Ep 178 Ruminations 10 = Reacting to Individual and Collective Calamity

Episode 178 of RevolutionZ, the tenth in our Spontaneous Ruminations sequence introspects personal crisis and considers social crisis and explores their commonalities and differences.

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Speaker 1 0:00

Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and this is the hundred and 78th consecutive episode of the podcast. That's titled revolution Z. We had a late postponement. So today I have to do our 10th ruminations episode. Um , ruminations episodes. Remember our basically what's ever on my mind as it emerges as we're doing the episode, it's kind of a spontaneous thing. Since it's on my mind, I will start with something quite personal. I guess one might call it. I hadn't anticipated this, but here we go. A few days back. I had my first doctor's appointment in three years. I'm not much regarding to the doctor , uh , unless there's something wrong and I had moved. So I got a new doctor. So it was my first time seeing this new doctor and , uh, I wasn't feeling quite so great for various reasons. I went and , uh, for the first, you know, catching up , uh , uh , checkup, et cetera , et cetera , I was fine. Picture of health, et cetera . At the end of the session, he started taking a look at my scalp under my hair, what that's what's left of it. And when you know it , uh , he found something, he didn't like it's , uh , these things are called by various names and can be various things. So it could be actually I have them all over , uh , just a spot larger or smaller has various causes. There's absolutely no consequence. So that's what, everything, except this particular area that he scrounged up on my scalp was this, he thought was , uh , perhaps even likely a melanoma, which is a skin cancer. When I was a kid, melanoma was essentially a death sentence. Uh , nowadays I don't think that's the case. I think there's various ways of dealing with it, depending upon how far along it is. But of course, that gets ahead of the story. We don't yet know what this is. So I had to go get a biopsy and I did that yesterday. That's where they basically take a little bit for those of you who don't watch medical shows on TV or aren't doctors, you take a little bit of the suspicious , uh , entity could be a growth on your kidney or wherever, or it could be skin and they then , uh , process it and determine what's what , uh , so they did this and , uh , it'll be a week before I get results. So right now, and for basically a week, this was yesterday that , uh , was done. I sit and wait. All right .

Speaker 2 2:58

That's not such a interesting story. I don't think , uh , and I don't mean to burden you with it, but it is on my mind. And , uh , to be honest, ruminations, I'm supposed to talk about that. So is there a political link to this? Well, maybe I thought about it after I got home and , uh, you know, mulling on it, watching some TV distraction reading. And I decided that honestly, my current situation possible catastrophe possible gigantic intrusion on life, but not catastrophic and possibly nothing , um , is not that different from what is now commonplace for some people, arguably all people and dealt with. Similarly, I suspect so how am I dealing with it? Well , I'm dealing with it by basically a kind of denial mixed with a kind of , uh , exploration, I suppose you could call it. There are moments when I just take the worst case scenario as the likely outcome and start thinking about what I do in that case. And then there are other moments more often, and most of the time when I'm not thinking about it at all, which is most of the time , um, when I'm in a kind of denial, I suppose you could say, I'm basically assuming , uh , that it just won't be that bad. It'll be something either nothing or something handable , uh , treatable , uh , manageable. And now consider the feeling is a kind of , uh , variation on the notion that , uh , doom alone awaits around the next corner. And isn't that something that is in many people's minds. Now, the pandemic climate, global warming, ecological nightmares, war, internal, societal, social disillusion, how do we writ large and perhaps even wri individually for each person who's listening to this, respond to these four bearers of doom alone, a waiting around the next corner, because surely you could see it that way. And how do we respond? I think partly with this , with denial, partly with, okay, it's gonna be horrible. What's the next thing that I do. And partly with, you know, worrying over angsting over and , uh, uh , elaborating upon in our heads, the worst scenario, the thing is none of those responses in the case of pandemic, climate war, internal social dissolution, are that sensible? I think, whereas I honestly think that, you know, I'm not being crazy combining those kinds of response to the waiting game of waiting for a biopsy result. And the reason I think there's a difference is because the feeling of hopelessness that is we can't influence it is true with the biopsy. I can't do anything. It's I just have to sit here and wait, but on the other fronts, I think that's not the case. I think on the other fronts, yes, they do foreshadow potential calamity, catastrophe, even doom, but it's not the case that we can do nothing. And so if we sort of go into a denial mode or a okay, plum, the depths of the, of the horror mode, we are not doing, what has a potential merit take the pandemic, first of all, is there a denial mode? Is there a mode of, okay, plum the depths of the horror and just basically figure out how to respond to it when it unfolds? I think both those things exist for the pandemic and the pandemic is closest, I suppose, in some sense to period that I'm in because the pandemic after all is disease also. But the reality is that when we are in denial, that is when we say to ourselves, well, it's over, there's nothing to worry about now. There's no real concern onward. Or when we say to ourselves, it's hopeless in either case, we're not just trying to manage our own response. We're simultaneously affecting the prospects of what will emerge, because even if this pandemic COVID was over and I think it's not, but even if it was even if it was going to now be, you know, like the flu , uh , something manageable, something that's dealt with, something that doesn't disrupt the entirety of societies and so on. Even if it was that it wouldn't mean that pandemics are over. And there's every reason to believe that regrettably, the kind of phenomena and circumstances and factors that led to COVID can lead to another. And so we can be back where we were unless instead of denying and assuming it's all over , uh , we take steps. If it's continuing, of course the steps are important. You know, the, anti-vaxers the people who, who arguably saying, you know, there's no need for masks and there's no need for social distancing and we're doing so even at the height of it, you know, I can empathize with what's going on in their feelings and thoughts. They want to get on with life. And they also feel helpless in the face of it. And so they just, you know, try to get by. But the reality is that a collective response and a much more important collective response in the form of pressure on social institutions and in support of those who are trying to change those institutions and change the probability of pandemics in the future is really what's warranted. I know you all know this, but you know, there's an element of knowing. And then there's an element of knowing, and they're not, they're not entirely the same, there's academic knowledge and there's knowledge in your gut. Global warming is the same way. It could be the end of everything. Let's lump it in with all the other ecological problems that are emerging. So what do we do? Do we hunker down, say to a cells , well, it's 50 years off. The , the , the giant calamity is 50 years off or 30 years off or whatever, make the best of it. And don't angst over it. Do we say, well, it's exaggerated. It's not really that dangerous. It's not really an existential crisis or a gigantic crisis or whatever you want to call it sort of denial. Or do we face facts face that it is an existential crisis face that it, whether it's further off or nearer, it's gonna affect humanity. It affects our offspring or ourselves. And actually I think it's ourselves. And the only response that ultimately is going to have an impact is massive political participation in a dissident manner to force institutions, to accommodate the changes that are needed. And if we really understand that, then, then you know, it's like, I don't know if , uh, if you're in the street and there's a car barreling toward you, you don't deny that there's a car barreling toward you and you don't say, oh, well, I'll just live with the result you get out of the way. And if there's something barreling towards you, which could be pushed off its track, you try and push it off its track when it's bigger, when it's a whole of society, I guess we have trouble going from seeing it to seeing what's necessary. Same thing is true about war. Same thing is true about internal social disillusion war Becks. Now it's happening. It's not just happening in Ukraine. It's happening everywhere. Guns are being shot at people. Bombs are exploding at people. Countries political forces are pursuing ends by violent means. So internal social dissolution is happening everywhere that I , I don't know what to call it. A degree of frustration and despair is combining with a degree of manipulative vial self-serving and yielding and outpouring of irrationality of attachment to inclinations values and behaviors that are self destructive and socially destructive. And that isn't just on the right. It's also on the left. You can also see it in our own institutions in the sense they mirror the world around us. So what we're talking about then is in this strange juxtaposition of personal threat fear possible disaster. That certainly not just I, but a great many people are dealing with in various forms and the social , uh , potential threat, fear disaster in many forms, the link is somehow our psychological response, or so it seems to me anyway, and perhaps this points again to something that, of course y'all know, I keep harping on, but about which I've had a slight change of, of mind recently, or a slight broadening of mind recently, the thing is the need for vision, the need to know ballpark roughly in fundamental terms where we want to go, what do we want instead of the sexist misogynist masculinist mess that is current kinship relations and the damage that it does to us, what do we want instead of the current cultural community racial, ethnic situation that we endure that divides that hurts that cripples, that denies that we endure, what do we want instead of a political system whose insanity is more and more revealed every day in which the political institutions are structured in such a way that a very small number of people, a small constituency determines the life situations and circumstances of everyone else. They might do it under the rubric, under the name democracy. They might do it under the name oligarchy , but all in all what's going on is that the few are deciding norms, rules, legislation, adjudication of disputes, and the implementation of collective programs on their own behalf, not in a manner that reflects the will the needs and the desires of the many. And what do we want in place of an economy capitalism, or for that matter, what I've called TISM which again, elevates a group, a sector of the population owners. In the case of capitalism, what I call the coordinator class in the case of coordinator sometimes called 20th century socialism to a dominant position, which determines outcomes, which accrue benefits, which imposes the costs on others, which creates inequality, impoverishment, indig, denial, and all the rest. What do we want in the place of all that? Why is that even a matter of concern now, with all these crises that we face with the need to address global warming, with the need to address , uh , poverty at its grossness, with the need to address the, the perversion of political institutions with the need to address violence and rape. And now the, the denial of, of, of , uh , abortion possibilities for so many, with the need to address the violence against communities, blacks, Latin, Asian, with , with the need to address all that immediately. Why the hell do we need to talk about vision? Which sure is hell isn't immediate. It's not gonna happen tomorrow for those who think it is, it's not, it takes time. So why bother? Well, the reason to bother is because knowing where we wanna go informs how we try to get there provides hope, provides a reason to struggle, provides a reason to give one's time to movement activity. So I've said for a long time, and I've tried to work hard to promote vision mostly for me around economics, but also around kinship and community and politics, all of which are equally important. All right , what's the change. The change is a number of people have formulated this to me. And they've said, basically we agree having vision, having a, a, a point at which we're attempting to get , uh , will inform how we get there. Of course it will provide hope and , uh , direction and , uh , commitment of course, but there's an obstacle to people even paying attention to vision, even hearing the words of it, even, you know, much less, you know, seriously, and with , um , a degree of, of rigor considering let's call it visionary proposals to try and decide their merit and their implementability their viability , uh , in order to perhaps share them and to become advocates. And what is that obstacle? The obstacle is not just, and this vision tries to overcome directly, not just skepticism, that anything better is possible, not just concerned that maybe people are, are just too screwed up , uh , to do anything better, not just that, which the sort of visionary impetus tries to address directly, but something slightly different, which is the notion that you can't beat city hall. That is that's an old formulation of it. You can't beat the, you know, the governmental corporate military academic media gigantic that made theism that maintains and will fight to maintain the current system against any better vision. And if you can't reach a better vision, it's just academic. It's just noodling to, to propose one, to propose something that's unreachable is a waste of time. Maybe it's good for curiosity. Maybe it's good for a novel, but it's not good for movements or so goes the feeling. And so goes the widespread disin inclination to give much time to the topic. And what this leads to, I think is the observation that , um, not only do we need vision. So in the case of what I advocate the vision of a participatory society, and in particular, in my particular case of what I advocate the vision of a participatory economy, but we also need to talk about and to arrive at hope about, and to arrive at shared thoughts about strategy for getting there strategy for winning that future. Now here, there's a complication because there is no one strategy. It's not as if there's no one vision either, right? So take economics participatory economics. I describe it as a scaffold upon which we build a future economy. So it's just the essential and the core features is the vision different places, different times, different prior histories will yield different details, different ways of filling out the scaffold to become a whole economy. I mean, just like there's not just one kind of capitalism, one instance of it that is always in exactly the same in all countries. It has many elements built upon the core. That is the same. So participatory economics, I think, is like that it's a proposal for a different kind of economy, meaning a different set of core underlying defining relations upon which future people will create, implement, sustain, refine , um, all sorts of additional features that fill it out to become a full economy, same thing for participatory kinship or community or polity . The vision is the core essential elements. Okay. So now let's go back to strategy. We're trying to attain this new result, this new society in which the crises that we experience no longer exist in which not just that, but business as usual is no longer denial, denigration, division, impoverishment, and so on in which people are living full lives and controlling their own lives. Okay. But there is no one strategy because in different countries at different times, and in different places and with different choices, new contexts arrive and in the new context, new choices are made. And so what we need, I think is some clarity about some shared thoughts about some allegiance to a broad strategic conception that is in tune with the kind of vision that we wanna attain. That that is consistent with the kind of vision that we want to attain that can attain the kind of vision that we want to attain. Not all the tactics, not all the steps, not all the multitude of, of circumstances , uh , you know, which we will encounter many of which we can't know now, some of which we can know and predict as possibilities, but rather a conception of how we deal a conception of how we judge choices, how and against what rubric, for example, enlarging the number of people who align with our cause enlarging the commitment and the competence competency, the, the consciousness of the people who do align with our cos winning changes that are such, that they accumulate in a positive way and winning them in a manner which creates a conducive to winning more changes so that we're winning a trajectory of change. If you will, that's moving us closer to what it is that we desire for society. And finally, of course, constructing building, maintaining the new institutions, those core defining institutions that we need , um , for future people to be able to self-manage their way to full, consistent , uh , stable , uh , worthy new social systems at any rate. It seems to me as much of a mouthful as all that is that it is what's needed. And yet it seems like there's another thing needed. And I'll maybe bring this to a conclusion with this. Although it'll take a bit, the other thing that's needed, let's assume for a minute that we achieve what I just talked about. We achieve a degree of widespread unity, shared conception, not universal agreement about everything at all, but shared conception about the defining features of goals that we desire and defining practices, general methods and value to procedures and strategic goals for the path that we take to that goal. Suppose we do that. There's still another issue I think. And the other issue is if we continue as now, if we continue as last year, if we continue as last decade, if we continue as we have four decades, right? It isn't an entirely new phenomenon, though. Right now it is particularly, I don't know how to describe it. It is particularly widespread and virulent. If we continue to fight ourselves, if we continue to form what are called circular, firing squads, if we continue, have no way to deal with each other, when we differ other than to choose upside and denigrate those, not on our side, while elevating those on our side, leaving behind all find all elements of, of listening, of empathy, of trying to resolve differences of trying to even maintain differences inside one structure with diversity, with respect. Instead of saying that those who differ from me must be literally opposed must have sharply different values, much have, must be an enemy. If we can't overcome that, if we can't overcome, what's called sometimes sectarianism nowadays cancel culture. Um, if we can't overcome these kinds of dynamics that rip us apart, then even as we try to attain a shared vision and try to attain a shared strategy, our efforts will be undone by the kind of cultural dynamic, the kind of interpersonal reflex behaviors that we carry. These things are not so different from what exists out there in the wider society beyond us. We don't wanna replicate racism in our movement. We don't wanna replicate sexism in our movement. We don't wanna replicate class hierarchy in our movement. We don't wanna replicate authoritarianism in our movement, but we haven't yet come to the conclusion, come to the realization that we do not want to replicate the kind of interpersonal hostilities and defensiveness and aggressiveness that characterize life outside in our movement. Not because we're trying to make some isolated, wonderful entity, but because those habits, those patterns and ways of behaving are destructive and will destroy our efforts to create a better society. And so I guess what the upshot is oddly coming from, you know, this personal circumstance is that we not only need vision, meaning and understanding of the defining core features of the society we wish to accomplish. We wish to attain not a blueprint, but that which is essential for it to be worthy. That which is essential for it to be viable and a strategic mode of thinking of operating of, of evaluating our choices, of understanding our potential audience of relating to it. We also need to somehow arrive at and incorporate in our efforts, a culture, I guess you could call it a, a way of interpersonally relating when there is difference, even significant difference that isn't destructive, but is constructive. That doesn't call out denigrate and cancel, but instead manages to call in and to, and to align, or at least respect and maintain differences to explore and experiment with, with an open mind about which will prove to be more accurate and more productive. I hope this wasn't , uh , uh , totally. I don't know what word to use rambling. I am a bit distracted, I suppose you could say. And I apologize for that. Uh , but all that said, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for revolution Z .