An Epidemic of Control, Charles Eisenstein

[Music] Charles Eisenstein has been writing about the need for systems change and personal transformation for many years in books like sacred economics and the more beautiful world their hearts know as possible in response to the pandemic crisis he wrote an article the coronation there has been widely shared the things that I've been foreseeing and also fearing are all coming together at once so on the one hand the breakdown of normal that gives us an opportunity to choose what we've been unconsciously choosing before we also discussed some of the criticisms of the article whether it bypassed anger and the need for change in favor of making people feel better about themselves is this not the time for righteous anger I do think it's time for righteous anger the the trick that the controlling forces of this world have used is that they again and again divert the righteous anger onto a false target and onto false solutions Charles thank you very much for joining me I'm familiar with your work and I think it's about time we had you on the channel because you write about a lot of the same things that many of the other people we feature on the channel talk about in particular kind of systems change and possible other operating systems for the society that we have and also linking it to like personal growth and personal change at the same time given what's going on right now like I think a lot of people are recognizing a few things one how interconnected everything is and also how this sort of idea about alternative operating system seems to be coming into a sharp relief for a lot of people how do you think that this current crisis is is showing it's kind of throwing into relief your work from before yeah thank you it's kind of hard to summarize it that's why I that's why the article ended up being 9,000 words I didn't try to write such a long article but there was just so much to say so there's a few in it but one of the as far as like how it relates to my earlier work I've been writing about how change happens through crisis even through a process of initiation where the old normal falls apart where we recognize finally that reality is not what we had fought it to be and that therefore we ourselves are not who we thought ourselves to be because self and reality are inter interwoven we're not just separate selves floating in an external reality but our relationships are part of ourselves in fact you could even say that we are relationship and this is one of the realizations that's coming out as you were saying that we're all interconnected you know through the kovat crisis so it's it's like the things that I've been foreseeing and also fearing are all coming together at once so on the one hand the breakdown of normal that gives us an opportunity to choose what we've been unconsciously choosing before like unconscious choices are are being brought into our attention and therefore we're being asked do we want to keep going in the direction we've been going doesn't mean that kovat is going to rescue us from the path that we've been on but it's at least putting us into a into a liminal zone where the reinforcing circumstances of our old way of life are temporarily dispelled and we can say yeah do we really want to continue down the road of separation one of the things that's that's being shown to us like none of the none of our responses to coronavirus are anything new there are all intensification of trends that have gone on for a long time for example the migration of social interaction on to the like that has been happening for 20 years at least now we're forced to do it and it's taken to an extreme or the or the movement of Commerce online or the regime of Hygiene and the fear of germs or the movement of life indoors when I was a kid we there were packs of kids outside playing all the time and now and and to be kept indoors was a punishment like you're not allowed to go out and play now it's kind of the opposite and this did not all of a sudden happen with coronavirus or the restriction of political freedoms the censorship of information the destruction of small businesses like all of these things the the increasing medicalization of life all of these things were already happening and now we get to ask do we want them to continue to happening when we're being shown what they are like taken to the extreme my hope is that we'll say no we don't want to sacrifice everything for the holy cause of risk minimization maybe we will accept a bit more risk except that death is part of life and no longer live in this regime of control that seeks to to minimize risk control every variable guard against the world guard against each other and therefore not even really live in an in an attempt to forestall death I was struck by one of the metaphors that you used in your article cuz I've heard it a few times now and it's the the addict rehab metaphor and I think it comes up a lot people over it seems to illustrate things very well this sort of idea that there's a sort of delusional way of being that maybe we're now being confronted with and there in that there is a choice can you unpack that for me how do you see that metaphor being useful yeah so on the one hand the one of the approaches to addiction is it's called an intervention where are you by force if necessary pluck the person out of the totality of their circumstances that that make the addiction happen like the the addiction is part of an entire life an entire lifestyle your surroundings and so forth if nothing else changes then the addiction isn't going to change either so you intervene and and interrupt the routines the relationships the the whole way of life of the addict and that doesn't mean that they're cured but it means that they have at least a chance to make other changes and to look at the things that the addiction was obscuring because addictions kind of work temporarily at least they they dull the pain they're they in fact they originated as a coping mechanism and for them and and the problem is that the price that they take to keep working gets greater and greater and greater so on a on the on a grand scale I think that we have a society that is itself addicted to control addiction the things that people use um you know as there are pathways of addiction these are ways to control life in some way to control pain to control emotions to control other people and so forth so our culture our society let me say responds to its problems through various technologies of control or another example would be the the piling up of pharmaceutical medications each one causing symptoms that another one is added in to address or agricultural technology where where ders and chemical fertilizers destroy the soil and allow pests to proliferate and so then you add a pesticide and that destroys the soil even more so you add another one and another one and pretty soon you're completely dependent on the chemicals so the same pattern or foreign-policy you know there's terrorists you bomb them or you try to keep them out and somehow it doesn't solve the problem something else happens and you need even more and more and more control so generally the big picture is that our society is addicted to control the response every time it doesn't work is more of it and just like with an addiction the price that we pay that is gouged out of our lives and gouged out of our souls is greater and greater what is it in America like 15% of the population or something ridiculous like that is clinically depressed and another huge chunk of them or have anxiety and another huge chunk are addicted etc etc it's like half the people have some serious psychological disorder and what do we do then more control mood altering pharmaceutical medicines like will control your very brain but at some point we need this interruption to say hold on here is this working have we actually hit bottom like this is showing us where bottom is going to be like what what current trends are taking us toward and that's why I have hope in this crisis as well as a certain amount of despair and despondency before we started recording you asked me how am i doing you know and like sometimes I'm like oh my god everything that I've been afraid of is happening now and I see this timeline going into a dystopian future where it becomes normal never to leave your house like a lot of people in this country haven't been that disrupted because they were already shopping online for everything and everything was getting delivered to their house and not talking to anybody when they went shopping and now you don't even need to go shopping you can get deliveries to your house like why do we even think we're gonna go back to normal and how far could it go could we see a world where even dating is online and procreation happens via sex robots where you know the sex robot comes to your house and you deposit your sperm and then goes to a lab and so on and so forth like like and I'm not predicting that but from the totalitarian nightmare of constant surveillance to the nightmare of separation from each other like all of these things are happening and so sometimes I'm like I go through this despondency but it helps me to recognize that this is also it's it's a choice point making our old trajectory visible conscious and therefore we can still choose to go that way but maybe there's an awareness now that we do have a choice yeah and you mentioned for example the medicalization crisis in American society and let's not just keep it to America let's talk about sort of more worldwide but you use the metaphor in the article of the taut rope which I think is quite a good a good one because what it seems is happening is that this crisis is showing it's kind of unveiling a lot of the stress points for example in the economic system where we've taken out all of the slack and so we're vulnerable to a shock like this also if you look at kind of our immune systems or the kind of medicalization of so many people in America like we've taken out the slack of so many systems and we've we've got weak systems in so many places and what it seems is happening is this this crisis is kind of unveiling or showing us the kind of stress points in society yeah very fragile everything's very fragile our financial system is very fragile like hate me leveraged you know so let's just know as you're saying no slack and even our psychologies you know where we're not resilient the the Hong Kong flu that struck in 1968 killed according to some estimates four million people worldwide the population was half that said that would be the equivalent of like you know maybe eight million people coronavirus has killed what so far 60,000 maybe hmm like not even in the ballpark and I asked my mother if she remembered Hong Kong flu she need to remember it nobody was panicking and yeah like you could say that okay so it's an interesting question why hmm and I think that it's similar to what you're saying that that we were healthier psychologically healthier in that we weren't so afraid of death and so fixated on preserving youth and preserving life at all costs we were psychologically less fragile and socio socially less fragile and now our civilization is just like yeah like I said like this rope that's pulled tighter and tighter and tighter until it just takes a little little touch for it to snap and if it wasn't going to be this it was going to be something else so now we're in it and this is another thing just the uncertainty one of the things I was saying in the essay is that maybe it is time to release into the uncertainty rather than to try to cling to the old normal and to bring normal back because normal wasn't that great was it given the like the statistics I was referencing about addiction and depression and obesity and autoimmunity like we haven't even been getting healthier in 1968 people were way healthier than they were at least by some measures than they were in 1928 life expectancy in America in 1900 was about 40 six years and in 1960 it was like 72 73 if so it increased by 25 26 years in half a century and then in the next half century it decreased by maybe it increased by maybe six years and after that it didn't increase in all and now it's actually declining and people are not as healthy overall either all these chronic diseases have arisen that can't be controlled very well like the technologies of control do not cure almost any of the major diseases of our time they can't cure autoimmunity they can't really cure heart disease they can't cure diabetes they can't cure cancer I mean sometimes you can but overall I cancer is still the number two killer you can kind of control them but you can't cure them you can't win this triumph that was part of the ideology of the onward march of science and onward march of Medicine we were supposed to have no disease by the year 2000 that was that was the future that was the shining future when I was a kid like it was gonna be awesome the future and the future never came so there's also this another thing that I didn't write about in the essay that much but that's really coming up you know with all of these you could call them conspiracy theories or you could call them alternate narratives what's becoming visible is incredible distrust in the authorities a lot of people just don't really believe what they're being told by scientific and political authority and this is also like this would not have happened in the late 60s you know or even up until maybe 20 years ago people would generally believed that there was a consensus about what was true what was real in society and a broad consensus not anymore a lot of I mean a lot of people are kind of going along with it but underneath I think there's a lot of skepticism and especially among like working-class people why would you believe what you're being told when you when you feel like you've been betrayed by the very authorities that you're supposed to listen to the authorities that were supposed to be preparing this marvelous future for us to live in and it's just gotten worse not only his health gotten worse but people's economic situation has gotten worse every generation was better off than their parents until this generation I'm worse off than my parents and a lot of my peers are and I'm Generation X I mean down the road it's even like Millennials I mean you know forget like trying to own your own house or anything like that the inequality of income is intensified to the to the an extreme so yeah I think the end of the world as we know it doesn't have to be a bad thing but it can be a very bad thing one question I'd ask is is there a danger of confirmation bias in that you've been writing about these things for a very long time and now we we have this situation and this danger of saying AHA see I was right all along is there a concern there of just sort of seeing things through a particular lens that that you've you've already built up there's a lot of confirmation bias going on I mean that's how conspiracy narratives are built you you kind of screen out the things that don't fit the narrative you take in the things that do you interpret things in order that they fit the narrative and it's you know anything that contradicts it you examine it rigorously and make sure you know who's saying that and what and and could the speed just propaganda and so forth and anything that you agree with that you take that in on critically the thing is the mainstream does the exact same thing on an institutional level science is subject to tremendous confirmation by us otherwise how could we have been told for 30 or 40 years that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease when it's utterly not true and finally after 40 years of certainty that orthodoxy is dissolving so confirmation bias and other forms of cognitive bias are rampant in the corona virus outbreak both within the mainstream and and it's not like there's you know conspiratorial overlords who are directing the confirmation bias maybe there are I don't know like this is um like I can go there but it's just the tilt of the playing field toward a certain narrative so that you know if um you know say if there is a hospital that's that's being overwhelmed like that gets in the news and if there's one that's not being overwhelmed and that's laying off doctors because there's you know not enough for them to do because there's no traffic fatalities anymore or something like that or people are being forced to stay home if it's not essential and that doesn't get in the news so the media creates a nasteria that is far out of proportion to the actual number of deaths or even the actual risk and you don't need somebody to mandate that that SIOP is gonna happen in order for it to happen as for my own confirmation bias I mean I've been going through I've I've gone into there like whichever these narratives that I type I'm reading I'm I am I go through this turmoil this doubt of like oh my god maybe that's right maybe I'm totally wrong how do I know that I'm right how do I know that this epidemic pandemic whatever you call it isn't as bad as we're being told do I actually know that maybe it's gonna be worse than we're being told why do i why do i as Daniel smackin Berger wrote in a beautiful little post how do I know that what I believe is true most people and I'll not exempt from this choose their data points in order that they fit existing beliefs in order that they confirm that I've been right all along in order that they reinforce a familiar worldview and a familiar self-image anything that doesn't fit that is an attack it's an attack of my identity so it actually takes a bit of courage and humility to entertain narratives that contradict what you had believed in the past and it's a shock and people going to denial when when it happens maybe there's a lot of denial going on right now but denial is a phase you know it's part of a larger process eventually the the denial is harder and harder to maintain and you enter the next phase ultimately accepting that you don't know and that is similar to the acceptance of death actually it's the same fear of the unknown fear of transcending who you are right now and that fear the fear of death has governed our society increasingly for a long time which is inevitable from the story of self that prevails in our society a separate self in a world of other if that's what you accept being to be then death is the worst possible outcome it's the annihilation of all that is all yourself the universe itself and so of course we have a medical system and an entire narrative now that's all about saving lives yeah you mentioned in the article about death aversion and how that's one of the the dynamics that's going on and that I think you pretty much say that we're going to have to come to terms with what freedoms are we prepared to forego in exchange for some acceptance of risk would you is that about right it's some a matter of conflicting values you know like when we hold life sacred and we hold our beloved fellow beings our parents our grandparents people who are immunocompromised I mean these people are equally sacred and equally worthy of life as anybody else and so that's a value that we should do whatever it takes to protect these people like my mother is in this category she's in her late 70s she's had cancer she's frail if she got kovin 19 she would probably die and she's loving life probably you know she just wrote her obituaries the other day like she's probably not gonna live that much longer um but who knows maybe she'll be with us for several more years and she's loving every day of her life she's like oh the sunshine it's so beautiful you know she if she can sit in the sunshine and hear a bird singing she is totally content with that every day is precious to her and I value that and I want her to have if if if she can have six more months of that I want that and I'm willing not to visit her for alone fur this month in order to keep her safe but would I be willing to not visit her for six months or a year and what I'd be willing to and maybe never see her again would that be worth it would I be willing to tell the whole world to stop to stop gathering just so that my mother can survive no I don't think so I don't think that that's so there's other values here that that it's always a trade-off of values like what are we willing to sacrifice to keep these precious ones safe are we willing it you know to practice social distancing forever if it reduces the death rate and in and makes average life expectancy six months higher I mean a lot of people who are dying of Kovan are you gonna die anyway I mean everyone's gonna die anyway but you know in Italy for example the median age of death was like 80 it's been 80 so that means that half the people who have died are over 80 well life expectancy in Italy is around 80 anyway so so these people you know on average who are who have been dying of coronavirus could have maybe they had an average of six months to live anyway or who knows you know is is it worth totally changing the way that we live in order to postpone death a little bit sometimes it is like there are times where I would be like yeah mom I'm sorry I'm not going to visit you because it'll be over in a few weeks and then I'll be able to visit you like it's a worthwhile sacrifice but we have to be clear that a lot of the rationale for social distancing quarantines and so forth isn't gonna go away the virus I mean okay maybe this virus will subside but there's always a possibility of a mutant variation of it or another one or this the flu or there's always gonna be a reason to maintain these practices or they say you can get reinfected with it you know maybe it's endemic we're gonna have it forever so the questions that come up in the short term are the sacrifices worth it they're gonna remain with us in the long term too and it brings up what do we value do we value the prolonging of life at any cost or do we value play the exploration of our boundaries the challenging of limits adventure I mean people make choices all the time that are risky like to go to a festival it's much safer to stay at home to let your kid play out saket it's much safer to keep them indoors to go to a bar to get on the highway I mean there's there's all kinds of choices that we make in order to live life fully that put living life longer at risk and I think that this conversation about our values is unavoidable and hitting home for a lot of people like my friend listen Rankin who's an MD she's saying do you guys really know it it is like to be on a respirator and she cites these statistics like two-thirds of the people who go on respirators for this die anyway so instead of dying sooner surrounded by loved ones they're dying after several weeks of torture with a machine breathing them in an ICU behind glass saying goodbye to their loved ones on FaceTime but they get to live two or three weeks longer for a 30% chance of of eventually coming out of that but severely compromised it's not like you're better cured you know like is this conversation even being had the medical system is geared around saving lives it has no conception of dying well house do not keep records of did the patient die well it's only the fatality rate so these are just this is just the tip of the iceberg of conversations that we need to start having right now and in the the article you can you kind of as you've said before you see it as a kind of inflection point could it be a transition or the beginning of a transition to a better system than the one we have or could it be could it go the other way and I've seen a couple of criticisms of you I saw Daniel Pinchbeck wrote quite a long one on Facebook that you responded to and I think his to boil his down he was sort of saying that he he felt that you were in danger of kind of wishful thinking that it was that he's more in the sort of we need to be planning actual kind of action we need to be having plans right now and he was sort of suggesting that you were kind of making people feel better but not not giving them any guidance of what to do in this situation I disagreed with that critique I'm not saying that coronavirus is gonna come and save us you know that it's delivering us from the situation that we've been in and automatically gonna bring us a better world and so take comfort you know this is a good thing I'm what I'm saying is that it is making our choice starkly apparent to us it doesn't guarantee we're gonna make the right choice but it is showing us that for one thing like I was saying before that that normal isn't even necessarily where we want to be it's but it's making our old trajectory starkly obvious so and and also in the in the piece I'm offering things like that part about about death denial and a whole other piece is about the the title of that section was life is community saying that that here's the irony that even the things that we're doing to prolong life don't actually necessarily do it the things that we're doing for the sake of health don't actually make us healthier like excessive hygiene which cuts us off and social distancing which cuts us off from the constant interchange with the world that's necessary to maintain a healthy immune system a healthy got gut biome and so forth so yeah I'm not saying okay therefore you know let's have here's my plan for a big program to introduce more probiotics into the diet and get our hands dirty again and so forth but I think that that's implicit in what I'm saying when we take in more information then our choices change and what we recognize as possible changes so that's and I think that as well if we don't accept the opportunity that we're being offered to take a step back and take in more data points and survey the situation from a larger perspective then we're going to be trapped in patterns of response that are actually a part of the problem and the main pattern of response is a bad things happening let's find something to kill let's find something to control let's find something to keep out let's keep our world safe our world of separation safe it's the same kind of thinking applied to coronavirus as is applied to you know immigration or terrorism or a crime how do we keep ourselves safe from these bad guys that pattern of thought needs to be interrupted we need to to take a pause and we're being offered that not that the pause is magically gonna change things but that's not what I'm saying I'm saying let's take in the full spectrum of information let's let's see what happens when the unconscious is brought into visibility into consciousness yeah I guess I guess sort of following that thread my concern I spoke to Joe Brewer the other day who's kind of got a name for himself as he's a complexity theorist and and looks at cognitive science and cultural evolution and he said we know that the kind of more Machiavellian maybe the people trying to defend the old regime the more sort of sociopathic tendencies will be activating right now they will be kind of looking at how they like disaster capitalism Naomi Klein's idea that we know they will be doing stuff how do we and people who are writing books like a better world their hearts know if possible how do we compete with those people with the knowing that there are kind of really ruthless people out there looking for control of the situation that there is a concern there isn't that oh absolutely um and so what I look at is what are the ground conditions that allow those people to even prey on the rest of us what makes the totalitarian response to coronavirus so compelling that people go along with it what makes the war on germs so compelling like because these psychopaths in power they don't have it's not like they're superhuman it's not like they have a mind control ray necessarily their power comes because everyone goes along with it that's why I get down to the governing stories of our civilization the story of separation the story of ascent that human destiny is to rise above nature the story of the separate self the story of control that comes from that like once you accept all of these basic things then malignant powers can leverage those they can leverage the fear they can leverage the they can they can play divide and conquer if you are pretty so that that's a good example if you are predisposed to diagnose a problem as being caused by a bad guy by an enemy then a manipulative reader can come and say here's the problem it's those enemies and we're in a where this is war and so you're gonna have to make some sacrifices to keep the bad guys out that's what Goering said it at Nuremberg you know that yeah it's easy to get the population to go along just proclaim that there's an enemy and that they're out the gates and that we that if you don't go along with it you're a traitor and you know he this is a this is standard operating procedure and and we have in our civilizational myths and narratives fertile ground for such manipulations to take root and the antidote to that is solidarity the antidote to that is a new story a story of interconnection and interbeing that says yeah is it really an enemy or let's question that how am i part of the enemy how i part of the conditions that breed terrorism or immigration or crime how is everything connected how am i part of a viral infection like i mentioned an article terrain theory which it can be summarized by the meme that I saw German your fish is sick germ theory isolate the fish terrain theory clean the tank so we have a very dirty tank here we have like why are people so susceptible to this if you look at the the fatality statistics it's obvious almost everybody who died from this had serious producing conditions so that's part of the dirty tank why why there's so many diabetic people why are there so many people with high blood pressure in Italy there's the statistics I saw 75% of those who died had high blood pressure 35% were diabetic 30% had his Kimia you know so so so yeah just to answer your question rather than to fight the evil Illuminati and Psychopaths and disaster capitalists I'm not saying we shouldn't fight them but let me say in addition - fighting them we have to change the battlefield on which we're fighting that dooms us - one defeat after another after another and these ground conditions go layer after layer after layer layer into the structure of the financial system for example based on interest-bearing debt like that already casts us into competition with each other but down to the bedrock of who do we know ourselves to be what's real how does the world work how does change happen what's possible Who am I how did what is a good life what's the purpose of life the answers that we have been immersed in prime the field for the regime of domination and control that we live in today that's you know I mean that's a big thesis to lay out that's my first book the ascent of humanity I wrote like you know 600 pages of diagnosing that tracing our institutions a world under control - the story of self and how that story historically developed I certainly I'm trying to hold both of those pieces that potentially this could be the beginning of a transition I think it has to be the beginning of a transition into a different system but my sense is that that's going to take a long time and it's going to be incredibly painful and incredibly difficult to get there and it seems very difficult for even in myself I feel this difficulty of holding both of those pieces it's very difficult to to look full in the face the like how difficult it will probably be for us to go through the the death of the old system how how is it possible to live into and live through that without kind of bypassing it in any way you know I look within and ask am I really ready for the death of the old system what part of me I mean I've been you know I've spent my life advocating assistance change but there's part of me that doesn't want systems change there's part of me that was as a fairly privileged person you know pretty comfortable with the way things were am I willing to step into the unknown am I willing to step into it's a kind of a death the death of what was familiar and therefore who I was in that familiarity am I willing to sacrifice you know flying to exciting places to give speeches that you know are moving and inspiring and seem to be helping people but do I really know that they were helping people like am I willing to give that up are we willing to give up being able to just order supplements like I like ordering supplements you know I was you I'm using these like these homeopathic energy medicine sleep patches that have like solved my insomnia you know that guy wake up in the middle of the night and not builder back to sleep and like wow I can sneak through the night now you know and I ordered these things online because my credit card worked that could all end and it could end in different ways that's what I'm saying and it may not end like we could have what I caught I call call hippie planet you know where everything instead of doubling down on conventional medicine which is what could happen if we have universal health care from this it can become mandatory health care I mean already chiropractors and acupuncturists have been shut down all over the country I cannot go to my chiropractor my wife is an acupuncturist and healer people cannot come it's deemed non-essential so like you know we could go we could go either these ways and in a way we're kind of going both at the same time but right now it's I have this sense of dread that we've taken a couple steps down the wrong path and that it's gonna take a pretty dramatic shift for us to jump from this path onto the path toward holistic planet toward hippy planet you mean that we've taken a step or already during this crisis we've taken a step down yeah I wanted to come back to that just just before I do and Daniel Pinchbeck mentioned this but I just wanted to kind of raise it as is this not the time for righteous anger like we've got we've basically got a set of authorities that didn't see this coming that seemed to be behind to be kind of mishandling it completely I see a lot of people like Eric Weinstein for example getting kind of calling for heads on spikes and Daniel wrote also about maybe this is the time for righteous anger for kind of motivating and taking action to create the new world that where I do think yes I I do think it's time for righteous anger the the trick that the controlling forces of this world have used is that they again and again divert the righteous anger onto a false target and onto false solutions so yeah they're people there is a lot of bubbling anger and there well should be because we have been as a collective we've been betrayed we could be living in an incredibly beautiful abundant world right now there is enough for everybody there's enough of everything that we need for everybody but instead we live in a society of intensifying artificial scarcity enormous waste side by side with enormous poverty a million homeless people next to tens of millions of vacant housing units one in seven children in America going hungry every month next to 40 or 50 percent of food being wasted I mean I could give many examples of of the obscene juxtaposition of overabundance and poverty so yeah there we should embrace the anger because it is valid it points to a violation but to then say but yeah to offer too hasty a target for that anger risks replicating that pattern of diffusing it by by diverting it onto of a false target the people who look like they are the perpetrators they are functionaries actually they are playing a role that's systemic Lee necessary and if we put their heads on on spikes guess what new people are gonna come and do the same thing that the old people did so Wes have the right to sang to be targeted I'm not even sure if targeted is the right way to think about it the righteous anger ideally will flush out the truth it should never be satisfied with a false explanation it should be vigilant it should say anytime that it's being offered a channel it should say really are you sure because I'm mad and I want it to change I don't want to to run off in a mob and you know find some scapegoats and string them up and not change anything like that's that all of that is a betrayal of the anger actually so even the idea of find a target for it that's part of the trick that's it that's the diversion it doesn't mean that things don't need to change but it asks what needs to change so that the conditions that generated this betrayal and this violation no longer exist and it could be that the best route to that involves compassion and forgiveness those these are not the opposite of anger they are the result of the truth that anger can flush to the surface and this is yeah this is deep deep work here but the anger is what can can keep us on point and not be satisfied with sobs with with booby prizes and this sort of brings us back to the idea that we sort of hinted at before that it does seem that the orthodoxy like what it seems is happening as far as I can see right now you look at sort of the financial system we might be seeing kind of a bailout to dwarf 2008 we're seeing a lot of the same kind of thinking just being doubled down on again and again and sort of sense that it the system is reacting in the only way that it knows but it seems to be doubling down on the same kind of thinking and kind of methods that created some of these systemic crises in the first place can you speak to that cuz I think you talk about that in your essay there is also signs of I mean in America there's a moratorium on foreclosures and addictions and that so that's something that actually does help the common people what we should be advocating for in terms of a bailout is what I call it debtors bailout as opposed to a creditors bailout in after 28 20 2008 after that financial crisis we had a creditors bailout where the the Fed and the Treasury basically bought up all of the troubled assets which are what like fundamentally they were troubled because people couldn't make their payments on their mortgages so they were bought up but did people have to stop making their payments no people had to continue the debts all stayed on the books an alternative strategy would be to buy them up so that the banks yeah they're made whole the banks do get bailed out but then the debts get forgiven and we're seeing some some stirrings of that actually to maybe forgive some portion of student debt ultimately though the only way I think to resolve the increasing inequality that we have today is through some kind of debt Jubilee and that is profoundly radical because it it redresses or it reverses a legacy of oppression and inequality even going back to slavery even going back to to colonialism and indentured servitude and so forth and kind of wipes the slate clean so yeah that's that's that's one thing I would like to bring into the into the awareness and I'm seeing it a little bit a debt some kind of debt forgiveness like I mean this is part of the righteous anger like this recognition that I'm not supposed to live my life in hock to the banks like people you know graduate and maybe it's you know in this country it's especially severe but levels of debt are rising everywhere like my life is not my own I owe my productive capacity to these distant distant institutions people you know graduate from school with with sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they'll never pay off their entire lives your labor is not your own and of course we're angry about that when one or two generations before you could have a working class job support a family like you needn't have to have both parents working you could have a working class job support a family save money buy or have your own house eventually own it free and clear you didn't have to be in the elite to do that why can't we do that anymore have we regressed technologically have we lost our ability to build houses as well no we should be richer it should be even more accessible than it was two generations ago but it's the opposite so yeah that's something to be angry about and that would be to answer your earlier question a target a debt Jubilee is not a target it's not someone who that we can punish for our oppression it is something that that removes the conditions under which we've been so violated yeah my last question is kind of summarizes some of the questions that I've asked already which is how do we live and lead into that better world that our hearts know as possible when in so many areas we sort of feel our hearts bleeding and we see the world burning yeah the title is actually the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible and you know the the word beautiful was I chose that quite purposefully as a different word ent in support in contrast to efficiency and the cult of quantity that governs our society and I would just offer that as as an orientation and it plays into even you know decisions about life and death quantity says how many years can I live Beauty says how can I live well it provokes questions of why am I here to begin with I'm not gonna survive life I'm not gonna have that on my gravestone he made it till now you know that's there's there's an illusion that we're living in essentially that we're gonna live forever when that illusion is dissolved we can be in truth what comes from that is unique to each person but I think that as a society if we are able to release that delusion which on a collective level is you know basically that we are here to transcend nature that other beings don't matter that our own survival is the most important thing I mean this even gets into environmental discourse when we say well we're gonna have to change now otherwise we won't survive and I'm like well what if we can survive on a concrete world where we grow our food in these vats and hydroponics factories and and modulate the atmosphere with carbon sucking machines you know what if we can survive is that why we're here is that is that the most beautiful world that we can imagine yeah maybe according to everything measurable we'll be fine we'll have more gigabytes of downloads per person more bandwidth per person more life expectancy per person higher GDP per capita but when we when we reduce life to quantity then the qualitative gets left out and this is another addiction when the qualitative is missing like intimacy and beauty then we need more and more stuff to compensate for it I'm not sure what your question was or if I've answered it but a brush with death can resurrect these lost truths and I'm I'm holding that out as a potential outcome of for coronavirus that it is bringing death into our you know putting it death in our faces and thereby resurrecting these questions of what is in fact a good life and why are we trying to preserve life at all costs rather than celebrate life and live life fully live it beautifully not just little long why am I here am I here just to survive and reproduce and maximize myself interesting go to the grave anyway or am I here to make something beautiful of my life so that instead of leaving no trace I leave a positive trace on the world and I'm part this evolutionary project of life itself to create more and more life and a world that's more and more beautiful that's the initiation you know that's a I titled it the coronation as an initiation into sovereignty into kingship queenship the true sovereign is somebody who is in service and is consciously choosing that in service to what in service to the kingdom in service to life that is only possible when death shows us how precious life is because it ends therefore it's precious and our society doesn't get that we don't we don't embrace and accept death we think we can move forever we think that the highest goal is to preserve life preserve our preserve the self the separate self which is actually not permanent no matter what it's a huge delusion and yeah maybe we're catching in this pause we have this opportunity to look at that and to choose otherwise rebel wisdom was set up to make sense of the world at a deeper level than the mainstream media it was built for these times of crisis and change which is why we want to do what we can to meet the challenge of the times more films and also for our rebel wisdom members weekly sense-making calls with our amazing interviewees and also we're introducing the wisdom Jim a place to practice some of the skills that we've talked about on the channel thanks for watching and see you soon [Music]

Channel: Rebel Wisdom

Views: 205,844

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Id: NK8C_rCz1yw

Length: 60min 48sec (3648 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020