Facing Climate Despair: How to Cope with Wen Stephenson

of Catastrophe. In it, Stevenson argues that the only way to confront the crises of our time is to meet despair head on, to see it for what it is, to feel it, and to accept what it means about where we are and where we need to go. Over the summer, Adam spoke with Stevenson about how he processes his own climate despair, what scholars of totalitarianism like Hannah Arentt and Albert Camu can teach us about fossil fascism, and whether a mass movement for climate action might not

come together until enough people are desperate enough. This conversation is a lot like how Stevenson describes his book. It's about how to live into this era of climate and political and social catastrophe. While holding on to our humanity. Just a note before we get into it that this

conversation does briefly discuss suicide. If you are in crisis, please call or text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at nine to eighty eight, or contact the crisis text line by texting talk tl K to seven four to one, seven four one. Here's Adam and.

But you know, it's a it's a risk, right, it's a risk one takes as a writer if you're going to get personal, and it's even a risk of another of a special kind as a you know, and I understand, I understand why the reasons why, just as a you know, a white straight cismle you know, writing on the you know, within the left, you know, to kind of be personal because it's like, well, why should my story matter that much?

You know? And I try to acknowledge that obviously off the top, like what are my struggles compared to you know, you know, the vast majority of people on the planet, you know, right, you know, and even in my own community for that matter.

I wrote it. I mean, it's definitely a climate book, right, but I mean that is the overarching and the and the and the unifying kind of you know, thread or theme you know of the book. And I'm a climate writer and a climate activist and so on. But it's it's really not a typical climate book, at least I think the way that usually is that, you know, is the term is used in the publishing world, you know, because it's not a policy book, and it's not a solutions book, you.

even polemic in the book. For sure, that's certainly part of it and part of who I am as a writer, and you know, but but more than that, I think it's what it is essentially, is a kind of moral ethical inquiry into as kind of the title implies, like how to live into this era of climate and political and social catastrophe that's upon us while holding on to

our humanity. I mean that that phrase, you know, can become a cliche, of course, but I hope that in my book it's not, because I try to go very deeply into what that means under various you know, various scenarios, and what it has meant in the past, and what there is to learn, you know, from writers and thinkers of the past, so on that kind of personal level.

You know, when I was in my really darkest moments in sort of twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, like a lot of other people, you know, and then again at various times over these last eight years, as I was writing this series of essays, I went looking I kind of instinctively reached for a certain group of writers and thinkers of the mid twentieth century, you know, these kind of iconic, and I it certainly wasn't the only person doing this in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, you know, but these like

iconic anti fascist and anti totalitarian thinkers and writers like Hannah Arendt and Albert Camu and Simon Vais and others, you know. And I even ended up, you know, looking very closely at the great anti colonial revolutionary fronts, finol.

You know, that's where the book ends up. And I was looking for a sort of like the intellectual and moral and even spiritual sources of or resources sort of like for not as I say, you know, not hope, because I feel that term and that concept is kind of abstract and is means many different things to different people.

And I mean like across all our divisions of race and gender and class and ideology and religion, you know, just probably the most important quote in the book, or one of them. There are a lot of quotes in this book, maybe the most important, the one that means the most to me. I use as one of the epigraphs for the book. It's from Camu's novel The Plague, which, if you or anyone else listening to this has not

read Camu's The Plague, I highly recommend it. But it's where the main character, Doctor Rue is talking to priest Father Parlous. The doctor says to the priest at a very intense moment in their fight against the plague, we're fighting for something that brings us together, beyond blasphemys and prayers. It's all that matters when I look at across our movements, you know, on the left, and I think about my comrades and just and I think about members of my

own family who are deeply conservative. For that matter, I'm looking for, you know, what it is that could actually hold us together in the face of just now unimaginable you know, suffering and oppression and pain, you know, and darkness.

that kind of more productively than Hannah Arendt. Okay, Yeah, I guess the first thing that's important to say is that given what we're up against, right, that despair is warranted. That's really central for me, and that it's not you know, I say this kind of flippantly, but not really because I say, you know, it's not a sin, right, I mean, you know for Catholics it's like one, I'm not Catholic, but I was raised in a conservative Christian family. But you know, despair is not a sin, okay, as some

would say. It's not like moral weakness or a flaw in your character. It's entirely understandable. In fact, it's rational on some level. But but given those caveats, right, it is dangerous. It can lead to some very dark places almost by definition, right, it is those dark places, and and so it's dangerous, and it's defeating, you know, especially politically, like for anyone engaged in social and political movements, it's defeating.

So it's something that needs to be worked through, preferably with others, like preferably in community, right if possible, or you know, like myself, with a therapist. You knows, as

I did and still do. You know, but I think I can honestly say that I've I've learned to live with despair or you know, even the kind that has led me at times to question my own desire to live, you know, like I've never really been truly like in a suicidal place, Like I've never attempted to end my life, but i've but I've been close to that, I think, And and it's worth also saying that, you know, anyone listening to this, if that's where you are or you

know have been there or are there now, please please like talk to talk to someone, Talk to your friends, talk to your closest friends or loved ones, someone you trust, you know, if you need to talk to a therapist, please reach out. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is nine to eight eight. Yeah, I mean, I take this. I take this very seriously. I don't I don't lightly write about this, you know, it's a I take it seriously as a response, you know, my responsibility as a writer

broaching this topic in public. But really, uh, you know, we don't want to lose you. You know, we don't want to lose anyone. We can't afford to lose you. You know, you're needed and you're loved, and there is help if you reach out for it. So I just want to say that. But there's more, so much more

to be said on this. But I guess the most important thing also is that about you know, the way I come at it in this book is I found that what's required for me to live with my despair, Like, I don't believe this despair is like an end point. There was a beautiful essay by Hanef Abdekery in The New Yorker recently about despair. I think it was called in Defense of Despair.

So what I found I needed was not just some kind of quote unquote hope you know which I mean, what does that word even mean anymore in the context of climate like we really have to I mean, now, I know a lot of people do use that term and have written about it beautifully, and so I think there are good answers to that. But but I just needed something sturdier, like I needed, like I said, resolve, Like for me, hope is abstract, it's you know, resolve

is visceral. It's like in your body, it's what you Yeah. So I had to actually kind of let go of hope, you know, any kind of abstract, cost free hope, you know, in order to find my resolve.

have have done this. I'm certainly not the only one, and shout out to Mary Heglar, who I know as a friend of drill and is someone who I think has has done a wonderful job over the years of being of that emotional honesty you know, that kind of not just intellectual honesty, but emotional honesty about about dealing with this, uh, with this stuff. And you know, I think if if there's something I can say that is, you know, for lack of a better word, hopeful.

words for it. But if I could say something, you know, yeah, like positive, it's that I think what I have found is that for me, the resolve is found in relationship to other people. It's found in other people, It's found in each other. Right, Like the title of my first book was what We're fighting For? Now is each other right, And so for me, the source of my resolve is that human solidarity. It's it's you. You know, it's you, Adam, It's you and all the folks that drilled and everybody

listening to this podcast. You know, it's like, y'all are the source of my resolve at the end of the day. And I think that what I you know, I've found over the course of a decade and a half working in social movements, you know, mainly the climate justice movement, is that's what it is for most people. That's what keeps us going is each other and that sense of solidarity. That might sound somewhat pat or something, but sometimes the simple things, simple statements are true.

the book. And you talk, you know, whether it's Camu or Hannah or Rent or some of the others, there is this idea that they come back to a lot that you surface in your own book, which is, you know, a real human being in front of you versus an abstraction of the concept of humanity. You know, describing people, let's say, as superfluous is sort of a key tenet of a totalitarian state, totalitarian way of seeing the world.

Can you talk about that a little bit, you know, to talitarianism as a way of understanding the climate crisis. And I feel like we don't we hear a lot about Hannah Rent and other philosophers these days for good reason, Yeah, but we don't hear it in the context of climate as much necessarily.

I mean, we can go back well before the mid twentieth century and look at the system of chattel slavery or the global slave trade, or definitely colonialism, and which closely related of course, And as I think it was a mess Are who made the seminole argument that in some ways totalitarianism and fascism and in Europe in the twentieth century was sort of was colonialism coming home to roost in Europe. But what struck me about that in

relation to the climate crisis. I was trying to somehow come to grips with what kind of mindset enables someone in a political system to pursue relentless expansion of fossil fuels in the face of the science that we have. And as we all know, the leaders of the fossil fuel industry and the lobby and the politicians who are all part of that, they know full well what they're doing. They know full well what the climate science says, and.

And it had to do with the kind of that this belief in the limitless nature of power, okay, and a kind of pursuit of power and domination that requires yes, turning you know, entire populations of humanity and and you know, really everyone under its sway, treating them as superfluous meaning you know, not at all useful or relevant to the ultimate end, which is, you know, complete domination. And if you think about it, that is precisely what the fossil

capital regime really is pursuing. It is a form of global domination, you know, it is it is subjecting the entire human population to these catastrophic consequences and to the power, the sheer economic and political power of this industry and its political regime. Right. You know, I could probably do a better job of articulating all. Read the book. Read that chapter. It's the first chapter of.

he was deeply involved. He was a martiniquean French black writer and psychiatrist who was educated in France and ended up getting deeply involved in the Algerian War of Independence, the Algerian revolution that threw off French French colonial rule. I write about Phenoe in the context of Gaza and

the genocide that we're now seeing there. I was looking to that because again I have this sense that the climate struggle, climate justice struggle will never really be as radical as it needs to be, as fearless and as serious as it needs to be, until enough enough people are desperate enough to really lay everything on the line.

You know, as in the history of anti colonial liberation struggles, the climate justice struggle, the fight for a habitable planet and a livable human future in which justice is still possible, will not be radical enough or fearless enough until enough of us are desperate enough to risk everything. And then the question, maybe the only question left at this hour, is whether we will hold on to our humanity in

our desperation. I look at phenomen because he he is in so many ways and has been ever all through the you know, beginning in the in the that great

period of anti colonial independence movements in the sixties. Once The Wretched of the Earth was published, he became this icon of the anti colonial struggles, right and and this voice and this you know, great prophet of and that book famously opens up with this discussion of violence, of anti colonial violence in particular, and he's been held up as this kind of apostle of unlimited violence against against

the colonizer. And you know, as I've as I started reading about phenol and then really closely reading the book, it occurred to me that he and others have seen this as well, not just is that he's actually not that, you know, he always he always affirmed the right to armed struggle, you know, armed anti anti colonial revolutionary struggle. But he was not a proponent of of just unlimited

violence and especially against civilians. He was part of the f l End of you know, the Front the Liberal the Algerian revolutionary movement UH and and its tactics of you know, indiscriminate violence against French settlers and you know, civilians and against the French army armed forces was really

influential and including influential to the Palestinian liberation struggle. But one of the things that Phenol goes right on to say after that famous or infamous opening chapter is that is that an unlimited violence, and you know, UH, an indiscriminate violence can actually destroy a movement and can actually

just from a purely strategic standpoint, can be counterproductive. And then he goes on by the end of the book as a psychiatrist who treated patients you know, in Algeria both and and in Tunisia where he he and other f l IN leaders fled after the first couple of years of the of the war. He did all sorts of patients he treated, you know, Algerian independence fighters and French civilians and French military and police who had been involved in torture and in all kinds of atrocities against

the Algerian population and so on. And that final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth is incredibly powerful and eye opening in just the way PhNO somewhat subtly because he wasn't going to just he wasn't going to just you know, denounce the FLN's tactics. Don't and I don't think that he ever would have, honestly, but he was complicating the whole thing. He was showing the costs, the very real, undeniable human costs of that kind of a war.

And what's very clear is that he's focusing on the individual person, you know, the costs at that individual, individual, personal level. And when you look at some of Phenon's other writings, famously Black Skin, White Masks, which was his first major book, which is still today valued for its insights into race and colonialism, he did adhere to a kind of universal humanism. That's what he wanted, you know.

I mean, even someone like Edward said, who you know, you know, you won't find a better anti colonial theorist than Edward said, you know, pointed out about Phenol that he wanted a kind of humanism in which the colonized and the colonizer, or the European and the Algerian or whoever, were able to come together. That's pretty idealistic, right, I mean, but it was worth it was really worth delving into.

And so there has been talk about a climate movement that adopts a more Funonian approach, right as opposed to a Gandhian approach. Famously in Andrea's Mom and his big blockbuster, if there was ever an unlikely bestseller, it was his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

And I ask what that would really mean, and I think, like, oddly enough, it doesn't necessarily mean a violent climate movement.

I mean, it probably mean means, And I personally have come around to the conclusion that, yes, I accept the idea that some sort of violence, some sort of even armed struggle, might one day be justifiable, you know, it might even now be justifiable in the in the case of you know, climate catastrophe and climate injustice in some ways because it is a form of colonialism, it is a form of totalitarian you know, domination.

and this topic is always personal. But I think the reason we need to be asking ourselves that question is that I feel strongly that we're going to need, and we need right now and have needed for a while, a kind of movement that is willing to take big risks, and that requires individuals who are willing to take big risks.

You know, it doesn't mean, by any means that everybody in the movement, any everybody needs to be willing to take large, you know, huge personal risks that are like our legal or physical risks, you know, not saying that at all, but there is something to be said about a kind of risk, aversion that has existed, you know, in our politics and in our and in the certainly the mainstream climate movement for a long time. You might just say it's an aversion to political risk or whatever

and risks. Now, let's let's be clear, like the risk level has gone way up since the inaugurate second and auguration of Donald Trump and so, and these are real and these are not evenly distributed, right, risk is not evenly distributed by any sense of the imagination, right any stretch.

Someone like me, a white guy like me, you know, my level of risk is considerably lower than a lot of other people who I've worked with over the years, and you know, done actions with and worked side by side within the climate movement, and certainly right now when you look at the kind of action that's being taken to protect communities in la for example, from mass deportations from ice and we're talking about people taking real risks.

But the point is, the point is when people are desperate, when people are oppressed, when people are we can look to the history of of of movements by oppressed peoples for inspiration and for examples of of movements that have been willing to take enormous risks, right, and I think that it's important to recognize that we're in that we're in that position now. You know, again the risk isn't evenly distributed, but even even someone like me or you

is facing a level of threat and let's say it oppression. Uh, that's that's, you know, something we've never never faced before, you know, whether it's just climate change, or whether it's the political situation, whether it's fascism. That said, I'm I'm in I'm in favor of a kind of movement that is willing to break things, that is willing to you know, within within reason and without trying to harm other people.

You know, is is willing to to go out and create a crisis, create in some ways create chaos, uh, for the fossil fuel industry, and force a kind of crisis on them that they've never had to really face before. And Indale's all sorts of risks, you know. I talked about this with Andrea's mom. You know, it's like, of course, everything from political blowback to security state repression, you know,

are our increasing fascist police state that we're facing. But we got to ask ourselves, at what, at what point you know, does this become unavoidable? Right, what point does it become unavoidable? You know, I've worked in spaces and and I've worked on direct action campaigns where these kind of risks were taken very seriously. I haven't I haven't

ever sabotaged anything. But but okay, something else to say on that is that I think it's really important I say this in that in that same chapter you were just quoting from really important to acknowledge that going out and committing some kind of quote unquote revolutionary act, right, like blowing up a pipeline or whatever, that in itself does not make a revolutionary movement or a revolutionary politics. So so called revolutionary tactics do not make a revolutionary

politics all by themselves. Only movements can do that, right. So, for me personally, in order for that kind of radical action to really make sense, it would have to be

first of all, very carefully considered as strategic. It would have to be sustained, you know, not just one offs, right, and it would need to have the support the backing of Now, obviously that backing may not be public, it may not be explicit over you know, but it would have the backing of a movement, right of a of a large movement, and those conditions do not currently exist.

So I don't think it would necessarily make any sense to go out and sabotage a pipeline or whatever at this moment, because I don't think those It might be just a waste of effort and a waste of a life, you know, being sent to prison. But then again, if we're, if we're collectively working toward that kind of you know, explicitly, that kind of of a strategy, that kind of a goal, I think those conditions certainly could exist, and maybe sooner

rather than later. You know, I think there are a lot of people in this country and internationally who are getting who are getting to this point. I think those copies are really important.

of substantive political change. Is that a fair way to summarize it.

social movement theorizing and study history, which is the radical flank. Now, the climate movement has had a radical flank for a long time, ever since, certainly even you know, certainly even before I got into it back in like twenty eleven or so, and I reported on on and wrote about a lot of the some of the people who were very much part of that radical flank back in the earlier years of the movement, sort of around the Keystone

fight and so on. There's the radical flank effect, you know, has been seen many times in history, and it opens up space, you know, political space for the main The more you know, mainstream part of the movement, the sort of political inside game to work, it can and it can also kind of shake things up and break up, break up a situation that's become kind of ossified, right, so it can create new dynamics that you know didn't

exist before. This might be a good place in the conversation for me to I first wrote it back in twenty nineteen, kind of the peak of or almost the peak of Green New Deal advocacy and the building of the Green New Deal Coalition, which, by the way, as critical as I may be at times, you know, that was the most hopeful thing that I had ever seen.

And I still think, you know, we need to be looking back to that period of like twenty eighteen to twenty twenty, when the Green New Deal Coalition was coming together.

well to the left on climate. Build Back Better wouldn't have existed without the Sanders campaign and the Green New Deal being at the center of that, right, That's why we had people like Varshny Prakasha, the Sunrise Movement and sitting you know, being as part of the Sanders team that sat down with the Biden team and hashed out

what became Build Back Better. Right now, of course that was all eviscerated and became the Inflation Reduction Act, which, as useful as it has been for spurring you know, clean energy development in this country, obviously was not anything like a Green New Deal, even though of course it's labeled that by everyone on the right, you know, but that's a whole other.

movement into the conversation into the organizing. Right. So when we think about the climate justice movement or the climate left and its relationship to the broader left, okay, I think is crucial. I've felt for quite a while now that the time for a mere climate movement or even climate justice movement has passed. That I think it had

passed even by twenty nineteen, okay. And what I mean by that is it's clear that a climate movement, or even what we call nowadays the climate left, is never going to build enough just sheer political power on its own to literally overthrow the fossil capital regime. Right. And I think of something that Olaf M. E. Taiwa wrote last year in a really good piece in Boston Review.

He made it so explicit where he said something like, you know, the strategic imperative is that the strategy has to be the complete defeat, the utter defeat of the combined interests of oil, gas and coal producers, right in order for any of our climate justice goals to be even a remote possibility. I think it's pretty clear that no individual, kind of siloed social movement on the left is going to build the kind of power required to

do that. So what we need, and I think what we've always needed, is not so much a climate movement or a climate left as an actual left, you know, like a resurgent revolutionary left, you know, and revolutionary can mean all sorts of things, right, But I'm mainly talking here about political revolution, you know, maybe something a little more sweeping and transformational than you know Bernie was talking about in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty where he popularized

the phrase political revolution. Right. But what we're talking about is a left, a movement of movements, a popular front, if you want to call it that that has both climate survival okay, so meaning deep decarbonization and economic and social justice right at its core. Right, And that was the idea of the Greed and is the idea of the Green New Deal coalition, right, But it needs to

be expressly revolutionary or transformative in its goals. It's political goals, and that isn't going to happen with any one individual movement on the left, it will take the entire life and then some coalition building will will mean including the center left in that. That's not something that's really on the table right now, which could be, which is another reason for you know, despair, right, because we need that, We needed this yesterday, we needed this ten years ago.

But you know, I think that there's a lot of self blame, self recrimination in a way in the climate movement, a lot of you know, this feeling that we have failed. But I'm not really sure why we've put that entire like world saving burden on ourselves as climate activists. You know, it's not like climate activists can do this on our own, right, you know, it's not just a climate.

decades ago. Right. There are all sorts of reasons why it didn't, and some of that is the blame of climate activists and the environmental movement for sure, Right, But at some point you got to ask yourself, like Why wasn't there something like a Green New Deal coalition bringing labor and racial and social justice into the you know, one big movement. Why wasn't there that twenty years ago? Because it was clear years ago what we were facing.

despair is a reflection of being honest. It seems like, again not just the climate movement, but the center and the left more broadly, we have engaged in what, in hindsight seems like at least a decade of this new climate denial, of thinking, reassuring ourselves that piecemeal, incremental, market driven, technocratic tweaks to the way things are can solve this problem. Whatever solve means, whatever solve. But yeah, can you talk

about what that? I guess why you think of this as a new form of climate denial.

I mean, climate sciences has been quite clear. I mean, the IPCC itself came right out and said in twenty eighteen that you know, to you know, in its famous report on one point five degrees C and the difference between that and two C and what would be required to actually achieve one c one point five C, which is now pretty much the game. That game is up. I mean, we're already passing it, but they've made it very clear that it was going to require unprecedented transformative

change at the political and economic level. So what I'm talking about, though, is a kind of political denialism, you know, or maybe call it just wishful thinking, Okay, might be kinder way to put it. It's inconceivable that our current two party system are current the Democratic Party that we have today as the only opposition to MAGA and the right and the full control of the false fuel industry over our politics at this point.

you know, is capable of what we're talking about. And so clearly there has to be at the very least a kind of political revolution within the Democratic Party, but more likely, in order for that to even be a possibility, there has to be a broad, broad, uh you know, bottom up you know, mass uprising of some sort kind of you know, truly mass movement that can force the issue and that can really bring things to a halt, right,

And so there has been taught. One of the most positive developments I think in recent years has been, uh, maybe longer than just recent years, has been the call from the UAW and you know Sean Fayne for kind of synchronous strikes right in twenty twenty eight, and you know, basically a general strike, the idea of a general strike, I mean, that's the level of political uprising that we're

talking about. That's the kind of mass movement that we're talking about, right It's got to be at that scale and that level, and that isn't happening right away, and it can't really happen. It can't just you know, you don't just snap your fingers, and you know, a guy like me doesn't just write an op ed piece saying we need a political revolution, that something to just organically materialize. Right.

It's like, as Jane mcleavy, the great labor writer, late great labor writer and organizer, always said, right, there are no shortcuts, and she was referring specifically to, you know, within labor organizing. But I think it's true broadly of left you know, mass movement organizing. There's not really a shortcut to this. Now. On the other hand, we are

not starting from scratch, right. There's been a lot of movement building over the last decade, and I think we can continue to build on that where we need to be, and there are some real positive developments in that era, you know, along those lines.

might come off that way. It does feel like there will come a point when, again paraphrasing you hear that enough of us are desperate enough that something there will be the conditions for such a movement to come together.

that has circulated for a long time. Right, We've known for decades and people have warned that, you know, climate change itself could very easily give rise to the kind of you know, social situation, social breakdown that could lead to fascism. And of course we've had forms, certainly fascistic forms of control and governance, you know, in this country and elsewhere for a long time. But I don't think

what you said there is fatalistic in the least. I don't see it that way, because the whole premise right is to fight on no one In my book, is talking about folding up their tent going home, right, I mean, all right, but it's it's it's being honest and facing up to the conditions that we have and that we are facing, and that what we are going to be

living into in the coming decades. And so those are the conditions under which we're going to have to practice politics, than which we're going to have to build movements, and you know that we're going to have to fight, and in some ways that's going to make our task far more difficult, and you know, maybe in some ways it might actually open up opportunities.

And again, I can't stress this enough. You know, the the healthiest things I do, the healthiest things in my life are being part of communities, Being part of communities of people who are actually working together on this. Being in isolation, being a self sufficient individual, you know, is not the way.

is doomed to fail. And I found it interesting to the way you talk about them getting all sorts of balloons.

Like I think that it's never that simple. And most of the people I know and have been in deep conversation with in the climate justice movement, and you know, people of all all identities, one thing that we seem to agree on is that that that's fart, is that that that's far too simplistic, That that that a healthy community and a healthy movement values every individual right at the same time, that we recognize difference, and that we

especially recognize differences of privilege and of you know, social oppression. Right. So, so all that said, I guess what I'm trying to do, or what I realized at some point, is that I wasn't. I'm just not willing to give up, you know, a sense of universal humanism, a sense of universal human solidarity, right, Like, and I think it's important, you know, I'm looking back to these writers who are part of the liberal humanist tradition.

I mean, look, Hannah Arendt and Albert Camu are not necessarily authors thinkers that you'd expect to find in a book published by Haymarket. Okay, the Market Books, a self described radical left publisher, right, I mean, these are these these folks are are liberal humanists, and they have a lot to answer for. I mean, that tradition has a lot to answer for, right, But I'm not willing to throw out the humanist baby with the liberal bathwater, you know,

Like I'm not a liberal anymore. I'm I'm I'm far I'm way too far left to be considered a liberal, right right. But I do consider myself a universal humanist, and I think it is possible there is such thing as a as a radical left humanism.

are totally capitalism, and those are totally intertwined. But it also refers to a kind of radicalism I don't want to say merely of tactics, right, like the willingness to go sabotage of pipeline or something, but kind of on a personal level, that willingness to do the things that others will find extreme to do and say, the things that will be called extreme, called unreasonable, well outside the Overton window, you know of polite discourse, polite and reasonable discourse.

And so I think, what does that look like? Well, we can look at all sorts of examples from history, right, I mean, the abolitionists were were the radicals of their time, and we're considered dangerous and extreme, and you know, pretty much in every successful social movement in American history alone, you can look back and the people who led those movements were the radicals of their time, and they were considered extreme and they and they had that radical analysis too, right,

that's what was driving those movements. So yeah, Like for me, the word commitment then is, let's say I reach a point where I am I get it. I've kind of reached that point intellectually and internally, you know, in terms of my result to you know, take action or say the things that need to be said. The commitment part, I think has to do with the long haul, staying in it, sticking with it for the long haul. That really is what the book is all about. Right. Where

does that kind of commitment come from? I don't know. I don't know. The best answer I have is that it comes from my comrades, right, from that collective sense of solidarity. Right. But that's in some ways too easy an answer, you know. I think just each one of us it's spiritual. You know, for lack of a better word, it doesn't mean it's religious in any like conventional sense,

but for some people it is. For me, it actually is, but it's it's somehow it requires a willing to, you know, an introspection and a level of self inquiry into parts of ourselves that we don't really understand.

and strife and hardship, but certainly doable. So I am very grateful for you for writing the book and for this conversation, So thanks very much when really enjoyed it.