For The Wild - TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Inviolable Lore ⧸362

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with

00:00:08.440 Tyson Yankapoda.

00:00:11.680 You've got to be able to spend time out in the land and let the land heal you as well.

00:00:16.560 You know, you need all these things, not just the medication. So for me, that's story. Story

00:00:21.700 is the landscape. Story is the cultural landscapes. We all live on the psychological landscapes.

00:00:27.120 And there must be law, capital L-O-R-E, that is just your firm foundation that's unchanging, that cannot be up for grabs, that cannot be something that's subject to change and violation.

00:00:41.800 We need sacred law again. We need story that's inviolable. This is what we need.

00:00:48.320 tyson yankapora is an aboriginal scholar founder of the indigenous knowledge systems lab

00:00:56.340 at deacon university in melbourne and author of sand talk his work focuses on applying

00:01:02.360 indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises

00:01:07.580 tyson i am so happy to have you back i still remember our first conversation not that i

00:01:19.480 expect you to but i still remember it along with our team and it was just one of the most refreshing

00:01:26.600 and humorous uh conversations i think i had not that you were trying to be funny but i

00:01:31.840 definitely got a few chuckles from it so thanks for coming back on for the wild and i look forward

00:01:37.880 to this conversation yeah no worries it's good to be here yeah i was saying thinking before

00:01:45.820 how many podcasts there are with wild in it and you said it's a word that beckons

00:01:51.220 and i like that that word beckon it's a little less coercive than than you know longing and

00:01:58.700 despair and you get sort of striving yeah well in a sense beckon to me is the other

00:02:10.360 where longing is from the source that's it yes just come hither you know and then you got to

00:02:18.860 decide uh yeah will i will i pursue this let's explore this let's explore this the wild beckons

00:02:28.840 for sure take that plunge yeah like if you see someone hot like uh across the room at a bar or

00:02:34.760 something and they kind of give you that look you know and you think uh do i have another drink now

00:02:41.740 or do i get up and walk across why can't they walk across for a change yeah kind of like that

00:02:47.320 yeah yeah a little bit like that um yeah i think the wild does that for me

00:02:53.060 in in its way in its most um potent way more potent than a human for sure

00:02:58.620 and sometimes it swipes right and sometimes it swipes left

00:03:05.040 the dating dating metaphor yeah well for me the the wild happens to always be worth it or

00:03:14.000 whatever that's worth. It never disappoints, always challenges and asks me to show up in my

00:03:23.700 most authentic self. You're not swiping in any direction. You're throwing your phone into the

00:03:31.880 sea and just running naked down a beach. Yeah, there's no phone. That's the best part is that

00:03:37.900 the phone has no power with the wild the wild shatters the phone um shatters shooting arrows

00:03:45.200 helicopters like a central knees islander or something yeah yeah the the land in its in all

00:03:52.380 its autonomy says no phone here they're mad did you ever come across that central knees islanders

00:03:58.000 no see them online oh it's like no one's ever been able to land there i think a christian tried

00:04:05.260 to go there to convert them a while back and um and he just got shot full of like 40 000 arrows

00:04:12.120 in in the first 10 minutes every now and then a helicopter goes and tries to take photos but

00:04:17.380 then the helicopter ends up full of arrows too which i think it's nice that there's someone

00:04:22.020 still shooting arrows at helicopters somewhere in the world yeah well i hope more and more of us

00:04:29.820 take up arrows and start holding off the helicopters wherever we are yeah yeah well

00:04:38.540 you're gonna do it you're doing it with your river there aren't you protect the salmon runs

00:04:42.780 yeah for bloody mining companies yeah hey we'll just drill under this glacier that'll be all right 0.94

00:04:47.580 uh it's insane just gonna drill right under there yeah yeah it's it's it's it's insanity and 0.89

00:04:55.800 And we live in this intense time, lots of pain, just trying to take in the reality of the world right now.

00:05:04.540 And something I really loved about our last conversation, we talked about how identity and branding have really fueled a society just obsessed with perception rather than the truth of conditions.

00:05:20.260 And it just seems that in the time that's passed, this has only become more true as we witness the constant cultural narrative spin around pandemic, war, global crisis, so on and so forth.

00:05:37.520 And maybe you could help us out with talking about how you're steering yourself against the forces that urge us to continue on as, quote, normal.

00:05:48.080 oh just badly you know i did the decades of the decolonial work and i'm decolonizing myself and

00:05:57.180 i'm like helping other people decolonize like like it's some inner practice like some inner work

00:06:03.040 which you know does not stop the machinations of empires you know the empire keeps rolling on

00:06:12.220 And we're all here, you know, doing breath work and stuff to decolonize.

00:06:19.340 We're all like, you know, we're all reading Foucault and Said and sort of, you know, decolonizing in the cafe.

00:06:27.260 And, you know, I don't know, we're just writing lots of things that are, oh, man, this is true.

00:06:32.860 Yes, yes, Tyson speaks truth.

00:06:35.860 And then people have this illusion that it's speaking truth to power, and it's not.

00:06:44.840 You know, truth to power is like Niger Delta follows in like speedboats with AK-47s.

00:06:54.180 You know, that spoke truth to power, and I don't think very much else does.

00:06:58.900 Except maybe a screenwriter's strike or something like that.

00:07:03.020 but they know what they're doing you know they hold out forever now power against a strike 0.95

00:07:10.720 uh it's hard to hold hold out against ak-47s though you know not that i'm advocating that

00:07:17.460 i was all into that like i was um very isis green for a while um like about a decade ago 0.92

00:07:26.060 and i was like stuff it's young and i'm gonna get my hands dirty get in there and then i met a girl

00:07:32.540 you know and it all went away yeah met a girl moved to the city and uh yeah and slowly went

00:07:41.280 insane like you do in a city going back to this idea of decolonizing i think that's

00:07:50.720 oh just hearing you talk about it it's almost like 0.80

00:07:53.700 it almost feels a bit like walking on eggshells to talk about it in the way that you brought it up

00:08:03.220 because i think for some of us we want it so bad but what is it yeah uh what is the material

00:08:12.920 consequence of decolonizing and sometimes i think what we feel like we can do is talk to each other

00:08:21.560 rather than talking to power or maybe we think if we talk loud enough to each other power will

00:08:27.540 hear it but i see you know i see the discrepancy in that um even i just i don't know how to do

00:08:39.280 anything but the poetry you know yeah i mean every revolution needs poets but it's not going

00:08:44.980 to be much of a revolution if everyone's a poet you know we're all content creators

00:08:48.860 now just sort of out there endlessly creating content about what's bad and why, you know,

00:08:56.600 it's very tricky to find that space between the online presence and sort of doing the work that

00:09:06.540 needs to be done. Oh, gosh, that's a big can of worms to open. Yeah, the content creation,

00:09:15.160 And it's something that we can do, yet we create this content to be put on a platform owned by the powers.

00:09:24.460 And so that's an interesting concept to grapple with.

00:09:28.900 And yeah, I agree. We can be creating all this content, writing poetry, breathing, speaking to ourselves, but who is or who are the people actually holding the line with the mind, et cetera, et cetera.

00:09:45.320 or maybe it's changing policy or who's doing –

00:09:50.320 I mean, I think there's many categories of the dirty work, so to speak,

00:09:54.620 of actually shifting the material reality.

00:09:59.840 Yeah.

00:10:00.560 And –

00:10:01.380 The forces we're up against are just, you know,

00:10:04.260 you can play whack-a-mole with the minds like forever, but it keeps coming.

00:10:10.100 It's really rough.

00:10:11.700 struggling with it a bit of late and here's the thing this is what i was trying to say and i

00:10:20.560 forgot but it's back again it's like we're we're all preaching to the choir you know then we keep

00:10:29.680 going with that and it's just so much competition and so then there's factions and and pretty soon

00:10:35.200 we're not just preaching to the choir anymore we're like molesting the choir you know doing

00:10:40.180 heaps of lateral violence you know across all these movements that should be aligned

00:10:44.340 um you know but we're kind of factionalizing this way and that way around all these sort of

00:10:50.360 culture war hills that we all want to die on yeah i don't know it's really hard because

00:10:57.520 i used to be all about you've got to reach out a hand you know if there's a you know a kid who's

00:11:02.960 turning into a neo-nazi you can't cut him off you've got to show him love and you've got to

00:11:06.800 hold on to him you know and you know these people you got to try and bring them back

00:11:10.760 but then at the same time you know you reach out your hand and they take an arm these people you

00:11:16.340 know everything is jiu-jitsu'd around uh all of our language you know from long research and

00:11:25.100 struggle and lots of really good deep thinking and a and a big sort of scholarly canon that we've

00:11:31.280 built up. You know, where the science is settled on stuff, any of the language that we have for

00:11:37.780 that, that can just be taken, you know, by the powerful and turned around back on us. Everything

00:11:45.520 from woke to anything else that you want to say, they'll turn around and co-opt it, fake news,

00:11:52.080 anything. They turn around back the other way, and then that word's gone now. And we're running

00:11:57.440 out of ways to describe things you know our language uh people who don't want the world to

00:12:03.960 die our language is not evolving fast enough you know for how the destroyers of this world and all 0.99

00:12:11.680 their useful idiots and henchmen can um jujitsu it around and wreck it on us because that's the 1.00

00:12:19.500 second law of thermodynamics there you know it's uh it's easier to break shit than make shit 1.00

00:12:24.060 and why wouldn't you break shit at the end of the world 0.98

00:12:27.700 well that's my thoughts on that you were going to say something about content creation 0.97

00:12:36.300 yeah yeah well i'm thinking about content creation and language and it's all about story

00:12:47.540 right i mean that's how us humans learn is through story and your new book write story

00:12:53.700 wrong story takes the form of a very specific journey and maybe you could share what inspired

00:13:01.300 the structure for the book and how you see the role of story as integral to knowledge

00:13:06.420 well when i moved to this city you know it was a strange change for me like being in the city you

00:13:13.900 know and i was still myself for i don't know maybe three years two three years so like when i wrote

00:13:22.080 my first book, I was still, I was still me and I was still connected, you know, to land,

00:13:27.400 culture, language, you know, all these things. And, um, uh, but yeah, since then, and especially

00:13:35.240 over COVID, like, and those lockdowns, cause we had two years of them in Melbourne and the

00:13:40.400 universities didn't, we didn't go back to work and we stayed working at home. So it's kind of

00:13:46.720 just been this really internal existence you know for that whole time and i kind of lost myself a

00:13:53.060 lot you know that when you're part of the land and and these natural systems then the land is a

00:14:00.820 sentient system that you're part of it gives you what you need you know from moment to moment

00:14:06.580 you know i always say anything you need like look around like any problem you got like really look

00:14:12.160 around you because it'll be there the things that you need to fix it'll be right there if you're

00:14:18.580 hungry there'll be food there if you care to look um yeah because country land does this you know

00:14:26.500 it opens up for you when you're in it not if you're standing outside looking at it and taking

00:14:31.580 photos or you know uh constantly in a struggle to save it you have to stand outside of it to do that

00:14:38.240 because that's where the enemy is, you know.

00:14:41.140 So here I am, heart of darkness in the city.

00:14:44.640 And, yeah, I just kind of lost my mind.

00:14:48.560 And I, yeah, I have like childhood onset bipolar disorder.

00:14:55.440 So I've always had this bipolar and it just got really exacerbated.

00:15:00.680 I started having lots of psychotic breaks and big ones.

00:15:04.300 Like I classify the big ones as the ones where there's police involvement,

00:15:07.820 you know so yeah there's been a a lot of struggle a lot of strife and trouble and i'm trying to deal

00:15:14.400 with this um this grief i have about like decolonization is something you hold on to you

00:15:20.400 know and and and gives you hope like you're fighting a good fight and then i just kind of

00:15:26.120 saw this like fabulous zeitgeist that had become in the world and very much a middle-class activity

00:15:34.260 and, yeah, and something that really wasn't having any impact on the world.

00:15:39.800 It's like we're decorating our living spaces in post-colonial style,

00:15:46.920 you know, and that's what decolonization is.

00:15:50.360 We can lend our eye to, like, redecorating places,

00:15:53.740 but we can't do anything structural, you know.

00:15:56.260 You can be political decolonial, but you have to be fiscally colonial,

00:16:00.800 if you know what I mean.

00:16:01.680 and so the book came out of that and I kind of held it together for the first half of the book

00:16:08.520 and then I went completely I lost my mind so the second half of the book it like just degenerates

00:16:16.140 into this madness you know spiraling down I had like three suicide attempts while I was writing

00:16:22.760 it yeah it took me two years you know the first book I wrote in a manic upswing and so I wrote it

00:16:28.920 in two weeks, but this one took me two years. Yeah. And so it was kind of like pressing on all

00:16:34.880 the sore bits. You know, when you do that, you kind of press the sore bit and it hurts, but it

00:16:40.140 kind of feels like you're doing something to help it. You know, when you rub that bump or that wound

00:16:46.260 or cut or whatever. Yeah. So I was kind of doing that, you know, connecting with the reader as a

00:16:52.300 sibling, you know, who might be going through the same kind of things because I look out in the

00:16:56.760 world and I see the same kind of pathologies and the same grief and the same, you know, frustrations

00:17:03.660 and destructive behaviors all around me that, you know, that I'm going through. I see them in a lot

00:17:08.740 of other people. I see them in systems, you know, I see them in movements as collective disorders.

00:17:15.620 I see them in economic systems and entire cultures, this sickness, you know. And so I saw the same

00:17:21.680 things there and i kind of mapped it all on dante's circles of hell you know inferno so each

00:17:29.100 chapter each chapter is going through a different circle of hell and it starts off as it's a lot of

00:17:35.320 yarns people call them interviews i guess uh you know with different thinkers who are really

00:17:39.920 interesting you know and it's following that structure but then it starts to deviate from

00:17:44.120 that quite strongly yeah so it really is a journey into madness and and just hell but with lots of

00:17:52.140 laughs along the way you know lots of laughs and eventually we come out at the end and have a yarn

00:17:57.440 with um hannibal lecter on the last page i won't go any more into that than that because spoiler

00:18:02.840 alerts you know it's it's kind of weird there's a lot of movie references in there uh because

00:18:09.540 That's kind of how I talk and I interact with the world.

00:18:15.860 Oh, gosh.

00:18:18.300 What you said about being, I don't know if this is the word you use,

00:18:22.540 but being theoretical or being theoretically decolonial,

00:18:28.440 but fiscally colonial or something like that.

00:18:32.560 That's definitely pushing on the world.

00:18:35.420 Yeah, that's what the politicians are always saying.

00:18:38.000 Like, left-wing politicians have to say that they're, like, socially liberal and fiscally conservative.

00:18:43.600 They always have to state that they're fiscally conservative.

00:18:46.520 It's pretty much the same with Indigenous scholars, you know. 0.92

00:18:49.840 We kind of have to be fiscally colonial. 1.00

00:18:54.640 Yeah.

00:18:55.900 I mean, what would it look like to be fiscally decolonial or just decolonial, period?

00:19:02.640 It would look like Bougainville when they went into the mines at night and took the rubber bits out of all the engines and the tires off the trucks and then made these spear guns out of that.

00:19:20.460 And then they went through the whole mines and shot spears at everybody until they left.

00:19:24.240 And then Bougainville was independent again.

00:19:27.160 And, uh, but then I guess the problem is that, um, you know, once people have tasted that

00:19:33.220 civilized life and there's little bits of infrastructure there and it's kind of decaying

00:19:37.700 away and, and they're all depending on sort of one leader who led the revolution, then 0.92

00:19:43.020 that leader dies, everything kind of goes, goes to shit after that, you know, and it 0.97

00:19:48.320 certainly did in Bougainville became like the rape capital of the world and there's 0.97

00:19:52.580 murders all over the shop that went really badly there for a while yeah so i don't know i don't

00:19:59.560 know what it looks like in a productive way i know it's not revolution because i always see

00:20:04.780 revolution is like it's just part of the pump and dump scheme of imperialism you know pump and dump

00:20:12.620 in the marketplace how like they really hype up a stock and they buy heaps of it and

00:20:19.280 the price is going up and up and up because they're buying heaps. And then all the idiots 1.00

00:20:24.520 come in then and buy because they think it's going to go through the roof. And then the rich 1.00

00:20:29.260 people who were pumping it, then they dump it. They dump it all. They sell it to one of their

00:20:35.740 subsidiaries, so they still hold it. But they sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, and then the price

00:20:40.280 drops. So everyone else gets out and they lose the farm. And those rich bosses come in and they

00:20:45.880 buy them all back at bargain basement prices and they just basically have a money machine

00:20:51.720 like factory there just pumping and dumping stuff. I feel like revolutions are part of that

00:20:56.580 you know in a longer term sense. Revolutions are pump and dump scheme for the powerful

00:21:01.620 because you always end up with the same freaking oligarchs one way or another you know holding

00:21:07.440 all the cards at the end. I mean the mines are back in Bougainville and you know that really 0.77

00:21:14.460 sort of uh modernize the place i guess uh and change things it's it's all part of the pump

00:21:22.700 and dump scheme so i don't get too excited about about much activism anymore and uh i feel like i

00:21:29.280 should just to be a good person but uh when i look at the overall picture i'm like ah something's

00:21:35.880 needed and what it's not is like a shift in consciousness of everybody because it doesn't

00:21:40.900 matter what everybody thinks most people in the world are like yeah like let people get married

00:21:49.660 if they love each other you know lgbtqi plus like yeah let them do what they need to do you know

00:21:57.800 most people in the world are yeah let's not let's not kill the air and the oceans

00:22:03.480 you know let's kind of you know have better communities where you know things are in reach

00:22:11.740 where we don't have to drive an hour for work where we can go 15 minutes to everything we need

00:22:16.660 yeah that sounds great there's most people in the world you know but that doesn't matter at all

00:22:22.260 the consciousness shift has already happened you know most people feel the same way about most

00:22:27.080 things and it's not the world that we've got that most people want but then what's happened what is

00:22:33.160 it what does it do this shift in consciousness not a lot not a lot because it's you know a handful

00:22:40.240 of billionaires pretty much got the world by the balls and um driving it like they stole it i guess

00:22:46.760 to mixed metaphors balls and cars that's my mixed metaphor hey

00:23:03.160 Thank you.

00:23:33.160 I don't know.

00:24:03.140 happened. I, I do hear the disenchantment of activism though. I sadly can, uh, feel that with

00:24:18.340 you. And yeah, I guess I wonder what do you get excited about? What does seem like something

00:24:28.700 that's knocking on the door, beckoning.

00:24:31.320 I think it's just...

00:24:32.880 For a better world.

00:24:34.460 See, ironically, you know, in the English-speaking world,

00:24:38.740 which is the world, like even though it's a tiny minority of people

00:24:42.540 who are speakers of English as a first language, 0.99

00:24:45.880 everybody else has to learn the bastard. 1.00

00:24:48.400 Everybody has to learn English and everybody has to use English 0.99

00:24:50.940 if they want to do anything in business or politics

00:24:53.400 or communications around the place.

00:24:55.740 Yeah, I watch all the co-opting of language and the neutralizing of language and the theft of terms, the way language is sullied around anything that's good and anything that's actually achieving change.

00:25:11.280 The language gets turned around, as I said before, and lost.

00:25:16.260 But if you think about that, it's kind of almost like this globalizing culture,

00:25:21.720 this weird culture, Western, industrialized, educated, rich, democratic culture.

00:25:28.780 It's kind of eating itself in that way, eating itself in a weird way,

00:25:33.660 like, I don't know, that movie The Human Caterpillar, only if it was in a loop.

00:25:38.600 It's kind of eating that, it's all falling apart.

00:25:41.280 I'm kind of excited to see what emerges next because, you know,

00:25:46.440 the activist community has enjoyed a long tradition and, you know,

00:25:51.880 and a lot of language that was safe and stable and that meant something.

00:25:56.280 And it was building on a lineage of thinking and action

00:26:00.320 and really successful movements.

00:26:03.500 But that's kind of gone.

00:26:05.720 And that's part of the culture, that weird culture.

00:26:08.000 And I'm just interested to see what emerges next after this one finishes eating itself,

00:26:14.300 which is pretty close to doing. I think you've got one more US election cycle left in it.

00:26:22.060 After that, nothing's going to mean anything. There's going to be no truth, no story,

00:26:28.280 no unifying narrative to hold all the atoms together, and then everything will dissolve

00:26:33.960 into a quantum soup and then reform around something else. Who knows what that'll be?

00:26:40.500 Global fascism or, I don't know, like startling diversity and a whole heap of productive

00:26:46.580 interdependent regionalism. Who knows? I like the latter. That sounds pretty great.

00:26:54.900 Yeah. Well, that's where coming from the other end of the beckoning, I guess that's where the

00:26:59.400 yearning is pointing to people towards you know unfortunately for some people that means a compound

00:27:05.120 with 14 year old wives and lots of rifles you know so it's a it's a weird one

00:27:10.560 lots of libertarians sort of what's the libertarian crossover with new age

00:27:16.540 stuff now yeah that's fascinating uh you know new age new age culture has collided with conspiracy

00:27:23.620 culture you know in this quite startling way and it's no longer a horseshoe it's just a it's a

00:27:30.100 the cycle's complete yeah now the student has become the master talk more about that because

00:27:36.620 i think that's really fascinating the new age and the conspiracy theorist coming yeah i don't know

00:27:44.440 i'm just wondering if that star wars metaphor star wars metaphor or work there's an extended

00:27:48.740 thing for this. I don't know. Let's explore. So, you know, Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker. He's

00:27:55.100 good. Then he's evil. Then he's good again. Then he's dead. Then he's a ghost who comes back and

00:28:01.680 talks to Rosario Dawson. And we're not sure where she's going to end up. I know one thing for sure,

00:28:09.820 though. There is a force in the universe. There is magic in the universe that binds all things

00:28:14.560 and moves all things and connects us all in startling ways.

00:28:19.860 But you can't manipulate that.

00:28:25.300 You can flow with it.

00:28:26.740 So people who think they're doing magic and doing something amazing

00:28:30.180 with their consciousness and their breath work and their psychedelics

00:28:34.180 or whatever else, people who are practicing shamanism

00:28:37.380 that they learned in a workshop or off a bunch of TikTok videos, 0.99

00:28:43.320 You know, this is kind of like, like, yes, the force exists, but as soon as you form a cult that's based on child abuse and lightsabers, the galaxy is pretty much fucked, you know?

00:28:59.520 yeah so i think everybody feels like they have a handle on the magic you know whether it's the

00:29:08.840 gift or like you know the body keeps the score or whatever airplane book airport book they just

00:29:14.360 finished reading everybody you know has a spirituality where they where they're sort of

00:29:20.160 hanging these individualized personalized uh sort of little brands and hanging it off that

00:29:27.440 and feeling like they're magical, but the magic isn't in them.

00:29:33.960 It's all around and moving and flowing, and they've got to flow with it.

00:29:39.500 You don't become a magical being.

00:29:42.680 And I guess everybody felt like if they did the work

00:29:45.740 and enough people did the work for personal development

00:29:49.520 that somehow that would create a massive shift

00:29:52.940 and everybody all at once would experience a collective leap in cultiousness.

00:29:59.120 This lie, this neoliberal lie of moving towards collectivism

00:30:04.380 through startling individualism and navel-gazing,

00:30:11.200 it's just blown me away.

00:30:14.200 And I feel like that took over the entire decolonial movement.

00:30:17.640 I feel like it's in every activist movement.

00:30:20.520 too many poets, uh, not enough soldiers, you know.

00:30:29.000 You said something, uh, just a few responses ago about

00:30:34.280 language being co-opted and so much, not so many, so many words not having the meaning they used to.

00:30:45.080 And I guess I want to ask about the word woke.

00:30:47.700 Yeah.

00:30:48.620 And where has that gone?

00:30:51.620 Well, it started off as something that black people in the U.S. used to say to each other.

00:30:59.600 It was like an internal memo.

00:31:03.440 That was an internal community thing.

00:31:05.500 And then it sort of got taken up.

00:31:08.140 You know what I mean?

00:31:08.600 like heaps of middle-class people suddenly took it up

00:31:14.220 and were brandishing it around to mean God knows what.

00:31:18.860 You know, then it became a rallying cry for, I don't know,

00:31:22.580 these indolent sort of excesses of people whose entire activist life

00:31:30.200 was just online writing snarky tweaks and bloody piling onto people

00:31:35.900 and going, OMG, I just can't with this guy or whatever.

00:31:42.140 I don't know, and all the things that – I know it's not OMG.

00:31:45.260 I'm showing my age there. 0.98

00:31:49.500 But, yeah, it just all went to crap. 0.99

00:31:53.640 And then, of course, the right just gets to seize on that 0.99

00:31:56.060 as a catch-all phrase for everything they hate.

00:31:59.160 So they can create this huge basket of issues with anti-trance

00:32:05.260 stuff uh anti lgbtqi plus um you know anti-feminist anti-bloody you know everything

00:32:15.440 that sort of tries to make cities work um yeah and just everything that people are just trying

00:32:24.020 to survive um yeah they get to make a big catch-all for that with one word and then suddenly

00:32:30.620 the word's gone. It's useless. It's ruined. It doesn't mean what it meant anymore. And it has

00:32:37.300 more power for the evildoers in this world than it has for anyone else. We have to pivot and come

00:32:48.640 up with new words, but there's only so much that a trade Creole like English can do in terms of 1.00

00:32:54.960 describing the universe and um you know it's it's certainly i don't know it's pretty chameleon 0.66

00:33:01.740 you know fast growing changing language but you know even english isn't fast enough to um 0.91

00:33:07.560 you know deal with the arseholes of this world because it seems to be mostly arseholes who 0.94

00:33:12.320 invented it you know like like a series of invaders of a of a small island nation you know 0.98

00:33:20.440 who sort of ran out of soil in their own places.

00:33:26.460 Six different invasions ended up producing English,

00:33:29.780 and then it went out and exported it all around the world,

00:33:32.560 and then it grew into all kinds of different dialects all around the planet.

00:33:37.200 So it's a pretty chameleon language, but at the same time, 0.97

00:33:40.960 it can't move as fast as arseholes can move because arseholes never sleep. 0.83

00:33:47.740 there you go that's that's the name that's the name of the podcast episode ourselves never sleep

00:33:54.080 yeah i i see it now um lots of clicks uh well in the liberetto for beethoven's opera

00:34:04.460 fidelio as you rewrote it for a performance at the sydney opera house conducted by simone young

00:34:11.540 you write quote your ego will not be satisfied by this you will want people of influence to know

00:34:17.460 how virtuous you are. Be aware of this flaw and choose carefully when you send truth keepers

00:34:23.700 to liaise with the powerful. Send those who are used to hiding their truth and smiling to please

00:34:29.920 the fragile brutes who oppress them, end quote. And then I said, send the women. 0.99

00:34:38.900 Because I think if I was going to write a dictionary, that'd be my definition of a woman. 1.00

00:34:43.920 well yeah someone who keep going yeah i just want to i just feel like this section is so

00:34:54.020 potent right now and want to hear more about the ways you're witnessing and theorizing about

00:35:00.140 the dynamics of power and oppression and maybe moving beyond ego and what you were exploring

00:35:07.520 with this? Well, for me, it's mostly about the narrative. It's all our underlying narratives.

00:35:17.840 See, when you take something like Woke and turn it into something else, you are taking

00:35:24.300 a long lineage, like many generations of civil rights activists and a massive body of work,

00:35:33.620 huge body of work and scholarship and activism and struggle you're taking all of that right

00:35:41.200 story all that good story and you're um and you're just you're just destroying it you know

00:35:47.760 you're turning it into a series of memes um you know you see everything like right story is just

00:35:55.360 disintegrating all around the planet uh and it it doesn't have a very fast evolutionary cycle it's

00:36:03.500 certainly not able to keep up with how fast wrong story can come out.

00:36:07.380 So for me, I look at this weaponized disinformation

00:36:11.560 and I look at the handful of billionaires around the planet

00:36:15.820 who are funding all of these think tanks and PACs and different groups

00:36:22.460 who actually produce all of this disinformation

00:36:25.880 and who build the algorithms to be able to aggregate

00:36:31.440 you know vulnerable disgruntled weird people online to be able to aggregate these ones together

00:36:37.340 um and you know to be able to pump out wrong story new wrong story every other day

00:36:44.460 um or you can take wrong story from the past like you know uh the idea of jewish blood libel

00:36:54.100 you know where the jewish people are drinking the blood of christian children uh you know

00:37:00.220 abducting christian children all this sort of stuff uh you can take those older stories uh that

00:37:07.180 were weaponized by the powerful in russia against the jewish population to sort of give the people

00:37:13.280 you know a different foe to look at rather than the powerful themselves so they could save feudalism

00:37:19.900 yeah they can recycle and regurgitate that narrative um you know they can even take

00:37:27.440 narratives from the left, like CRT in a critical race theory, they can take that story and they

00:37:33.640 can twist it and turn it into a wrong story. Say, oh my God, my nine-year-old child should

00:37:42.920 not be learning about Rosa Parks at school. That's like an adult theme. Yeah. They shouldn't

00:37:50.380 be learning that gay people exist. And they shouldn't have to hear that the kid sitting 1.00

00:37:56.320 next to them's got two mums. You know, they can do all this stuff. A wrong story can go so fast

00:38:02.280 because like I said, it's easier to break shit than make shit. So for me, I'm exploring these 0.98

00:38:07.120 narratives and the way weaponized disinformation is spun into these endless yarns, these recursive

00:38:16.760 yarns that keep coming back on themselves and round and round in insane positive feedback loops,

00:38:23.240 just growing and growing and then i look at that and i think about

00:38:27.520 that same action for me in my manic episodes and particularly in the last couple of years

00:38:36.800 my manias have been spiraling downwards instead of up you know um and i can just see that's the

00:38:43.060 same spirit doing that you know we look at that um so we got uh willy willies here in australia

00:38:50.200 We had some whirlwinds, little whirlwinds, and that's one of my totems,

00:38:57.040 that whirlwind, and so we know that it's got that bad spirit in it,

00:39:01.300 and it's basically this positive feedback loop,

00:39:05.200 and you've got to kick off a negative feedback loop to kill that thing

00:39:09.680 and to get rid of that bad spirit. 0.99

00:39:11.540 So you've got to throw a stick at it, and you've got to hit it

00:39:14.560 in just the right part in the whirlwind, and it disrupts the cycle.

00:39:20.200 and puts in a regulatory feedback loop, and within a minute or so that whirlwind dies,

00:39:27.140 so that bad spirit can't come through your camp or whatever.

00:39:32.120 Yes, we have that, and I guess, I don't know, in a way, I'm probably breaking my own rule

00:39:38.160 and trying to mess around with magic, I guess, if I think about it in terms of energies like that.

00:39:44.340 That's more of a metaphor for me.

00:39:45.980 That's that story of spirit and how spirit works.

00:39:49.720 and i see that in myself i see that whirlwind you know goes round around i look out and i see it in

00:39:55.500 the world and i know what i've got to do for for myself when it starts getting out of control you

00:40:00.840 know you've got to get that regulatory feedback going um which used to be alcohol for me i used

00:40:07.260 to be able to like just drink a bottle of rum and then and then wake up and it'll be over

00:40:13.520 you know but then that just means that i'm 50 and i've got a 90 year old liver

00:40:19.620 um and it stopped working and yeah it kind of went the other way uh so i i ruined that and i

00:40:26.620 can't do that anymore um i'm experimenting i'm using seroquel at the moment that's so i have

00:40:34.640 to take that every night and knocks me out and so i like reset in the morning and i start from

00:40:39.740 scratch again um that's that uh that's part of the medication for bipolar and i guess uh i don't

00:40:46.700 know i'm trying to do a bit of seroquel for the world it's not um it's not useful in the long

00:40:53.320 term you can't rely on that uh because you sort of build up a resistance to it you know

00:40:57.980 like anything else but you know at the core of the problem you can't just have medication you've got

00:41:04.000 to have uh you've got to have therapy you know you're gonna be able to talk through and work

00:41:09.100 through all of your business and all your issues and get things straight. You've got to be able to

00:41:14.340 spend time out in the land and let the land heal you as well. You need all these things, not just

00:41:20.420 the medication. So for me, that's story. Story is the landscape. Story is the cultural landscapes.

00:41:26.920 We all live on the psychological landscapes. And there must be law, capital L-O-R-E, 0.85

00:41:33.760 that is just your firm foundation that's unchanging, you know, that cannot be up for

00:41:40.480 grabs. That cannot be something that's subject to change and violation, you know. Yeah, we need

00:41:47.580 sacred law again. We need story that's inviolable. This is what we need. I heard this bad story the

00:41:55.300 other day. This is like somewhere from the Northern Hemisphere, and I won't say which

00:41:58.540 culture because I don't want to run them down. They were telling an ancient story from their

00:42:03.740 culture, folklore. And it was like, yes, a man, he was attacked by a viper and the viper was going

00:42:13.300 to bite him and sting him to death. And then a heron came down and the heron killed the viper

00:42:18.920 and saved the man's life. So the man, he picked up the heron and put him in a bag and took him

00:42:26.020 home to eat for his dinner. And his wife said, why are you doing that? That heron saved your

00:42:33.320 life you shouldn't be eating the heron and killing the heron you should let the heron go 1.00

00:42:38.440 and then the wife opened the bag and let the heron go free and the heron pecked her fucking 0.99

00:42:43.780 eyes out and that's the end of the story what's the message for that story it's like oh my god 0.99

00:42:53.900 what's that message it's like don't do anything to help anyone because like they'll eat you

00:43:02.240 Oh, they'll peck your eyes.

00:43:05.600 It's kind of the, I don't know, maybe it's an old curse,

00:43:08.840 but it's kind of the world we're in right now.

00:43:11.420 You know, you reach a hand out to a friend who's sort of been red-pilled

00:43:15.100 by like Alex Jones and all this stuff online.

00:43:18.060 You reach out a hand, brother, brother, I'm still your friend.

00:43:23.380 I'm here for you.

00:43:24.440 And then they just rip your arm off and chew it up

00:43:28.380 and spit a whole heap of stuff about Putin at you.

00:43:30.900 and then docks you online and then suddenly there's people arriving

00:43:36.400 at your house and throwing a brick through your window.

00:43:38.740 You know, it's a tricky old place.

00:43:40.980 It's a tricky old storiescape that we're living in.

00:43:44.520 And I don't know, we need these good yarns.

00:43:49.040 We need good cautionary tales emerging, you know,

00:43:52.460 a good story that grounds us in, you know,

00:43:56.620 just some basic care for each other and care for our place and just a general idea of, well,

00:44:03.500 we don't, you know, kill each other and everything else. That's probably a bad thing. Yeah,

00:44:10.520 really got to start at the kindergarten level with this stuff, eh? Especially if there's

00:44:15.500 herons pecking your eyes out and like scorpions stinging frogs who try to help them cross the

00:44:21.520 river. You know, I think there's somewhere in the Northern hemisphere, people went wrong

00:44:28.180 at some stage. And we've always had this attitude, well, we have to help them out. We have to,

00:44:36.060 you know, you know, the death of the world and the destruction of our land and communities, 1.00

00:44:42.000 it's kind of our own fault because we've failed to bring these settlers into proper relation. 0.66

00:44:47.560 um but yeah i don't know i don't like the idea that people are irretrievable because that would

00:44:55.880 mean that they're also disposable that would mean that the world will be better off without them and

00:45:01.540 you know where that kind of thinking always ends up in groups of people it doesn't end well

00:45:06.580 kind of turns people into maniacs and psychos i wonder exclusionary cultures

00:45:13.920 That's what power does anyway.

00:45:43.920 I don't know.

00:46:13.920 Yeah, I mean, power and disinformation, they are for some reason so appealing or seemingly

00:46:36.300 appealing and i'm curious about that and why does and how does disinformation thrive in these times

00:46:45.060 and it also seems like it goes under the radar even though it's so prevalent so

00:46:50.960 yeah just love to riff on that for a moment

00:46:54.260 Well, the left is secular and must be in terms of making sure that reason is there in the world and making sure that the most powerful part of everyone's discourse and mundane life is not an altered state that should be in ceremony and nowhere else.

00:47:24.260 And, you know, but the problem with that is that's boring and everyone's scared and, you know, everybody feels special and they want these altered and heightened states that come with these insane narratives.

00:47:40.360 Traditionally on the left, that was like the New Age sort of discourses, you know, and the Age of Aquarius is coming and all this sort of stuff, which is pretty much like any Abrahamic cult, pretty much does the same thing.

00:47:54.260 um yeah but that in the end that wasn't very far from you know in the horseshoe the other end of

00:48:01.800 the horseshoe on the right you know they all had the same stories you know that whole idea of uh

00:48:08.900 you know a special chosen people you know this arian race um you know that was like the driver

00:48:16.500 of the the age of discovery was all this weird new age stuff and you know uh the explorers were

00:48:23.700 looking for Atlantis. You know, there's a reason it's called the Atlantic Ocean. It's because they

00:48:29.000 thought Atlantis was there and they were going to find where all their Aryan people came from. 1.00

00:48:34.140 They keep looking for it. Maybe it's in the Caucasus Mountains. Oh, yeah, it's probably 0.99

00:48:38.920 in the Caucasus Mountains. We'll call ourselves Caucasians now. You know, oh, and maybe it was 0.94

00:48:45.040 in India. But then the Indian people, you know, were interbreeding with inferior peoples and then 0.95

00:48:51.180 they became degraded and their civilization fell apart. But luckily, there was enough pure Aryans 1.00

00:48:57.520 who escaped to the West before that happened. So yeah, so let's call it Indo-European. I mean, 0.99

00:49:03.980 in linguistics and anthropology and history and everything else, it's all Indo-European now. But

00:49:09.880 half of that was coming out of seances back in the day. People would have mummy unwrapping parties 0.97

00:49:16.240 and bohemian orgies and then, like, you conduct seances and talk to the dead

00:49:22.320 and then write these, like, Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky

00:49:26.640 all writing these horrendous, you know, volumes about, oh, yeah, you know,

00:49:30.680 progress is a spiritual thing, you know.

00:49:34.220 Each new lifetime you're reborn and you're a little bit better than before.

00:49:38.100 And the same thing is for groups of people.

00:49:40.160 So, you know, and as you progress through, your skin gets lighter.

00:49:46.240 And you become, you know, eventually you get reborn as the master race,

00:49:50.860 these higher-level beings.

00:49:54.040 Just insane stuff.

00:49:55.740 You wouldn't believe how much history, science, you know, anthropology,

00:50:02.240 linguistics, you know, cartography, all these things are built on these insane

00:50:08.100 wrong stories, wrong stories of people who were longing but they were not 0.77

00:50:14.460 fucking being beckoned ayana there was no beckoning just longing and now the reckoning 0.88

00:50:22.000 ah i rhymed that for you there there's so much more to dive into but i i know you have a time 0.99

00:50:31.760 limit which is just yeah we could probably do another 10 minutes i'm like okay jumping in a

00:50:38.140 car and racing to pick up my kids oh it's gonna be hard to end there um yeah so i think the

00:50:46.220 beckoning and the reckoning is is pretty some good symmetry for a yarn there oh yeah i mean it's um

00:50:54.360 yeah i wonder if it's the reckoning is the good story

00:50:59.340 or maybe that's too simplistic i yeah because it's something you'd said earlier about

00:51:07.680 once people have the taste of civilization it's i mean you didn't say that but that's what i

00:51:13.460 remembered you know you get the taste of civilization it's hard to go back

00:51:16.540 because the infrastructure is there and so yeah and the narrative structure

00:51:23.160 and so yeah we we could be beckoned to something that feels more honest yeah but what the reckoning

00:51:32.940 is with so much complexity and nuance and i don't know if it's imperfection i don't i don't even

00:51:42.020 know what i think of the word perfection anymore or purity that seems so far yeah and maybe we

00:51:48.280 never should have strived for that in the first place um so yeah maybe gosh there's so much to

00:51:55.720 say, but I think I'm trying to settle on the material realities of the world again. And I

00:52:03.220 want to go back to the Liberato that you rewrote. And it's, quote, so too beneath the pavements and

00:52:11.220 monuments of civilization in the dark sites where dark money and dark ops generate unspoken and

00:52:16.960 unspeakable cruelties, where the souls of whistleblowers and iconoclasts are thrown

00:52:21.940 to face silence and torments there are seeds of joy and liberty and love yearning for the sun

00:52:29.200 every nation is grown from such foundations end quote that's so beautiful i mean it's just uh

00:52:37.780 yeah i i felt just wrecked and then and then like the phoenix from the ash um rising up and so

00:52:46.260 So, yeah, how might bearing witness to these dark realities might uncover an understanding that allows us to dream differently?

00:52:58.780 It can. It can do that.

00:53:00.700 But then again, I know one of your January 6th insurrectionists, you know, currently in prison, might read that same thing and feel an affinity for it.

00:53:17.960 And then that becomes their song, too.

00:53:20.520 You know what I mean?

00:53:23.420 They've taken all of, like, you know, they're the ones who were like, yes, you know, three strikes rule, buddy, lock them up.

00:53:30.700 lock up all these super predators. And you know what I mean?

00:53:34.420 Tough penalties, tougher sentences.

00:53:37.360 They would have been politically all like that.

00:53:39.240 And then all of a sudden they're in that prison system and they're like,

00:53:41.860 oh my God, this is horrendous. I'm being oppressed. I'm being oppressed.

00:53:46.180 Me, you know, and now suddenly it matters all of that.

00:53:51.060 And I keep hearing them crying out and, um,

00:53:55.300 and all of their woe. And I think, well,

00:53:58.140 they could read that same thing and think it applied to them.

00:54:00.460 I don't know, it bloody doesn't. You know what I mean? That's not a good story yet. That is a seed, I guess, that libretto. Just hoping for the emergence of right story in this world and just trying to contribute to that.

00:54:19.340 you know there's signal and then there's noise and how do you know which is which how do you

00:54:24.980 know which way to go and I think it comes back to this word beckon I guess if you sat for a quiet

00:54:31.920 moment and then you talked to some close friends family about it you have to think about okay

00:54:39.580 with this story I'm hearing am I being beckoned or am I being being lured you know because I think

00:54:48.420 most of us will know in our gut and just from the language when we look at it as the story we'll

00:54:53.300 know if we're being lured towards something that is working against our best interests

00:54:59.420 and for the best interests of somebody uh somebody powerful who is just looking to 1.00

00:55:06.160 eat us alive and throw us on the scrap heap as used as the useful idiots we are you know that's 1.00

00:55:14.000 that luring. And I think that beckon that you first spoke, you know, at the start of this, 1.00

00:55:19.180 I think that's a, that's, I can't get that word out of my head. You know, are we trying to use

00:55:25.860 the magic? Are we allowing ourselves to flow with the magic and therefore rise above all the sorcery,

00:55:33.940 all the curses, all the wrong story, you know, all of the propaganda? Can we feel that truth in that

00:55:42.180 way, and can that somehow bind us, you know, with each other in stronger, better relation?

00:55:49.860 And then, what does that do? What does that do? Well, I guess that's the ground, that's the

00:55:58.160 manure for the seed of that right story, you know, that our new stories can rise out from that,

00:56:06.700 because we're not going anywhere and we're not changing anything

00:56:09.920 without good story, right story again.

00:56:13.980 Well, our old stories are broken and the hour is late. 0.96

00:56:20.100 I'm thinking about how and where does the Indigenous knowledge systems

00:56:27.700 feed into right story.

00:56:31.500 Well, that's where you get a model, a good model,

00:56:34.740 what Law, capital L-O-R-E, right story looks like because, you know,

00:56:42.680 these things, we still keep those old stories and they are inviolable

00:56:46.900 and, you know, they're a conduit and they're an expression of law, L-A-W,

00:56:55.400 you know, proper law of how to live, you know, for yourself,

00:56:59.620 but then for your clan and then out further your tribe and your region

00:57:05.040 and then out further your continent, you know, and then beyond.

00:57:12.060 You know, there is law for how to be and there are protocols

00:57:15.720 and you don't have that unless you have that LORI law.

00:57:21.260 And, yeah, the weird people in the world and all of their minions,

00:57:27.760 um i guess it's time to rediscover that one maybe skip the part where the scorpion stings the frog

00:57:36.840 and the the heron pecks out the eyeballs of the housewife who tried to help it

00:57:41.500 and yeah i feel like i don't know if this is the other side of the spectrum probably not but

00:57:49.000 technology fits somewhere in this question of good of right and wrong um it's complicated i

00:58:01.580 am wondering how you see technology as part of the story especially with such rapid and

00:58:08.620 changing developments and saviorism and solutions and and control of course i mean it is just

00:58:15.300 ripe with i don't even know the words right now but it's here more and more and more and more

00:58:23.520 and yeah well we have we have pretty effective law for that for technology it's oh it's so

00:58:31.240 complicated and it's you know so oh it's so many good things but then it does so many bad things

00:58:36.180 you know how do we etc we we've always had you know like our approach to technology is that um

00:58:43.700 no new technology can come into our life and into the world unless it's accompanied by

00:58:52.140 an equally powerful social technology that can prevent that thing from ever being weaponized

00:58:59.060 and sometimes that means that limitations regulatory feedback loops etc i was talking

00:59:06.040 about before with the whirlwind that um that these need to be built into the technology

00:59:11.240 but more powerfully you need that social technology and psychotechnology you know pretty

00:59:17.720 much it comes down to that good law good l-o-r-e law in the end um you know the stories

00:59:24.440 that you know uh prevent people from weaponizing these things um you know so that's slow tech

00:59:33.620 uh it's tech like t-e-k traditional ecological knowledge um that you know holds the solution

00:59:41.940 to that you can never compromise your t-e-k with your t-e-c-h if you know what i mean

00:59:48.240 because one eats the other okay we're going to need to have a part two because this is just too

00:59:56.420 juicy and i really appreciate this conversation and all that we've touched on lovely talking to

01:00:05.820 you yeah thank you so much

01:00:09.740 thank you for listening to this episode of for the wild

01:00:24.440 The music you heard today is by Leo James

01:00:28.360 Generously provided by Patience Records

01:00:31.280 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young

01:00:35.460 Erica Ekrem

01:00:36.640 Julia Jackson

01:00:37.980 Jackson Kruf

01:00:39.200 Evan Tenenbaum

01:00:40.700 And Jose Alejandro Rivera

01:00:54.440 Thank you.

For The Wild - January 17, 2024

TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Inviolable Lore ⧸362

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