The media. So Trump is kind of moving like a bull in a china shop, or rather a bull and a missile shop. You know, I think that's a more apt analogy. The system of government wasn't exactly benign beforehand, you know. Yeah, I think it really needs to click for people that Trump is not truly exceptional mm hmm. Rather he's a product of the normal that people seem to be uni for.
Yeah, you know.
And the other issues we're dealing with too.
Yeah. I think like this is the the crux of what comes next. Right, It's like we have this, like I don't want to I don't want to disparage people. We have this tendency in American politics, this liberal tendency, progressive liberal tendency. Even to think that, like basically things have been magnificent until the first week of November in twenty sixteen, right, that America was progressing on this like linear pathway towards total quality and justice for all, and
that what's happening now is an aberration. It's the idea that there's a few individuals conspiring, rather that there is a system which inherently creates interest which we're opposed to our own.
I guess, yeah, exactly. It's like all of these these these problems, the genocide we're waging long before Trump came into power, you know, the economic strains people are feeling today that people have been feeling for decades for their entire lives. You know, the climate crisis that is only worse and this time is going on. You know, all of this is a product of that normal, of that pre Trump normal. And I still hear people asking, you know, when are things going to go back to normal? When
can we settle down? When will we go back onto the track of normalcy? And well, if you're listening to this podcast, I think you already know what time it is. This is it could happen here. I'm Andrew Sage and I'm joined.
By James again here to talk about the new normal.
All right, and welcome, thank you. The new normal, the ever shifting normal, the phantom of normal and why it is that it's really not coming back, and why normalcy as a concept is actually pretty weird. So part of I think what feeds into this notion of normal is this myth of progress that people are obsessed with. You know, recently read this book Progress by Samuon Miller McDonald and I would like to do a review of it at
some point for the podcast. But the short of it is that it gets into just how pervasive this concept of progress is in kind of tripping people up and keeping us serve insistems that don't serve us. You know, you mentioned progressives Eulier, and you know, even that notion
I think of being a progressive. He kind of calls that into question in the course of the book, going from ancient times to talking about a religious sense of a promised land to the sort of modern sense of a secular or technological progressive improvement or a social progressive improvement. He identifies it as a story and a story that's so powerful that it acts like a sedative. You know, we don't engage with the degree in reality the world around us, because be wrapped up in this all powerful
feet were balance of progress. The progress is linear, that we are ever striving forward, you know, and we point to examples of things like social progress. But as he quotes in the book, it's like what Malcolm X said. You know, if I stick a knife into you and I only pull it out three inches, that's our progress. Put it out six inches. That's our progress nine inches. That's a progress. Progress will be, you know, removing the
knife completely and mending the wound. But I would take it a step further and say that is it really progress to go back to a state that already was? Is it progress to abolish slavery when there was a time when slavery did not exist? You know, going back to a previous defaulted state is not necessarily contributing to Thenat same thing with patriarchy, you know, patriarchy did not
always exist. Eroding and abolishing the patriarchy reaching a point where the limitations placed on women are no longer there? Can we call that progress or suggest rectifying a previously imposed state? And so these are some of the questions he grapples with. And there's also, of course, the techno utopian promise of you know, we getting self driving cars any minute, you know, fusion energy AI and didn't work forever. You know, all these things are blind to the social
ecological reality of collapse. But what else would you say, might see this myth showing up in politics? I think I covered a good few, but I might be missing something.
Yeah, Like, I mean it's almost in everything, right, Like it's a fundamental myth of liberal capitalism. I guess, like it also underlies a certain logic of colonialism, right, the idea that like progress towards that then a neoliberal state is this can be like the logic of explicit or
less explicit colonialism, I guess. But like you see it there too, right, Like you see it in the sort of do you see a lot in nineteenth century it's very explicit the idea to uplift, civilize and christianize our little brown brothers.
Yeah, the civilizing miss yeah, yeah, yeah.
The white man's burden and these things that became very very on vogue in the late nineteenth thirty twentieth century. I suppose you see it a lot there too, right.
Yeah, that's all notion. I think that Ian's released with the concept of civilization when you have that civilized other divide that binary of the civilized and the barber area and all the civilized and the savage, and how that gets turned into this mission that civilization expands, that you bring those savage peoples into the fold and you slowly, you know, bring them up, make them upright men, and
closer to being human than the state that they were in. Previously, and the whole narrative around that's what has as it has evolved with time, led to the situation a bit in now. Yeah, and there's this idea as well that even when there are these ruptures in normal, that everything
will go back to its right place. But as of people say, you know, history is a series of unprecedented things, you know, And one of the unprecedented things in history that I wish people would realize is not ever going to come back, is is that sort of post war economic boom, you know, that nineteen fifty era growth and excess that has become the default day that many people are striving to return to, when in reality, something like that is a historical normally driven by artificially cheap and
abundant energy. Yeah, you know, the normal that people are talking about sometimes it's just this fifty to seventy year fossil fuel binge, a binge that we are reaching the end of. And I think a fantasy to believe that we can replicate for all the time.
Right, Yeah, but it's the time that so much of the like the world that we exist in, was created, right, and like people almost see themselves as like a different species from human beings in the in the nineteenth century, right, Yeah, they can't conceive of society that way.
Exactly, exactly, And it's something that I've been well on because like, what a time to be alive to see, you know, personal cars being so ubiquitous. But the ubiquity of personal cars is an aberration. It's a historical laboration. It's not one that is likely to be sustainable in the long term. You know, even if there are electric cars taking a place of gas powered vehicles and we run out of gas oil, even the materials necessary to produce electric cars are not always going to be around.
They're not always going to exist. We can't supplement each and every individual person with a car for all of time. You know. Yeah, so many of the rare earth minerals that are again quite rare, we've we've spent them on things that may serve a novelty or an interest in the short term, but it's something that we can maintain forever.
You know. I hear people talking about this EI bubble, you know, and it is in the sense of the financial markets, the financial aspect of AI, and how it's affecting our perception of the economy and whether that bubble is going to burst economically. But I'm more interested in the EI bubble in the sense that how long can this EI everywhere thing persist when the material is necessary to maintain it because it is material, despite the sort
of cloud marketing they get associated with it. How long until we run out of those materials, until those material needs cannot be sustained.
Yeah, we keep shifting like the goalposts, but like the terrain, right, like you know, we okay, well, we've run out of fossil fuels, so that's fine. We will do electric, okay, we you know with the electric actually relies on our rares, so that's fine. We'll find a different thing to make batteries out of it for other than acknowledging that like we've created a system, or we'll just go.
To space yeah yeah, yeah, and.
And trash another planet for another few hundred years. You know, when you're driving your track and you have a lot of stuff in it and it's hitting the end of the rev counter, you know, like you're trying to pass someone,
it's bouncing. It's in the red zone. Like we've been running in the red zone certainly from most of this century, you know, since the Industrial Revolution, or certainly since the end of the Second World War, and like sustainability is a phrase that's been co opted, but like it's just not possible to keep doing it.
Yeah, I mean, it's really an anomaly, a blip in our timeline, I would say, and I think ruptures in that normal see, like the ruptural experience and now provides an opportunity for us to you know, take an egg at ramp to kind of control the transition, to control our descent. But instead, you know, it seems like we were just rapidly moving towards the more forceful transition, the transition made so by the laws of physics, and that transition I don't think will be nearly as pleasant as
it could be. You know. That's why a lot of people call it collapse. And that transition is being delayed currently with the collapse of the material resources and also
the collapse of the financial economic system. That stuff has been delayed by rent seeking, by new frontiers of exploitation, and by ramping up theft in parts of the world that we're not as pillaged as other parts of the world, or ramping up surveillance and violence to make it harder to resist, but eventually is going to hit, you know, and I hate that it makes me sound like a second comment of Jesus conspiracist or something like that, just
like well, yeah, it's coming, it's coming, you know, like like like I'm a prophet screaming into the into the streets. But you know, it may not be some kind of prophesiede end times, but we are approaching that point, you know, where that sort of narrative of economic roles going back
to normal. You know, there's this big group project of making the literature because that rise and tide will lift all boats, you know, the this is this story that everybody wins, that nobody will have to lose anything because the power will just keep getting bigger. It has to come to an end.
It's amazing how long it's lasted, right, Like certain group of society has been able to make the rest of society believe that the pie will just keep getting bigger when the pie has got smaller for most people, you know, certainly for the last few decades, but arguably you know, like lives have become worse for us since the Industrial Revolution in some ways.
Right exactly, And you know, people will point to improvements in health and sanitation. Sure, you can have improvements in health and sanitation without all this other baggage though, yeah, you know. Or you can have improvements in literacy without literally poisoning our fresh water and bleaching our oceans and killing off biodiversity by the millions of species.
Yeah, it's not a like a package deal, right, Like we can have vaccination against diseases without having super fun sites. We didn't need one to make the other. It's it's not a like this way or the Dark Ages exactly exactly.
For example, all London had to do, I mean I'm oversimplifying, but all London had to do was stop dumping their sewage in the Thames.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a remarkable. It's not that hard. But like just look at the disposal of hazardous waste and the way that rather than being like, huh, maybe we should stop making waste that will be hazardous for centuries, for the better part of one hundred years, we've just been finding somewhere else to put it.
Yeah, just keep just keep dumping it. Yeah. Even as a child, I was like, what are we supposed to do with all these sense the garbage, Like, like are we just going to keep on piling it up until we reach the moon.
I mean, yeah, it's like it in San Diego. They dump these dump it in the bay. There's a whole part of our bay which used to be a landfill site. And like I like to to free dive sometimes I would be practicing or diving in the bay or whatever, and like you dive down and be like, the fuck is a barbecue grill doing on the bottom of the ocean, And people just continue to chuck shit into the bay, right, Like, even though we have another landfill, what we put it now?
No, but you see, games, it's like that barbecue grill was seven dollars on TMU. Yeah right, you can't pass up that deal, you know.
Yeah, and then when it turns out to be absolutely crap, it will be on our planet for longer than any of us. But we've created a system where there's no disincentive to buy a TMU barbecue grill, use it once, and then throw it into the bay. And like we can't see that that's a problem.
Yeah. Yeah. Because of how this system is set up, you don't have to think about, wait a second, why is the barbecue grill seven dollars, you know who is suffering so that this barbecue real.
Resemble Yeah, right, because they were so detached from that, right, Like, despite being so connected, we're also so far away from the people who the misery is a consequence of our consumption or of the system which which makes our consumption the way it is exactly.
And you know, instead of thinking about how we can make society resilient, how we can reasonably and ethically and with consideration for seven generations use the resources that we have without endless throughput all the years, continue to chase growth, They continue to chase progress perpetually like a cancer. Yeah, you know, and everybody is seeing the consequences. At this point, the work situation is getting worse because these platforms, these
these employers are finding ways to game the laws. You know, we're seeing shrinking margins and sit in sectors. Because when you rely on growth, when that growth comes to an end, there's nowhere else to grow. You have to squeeze what there is. What's the phrase squeeze blood out of a stone. Yeah, you know, you have to force over work. You have to and shittify existing services so that you can extract
more subscriptions. More pay months, more upgrades, whatever the case, maybe the liverability of entire cities of it has been wiped out because you know, you have ABNB and a private companies holing out something as basic as hose in for all, and so the pressure is to keep the whole machine run and just how grease any long term considerations. But like I keep saying, this normal was never sustainable.
I will say, though, when we criticize the system and we call it out and we talk about how these leaders are pushing things in a certain direction, they are. But at the same time, it's easy to fall into this notion that they are manipulating the whole thing. You know, that they manage the system in its entirety. It's tempting to see the system as coherent, you know, to act like it's all piloted by one vidual or group yea
as some wise or malevolent parental figure. And you know, these institutions, they all rely to varying degrees under the appearance of competence. Right. But I think what recent times has revealed is that things are a lot messier than that.
That political leaders know that they don't know, but won't admit that they don't know, or they don't know that they don't know, and in either case they are pretending or believing that they have this grip on things they can anticipate and smooth out the shocks to the system. You know, there are those who think that if they share the honest truth that they could trigger a panic
into populace. So they think they're doing something you know, brave and benevolent by not giving people all the information they need and whose yet they're failed by sharing all the information that needed to make accurate decisions, that they might lose investments, They might lose investors, you know, that the economy will take a hit as a result. That's why you have situations where like when the Texas gridfield in twenty twenty one, that the officials were insistent that
it was stable. Yeah, and so they wasn't, you know. Or for the years the UK's hass water, it's water infrastructure is used, continues to claim that things under control and sewage was still getting into people's reverse.
Yeah, you know. Yeah, Like I think a lot about Flint, Michigan, where the water that people have to drink to survive is killing them. And this has been happening We've known about did for a decade, and there have been a series of politicians for both parties who have just been like, yeah, no, don't worry, we've got this cupboard, and like that. We
fundamentally have not got this cupboard right. But the machine is moving so far so no one person can can stop and turn it around because the machine will just bulldoze them.
Yep. It's not as steady as unstable as it puts forward. You know. In fact that that whole image of the system as coherent as stay as stable. I think it also serves to keep us from defying it. Yeah, you know, because we get this sense that yeah, this is just like this, this behema of this all powerful love crafty and entity that us mayle individuals can truly challenge when there are things that we can do directly to throw you know, spooks in the wheel if that's the expression, you.
Know, it's something in this spooks Yeah, Spanner where sticking to spokes maybe right?
Yeah? Sure? Would you say there was like a bit secular moment when you realize that nobody actually knew what they were doing though, Yeah, I'm trying.
To think if it was like a momental recognition for me, or like a sort of gradual one, you know, I think a few of the times, like you see it a lot when you travel more, right, because the perception that like we are helping here, we've got this under control. I think with immigration it's a great example actually, right, Like so I've obviously spent a lot of time with the immigrants, and I think you see this. I remember in twenty eighteen we had the migrant caravan, right like,
there have been many migrant caravans. This one was just coincided with a mid term in a way that allowed it to become like a political football, and the American government is like, we are stopping them at the border so we can check if everyone's okay, and government in Mexico is like, well, we are taking care of them.
And get there and you're like fuck, like these people haven't had water today, and like at that point, you know, I was already sort of predisposed to thinking that perhaps the state didn't have all the answers, and like to be clear that Mexican states a lot more than the US state in this instance and provided these people with a place to be, which it would have been much worse if they hadn't had that, But like it was
just this realization. I was with a few friends. All of us happened at the time to be full time bicycle people, so we didn't have jobs that needed us
to be like in a place at nine am. So that realization that like, if these people are going to get water today, it's going to be because we go to Costco and buy all the water bottles and then we we ride back whilst slowly destroying the suspension of this pickup truck because we've got so much weight in it and give them out, like because no one else is going to right, and like there's this whole world of NGOs and governments and states, so like didn't matter, right,
these people stidn't have water.
Yeah, there's a lot of rule for direct action still, Yeah, and the powers that be're not as competent as they may a first glance appear. In other words, if they say they have everything under control, don't believe them.
Yeah.
I think also that instability within the system is part of it, you know, it's part of how it works. It's part of what's necessary for it to keep going. The competitive tune of the gapitalist market, the shifts of industries that you know, upgroove people's lives just part of how the system operates, you know, the booms and bus in real estate. They all always for the powers that be to expand their wealth in some way, to expand their regions and territories, and people, for the most part,
just go along with it. You know. Daily life is complex as it is without having to grapple with the full scale of all the global issues, you know, the following the leader, just going along with what they say. It does give you some psychological breathing room. You know, it's hard to grapple the existential threats that we face. I don't have time too in many cases, right, especially when you have an administrative strategy that involves flooding the
zone with so much mess. It's so much drama, with so many different controversies and lies and incidents, that it feels like the best thing to do is just throw your hands up and you up. And then I'm speaking both from the perspective of what I'm observing in the Trinitian government and what I'm observing in the American government. But I see this at dude of raguns, callousness and corruption, it's like they're not even trying to maintain a veneer
of legitimacy or intelligence or anything like that. Studies go through the motions to provide the things that it claims it's necessary to provide, you know, but they're feeling not even that, and they're so cocky about it. Yeah, they're so careless about it too. So they're smiling in your face and lieing to you.
Yeah.
People do see what's happened, and they're responding in a couple of different ways. You know. They panic, of course, or they fall into conspiracies, or they deny that there is an actual problem. They continue to insist that everything is normal, that everything is fine. If they double down, they hustle harder, they consume more, they carry on as
if nothing's wrong. And there are those who see that something is wrong, but they see everybody else carrying on as if everything is fine, and so they go along as well, you know. Or there are people, of course, who disengage, who are burnt out to a numb who
are just drifting or going through themotions. But only a portion have turned to challenge the concept of normal itself, whether it is that they're experimenting with simpler living, developing some program for survival, some strategy either for themselves, for their household, of their community, engaging mutual support. And of course this is only a portion of the population because many of us like fishing water. You know, we can't
really recognize the socioeconomic structure that we are within. It's hard to recognize what you are immersed in as a thing itself. And some really, in seeing and reading about alternatives, they can get a glimpse of this normalcy and question to realize this system isn't natural or inevitable. There's an aberration destined to decline, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise. That the script of work, in consuming career,
in accumulating property in all is unnormal. That is actually kind of weird, you know, like it's strange that an entire society is dependent upon globe spanning supply chains, volatile markets, and oriented entirely around the court, evenens of elites. You know, it's strange that whiteness, maleness, cis, heteronous evilness are treated as the default, the starter kit, even though only a fraction of humanity fits in any one of those molds,
let alone the combination of all of them. You know, it's strange that normal is so narrowly conformist with those who don't conform, a marginalized It's strange that normal means an illusion of independence. The disguises the webs. You will always rely on that you can claim to be independent and say, yeah, well I just bought that seven dollar grill off Timu, and not think about the the well of relationships that brought that seven dollar grill to your
doorstep and eventually to the landfill. Yet to feel self sufficient while the system hides the label the ecosystems logistics and the people who them up.
I'm just thinking now about like people whose whole thing is being like homesteaders, but their homesteading is in itself a performance for the global supply or like the global market for distracting or entertainment or whatever you want to call it, right like, And they do not exist outside of those supply chains, like they are doing this performance of of like independence because they are so codependent, right like, Like they exist to generate like a revenue or affiliate
links or however influences make money. Sponsorship.
Oh yeah, it's like one of the influencers.
Yeah yeah, like there's a guy who I remember like a year ago, am because I'm like, I know broken inside. I had gotten to an argument with someone on x dot com. Oh yeah, this guy was like posing as a homesteader, and like, you know, I grew up on a farm, right, Like I've I spent lots of my life around like domestic animals and around domestic like I know how to fix things, I know what tools look like when you use them, and like this guy was very clearly just posing and posing a series of photos.
It just really like I don't know why that particularly threw me for a loop, right, but like the idea that this guy is performing performing independence for a system he himself is reinforcing. It was just such a strange thing to understand.
Yeah, a system means dependent on.
Yeah, exactly, a system he's entirely dependent on, like more so than most of us even, right, Like like he makes nothing other than photograph so that people look at on their phones, Like he makes no tangible product, Like at least if you're a you know, you could be a cabinet maker, right and yeah, you install kitchens for each people, but you know how to make things with
your hands. This guy just gets, you know, a saw that looks like I hadn't been used since the had Wardian era and stands around for photos next to a log in the same breath. I guess that I condemn that. I feel like the way that we deal with the end of this, it's the same way that we help each other get through the middle of this and the
collapse of it. Right, Like, I've seen people do mutual aid with such scarce resources and manage to make such amazing things, like both in terms of like physical objects and in terms of like these beautiful things we do for each other were so little, and like the ingenuity
that's still there. It's not like people have forgotten how to exist without team, right, but we just haven't created a way a situation where we have to and in mutual aid spaces, I sometimes feel like we already have the solution to this, which is to depend on and care for each other. It's just that we need that to be the way we do everything, not just some.
Stuff exactly exactly. You know, the whole homestead and fantasy is very comforting illusion and fiction in my view, because if we're talking about going back to the land, people who live on the land who live off of the land. They did so in community. Yeah, you know, very very very very rarely did someone live entirely by themselves without contact and anyone else. Because you can't be an axe maker and a carpenter and a cook and you know, a farmer and a hood and all these different things,
all of these different rules. A madisone maker all these different things at the same time. That is why we as a species have survived and succeeded, because we are able to share our skills with others and you know, collectively accomplished more than the summer of our parts.
Yeah, it's a fantasy. I was recently in a place called Chako Kanyon. I don't know if you've if you're familiar with Chako Kanyon at all, No, but there's this idea I think that like pre the arrival of capitalism, that's how indigenous people lived. And it's just not like like, yeah, this was a large, thriving communitium. I'm interested in Chako Kanyon because I'm interested in what you're talking about, like a society which consumed at an unsustainable level and then
collapsed and what came out of it. But what came out of it is what kept the working class people in that society of life throughout it, which is helping each other, right, Like, yeah, sure people had these little plots where they grew grain, but also like by doing their ceremonies, by coming together in community, they had something which could sustain them even when the economic reality completely changed for them. And it's like it's that part that
people forget right that they think they can. Yeah, they think they can grow their own food. Yeah you can. But when you need a new plow, what are you going to do? You're going to buy a forge on TMU? You know, like it's so detached from the way anyone has ever lived.
Yeah, it is, and it cannot lasts. And me personally, I would rather not wait until supply chains break down completely and stones wipe the slate and blackouts cut ale communication. I would rather wait for those things to create and sustain those networks of dependence, networks of interdependence, so it's local networks of aid and cultural practice and you know,
meeting of mutual needs. There's a saying that the sort of hustle bros would say that your network is your net worth and that I must concur you know, the community support and the share resources are going to matter a lot more than your personal purchase and power. Being part of something is emotionally easier than carrying everything alone. The matter now and the matter even more in the future,
as crisis makes the invisible all too visible. The normal that we remember is an illusion, but once you've seen it, you can't unsee. I think the departure from normal is an opportunity or chance to make something better, to be adaptable to the shocks that come with courage and with clarity, and I hope that this conversation is able to put towards what I'm sure that I'm not alone in feeling. That's all for me today. All power to people. Peace.
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