family when you're living in the in the countryside, when you're living in

a place like and then you see that, you know, the Getingos are going crazy over a cap goo gold in the late sixties. Um, and you have uh, you know North Getingo traffic is coming into get Ready with new seeds. Um or you have set lewnce is coming into your state saying, you know, grow these here are some marijuana sees grow that strain um, you know, and they can buy off you know, local politicians and soldiers

and police. That's that's one of the ways that you get the emergence of industrial proportion production of marijuana and and opium poppies. And in the sixties and seventies and again at the same time that this massive dirty war is being waged against two different peasant guerilla movements. Right, So it's like a really messy like social matrix that's

occurring at the same time. I guess one everything I wanted to talk about was about how the political parties sort of work into this because I guess, like my experience with this sort of like the kind of like narco state fusions with like twenties and thirties China and there, it's like like you're you're I don't know, I mean, the Communists have an actual independent political outside of like like the Green Gang, but like the k MT, it's like like this is basically just a like like this

like this is this is just like an ARCO organization with like a flag planted on it. And I'm wondering how like on what end of the scale we're working with with the p R and also also like with with the other Mexican parties, because it seems like there are like parts of like a functional state app like a party state appartus or like a party apparatus, and then parts of it that are just like this is a cartel. Yeah, it's it's that's a huge question. It's

it's um yes, I've really resistant. No, no, no no, it's all good. I've I've stopped understanding this within the framework of like an ARCO state, right, because to think about an ARCO state, you really have to think about how a state was captured by these drug trafficking organizations. And and I historically and currently, I don't think that describes

what's what's happening in Mexico. Um, I think what you would and it and it goes back to the question of what is the state, right, like the questions like I'm gonna be thinking about this decade. Right, but because you have, you know you have? It depends on what part of the Mexican state you're also referring to. Right. So if we're talking about the military, the military has

all segments of the military. I have always had an important role to play in the production and trafficking of narcotics from Mexico into the US from the from like the nineteen tens, right, the military governor of Baja California, this guy by the name of Colonel Estevan Kantu. He was helping traffic opium um into the United States during the Mexican Revolution. Right, And this has been a constant rum. The guys that I talked about in my article, this guy Um who ends up he he's a general by

the time he's he's arrested in two dozen two. But this guy, Mario Costa, he was like the main counter insurgent, theorist and and and and bright mind of the Mexican military that gets sent to get right on the seventies to wipe out these different guerrilla movements. But he's after they wipe out the gerrilla movements, he stays on. He serves as as a kind of like the leader of the state police forces. And what do he starts to do. He starts to buy up land allegedly that will start

producing opium poppies and marijuana. And this guy from the late seventies up until he's arrested in two thousand, it's pretty clear they had he had been collaborating with different

narco trafficking organizations. He gets arrested by his own military UM in two thousand because he it was pretty clear that he had been protecting and collaborating with this you have a guada's cartel and I'm a lookouenti UM, so you know one of these like anti anti guerrilla, anti nautical nauticles that will you know, actually get go to jail for about six years UM because it was pretty apparent that he had been for a long time collaborating

and protecting the different narco trafficking organizations. Right, So that's the military. Then you have like the secret police that gets formed in Mexico, the DFS, with the help of the FBI. Um, the DFS becomes like this political police that the Mexican president can use to tamp down on political descent. They're the ones, you know spine surveillance by the sixties and seventies, are also torturing, disappearing, and with that level of impunity and power, they also get into

the drug game. By the seventies and eighties. Um, you have the Federal Judicial Police. They're the ones who control for this during the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Really they're the ones who are controlling, um, the kickbacks that they're receiving from narco traffickers until the military moves in the seventies and takes over for them. Right. So the repressive apparatus is within the Mexican state of the twentieth century play a really key role, if not the role in

helping foster create this this political economy of narcotics. Now, how do how do we view that in relation to the p r I. Right, the party that emerges from the Mexican Revolution, the party that will rule Mexico generally will say from the late twenties up until the year two thousand, well, you have pretty important, you know, political officials within the party throughout the twentie century that are directly linked to narco trafficers and directly linked to military

officials who are obviously involved in the game as well. But at no level can we say it's a narco state because an archos having captured the state. It's actually the other way around. It's the Mexican post revolutionary state that's trying to get its hands around this thing that's growing within its own confines, and and and by and they lose control of it. Like by the late eighties and nineties, they've effectively lost control of this thing, and that's when you see the rise of these um highly

centralized drug trafficking organizations like this. You have puttest cartel that's making a ton of money off the cocaine. So, I guess it seems like it's almost like you're dealing with from from from the very very local level, where you have these sort of landed elites and their gun slingers.

It's like it's this almost sort of like like miniaturized fractal version of the state where's like you're getting these like very very small sort of like uh you know, like almost like fetal domains and that they sort of expand upwards and stand upwards. But yeah, and I guess the interesting part to me is is how like the paramilitary dynamics of that, and how how the power of these sort of land at least into power, Like how how it's like like the power like the the use

of power from the top seems to strengthen them. Where you know, if if you're looking at this from like like how how this is supposed to work in theory, if you're someone who actually is like trying to eliminate the drug trade, you think would be the way around that, like the application of power would shatter, but it sort of doesn't. It causes these like these these build ups, these apparatus is and then they fragment and they rebuild again.

But it's you're not ever actually dealing with these sort of like micro state like yeah, yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And if anything, the paramilitarization is also like a like a long it's a process, right, So like the first if we can use this term, the first paramilitaries were used to wipe out a gray and

reform minded campasinos in the thirties and forties. Um, but you don't really have like a paramilitarization of of of the drug trade in Mexico to a certain extent, because you have the military and the police to do your dirty work. Right if you're a nautical UM. That's a more recent phenomenon that you start to see in the nineties and especially the two thousands, so right that the case that everyone points to, are these the elite of

the elite in the Mexican military, the gopis. These guys are like the Navy Seals or the Special Force, you know, the Army rangers, the Mexican military. A bunch of these guys in the mid to late nineties decide, you know what, we don't want to work for the Mexican military. We're just gonna We're gonna dessert, and we're gonna go hire ourselves out to the Gulf cartel. And they become really the first like paramilitary wing of a major drug trafficking organization.

And these are guys, some of which probably most likely were trained at school the America's or received the American specialized training now switching sides and and and protecting a pretty powerful drug trafficking organization, like at the time in the nineties that was the Gulf Cartel. And these are the infamous set us, right, these are the zs UM. They're called the set us because that was like their military code. There was always a Z in front of

a number UM. So Z one was kind of like the leader, the first guy who took twelve or thirteen guys with him to desert and they hired themselves out to this drug trafficking organization and they become like the paramilitary unit. The rest of the group see that and they're like, oh, ship, Like we gotta catch up, right, because these like and these guys the gop is, you know,

they have counter insurgency experience. You know, they were the ones who were fighting against US and chiapas in the early nineties, right, they were the ones that they were sending to. Yeah, they were the ones who were fighting against the new cycle of guerrillas that emerging get read in the mid nineties, the e p R. And then when they're used for counting our context operations, they look at the situation they say, you know what we're not going to fight on the side of the military. We're

gonna hire ourselves out to these this golf cartel. We're gonna make a ton of money. Um. But they have a lot of skills, right. So the rest of the so the rest of the drug traffic organizations see that, and they're like, we gotta play catch up, and and and and you see the paramilitarization of this conflict, and and in certain parts that's what's driving UM. I think has has played a really big role in driving some of the bloodshed and violence that we've seen in Mexico,

particularly since two thousand six. Right, we can speak of probably four hundred thousand homicides since two thousand six, at least a hundred thousand disappearances. UM. A lot of that has to do with, you know, the people who are fighting our our paramilitaries, right, they're receiving training from Colombian military advisors, They're receiving training from Israeli military officials, they're

receiving training from UM. Guatemalan special forces. These guys called the Kails, who committed some of the worst atrocities during the Guatemalan conflict of the of the of the seventies and eighties. Um, my families from men which is the state north of Guerto And I remember when probably two thousand five, six or seven was down there doing research and Disney family and they reported on the arrest of to Guatemalans and two Colombians in this random of far

off part of meat truck. And you're like, what were these two Colombians and two Guatemalans doing there? While they were most likely like special X special forces in those countries, militaries who had been hired by local organizations to train their their their soldiers, to train their their paramilitaries. Um. So that that's I think that has driven a lot of the violence, right, And you see it's in terms of techniques they use, the weapons and armament, the logics

of of how to take down their enemies. Yeah. I remember I read an article like okay, I've literally lost all since the time. I think it was like mid last year about a cartelogist basically running a military operation just shutting like shutting down a city. Um yeah, that was pre pandemic. That was it was pre pandemic. Oh my god. Yeah, I remember because I was on the day and the day after it happened. I think I

spent way too much time on Twitter talking to people. Um. That was when I think you're referring to when the UH detachment from the Mexican military um in the city

of Koya Khan, which is the capital of Sinaloa. Kulakhan is seen as like Sinaloa is the cradle of the Mexican drug trade, then like Kodiakan is the capital of it, right, Um, I think I think you're referring to when the Mexican military detachment tried to arrest one of the chapel right, and they actually found him, they localized it, they located him, and they tried to arrest him, and like the hills just came down on the city of Koyakon, and you

had hundreds of of nauticles or paramilitaries who came down and essentially forced um, forced the military and the state to hand over at Chapel's son to them and and for and the reason why I was like, uh, you know, spent way too much time on social media going after people because people said, oh, this is an example of a failed state. Oh, look at the new president of Mexico and he's lost control of the of the state like he's tawtowing too nauticles and it was much more

complicated than that. And something similar had already happened um in the previous administration where these different like particularly in the city of of Wadajada, where they even shot down a military helicopter or police helicopter and they and they essentially um shut down the entire city because one of

their leaders have been captured. Okay, so what are what are the things the things that you you talked about the end of the article was about these this environmentalist group that gets like they all get arrested while like their

their lawyer gets killed. After we starts talking about like connections between business owners and the party in the archo trades, I guess what do you how do you sort of like like, how how do you left movement sort of navigate this space because you have it seems like you have on the one hand, you know, you have of these premamilitaries and you also have a state that is

like incredibly violently hostile to you. And I guess I don't know, Like I guess you sort of have the Zapatista model of this combination of sort of like arm struggle and social pressure. But I guess, like, how how how do people navigate this sort of like was it seems like like a really disastrous like a place to be trying to do leftist politics? And yeah, it's it's really difficult, right, And I think that's again going back to the thesis that the war on drugs is actually

war on poor people. It's, um, you know, leftist movements, dissident movements in Mexico have to well, for while, I'll say this in a place like Garrido, it's these movements that have provided I think the the most accurate like X ray analysis of what the state is at the

local level. Right. So, um, this this guerrilla leader that I talked about in the article, Commandant Ramo, who who was around in the late two thousand seven dozen eight, does nine like based on his travels in the mountains of Guerrero and kind of like the actions that he was engaged in for him, it was very clear that the military was collaborating with all a narco trafficking organizations, not just the one, not just like the most powerful one. Right.

So at the national level, there was a lot of discourse of well, this dark drug trafficking organization is going at it with this one in a place that Garrido, this guerrilla leader, looks at the situation, he's like, actually, they're all working together. And not only that, but they have the police in the military, and what are they doing.

They are, um, going after poor communities up in the mountains who don't want to grow opium poppies or who want to organize a different way, an alternative model of of of living, of social reproduction. Um. What they'll say is, you know, uh, the what the military is doing in terms of drug interdiction is they'll only go and and and burn some opium poppy fields and not others. And that's because the owner of that well popiu poppy feel that they burn didn't pay up. Um. So you know, now,

current movements in Garretro partically indigenous moves and Grello. There's a recent report that that an indigenous group just put out and they're linked to the Congress CO. The C and I came the acronym um where they talk about a criminal state existing in in the in the part of guerreron As, Montana, which is a heavily indigenous area on the border on the eastern part of the state.

And what they say is what we see here is uh an alliance between nauticles UM, political parties, military detachments and transnational corporations UM and so and and in Gerello. Those transnational corporations are usually have something to do with mining and they're usually Canadian UM. So how do you navigate that? Like that is like like the correlation of forces,

if we want to use that kind of terminology. Like from a perspective of a group that wants to resist this, it's it's it's damn near impossible, right, Like you have every thing going against you, and yet Ingerero people are still resisting, right. You have the students of at Napa, they're still protesting, they're still organizing, even after the disappearance of their forty three comrades back in September, and we

still don't have a clear answer as to what happened. Um, you still have you know, you have the model of of a Tommy that like that that certain indigenous communities, like the community in Chadan and have have practice which is essentially they kick out all political parties, they kick out all police officers, and they self organized at the communal level almost like a community police force, and you see that in Guerrero as well. There's all you know,

there's there's challenges with that. There's a that usually brings on a lot of violence. And the people of Chadan have really suffered for for trying to go this, for trying to protect themselves, right, they've they've suffered a lot

of casualties. Um. And there you have a uh, this combination of like narticles and illegal logging, right and and so the community there on the one hand is trying to protect their ecology, but they're also trying to offend themselves from nauticals who have taken over local political parties and they don't want them in their in their town. In Guereto, you have community police forces and you've had

them since the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, um. But that's raised a lot of issues in terms of you know, what happens when one community police force gets cooputive or co oputive or corrupted by a political party or by even a nautical and then that that group is used to hit against other community groups who are who are still trying to organize for for for a radical alternative.

So it's it's it's on one level, it's really depressing, right, because everything is stacked against groups and communities and organizations in a place like Geretta who want a better world, who want to create a better world. But in the longer scope of Gueretto's history, they still resist. They still resist.

And to me, that's one of the things that fascinates me about this place and about its people, about its communities, that the odds have always been stacked against them, and nonetheless they still resist, they still try to um against overwhelming odds. They still try to carve out a better, more just more dignified existence for them and for their communities, even at great risk, you know, for their well being, and they're willing to risk everything. So they're still there.

They're still there, even though the forces that they're facing are are extremely powerful. Yeah. I think that's a surprisingly hopeful note to end on, which is that, Yeah, it's even like, you know, places with just incredible concentrations of violence and different kinds of power against you, that people,

people are people continue to fight. Yeah, Yeah, I think that's I think that's one of the lessons that we definitely get from a place like get Rid all Um or a place like Chiapa's right with the with the Abatistas who are still there, who have still managed to read I mean, they've managed to reproduce themselves generation only, which is really difficult for an armed um Uh insurrectionary group. Right, Like, they've managed to do that, and and and and to

carve out at great cost as well. Right, they're currently right now suffering. They've been suffering for for more than a decade of low intensity warfare that's been waged by the military and their paramilitaries. But they're still there with their example, right, And I think part of the power of them and the people is their example alone is threatening to power to the powers that be, and and that's why that there's always an effort to exterminate them.

So just by virtue of surviving and and and defending themselves, Um, that's like a small it seems like a small thing. But but they're providing an alternative. And I think that's

where there their example is really important. And I think I think there is I think there's a real argument that the whole sort of the whole sort of anti globalization, like that wave of struggle like is something that was kicked off at the Deputistas and like, and not just on the sort of like they were the first people to go into revolt, but it's I mean explicitly like the way they brought you know, like social movements from across the world together and the way they you know,

the way that they like had they got, the way they got people talking, the way they have people training each other, the techniques and the sort of ideas that they were exchanging that they like, like they they set off like a wave of revolt that lasted for like I don't know if you started in like nine, like the end of it's like two six. Yes, yeah, it was.

It was incredible. Yeah, no, they I think they there and even if you want to go this might take us off topic a little bit, right, but like scholars who focus on like Venezuela would say, actually, the first one was the Karda Castle, right in the late eighties, when you have a popular rebellion in Karakas Venezuela against neoliberalism, against the liberal starity measures, right, and then so I've had that, I've had a talk with friends, will be like, yeah,

were the first ones? They're like no, no, no, no, no, it started in Karaka eighty nine, I think is the kinda castle. But yeah, no, I think their global example it continues to be a really powerful one for me personally. It's like I still remember my parents had my parents are are migrants from Mexico. They had this this big satellite dish in our backyard so we can beam in uh,

you know, TV stations from Mexico. And I remember January one, we woke up right groggy ley, uh, celebrate New Year's and my parents turned on the TV to see Mexico City news and there was Modocles, right, and there were the Sabbatista's um and there were then the Mexican politicians saying, no, don't believe what, don't believe your eyes? This isn't You had a guy, I remember you had a guy go

on TV. I think saying something like this is not an indigenous movement, because if it was an indigenous movement, they would be using machete is not rifles. Something really condescending, like the level of racist condescension that came out of Mexican politicians and in in response to this movement, yum

was was super high. Right. But I remember I was in junior high and I remember seeing it and I'm just like, the has to be something wrong for these people to do this right, And that just led me to want to do more research and to do more reading, and that I think is really powerful. I think I still think it's really powerful. So the more we can get the word out about these movements and in other parts of Latin America, I think, I think it's still

really important. And I think especially today, we really we do need a bit more hope in these dark pandemic times. I was trying to figure out a speaking of hope segue and I couldn't. I couldn't quite get it. Do you do you have anything that you want to plug? Where can people find you? Yeah? Well, thank you so much for having me on this was This is a lot of fun. Um. You can find me on God like you can find me on Twitter. I think the pandemic,

my Twitter consumption has really gone up. It's been powerful. But you can find me at Alexander Underscore Avena. Yeah. Um, then I want to plug. No. I think if you go on my Twitter page, you'll see you You'll be able to get the linked to the to the article that we've been talking today, um about about the drug

from dirty war to drug war into um. I recently published a book review of this really fascinating book on the connection between the Israeli arms industry and like Cold War Latin America, So you can find that on my page. But yeah, it's I don't really have anything else to plug. Whenever I finished his damn book on the drug wars, have me back on and yeah, definitely tangible to the plug right now, it's just short little articles. Well, thank thank you again for coming on the show. Um yeah, this,

this is, this has when they could happen here. You can find us in the usual places. If do you want to venture on social media for some reason, please don't. It's it's a bad place. But yeah, thank you and goodbye everyone. Ye hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It could Happen Here is a production of

cool Zone Media. Or more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool Zone media dot com, slash sources, thanks for listening.