Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Unseen Side of Anthropology: A Discussion with Jules Delisle
Jules Delisle, human behavioral ecologist and nurse, joins us on this fascinating journey through the complex world of anthropology and its implications on modern society. She is an associate and organizer of the Mimbres School. Together, we dissect the limitations of social and behavioral sciences, questioning common assumptions about modern liberalism and challenging the over-reliance on quantified data in qualitative research. We also delve into the power of arbitrary designations and their critical influence not only in bedside nursing but also in research.
Venturing further, we illuminate the significance of understanding people's needs beyond the realms of data-driven research, taking a critical look at language and its impact on kinship. Delving into the intriguing concept of 'weird societies,' we explore how an over-dependence on data from modern, industrialized societies may distort our understanding of humanity. From Amazonian partible paternity to the economic flow issues in Western societies, we unpack how kinship can serve as a source of both social and economic support.
We wrap up this enlightening conversation with an analysis of family structures through the lens of Marxist theories, the importance of environmental connection, and the irrational aspects of human relationships. Taking a historical perspective, we discuss the often overlooked aspects of anthropology, such as ritual human sacrifice, modern slavery, and social stratification. Lastly, we encourage a shift in thinking around belief in magic, rationality, personhood, and historical choices. Join us in this thought-provoking episode that challenges conventional wisdom and inspires a deeper understanding of anthropology.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf
Hello, I'm here with Jules Deleel of the member school and we are talking today about symbolic kinship and the limits of anthropology, although I think we're actually going to get into the limbrance of broader social sciences. Jules is a human behavioral ecologist, which is a big way of saying, works in a lot of different social sciences and doesn't really trust them, and also a nurse. So, jules, I audited your class on symbolic kinship for member school a couple months ago, went back through the videos of that course and I have also been kind of critical of Marxist sociological thinking and I know there are Marxists out there who go we don't do sociology, we do the objective science of Marxism, whatever the fuck that is. But in general most sociology has, you know, kind of four origins.
Speaker 1:You know kind of Durkheimian positivism, comte and positivism, and then the other two origins are like German historical school and then German historical school slash, also quasi Marxist in terms of Sombart and Weber, and so I have been very distrustful of those categories because I have just enough anthropological training to know that talking about everything purely in modes of production and classes related to modes of production actually does not deal with the fact that for the great majority of human cultures, both currently existing and that we know of in the past. Familial and kinship organizations are the way people understand themselves in quote modes of production and in fact they think most things that extend, you know, most other social forms, be they tribe, race, nation so some agree, even class, are many ways kinds of extensions of ideas, of kinships, abstracted out at various levels of kind of degree, so far from most human reckoning traditionally that they're not recognizable as as kind of kinship metaphors, although it shows up in our language around them all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's actually one of the things that people think is what distinguishes humans from other primates and one of the focuses of like speculative neurology and evolution is like ontologization, like when did kinship categories and actually differentiating like mother, father, brother, sister, and then, like you know, like uterine, cousin or other things like as you're expanding these categories farther and farther outward, is that actually the foundation for all linguistic development, neurologically so like what? Like that's one of the things that we'll get into in my human origins class when we actually started talking about like encephalization and structural changes. Like people think that that's essential to all linguistic determination, which I think is. I think that that's like a big deal because we take language for granted and some people even argue about whether or not it's a technology, though, though we do kind of see it as being a quality which is uniquely human and that's important to sociology that's descended from like European enlightenment right. It's the idea that humans are unique in our ability to reason and to act against our base urges and to make choices for the greater good.
Speaker 2:Right, that's, that's one of our fundamental assumptions in modern liberalism and all of the data pretty much destroys that. So it's a sad place to be if you're a social scientist that, like, truly believes in, like, liberalism and democracy and inherits this genealogy and then is confronted with the way that things actually are, which is far, far messier than the theories that are in science. So yeah, like I'm, I'm distrustful of all of the social and behavioral sciences, but I also feel like there's a big language game happening that's kind of like concealing concealing a widespread reductionism. That is just like it's not good enough. I think that that's my fundamental problem with it. It's not good enough if we want to call it science and say that it's rigorous and make these universal determinations from it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you and I were talking off air about problems that we both have with over aggregate, aggregation, are over quantification of things that imposing a quantitative scale on is often how do I say it bullshit, like, like, like. Effectively it's arbitrary what we're including in this quantitative scale or not. And I know there's a lot of physicists and stuff in my audience and they get mad when I, when I, go in these rants. But I'm like a lot of times when we look at like, say, sociological research or it's even worse than educational research we are taking numbers and not dealing with their origin.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that people know this about is like the IQ test and we all like it's a common thing on the left, but I'm also like this is these problems are true for a whole lot of educational rubrics that you're not questioning, and I don't just mean standardized test either. There's like measures of behavior, supposive, like qualitative behavioral observations, and you and I have even both done them. And then you look at you look at what they're asking you to do and it's like rate this child's behavior on a scale of one to six, rate this teacher's behavior on a scale of one to 100. And that rating is effectively arbitrary. I do just a serious consequences.
Speaker 2:Like that's the thing. It's like I might. My problem is not just with the fact that our data, in being stripped of its context, isn't as good as it could be. Like my perfectionist side cares about that a lot, because I do want to be the dutiful little scientist who does the best, iterating towards the truth ever, knowing I will never reach that horizon because it's like the scientific utopia. You know, there's a part of me that has that drive. But I think it's the real consequences that come from aggregating data, stripping it of its context and then giving the power, giving people the power to make these arbitrary designations as if they are objective observers. And I think that's one of my biggest problems with being like doing bedside nursing and interacting with patients, working with other health care providers, and. But just in the history of my research I've done I've done nursing research, I've done sociological research, I interviewed gamers about piracy and other things like that at different stages. So like I've had a lot of different interactions with people in interview formats.
Speaker 2:The conclusions that are kind of like always made by these studies are basically that we need more resources for more education in order to explore these issues further. When, like the data that you actually get from being on the floor and interacting with these people is that they're suffering and that these, like policy conclusions and decisions are just like completely divorced from simple solutions that could exist in their daily context, that there's this, like you know, leviathan of bureaucracy and nonsense in between the person and us, the you know, the agents of the bureaucracy. It's like sorry, can't help you with that, can only write down one through 10 on the chart, rate your pain Right. So like there there's, there's something dissatisfying with seeing humanity and experiencing humanity, while your empathy isn't crushed in those contexts because you like care about those people. But it also, just like the dutiful little scientist in me, like we could do better research design and we could be better materialist by taking into account these very difficult to you know, these very difficult to make objective and numerical quality. So like I always go on the spiel about how, like IQ, bmi, gdp, all of these things are like completely made up and they don't actually say anything about how a person is properly provision.
Speaker 2:So I like to talk about embodied wealth and that that's actually like a human behavioral ecology concept that a lot of the really quantitative scientists aren't very fond of, because it deals with a lot of kind.
Speaker 2:It deals with things that are difficult to quantify, like skills, experiences, knowledge of the environment, you know, competence, physical competence, your ability to balance on a precipice, those sorts of things that you can't really like.
Speaker 2:Plug that into a spreadsheet and decide whether or not your investment in an individual is worth it based on that, and that's that's. I think my big problem with the ultimate outcome of social and behavioral science research is that it reduces what we could be doing for each other to kind of like what kind of material inputs would be most efficient. This is where you get into kind of like the like um altruism ideas right, like the most efficient forms of economic altruism, instead of looking at people on the level of the human and actually listening to them tell you what they need, which is like I think that that's it. We're doing kickflips and very complicated, highly funded research to not actually listen to people or make their lives better Most of the time. So I just in terms of wasting human energy while the climate is dying, I really think we could be spending our time doing better things.
Speaker 1:I think is interesting about that is that people are going to hear those two questions and not see how they're related, right? So one of the things that one of the points here is we are dealing with abstractions that seem to tell us something and they might tell us something, but like we talk about class, class, class, class, class class, class, class, class, class, class, something, and so what we're dealing with is that are highly varied but but in our language, almost universal, right, like I can't tell you that there's one primary type of kin relation, that that that dominates all human subgroups, going back for what we have data for, but I can tell you that I can't find a society that doesn't have a concept of kin relation, that literally cannot find one, like I've never seen anyone say there's any evidence that there is one.
Speaker 2:All people, all people are related to other people somehow, and that's the thing it's like we are problem with the way that we approach kinship is that we also we often use it as like a coefficient for degrees of biological relatedness right, how many genes you actually share, and whether or not the concept of genes is ever in the mix for people. There are tons of cultures that are extremely successful and have continued across centuries without knowing what a DNA helix looks like. It doesn't matter to them at all. The concept is some kind of shared substance, like that's really what kinship is, and if we stop thinking about the shared substances being genes and start thinking about it as food or air or other other substances that are important to different individuals, it helps us, kind of like it helps us realize what is actually happening in a way that's more satisfying than kinship. Diagrams, circles, triangles, dotted lines, straight lines.
Speaker 2:Like we've all we've all seen the kinship tree, especially in the context of like European, and I think that's the problem is that we have a language of kinship and we utilize this explanation of kinship within anthropology. That's basically taking the propaganda of very inbred Habsburgs and their claims to legitimacy and using that to create kind of like a structured, systematic language that we then impose on other people, when how people are relating, what they're sharing, what their duties and their obligations really are, is not following the lines of that kinship diagram. So like we're missing a lot in this kind of objectification of exactly what it takes to make you and someone else of the same substance. And I guess this is another thing that's maybe hard for people from Western educated, industrialized, rich democracies to think about. So this is another concept that I use. That's really important is weird societies, like the best way to put it, I think, is that you know the United States, denmark, sweden, england, france, it doesn't matter Like these societies occupy the extreme end of distributions and so they're kind of like the worst subpopulations that you could study for generalizing about homo sapiens, the vast majority of human history.
Speaker 2:We didn't live like this, we didn't conduct ourselves like this Like none of this was a fundamental component of how we organized ourselves and we are coming from an idea of individuality and separateness and it's kind of reinforced in psychoanalysis and in the legacy of Freud. So everybody, you kind of get it from all angles growing up. It's almost impossible to avoid. But when, like when it comes down to it, we think about individuals, we think about you, ending at the edges of your skin when in the vast majority of cultures, a person is also sometimes their ancestors and a lot of other things all at once. So they're actually not individuals, they are individual persons, they are multiplicities, and Salens is actually my favorite anthropologist to bring up for this and he's a contrarian with an anthropology.
Speaker 2:He kind of picked fights his entire career and tended to pick up theoretical lines with other contrarians, so like he and Graeber wrote on Kings, which is one of my favorite Graeber texts actually because of how he kind of reels in Graeber's bong rips.
Speaker 2:But I really like talking about the idea of people that are the composite sites of identities and of investments, because I don't exist in just one family tree and most people don't either. But we do have this kind of weird idea about like patrilineal society, patrilineal descent. You know, like I get my dad's name, I inherit his land, and we project that idea really deep into the past when people might not have had those ideas at all and like, yeah, you probably have a strong relationship with your mother because she carried you and gave birth to you and lactated in order for you to survive, or at least coordinated the provisioning of that amongst her relatives. But you also have strong investments from other people that might not have given you any genetics at all and that's like my favorite example of this is Amazonian partable paternity. Do you know about this?
Speaker 1:No, I don't.
Speaker 2:Okay. So in the Amazon when in certain societies it's not across all Amazonian indigenous cultures, but it's pretty common when a woman becomes pregnant, the general belief is that a certain amount of sperm is necessary in order to complete that pregnancy, and so she will like make connections with other male members in the community and beyond, everyone investing sperm in the child and therefore having a ritual and spiritual obligation to that child across the course of their life. So everybody's like a dad and so, like you could, a family in a lot of Amazonian cultures is one mom, her kid and maybe eight to 14 dads, depending, and they all bring ritual gifts and bring food and help support and it's just a way that everyone is invested in everyone within the community. And when you look at like humans who do things like this and you kind of question, well, like what's the outcome for the children, it seems to be significantly better than in a lot of circumstances where they don't have so many individuals investing in them, where there isn't that sense of collective responsibility.
Speaker 2:So the substance doesn't matter as much as the reciprocal rights and duties that come with that relationship. And sometimes it's cool to be a ritual dad and to show up at a ceremony for your kid as they're growing up and to bring what's necessary in order to provision them. So there's like a there's a satisfaction that comes from that that isn't necessarily explainable in the cold, objective language of return on investment Either. So that's another failing of anthropology and sociology and trying to figure out exactly like what the obstacles are to the success of these relationships. In Western societies.
Speaker 2:I think that we often say, well, there's financial strain, there are economic problems, and there are undoubtedly, and kinship organizations solve a lot of problems. So if we're having economic and material flow problems, then we're going to be able to have economic and material flow problems. Then we're probably also having kinship problems that aren't being addressed, and I see that in my peers, like in my own experience. I don't. I don't know anyone who has access to elders with their experience and their wisdom. I don't know any of my peers who have kids who have access to the right amount of childcare. I think that we definitely aren't getting the kinds of social supports and interactions from each other that we want, and we we talk about these as political problems. We talk about these as economic problems. We don't talk about them as problems of kinship.
Speaker 1:Right. So one of my big pushes lately is to get people to realize if you're going to talk about modes of production, even remotely balance, if you want to use Marxist phraseology we have to talk about modes of reproduction because they set up quote relationships of production, because most relationships of production having to put all this in the proper Marx theological quotation marks, because I'm not sure that these phrases help you, but I am sure that if you're going to use them, you could use them more responsibly than we do Really aren't driven by kinship values, and I realized that even before I read Marshall's Solomon it was funny you mentioned him you know what kinship is and what it isn't. That book really helped me articulate this. But I'd had this insight for a long time where I'm like, seems to me as someone who has, you know, undergraduate level anthropology work, admittedly not a specialist in it, never claimed to be an anthropologist, don't want to be an anthropologist, have critiques of the whole field, but Me neither.
Speaker 1:But and not just that it comes out of colonialism, although that is part of it. It seems to me that there's there is very little Marxist writing on this outside of Ingalls's origins, of the family book, and Ingalls does kind of come to the right conclusion that, like, the family is probably the orientation of class and he talks about the relationships of divisions of labor between men and women being the first site of class origins. But then I sort of thought about that. I was like, well, that's true enough, and he is realizing something. And he's realizing something early and with very sketchy inputs. I mean, the anthropology he's dealing with it's really bad actually. But I realized like, okay, if we take that seriously, we really should be looking at kinship connections and that is a lot larger than just the biological family, as we just mentioned. It's a lot larger than even just found family. The way we talk about this now are our imagined social family People like kinship.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:We love that fictive kinship, especially when it's like, related to a mythological character. I love it when entire cohorts of people start working cooperatively because they believe they're descended from somebody from space or other things like that. There's amazing. What actually triggers the cohesion, like that coagulation of kinship, that seems to be arbitrary. It's that people want to link up and to form squads in this way, regardless of what the actual flows of genetics are. Okay, so if you talk about modes of production, you have to talk about modes of subsistence, because you cannot do work without a body that's full of food and energy, right? So, like the metabolic realities you know, marxist materialists will talk about the cost of linen and then they'll kind of struggle to think about the metabolic costs of sociality, and that's the thing. This is kind of like one of my favorite things to point out to people. But, like, if we're going to criticize the bourgeoisie for not being self made, we need to recognize that literally no human being is self made. Everyone is provisioned by a community, by their families, and then they're they're provisioned while they're doing this work. So it's. It's yeah, marx was recognizing that in order for the labor movement to actually function, that it was going to need this like giant body of unpaid domestic labor in order to support it. And he no doubt experienced that in his own household. Like the role, the roles of women form kind of like an interesting, an interestingly weird lean in social theory because they like weren't quite Like, weren't quite ready to acknowledge that division of labor along gender lines, like it almost felt like it was essential to them. So there is some determinism in Marx and in the origins of anthropology and sociology that have to be confronted and it's nobody really wants to do it because you don't like, you don't want to look back in the textbooks and be like, hey, I'm citing, you know, robin Fox, the anthropologist who said that principle one women have children. Principle to men fertilize women. Principle three men have authority. Principle for primary can do not copulate with each other. You know, like they they're setting out these like deterministic rules for engagement that, like you know, if you want to be progressive now you can't say any of those things, that's all like you'll get cancelled for that. But we're still citing these dudes in the social and behavioral sciences. This is still like the, this is the skeletal structure that underlies anthropological theory.
Speaker 2:So we've got big problems with that idea and especially because, if we're looking at biology, the division of labor is actually far more likely like something that's related to couple formation and maintaining monogamy than it probably has anything to do with class. Because that's when we look at primates that actually like, are monogamous and have concerns about paternity, they stay together all the time. Right, that pair bond is what ensures paternity. And humans are kind of interesting in that, like we're highly social. So having the division of labor is one of the ways in which it is made impossible for paternity or for infidelity to occur in different social contexts. So it's like that's not something that comes up in Marxist way of thinking. They're not thinking about like couple formations or how babies are made. When they're thinking about labor movements, they're thinking about larger waves in social organizations. So like this is really a problem in scale. I think yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean this really shows up, for example, in Mao encounter some groups of people in China who were very socially stable and somewhat even socially socialistic, and that they had shared forms of property. They immediately tried to force the I think it's the Mizou, I don't know how to say it correctly, but it's M? I and transliterated into English for people want to look it up, it's M-I-S-O-U, but that's probably from Pinyin, so I have no idea how to pronounce that. They immediately tried to impose the quote bourgeois family on them, deliberately as a modernizing project, because that's the only model they had. And this was, this was imposed in almost all of the socialist countries, not even just the ones in the communist bloc, to even though and like I, to do some defense of, say, the Bolsheviks which they did not initially insist on this, but they really do enforce this later on. Hence a lot of the anti. The reversal of, like, the decriminalization of homosexuality and stuff like this is also done in the L'Ollini's lines too, and I think it's something that when people go, oh, that was just at the time, and I'm like, yeah, but ask yourself, why was this an inclination, why was this assumed, why were the social forms of bourgeois life assumed. And I realized that because I hit this wall.
Speaker 1:I'm a Christopher Lastry and I agree with a lot of what he has to say, but when he writes on the family he brings up all this, this anthropology that literally actually ignores most of the anthropology that was happening in the 60s and 70s, that that that was critiquing the fact that the reason why all the family, couple bondings that we looked at look like the ones that we had normalized in the developed West was because that's how we define family and we only looked at those units for the definition.
Speaker 1:And that was that was actually being critiqued at the time he was writing that he was projecting this notion of family all the way back in human culture. I mean like in human culture, like period like, like going like pre capitalist. Even so, the Marxist critics would just say oh well, you're just, you're just confusing. This time the bourgeois family was was projected onto the working class family and thus you don't understand the points of family abolition, but fine, whatever. You also don't understand what kinship is, how fungible it is and how these relations are highly varied from culture to culture, time to time, mode to mode, and again, I'm putting that in quotation marks.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and so this is the problem with people who come out of Marx in the social and behavioral sciences. Marx is a unilineal cultural evolutionist. He believes in a progression of culture from a primitive primordial state towards civilization. Right, this is. You know, this is Hegel, this is, this is in kind of everything. There's this idea that we are moving towards a moment of perfection. They somehow managed to do this while also still having an idea of the fall and deterioration away from a more perfect period. So, like you know, cheers, that you can pull that off at once. That must be the dialectic or something. But like, the thing about that idea of progress from one state to the other is that we start to stage human organizations in the same way that we stage cultural progression. Right, so you get the idea of the primordial horde, right, the first origin, the promiscuous horde in which you do not know who the fathers of your children are, there's no way to keep track because you're just doing whatever you want, right, and that's that's what we associate with, like hunter-gatherers, for example, which is clearly the earliest organizational stage of humanity. And then you move through your nomadic people that have some form of paternity, but you know, and eventually you'll end up with Lewis Henry Morgan's version of Oedipus, right. You get the nuclear family, the mommy, daddy, me, and this is why, like at member school, we've spent so much time dealing with psychoanalysis, dealing with like delusion guitar and going through these concepts of kinship and the ways that European philosophy has dealt with Marx's ideas about family.
Speaker 2:So, first of all, modes of subsistence or modes of production are not stages through which a Pokemon evolves Like. This is not how this works. You don't, you know, go through one stage to the next. They are strategies that you can use at different times over a single life cycle and that cultures might use interchangeably or at different times over the course of the year. So so that's the thing.
Speaker 2:Some people do, like horticulture and pastoralism. You know some people do agriculturalism and then also will forge off the land and hunt for different periods of time. So we do ourselves a serious disservice to think that it goes like hunter, gather, you know, nomadic, pastoralist, horticulturalist, agriculturalist, industrialist, because the truth is that industrialists are often have way shittier bones and have worse families and are under much more stress and are much worse provisioned than hunter-gatherers are so like. If you think that we go from nasty, brutish and short to you know, truly civilized and safe and that modernity is the best it could ever be, then I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how people live and do stuff. And this is the problem with reading the theory on the books as opposed to seeing how people actually live their lives. When you watch people adapt to exogenous shocks, you realize that the rules are not these hard lines, they're just. They're just strategies and people can change them as quickly as they can do anything else.
Speaker 1:Well, that's an important point. I mean, one of the things that shocked me when I was, when I was in my 20s and first encountering anthropology, was learning how bad the bone density decrease was for early agriculturalists. And it's like and we have evidence of disease increase and just in general, like, yes, you could sustain higher populations, there was a an increase in birth rate, but the quality of life for basically a thousand years or more drops dramatically. Yeah, it's terrific.
Speaker 2:Well, honestly and this is why I need to get into an actual fist fight with Yuval Harari and Lee Phillips and I honestly I think I could take them both at one time, because these are both there are narratives that both of them utilize that I really, really dislike. Yuval Harari presents in his Homo series the idea that we just made, we slowly made decisions and kind of sauntered vaguely downwards into agriculturalism because it just, it was just, it had more advantages than disadvantages. That's the way that he talks about it and that you know, humanity couldn't see these cumulative negative effects that were happening. I think Yuval Harari doesn't understand the history of people that were kidnapped and enslaved in order to be agriculturalists. So, like, agricultural sedentary strategies have been imposed on populations from the beginning of agriculture.
Speaker 2:Like, we have historical texts and texts even older than that, including, like Gilgamesh right, things from early Assyrian periods that talk about entire communities being enslaved in order to grow grains. So people didn't just choose to grow grains and have bones that were made of dust and to be subjected to zoonotic diseases and to be raided by people on horseback. You know, like that's, that's not the choice that everybody was making, just because it was like oh, we didn't see it. So like there's a false narrative to the way that humanity has been ensnared by agriculture that Yuval Harari presents.
Speaker 2:And then, like with Lee Phillips, for me it's this idea of progress towards the fully automated, like luxury communist Star Trek utopia, because both of them completely suppress the idea of assimilation. And this is what you talked about, like when you impose the bourgeois family onto communities that have completely different kinship systems, what you're doing is assimilating them into your institutional project, into your imperial paradigm.
Speaker 2:And when you split up families like that, everybody can be usable. They can be inserted into other cohorts that have already been socialized into these ideas. The people become much more easily exploitable. And there is a reason why indigenous communities have resisted assimilation and have fought to maintain traditional kinship systems like grannies taking care of grandkids. Like this is a huge problem in Canada.
Speaker 2:When the British came to Canada they intentionally destroyed food systems. They intentionally separated children from their families so the children couldn't learn their food ways. They put them into residential schools, they gave them TV on purpose. They hid their bodies and this is a part of the colonial project that has existed since Rome. So that's one of the reasons why you'll actually see it like not just where European imperial and colonial powers have existed, but also where colonialism operates in other places.
Speaker 2:In China and in the Incan Empire this happened. They take children and educate them very explicitly not to gain the food ways and the independence and the resilience of their indigenous communities. They want them assimilated into dependence and operation within larger social systems. So I mean we see that kind of stuff but we also struggle to identify it. But it's ancient, it's not a capitalism problem, it's not a modernity problem, and I think that that's part of why the social and behavioral sciences also struggle to talk about. It is because it is something that's much, much older than what we think of in terms of markets and economic pressures and laws regarding family organizations as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in one sense it ends up being kind of teleological to the point of eschatology, and the other sense it also is given to Lasserianism, like, ok, so there was a time when we were unalienated.
Speaker 1:Now we are totally alienated, but we can't talk about why, except in this vague way, about our relation to what we produce. And yes, I do think I am still a Marxist in that sense. I do think that matters, but I don't think it's the only thing we've lost and I also don't think that we've entirely lost any of it, like we've lost elements of this. This has become harder to do the way most people would probably do it if left alone, but we still see plenty of these kind of social organization tendencies and trends emerging all the time. They are not and they emerge from everything, from weird stuff around COVID to any time we see a crisis, et cetera. I mean, that doesn't even get into the fact that I think, when we talk about gay luxury, space communism, when fully automated everything, that that assumes infinite energy and infinite soil productivity and infinite and while I'm not a Malthusian on population, I'm not, but there is not infinite everything.
Speaker 2:No, and this is where an idea of kinship extending to the environment is extremely important. If you believe in Star Trek and space and your anthropocentric and the capacity of the human mind is the thing that you really think is the best thing that has ever happened, and most of your bros probably feel like that Like human exceptionalism, I think is kind of like I automatically assume most people feel that way that they would rip open an orangutan rib cage every day if they needed that to give their kid medicine or whatever. I think most people don't have any problem with the idea of a human life as being more valuable. The problem with that is that you are not just one species. You're like many, many microbes and also mites and amoebas and other things. You're an ecosystem dude and you are dependent on species that you can't name and they do affect your ability to perceive and to cognate and they make your tummy hurt and sometimes that influences whether or not you know what's real. And so you are yourself an ecosystem in a soup of other ecosystems interacting with each other, and we are dependent on the bacterial load of the troposphere. We're dependent on these things that are outside of our ability to see and to measure, and our best efforts as scientists to improve our measurement technologies are just now starting to scratch the surface of exactly how many species we have been influenced by genetically and energetically over the course of our evolution. So I cannot think of humanity in the colonial kind of like.
Speaker 2:The idea of leaving Earth and going to a new planet and terraforming it and making it work for us, like that idea depends on the idea that we don't have some kind of reciprocity with the soil and with the animals that we eat and the environments that create them too. And I'm saying this like as a scientist and as soon as like many indigenous activists talk like this when they talk about reciprocity and kinship relationships with the environment. There are many world religions that have this perspective, but when you talk to people from weird societies and you talk like that, they're like OK, put on your elephant pants, let's all start drinking kombucha. Clearly this isn't going to solve any problems, but we can't engineer ourselves out of problems that we don't understand, and there are living things that are creating our environments that we need to understand better, that we can't necessarily simulate through our cognition and reduction. And that's another problem with how we approach.
Speaker 2:Like what are we going to do? Moving forward, because we can't just move forward with a revolutionary program in which the classes will suddenly will form consciousness that allows us to advance and progress together towards a goal that's beneficial. We're actually we're not even able to identify which people we see as being as human as us, let alone extending a concept of kinship to the environment and to other species. So we have a hard time with exclusion and inclusion and kind of like lumping and splitting when it comes to families.
Speaker 2:Still, and I think that that's a big obstacle when you're trying to figure out how to overthrow an entrenched hierarchy that has funneled the metabolic energy of the plant to a very small number of people in a very short period of time, it's a big problem to think could be solved through pamphlets alone and not through shared being and doing. And one of my very good friends, amir Hernandez, is an astrophysicist and has written articles on Marx and is one of my favorite people to argue with about Hegel and things like that. But that's one of the things that we actually talked about in terms of community building the unions and Marxist organizations that used to have physical activities together like they do sports clubs and other things like that.
Speaker 2:There was active integration and people doing things together, eating food together Like that's where all of the organizing happened was around dinner tables. And I've done a lot of community organizing and the strategies that have always worked for the best for me have been creating community integration through potlucks or community gardens, sites where people come together and do very wholesome things together, and I don't see Marxist podcasts in general these days or just anybody really advocating for those spaces, for kinship integration and for social interaction. Like we fundamentally change modes in terms of how we engage food in space and we're all kind of like we're on our screens in our own rooms eating our microwave dinners and we're not in a space solving problems, which is kind of an interesting anthropological thing. There have been several stories about how in communities where a well is put in so that it can access fresh water, so before all of the people in the village would have to walk many miles in order to get water in the morning. And when they did that, when they walked together, they would gossip and they would solve problems and they would walk to go get the water and by the time they came back they had solutions and when the well was put in the community, all of a sudden problems started popping up. There was more and more conflict because people weren't spending that time doing the social work.
Speaker 2:I only really know academics and Marxists in general to draw lines in the sand and say that you're not my kin and I won't work with you Like. I see a lot of conflict and adversarial interactions, no matter what sphere I'm really trying to talk with people in about how we could relate to or think about relatedness better, and I think it really is. There's a fundamental lack of experience of insidiness for a lot of people and they really need a granny to yell at them and tell them to come inside. And they need to be inside on that to know what they're gaining. Because I think when we talk about the fully automatic luxury communism, when we talk about this idea of enlightenment progression, there is a promise of what we will gain and it is a utopia. It is a super cool blue robot body and everything being all efficient and wall-y, without the floaty chairs or whatever.
Speaker 2:Athens without slaves. It's all kind of the same thing to me at this point Because it is a really nice story. But what's lacking in that narrative of what we'll gain is what is lost in kinship, what's lost in biodiversity, what's lost in viability and resilience. Because if we have to engineer the planet all the time, if we have to have all these artificial institutions for managing people, because kinship systems aren't managing them and caring for them and provisioning them, we're not really seeing what we're losing. So we can't even form a vocabulary for what we would gain In embodied wealth, in satisfaction, in cortisol reduction and everything that matters to me and shout out to Robert Sapolsky for teaching me everything I know about cortisol, but it really, really matters.
Speaker 1:So Robert Sapolsky and cortisol, and it's interesting to me that I get a lot of pushback on a lot of these issues. I am not as explicit about it as probably you are I still?
Speaker 1:use a Marxist terminology, although increasingly I'm frustrated with that. We're trying to get people to expand or incorporate that I can get them to realize. Ok, yeah, you mentioned Amir as a side note. I used to work for Amir's dad, speaking of kinship, like we know each other, know his family, and we were kind of going through a lot of similar changes on this point at the same time, where I was like, look, I'm a fairly orthodox Marxist, but there's all this stuff. I learned in anthropology that this is not accounting for. When I read Marxist anthropology, that tends to be a mess.
Speaker 2:You mean like the urban Harris like Columbia School Marxist anthropology.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Oh, the dirty stuff. You like a real vulgar OK.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was pretty vulgar and it was not very satisfactory. And I found around this time I found Marshall Solans' Stoneage Economics actually his book from 1972, which really goes into substantiveist economics versus formalist economics, and even that he doesn't seem totally happy with the distinction, but he does point out that, look, you can't really separate culture, law, economics, society, even governance, in a clear way before modern societies and, if we're honest, you probably can't really separate it in modern societies either. But we've convinced ourselves from moment one that we can. And that was really influential to me, particularly with dropping this notion of progressive development. Well, and the reason why I had to drop it was I hit this wall because I was like, ok, we talk about technologies and we talk about how technologies that are always optimized for the society that we're in, but we do not include seemingly irrational cognitive frameworks as part of that assumption. Ok, why are most cultures animistic? Is it because it's just a stage towards the truth of going through a singular god and even dropping that? Or is it because there's something about projecting personhood onto even things? That is highly functional and stable for most human organization? And when I started thinking about that, I also, at the same time was dealing with Samir Amin and him pointing out that Marxism has this hereby dragons to most of human society which it cast out to do their Asiatic despotism or the Asiatic mode of production, whatever the hell that is.
Speaker 1:No one really knows our primitive accumulation forms Because the modes and Marx there's really like hunter gatherers, blah, blah, blah. Something, something growing an empire. We don't even know what to call that. Slave society, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Capitalism, feudalism too, but we don't really have a good definition for that either. Capitalism is the only mode of production we know how to really talk about. But there's been more modes.
Speaker 1:Admittedly, marx mentioned modes of production twice and basically both in explanations, and his explanation and Engels' explanations seem to be the same. But if you actually look at the wording they're not. But you can't discount, even if you're dealing with Marx, that is the assumption of Marxist. Your point about the linear developmentalism in Marx, while you know a cohesita, a Cito and company are trying to convince me that's not true. My only counter argument is that until the 1960s, every Marxist I know of accepts that. After the 1960s, actually really kind of beginning in the 1950s, but after the 1960s, for sure everybody's trying to deny that's what the text says, even though, while Marx isn't necessarily always consistent on it, it is what the text says.
Speaker 2:They just completely okay. So after the 60s, that's when the GI Bill brought in this surge of white dudes into anthropology and so like. Okay, it's important to understand the history of anthropology and most of the social and behavioral sciences. It was being done by dandies from rich families and fancy outfits. They were literally the definition of armchair right. They read a bunch of books, they argued in their lounges in their smoking jackets and they had very little interactions with people at all. Lewis Henry Morgan was actually kind of different in that like for a lawyer he was like out interacting with indigenous peoples. He had very messed up ideas about them that later in life he ended up one-aiding real hard on. But the problem is that nobody ever remembers you for your 180. They only remember you for the dumb stuff you said first and I think that like Marx is really like that too. And on German ideology he has this like super underminable trajectory of cultural development that he presents that involves a description of primitive accumulation. I think Engels does a little bit better in his text. But what they both really failed to account for is what you said like it's the irrational stuff.
Speaker 2:It's ritual human sacrifice and witchcraft, which are very important parts of managing kinship relationships. And there are also things that social and behavioral scientists struggle to talk about because, like it's hard to admit that slavery still exists on earth. We call it modern slavery, we call it human trafficking, we have a bunch of different linguistic tools for kind of separating ourselves away from the fact that slavery is still real in some capacity. And then a lot of the let's distinguish chattel slavery from human trafficking and other things like that is also a cope, because there are people that are being bought and sold as assets in different places on the planet still, even though it's not legal anywhere. And I feel like some of the problems that, like, in order to accumulate, in order for classes to form, in order for elites to exist, those social stratifications are escalated and reinforced by ritual human sacrifice. And, if you're interested, in reading on this.
Speaker 2:I this is one of my favorite special interests that have accumulated quite a lot of literature on it. But when a spread starts to form in a society, it can often be like ossified through sacrifice, and whatever that form takes, it can be in wasting, it can be in like a really gory public, you know, like ripping open a rib cage or shooting someone full of arrows or whatever. There's lots of different ways that we use violence to reinforce the hierarchies that exist, and I think that you can make a fair case for the way that black men have been killed by police officers, that, like there, we still are seeing people that are sacrificed in order to maintain social power now, and it happens very systematically. So I think that that's an issue too Like we want to talk about these things in the terms of reason and cognition, when some really creepy, impulsive things are happening that have everything to do with like us versus them and the way that our ancestors were successful in their environment of evolutionary origin and forming ideas of us versus them and then also run away by this training and the suppression of empathy and in not extending ideas of kinship right and not bringing people into the us.
Speaker 2:This is a big problem when it comes to the way that we approach genocides, because I think that, like, there are a wand in genocide, in the fact that it was like, if we look at the numbers, is like proportionately more horrific than the Holocaust, like it's it's something that was supposed to never happen again and then happened again, and so that kind of undermines the idea that genocide is an impossibility and all that it really takes is knowing how to manipulate language in order to make a person, another human who is extremely related to you Like you have every reason to want them to thrive and survive, as much as you were actually very close to make them in your mind the equivalent of like a cockroach or an insect.
Speaker 2:Right like that. That dehumanizing language and that dehumanizing strategy. That's playing with the cognitive and parsing framework of kinship in the human mind and it's we need to know a lot more about perception and personhood If we're going to think that, as social and behavioral sciences, we can contribute anything useful to the conversation of, like how to make the world a better place or make it a place where genocide can happen. Because I think that they don't really want to talk about violence, they want to do the pinker. They want to hide behind the shield of statistics and be safe to know that, like things are getting better and all we have to do is keep plugging along with the enlightenment project and we'll be fine, I'm personally not optimistic.
Speaker 1:Nicholas Nassim Tuleb is not a guy that I would normally tell people to read, but his takedown of pinker is brilliant and it's just like look, you're statistically whitewashing levels of relative violence because they happen in sporadic spurts and then they die down again, usually because you can only maintain that level of violence for so long before something does kind of break the spell of language. But the spell of language is fucking real and I remember just, you know, I lived in Korea for a long time and I learned well, a long time three years is not really long time, but long enough to learn the basics of the language and I have Korean relatives and so I do have some cultural ties to Korea before I went there. And I don't know, I don't. I don't think this is good about me, but the longer I was there, the more I kind of hated the Japanese. Yeah, like um, and I don't have no one from Japan's ever done anything to me.
Speaker 2:You just learned it through osmosis, you just absorbed it through your skin, and that's that's how that works, right. That's how the concept of social contagion is useful when it comes to very little other than the idea of us versus them. So like when people that you have mutuality of being with, someone that, like, has moved their body and accomplished a task and you have been able to, through your piercing frame or put yourself in their position, mimic that activity and do it right, when humans have that kind of relationship with the way that we watch each other move and do things, we form special bonds of its reinforced. That's the neurological foundations of kinship. So it really is like primacy and recency and repetition creates legitimacy. When it comes to like what actually makes people recognizable as kin neurologically. And if a person who is totally and us, if a few people that you're with, identify them as them, it's amazing how quickly discussed is activated, how quickly your limbic system gets hijacked and how permanently your judgment against that person is Encoded, and it's just wild, honestly, to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's one of the things where I was trying to explain this to to someone. Okay, you tell me about all the stuff about how economics can predict politics and to some degrees you're kind of right, and that predicts voting patterns, sort of. But you're going to have a hard time explaining why regions and age are far more predictive of voting patterns than economic class with. And the only real time we see class tying into it, honestly, is the elites in the area tend to vote class interest. So you can kind of predict what elite interest is going to be and downstream from that is downstream from that. Yes, highly educated individuals tend to be, you know, of a certain political valence, but I don't want to sound like a conservative, but they're not totally wrong about this. That's also an exposure Alliance program, a lot of ways. And and then this gets naturalized.
Speaker 1:I mean, I remember you know the Jonathan hate disposition stuff that makes it seem like well, liberal and conservative or somehow these trans historical values that are in our, our psychology some way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, let's look at temperament sorters this way and and I remember him going, it's trans, you know it's it's, it's trans cultural and so I took his stupid test. And one I didn't actually fit their values patterns at all. In fact, my values patterns are apparently really weird. And two, I really don't have a discussed mechanism whatsoever but I actually do value loyalty and familial loyalty like obscenely more than a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Like I will probably shoot you over and not on pro violence, but I know that about myself to get back into your, your studies. So you have that and then you have this stuff. I mean specifically genocide. One of the things I pointed out to people about genocide is like the genocide rules aren't really about predicting stopping genocide. The genocide rules are kind of about nations being able to do what the Western nations that came up with the genocide rules did to consolidate their own nation, national identities. Sorry, that's really what that's about.
Speaker 2:They didn't they mind business.
Speaker 1:It's just like you can't. You guys can't do that because it's bad, even though we all did it. Let's list the things we did force language, force labor, deliberately breakup familiar context. You know all the stuff that you see thrown as a China about the Uighurs, which that stuff is really, with the exception of, probably, the mass death. I don't actually see a lot of evidence that the death is really happening there. But that definition of genocide is like deliberately political. Does it stop actual murders of huge groups of other people based on ethnic lines? No, not at all. And our ethnic lines even really that clear? Not like no.
Speaker 2:There's a problem with people who are composite sites, right like ethnic lines aren't clear when you are claimed by multiple people and you've also claimed multiple lines of people, and there's also a value to that. That is not just economic and this is just a point that I wanted to make about what you're saying. If you do the math on colonialism, it's not economically justifiable unless you also account for sadism and all of the pleasure that people derived from being absolute monsters. And it's the same sort of thing like people pay in studies and where there is neurological imaging done about people's intentions, people pay to punish other people.
Speaker 2:You know they go out of their way to do things that are spiteful and mean and do not fall under the umbrella of what we would call, you know, an economic rationalization. So, if you like, we can't explain the history of humanity, we can explain, like the Neolithic Revolution and the advent of agriculture is just like people making these rational decisions. When we exist in a world in which we watch people believing in math, covid, like how can people argue for a world in which, like, rational thinking dominates when they saw everybody believe in magic during COVID and do the whole horse paced thing and do all of the rituals and, like you know, it's just kind of amazing to watch so much religion and the supernatural exist in the modern world and try to plan for how we'll get to a world that we actually want to live in without accounting for it.
Speaker 2:It's like I have to think about the people who believe in magic and I have to think about the engineers, because I consider both of them obstacles to a viable planet.
Speaker 2:But we how exactly we approach that. I have to think about it in terms of, like, expanding the circle of kinship and figuring out how to integrate people. How do we integrate people back into families when their entire development and socialization has been pushing them farther and farther from anything that could be inside, more and more into isolation? I don't know how to deal with that problem, and isolation is a conservatizing and aggressiveizing factor.
Speaker 1:I mean one of the things that there's two things that I always talk about, like we have examples of relatively egalitarian power, egalitarian societies like a particularly immediate, immediate return, hunter gatherers being the big one. I am interested in some of the examples David David Graber gives in the history of everything. I'm not sure I believe them all. I'm going to have to do more research, but but but I don't think the only form of egalitarian society. But I actually do think that and I have some friends of mine and really pushed back on Graber on this, but he's got a point about having the offsite, this hierarchy and aggression, somewhere like and and that doing it symbolically is is fairly effective and the and that egalitarian society, just as much as hierarchical societies, actually do have to enforce it, like both those systems require, frankly, violent reinforcement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's my favorite thing to talk about when people think that egalitarian is the Russo noble savage where everybody's just eating berries chilling in the sunlight, nobody's fighting over where the rocks are. It's hilarious because, like hunter gatherers that intentionally suppress hierarchy, let's say like, let's say, you're like the best hunter and you just killed this extremely beautiful animal and you bring it into everybody, instead of you getting too big for your bridges and thinking, wow, I'm a big provider. Look at everything that I just did for my community. All of the grannies will come and be like. This tastes like you pierced the intestines, did some Did some stomach juice and some, you know, did some bile pour out on this. This tastes rancid and they'll just negate the entire time they're eating it, right? So there is an extraordinary amount of negativity and violence necessary in order to suppress hierarchies and to stop them from forming. So it's really, the question isn't whether or not we're like a peaceful fertility cult or like a murderous death cult. It's how do we oscillate between being supportive and integrating and putting people in their place through violence in order to like, in order to provision, offspring the best.
Speaker 2:And this is where we get into the idea of like gerontocracy as opposed to neontocracy, right. So, like anthropologists love triangles. This is another reason that you should be extremely suspicious of them, because anything that can be easily turned into a diagram involving a triangle probably should be questioned. But they like to think of the idea of like, if all of the children in the society are basically worthless, but the ancestors are very valuable. If there are a small number of old men at the top of your society, that's a gerontocracy, right. It's where the geriatrics get all of the energy and investment, all the best stuff flows to them. And then a neontocracy would be the opposite, where all of the grandparents and all of the adults and all of the community members all give all of their energy to one little baby and they make sure that that baby is provisioned and they are considered where the ancestors are seated, right.
Speaker 2:Like often, babies are viewed as reincarnated ancestors in these neontocracies and like in the anthropological literature, there's actually this one guy, lancy. I think he's important, but he annoys me because he says that weird societies have neontocracies now because we have a small number of children and invest in them heavily. My problem with that is, in these situations the children are in the arena of competitive parenting and there's like mimetic rivalry and trophy like presentation of children that's involved in all this. I think he's wrong. I think it's actually like evidence of return on investment in Western and educated, industrialized, rich democracies.
Speaker 2:But I do think it's important to think about how an indigenous culture would use negativity and violence socially for the benefit of children, as opposed to using children as lubricant for like the wheels of an empire, which is, I think, what we see much more commonly when we look in the archeological record and the roles of children historically.
Speaker 2:So I think that's another like framework that people who come from the Marxist social sciences like my professor, chris Kyle was a student of Marvin Harris, so he was like Marx was my genealogy anthropology and it was like the GI Bill involved all of these guys coming into anthropology outside of these like elite families and they started really focusing on materialism as opposed to idealism, because I think that they were really they were pushing back against conservative Christianity after they'd gone to war during World War II and had seen other cultures and maybe they had slightly different ideas, but they did really lean onto this idea that everything could be explained through material conditions and the reality is that, like the social conditions are often created through violence, and that violence doesn't have to be rooted in material objects. It can. Social control can take a lot of different forms. I think it's just really important to keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know you and I are both interested in primate studies. That's part of the anthropology stuff that I'm interested in. That makes people uncomfortable and I actually got really pissed at David Graber for like implying that anyone who would compare primitive which I think that's offensive, but primitive cultures to primates was insulting primitive cultures. And I'm like you're assuming that I don't see primates is on the same spectrum as us.
Speaker 2:Like that's the problem, right, Like Like the primates are like Sapolsky, frans Zavall, jane Goodall, like they truly extend the concept of personhood to primates, right? And there are other primatologists within anthropology that don't. They do not have that concept of personhood. And it's really like Tomasello, right, like Tomasello, kind of, is cited by Salons. Actually, even though I don't agree with Tomasello as much as DeWall, I'm very much like a DeWall school of empathy and personhood. But yeah, there's this idea that, like, by saying that humans and primates have similar structures, we are saying some humans are less than. That anthropocentric idea is like it's super enlightenment, it's great chain of being, aerosol stuff. That's just like inextractable from modernity, from everything.
Speaker 2:Like I haven't had a single professor that didn't have that belief Like. And even when they were like talking about like network theory and like the cybernetic ideas around ecosystems and other things like that, they were still happily like chomping on the barbecue chicken and talking about how we're gonna have to do lab grown meat because they're not giving it up. So it's like their concept of like, kinship and integration doesn't extend far enough to actually change how any of them live or act or like consider the feelings of animals or other living things. So no, I think that that's a big problem with academia in the West in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was actually surprised that Graber did that. I was, but if Solens restrains Graber, apparently David Wingrow just gave him more crack, yeah absolutely.
Speaker 2:They started off with the Hobbs and Rousseau binary and it's like, oh, come on, guys, and but we're gonna I can't wait to actually read that book.
Speaker 2:I really hope that you're able to come with us when we do it, because I wanna go through all of the citations and just his strategy of pulling from dozens of ethnographic examples to like form his argument. It just it's. There's problems with that kind of Frankenstein's ethnography that like. I like what he's trying to say, I actually like how he does bibliography, but I just I don't come to the same conclusions. I can't agree with the synthesis, but I'm glad I'm always glad that he challenged the kind of, like, typical narrative within academia. I think it's good to be a contrarian in anthropology. There are just probably more constructive ways to have done it. Especially, do you know about David Price?
Speaker 1:actually, yeah, I do.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the weaponizing anthropology is probably. If you're gonna touch on one text in order to kind of orient it, that's good. But then there's also the network for concerned anthropologists. The counter-counter insurgency fieldbook, I believe is the full title, but it's just about the history of anthropology being used by governments, by the military, by businesses to exploit and to take advantage of indigenous peoples, to displace them. All of the ways in which anthropology has been the social worker in the colonial cop relationship, basically how anthropology from the Jesuits until now has facilitated a lot of really awful assimilation behaviors. And I think the people who are interested, people who want to say that anthropology is like the best department in the academy, I think they need to read David Price, because he does not like his colleagues and I think that that's useful to put into context. Like a lot of these people don't really care about cultural relativism or the preservation of culture. They're just very happy to have tenure and to not have to work in a mine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, blame it for not working in the mine, but you are, you're not wrong. I remember the first time I was ever actually tempted by an anthropology scholarship and it was actually read by the intelligence agencies in the United States. So seeing that in real time.
Speaker 2:Learning Arabic in the early 2000s was like, heavily subsidized by the US government and I knew a lot of people in anthropology who they're totally boo liquors. They violated the fundamental principles of not being a douche and I think that that's actually kind of like interesting to see that trajectory of Marxist academic to government inform it. It's not a thin pipeline, it has been well traveled.
Speaker 1:Well, on that note we have to end. I could talk to you about the stuff all day. Weirdly, for vaguely socialist podcasts, we do have to plug. So what would you like to plug?
Speaker 2:So I'm an organizer at the member school and this is where I'm able to actually talk about my interests in ritual human sacrifice, horse war and basically all of the ways in which everything that you've been taught is a lie. We spend a lot of time dealing with these ideas of personhood but then also exactly at what point we could have said no in our history. I think that we have a very Tom Stoppard, rosencrantz and Gilderstern energy about everything, like if there was a point at which we could have personally made different choices in order to subvert these institutions, it happened before the play started. So that's what we're looking for, is that kind of moment. And it's a wonderful group of scholars.
Speaker 2:We have people from all over who specialize in everything. We just had a class on the history of gold rushes and mining with Duncan Money, who's a fantastic independent scholar. We're doing what is blackness right now and reading Finaw and really exploring kind of black studies and Afro pessimism. So it's a great community of learners and if you like reading books and you like arguing, then that might be a place where you would be welcome. So I think it'd be interesting if anybody who listens to your podcast comes into the Discord and kind of sees what we're talking about, because it's a lot of what you and I talked about here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is, and a more detailed and kind of contentiously. Thank you so much. I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:I love you too.
