Morbid Zoo Calls Out Racist Agriculture Discourse

[00:00:00]Without agriculture, we're small nomadic family groups with no medicine or security. Oh, well, >> no, that that's not true. You have you have medicine and security. [laughter] That's not true. Um, I appreciate the direction she's going in with this because this is one of those cases where a whole lot of people who who are well-meaning, there are a lot of people who go like, "What? What do you mean agriculture bad? We would still be we would still be living in the wilderness without medicine or clothes like those people without agriculture.

[00:00:33]You see you see the fine line you have to dance upon. You know what the problem is? You know what the problem is with our world today? Vegetables. We ate too many vegetables. We needed to stop making so many vegetables. That's the problem, guys.

[00:00:46]>> Splits into two camps. people who believe that other cultures are products of physically less evolved subspecies of the self-evidently superior Western European human. [music] >> I mean, come on. Come on.

[00:01:00]>> Also, like, isn't the story of at least North American indigenous people pretty much the society grew for 3 to 4 hundred years until 5 years of famine and drought wiped every trace of the society from the earth?

[00:01:12]>> Hey, uh, LZ le Bon Queso Roller. Um, why am I here?

[00:01:19]This isn't Europe. Why Why am I here?

[00:01:25]Somebody else watched this video in advance and they put to rest a couple worries that I have. Not because I have any particular worries about Morbid Zoo, because her content is generally very thoughtful and very good. Um, but I'm always wary whenever people talk about anthropology on YouTube because it is so so easy. It is so easy to just blindly accidentally with the best intent in intentions just wander into just a radically racist stance. And it's not because people want to.

[00:01:53]It's because unfortunately most of our language inherits stuff. Most of our frames of reference inherits stuff that implies that.

[00:02:03]So it's like, you know, you're you're you're begging for it basically dealing with this topic dealing with the topic of anthropology at all. um on YouTube uh especially as a non-speist, but it seems like she did a good job. So, I think I think we'll be okay.

[00:02:20]>> So, I thought I might cross-ost a little dissertation research again if that's okay with you. The other day I was scrolling Blue Sky and Blue Sky has kind of gained a reputation as sort of snoody Twitter. If you're on Blue Sky, it's at least partly because you think you're too good for Twitter, which you are, by the way. Everybody >> I'm actually banned on Twitter, that's why >> he's too good for Twitter. It's where academics and writers go. It's everybody with the same sort of short attention span and mild narcissism required for Twitter who also don't want to be flashbanged with white supremacy every third post. It's okay. Anyway, for a few hours a couple weeks ago, the main character of Bluesog posted by a guy who commented upon it a different take on that statement from an archaeologist 100. Let's watch it, shall we?

[00:03:05]>> Are you ready? [music] >> [music] >> Wait, wait, what?

[00:03:19]>> Oh, I see. Okay, sorry. They're dissing agriculture. What?

[00:03:28]>> Why? [music] >> Oh, she means really bad internet anthropology. Oh my god.

[00:03:40]Think maybe they were getting some benefit from the stored food.

[00:03:45][music] Food surplus is inequality. Food surplus is inequality. Oh, it is myth of subsistence [ __ ] and morbid zoo is critiquing it. Good. Good. That does not follow. There's nothing saying that you can't disperse wealth once a generation dies. You do not need to actually pass it on to the following children. And sometimes they don't. Actually, you don't need agriculture for slavery.

[00:04:11]Nomads had slaves. Um, this is something that Markx talks about. One of the earliest forms of commodity exchange was slavery.

[00:04:18]>> Stupid. Oh my god, what a stupid thing to say. Let's take a little time to dismantle this. The easiest claim to attack here is the war claim. I think that should be pretty obvious. War has existed forever and is and was regularly practiced by people without agriculture.

[00:04:34]But this really is the least of them.

[00:04:35]All sorts of agricultural.

[00:04:37]>> Okay, there's a great line here. By the way, [clears throat] this is this is what you need to understand about warfare. And people I this is something that I can see people on my end of the fence where it's like, no, war is institutional. War is something that has specific legal conditions.

[00:04:52]I can see them making this mistake. What do you mean you need an aortionment of of land? You need a nomos, quote unquote, in order to have war? No. What you need is a conception of the collective as an entity that can make decisions as a collective, right? And it's it's self understood as such.

[00:05:09]So this is uh this is Michelle Sarah in the natural contract talking about debate. Okay, this is a short paragraph. It's not well, it's two paragraphs, won't be too long. This is a section on dialogue.

[00:05:22]Let's examine an analogous situation to a a duel on a painting. Okay. Uh suppose two speakers determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be as long as they are willing to continue the discussion, they may speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take place. There can't be an argument between two people if one speaks a language the other can't understand. To shut someone else up, somebody suddenly changes idiom. Thus, doctors once spoke Latin and collaborators during the last war German just as today's Parisian newspapers use English so that the good people understanding nothing obey in a days. Nearly all technical words are harmful in science and philosophy. They serve only to separate the sectarians of the parish from those who are excluded from the conversation so that the masters can hold on to some form of power. Even more than a common language, debate requires the speakers to use the same words in a sense that is at least related and at best identical. They therefore enter into a preliminary contract, spoken or unspoken, stipulating the use of a common code. This agreement, most often tacit, precedes the debate or combat, which in turn presupposes an agreement.

[00:06:28]I think that's what is signified by the term declaration of war, whose wording allows no ambiguity, a legal contract that precedes the violent explosions of conflicts. By definition, war is a legal state. What you need to have a state of war is not a notion of property because nomadic groups can go to war. We could go to war if we were if we inhabited space and we were on spaceships that just flew around and never stayed in one place for very long, right? But maybe for example, we conflicted over uh whatever the interstellar version of hunting grounds would be, right? You absolutely can have war without agriculture.

[00:07:06]What you can't have without agriculture or what is difficult to understand having without agriculture would be a better way to put it would be for example a liberal idea of property wherein there is an extension of the person to productive land right because our notion of property specifically has to do with with land. Our notion our notion of the private as opposed to the public specifically has to do with dominion over parcels of land which is hard to justify when you're not growing anything on it.

[00:07:40]>> The AA people definitely had a food surplus and definitely also had a communal labor system with equal resource distribution. No great inequality.

[00:07:48]>> This argument is complicated by examples of wars that were not officially called wars which NATO did in recent years with terms uh with terms like special military operation. What are your thoughts? [clears throat] Uh Carl Schmidt is hopeful here. Unfortunately, um fundamentally when you are able to wage a war without calling it a overridden by one greater power or collection of powers over a smaller one used as a kind of global policing operation which blurs the distinction between inside and outside in terms of a state's purview in terms of state sovereignty. And so as a consequence, you have you have indeed, as you say, like acts that are equivalent to acts of war and war crimes being committed under nicer sounding names, less spooky names like special operations, right? What you're putting your finger on is that um investment by the greatest powers into the stable the stability of an international system of sovereign states has degraded. Right. Yeah. Or intervention or military assist military assistance is is a particularly nefarious one because typically what that means is you're taking sides in a civil war >> here. But quite a few of the Pacific Northwest tribes like the Tlingit who did not have an organized agricultural system but did have permanent settlements. Absolutely.

[00:09:07]>> You know what I love about the myth of subsistence? By the way, >> can you imagine making all that stuff if you can't if you have no leisure time and the only thing you can do is feed yourself?

[00:09:20]No, you wouldn't.

[00:09:22]That's art.

[00:09:25]That's culture. That's civilization. You don't do that if every if if the only thing you're capable of doing under non- capitalist conditions is just barely feeding yourself. It's ridiculous. The Tlingit, who did not have an organized agricultural system, but did have permanent settlements, absolutely valued wealth and had a hierarchy and kept slaves as property.

[00:09:49]So, yeah, this is >> I'm not talking about those specific outfits. I'm talking about the art the art on the outfits.

[00:09:54]Those those outfits are I don't know if they're traditional materials. They might very well be synthetic. Who cares?

[00:10:00]>> As hell, you can find an exception for every single one of these claims. And if there are exceptions, then the relationships between agriculture and these bad effects are obviously not causal but are instead correlational.

[00:10:12]People >> you can go a little bit stronger actually. Um you can say they were known like like rats for example. At no point did they go oh we got an infestation by rats. A lot of people are I guess we need to go back to hunting buffalo.

[00:10:29]>> In the comments thought this was stupid too. There was no slavery or inequality before agriculture. What are we trying to say here? That there was no slavery or inequality before agriculture. That's good. The absolute ahistoricism of something like this should be called out. I like this tweet. It's a good tweet. The Tik Tok person claiming to be an archaeologist. Maybe no such thing.

[00:10:46]Certainly.

[00:10:47]>> No. I I would actually buy that she is an archaeologist. We were covering a Gutsag Gibbon video. And again, I like Gutsag Gibbon. I I appreciate her stuff.

[00:10:55]Guts Gibbon is a primatologist. Gutsy Gibbon bought into the notion that at a subsistence level quote unquote you could not have for example science right you couldn't have the cataloging and study and discourse about the world and the the organisms and structures that you find in it is completely belied by anthropology. Um, one of the reasons why uh early anthropologists and actually current anthropologists uh frequently need guides from among native groups is specifically because they have extensive cataloges of even the very useless uh things in their environment. And a big part of this is that they had a curiosity about them. They talked about them. They did this for fun.

[00:11:39]Turns out actually under conditions of not being squeezed for every last drop of labor that a human being can have extracted from them uh human beings actually like to do things productively by themselves without without being forced.

[00:11:55]Um, in fact, they will do that even under conditions of extreme scarcity, which is why even the most starving groups in human history have had art, poetry of various stripes, whatever you want to call it. Um, and guaranteed, even without writing, they had philosophy. It's one of the reasons why I'm really annoyed by um certain well-meaning approaches to indigenous uh revitalization that try to cast traditional stories as indigenous philosophy because they had both. They had myth and they had philosophy. And to call this that one is a to insist that oh without a without a a recorded written artifact, they're not equal. And B, it's it's to make it so that both the categories of storytelling and philosophy disappear because they were absolutely there were absolutely pre-cont humans in America who didn't write but who thought about things who had no philosophy. Vos, >> I've never heard an archaeologist say anything close to this kind of rubbish.

[00:13:02]This is pure unadulterated far-right return [ __ ] Without agriculture, we're small nomadic family groups with no medicine or security. Oh, well, >> no. That that's not true. You have you have medicine and security. That's [laughter] not true. Um, >> attackendu761 super chatted $50. My theory is a lot of that philosophy was lost as the new world was conquered.

[00:13:30]>> Oh, categorically on that point. So, something very curious happens, for example, with the Aztecs, right? They they're still around. It's weird how like we talk about them like they're just gone. They're still They're still around.

[00:13:46]It's It's especially weird we talk about them like they just kind of disappeared culturally because we know that they're still around.

[00:13:54]You you you've you've met many of them.

[00:13:57]You've met many of their descendants.

[00:13:59]with the dissolution of of Aztec society certainly as like a a a a dominant political structure, you had a curious thing take place where [clears throat] uh Mashika people learned to write and by learning to write they preserved elements of of their thought, right? But there's a catch to this and this is one of the reasons why privileging written forms is not always actually useful from an anthropological standpoint. In fact, it's usually perverse. You need to have a more open mind about this kind of thing. Because when you write, you create an artifact. And the Mishika, by the way, had writing to be clear. But when you write in a different way, you create an artifact that is more or less specific than the thing you are trying to codify. And you create something capable of repetition outside of immediate experience and outside of not just immediate experience but outside of sort of a um a dynamic [clears throat] social preservation of of not so much a thought but of like a like a a a social slash mental movement right but as I was saying like as a consequence of this though uh there is a transformation of that thought so you don't even even written down and preserved quote unquote You don't have the original thing. That doesn't make it invalid and it doesn't make it in not invaluable. It does preserve a lot of of at the very least insight. But you lose you don't just lose the detail or the specificity. You lose the form the form of that discourse because it is no longer the product of community investments. It's no longer lived in the same way so to speak, right? And this is not unique to people who have been colonized either. Like for example, this monstrosity. This is this was originally spoken and now people are complaining.

[00:16:04]This person isn't continuing to pretend like ancient Greeks used the word [ __ ] Anyways, >> uh I mean kind of. I don't care how bad things get. We are not turning on the concept of >> ag Not kind of. Careful. Careful. Um agriculture is not a condition of medicine. Um, agriculture is a condition of a lot of different types of disease.

[00:16:24]There's actually a grain of truth in that in that quote there, but that's not an argument for saying agriculture bad.

[00:16:29]Um, secondly, nomatic peoples also engage in agriculture. Nomadic groups engage in agriculture. Nomadic family groups have medicine and security.

[00:16:38]There's actually there's actually a lot of racist uh memes about medicine, quote unquote, but they specifically come come from that, right?

[00:16:48]Why? Well, because one of the things that they were very good at is again cataloging all the local flora and fauna and making use of them through experiment.

[00:16:59]>> Small nomadic family groups with no medicine or security. Oh well, I mean kind of. I don't care how bad things >> I'll accept kind of >> get. We are not turning on the concept of >> what is medicine? That is an excellent question.

[00:17:12]>> Agriculture and non-nomatic civilization. Yes, graneries lead to rats, but it also leads to feeding populations, which allows for organized society.

[00:17:22]>> Oh, no. No. You have or you have [clears throat] organized society outside of e agriculture.

[00:17:28]Guys, guys, come on.

[00:17:31]>> Every time I see some video of someone smuggly pointing at text, I want to barf on them. Apparently, this one thinks we should all be hunter gatherers with short lifespans, living in small groups in the forest, huddled around campfires, hoping the mushrooms we gathered won't kill us all. Uh, better to live in. No, >> I just said they were domestic independent. You can go to war with them. No, not really. You can't go to war with Native Americans in the United States. What? They aren't recognized as states at huntergatherer tribes that I guess never fought on the brink of starvation with an average life expectancy at birth of like.

[00:18:04]>> I appreciate the direction she's going in with this because this is one of those cases where a whole lot of people who who are well-meaning, they are well-meaning. They don't they don't realize they're doing this. It's one of the reasons why I was also like very wary of of her covering this topic. Um there are a lot of people who go like what what do you mean agriculture bad?

[00:18:22]We would still be we would still be living in the wilderness without medicine or clothes like those people without agriculture.

[00:18:31]You you see you see the fine line you have to dance upon.

[00:18:36]>> 23 sounds better than watch his video again. taxes achieving perfect equality when everybody in the tribe starves to death together. Beautiful.

[00:18:46]>> Oh god.

[00:18:48]>> Also like isn't the story of at least North American indigenous people pretty much the society grew for 3 to 400 years until 5 years of famine and drought wiped every trace of the society from the earth.

[00:19:00]>> Hey uh LZ le Bon Queso Roller. Um why am I here?

[00:19:07]This isn't Europe. Why why am I here?

[00:19:10]Little riddle for you.

[00:19:12]>> 400 years until 5 years of famine and drought wiped every trace of the society from the earth. Oh no. Weak. It's human progress. Progress has repercussions.

[00:19:22]Agriculture allows for cities. Cities are culture. Without an overabundance of food, man doesn't progress at all.

[00:19:28]Nothing [laughter] nothing ever is perfect or without consequences. But farming >> can you just just just by the vi I do I do love like the backdrop to all of this of course is that the the particular cultural trajectory has it's one of its key pillars you know the Bible you know one of the oldest chronicles of a nomadic people for like roughly solid solid quarter of the text now they're just being bigoted against rural people they're being bigoted against a lot of people and the scary thing is They don't realize it. They think they're being scientific and progressive. It doesn't even occur to them.

[00:20:09]You see what we're up against here? And these are a lot of these people are are quote unquote leftists or they think they are.

[00:20:16]>> Loud civilization, educated classes that create writing. Farming turned us from an animal into a civilization. So, art, culture, philosophy, literature, music, >> we are we are still animals. I am sorry to say >> all the things people could devote their lives to because they didn't need to put that time toward hunting and gathering.

[00:20:35]Appreciate the people rebutting this with stats and evidence. But also, if tribes wanted to walk into the woods and start foraging again, it seems like they could have done that. And it turns out they mostly preferred living in cities where they could do textiles instead of being eaten by a wolf.

[00:20:49]>> I am so sorry for pausing you on that uh on that face, Morbid, but you know what?

[00:20:54]I concur. I sympathize with this micro expression very much so.

[00:20:58]>> Hey, does anybody else think it's weird how many people on the center to left of the political spectrum think it's absolutely okay to be racist toward indigenous people?

[00:21:08]>> Oh, thank [ __ ] God. Okay, >> there's actually a reason that's the case, I think. But we can talk about that in a bit. First, I want to spend a couple >> Excuse me. Sunday, the Bible says humans are separate from animals. No, it says that humans are separate from beasts.

[00:21:21]That's different. And it's dismantling this position too. Firstly, cities can exist without agriculture. Not cities of the scale we have today. Obviously, that would be extremely difficult. But this idea that there's like a hard line between small bands of hunter gatherers and urban complexes is nonsense. Poverty Point is a place in southern Louisiana that is home to a prehistoric city where thousands of people gathered and did something. We're not sure, but they definitely didn't murder each other there. and they definitely didn't farm.

[00:21:52]Whether they lived there year round is up for debate, but this is >> uh here's where I would disagree a little bit. Um when we're talking about cities and like these are these are big. I think there's a lot of emphasis being placed on scale as a sign of development. Uh one of the things that humanity is learning is that development is not always synonymous with scale.

[00:22:19]Um sometimes uh you actually need a a balanced situation and so like an appropriate social structure is one that allows you to thrive in your environment. It's not one that meets the standards of another community elsewhere. And so like we can get into a whole discussion about like the definition of a city or whatever. I would I would say that what's being pointed to here is you have political communities. You have political entities that are capable of organizing and engaging strategically and pragmatically with the environment and doing all of the stuff that we think that we we we we like political communities to be able to do, right?

[00:22:57]>> Complex organization without agriculture quite clearly. But let's just say it that wasn't true. It is true to be crystal clear. Human beings are perfectly capable of organizing a lot of people without agriculture. But let's pretend there's something special about agriculture that unlocks largecale organization like a [ __ ] video game achievement. It would still be the case that this language about hunter gatherers, that they are huddled around campfires hoping the mushrooms they gathered won't kill them all, that they have no medicine or security, that they're essentially desperate, starving animals with no culture, constantly struggling to survive, would still be unbelievably offensively incorrect. You want to know something crazy about >> Well, there's a flip side to this, too.

[00:23:42]you can actually uh with a slight modification of the meaning of the terms use lack of security as a positive. See, one of the things that happens under conditions of agriculture um is you do have a specific property use for slaves, right? And so you end up starting to treat territory as a means of extraction and the humans occupying the territory as a means of extraction.

[00:24:06]And security therefore ends up being a matter of preemptively protecting your dominion over this is a point that was sort of made from Rouso onwards, right? Like the um when you when you fence out when you fence out territory and then deploy human bodies to make that territory productive, you end up treating that territory and the humans operating it as a single good to be manipulated from a distance. Right. So, uh, in a certain sense, non-aggricultural groups did lack those kinds of security concerns because they were mobile and they weren't dependent upon slaves/land in that particular kind of way. They still had slaves and often they would trade in slaves historically, but in a different way.

[00:24:56]You wouldn't, for example, have a viable shadow slavery system on a scale of what happened in America, right? Hunter gatherers, they know.

[00:25:05]>> Croatian word for cop, pendur, was an archaic word for guards that patrolled the fields. Interesting >> about food storage. They don't want it.

[00:25:14]What for? They've got all the stuff they need. That's the whole point of being a hunter gatherer. The benefit of being >> That's what Zoo is doing though. I don't think Zoo is doing that.

[00:25:23]I don't I don't think I don't think Zoo is doing I think some of the people she's criticizing are doing that. I don't think Zoo is doing that.

[00:25:27]>> Being a hunter gatherer relies on the presumption of food being everywhere.

[00:25:32]Hunter gatherers always assume there's enough food. And yet somehow this perpetual surplus still hasn't resulted in the vast inequality it's apparently supposed to. In the real world, the biggest threat to huntergatherer societies is the nation state. These outside forces displacing them, ruining the land they depend on for food, disrupting the climate that makes their lifestyles predictable, and trying to make them change when they've made it very clear that they don't want your [ __ ] They're not dying at 23. They're not malnourished. They have art and music and philosophy. Stop talking this way about hunter gatherers. It is extremely rude at best. This is the case for >> by the way. It ain't just hunter gatherers that uh nation states are starving in collusion with each other.

[00:26:15]>> Past as well as modern hunter gatherers.

[00:26:17]By the way, people know about each other. You know, they trade, they fight.

[00:26:21]It is extremely rare at any point in history to find a population of human beings that thinks they're genuinely the only people in the world. Any population of hunter gatherer past or present for the past several thousand years can be reasonably suspected to understand what agriculture is. It's not a very complicated idea and a lot of hunter gatherers even practice it to >> well actually most of them practice it to some limited degree. Absolutely extent. These categories of human organization we've made up are so non-exclusive that they're almost useless. Part of what's happening here is a variation of what's called the first step fallacy. We talked about this a little bit in the metaverse video without referring to the specific idea by name, but it's pretty intuitive. The first step fallacy is the assumption that every technology you make is a first step to something bigger or greater. Some of them are, but not all.

[00:27:15]And this is entirely dependent on what you think of as greater to begin with.

[00:27:19]It's one of the most pervasive mistakes I see in people's understandings of history right now. regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. And it's super super damaging because it makes us categorize features of society that actually have nothing inherent to do with each other. Like when people extol the virtues of say modern America, >> perhaps agriculture has its own brand of stasis that isn't superficially apparent. I believe Thusidities would have something to say about that. He does as a matter of fact. I'm glad you pointed that out. Thanks for reminding me. So one of the reasons why Athens was able to grow actually for a very large part of its history and become a great power in at least in Thusidity's view um was because of the barrenness of the soil of Adica which meant that that territory was not desired by the great imperial powers that would have otherwise swept through and made it vassels long in advance of it developing into a a massive seaborn power. Right?

[00:28:09]But Athens primarily although to be clear you have to be careful here because it did rely on agriculture just on other people's agriculture. Um, Athens uh did not strictly speaking have a robust agricultural society like we tend to think of. And yet it was a massive one of the most important cities in and at the very least like um the history of of what's destroyed the world so far.

[00:28:34]>> American culture. Two of the accomplishments you'll often hear people attribute to it, especially centrists, are the moon landing and vaccines. It's always those two things, going to the moon and vaccines. especially polio for some reason. And the implication is that these two things are somehow inextricably linked. Like the only way we could have ever come up with the polio vaccine is if we also lived in a society that went to the moon and vice versa. This is dumb on its face, right?

[00:29:01]Like just because the research required to do these things were both fostered in American universities does not mean that the moon landing and vaccines share some kind of metaphysical genealogy. The moon actually has very little to do with vaccines. We could have easily reorganized our priorities and done one without the other. And if we >> without the moon, I hardly think so.

[00:29:24]>> We did. [clears throat] It wouldn't damage either one as an accomplishment.

[00:29:27]Though, I do think it's worth saying that in my opinion, they're stupid to group together anyway because vaccines are just far and away more important and valuable than going to the moon. Sorry, I live next to a rocket company and they're always doing tests. So, I hate space. Now, this isn't to say that fostering a general environment of learning and innovation isn't important for moon landings and vaccines, but pursuing those things is a matter of agency and intention, not just technological momentum. The Aztecs were some of the most impressive city planners in the world in their day. When the Spanish invaded in the 1520s, they had an aqueduct and a sewer system.

[00:30:08]>> They don't anymore, you'll notice. and public education, >> but no pants.

[00:30:14]So, you know, give a little, you get a little >> and bathed twice daily and brushed their teeth. And the China agriculture system remains one of the most productive ever devised. Like to this day, it's in use.

[00:30:26]And guess what? They still didn't invent the iPhone. And also, >> well, there we go. Agency and choice is what makes everything. know agency and choice is what makes for example um specific scientific ventures under an organized system that has a particular scientific apparatus to for example create pharmaceuticals and mass-produce them. Right? That's not saying that the condition of science and medicine is agency and choice in the sense of you know like okay guys listen we're getting together we're going to do science now that's not they had curiosity they had recording they talked about stuff they studied stuff they named things they took uh they they they remembered and paid attention to what did what and they developed systems of applying these things right that's not retrojecting the subject um that's talking about a science is a particular type of practice as we understand today capital S science in ltor's language right like when we're talking about for example like modern pharmaceutical research that isn't something that isn't something that generally people did until relatively recently that wasn't conditioned on agriculture though that was conditioned on a bunch of stuff including a particular history of agriculture >> also everybody in the area hated them because they kept ritually sacrificing their war captives People don't invent things because it makes logical sense.

[00:31:50]People invent things because it makes cultural sense and they consciously reject other inventions for the same reason.

[00:31:57]>> Okay. Now I agree I disagree with the language on the subject of Lour though.

[00:32:03]Um just as uh capital S science is out just as capital and nature is out um the cultural as the separate domain of activity apart from other types of human activity I think is also it's a distinction that these people wouldn't necessarily recognize but the point she's making I think is good and the point is this they don't and you can just simplify your language here they don't do things because of an economic imperative. They do things because boom boom boom they make sense.

[00:32:41]And making sense does not mean following through on the logic of what makes sense to someone else.

[00:32:47]And we do [ __ ] that doesn't make sense all the time. Like for example, sending uh cars into space when we are actively starving untold numbers of people, right?

[00:33:03]culture determines what seems logical to people as we're seeing today. Vaccines are >> like like imagine for example, imagine looking at corporations like Amazon.

[00:33:13]Imagine looking at the current US presidency which is ritually sacrificing thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people with every single decision it makes.

[00:33:23]I think like wow those Aztecs sure were dumb.

[00:33:26]>> are in fact not at all a defining feature of modern American culture anymore. Perhaps we should start considering the idea that all tech >> That's unfair. He's controlled by the worm.

[00:33:34]>> Technology naturally evolves to produce an antivaxer society. Does that sound reasonable to you? So, I give you my theory about why this is happening. Why these comments seem to think it's okay to be racist about indigenous people? In the Enlightenment era, when all these young rich upstarts were making all these great strides in science and philosophy and establishing the shape of modern globalist society and whatnot, the main schism of inquiry about everything was religion. People have started forgetting this in recent years because of an incredibly effective propaganda campaign on the right. But the entire reason enlightenment thinking was considered radical and crazy was because it trended toward secularism. So when colonialism happened and people in Europe started encountering all these new people, all the smart people back home had to figure out how the discovery of these far-flung societies fit into their very narrow cosmology that asserted Europe was the center of the early modern spiritual universe. One religious approach was to say that indigenous people were fallen. That they were descendants of people who had left God and fell to sin and that's why they don't wear as many clothes or do things that seemed really strange like polygamy or ritual sacrifice or cannibalism. If you are a really practical-minded monk, >> do you mean common sense? No, I mean I mean good sense. Common sense is future oriented. Good sense has to do with what is inherited from the past. Aztec ritual sacrifice would have been something inherited from the past. The other religious approach was to say that these were people who had just never heard the gospel and could be converted. The Church of Latter-day Saints is actually a really interesting example of how this philosophy got passed down. Mormon tradition believes that Native Americans are the descendants of a tribe called the Lamemonites who emerged after the Mormon prophet Lehi came to the American continent and his son Lame.

[00:35:21]>> The Book of Mormon is wild. By the way, >> rejected God. It is a matter of Mormon theology that Native Americans are brown because they were cursed by God for their betrayal, but that with the proper application of faith and repentance, >> they can be white again.

[00:35:36]>> They can turn white again. Anyway, the secular position that developed at the time, very radical, very progressive, was that Native Americans were simply humans at another stage of development.

[00:35:47]Initially, this gets popularized by people like Edward B. Tyler and Henry Lewis Morgan who considered themselves great defenders of Native American humanity. This became especially solidified in the 1800s when >> we talked about Edward B. Tyler recently. He's the one who came up with the uh the current definition of animism that we use which is which is really problematic but it's also well-intentioned. So just as a quick review, one of the things that Tyler was doing and he again like in actually a similar vein as a lot of these these people on blue sky was he was looking at all of these anthropologists who were regarding uh groups being studied by by ethnographers like groups groups in the Amazon and and in North America etc. Australia as being like, oh, they don't have religion. They haven't developed to that that to that state yet, right?

[00:36:46]And so what Tyler did is he went, well, hang on, hang on a sec. Look, we need to be more flexible with our terms here.

[00:36:51]Actually, actually, they do have religion. So, uh, actually, no, they are as developed or they do, they are developed a little bit. So, they have they have religion. And it just it it is oriented around the inanimate objects of the world as well as like the animals and so on and so forth. So look they do they have they they do have religion. It is animism that is their spirituality.

[00:37:13]So that is our developmental route is from this primitive religion and it's like nice attempt I guess while still preserving your place on the racist chain of being.

[00:37:29]Darwin introduced the idea of the evolution of species. And so now what's called the evolutionist perspective of the [clears throat] origin of human social organization splits into two camps. People who believe that other cultures are products of physically less evolved subspecies of the self-evidently superior Western European human. This is where things like phronology come from.

[00:37:50]And people who believe that all cult >> I mean come on.

[00:37:56]Come on. cultures are made by the same kind of animal, but it's culture that varies in its level of evolutionary advancement. That all cultures progress from huntergatherer to tribe to chieftdom to monarchy to republic. And the systems lower on the list are obviously less evolved, but can improve over time through education. It seems like one of these evolutionary perspectives is better than the other, but actually they're both moronic. Tyler and Morgan were trying their best, but we really don't need to keep bad ideas around just because they're old. Tyler and Morgan didn't. It makes no sense to talk about culture in terms of evolution. Not only because that's not how evolution works. Things don't evolve to get better or more complex again, as we talked about with the metaverse, but because culture is not hereditary. Draw my blood and put it through any analysis you want, and you will not find the American English accent gene. Culture is always in conversation with its material surroundings for sure. But the interesting thing about humans is that we can consciously change our surroundings and our relationships with them. Culture is a result of how we interpret the things around us. What we decide those things mean. All humans do this. There is no magical configuration of technology that suddenly makes the concept of meaning possible for us. Now, here's here's where it gets tricky and this is where you get into very slippery territory. It actually it comes about a lot in terms of anthropology of religion. Um because among other things, religion as a category is as we've talked about before on the channel has baked into it, sort of preloaded Christian presumpt Christian presumptions. I'm sorry, the pollen's getting to me. I'm going to need more coffee in a second. Christian presumptions about the relationship of human beings to society to some higher principle, right? And not just Christian presumptions but largely filtered through that lens. So when you were looking for the religion for instance of other cultures, um this befuddles a lot of anthropologists uh when you're dealing with quote unquote preodern communities simply because they [clears throat] didn't understand the world as being divided into uh secular and religious realms, right?

[00:40:21]secular and sacred realms where different rules apply in each that have a distinct uh relationship with each other.

[00:40:31]And so this is where you get into weirdness like Tyler where it's like okay we need to find we need to find a way to locate the ultimate concerns associated with the Christian God or the Islamic God or what have you. We need to find a way to locate these in the thought systems of these other peoples.

[00:40:54]And the actual answer to this is that you don't need to do that. You can just take them on their own terms.

[00:41:00]They name these things these things and they interact with these things in such and such a way. You don't need to actually put them on a flat plane with equivalent terms. Like you don't need to find their god. Even the word god does this by default. Um, like one of the things that uh really ruins a lot of people who develop an interest in studying religious history is it's like, well, you got gods over here. You got Pan, just a dude with goat legs, and you've got a disembodied elder thing that precedes the existence of the universe and is timeless. And yeah, these these aren't the same kind of thing. What do you what do you do?

[00:41:40]And typically the solution that people fall upon is um they look not at they don't they they totally disrespect the classification first of all and they put their focus on what is the social relationship to these things. The problem though is that we have these social relationships with a lot of things like for example with the military like for example with people in positions of of political power like for example with respect to natural phenomena that we may or may not like imbue with divine importance quote unquote the word divine does this too but you know vocabulary is limited and I'm trying to be efficient here likewise meaning and meaning making the need for meaning and the activity of finding meaning also sort of derive from a particular view of the world that sees the world as a separate thing from us that needs to have meaning imposed upon it. And so the deliberate construction of our world, I mean, first of all, it's a mistake to think that we do this. Um, but the deliberate construction of our world is not something necessarily that uh these groups did or would have to do for their viewpoints to be valid.

[00:42:59]But like I was saying as well, it's a mistake to think that we do this.

[00:43:03]There's a great book by Bruno Lour called the modern cult of the factoish gods which I'm not going to quote from but I am going to talk about politics of nature a little bit because one of the things that uh Bruno Lour is very alert to is the way in which institutions with elevated names like capital S science for example shortcircuit the deliberating and agential uh actions of the community by insisting that they have gone forth into the other world of nature and have brought back its its divine edicts. They brought back facts, right? Facts, artif artifacts, objects that contain within them eternal fixed truths that are apart from human interpretation and culture. hiding the fact that the entire project and the humans that produced these facts were themselves both a part of that culture, motivated by that culture, funded by that culture, equipped by that culture, and actively motivated to use that to assert dominance in that culture in some capacity.

[00:44:10]And so it's a mistake to think that even we now in our context today as for example North Americans or people in the UK or whatever that we construct with agency and deliberation our surrounding world right because we don't I mean we do like it it is it is made by us quote unquote but we don't we don't do it on purpose even even when are doing it on purpose.

[00:44:39]We're not doing it on purpose.

[00:44:41]>> This is a stupid and racist thing to suggest. These people clearly don't think of this kind of thing as racist.

[00:44:48]And the reason I think that's the case is because it self-implicates, right?

[00:44:52]It's there, but for the grace of industrial scale row farming goey, which is where both of these positions, the one in the Tik Tok and the one in the comments converge. They're actually in a very basic sense saying the same thing, which is that there's something magical about agriculture that somehow unlocks human consciousness and makes us into agentic, self-aware, politically active human beings instead of animals that just function by instinct. Like it takes some genius to come up with planting seeds. So either agriculture is this fragile rare thing that we just stumbled into by accident and dishonor to our great peril or it's an original sin that's trapped us into a destiny of degradation and shame.

[00:45:40][sighs and gasps] >> YOU'RE BOTH IDIOTS.

[00:45:44]>> STOP BEING SO DRAMATIC.

[00:45:45]>> CLASSIC.

[00:45:46]>> Have some selfrespect. You know, everyone is really up in arms about this video, but it is true that health was worse after agriculture, at least in the short term.

[00:45:55]>> Was that Kate Mulgru? That was Janeway, wasn't it? No, it was Glen Close. I've been living a lie.

[00:46:00]>> And also that inequality increased. I wouldn't necessarily have linked these points together in this order, but there is evidence for a lot of these claims.

[00:46:08]Yeah, I read Sapiens, too. It's an extremely stupid book. Harrari makes the claim in this book. It is >> that wheat basically domesticated humans.

[00:46:18]>> I feel I feel bad for buying that for my brother once.

[00:46:21]>> That it shackled us in this velvet prison that had essentially nothing but negative consequences for human health and well-being. And I just want to sit for a second and appreciate how dumb that is. This idea that agriculture is somehow something that just invents itself instead of being organized on purpose by humans. Hunter gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The agricultural revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind. But the extra food >> I love the theory that uh philosophy emerged in Athens because they lived on the shore. So they ate a lot of oily fish and that made their brains bigger.

[00:47:04]I love I love that. I love that implication.

[00:47:07]>> Did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather it translated into population explosion. You will know her Herrerari is one of these weird um pseudo deep people that exist as in the original Matrix uh two and three like script. Um Zion, the underground city that the resist the last resisting population of humans lives in after the machines take over. Um that was originally going to be a separate matrix to capture people who escaped the first one.

[00:47:41]That's what this is. Uh stuff like uh you will know a harrari stuff like um uh AC graing Steven Pinker even Richard Dawkins these days frankly um their material largely exists as stuff to catch people who have developed an interest in learning. not necessarily learning something specific, but an interest in learning so that they can go into this thing, absorb it on easy mode, not actually be challenged, but feel like they did learn and therefore they buy more of these products and so on.

[00:48:18]And it's a weird commodification of uh like this weird tech bro of of liberal academia.

[00:48:28]Um, which I despise >> and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager and got a worse diet in return. The agriculture >> Man, that's a dumbass plot for the Matrix. That's like the only smart plot for the Matrix. Why would you not have a followup? Cuz like the Matrix the the the the setting for the core matrix is a modern city with computers and simulations and video games. You know, like the one setting where it would be intuitive to human beings trapped in the matrix that hey, there may be a thing called a matrix that I'm trapped in.

[00:49:03]Why wouldn't you make it medieval or something? Um, but but if you allow them that and then you trap them in a second one that they got out of, that may be enough to hypnotize them out from questioning that reality further revolution was history's biggest fraud.

[00:49:21]Who was responsible? Neither kings nor priests nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated homo sapiens rather than vice versa.

[00:49:36]The best part about this is it doesn't pay attention to the fact that we deliberately change these plants in order to make them useful.

[00:49:44]>> According to Harrari, agriculture creates humans, but humans can't create agriculture. Make it make sense. He spends the rest of the chapter talking about wheat. He's really obsessed with wheat here and I think that's >> Sorry, the wheat outside is making me violently want to sneeze and I'm fighting it >> because it theatricizes his point best.

[00:50:01]Wheat is really difficult and timeconuming to process. It takes a lot of effort to produce not that much bread. And he kind of holds this up as evidence.

[00:50:09]>> Oh, it gets better. You can make bread without wheat.

[00:50:12]uh natives of Hispanola made bread out of uh cassavas, which apparently was very doughy tasting >> of how horribly demanding agriculture is in a way that anybody with a passing interest in growing food can see the lie in. In the Americas, corn is the corollary of wheat. That's our native edible grass species. And it takes a significant amount of effort to process corn. But corn is not the only staple crop here. Check it out. This is my uh this is my bean harvest jar. This is how many beans I've gotten um in this season so far. Uh every every morning I go out and take five minutes and just pull some beans and stick them in the jar. Uh they're ready to eat. Guess how I made them. I put some beans in the ground and waited. Here's some potatoes I grew as well. Uh these are >> I'm really glad that that sentence ended the way it did.

[00:51:07]>> Completely ready to eat. I ate one this morning. I, you know, just yanked it out of the ground. Guess how I made these? I put a couple potatoes in the ground and waited.

[00:51:16]I barely even watered them. Is it's incredibly easy to grow potatoes. It's really, really easy to grow a lot of stuff. Sorry, I've been >> By the way, if you hate somebody or you hate an old landlord, um just uh quietly on your last day there at night, take a rake or a plow or whatever, just poke some holes in their lawn.

[00:51:37]Just fill it with onion seeds. Just fill it. Fill it everywhere and then walk away.

[00:51:44]>> Completely garden pills for the past year and a half. It's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it. Here and there, a lite hold out refuses to open an email account just as thousands of years ago some human bands refused to take up farming and so escape.

[00:51:58]>> Why onions? Well, think about it. What happens when you try to dig out the onions?

[00:52:04]Cuz you're not harvesting them. You're taking a shovel and you're breaking them out. What happens to them? They break [snorts] >> the luxury trap. But the agricultural revolution didn't need every band in any given region to join up. It only took one. Once one band settled down and started tilling, whether in the Middle East or Central America, agriculture was irresistible. Since farming created the conditions for swift demographic growth, farmers could usually overcome foragers by sheer weight of numbers. The foragers could either run away, abandoning their hunting grounds to field and pasture or take up the plow share themselves.

[00:52:42]Either way, the old life was doomed.

[00:52:45]This guy thinks agriculture spreads like a virus. He's just making [ __ ] up to support his pre-established conviction that things are just naturally bad. Few authors have done as much damage to the public understanding of >> It's weird you call it a virus, too.

[00:52:59]Like, why not call it a technology that certain people found use for and certain people didn't? One of the interesting things about um and and to be clear like uh Greyber and Wenro's book the dawn of everything has problems. I don't necessarily recommend it as like a source but one of the things they do point out which is which is correct and useful is that a lot of groups actually seasonally and periodically shifted their mode of production. They shifted from agricultural to hunting to whatever and they even experimented with different types of organization depending on the conditions at the time.

[00:53:32]So there were societies that had agricultural traditions that also hunted, even primarily hunted.

[00:53:41]Right? Now they weren't attached to a particular agricultural like land base obviously because that that would that's that's an investment that does trap you so to speak in a certain sense because you're committed to a project.

[00:53:54]But you get the idea.

[00:53:56]>> Apology than this guy. Don't read this book. It's not good. Uh don't don't read anything by this guy either. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Uh if you if you want to read about this kind of >> he knows about birds >> thing um read this instead. Uh it's still >> speak of the devil >> oddly speculative about a lot of things but it is actually informed by real training in anthropology instead of military.

[00:54:20]>> That copy is I don't know if just the color grading that copy is yellowower than mine. Mine is orange [sighs] >> history which is what Herrari's doctorate is in. human beings are actually pretty >> personally I would go against the grain.

[00:54:32]Uh that could be a pun but I was actually talking about James Scott's book against the grain. I think against the grain is better. Um it has Graver's endorsement although Dawn of everything I think has Scott's endorsement. Um James Scott's Against the Grain is a much better resource for you on this on this topic.

[00:54:51]Pretty good at feeding themselves. Also it's worth saying that people have been planning and ending pregnancies forever.

[00:54:56]Humans aren't rabbits. We don't just reproduce indiscriminately according to food availability.

[00:55:02]>> Humans aren't rabbits, furries, and shambles.

[00:55:04]>> We have a lot of influence over how many babies we have.

[00:55:08]>> Don't have everything's just greyber lashing out. No, it's not. What? What do you mean it's just graber?

[00:55:14]Against who? Rouso.

[00:55:17]>> And always have. The reason this matters, the reason I'm I'm showing off my produce to you is because when we consider the idea >> Dawn of Everything isn't even just Greyber. had two authors, both named David. Hilariously, >> that people have always understood the concept of family planning and also that growing food is not actually that difficult in a lot of, if not most of the inhabited places in the world.

[00:55:38]>> He says so in an interview. He did not say he is just lashing out.

[00:55:44]He maybe said in an interview that he was also lashing out at bad anthropologists, right? or at racism and anthropology or at positions approached to anthropology that presume that certain types of social organizations had less ability or or creativity than other ones did. That's all. He wouldn't have said he's only lashing out. What >> they can just toss some stuff in the ground and check it every now and then until it's ready to eat. This image, >> if he did say that, he's wrong. Humans toiling away in the hot sun, devoting all their energy to developing these big complex bureaucracies just so they can feed their populations just completely melts. Agriculture can't be the anti-hero of civilization. If that's the case, if agriculture is not really that difficult to either practice or comprehend, then we can't blame all our problems on it and throw up our hands in despair. I am so tired of this suggestion that we should look at systems that have been perfectly functional for hundreds if not thousands of years and the people who run those systems and say, "Well, don't be fooled.

[00:56:56]This might look sustainable and its people might look happy and satisfied, but that's just because they're dumb savages. They either don't know how bad they have it or they're blindly hurtling down the road to the same suburban dystopia I live in. There is a serious strain of misanthropy in the mainstream political center and left that we desperately need to address before we can get to any of the many problems we're facing right now. That that's really what this is about. That's why this bothers me so much. I think this it's this idea that so many people have that being secular or logical or realistic means you have to be disdainful of your own species and its possibilities. Like if we're not actually God's favorite babies, then that means we have to disrespect ourselves as much as we dis >> I'm not a baby.

[00:57:45]>> Disrespect every other thing that walks or flies or swims around on this planet.

[00:57:50]I think this is an enlightenment hangover, too. If you believe in cultural evolutionism, then you also probably believe that whatever kind of human you are right now is going to seem as primitive to future evolutionists as tribes seem to you. So to advertise, >> one of the things I really liked about Project Hail Mary is that they deliberately didn't do that and the aliens that they encounter actually problem solve with the humans. And I love that. I love that it went away from this attitude of like, oh, the aliens are basically just what we will be once we achieve ultra super space enlightenment and instead they're just other animals feeling their way around the cosmos. I love that.

[00:58:33]I I I love that attitude towards it.

[00:58:35]It's one of the reasons why despite, you know, as a as a as a film, Interstellar is probably better, quote unquote, I enjoyed Project Hail Mary more.

[00:58:46]I genuinely did. I thought it was and and the Zoomer humor didn't land for me, but I actually did genuinely like that aspect of the story. Mickey 17 was the same way. I haven't seen I've seen I've seen clips from it. pies how smart you are to predict that you perform this dismissiveness toward humans as creatures. If that were necessary, I'd do it, too. But not only is it not necessary, it is categorically factually incorrect. People are so much more interesting than this. The human species is beautiful and complicated. And I take a lot of inspiration from the fact that the overwhelming majority of the things we do as a species, both good and bad, is a matter of choice. We didn't invent slavery and inequality because we were just helpless to resist the gravitational pull of row farming. You are so much >> Why does Brooks have tropical stuck on stream? what >> much more than a collection of nerves and impulses available for domestication by a species of grass. There are so many ways to organize human society and basically an infinite number of possibilities for how we might structure society in the future. And that's why it's important to understand and respect other cultures. Not because there's necessarily anyone who does it better, although there might be, but because there's nothing keeping us from just cribbing the ideas we like and rejecting the ones we don't like. when it comes time to rebuild the world in the shape we want to see it take. There's one counterargument here that I want to discuss that's tangential but related to the point I'm trying to make. It goes, well, Mariana, you can't expect everybody to be knowledgeable about this kind of thing. Not everyone knows this stuff. We got a long way to go obviously, but there's no >> But you know what you can do? You know what you can do? And this is the thing that makes me mad at a lot of YouTubers um who like weigh in on this stuff and then stake out a position in ignorance and then defend it is that you can recognize that you have not spent time thinking about this and you cannot speak. You can just not talk about it.

[01:00:47]You can just go, "Oh, I don't think that's right. Actually, that sounds wrong. Let me look into this." That's a thing you can do. You don't need to go, "What do what do you what do you mean agriculture is bad? Agriculture is the only way that we aren't savages, right? Like, you don't need to do that.

[01:01:02]No one's forcing you to do that.

[01:01:05]>> No reason to be so hard on what are ultimately some bad tweets. Maybe we don't need to take them that seriously as representations of what people actually think. Let's take a look at a couple comments here that essentially said that same thing. I am an archaeologist and I agree 100%.

[01:01:19]Agriculture is where we went wrong as a species. add overpopulation and human-caused climate change to the list.

[01:01:27]>> Yeah. Because it's agriculture that caused overpopulation and humancaused climate change. I mean, first of all, human-caused climate change is is constant and and always there. It's the kind of climate change that we've we've affected. But leaving that aside, you you can have agriculture without capitalism. You can have agriculture without, for example, turning massive swaths of territory, huge, as far as the eye can see into non-edible produce.

[01:01:52]Like, >> without agriculture, there would be no permanent human settlements, no libraries, and no archaeologists.

[01:01:57]Actually, this is starting to sound better already. Some of y'all got weirdly aggressive over this. It's a weirdly aggressive statement to make. I don't see it as such. It's not a value statement. We can't exactly put it back in the bag. There's loads of research on how the invention of agriculture >> I also love the idea. Guys, listen. You know what the pro You know what the problem is? You know what the problem is with our world today? Vegetables.

[01:02:20]We ate too many vegetables. We needed to stop making so many vegetables. That's the problem, guys. It's the It's not the systems of production and exploitation and the complete disregard for the balance of our ecosystem. It's vegetables.

[01:02:34]We need to go back to hunting buffalo.

[01:02:36]Okay, that's what that's what we need to do. That's the pro that's where we went wrong. Okay, we stopped we stopped hunting animal species to extinction, which by the way, we did.

[01:02:48]We hunted animal species to extinction before capitalism just by the by.

[01:02:55]There is no such thing as an as an innocent human activity that doesn't impact its surrounding environment.

[01:03:02]created diseases of poor diet, zunotic viruses, inequality, etc. It's just a fact of >> guess what? Nonhuman animals have hunted species to extinction.

[01:03:13]Where we went wrong equal >> non-animal vegetables have hunted species to extinction value statement. So after >> don't even get me started on the rocks.

[01:03:24]>> Taken to task for agreeing with this Tik Tok. Dayring goes to their own page.

[01:03:28]Didn't expect to get blue sky famous.

[01:03:30]Blue sky famous. You got 15 quote retweets and a few dozen replies. Okay, relax. Didn't expect to get blue sky famous with the common 50-50 joke archaeologist phrase, "We should have never invented agriculture." Similar to, "We should have never come down from the trees. Now that I've been called a genocide, racist, bad at my job, and better off dead, I'm going to mute the thread. Some of you really need to lighten up." So, even though this person indicated that they were serious about this opinion in their first comment, it turns out they weren't really serious.

[01:03:59]If we take them at face value, they were speaking to a specific kind of audience that understands this is a common archaeologist joke. The promise that social media democratizes information needs to be reckoned with the fact that social media is >> I was shocked when I found it. I can eat raw meat. I mean, you could always eat raw meat. Just question is, do you want to >> not a place where people go to learn or think or any of the other things we actually associate with democratic activity. It's generally where people go to fire off their least thoughtout opinions, the opinions they have when they're just alone in a room because that's fun and easy. And democracy is not fun. Democracy is hard. Places like Twitter and Blue Sky Bikes.

[01:04:43]>> I disagree. Democracies Democracy can be pretty fun. dungeon as a matter of their infrastructure discourage their users from engaging with the platform as an environment for serious discourse while at the same time publicly claiming that it reflects the truest discourse society has to offer and is in fact a staple resource in the modern political economy. And part of the reason that's a huge problem is because it legitimizes public conversation getting clumsier, meaner, and more juvenile. It turns you away from conceptualizing society as an exercise in collective thought formation and toward thinking about it as something you should never ever have to shift your axis for. It's just it's a conceptualization of political opinion as whatever you think everybody else should move to accommodate while you stand completely.

[01:05:33]>> Are we pro or against you? I think very pro- Zoo in this in this video. This is a very good video so far.

[01:05:38]>> That's not politics. That's just a bunch of people acting like children. One thing that every functional human society understands at a very basic level. Yes, even hunter gatherers. Is that society only functions if you care what the people around you think and have an interest in not offending or alienating them. That is the foundation of a sustainable society. And the main thing that micro blogging has managed to do is let people pretend that that's actually not necessary. That lack of the friction involved in mutual care that makes a productive conversation by reminding you that yours is not the only opinion that matters is resulting in people getting >> I don't get this take. Politics is pretty damn infantile if you actually observe its operations. What do you mean by infantile? I don't think politics is infantile. Politics is extremely complicated and advanced. It's actually hard to engage in effectively. It takes it takes a lot of savvy and a lot of education to do it well. You can moralize and say that politics should be more polite, but then don't act like it used to be polite. Well, it's not that it used to be polite. We paid lip service to paying it a little bit of respect, right? Like we we we valued to a certain extent limits on power. We valued expertise. We valued having expert witnesses, people who actually studied things to speak on different issues and so on.

[01:06:57]>> Getting actively stupid. Iron sharpens iron. We need constant input from other people in order to be intentional and self-conscious about what we think. And >> this is a good crit critique of uh bullshism by the way or leninism or tankism or any sort of vanguardism precisely. And again I apologize for pausing you on that face. Um, one of the things that Lenin was concerned about was making sure that the plebeian localized um, production related interests of the masses didn't infect the revolutionary project in the long term of the revolutionary elite. And so you had a vanguard party that was not accessible to them in that way. Um this was uh this is the subject of a debate between him and Rosa Luxembourg who argued that actually no you actually need to involve the masses in both educating the party and being educated by the party back and forth in communication with each other because a uh this makes the people smarter and b this prevents the party from becoming solopistic and insane. It keeps it so that the party doesn't stagnate. It makes it so that there is a constant input. There is no longer this um it doesn't oify into this thing that presumes a a single worldview and a single struggle and a single condition that it carries with it everywhere it goes. Um this is Pure Class's society against the state which is phenomenally good by the way. Um it goes like this.

[01:08:29]Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better in his travels.

[01:08:33]I should think not. He said he took himself along with him.

[01:08:37]And that's the thing like if you are constantly in a situation where you have closed yourself off to anything else that you are only ever experiencing yourself, uh you just you're locked in a room with a crazy person. you uh you don't have the ability now to learn or to grow with respect to external stimuli because even your projections of the nonhuman are actually just projections of yourself.

[01:09:04]just mirror images of what you have decided is the human forgetting the fact that your appreciation of everything human, non-human, all these categories is itself a making graspable by your human hands or your human brain of stuff outside of the world that actually has nothing to do with you.

[01:09:21]>> You don't get that in places like this.

[01:09:23]I'm very certain that at least some of these people know that indigenous people had and have agriculture and permanent settlements. In the US, we have an entire national holiday.

[01:09:35]>> Yes, Sunday. Let's get the raw, unfiltered, illiterate peasant masses to make decisions on production and foreign policy. Um, have you noticed that you're presuming a capitalist state in your characterization of that situation so that your socialist revolution is actually just a capitalist revolution that calls itself socialist?

[01:09:56]You are regarding the illiterate masses as a standing reserve, a human resource to be exploited by an elite that considers itself to be above it. You're not a socialist. You're a capitalist with Rzonttomont coming out the wazoo.

[01:10:12]Sorry.

[01:10:14]Whose myth is rooted in the idea of that being the case, but because this is micro blogging, we can't ever get to that point in the conversation. And so everybody's understanding of this issue just degrades.

[01:10:25]>> Russia was feudal, wasn't capitalist.

[01:10:27]Also, we're all resources until we reach communism.

[01:10:31]Because you're a capitalist. Thank you for clarifying that.

[01:10:34]>> Over time, nobody here is defending their own position. Nobody here even gets a chance to defend their own position.

[01:10:39]>> Yeah. The Russia was Russia was feudal.

[01:10:41]This is one of the problems, by the way, with with a lot of Marxists. Um, and this is something brings up, and I like how he brings it up.

[01:10:49]They still want science as constructed by capitalism and in capitalism to be the thing that shortcircuits discussion and puts human beings in their place, forgetting that capitalism produces science.

[01:11:02]And furthermore, that the subjugation of human beings into categories based on development is itself based upon how their productivity is rated by capitalist production.

[01:11:14]So, by the way, feudal Russians are perfectly capable of being inside socialism if you treat them as human beings.

[01:11:23]There is also, as uh Red Hand has uh helpfully put forward, uh the fact that there is no such thing as feudalism.

[01:11:34]uh these periodizations as shorthands for modes of production and modes of organization and therefore by extension as statements about types of humans in different periods. It's not real. It's [ __ ] It's fake. Never happened.

[01:11:48]This one was invented by a writer.

[01:11:51]They're just attacking other people, which is a really bizarre way to conduct a conversation supposedly rooted in intellectualism. Pretty savage, primitive behavior if you ask me. There are so many ways I think we discount how much social media has warped the way we talk.

[01:12:08]>> I really I really like Bruno Lour's reconfiguration of the categories of civilized and barbarian for Bruno Lour because he retains them by the way. He retains civilization and barbarianism in this book but he does it in a really nice way which I like.

[01:12:24]The barbarian is that which proliferates enemies and sees as all of its neighbors just potential enemies. It's the only thing it sees in other people's, other ways of life, other entities, other planets, other spaces, whatever.

[01:12:42]It only sees enemies. There is no two-state solution for Israel Palestine, for example. Because to create a Palestinian state would be to create a sovereign power that would therefore be a potential enemy on Israel's doorstep.

[01:12:55]It can't even conceive of having a potential friend, right? And not without reason, you know, because a Palestinian state would have every justification to hate the state of Israel into perpetuity forever and ever and ever.

[01:13:10]But that makes the state of Israel a barbarian. It's a barbarian state for precisely that reason. It is only capable of acting with the presumption of violence on everything outside of its borders.

[01:13:20]A civilized state can do both. It can treat other parties as potential enemies and potential friends and therefore can actually preserve the world around it with the understanding that in the next cycle in the next convocation of the collective what is an enemy now might be a friend later right or vice versa that's a civilized state that's one capable of building a common world it's not just in a constant state of stasis a constant state of war with everything and it can never leave that it's logic it's self-preservation depends upon maintaining the very conditions of its endangerment into perpetuity.

[01:13:57]>> Talk to each other and build knowledge.

[01:14:00]It is a mess out there [laughter] and it's only getting weirder. Y'all hear about that bricks and minifigs fiasco?

[01:14:06]Holy, there's a lot going on there that I think is super relevant to this conversation, which is why I made a whole other video about it that you can find right now on Nebula.

[01:14:16]>> No, no, no.

[01:14:23]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]