Transcript: TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Unbranding Our Mind [ENCORE] /328
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Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Tyson Yunkaporta.
Tyson Yunkaporta This is where hope is a destructive force in the universe, hope is part of what keeps us all enslaved and it speaks to that narcissistic core.
Ayana Young Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Well hello Tyson, I’m so looking forward to spending this time with you.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, it's good to be here Ayana.
Ayana Young Wonderful. So in preparation for our time together, I came across a conversation you had with Howard Johnson where you shared the sentiments; “We used to fight to change conditions, now we fight to change perception.” And I’d really like to begin our conversation here because it’s such a succinct vocalization of a phenomenon that has really taken over in many of the spaces myself and For The Wild listeners exist in...And part of me wonders if this shift is perhaps a by-product of generations growing up in a capitalist system where good branding is enough, but as a guiding topic into our conversation, I wonder if you could elaborate on this and what you think it will take for us to free ourselves from our obsession with perception?
Tyson Yunkaporta I mean, perception is really important, you know, but it also could be manipulated and then I guess it's the same, it's that multipolar trap of, you know, the proliferation of perverse incentives. And, you know, that tragedy of the commons where, you know, you only have to have one person, you know, doing the wrong thing and gaining an unfair advantage, and then everybody has to do it, even if it's going to wreck everything. So, you know, we've had quite a few decades now of, you know, powerful people manipulating perception. And I guess more and more people have been getting in on that game, to the point where anybody who's anybody in the power broking business has got to have, you know, PR people, marketing people, they've got to have, you know, psychologists who can do the, you know, torches of freedom, spin on everything, you know, and sort of change perception.
But it's funny that it's democratized so much now, well not democratized let's call it metastasized because now everybody has to have their nuclear weapon, if you know what I mean. So basically, every single person on the planet is in the business of perception management, and everybody's perception and opinion is sacred and everybody can have their own opinions, they can have their own facts. And like I said, to Howie there was a time when we'd be fighting to change our condition, but we found increasingly, you know, in the last decade or so that that's, um, that's it's just not acceptable, you're not allowed to change the actual material, physical conditions, you know, you're not allowed to do anything that will affect the economy or the marketplace. But we've been sort of let loose on this new frontier that everybody can colonize and go out and, you know, claim a name and building brand, all of their, you know, personal and group identities and, you know, alternative facts and, you know, the, this position on that position on this standpoint, and that standpoint, on everything, and just have so many billions of different competing narratives, all jostling for space out there. It's like everybody has access to those weapons of mass PR now, which ironically makes them less powerful, but it also sort of prevents anybody from, you know, we have then so people can rise up and go, yes, Extinction Rebellion, you know, I mean, that sounds huge. That sounds like we're all going to throw our bodies on the machinery and bring it all to a halt, we're going to do something to change the condition. But I mean, what happened? Really, you know, a few people went on a few hunger strikes, there were some placards, nothing really changes. Yeah, it's really tricky. But you can't even talk about this, you know, because everything is, you know, splintered and fractionated into 1000 different points of view, and a 1000 different sets of alternative facts.
So even this, you can't even talk about it. In the alt right, they call what we're talking about now, “Cultural Marxism”, so that idea that, you know, Marxism, 1.0 was all about redistributing wealth, focusing on capital versus labor and all that sort of stuff, and, and making sure things would be fair, and people can have a weekend, and you know, wouldn't die too young and all that sort of thing, like I was actually focused on conditions and then the idea that, no, it's Marxism 2.0 “Cultural Marxism” is just, you know, now the change that we're allowed to have is in the culture, is in the perception, is in the old arrest. But that branding, I mean, that's all sort of tainted and spun around these sort of facts about the liberal left, and it's trying to disguise or mask, you know, quite a bit of racism and, and misogyny and all that sort of stuff. So that's that branding of it, and you've got, then you've got the old school Marxists and their branding up, but then you've got this one, that when you've got the woke, sort of branding of it, which is just, everything's different. You know, it's just, it's just such a mess. And I mean, you can see that all sort of spinning out in this sort of chaotic, you know, mishmash of ideas and no sense, no meaning making it all going on in any meaningful way, that's actually, you know, people are able to agree on, you know, a broad sort of reality that we can sort of work around, you know, individually and collectively. That's, that's kind of that's gone. I'm not sure it's coming back in. So it's just gonna be, you know, different groups and group identities, just fighting brand wars, and even physical wars, maybe even civil wars, or certainly civil wars. Yeah, on and on for, I can't see that ending in the next decade. Can you? What do you think the next decade looks like?
Ayana Young Where do I begin? Like am I in my radical imagination-
Tyson Yunkaporta Let’s start with this weekend. Yeah, what's gonna happen this weekend where you are? And if we were having this interview next week, it might look a little different.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm interested, when you said that we're not changing conditions, it's because of the economy, or if you could just elaborate a bit more on why you think we resist changing conditions?
Tyson Yunkaporta Well let me just give you an example of the Indigenous Australian experience, there are, you know, millions every year budgeted for Indigenous communities and programs, such as, I mean, the broad policy idea is closing the gap. I think we borrowed that from Canada. You know, so closing the gap in life expectancy, education, health, etc. because it's a significant gap between the Indigenous population and the rest, but yeah, so millions are spent - most of that money goes into the wages of non-Indigenous administrators who keep endlessly just administering these programs and then evaluating them and coming up with having to do report on why it's not working, you know, it's been like that for decades and decades and there are endless conferences.
So a lot of money goes into, you know, grants and funding for running conferences on how to change the condition of Indigenous people and I've been going to these conferences for a couple of decades now. I don't anymore, because it's a waste of time, they've been saying the same thing for decades, at these conferences, it's just rehashing the same conference papers over and over again, it's just this, you know, closing-the-gap-industrial-complex or something and, you know, you go there, and you see all these people who have, you know, they've been put up in, you know, flashy motel rooms, and then you walk around at the lunch, and there's all these canapés and stuff like that. And, you know, that's where all the money's going.
I used to get invited to quite a few keynote speeches and stuff at these conferences. But about 10 years ago, I started every keynote speech with “Did you enjoy your lunch? Looks really good. How's your hotel room, is that lovely? Yeah, this is a beautiful conference, it is really good to be able to take a few days off work and walk around and meet people. You know, but nothing's changed. And I tell you, if you just took the money for this conference, and put it directly into the bank accounts of the people that you're trying to figure out how to help, then the gap will close like a motherfucker.” And I would say that, you know, because I think you need to use language in that way, sometimes to sort of shock people a little bit into, because they'll remember what you just said, after a while they stopped inviting me, because that wasn't the message that they wanted to hear, it's pretty much anything, but actually giving the wealth directly to people, instead of you know, running programs that are going to help them to become better people so that they can access the opportunities of the marketplace better, and pull their bootstraps up, you know, that, that attitudes never gonna change.
It's very difficult because it was only a few decades ago, there was still this thing going on, that had been happening for a very long time called stolen wages. So for a long time, in Australia, our communities, our Indigenous communities, we weren't allowed to receive our own wages because we weren't trusted to be able to spend the money properly, you know, so our wages would be held in trust for us, and we'd be given just enough for basic survival, for basic food and clothing, very basic, and the rest of it was held in accounts in trust for us to be given back to us. So anyway, the upshot of all that is that, you know, in the end, so we had generations of generations, having their wages stolen, and what happened in the end was the government kept all of that money, everybody's wages, and they spent it all on infrastructure. So in the end, it was Indigenous wages held in trust, that built, you know, all of the roads, and all of the bridges, all of these things. In the meantime, non-Indigenous people got to build up intergenerational wealth. You know, these are not investors and all this sort of thing, these are just unskilled workers who were able to have an unskilled job and just work for three or five years and buy a house and then work for another three or five years and buy another house. You know, so you got quite uneducated, unskilled sort of people, multi generational, not particularly special, amazing people, you know, ended up quite wealthy. And that's an intergenerational equity thing too, because, you know, the millennials, even, you know, some non-Indigenous ones, they can't, they can't do that anymore. They'll be spending their entire lives trying to scrape together enough to get a mortgage that they'll never pay off. If they're lucky.
So these are the material conditions and you're not allowed to campaign to change those, I mean, you're allowed to campaign, but you're not allowed to actually change that. But I tell you, you can have a lot of wins, if you're just changing, you know, well, I want to have this word eliminated, or I want to add this word, you know, I want to change our language so that we can airbrush this intensely inequitable system, that demands inequality just to be able to function. But we won't worry about the system, we're not allowed to look at that with what we're going to do is just tweak it to make it feel more fair, to make it, you know, feel more equitable.
We can be completely destroying minority communities, but as long as you know, we're using the right language about those communities, then, you know, we won the battle. So it's just, yeah, it's just that it's just basically, you know, everybody's involved in neuro linguistic programming bloody wars. Other people call them culture wars, but, you know, it's just this endless battle, this endless PR battle, you know, with everybody behaving as a corporation unto themselves in charge of their own branding, you know, choosing all their little identities and intersectionalities and, you know, gathering together their little echo chambers and going, “Well, this is what I like, and this reflects who I am, and this is the narrative, and if I can get more followers than anybody else, then, you know, I win, my narrative is the dominant narrative comes out on top, in this little sector over here, you know, then we can go to war with that sector over there.” I mean, you know, it's just a theoretical game, just a nightmare of endless stuff. And, of course, I mean, that ends up, you know, exploding out into physical violence as well, and which, you know, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of violence, but as long as it's productive.
Ayana Young Wow, so much in the response. And in thinking about perception, I can’t help but want to interrogate the ways in which many of us are identifying ourselves to each other. Bluntly put, you’ve articulated that there will be massive ramifications if we don’t bring non-Indigenous people back into relationship with the land, and I think, in many cases, non-Indigenous people are really feeling this separation, but rather than delving into the trickier parts of this, it’s a lot easier to tend to an ancestral lineage or even a nationality, and while I think that this is done with the right intentions for the most part - there are moments where it also feels like an attempt at gaining social capital; not honoring one’s responsibility to place. So moving into a discussion on identity; I wonder if you could share your response to the sort of performance of identity that is becoming quite rampant; versus the call to become responsible to your place in the immediate?
Tyson Yunkaportra Well, basically, you know, if you're a millennial, or you know, I mean, even most of Gen X, but you know, if you're a millennial, or if you're like 30, or under, or even mid 30s, you're not ever going to have any financial capital, that's chances are, wherever you are in the world, is, you're not going to have that kind of capital. But the capital that's available to you is basically around your identity, you can have cultural capital, social capital, all those kinds of things. And some of these things can be leveraged for a little bit of value, or a little bit of position, you know, so that you can move around in a pecking order.
And it's funny, there's a kind of biological capital that's associated with that now. So over on Turtle Island, where you are, you're in the States, North America's - you know, the Kim TallBear, I don't know if you've come across her.
Ayana Young Yeah, I've interviewed her.
Tyson Yunkaportra She's written quite extensively about this fetishization of genealogy and a genetic inheritance, you know, bloodline and all these sorts of things and the idea of this being a kind of capital of this being something that somebody owns intrinsically inside themselves that they can sort of curate and narrativize and fetishize, you know, as a marker as a marker of their identities and, you know, intersectionalities and the rest. So rather than kind of living in that struggle and working to change condition, it becomes more about branding oneself. It's very tricky. It's just perception is everything at the moment.
So a lot of our scholarship as Indigenous people, and minority scholarship, you know, queer theory and everything else, critical race theory, you know, these things have a really solid base in very rigorous academic work, that a lot of people just struggled and struggled and bled for, to make happen and carve out space for that in our institutions. You know, so we had, you know, post colonial theory, you know, standpoint theory, you know, all of these things are critical race theory, queer theory, all these things were built on a really solid foundation of very rigorous research, that really did uncover all the machinations of power and how these things work and how to make spaces within that discourse, you know, for a voice to emerge to actually change the condition of things that that's what that was about, until really recently. But what I've noticed over the last decade is people engaging with that in increasingly shallow ways around their personal branding, and the fetishization of their their inherited biologies and inherited inequalities and all of these sorts of things, whereby they get this idea that just any random thought that flitz across their consciousness is truth, and wisdom, and logic, you know, sort of washed, clean, made pure and, and, you know, always containing pure truth, no matter what, just on the basis of their kind of, you know, cultural capital, and identity, capital and all that sort of thing.
It's just, it's this insane, magical thinking that sort of took over something that was quite a strong discipline. And it gives us a bad name because I know, a lot of really good thinkers, and I'm involved in a lot of communities of really good thinkers and rigorous change makers, who have completely rejected post colonial theory standpoint, theory, you know, postmodernism, they just laugh at that, because all they see is this silly work being done. And this stuff, that's it's just not rigorous. It's not tested against anything, it's invalid, it's not verifiable. The people who are doing it are not attempting to falsify what they're looking at, to test it and put it through the fires of a real process of inquiry anymore. So it's just all flippant, and vague, and just self indulgent and stupid and, you know, so understandably, it just has no respect anymore and I think it's some, it's really done an injustice to all the people who fought rigorously in that space, you know, to give us the methodological tools and epistemological tools to be able to leverage some real change in the conditions of the world. But, all these insane wokesters and alt-right, and alt-left, and you know weirdos have sort of taken over with absolutely no rigor. So I find it really hard because a lot of my work over the decades has been using a lot of those tools and building on them, and bringing out new really good methods of inquiry grounded in our ancient traditions of inquiry, and making really rigorous tools for research and such and then, you know, all of that tainted with the same or tarred with the same brush if you like now, so it's sort of its diminished our capital, you know, and leverage in the real world, but sort of increased fabulousness in the sort of shadow world of cybernetic narcissism and hubris.
Ayana Young I think trying to interrogate the way we cling to our identities, the way we mark ourselves through space, opens up more room to discuss what you talk about as “hybridized insight.” And many are eager to explore the fruitfulness of the liminal and in-between spaces in general, but especially so in terms of the importance of intermediaries who really challenge supremacist or colonial rigidity; and how after decades of this narrative of never being enough of one thing, this perspective may actually be just enough to serve as a bridge during times of transformation and break down. What is hybridized insight to you? Do you think hybridized insight can also serve as a remedy to the mass memory loss, and cultural loss that dominates in Western systems?
Tyson Yunkaporta Hmm. Well, I mean, hybridization is just, it's what it I mean, it almost doesn't exist, because it implies that there are, you know, separate closed systems that sometimes come together and hybridize, but I mean, the reality of the natural world, and of what you're calling the wild, these are fairly permeable membranes, in these sort of separate systems that are really separate, all of these things are mixing, combining moving all the time. There was that idea. In early science where, you know, everything in the whole world was named and classified and given a location, you under the idea that that's where God put it, so that's where it belongs. Zed is for zebra, and they're from Africa, you know, etc. So there's this kind of perception that everything is in its place. And that, you know, it's weird now, because things are now moving out of their place and mixing, but in reality, that is, what happens, you know there is exchange and interaction constantly occurring in wild systems.
So an ecosystem will move a couple of 100 meters every year, it's constantly moving, and there is constant exchange between those systems, a system in itself, if it was just self contained, entropy will build up in that overtime, that's that second law of thermodynamics, and it will just collapse in on itself. So every system must dump entropy out into another system. And in nature, the idea is, the way that's evolved is that the entropy that you're dumping is another system's lunch. So you're putting that into there, and then that system is also exchanging things back. So it says there's this constant flow, there are these closed loops of flows between and among, and across systems, constantly in a myriad of ways, so that there are no separate systems in the end, there are no closed systems.
So you know, the second law of thermodynamics is really only a theoretical state, you can't really have that entropy, you know, in a vacuum, because that vacuum doesn't exist. It's the first law of thermodynamics, that idea that nothing is created or destroyed, it just moves around a bit, would be a simple way of saying, which unfortunately, then changes your notion of time, etc. So, you know, the idea of hybridity itself is, is kind of, you know, supposing the separation that doesn't really exist, but I guess when things have been separated for a long time, and then they come together, you get this thing that's noted by dog breeders and stuff like that, you know, so populations or systems that have been separated for quite some time, artificially or otherwise when they come together, there is an explosion of vigor. But I really just, I feel that that's just the wild, wildness reasserting itself and celebrating for a minute. It's like, thank God, you know? I mean, so this happens with genetics but it also happens with ideas. Ideas exist within evolutionary pressures and laws as well, and there are always Cambrian explosions when you know systems come together and dance together that have been previously separated. So I guess that's that idea of those hybridized insights, you have exciting things.
The only problem is, and this is another thing, because the perception Nazis have taken over everything, it's hard to talk about, you know, it's hard to talk about power in this, because that's something that actually messes that process up. You know, there isn't free exchange, it's very difficult when we're sitting under a global economic system and anglosphere, that sort of taints everything with unequal power relations, every exchange is sitting under the framework of an economic system that demands inequality for anything to have value. So therefore, when we have dialogue, you know, when we have a dialogical approach to things and where, where there's a cultural interface happening between two cultural systems, power dynamics, unfortunately, unequal power dynamics will come into play, and actually skew that and mess it up. So you inevitably have one group that's existing in an extractive relation with the other group, and you just can't have good thinking, and good exchange, and, you know, third, culture, innovations, etc, emerging, when you have that kind of power imbalance. And you can't address that power imbalance through frickin optics, you can't just have a few different colored faces around the table, and go, look, look, we got a CEO who's, you know, from this minority group, or whatever, that that's optics, that doesn't change the quality of the thinking.
You've got this, you've always got this sort of Anglo Western kind of thinking coming out on top as the default, and everybody else has to sort of orbit around that, and translate their ideas across to that and then that center, the anglo center, chooses what it's going to use, and sort of takes bits and pieces of it, you know, not entire ideas, like, “Oh, my God, we're not going to take the whole Vedic tradition, we're just going to take this bit, the breathing technique, alright? We'll turn that into mindfulness and send that out to every corporation and everybody has to do the training.” So everything is simplified, rebranded, repackaged, and just pretty much destroyed, commodified, commercialized. And I guess that's the same thing that's happening with their identities and activism and everything else. We're just selling. We're all selling and buying together in some highly skewed power dynamics, which for most of us is a zero sum game. Isn't that awful? Can we make the next question a nice one? You know, about something lovely.
Ayana Young Well, yeah it's heavy and it's also honest and I think sometimes that blunt honesty in a world of fake news is really refreshing. There's something I think, kind of relieving just to truth tell to one another, and take down the masks and stop playing the games and stop trying to make everything sound like a branded, clean package with a bow wrapped ready to go with the solutions inside. You know it's real. And there's something yeah, just there's something light about just actually being real with people these days. I think the heaviness to me comes in from a lot of the confusion and not feeling like I can trust things that people are saying, and that really weighs me down.
If there is one thing I’ve really felt incredibly committed to conveying on the podcast, and exploring in conversation is the reality that there are no solutions; the solution is a capitalist endeavor, and so in this sense, chasing down a solution to the problems of our time is a colossal waste of time, and similarly I’ve heard you share that in lieu of solutions, we should be “fostering the right environment for emergence.” And, so I’d like to ask you more about what you see as the environment for emergence, because certainly what it evokes for me is the importance of relinquishing our attachment to normalcy; because emergence certainly does not bloom in the stagnant waters of normalcy.
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, and it doesn’t come from the stagnant waters - to think about energies and flows that you can tap into and connect with and find the pattern in there and be responsive. And I mean emotions, but feeling as a way of thinking, you know, what I mean? Like connecting with the gut through things and finding a path through, suddenly, everything just comes together, everything connects up, everything fits into your day, you just brilliant ideas, amazing things come in, you know, huge conversations, you can have Cambrian explosion of movement and productivity and, you know, really organic sort of fecundity starts coming in your life, all your plants in the garden start growing better, it's brilliant if you can maintain that. The only problem though, is that there are competing energies and competing flows from different systems going on and sometimes you might think that what you're tapping into is the wild, you might think that what you're tapping into is that 100% free range organic, universal energy, but what you're actually tapping into is the net that's been placed over that. You might be actually tapping into marketplace energies and you think what you're doing is authentic because that net that's been placed over the world, you know, it has a shadow copy, an image of everything else in the world that's in nature, all the good and evil in all of us, in every individual there is a crappy shadow version of that in this net that's around the world, this kind of shadow world. And it's hard to know when you're plugged into that shadow world or into the real world. The shadow world is easy to slip into. It's like a warm bath, it's a lot easier.
So you know, are you doing the Vedic tradition? Or are you doing mindfulness kind of thing is, is an example, everything has a shadow, you might think you're being a revolutionary, and you get the Che Guevara poster on your wall or whatever, you think you're being that but you actually not, you're actually being manipulated in that shadow world as well. And it's very hard to know the difference. So you know, when you're sitting around, you're having a meeting, or a group and you're trying to do it organically instead of, you know, talking stick, everybody gets to talk, or like, you know, asking permission to speak or whatever, instead of that structured thing. You're actually just letting a free flowing conversation happen and you just know, when it's your turn to speak, when it's your time to speak, when you have something important to offer the group, this collective mind that's emerging in the group, and you feel that increase happening in your body, you get physiological signs, and you feel drawn to speak and you let the words come out, and everybody's doing that it's flowing, amazingly. But then you get somebody who thinks they're feeling that, but that's not what they're feeling at all. You know, they're feeling actually, they're sort of fetishized identity politic shadow. And, you know, they end up, you know, monologuing from that, and actually throwing out the collective group mind day, you know, it's the same as that, you know, it's, it's very, it's very tricky to know, when you're in the real thing, or when you're in the shadow. Right, it's difficult? You need more than one mind on that at a time, but you need a lot of people with you and to have your back.
The problem with that, though, is trust and in this economic system, global economic system, trust is the thing that can't scale. So any system that you have of exchange has to be something that finds a way to eliminate or police trust through a blockchain maybe or through, you know, a fungible token of exchange of currencies to facilitate the currency exchange, where you're going to be able to have some kind of trust, or you're going to be able to enforce trust through laws or whatever like that. Yeah. And that's a very difficult thing to do just in your interactions in networking. And so that trust doesn't scale, too well. Because I guess getting back to our original idea, all you need is one bad actor. One person acting in bad faith, to extract more from the commons and damage the commons and to you know, gain some kind of advantage and upset the power balance and, and then everybody has to do it. And then all of a sudden, the whole place is wrecked.
Ayana Young I’ve also heard you emphasize the importance of looking at what we can recover, rather than what we can solve - and I think this inquiry into recovery is really fertile because it is in tandem with a conversation on the Western propensity for extraction, and in terms of climate change and adaptation; it’s really a Western extraction of knowledge, and an obsession with saving the last vestiges of whatever we can, that is so pervasive - but knowledge doesn’t bring us into relationship. And while I understand that a Western system in decay would become hyper obsessed with saving, as it’s sort of the opposite side of the same coin of extraction, I wonder if you could speak to the importance and practice of recovering?
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, well, these preservation and conservation narratives, I mean, these are tied to a deep seated fear of the anglosphere and the people who benefit from it, that they're gonna lose all their shit. In order for everything to survive, and for everybody to thrive, and to actually preserve what's going on, you know, the systems that we need to be able to survive, you know, that would mean a lot of people have to give up. You know like, everybody's got all these terrible things that have happened, “Oh, no, that's in the past, that's in the past, we're all equal now. But I'm gonna keep all this capital, I have to, that's mine.” You know, so I mean, I don't know, there are a lot, there are so many movements and organizations that are just dedicated to making change in the world right now and the ones who are the most rigorous, I found it in their thinking, and who do the best analyses are unfortunately, there, they're also - I mean it’s very much in the tech world and the business world, you know it’s all people who’ve come to a realization in that and are actually you know doing really amazing things, a lot of scientists are amazing thinkers, you know, forming these big communities to make systemic change. But a lot of it is grounded in, like, once you start digging, you scratch through that surface, it's grounded in this, this desire to preserve civilization. We've got to save civilization. It's like, “Oh, my God, this is an existential threat to civilization, how do we save it?”
And I'm not talking about the billionaires, because the billionaires aren't interested in saving civilization, either. They have their bunkers in New Zealand and I know that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. But it's true. It's verifiable public record knowledge that billionaires have openly declared, they call it “The Event” in capital letter, when rule of law has gone when, you know, a nuclear winter or whatever, it's like, well, this, this is all crashing. We've got to have our bunkers. And the only thing that they haven't been able to resolve is how they're going to keep their security forces legal, because most of the military in the world at the moment is in private, private forces, private, privately owned militaries. So it's all these billionaires stuff. So that's not who I'm talking about, the mega powerful, they're not interested in saving civilization.
But a lot of the people in the middle, bougie bastards in science and tech, you know economics, business, finance, all these sorts of things, they are quite desperately keen to save civilization. So a lot of the ideas, I mean, that trickles down. So a lot of people when they are into conservation preservation, they need to preserve the biosphere that allows civilization to happen. It's people who've realized that when the biosphere has gone, civilizations are done as well, so how do we save civilization? Well, we have to save the biosphere. So somehow, yeah, we want to keep our economic system, that's inimical to the biosphere, we want to keep that somehow, while saving the biosphere that it depends on. We want to have our cake and eat it too. So I mean, I guess everybody's trying to do that. But even though like I said, the mega rich, who have their bunkers, and private armies, they still don't know how they're going to stop those private armies from just kicking down the bucket door and taking over and drinking all their brandy. You know what I mean? So they're a bit terrified about that, everyone's a bit terrified that they won't be able to hold on to their accumulated shit, which is basically what civilization is based on.
So you know, when people are looking at the end of civilization, they'll be looking at the end of safety. And that safety doesn't mean my person will be damaged, no no, or my family will be damaged, no, no, it's like no property, we need to be able to protect property, we need to be able to protect our capital and 60% of the capital in the world is what? Land is most of the capital in the world. That's what's used to leverage, you know, all this, you know, derivatives and futures into infinity is that land, that's why we're not allowed to have access to it as you know, human beings, as organisms, that need habitat to survive. We're not allowed to access our habitat, because that's somebody else's capital, that they're leveraging for debt, to keep investing and reinvesting and then drawing and creating more capital and borrowing against that. It's a horrendous magic trick. It's that desire to have cake and eat it too. But they don't realize, maybe they do realize, I mean, all they're doing is stealing from the future. They're stealing from all the millennials and from everybody else coming after them, which is a bit tragic.
Ayana Young Similarly, I’d like to talk about preparedness; and typically there seems to be a fixation on either physical preparedness or emotional resilience when talking about the apocalypse or societal collapse, but less are these two bridged or put into conversation together; I’m wondering what tangible resilience in crisis looks like to you?
Tyson Yunkaporta Quite simply looks like diversity. You know, so you need unique community and strong community. But if in your community, everybody thinks the same way and believes in the same thing, and is acting the same way, you don't have any resilience. The resilience only comes through diversity, like real, genuine diversity. So I'm not talking about you know, you've got some Sikhs, and you've got some, I don't know, Latvian transgender people there, and you've got some, you know, differently abled people there and cognitively diverse people there and these are all the people in our community, we have diversity, but you all think the same way, and follow exactly the same rules and logics and everything else, you don't actually have diversity, and all you have is a diverse portfolio of identity capital, so that's not genuine diversity. That's not genuine resilience.
Genuine diversity is, it goes down to what people actually are. It comes down to a lot of people having very different ideas, and talking together, and yet somehow still forming a community with very strong bonds and that is productive. If you have that, you have as many different kinds of people with different capabilities and abilities and thought processes and worldviews who can yet cohere together around that organizing principle of, you know, maintaining, you know, a collective that is individual and diverse at the same time. If you have that, then you have resilience. Yeah. But I mean, that is very difficult in a movement because you expect everybody to be marching in lockstep together. You know, you're all supposed to be cohering around one idea.
But that's why as far as I'm concerned, the only really successful movement that's ever existed was the Occupy Movement, which everybody considers to be a failure and a disaster, but I think that was the most resilient movement ever, and everyone thinks it passed away, but it didn't. It was very diverse people all with different aims and objectives and goals. You know, I'm still cohering together for, you know, a brilliant moment. And then everybody thinks it disappeared, because the branding disappeared, and the name disappeared. But I mean, most of the people I talked to, and I'm involved with, have come out of the Occupy Movement in one way or another. And in the time after it was called Occupy, in the time since then, have produced amazing things, huge solutions, it's been the most productive and dynamic and fertile ground that's ever happened in a movement.
But what that movement did not do was seize power, and then just become the institution that it was seeking to overthrow. That's why it's regarded as unsuccessful. See, there's this trick that's happened to us, this illusion, this idea that in order to be a changemaker, in order to be an activist, your goal, I mean, basically, you have to change yourself, you have to get a group of people, a group of wild people, and you have to domesticate them all into one way of thinking, and gain enough momentum and power together to overthrow the powerful that are that are making the mess in the first place. But in order to do that, you have to become like them and then you have to basically just take over those reins of power and then keep replicating the same destructive patterns. That's when you're allowed to have a successful movement. So yeah, pretty much everybody follows that blueprint, even people who are aware of that, I've just noticed they do it anyway. But that's why I believe the Occupy Movement was the only successful change making thing to happen in the history of civilization.
Ayana Young Well, that makes me feel good personally because I definitely was, I'd say, the Occupy Movement has been in my activist lineage. I came out of that, it was really the catalyst for me and so yeah, I think it had issues like anything humans try to do, but I certainly felt moved by it. Yeah, so it was nice to hear.
But you know, one thing we were talking about earlier was violence, but really briefly, so I want to come back there. And this past year, at least in the United States, we've really been reminded of the ways in which the media seems to capitalize and sensationalize civil violence, you know, leaving the public to fervently consume snippets of violence through social media and the news. And I do think that in some ways, white supremacy conflates violence with entertainment. But this isn't to make the claim that violence is inherently evil, or that this could be chalked up to a misplaced obsession. So I'd like to ask you about this phenomenon and context to what you call contemporary monopolies of violence. What are some of the fundamental myths around violence you see rampant and global systems? And do you see the media as one monopoly on violence?
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, well, I guess there's two kinds of violence, there's violence that creates transformation and lifts everybody up. So all participants, so you know, there's no just encoder and decoder of the violence and one of them dies. Yeah, so there's violence that lifts everybody up, lifts the entire community up, and, you know, increases the sort of consciousness or the creative capacity of that group and that's sort of ritualized violence. Which, unfortunately, that's a niche that spectator sports is occupying at the moment, which is actually just twisting it around. See, there's a shadow of everything. It's just twisted around so that no good shadow of violence, which is not about transformation is not about creation, it's not about increasing relatedness and making good relation as an outcome. It's about destroying those things.
There’s forces of creation and destruction in the world and there's supposed to be attention and balance between these things. But you know, the problem is that it's easier to break shit than make shit. And at the moment, there's more people breaking shit than there are people making shit. It's really hard to make shit. And it's really heartbreaking when someone just smashes it, and then while you're putting it together, they're smashing the other thing and then you're almost done, and then they come and smash that that's very easy for them to do.
Now, that kind of violence, that entropic violence, that lawless violence, that's what it is. It's violence, without law, without protocol, without anybody overseeing that as a ritualized behavior, you know, to maximize transformation and minimize damage. You know, if you don't have that, then your violence is just rubbish. And that's just what you see now. And I guess your laziest people have sort of given into a more easy path of, you know, gaining short term, sort of gratification from breaking shit, rather than the longer term thriving of making shit. You know, these are the people who are attracted to those things and we have that right now, I don't know if I can use the word metastasizing twice in the same interview, but I'm going to because that's what's happened to you. And that's, that's really kicking off. That's going to be not good. You know, even in the short term, but you know, particularly over the next decade as everything unravels, which everything is in this anglosphere.
You know, you're staring down the barrel of a very big economic shift. Globally, I don't think people fully realize the implications of that yet, of what's shifted already. Like, people are still sitting in an illusion of a normal that was in a lot of cases, and they haven't really seen the damage done yet, but you know, we're staring down a very difficult decade, you know, just it was just the economic side, that would be cataclysmic enough, but it's everything else, you know, culturally, politically, and the sort of shift in the habits of people, you know that's been happening since about 1971. That's when all these things came into play. So I was born in 1972. So I was born into a, into a new world that nobody realized was a new world yet. You know, a particular macro system that was very much designed for maximum extraction. That's been horrendous. And we've all been kind of manipulated. Sort of neuro linguistically programmed, you know, into this thing. And I guess that's going to be playing out quite around, horrendously, in the short term, and in the mid term, and probably in the long term. But I feel quite excited about that, though. Because, you know, I believe that the sooner the thing collapses, the sooner we can get on starting up the 1000 year cleanup, and figuring out how we're going to look after each other while we do that.
Ayana Young Yeah, I like that vision of cleaning up and taking care of each other, that's, yeah, the real hope. If I can use that word, which I have not used for years, because I also see it as being problematic. Yeah, I have another question for you and I know we are getting to the end of our conversation, but I'm just thinking about the western or colonial global system gives us ways of classifying ourselves in a sort of hierarchy of colonized, colonizer, oppressed, oppressor, and I think these histories and stories and recognition; are obviously valuable as we reckon with history, but I do wonder at which point do they sort of hit their limit, and I’ve heard you speak about how these identities really foster an environment where we all become very obsessed with trauma stories, and we sort of demand them and then end up reproducing them. And I’d really like to ask about that, but I also think about how our media is also really feeding us these trauma stories and it’s becoming its own language and the perils that it poses. What does the pervasiveness of trauma porn do to all parties on a collective level?
Tyson Yunkaporta Yeah, well it forces us to you know, like we have to upgrade - oh my God, we have to upgrade our like drama credits, like personally, you know, because trauma narratives are capital as well like personal capital, you know, identity capital, all the rest of it. So we're all forced to dig around in and revisit and relive and inflate, and conflate all these things, you know, out across our entire personal little universe. You know? Yeah. I don't know. So I often say that the trauma doesn't happen at the moment of impact, trauma happens later. Trauma is your failure to make meaning of an event. That's all it is, you have to make meaning around that in the real world. What that means in the real world, you know, under the sort of laws of the land and the laws of physics, okay, what does that really mean? You know, in the patterns of me as an organism that belongs to a species that follows these patterns, what does that mean in the picture of that? What do we learn from that? How do I transform and transform people around me from that, boom, you're done, doesn't matter what happened to you, there's no trauma, then.
But instead, we have to actually, you know, we're expected to wear these narratives on our sleeve, you know, it's kind of, that's your pass to get into the room kind of thing, it's your capital to enter these spaces, where you might be able to compete for some kind of value, and kick the can down a bit longer, so that you can survive. So I mean, I don't blame anybody for doing that. That just is what it is. I don't know, it's very difficult, but basically, you do have that I was talking about that shadow world, the net that's over everything and all of these dichotomous identities, so colonized/colonizer, these are our shadow images in that net, because when you get beyond that, and you look down, and in to that real world, to that what you call in the wild, you know, we organisms we’re a species, and that is patterned similarly, everywhere with amazing individual unique expressions, and then regional expressions, you know, as well, because we're, we're mirroring very diverse bio regions and ecosystems, you know, in our patternings, but there are common patterns right across that allow us to flow and move and trade, and hybridize in between all of these systems and keep them vibrant, and vital, you know, and that's what we do.
So beneath that net, of like, these shadow identities, we something else, you know, much, much more vibrant, beautiful, glorious things we are, and you just glimpse that every now and then nothing, anybody who's glimpsed It is never the same again, because you know what your potential is, you know, as a species, and you know, what your ecological niche is. And every cell in your body, every molecule is, you know, crying out for that, you know, to be that to live that to get out of the cage. You want to get there, and then do that be that.
But yet, we are as much in our shadow in that net, or the anglosphere around the planet, as we are in the other side, even when we're there. So, yeah, I guess we just, it probably sounds like I'm working towards a solution for you here and I'm going to give you this amazing tip and you'll be inspired and “Oh my god, that's amazing, I'm gonna do that.” But I'm not. I don't have the answer for that yet. That's just gonna have to work its way out. It's weird because that shadow world is also part of creation. It's just in a weird moment of imbalance and disequilibrium at the moment. So I guess we'll see where it all ends up as the sort of mud settles to the bottom of the pond.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by 40 Million Feet, Marty O'Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra and Violet Bell. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.