A media.
Humanity is not a parasite, but the systems we collectively uphold today are certainly parasitic. They maintain their hold on us due to our interdependence, as we rely on each other to survive. And these systems, as destructive as they are,
are how we know how to cooperate. And they also maintain their whole of course, through ideology, the sets of ideas about the world carried through religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture, etc. And to some extent they maintain their hold through violence. And so we can, and I believe we must break free from this parasitism. I believe there are other ways of relating with each other with nature, and I'll talk about those ways at the end. By the way, hello
and welcome. It could happen here. I'm andress Age Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined today by.
Mia Wong also here. Yeah, we're doing great introt yepee.
So I want to talk about paris Is the development of paristism over time, as discussed in Samuel Milla McDonald's book Progress, which I highly recommend quite an enjoyable read. So I actually really first heard about that book years ago before it was even out and I had reached out and I was like, oh, I would love to, you know, get a copy as soon as it's available and talk about it and stuff. And you know, I was at that point in my life, I was really
voraciously consuming these kind of grand narratives of history. And of course we know the flaws with these grand narratives. They have limited explanatory power. But I still found use in these narratives and understanding aspects and angles of his history, at least when you take a critical approach to them. Because I mean history is, as the name implies, a story.
You know, there are many interpretations and frameworks that can be used to explain or better understand different aspects of history, and so progress offers one framework through its three eras of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different forms can coexist, forms can come and go. It is in this sequential development as is sometimes posed. But there are trends that we can observe, and so at these three phases that McDonald discusses identifies particular ideas of progress,
forms of parasitism and egence of history. And I think it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics, and ecology that intertwine to make up history. Obviously not perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist a jacent approaches to tracing the development of the state in history. You know, Pt.
Gal Loose had worship and power. Jmec Scott has against the Green and in progress, although I don't think he is anarchist anarchista jacent in progress. McDonald's starts with the beginning of recorded civilization in three thousand BCE and looks at the way that many early states developed from a blend of religion, politics, and daily life. So I mean humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years before
recorded history, right, They spread across the globe. They experimented with all kinds of different social, political, and economic organizations that are now lost. Their time and the Dawn of Everything by David Grieber and David wen Grew kind of wrestles with some of this. In the early years of recorded history, there were many manners of approach to state development from roughly three thousand BCE to fourteen hundred CE.
This is the first phase of McDonald's timeline, human societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesonarica, and medieval Europe saw a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. McDonald calls this phase Heaven in the book, not to co sign it as an ideal, but illustrate the prominence of religious power in
this time period. And me I know, even hosting recently about the impact of religion and the seeming hesitance people have nowadays about actually engaging with what it means materially for the experience of domination in our day to day lives.
Yeah, well, and erstent thing you can you can look at sort of in that period is the emergence of states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes as the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems. Graver talks about this. I think that actually where a bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become like credit, are these things that are developed in order to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes.
And so you have the situation where you know, the things that are going to become the building blocks of economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history are developed in order to in order to fuel these sort of hierarchical massive complexes, where like just staggering amounts of resources are like fueled into into these sort of temple complexes. And that's a you know, that's a thing that continues to current present day.
Indeed, you know, indeed we have we have temple complex like what is temple complexes and this of megachurches nowadys, yeah, it's.
Like what is the megachurch? But like the temple complex is force?
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. That's the thing, right, like we are seeing an echo of this historical time period even in the present, because the idea of progress in this time and in these places was about progressing toward a higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods, you know, ensuring that different groups of people were in their proper place in that order. And so you had the development of religious laws and theologies and monumental architecture
which established this particular kind of order. And when disasters struck, whether it be floods or drought, cer invasions, this was a sign, a sign of the times perhaps that the order was breaking down, and so it's really funny to me that, you know, in this progressive account of the idea of progress that McDonald's talking about, you know, even the earlier ideas of progress have not entirely gone to be you know, they haven't been replaced by the next era.
They have just taken on subtler forms, and sometimes not as subtler forms.
Yeah, there's there's a concept that the journal Chwong uses where I mean they're specifically talking about like the ways that elements of like the Chinese I guess you call it the socialist regime are sort of taken and then used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing from biology called exceptation, where something like evolutionarily that was used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a new thing. So it's like, you know, you've like finn
becomes hand like that. I'm a lot of great biologists, but this is this kind of thing where like you have this situation where like, yeah, elements of like the old notion of what progress was, of like the sort of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are like excapation by the next thing that's going to happen, and that's taken by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing, and we still have our sort of like versions of it that have been taken through like countless numbers of
world systems.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely see that. Of course, there were differences and how they would have i think, approached religion and thoughts of religion compared to how we doe psychologically. In a time like that, they didn't really have this more prominent and culturally accepted secular line set that we have today where religion could even be seen as something separate from everything else, you know. For them, religion was whole reality, worked the seasons, the hardest illness, victory, and war.
All of this was interpreted through a secret lens. People knew what place they had in the cosmos, or at least thought about it in that lens, and they understood what role they had in the divine hierarchy on a material because I mean, we do have to think materially and not solely ideologically. These societies engage in what McDonald called continuous and regional parasitism to extract resources like food, labor, and land, and the agents of this parasitism are city states, kingdoms,
and empires. On the city state level, you had them dominating their immediate hinterlunds, and on an empire level, their conquering neighbors done for either integration and taxation or tribute or slavery. But due to the limits of the technology of the time, you know, they didn't have the instant communication and fast transportation that we do today, there were limits to how far an empire could spread. Even the largest empires had their limits and would often devolve power
or fracture. Tensions would begin to build as growing empires struggled to uphold central authority. Belief systems came into conflict,
and contact and intellectual traditions developed. Over time, governance would get more bureaucratic, religions would face reform due to challenges from within, and by the time that we approach the late medieval period around the thirteen hundreds and fourteen hundreds, at least from a europe focused account or Old World focused account, the world is indeed change it transition has begun from this Heaven phase to the next phase in
McDonald's framework, as in the nation phase from fourteen hundred to nineteen hundred, where we move away from a world of cosmic order to a world more distinctly human, a world of human order. Religion phasis, of course, but authority has begun to move from the heavens down to earth, an earth that could be observed, could be measured, navigated,
controlled by human beings. And so we see this in this time with the emergence of the sciences and the emergence of newly minted political theories, and the idea of progress in this time was redefined as expanding knowledge, increase in efficiency, mastering the environment. Hence the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, advances in avigation, and so on, and consequently parasitism as
a process becomes more disposed. Extraction would stretch across continents and would be carried by maritime tree routes, taking resources from different parts of the world, including sugar, cotton, spices, metals, and labor, all flowing through increasingly complex global systems and increasingly industrial supply chains. As wealth starts accumulating in certain regions thanks the extraction of others, you know, the rich is being built up at one place because of the
poverty being developed in another place. As the agents of this time of the kingdoms and empires but also newly minted corporate charters and nation states. To be clear, I'm not trying to say that these are these sole agents history in any of these particular periods, which is that they were significant. I don't want to deny the role of you know, the politics from below the rabble as Graba sometimes refers to them, would have also shaped the development of history.
Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too, and it's something you were talking about from the top. But as with all of these sort of like really really broad sweet books at history, this is capturing trends in a few places in the worlds as they moved. There are obviously many, many, many other things that are also coexisting
with all of these systems. At the same time, the entire world world in like two thousand BC is not just like mirror images of like the Shang dynasty everywhere, right, Like, there's yeah, a whole plethora of different systems that are interacting with each other from I mean, I can't even there's there's just an unbelievable sort of diversity of like cultural forms, some of which are states, some of which
are not. But yeah, when you're doing a macrohistory like this, you were looking at certain sets of thems and matching patterns with them. But that also is not We're also not saying here but that's literally everything that is happening on earth, because it's not. But yeah, just just want to get that in for the people who are gonna get very mad about this. We're are aware of the
presence of other narratives. We have. We have we have done our postmodernism training, we have done our historical archaeological stuff. I just what did this noted?
Of course, of course, and like I was saying, they had these other egenes, but for the particular narrative of focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters, and the nation states. And you know, nation states. We take them for granted now, but they really were not always a thing. You know, the idea of a group of people with a shared identity, language, culture, and history being artificially i would say, unified under a state. It has
to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know, you didn't have this concept of France until France was built and the whole world is suffered as a result. You know, yeah, you didn't have this concept of Italy. You didn't have this concept of Nigeria. You didn't have this concept. These nation states had to be constructed.
Yeah, even China, which is seen as like the sort of archetypical example of this, Like we have a bunch of records of people in the fifteen hundreds, and I think even through the sixteen hundreds, like going and talking to people in China and being like, yeah, You'reine, and the people are talking to are like, what the fuck is China? What are you talking about? Like we're like under this ruler, who's under this ruler, who's under this ruler?
Who's like yeah, exactly.
You know. So yeah, these things have to be constructed, and they were constructed a lot more recently than people think.
And then to actually get people to identify with them also has to be constructed over generations in some cases.
Yeah, and usually by you know, a process in which I mean the only way to cause people to have a positive identification with like a specific new bounded national territorial identity is to have it be posed against an other.
So yeah, what of these? What are these? Also like the question of the national, like the twentieth century national liberation movements is when you get like, for example, like pan Arabism, It's like, okay, like whose national liberation is this, because sure as fuck is not like the Kurds or Yazidi's it's you know. Yeah. This is all of which is to say what you were saying, which is this is a violent and bloody process that is a lot more recent that people understand.
Absolutely. This time also saw a lot of revolutions, bloody indeed, you know, the rise and fall of old powers and new powers. And this is also a phase I think that could be marked by its contradictions. You know, you had this rise and tide of ideas like liberty and rights, and you know, liberalism was developed in this period, as was socialism. But you also had obviously this vast industrial
exploitation of peoples and ecologies. We saw the development of the sciences and scientific classifications, but you also saw how that gave way to pseudo scientific justifications, inequality, you know, the create chain of being, the idea of the white being on top of everyone else. Yeah, we saw self determination for some and self determination not so much for others. As by the time we reach the eighteen hundreds, the
piece of change was exceedingly traumatic. And volatile industrialization, urbanization, communication and transportation converged to compress time and space. We see the booth of new ideas and reformed relations, and by the time we reach the early twentieth century, a new phase is taken shape. We are now in what McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning from nineteen hundred to
the present day. The system, the machine, whatever you want to call it, is this fast, interconnected set of systems that organize how we live, produce, consume, and even think. The system does not have, you know, a single king or figurehead that you can point to as the big bad, despite I think people's efforts to try and find a
big bad. It's really a web of processes and incentives and networks, complex bureaucracy and global markets and industrial and post industrial economies and mass communication and the underground economy and all these different things chugging along almost like it's beastly bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive the alliteration and like to thrown out of poetry every once to know. So the idea of progress becomes very economistic in this period.
It's focused on growth, output, productivity, effisiency. Our entire economy is basically organized around these metrics. That's the thing that people are worrying about. When they're on Fox Business or whatever, the Financial Times, whatever spaces of dialogue about the economy. The focus is not on actually all a people's needs being met. It's what's what's growth looking like this quarter? How efficient, how we exploit in the planet.
Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that the clip on CNBC that we played in the EDA a few weeks go, whenever this is coming out, where the CNBC anchor goes, Trump has threatened to wipe out a civilization. What does this mean for investors?
Yeah?
I saw that. I saw that.
That's horrifying, haunting, haunting. Shit.
The way that our economy has been built around these metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea of progress in this time tends towards the economistic, you know, the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism, and so on. And parstism in this system phase is as the name implies, systemic. To quote directly from the book, contiguous parstism had captured energy from additional societies and native, wild and domestic species. This is the parstism of the
first feeds. Disparate parisism, meanwhile, had captured energy from additionous societies, imperial so and both exotic, wild and intensively domesticated species abroad. And that's the second phase. And so the new form networked parstism captured energy from all of these as well, but with the addition of ancient species of plant to
animal in the form of fossils. This enabled concrete energy capture through increase in electrification, and then the digitization and extraction and production and abstract energy capture from extremely large, dense populations of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this system were built in the nineteenth century, it was only the twentieth century that it came to dominate endcode. So this parstism is networked on another level. You know, it
flows through global supply chains. It extracts fossil fuels, you know, coal, oil, gas power, maintains the entire con it maintains transportation, industry, agriculture, digital infrastructure, all of it world, as we've seen, has been built around these fossil fuels. And something as simple as blocking a helly Spawns street can have a diret impact on the entire world, much of which is yet
to be felt. Even as the strait has now been reopened, well, it has not been reopened about to be seemingly, I mean, Israel did viod this. He's fire though, right, so it probably will not be opened again.
Yeah, I mean even before that it hadn't been reopened. I I don't know. I have no idea when this episode is going to come out, So I I am standing for the record here.
Yeah, it's very hard to comc It's impossible.
It's like not impossible. It's extremely difficult to figure out whether the strait is open on an hour two hour basis.
Yeah, like fair, I don't know what the.
Fuck it's gonna be, Like, I don't know, Like maybe so maybe someone will have like filled the straight in by the time this episode comes out, like who knows, who knows? Yeah, yeah, sorry, I just I've been so straight pilled.
That's a fair point. That's fair point. I guess. The point I'm trying to make is even in the hypothetical scenario where this strait is fully opened, we're still going to feel the impact of that brief period of closure.
Yeah, for years.
Yeah, this is dunphased by the way. It's not just on the whole extraction of resources, of land of labor. You also notice that it extracts our attention as well, through the collection of data, through the increasingly efficient ways that it seeks to draw out eyeballs for the sake of advertising, for the sake of profit. And this unprecedented scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's merely borrowing from the future and from million year old ecosystems. Eventually, that
debt is going to catch up on us. In fact that it already has begun to catch up on us. We're not in the when climate change happens in the future. It is happening right now, and the Nation States are carrying on business as usual and business is booming. They are the agents of this processing phase. Do not care. This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these massive transnational entities. I want you to notice about this period is that they are the agents of this time,
even sometimes more than countries. Some of them, some of these corporations have more power than entire countries. And with the advent of mass communication and comblization, we also saw ideological coalitions which could be seen as another agent in
this phase. You know that the government's institutions, media, tech giants and movements that share a particular worldview and shape the narratives that determine what people be it workers, consumers, users, or citizens believe it's normal, necessary, and didn't never tell As a person living in this time, it is very difficult to see it. You know, you get used to a certain system. It's you know, it's like water to fish if you abstract and tangible, like, what are you
talking about this? There's nothing besides This can be the reaction you get sometimes and it is not on any one individual to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system, the biggest picture. Nobody I think sees all the machinations of the entire system. But nevertheless, the system sees you. You know, it sees you as part of its functioning. And to kind of bring it to close, what I want people to take away from this is that you
know you can be and you are an agent in history. Now, whether you are an agent of history that serves as a cog in the machine, or you are an agent of history that serves as a wedge in the machine. That's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth, deep inequality, technological advancement, military might, environmental stray, and atomization. The twenty twenties have been a world bind of a decade already and it's not even over yet.
Oh God, still fore worry. Yeah, this decade sucks.
It really does. But the system is not unassailable. Yes it can and it does adapt to our ruptures, but it is a lot more fragile than it puts forward, you know, to borrow from. I can't remember who said it, the concept of paper tiger. It comes from Chinese mythology. You're Chinese military philosophy.
Right, Yeah, like I know, oh Mao talks about it a lot. I don't actually know where it's from, but.
Yeah, yeah, but I say that to say that it's a paper tiger, you know, a particularly study paper tiger, but a paper tiger nonetheless.
Yeah, And never have the people who are attempting to write the paper tiger have like, never in the entire like history of modern capitalism has it been written by people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing. Nick, Never have people who understand the system so poorly been in charge of it, and they are, you know, they are already kind of cheering it apart because they don't understand it at all.
Yeah. I think one of the one of these signs of that was just the idea that you can kneecap your country is soft power mechanisms entirely and believe every other country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen. I mean to say, the US doesn't face the consequences that it should for the things that it has done in this year alone, that's alone, in a decades of history.
Yeah.
But I mean when you saw the deconstruction of us AID, right, which was one of the US's primary mechanisms of having swaying other countries, building up goodwill in other countries, not also you know, intervening in the into the domestic politics of other countries, to break that down like a bull in a China shop, when that was really like one of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal world order float. It really, I think as an indication of the incompetence with even mes Yeah.
And then even on top of that, I think even on an even larger scale, right, the entire premise for I mean, like the entire premise of the Pax Americana, right, The entire premise of the post World War two American order was that the US Navy would keep the world's oceans open for supply chains. Yeah, that was the whole thing, and it worked exactly as long as the US never actually had to fight a war over like the sea
lanes that it couldn't militarily control. And then we fought the one war which would prove that we cannot in fact secure the sea lanes. Global capital ipakel transformations are happening in like the very structure of global capital because these people think that like the idea of not using your military power and then reaping the reaping the world spanning like trillion trillion dollar rewards of this, like they thought that shit was like girl, shit, Yeah.
I mean the whole the whole point of what I've been thinking. Part of the point of investing in all of this military might is so that you don't have to use it. Yeah, it's just just try and scale people into just bowing down the station your troops outside the territory and like, yeah, are you gonna really try and challenge us? Yeah? And then you went and stomp told them with somebody and obvious they had to stand up and defend themselves. And now everybody is seeing what it is, you know.
Yeah, and it's a situation too where like yeah, like Iran has always technically had the military power to like control the stradeer of Moos, but they never did because the consequence of that would be the US bombing their cities. So the only way you could possibly lose control of the strad of from Moose is if you bombed the cities first. So all you had to do was not do that and it would be fine.
Yeah, but I mean the little girls in the school were hamasna, so.
Oh god, yeah, it's just just a tragedy. God, it's really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves in the balls because they just like wanted to go kill a bunch of brown kids. You know, this is an unfathomable horror. And also they so clearly have no idea what the fuck they're doing that it makes a lot of things possible.
Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is you know what comes next. We're seeing, like, as you said, epochal transformations just in this year alone. This phase will be incurrently as defined by McDonald. It's not going to last forever, you know. Unlike previous phases. However, this phase has been imposed truly globally. There's no longer a hint
to land that one can escape too. Yeah, and so what comes next can be fragmentation, It can be some kind of evolution or calcification, or it can be a social revolution, and the moms and the cogs and wedges in this moment to actively decide in that. But I think we can do without this parasitism. As MacDonald knowes, there are other ways of relating with each other and with nature. He borrows from the ecological language of commensalistic
and mutualistic relationships. In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other. For example, we provide hives and protection, or bees pollt crops and produce honey. And commensalistic relationships, one organism captures energy from another while doing neither harm nor good to
the other. There's lots of animals and plants who make their home among trees while neither harmin nor help in the tree itself, although some of them do end up helping the tree in more indirect ways, but finally in parasitic relationships, which is the kind that has proved disastrous for our world. One organism that be in us has captured the energy of another, or of multiple others to those others detriment our system has put us in the
position of essentially being mosquitoes. One planet is and not in the role that mosquitoes play in the overall health of the ecosystem, but literally suck in more blood than the system can sustain. And so we have to shake things up. We have to emboldern ie and new forms of relations and what those relations look like after you as usual, All power to all the people. Peace.
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