Transcript: TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Inviolable Lore /362
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Tyson Yunkaporta.
Tyson Yunkaporta You gotta be able to spend time out in the land and let the land heal you as well. You know, you need all these things, not just a medication. So for me that story is the landscape. Story is the cultural landscapes we all live on, the psychological landscapes. And there must be lore, capital L-O-R-E, that is just your firm foundation that's unchanging, that cannot be up for grabs, that cannot be something that's subject to change and violation. You know, we need secret lore, again. We need story that's inviolable. This is what we need.
Ayana Young Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and author of Sand Talk. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises.
Tyson, I am so happy to have you back. I still remember our first conversation, not that I expect you to but I still remember it along with our team and it was just one of the most refreshing and humorous conversations I think I had... not that you were trying to be funny, but I definitely got a few chuckles from it so thanks for coming back on For The Wild and I look forward to this conversation.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, no worries. It's good to be here. Yeah, as I was saying, thinking before, how many podcasts are out with "wild" in it? And you said it's a word that beckons and I like that, that word ‘beckon.’ It's a little less coercive then, you know, longing and despair [laughter]... you get sort of striving.
Ayana Young Yeah. Well, in a sense 'beckon' to me is the other, where 'longing' is from the source.
Tyson Yunkaporta That's it.
Ayana Young Yes—
Tyson Yunkaporta Just come hither, and then you got to decide, Yeah, will I really pursue this? Let's explore this.
Ayana Young The wild beckons me for sure—
Tyson Yunkaporta You gotta take that plunge.
Ayana Young Yes.
Tyson Yunkaporta Like if you see someone hot like across the room in a bar and they kind of give you that look, you know, and you think uhhhhh—
Ayana Young Oh my goodness—
Tyson Yunkaporta Another drink now before I get up and walk across? Why can't they walk across for a change? Kind of like that.
Ayana Young Yeah, yeah. A little bit like that. Yeah, I think the wild does that for me in its way, in its most potent way, more potent than a human for sure.
Tyson Yunkaporta Hmmmm. Sometimes it's swipes right? Sometimes it's swipe left. Dating, dating metaphor.
Ayana Young Yeah, well, for me the wild happens to always be worth it or whatever that's worth. It never disappoints. Always challenges and asks me to show up in my most authentic self and—
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, yeah.
Ayana Young Yeah.
Tyson Yunkaporta
You're not swiping in any direction. You... you've throw in your phone into the sea and just running naked down a beach—
Ayana Young Yeah, there's no phone-—
Tyson Yunkaporta Screamin' Aahhhhhh!
Ayana Young That's the best part…is that the phone has no power with the wild. The wild shatters the phone—
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah—
Ayana Young shatters—
Tyson Yunkaporta You're shooting arrows out of heli-helicopters like a Sentinel Island or something.
Ayana Young Yeah, the land and all of its autonomy says, No phone here.
Tyson Yunkaporta Hey mate, did you ever come across that Sentinelese Islanders?
Ayana Young No.
Tyson Yunkaporta See them online? Ah, it's like, no one's ever been able to land there. I think a Christian tried to go there to convert them a while back and he just got shot for like 40,000 arrows in the first 10 minutes.
Ayana Young Wow.
Tyson Yunkaporta Every now and then a helicopter goes and tries to take photos. But then the helicopter ends up full of arrows to which I think it's nice that there's someone still shooting arrows at helicopters somewhere in the world.
Ayana Young Yeah. MmmHmmm. Well, I hope more and more of us take up arrows and start holding off the helicopters wherever we are.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, well, you're gonna do it. You're doing it with your river there, aren't you?
Ayana Young Yeah.
Tyson Yunkaporta Protect the salmon runs, yeah, from bloody mining companies. Aye, we're just drilling into this glacier. That'll be alright.
Ayana Young Uggg. It's insane.
Tyson Yunkaporta Just gonna drill right under there. Yeah, yeah.
Ayana Young It's, it's, it's insanity. And it's, you know, we live in this intense time, lots of pain, just trying to take in the reality of the world right now and something I really loved about our last conversation, we talked about how identity and branding have really fueled a society just obsessed with perception rather than the truth of conditions. And it just seems that in the time that's passed, this has only become more true as we witness the constant cultural narrative spin around pandemic, war, global crisis, so on and so forth. And maybe you could help us out with talking about how you're steering yourself against the forces that... or just to continue on as, quote, "normal."
Tyson Yunkaporta Oh, just badly, you know, I did the decades of decolonial work, and I'm decolonizing myself and I'm helping other people decolonize like it's some inner practice, like some inner work [laughter]... Which, you know, does not stop the machinations of empires, you know. The Empire keeps rolling on, and we're all here, you know, doing breathwork and stuff. [laughter] We're all like, you know, we're all reading Foucault and Said and sort of, you know, decolonizing the cafe and, you know, I don't know, we're just writing lots of things that are, Ah man this is true. Yes. Yes. Tyson speaks truth. And it's, you know... And then people have this illusion that it's speaking truth to power and it's not. You know, truth to power is like, Niger Delta follows in like, speedboats, with AK-47s, you know That spoke truth to power, and I don't think very much else does. Except maybe a screenwriters strike or something like that? Hmmmm.
But they know what they're doing. You know, they hold their forever power against a strike. It's hard to hold out against AK-47s though? You know? Not that I'm advocating that. I was all into that like I was, um, very ISIS green for a while, like, about a decade ago. And I was like, stuff it [unknown], and I'm going to get my hands dirty. Get in there. And then I met a girl, you know, land it all went away. Yeah. Met a girl. Moved to the city, and, uh, slowly went insane, like you do in a city.
Ayana Young Going back to this idea of decolonizing. I think that's just hearing you talk about it, it's almost like, mmmm, it almost feels a bit like walking on eggshells to talk about it in the way that you brought it up because I think for some of us, we want it so bad, but what is it?... What is the material consequence of decolonizing? And sometimes I think what we feel like we can do is talk to each other, rather than talking to power. Or maybe we think if we talk loud enough to each other power will hear it. Yeah. But I see, well, you know, I see the discrepancy in that. Even I just—
Tyson Yunkaporta I don't know how to do anything but the poetry, you know. Every revolution needs poets, but it's not going to be much of a revolution if everyone's a poet. You know, we're all content creators now, just sort of out there endlessly creating content about what's bad and why. You know, ummm. It's very tricky to find that space between the… your online presence and sort of doing the work that needs to be done.
Ayana Young Oh, gosh, that's a big can of worms to open.
Tyson Yunkaporta Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Ayana Young Yeah, the content creation. It's something that we can do yet we create this content to be put on a platform owned by the powers.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yup.
Ayana Young And so that's an interesting concept to grapple with. And yeah, I agree. We can be creating all this content, writing poetry, breathing, speaking to ourselves, but who is or who are the people actually holding the line with the mine? And etc, etc?
Tyson Yunkaporta That's it.
Ayana Young Or maybe it's changing policy or who's doing... I mean, I think there's many categories of the dirty word, so to speak, of actually shifting the material reality.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah—
Ayana Young And—
Tyson Yunkaporta The forces we're up against it, just, you know, you can play Whack A Mole with the mines like, forever, but you know, keeps coming.
Ayana Young Yeah.
Tyson Yunkaporta It's really rough. Yeah.. struggling with it a bit of late. And here's the thing, this is what I was trying to say, and I forgot, but it's back again. It's like we're, we're all preaching to the choir, you know, then we keep going with that, and it's just so much competition and soon there's factions, and pretty soon, we're not just preaching to the choir anymore, we're like, molesting the choir, you know, doing heaps of lateral violence, you know, across all these movements that should be aligned.. You know, but we're kind of factionalizing this way, in that way, around all these sort of cultural war hills that we all want to die on.
Yeah, I don't know, it's really hard, because I used to be all about, you've got to reach out a hand, you know, if there's a, you know, a kid is turning into a neo Nazi, you can't cut him off, you got to show him love, and you got to hold on to him, you know. And, you know, these people, you got to try and bring them back. But then, at the same time, you know, you reach out your hand and they take an arm, these people. you know, everything is jujitsu-ed around. All of our language, you know, from long research and struggling, lots of really good deep thinking and a big sort of scholarly canon that we built up, you know, where the science is settled on stuff. Any of the language that we have for that, that can just be taken, you know, by the powerful and turned around back on us. Everything from woke to anything else that you want to say they'll turn around and co-opt it, fake news, anything. They turn around back the other way and then that word is gone now. And we're running out of ways to describe things, you know, in are our language. People who don't want the world to die, our language is not evolving fast enough, you know, for how the destroyers of this world and all their useful idiots and henchmen can jujitsu it around and reck it on us. Because that's the second law of thermodynamics… you know, it's a, it's easy to break shit and make shit. And why wouldn't you break shit at the end of the world? Well, that's my thoughts on that.
You were gonna say some about content creation?
Ayana Young Yeah. Yeah, well, I'm thinking about content creation and language and it's all about story, right? I mean, that's how us humans learn is through story and your new book, Right Story, Wrong Story takes the form of a very specific journey. And maybe you could share what inspired the structure for the book and how you see the role of story as integral to knowledge.
Tyson Yunkaporta When I moved to the city, you know, it was a strange change for me, like being in the city, you know. And I was still myself for maybe three years, two to three years. So like, when I wrote my first book, I was still, I was still me, and I was still connected, you know, to land, culture, language, you know, all these things. And, ahhh but, yeah, since then, and especially over COVID, like in those lock downs, because we had two years of them in Melbourne. And the universities didn't, we didn't go back to work and we stayed working at home so it's kind of just been this really internal existence, you know, for that whole time. And I kind of lost myself a lot. You know, that when you're part of the land and these natural systems, then the land as a sentient system that you're part of, it gives you what you need, you know, from moment to moment. You know, I always say anything you need, like look around, like any problem you got, like, really look around you because it'll be there. The things that you need to fix it will be right there. If you're hungry, there'll be food there if you get a look. Yeah, 'cause country land does this. You know, it opens up for you when you're in it. Not if you're standing outside looking at it and taking photos or you know, constantly in a struggle to save it, you have to stand outside of it to do that, because that's where the enemy is.
So here I am, heart of darkness in the city and yeah, I just kind of lost my mind. And I yeah, I kind of… I have like, childhood onset bipolar disorder. So I've always had this bipolar and it just got really exacerbated. I start having lots of psychotic breaks and, and big ones, like... I classify the big ones as the ones where there's police involvement, you know? So yeah, there's been a lot of struggle, a lot of strife and trouble and I'm trying to deal with this grief I have about.... Like, decolonization is something you hold on to, you know, and, and gives you hope, like you're fighting a good fight. And then I just kind of saw this, like, fabulous Zeitgeist that had become in the world and very much a middle class activity. And yeah, and something that really wasn't having an impact on the world. It's like we're decorating our living spaces in post colonial style, not what decolonization is. We can lend our eye to like redecorating places, but we can't do anything structural, you know. You can be politically decolonial, but you have to be fiscally colonial, if you know what I mean.
And so the book came out of that, and I kind of held it together for the first half of the book. And then I went completely, I lost my mind. [laughter] So the second half of the book, it like, just degenerates into this madness, you know, spiraling down. I had like, three suicide attempts while I was writing, it. It took me two years. You know, the first book, I wrote in a manic upswing, and so I wrote it in two weeks, but this one took me two years. Yeah, so it was kind of like, pressing on all the saw bits, you know when you do that, and kind of press the saw a bit, and it hurts, but it kinda feels like you're doing something to help it. When you rub that bump, or that wound or cut or whatever. Yeah, so I was kind of doing that, you know, connecting with the reader as a sibling, you know, who might be going through the same kind of things, because I look out in a world and I see the same kind of pathologies, and the same grief and the same frustrations and destructive behaviors all around me that, you know, that I'm going through. I see them, you know, in a lot of other people. I see them in systems. You know, I see them in movements as collective disorders. I see them in economic systems and entire cultures, this sickness, you know, so I saw the same things there. And I kind of mapped it all on Dante's circles of hell, you know, Inferno. So each chapter, each chapter has gone through a different circle of hell. And it starts off as… it's a lot of yarns. People call them interviews, I guess, you know, with different thinkers who are in that structure, but then it starts to deviate from that [laughter] quite strongly. Yeah, so it really is a journey into madness, and just hell, but with lots of laughs along the way. Lots of laughs and eventually, we come out at the end and have a yawn with Hannibal Lecter on the last page. Can't go more into that because spoiler alerts, you know? It's kind of weird. There's a lot of movie references in there because that's kind of how I talk, interact with the world.
Ayana Young Oh, gosh, what you said about being, I don't know if this is the word you use, but being theoretical, or being theoretically decolonial but fiscally colonial or something like that. That's definitely pushing on the wound.
Tyson Yunkaporta That's what the like, politicians are always saying, like, left wing politicians have to say that they're like, socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They always have to state that they're fiscally conservative. That's pretty much the same with indigenous scholars, you know. We kind of have to be fiscally colonial. [laughter]
Ayana Young Yeah, I mean, what would it look like to be fiscally decolonial or, or just decolonial period.
Tyson Yunkaporta It would look like Bougainville when they like, you know, went into the mines at night and took the rubber, like rubber bits out of all the engines and the tires off the trucks and then, and then made like, these spear guns out of that, and then they went through the whole mines and like shot spears at everybody until they left and then Bougainvillia was sort of was independent again. But then I guess the problem is that, you know, once people have tasted that civilized life, and there's little bits of infrastructure there, and it's kind of decaying away, and then they're all depending on sort of one leader who led the revolution. Then that leader dies, everything kind of goes, goes to shit after that, you know, and it certainly did in Bougainvillia... became like, the rape capital of the world and those murders all over the shop that went really badly there for a while.
Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know what it looks like in a productive way. I know it's not revolution because, I always see revolution it's like it's just part of the pump and dump scheme of imperialism. You know, pump and dump, in the marketplace?
Ayana Young Uhuh.
Tyson Yunkaporta How like, they really hype up a stock and they buy heaps of it and the price is going up and up and up, because they're buying heaps, and then all the idiots come in then and buy because they think it's gonna go through the roof. And then like, you know, the rich people who were pumping it, then they dump it. You know, they dump it all, like they sell it to one of their subsidiaries, so they still hold it. But they sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, and then the price drops, you know, so everyone else gets out and they lose, they lose the farm. And those rich bastards come in and they buy them all back at bargain basement prices, and they just basically have a money machine, like a factory. They're just pumping and dumping stuff. I feel like revolutions are part of that, you know, in a longer term sense. Revolutions are a pump and dump scheme for the powerful because you always end up with the same frickin oligarchs, one way or another, you know, holding all the cards at the end. I mean, the mines are back in Bougainville and, you know, that really sort of modernized the place, I guess, and changed things. It's all part of the pump and dump scheme. So I don't get too excited about much activism anymore. And I feel like I should, just to be a good person, but when I look at the overall picture, I'm like, uhhhh, something's needed. And what it's not is like a shift in consciousness of everybody because it doesn't matter what everybody thinks. Most people in the world are like, Yeah, like, let people get married if they love each other. You know, LGBTQI+, like, yeah, let them do what they need to do, you know, most people in the world. Yeah, let's not, let's not kill the air and the oceans... You know, let's kind of you know, have better communities where, you know, things are in reach, where you don't have to drive an hour for work, where we can go 15 minutes to everything we need. Yeah, that sounds great. That's most people in the world, you know. But that doesn't matter at all. The consciousness shift has already happened. You know, most people feel the same way about most things. And it's not the world that we've got that most people want. But then what's happened? What does it… what does it do, this shift in consciousness? Not a lot. Not a lot. Because it's, you know, a handful of billionaires pretty much got the world by the balls and driving it like they stole it, I guess to mix metaphors.
Balls and cars. That's my mixed metaphor. Hey.
Ayana Young Hmmm. That's interesting. I didn't think about that the consciousness shift has already happened. I do hear the disenchantment of activism, though. I sadly can feel that with you. And yeah, I guess I wonder. What do you get excited about? What does seem like something that's knocking on the door, beckoning?
Tyson Yunkaporta I think it's just um—
Ayana Young For a better world.
Tyson Yunkaporta See, ironically, you know, in the English speaking world, which it is the world, like even though it's a tiny minority of people who are speakers of English as a first language. Everybody else has to learn the bastard. Everybody has to learn English, and everybody has to use English, if they want to do anything in business or politics or communications around the place.
I watch all the carpeting of language and the neutralizing of language and the theft of terms, the way language is sullied around anything that's good and anything that's actually achieving change. The language gets turned around, as I said before, and lost. But if you think about that, it's kind of almost like this globalizing culture, this weird, cultural, Western, industrialized, educated, rich, democratic culture. It's kind of eating itself in that way, eating itself in a weird way like, I don't know that movie The Human Caterpillar, only if it was in a loop. It's kind of eating that, it's all falling apart. I'm kinda excited to see what emerges next. Because, you know, the activist community has enjoyed a long tradition and a lot of language that was safe and stable, and that meant something. And that was building on a lineage of thinking and action and really successful movements, but that's kind of gone. And that's part of the culture, that weird culture. And I'm just interested to see what emerges next. After this one finishes eating itself, which it's pretty close to doing, I think we got like one more US election cycle left in it. After that, nothing's going to mean anything. There's going to be no truth, no story, no unifying narrative to sort of hold all the atoms together, and then everything else sort of dissolves into a quantum soup, and then reform around something else. Who knows what that'll be... global fascism, where uh, I don't know... like startling diversity and a whole heap of productive, interdependent regionalism, who knows?
Ayana Young I like the latter. That sounds pretty great.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah. Well, that's where coming from the other end of the beckoning, I guess that's where the yearning is pointing people towards, you know. Unfortunately, for some people, that means a compound with 14-year-old wives and lots of rifles. You know, so it's a weird one. What's the Libertarians, sort of, once the Libertarian crossover with New Age stuff now?
Ayana Young Yeah, that's fascinating.
Tyson Yunkaporta You know, New Age culture has collided with conspiracy culture.
Ayana Young Yeah.
Tyson Yunkaporta You know, in this quite startling way. It's no longer a horseshoe. It's just a, it's the cycle is complete, now the student has become the master.
Ayana Young Talk more about that because I think that's really fascinating... The New Age and the conspiracy theorists coming—
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, I don't know. I'm just wondering if that Star Wars metaphor will work as an extended thing for this? I don't know. Let's explore. So you know, Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker. He's good, then he's evil, then he's good again, then he's dead. Then he's a ghost who comes back and talks to Rosario Dawson and we're not sure where she's gonna end up.
I know one thing for sure though, there is a force in the universe. There is magic in the universe that binds all things and moves all things, and connects us all in startling ways. But, you can't manipulate that. You can flow with it. So people who think they're doing magic, and doing something amazing with their consciousness and their breathwork, and their psychedelics, or whatever else... People who are doing… practicing shamanism that they learned in a workshop or have a bunch of TikTok videos. You know, this is kinda like, like, yes, the force exists, but as soon as you form a cult that's based on child abuse and lightsabers, the galaxy is pretty much fucked, you know?
Yeah. So I think everybody feels like they have a handle on the magic, you know, whether it's The Gift or like, you know, The Body Keeps the Score or whatever airplane book, the airport book, they just finished reading. Everybody, you know, has a spirituality with a sort of hangingness, individualized, personalized, sorta little brands, hanging off that and feeling like they're magical, but the magic isn't in them. You know, it's all around and moving and flowing and they gotta flow with it. You don't become a magical being, you know. And I guess everybody felt like if they did the work and enough people did the work for personal development that somehow that would create a massive shift and everybody all at once would experience collective leap in consciousness. This lie, this neoliberal lie of moving towards collectivism through startling individualism and navel gazing has just blown me away. And I feel like that took over the entire decolonial movement. I feel like it's in every every activist movement. Too many poets, not enough soldiers, you know?
Ayana Young Mmmm, hmmm. You said something, just a few responses ago about language being co-opted, and so much, so many words not having the meaning they used to, and I guess I want to ask about the word 'woke.'
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah.
Ayana Young And where has that gone? Where is it now?
Tyson Yunkaporta It started off as something that Black people in the US used to say to each other. It was like an internal memo, it was an internal community thing. And then it's sort of got taken up, know what I mean? Like heaps of middle class people suddenly took it up and were brandishing it around to mean God knows what. You know it became an Orwellian cry for, I don't know these indolent sort of excesses of people whose entire activist life was just online, writing snarky tweets, man and bloody piling on to people and going, Oh, OMG, I just can't with this guy or whatever. I don't know, in all the things that...I know, it's not omg.. .there I'm showing my age there. But yeah, it just all went to crap.
And then of course, the Right just gets to seize on that as a catch all phrase for everything they hate. So they can like, create this huge basket of issues with anti-trans stuff, anti LGBTQI+, you know, anti-feminist, anti-bloody, you know, everything that sort of tries to make cities work. Yeah, and just everything people are just trying to survive. Yeah, they get to make a big catch-all for that with one word. And then suddenly, the words gone, it's useless. It's ruined. It doesn't mean what a meant anymore. And it has more power for... has more powerful for the evildoers in this world than it has for anyone else, you know.
We have to pivot and come up with new words. But there's only so much that a trade Creole like English can do, you know, in terms of describing the universe, and you know, it's certainly I don't know, it's pre-chameleon, you know, fast, growing, changing language. But, you know, even English isn't fast enough to deal with the assholes of this world. It just seems to be mostly assholes who invented you know, like, like a series of invaders of a small island nation who sort of ran out of soil in their own places. Six different invasions ended up producing English and then went out and exported it all around the world and then it grew into all kinds of different dialects all around the planet. So it's a pretty chameleon language, but at the same time, it can't move as fast as ourselves can move because ourselves never sleep. There you go. That's, that's the name of the podcast episode, Assholes Never Sleep!
Ayana Young Yeah, I see it now. Lots of clicks. Well, in the Libretto for Beethoven's opera Fidelio, as you rewrote it for a performance at the Sydney Opera House, conducted by Simone Young you write, quote, "Your ego will not be satisfied by this. You will want people of influence to know how virtuous you are. Be aware of this flaw, and choose carefully when you send truth keepers to liaise with the powerful. Send those who are used to hiding their truth and smiling to please the fragile brutes who oppress them," end quote.
Tyson Yunkaporta Then I said, "Send the women," because that's, I think, if I was going to write a dictionary, that would be my definition of a woman—
Ayana Young Well, you had—
Tyson Yunkaporta Someone who—
Ayana Young Keep going, yeah. I just want to, I just feel like this section is so potent right now and want to hear more about the ways you're witnessing and theorizing about the dynamics of power and oppression. I know you were moving beyond ego and what you were exploring with this?
Tyson Yunkaporta Well, for me, it's mostly about the narrative, sort of underlying narratives, a sequence... When you take something like woke agenda and turn it into something else. You're taking a long lineage like many generations of, you know, civil rights activists and massive body of work, huge body of work and scholarship and activism and struggle. You're taking all of that right story, all that good story and you're just destroying it. You know, you're turning it into a series of memes. You know, you see everything, like right story is just disintegrating all around the planet. And it doesn't have a very fast evolutionary cycle. It's certainly not able to keep up with how fast wrong story can come out.
So for me, I look at this weaponized disinformation, and I look at the handful of billionaires around the planet who are funding all of these think tanks and PACs and different groups who actually produce all of this disinformation, and who like, build the algorithms to be able to aggregate, you know, vulnerable, disgruntled, weird people online to be able to aggregate these ones together. And, you know, to be able to pump out wrong story, a new wrong story every other day, or you can take wrong story from the past. Like, you know, the idea of Jewish blood libel, you know, where the Jewish people are drinking the blood of Christian children, you know, abducting Christian children, all this sort of stuff. You can take those older stories that were weaponized by the powerful and Russia or against the Jewish population, to sort of give the people, you know, a different photo to look at rather than the powerful themselves so they could save feudalism.
Yeah, they can recycle and regurgitate that narrative. You know, they can even take narratives from the Left like CRT, critical race theory, they can, they can take that story, and they can twist it, and turn it into the wrong story. Say, Oh my God, my nine-year-old child should not be learning about Rosa Parks. That's cool. That's like an adult thing. Yeah, they shouldn't be learning that gay people exist. And, you know, they shouldn't have to hear that the kid sitting next to them has got two mums. You know, they can do all this stuff. Wrong story can go so fast because, like I said, it's easy to break shit to make shit.
So for me, I'm exploring these narratives and the way weaponized disinformation is spun into these endless eons, these recursive yarns that keep coming back on themselves round around in insane, positive feedback loops, just growing and growing. And then I look at that, and I think about that same action for me in my manic episodes and particularly in the last couple of years, my manias have been spiraling downwards instead of up, you know. And I can just see that same Spirit doing that, you know. And we look at that, um, so we got willy-willys here in Australia at some, like, whirlwinds, little whirlwinds. And that's, that's one of my totems, is that whirlwind. And so we know that it's got that bad spirit in it, you know, and it's basically this positive feedback loop, you know. And you've got a kick off a negative feedback loop to kill that thing and to get rid of that bad spirit. So you got to throw a stick at it. And you got to hit it in just the right spot in the whirlywind, and it disrupts the cycle and puts in a regulatory feedback loop and within a minute or so that whirlywind when dies, so that bad spirit can't like come through your camp or whatever.
Yes, so we have that. And I guess, I don't know, in a way, I'm probably breaking my own rule and trying to mess around with magic. I guess if I think about it in terms of energies like that. That's more of a metaphor for me. That's that story, you know, of Spirit and how Spirit works. And I see that in myself, I see that well, when do you know, goes round around, I look out and I see it in the world. And I know what I gotta do for myself, when it starts getting out of control, you know, you've got to get that regulatory feedback going. Which used to be alcohol for me, I used to be able to like, just drink a bottle of rum and then wake up and it would be over. But then that just means that I'm 50 and I've got a 90 year old liver and it stopped working and kind of went the other way. So I ruined that and I can't do that anymore. I'm experiment— I'm using Seroquel at the moment. That's… so I have to take that every night and knocks me out nd so I like reset in the morning and I start from scratch again. That's that part of the medication for bipolar. And I guess, I don't know, I tried to do a bit of Seroquel for the world. It's not useful in the long term. You can't rely on that. Because you sort of build up resistance to it, you know, like anything else. But you know, at the core of the problem you can't just have medication, you got to have therapy, you know. You got to be able to talk through and work through all of your all of your business and all your issues and gets to get things straight. You got to be able to spend time out in the land and let the land heal you as well. You know, you need all these things, not just a medication.
So for me that story… story is the landscape. Story is the cultural landscapes we all live on the psychological landscapes. And, and there must be lore, capital LORE. That is just your firm foundation that's unchanging, you know, that cannot be up for grabs. That cannot be something that's subject to change and violation, you know? Yeah, we need sacred lore. Again, we need story that's inviolable. This is what we need.
I heard this bad story the other day. This is like someone from the Northern hemisphere, and I won't say which culture because I don't want to run them down. They were telling an ancient story from their culture, folklore, and it was like, "Yes, so a man, he was attacked by a viper and the viper was going to bite him and sting him to death. And then a heron came down and the heron killed the viper and saved a man's life. So the men he picked up in the heron and put him in a bag and took him home to eat for his dinner. And his wife said, 'Why are you doing that? That heron saved your life, you shouldn't be eating the heron and killing the heron. You should let the heron go. And then the wife opened the bag and let the heron go free and the heron packed her fucking eyes out." And that's the end of the story! What's the message for that story? It's like, Oh, my God, what's that message it's like, don't do anything to help anyone because like, they'll eat you or they'll peck your eyes out. It's kind of the... I don't know, maybe it's an old curse, but it's kind of the world we're in right now. You know, you reach a handout to a friend who's sort of been red-pilled by like Alex Jones, and all this stuff online, "Reach your hand, and brother, brother. I'm still your friend, I'm here for you," and then they just rip your arm off, and chew it up and spit a whole heap of stuff about Putin at you and then dox you online. And then suddenly, there's people arriving at your house and throw a brick through your window.
You know, it's a tricky old place. It's a tricky old storyscape that we're living in. And I don't know, we need these good yarns. We need good cautionary tales emerging, you know, good story that that grounds us in, you know, just some basic care for each other and care for our place. And just a general idea of well, we don't, you know, kill each other and everything else, that's probably a bad thing. Yeah. Really got to start at the kindergarten level with this stuff. Especially if there's herons pecking your eyes out, and like scorpions, stinging frogs, who tried to help them cross the river you know, I think it's somewhere in the Northern hemisphere, people went wrong. It's upstate. And we've always had this editor where we have to help them out. We have to, you know. You know, the death of the world and the destruction of our land and communities, it's kind of our own fault because we've failed to bring these settlers into proper relation. But yeah, I don't know. I don't like the idea that people are irretrievable because that would mean that they were also disposable. That would mean that the world will be better off without them and you know where that kind of thinking always ends up in groups of people. It doesn't end well. It kinds of turns people into maniacs and psychos—
Ayana Young I wonder—
Tyson Yunkaporta Exclusionary cultures. That's what power does anyway.
Ayana Young Yeah, I mean, power and disinformation. They are for some reason, so appealing, or seemingly appealing. And I'm curious about that and why does and how does this information thrive in these times? And it also seems like it goes under the radar, even though it's so prevalent. So yeah, just love to riff on that for a moment.
Tyson Yunkaporta Well, that the Left is secular and must be, you know, in terms of making sure that like the reason is there in the world and making sure that, you know, the most powerful part of everyone's discourse and mundane life is not, you know, an altered state that should be in ceremony and nowhere else, you know. But the problem with that is that's boring and everyone's scared and, you know, everybody feels special and they want these altered and heightened states that come with these insane narratives. Traditionally, on the Left, that that was like the New Age sort of discourses, you know, an Age of Aquarius is coming and all this sort of stuff, which is pretty much like any, any Abrahamic cult, pretty much does the same thing.
Yeah, but that, in the end, that wasn't very far from, you know, the horseshoe, the other end of the horseshoe on the Right, you know, they all had the same stories. You know, that whole idea of, you know, a special chosen people, you know, this Aryan race. You know, that was like the driver of the age of discovery was all this weird New Age stuff. And, you know, the explorers were looking for Atlantis. You know, there's a reason it's called the Atlantic Ocean. It's because they thought Atlantis was there, and they were gonna find where all their Aryan people came from. They keep looking for it, or maybe it's in the Caucasus Mountains, or Yeah, it's probably in the Caucasus Mountains. We'll call ourselves Caucasians now. You know, ah, and maybe it was in India, but then the Indian people, you know, interbreeding with inferior peoples and then they became degraded and their civilization fell apart. But luckily, there was enough pure Aryans who escaped to the west before that happened. So yeah, so let's call it Indo-European. I mean, that's, you know, in linguistics and anthropology and history and everything else. It's all Indo-European now, but that half of that was coming out of séances back in the day. People would have mummy unwrapping parties and bohemian orgies and then like you conduct séaances and talk to the dead and and then write these… like Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky all writing these horrendous, you know, volumes about it. Oh yeah, you know, progress, it's a spiritual thing, you know. Each new lifetime you're reborn and you're a little bit better than before, and the same thing is for groups of people. So you know, you know, and as you progress through your skin gets lighter [laughter] and you become you know, eventually you get reborn as the master race—these higher level beings. Just insane stuff. You can believe how much history, science you know, anthropology, linguistics, you know, cartography, all these things are built on these insane, wrong stories. Wrong stories of people who were longing but they were not fucking being beckoned. There was no beckoning, just longing, and now the reckoning, aaaah, arrived that for you there.
Ayana Young There's so much more to dive into, but I know you have a time limit, which is just—
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, we could probably do another 10 minutes. Okay. And then I'm like, okay, jumping in a car and racing to pick up my kids.
Ayana Young It was gonna be hard to end there. Yeah, so—
Tyson Yunkaporta Well, I think the beckoning and the reckoning is pretty, some good symmetry for you, Ayana.
Ayana Young Oh, yeah. I mean, it's... Yeah, I wonder if it's, the reckoning is the good story. Or maybe that's too simplistic. I—
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah.
Ayana Young Because it's something you'd said earlier about once people have the taste of civilization. It's… I mean, he didn't say that. But that's what I remembered. You have the taste of civilization, it's hard to go back because the infrastructure is there.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah.
Ayana Young And so—
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, and the narrative structure.
Ayana Young Mmmhmmm, and so yeah, we could be beckoned to something that feels more honest.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah.
Ayana Young But what the reckoning is, with so much complexity and nuance, and I don't know if it's imperfection. I don't I don't even know what I think of the word perfection anymore, or purity. That seems so far. Maybe we never should have strived for that in the first place. So yeah, maybe, gosh, there's so much to say, but I think I'm trying to settle on the material realities of the world again. And yeah, I want to go back to the Libretto that you wrote and quote, "So too beneath the pavements and monuments of civilization in the dark sites where dark money and dark ops generate unspoken and unspeakable cruelty is where the souls of whistleblowers and iconoclasts are thrown to face silence and torments. There are seeds of joy, and liberty and love, yearning for the sun. Every nation is grown from such foundations," end quote. That's so beautiful. I mean, that's just, yeah, I felt just wrecked and then like the phoenix from the ash, rising up. And so yeah, how might bearing witness to these dark realities might uncover an understanding that allows us to dream differently?
Tyson Yunkaporta It can, it can do that. But then again, no one of you or January 6th insurrectionists, you know, currently in prison might read that same thing and feel an affinity for it. And then that becomes their song, too. You know what I mean? They've taken all this, like, you know, they're the ones who were like, yes, you know, three strikes rule, buddy, lock them up, lock up all these super predators. And you know, what I mean? Tougher penalties, tougher sentences. They would have been politically all like that, and then all of a sudden, they're in that prison system. And they're like, "Oh, my God, this is horrendous. I'm being oppressed. I'm being oppressed, me!" You know, and then suddenly, it matters. All of that. And I keep hearing them crying out and all of their woe. And I think all they could read that same thing and think it applied to them. And I don't know, it bloody doesn't. You know what I mean? That's not good story.
Yeah, that is a seed, I guess that Libretto, just hoping for the emergence of right story in this world and just trying to contribute to that. You know, there's signal and then there's noise and how do you know, which is which? How do you know which way to go? And I think it comes back to this word 'beckon.' I guess, if you set for a quiet moment, and then you talked to some close friends, family about it, you have to think about, okay, with this story, I'm hearing, am I being beckoned? Or am I being lured? You know, because I think most of us will know in our gut, and just from the language, when we look at it, if the story... we'll know, if we're being lured towards something that is working against our best interests, and for the best interests of somebody, somebody powerful, who is just looking to eat us alive and throw us on the scrap heap. As the useful idiots we are, you know, that's that luring. And I think that beckon that you first spoke, you know, at the start of this, I think that's a, it's, I can't get that word out of my head.
You know, are we trying to use the magic? Are we allowing ourselves to flow with the magic, and therefore rise above all the sorcery or the curses, all the wrong story, you know, all of the propaganda? Can we feel that truth in that way? And can it somehow bind us, you know, with each other and stronger, better relation? And then, what does that do? What does that do? Well, I guess that's the ground. That's the manure for the seed of that right story. And you know, that our new stories can rise out from that, because we're not going anywhere and we're not changing anything without good story, right story again. All stories are broken, and the hour is late.
Ayana Young And thinking about how and where does the Indigenous knowledge systems feed into right story?
Tyson Yunkaporta Well, that's where you get a model, a good model, what lore capital LORE, right story it looks like because, you know, these things, we still keep those old stories and they are inviolable. And you know, they're a conduit and they are an expression of law, you know, proper law of how to live you know, for yourself, but then for your clan, and then out further your tribe and your region and then out further, your continent, you know, and then beyond. You know, there is law for how to be and there are protocols. And you don't have that unless you have that LORE. Lore. And yeah, the weird people in the world and all of their minions, I guess it's time to rediscover that one. Maybe skip the part where the scorpion stings the frog and the heron picks out the eyeballs of the housewife who tried to help it.
Ayana Young And, yeah, I feel like, I don't know if this is the other side of the spectrum, probably not. But technology fits somewhere in this question of good, of right and wrong. It's complicated. I am wondering how you see technology as part of the story, especially with such rapid and changing developments and saviorism and solutions and control of course, I mean, it is just ripe with a... whew... I don't even know the words right now, but it's here more and more and more and more. And, yeah,
Tyson Yunkaporta Well, we have, we have pretty effective law for that, for technology. It's so complicated, and it's so, Oh, we have so many good things, but then it does so many bad things, you know, how do we, etc, we've always had, like, our approach to technology is that no new technology can come into our life and into the world unless it's accompanied by an equally powerful social technology that can prevent that thing from ever being weaponized. Sometimes that means that limitations, regulatory feedback loops, etc, I was talking about before with the whirlwind, that these need to be built into the technology. But more powerfully, you need that social technology and psycho technology, you know, pretty much it comes down to that good law, good LORE, lore, in the end, you know, the stories that prevent people from weaponizing these things. That's slow tech. It's tech like TEK, Traditional Ecological Knowledge that, you know, holds the solution to that. You can never compromise your TEK with yor TECH, if you know what I mean, because one eats the other.
Ayana Young Okay, we're gonna need to have a part two because this is just too juicy and I really appreciate [laughter] this conversation and all that we've touched on..
Tyson Yunkaporta Lovely talking to you.
Ayana Young [laughter] Thank you so much.
José Alejandro Rivera Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard in today’s episode is by Leo James, generously provided by Patience Records. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Evan Tenenbaum, and José Alejandro Rivera.