For The Wild - TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Unbranding Our Mind ⧸235

00:00:00.000 For the Wild is brought to you in part by the Calliopeia Foundation.

00:00:05.080 We are grateful for their continued support and the support of grassroots contributions

00:00:09.780 from listeners like you.

00:00:11.800 Learn more at calliopeia.org.

00:00:14.640 To make a donation, visit forthewild.world slash donate or find us on Patreon.

00:00:21.120 If you'd like to support us in other ways, consider sharing our episodes through social

00:00:25.480 media or leaving us a review wherever you listen to the podcast.

00:00:30.120 Hey, For the Wild community, it's Ayanna here.

00:00:33.380 Before we begin the show, I wanted to take a moment to talk about our Patreon.

00:00:38.180 We are so grateful to all of the amazing members of our community who contribute to bringing

00:00:42.980 this podcast to life each week.

00:00:45.480 We couldn't do this work without you.

00:00:47.940 To keep For the Wild freely accessible to all, long-term we're exploring how we can

00:00:52.800 fund the podcast without resigning ourselves to overly commercializing our airtime in order

00:00:58.360 to sustain production.

00:01:00.000 We believe that independent media plays an essential role in telling the truth outside

00:01:04.980 of corporate agendas, and we want to be in integrity as much as possible with how we

00:01:09.600 support this work.

00:01:11.240 We have around 700 Patreon members currently, and we are dreaming into a goal for our Patreon

00:01:16.980 community to grow to 2,000 supporting members in the coming months.

00:01:21.880 Join us at patreon.com slash for the wild.

00:01:25.500 And if you're already supporting us in one way or another, we want to thank you so much and wish you a beautiful season wherever you are.

00:01:37.860 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Tyson Yankapoda.

00:01:46.720 This is where hope is a destructive force in the universe. Hope is like part of what keeps us all enslaved.

00:01:53.880 and that that it speaks to that narcissistic core. Tyson Yankapoda is an academic, an arts critic,

00:02:02.840 and a researcher who belongs to the Apaletch clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional

00:02:11.040 tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in indigenous knowledges at Deakin

00:02:17.480 University and Melbourne. Well, hello Tyson to For The Wild Podcast. I'm so looking forward to

00:02:25.580 spending this time with you. Yeah, it's good to be here, Yana. Wonderful. So in preparation for

00:02:33.820 our time together, I came across a conversation you had with Howard Johnson, where you shared

00:02:39.780 the sentiments, quote, we used to fight to change conditions. Now we fight to change perception.

00:02:47.480 end quote. And I'd really like to begin our conversation here because it's such a succinct

00:02:55.760 vocalization of a phenomenon that has really taken over in many of the spaces myself and for

00:03:02.540 the wild listeners exist in. And part of me wonders if this shift is perhaps a byproduct

00:03:10.400 of generations growing up in a capitalist system where good branding is enough but as a guiding

00:03:18.360 topic into our conversation I wonder if you could elaborate on this and what you think it will take

00:03:24.740 for us to free ourselves from our obsession with perception. I mean perception is really important

00:03:31.620 but it's also it can be manipulated and then I guess it's the same it's that multi-polar trap

00:03:38.940 of um you know the proliferation of perverse incentives and um you know that tragedy of the

00:03:47.300 commons where you know you only have to have one person you know doing the wrong thing and gaining

00:03:52.980 an unfair advantage and then everybody has to do it even if it's going to wreck everything

00:03:57.020 so you know we've had a quite a few decades now of powerful people manipulating uh perception

00:04:06.460 And I guess more and more people have been getting in on that game to the point where anybody who's anybody in the power-broken business has got to have, you know, PR people, marketing people.

00:04:18.400 They've got to have, you know, psychologists who can, torches of freedom, spin on everything, you know, and sort of change perception.

00:04:26.760 but it's funny that's it's democratized so much now well not democratized let's call it

00:04:33.020 metastasized because it's now everybody has to have their their nuclear weapon if you know what

00:04:40.720 i mean it's um so basically every single person on the planet is in the business of perception

00:04:46.880 management and uh everybody's perception and opinion is sacred and everybody can have their

00:04:52.580 own opinions they can have their own facts and like i said to howie there was a time when we'd

00:04:58.560 be fighting to change our condition but we found increasingly you know in in the last decade or so

00:05:04.600 that that's um that's it's just not acceptable you're not allowed to change the actual material

00:05:10.780 physical conditions you're not allowed to do anything that will affect the economy or the

00:05:15.240 marketplace but we've been sort of let loose on this new frontier this new frontier that everybody

00:05:23.200 can colonize and be pioneers of and you know go out and um claim and name and build and brand all

00:05:30.580 of their um personal and group identities and um alternative facts and this position and that

00:05:37.780 position and this standpoint and that standpoint on everything and just uh have so many billions

00:05:44.000 of different competing narratives all jostling for space out there it's like everybody has

00:05:50.040 you know access to those weapons of mass pr now which ironically makes them less powerful

00:05:57.080 but it also sort of prevents anybody from you know we have and so people can rise up and go yes

00:06:03.880 extinction rebellion that sounds huge that sounds like we're all going to throw our bodies on the

00:06:09.720 machinery and bring it all to a halt we're going to do something to change the condition but

00:06:14.120 i mean what happened really a few people went on a few hunger strikes there was some placards

00:06:21.620 you know nothing really changes yeah it's really tricky but you can't even talk about this you know

00:06:29.340 because everything is you know splintered and fractured into a thousand different points of

00:06:34.060 you and a thousand different you know sets of alternative facts so even this you can't even

00:06:39.600 talk about it in the alt-right they call what we're talking about now um cultural marxism

00:06:45.180 so you know that idea that you know marxism 1.0 was all about redistributing wealth focusing on

00:06:53.220 capital versus labor and all that sort of stuff and and making sure things would be fair and

00:06:57.840 people could have a weekend and and you know wouldn't die too young and all that sort of

00:07:02.000 thing like it was actually focused on conditions and then the idea that no it's marxism 2.0

00:07:08.240 cultural marxism is just you know the change that we're allowed to have is in the culture

00:07:14.340 is in the perception you know is in the all the rest um but that branding i mean that's all

00:07:22.320 sort of tainted and spun around this sort of you facts about the liberal left and it's trying to

00:07:29.740 couch or disguise or mask you know quite a bit of racism and and misogyny and all that sort of

00:07:37.080 stuff so that's that branding of it and you've got then you've got the old school marxists and

00:07:42.040 their branding of it then you've got this one that one you've got the woke sort of branding of it

00:07:47.140 which is just everything is different you know it's just it's just such a mess and you know i

00:07:55.980 mean you can see that all sort of spinning you know out in this sort of chaotic mishmash of ideas

00:08:04.140 and no sense no meaning making it all going on in any meaningful way that's actually you know

00:08:11.400 people are able to agree on a broad sort of reality that we can sort of work around

00:08:17.000 you know individually and collectively that that's that's kind of that's gone I'm not sure

00:08:22.620 coming back you know um so it's just going to be different groups and group identities just

00:08:29.100 fighting brand wars and even physical wars maybe even civil wars or certainly civil wars um

00:08:35.740 yeah on and on for i i can't see that ending in the next decade

00:08:40.900 can you what do you think the next decade looks like where do i begin it's like am i in my

00:08:49.460 radical imagination let's start with this weekend yeah what's gonna happen this weekend where you

00:08:55.940 are and um yeah well if we were having this interview next week it might look a little

00:09:01.520 different yeah I'm interested when you said that we're not changing conditions it's because of the

00:09:12.780 economy? Or if you could just elaborate a bit more on why you think we resist changing conditions?

00:09:22.900 Well, let me just give you an example of the Indigenous Australian experience. There are

00:09:29.980 millions every year budgeted for Indigenous communities and programs such as, I mean,

00:09:38.200 the broad policy idea is closing the gap. I think we borrowed that from Canada

00:09:42.420 you know so closing the gap in life expectancy education health etc

00:09:47.040 because it's a significant gap between the indigenous population and the rest

00:09:51.660 but yeah it's not about so millions are spent most of that money

00:09:57.520 it goes into the wages of non-indigenous administrators

00:10:02.460 who keep endlessly just administering these programs

00:10:06.520 and then evaluating them and coming up with having to do reports

00:10:12.440 on why it's not working.

00:10:14.000 You know, every year, and it's been like that for decades and decades.

00:10:17.960 And there are endless, endless conferences.

00:10:21.820 So a lot of money goes into grants and funding for running conferences

00:10:27.740 on how to change the condition of Indigenous people.

00:10:32.140 And I've been going to these conferences for a couple of decades now. 1.00

00:10:36.520 I don't anymore because it's a waste of time.

00:10:39.520 They've been saying the same thing for decades at these conferences.

00:10:42.900 It's just rehashing the same conference papers over and over again.

00:10:47.040 It's just this, you know, closing the gap industrial complex or something.

00:10:52.860 And, you know, you go there and you see all these people who have,

00:10:56.520 they've been put up in, you know, flash motel rooms.

00:10:59.160 And then you walk around at the lunch and there's all canapes and stuff like that.

00:11:03.600 And you're like, oh, that's where all the money's going.

00:11:06.520 I used to get invited to quite a few keynote speeches and stuff at these

00:11:11.720 conferences, but about 10 years ago,

00:11:14.160 I started every keynote speech with, did you enjoy your lunch?

00:11:19.460 It looks really good. How's your motel room? Is that lovely? Yeah,

00:11:22.980 this is a beautiful conference.

00:11:24.660 It is really good to be able to take a few days off work and walk around and

00:11:29.380 meet people. But nothing's changed.

00:11:34.380 And I tell you, if you just took the money for this conference and put it directly into the bank accounts of the people that you're trying to figure out how to help, then the gap will close like a motherfucker. 0.96

00:11:45.040 And I would say that, you know, because that I think, you know, you need to use language in that way sometimes to sort of shock people a little bit into because they'll remember what you just said. 0.96

00:11:58.240 After a while, they stopped inviting me because that wasn't the message that they want to hear.

00:12:02.600 It's pretty much anything but actually, you know, giving the wealth directly to people instead of, you know, running programs that are going to help them to become better people so that they can access the opportunities of the marketplace better and pull their bootstraps up.

00:12:20.140 You know, that attitude is never going to change.

00:12:23.840 You know, and it's very difficult because we, you know, it was only a few decades ago.

00:12:29.380 there was still this thing going on that had been happening for a very long time called

00:12:33.120 stolen wages. So for a long time in Australia, our communities, our indigenous communities,

00:12:38.380 we weren't allowed to receive our own wages because we weren't trusted to be able to spend

00:12:44.740 the money properly. So our wages would be held in trust for us and we'd be given just enough

00:12:51.100 for basic survival, for basic food and clothing, very basic. And the rest of it was held in

00:12:58.800 accounts in trust for us to be given back to us so anyway the upshot of all that is that um

00:13:05.660 you know in the end so we had generations and generations uh having their wages stolen and

00:13:11.320 what happened in the end was the government kept all of that money everybody's wages and they spent

00:13:17.320 it all on uh infrastructure so in the end it was indigenous um wages held in trust that built

00:13:25.840 you know all of the roads and all of the bridges you know all of these things 0.92

00:13:30.560 and in the meantime non-indigenous people got to build up 0.97

00:13:34.100 intergenerational wealth and these aren't you know investors and all this

00:13:39.320 sort of thing these are just unskilled workers who are able to

00:13:42.100 have an unskilled job and just work for three or five years and

00:13:47.540 and buy a house and then work for another three or five years and buy

00:13:51.940 another house you know so you got quite you know 0.99

00:13:55.060 uneducated uh unskilled sort of people multi-generational not particularly special

00:14:01.840 amazing people um you know who've ended up quite wealthy and that's an intergenerational equity 0.57

00:14:08.980 thing too because you know the millennials even you know some non-indigenous ones they can't

00:14:14.480 they can't do that anymore they'll be spending their entire lives 0.99

00:14:18.260 trying to scrape together enough to get a mortgage that they'll never pay off and

00:14:24.160 if they're lucky you know um yeah so these are the material conditions and you're not allowed

00:14:33.380 to campaign to change those i mean you're allowed to campaign but you have no you're not allowed to

00:14:39.220 actually change that but i tell you you can have a lot of wins if you're just changing

00:14:44.260 well i want to have this word eliminated or i want to add this word you know i want to change

00:14:50.360 our language so that we can airbrush this intensely inequitable system demands inequality

00:14:58.820 just to be able to function but we won't worry about the system we're not allowed to look at

00:15:03.360 that what we're going to do is just tweak it to make it feel more fair to make it feel more equitable 1.00

00:15:09.860 so that you know i mean we can be completely destroying minority communities but as long as 1.00

00:15:16.500 you know we're using the right language about those communities then you know we've won the 0.99

00:15:21.140 battle so it's just yeah it's just that it's just basically everybody's involved in neurolinguistic

00:15:28.860 programming bloody wars other people call them culture wars but you know it's just um this

00:15:36.680 endless battle for this endless pr battle you know with everybody behaving as a corporation

00:15:42.620 unto themselves in charge of their own branding choosing all their little identities and

00:15:47.540 intersectionalities and gathering together their little echo chambers and their networks and going

00:15:53.820 well this is what i like and this is this reflects who i am and this is the narrative and if i can

00:15:59.640 get more followers than anybody else then you know i win the my narrative is the dominant narrative

00:16:05.940 it comes out on top in this little sector over here and then we can go to war with that sector

00:16:11.900 over there i mean it's just uh a game theoretical uh just nightmare endless stuff and of course i

00:16:21.980 mean that ends up you know exploding out into physical violence as well and which you know

00:16:26.560 there's nothing wrong with a little bit of violence but um as long as it's productive

00:16:30.680 wow so much in your response and in thinking about perception i can't help but want to

00:16:42.300 interrogate the ways in which many of us are identifying ourselves to each other

00:16:46.300 bluntly put you've articulated that there will be massive ramifications if we don't bring 0.94

00:16:53.080 non-indigenous people back into relationship with the land and i think in many cases non-indigenous

00:16:59.620 people are really feeling this separation. But rather than delving into the trickier parts of

00:17:06.080 this, it's a lot easier to tend to an ancestral lineage or even a nationality. And while I think

00:17:13.580 this is done with the right intentions for the most part, there are moments where it also feels

00:17:18.900 like an attempt at gaining social capital, not honoring one's responsibility to place.

00:17:24.920 so moving into a discussion on identity i wonder if you could share your response to the sort of

00:17:31.980 performance of identity that is becoming quite rampant versus the call to become responsible

00:17:38.260 to your place in the immediate well basically um if you're a millennial or i mean even most

00:17:46.600 to gen x but you know if you're a millennial or next on a if you're like 30 or under or even mid

00:17:54.240 30s and under you're not ever going to have any financial capital chances are wherever you are in

00:18:01.980 the world it's you're you're not going to have that kind of capital but the capital that's

00:18:06.560 available to you is um you know is is is basically around your identity you can have cultural capital

00:18:15.620 social capital, all those kinds of things. Some of these things can be leveraged for a little bit

00:18:22.300 of value or a little bit of position so that you can move around in a pecking order. It's funny,

00:18:28.340 there's a biological capital that's associated with that now. Over on Turtle Island, where you

00:18:34.280 are, you're in the States, Americas. Kim Tolbert, I don't know if you've come across her.

00:18:41.460 Yeah, I've interviewed her.

00:19:11.460 fetishize as a marker of their identities and, you know, 0.56

00:19:15.900 intersectionalities and the rest. So rather than kind of, you know,

00:19:20.580 living in that struggle and working to change condition, it's, it's about,

00:19:25.180 it becomes more about branding oneself. It's very tricky.

00:19:30.120 It's a just perception is everything at the moment, you know,

00:19:36.340 so a lot of our scholarship as indigenous people and minority scholarship,

00:19:40.400 you know queer theory and everything else uh critical race theory these things have a really

00:19:46.500 solid base in very rigorous academic work that a lot of people just struggled and struggled and

00:19:53.340 bled for to make happen and carve out space for that in our institutions you know so we had um

00:19:59.980 you know post-colonial theory you know standpoint theory you know all of these things are critical

00:20:06.200 race theory queer theory all these things were built on a really solid foundation of very rigorous

00:20:11.820 research you know that really did um uncover all the machinations of power and how these things

00:20:17.940 work and um how to make spaces within that discourse you know for a voice to emerge to

00:20:26.920 actually change the condition um of things that that's what that was about until really recently

00:20:33.280 But what I've noticed over the last decade is people engaging with that in increasingly shallow ways around their personal branding and their fetishization of their inherited biologies and inherited inequalities and all of these sorts of things.

00:20:53.120 whereby they get this idea that just any random thought that flits across their consciousness

00:20:59.820 is truth and wisdom and logic, you know, sort of washed clean, made pure and always containing

00:21:09.120 pure truth no matter what, just on the basis of their kind of cultural capital and, you know,

00:21:16.560 identity capital and all that sort of thing um it's just it's this insane magical thinking that's

00:21:23.360 sort of taken over something that was quite a strong discipline and it gives us a bad name

00:21:28.080 because i know a lot of really good thinkers and i'm involved in a lot of communities of really

00:21:32.420 good thinkers and rigorous change makers who've completely rejected you know post-colonial theory

00:21:39.000 standpoint theory post-modernism they just laugh at that because all they see is this um silly work

00:21:46.860 being done and this stuff that's it's just not rigorous it's not tested against anything it's

00:21:53.580 it's invalid it's not verifiable um the people who are doing it are not attempting to falsify

00:21:59.720 what they're looking at to test it and put it through the fires of a real process of inquiry

00:22:05.000 anymore. So it's just all flippant, and vague, and just self indulgent and stupid. And so 1.00

00:22:15.040 understandably, it's just has no respect anymore. And I think it's some, it's really done an

00:22:20.660 injustice to all the people who fought rigorously in that space, you know, to give us the

00:22:26.580 methodological tools and epistemological tools, to be able to, you know, leverage some real change 1.00

00:22:33.520 in the conditions of the world um but you know all these insane like you know wokesters and

00:22:42.420 outright and out left and you know weirdos have sort of taken over with absolutely no rigor

00:22:50.240 so i find it really hard because a lot of my work over the decades has been using a lot of those

00:22:56.400 tools and building on them and bringing out new really good methods of inquiry grounded in our

00:23:04.620 ancient traditions of inquiry and making really rigorous tools for research and such. And then

00:23:12.780 all of that's tainted with the same, attired with the same brush, if you like now.

00:23:19.260 So it's diminished our capital and leverage in the real world,

00:23:23.620 But sort of increased our fabulousness in the sort of shadow world of cybernetic narcissism and hubris.

00:23:53.620 Synapse firing, shelling in the darkness

00:24:18.180 I feel like a crowd, all your voices in my lungs

00:24:22.860 it's hard to hold this answered brotherhood between siblings taught to speak in different

00:24:31.640 tongues i think trying to interrogate the way we cling to our identities the way we mark

00:24:44.800 ourselves through space opens up more room to discuss what you talk about as hybridized insight

00:24:51.300 Right. And many are eager to explore the fruitfulness of the liminal and in-between spaces in general, but especially so in terms of the importance of intermediaries who really challenge supremacist or colonial rigidity.

00:25:06.380 And how after decades of this narrative of never being enough of one thing, this perspective may actually be enough to serve as a bridge during times of transformation and breakdown.

00:25:19.440 So what is hybridized insight to you?

00:25:21.760 And do you think hybridized insight can also serve as a remedy to the mass memory loss and cultural loss that dominates in Western systems?

00:25:32.920 Well, I mean, hybridization is just, it's what, I mean, it almost doesn't exist because it implies that there are separate closed systems that sometimes come together and hybridize.

00:25:48.600 You know, but I mean, the reality of the natural world and of what you're calling the wild, these are fairly permeable membranes in these sort of separate systems that aren't really separate.

00:26:04.080 You know, all of these things are mixing, combining, moving all the time.

00:26:07.860 there was that idea in early science where you know everything in the whole world was named and

00:26:14.480 classified and given a location you know under the idea that that's where god put it so that's

00:26:20.180 where it belongs z is for zebra and they're from africa you know etc so there's this kind of

00:26:28.620 perception that everything is in its place and that it's weird now because things are now moving

00:26:34.800 out of their place and mixing but in reality that is what happens you there is uh exchange

00:26:41.280 and interaction constantly occurring uh in wild systems there is um i mean so an ecosystem will

00:26:48.540 move a couple of hundred meters every year it's constantly moving and there is constant exchange

00:26:54.620 between those systems a system in itself if it was just self-contained uh entropy will build up in

00:27:01.560 that over time that's that um second law of thermodynamics and it will just collapse in on

00:27:06.600 itself so you know so every system must dump entropy out into another system um and in in

00:27:14.640 nature the idea is like the way that's evolved is that um you know the entropy that you're dumping

00:27:20.440 is another system's lunch you know so you're having you're putting that into there and then

00:27:25.560 that system is also exchanging things back so it's there's this constant flow there is these um

00:27:31.980 closed loops of flows between and among and across systems constantly in a myriad of ways

00:27:39.420 so that there are no separate systems in the end there are no closed systems so you know the second

00:27:46.860 law of thermodynamics is really only a theoretical state you can't really have that entropy you know

00:27:52.860 in a vacuum, because that vacuum doesn't exist. It's the first law of thermodynamics, that idea

00:27:58.660 that, you know, nothing's created or destroyed, it just moves around a bit, would be a simple way

00:28:04.200 of saying it, which unfortunately, then changes your notion of time, etc. So, you know, the idea

00:28:11.000 of hybridity itself is, is kind of, you know, supposing the separation that doesn't really exist.

00:28:17.920 But I guess when things have been separated for a long time, and then they come together,

00:28:22.860 You get this thing that's noted by dog breeders and stuff like that, you know, so populations or systems that have been separated for quite some time, you know, artificially or otherwise, when they come together, there is an explosion of vigor.

00:28:35.840 But I really just, I feel that that's just the wildness, reasserting itself and celebrating for a minute.

00:28:44.380 It's like, oh, thank God, you know.

00:28:45.640 i mean so this happens with uh genetics you know but it also happens with um just i mean ideas

00:28:53.620 ideas um exist within evolutionary pressures and and um you know laws as well and there are always

00:29:03.520 cambrian explosions when you when you know systems come together and dance together that have been

00:29:09.540 you know previously separated so i guess that's that idea of that uh those hybridized insights

00:29:16.500 you have exciting things the only problem is i mean and this is another thing because

00:29:21.960 the perception nazis have taken over everything it's hard to talk about

00:29:26.900 you know it's hard to talk about power in this because that's something that actually messes

00:29:33.800 that process up there isn't free exchange it's very difficult when we're sitting under a global

00:29:40.920 economic system in anglosphere that sort of taints everything with unequal power relations every

00:29:46.500 exchange is you know sitting under the framework of an economic system that demands inequality for

00:29:52.000 anything to have value so therefore when we have dialogue you know um when we have a dialogical

00:29:59.960 you know approach to things and where there's a cultural interface happening you know between

00:30:05.020 two cultural systems uh power dynamics unfortunately unequal power dynamics will

00:30:10.400 come into play and actually skew that and mess it up you know so you inevitably have one group

00:30:16.960 uh that's existing in an extractive relation with the other group and you just can't have good

00:30:23.060 thinking and good exchange and you know the third culture innovations etc emerging

00:30:29.800 when you have that kind of power imbalance and you can't address that power imbalance through

00:30:34.920 freaking optics you can't just have a few different colored faces around the table

00:30:39.440 and go look look we got a ceo who's you know from this minority group or whatever that that's 0.96

00:30:47.660 optics that that doesn't change the quality of the thinking you know you've got this you've

00:30:53.340 always got this sort of um anglo-western kind of thinking coming out on top as the default and

00:30:59.460 everybody else has to sort of orbit around that and translate their ideas across to that and then

00:31:06.180 that that center the anglo center chooses what it's going to use and it sort of takes bits and

00:31:11.760 pieces of it you know not entire ideas like oh my god we're not going to take the whole vedic

00:31:17.420 tradition we're just going to take this bit the breathing technique all right um we'll turn that

00:31:23.480 into mindfulness and send that out to every corporate corporate and everybody has to do

00:31:29.560 the training you know so everything's simplified rebranded repackaged and just um you know pretty

00:31:36.360 much destroyed uh commodified commercialized and i guess that's the same thing that's happening with

00:31:43.200 our identities and our activism and everything else we're just um we're just selling we're all

00:31:51.380 selling and buying together in some highly skewed power dynamics, which for most of us is a zero sum

00:32:00.940 game. Isn't that awful? Can we make the next question a nice one? Like, you know, about something

00:32:10.520 lovely well yes it's heavy and it's also honest and i think sometimes that blunt honesty in a

00:32:22.240 world of fake news is really refreshing there's something i think kind of relieving just to truth

00:32:29.820 tell to one another and take down the masks and stop playing the games and stop trying to make

00:32:36.380 everything sound like a branded clean package with a bow wrapped ready to go with the solutions

00:32:44.220 inside you know it's it's um it's real and there's something yeah just there's something light about

00:32:51.580 just actually being real with people these days I think the heaviness to me comes in from a lot

00:32:56.800 of the confusion and not feeling like I can trust things that people are saying and that really

00:33:02.040 weighs me down i feel like if there is one thing i've really felt incredibly committed to conveying

00:33:11.140 on the podcast and exploring in conversation is the reality that there are no solutions

00:33:17.940 the solution is a capitalist endeavor and so in this sense chasing down a solution

00:33:25.060 to the problems of our time is a colossal waste of time and similarly i've heard you share that

00:33:32.020 But in lieu of solutions, we should be, quote, fostering the right environment for emergence, end quote.

00:33:38.900 And so I'd like to ask you more about what you see as the environment for emergence, because certainly what it invokes for me is the importance of relinquishing our attachment to normalcy, because emergence certainly does not bloom in the stagnant waters of the status quo.

00:34:02.380 Yeah, it does come from the stagnant waters.

00:34:09.380 So you think about energies and flows that you can tap into and connect with

00:34:15.380 and find that pattern in there and be responsive.

00:34:20.380 I don't mean emotions, but feeling as a way of thinking.

00:34:25.380 You know what I mean?

00:34:26.380 in uh like connecting with that gut you know through things and finding a path through

00:34:31.700 suddenly everything just comes together everything connects up everything fits into your day

00:34:36.840 you just brilliant ideas amazing things come in you know huge conversations you get a cambrian

00:34:45.220 explosion of movement and productivity and you know really organic sort of fecundity starts

00:34:54.520 coming in your life all the plants in your garden start growing better it's it's brilliant um if you

00:35:00.680 can maintain that the only problem though is that there are competing energies and competing flows

00:35:06.180 from different systems going on and sometimes you might think that what you're tapping into is

00:35:12.060 the wild you might think that what you're tapping into is that 100 free range organic

00:35:18.200 um universal energy but what you're actually tapping into is um is there is the net that's

00:35:26.280 been placed over that you might be actually tapping into um marketplace energies and you

00:35:33.340 think what you're doing is authentic because that net that's been placed over the world

00:35:38.700 you know it has a shadow copy an image of everything else in the world that's in nature

00:35:46.500 and all the good and evil in all of us and every individual,

00:35:51.480 there is a crappy shadow version of that in this net

00:35:57.640 that's around the world, this kind of shadow world.

00:36:01.660 And it's hard to know when you're plugged into that shadow world

00:36:05.200 or into the real world.

00:36:07.000 The shadow world is easy to slip into.

00:36:09.720 It's like a warm bath.

00:36:10.800 It's a lot easier.

00:36:12.360 So, you know, are you doing the Vedic tradition

00:36:14.640 or are you doing mindfulness?

00:36:15.780 kind of thing is as an example everything has a shadow um you might think you're being a

00:36:22.560 revolutionary and you get that Che Guevara poster on your wall or whatever you think you're being

00:36:28.220 that but you're actually not you're actually being manipulated in that shadow world as well

00:36:33.680 and it's very hard to know when to know the difference so you know when you're sitting

00:36:41.960 around you're having a meeting or a group and you're trying to do it organically instead of

00:36:46.720 you know talking stick everybody gets to talk or like you know ask permission to speak or whatever

00:36:53.200 instead of that structured thing you're actually just letting a free-flowing conversation happen

00:36:58.140 and you just know when it's your turn to speak and when it's your time to speak and when you

00:37:03.040 have something important to offer the group this collective mind that's emerging in the group

00:37:07.680 and you feel that increase happening in your body you get physiological signs and you feel

00:37:14.380 drawn to speak and you let the words come out and everybody's doing that it's flowing amazingly

00:37:19.240 but then you get somebody who thinks they're feeling that but that's not what they're feeling

00:37:24.100 at all you know they're feeling actually they're sort of fetishized you know identity politic

00:37:32.700 shadow um and you know they end up you know monologuing from that and actually throwing

00:37:40.500 out the collective group mind there it's the same as that you know it's it's very it's very

00:37:47.500 tricky to know when you're in the real thing or when you're in the shadow it's it's difficult

00:37:53.100 you need more than one mind on that at a time but you need a lot of people with you and to have

00:38:00.440 your back a problem with that though is trust and in this economic system global economic system

00:38:07.800 trust is the thing that can't scale so any system that you have of exchange uh has to be something

00:38:17.520 that finds a way to eliminate or police trust through a blockchain maybe or through a you know

00:38:24.520 you know fungible token of exchange of currencies or you know to facilitate that currency exchange

00:38:32.540 you know we know you're going to be able to have some kind of trust or you're going to be able to

00:38:37.820 enforce trust through laws or whatever like that yeah and and that's a very difficult thing to do

00:38:44.160 just in your interactions and networking and so yeah that trust doesn't scale too well

00:38:51.320 because i guess getting back to our original idea all you need is one bad actor one person

00:38:57.140 acting in bad faith to extract more from the commons and damage the commons and to you know

00:39:03.320 gain some kind of advantage and upset the power balance and um and then everybody has to do it

00:39:08.740 and then all of a sudden the whole place is wrecked

00:39:21.320 There's a path you've never seen

00:39:28.060 There's a place you've never been

00:39:31.760 And we're going

00:39:34.940 In between here and there

00:39:41.680 Hey, it's hardly anywhere

00:39:45.080 But you'll know where

00:39:49.260 And you're in the wind

00:39:56.760 There's a stair for you to climb

00:40:03.280 Get a penny for your time

00:40:06.440 Get a dozen for your dime

00:40:09.700 Make your money

00:40:11.740 Move your mind

00:40:14.320 Well, I've also heard you emphasize the importance of looking at what we can recover

00:40:22.680 rather than what we can solve. And I think this inquiry into recovery is really fertile because

00:40:30.400 it is in tandem with a conversation on the Western propensity for extraction.

00:40:36.240 And in terms of climate change and adaptation, it's really a Western extraction of knowledge

00:40:42.140 and an obsession with saving the last vestiges of whatever we can and that is so pervasive

00:40:49.600 but knowledge doesn't bring us into relationship and while i understand that a western system

00:40:56.100 in decay would become hyper obsessed with saving as it's sort of the opposite side of

00:41:01.920 the same coin of extraction so i wonder if you could speak to the importance and practice of

00:41:08.080 recovering yeah well this preservation and conservation narratives i mean these are tied

00:41:15.580 to a a deep-seated fear of the anglosphere and the people who benefit from it that they're

00:41:22.280 going to lose all their shit in order for everything to survive and for everybody to 0.95

00:41:28.140 thrive and to to actually preserve what's going on you know um the systems that we need to be 0.99

00:41:35.040 able to survive that would mean a lot of people have to give up you know like like everybody's

00:41:41.460 going you know all these terrible things that have happened oh no that's in the past that's in

00:41:44.940 the past we're all equal now but i'm going to keep all this capital um i have to that's mine

00:41:50.200 you know so i mean i don't know there are a lot there are so many movements and organizations

00:41:57.720 that are just dedicated to making change in the world right now and the ones who are the most

00:42:03.560 rigorous i found in their thinking and who do the best analyses are unfortunately um that they're

00:42:12.680 they're also stand i mean it's it's very much in you know the the tech the tech world and the

00:42:18.580 business world and you know it's all people who've come to a realization in that and are actually you

00:42:24.260 know really doing amazing things a lot of scientists a lot of amazing thinkers you know

00:42:28.820 forming these big communities to make systemic change but a lot of it is grounded in in like

00:42:35.100 once you start digging you scratch through that surface it's grounded in uh this this desire to

00:42:41.520 preserve civilization we've got to save civilization it's um it's like oh my god this there's an

00:42:49.500 existential threat to the civilization how do we save it and i'm not talking about the billionaires

00:42:54.780 because the billionaires aren't interested in saving civilization either they have their bunkers

00:42:59.480 in new zealand and i know that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory but it's it's true it's

00:43:04.400 verifiable public record knowledge that they've all openly you know billionaires have openly

00:43:10.940 declared yeah no this is all gonna uh they call it the event in capital letters you know when rule

00:43:18.220 of law is gone when you know a nuclear winter or a whatever it's like well this this is all

00:43:24.240 crashing we've got to have our bunkers and the only thing they haven't been able to resolve is

00:43:29.940 how they're going to make uh keep their security forces legal because most of the military in the

00:43:37.560 in the world at the moment is in uh private private forces private privately owned militaries

00:43:43.680 uh so it's all these billionaires and stuff so that's not who i'm talking about

00:43:47.700 the mega powerful they're not interested in saving civilization you know but a lot of the

00:43:52.340 people in the middle you bougie bougie bastards in science tech you know economics business finance

00:43:59.960 all these sorts of things they are quite desperately um keen to save civilization so a lot of the ideas 0.56

00:44:07.320 i mean that trickles down so a lot of people when they're into conservation preservation

00:44:11.400 they need to preserve the biosphere that allows civilization to happen it's people who've realized

00:44:20.180 that when the biosphere is gone civilization is done as well so how do we save civilization well

00:44:26.820 we have to save the biosphere so somehow yeah we want to keep our economic system that's

00:44:35.700 inimical to the biosphere we want to keep that somehow while saving the biosphere that it depends

00:44:42.160 on uh we want to have our cake and eat it too you know and so i mean i guess everybody's trying

00:44:49.380 to do that and so but even uh like i said the mega rich who have their bunkers and and private

00:44:54.480 armies they still don't know how they're going to stop those private armies from just kicking down

00:45:00.260 the bunker door and taking over and drinking all their brandy um you know what i mean uh so they're

00:45:06.620 a bit terrified about that everyone's a bit terrified that they won't be able to hold on 0.86

00:45:11.660 to their accumulated shit which is basically what civilization is based on so you know when people 0.97

00:45:18.520 are looking at the end of civilization they're looking at the end of safety and that safety 0.96

00:45:23.920 doesn't mean my person will be damaged no no or my family will be damaged no no it's like no property

00:45:30.460 we need to be able to protect property we need to be able to protect our capital

00:45:35.440 and 60 of the capital in the world is what land is most of the capital in the world that's what's

00:45:44.000 used to leverage all these derivatives and futures into infinity is that land. That's why

00:45:51.340 we're not allowed to have access to it as human beings, as organisms that need a habitat to

00:45:58.100 survive. We're not allowed to access our habitat because that's somebody else's capital that

00:46:05.280 they're leveraging for debt to keep investing and reinvesting and then drawing and creating

00:46:10.100 more capital and borrowing against that. It's a horrendous magic trick. It's that desire to have

00:46:16.920 cake and eat it too, but they don't realize. No, maybe they do realize. I mean, all they're doing

00:46:21.780 is stealing from the future. They're stealing from all the millennials and from everybody else 0.98

00:46:26.560 coming after them, which is a bit tragic. Similarly, I'd like to talk about preparedness

00:46:33.460 and typically there seems to be a fixation on either physical preparedness or emotional

00:46:39.180 resilience when talking about the apocalypse or societal collapse, but less are these two bridged

00:46:45.920 or put into conversation together. So I'm wondering what tangible resilience in crisis

00:46:51.740 looks like to you. It quite simply looks like diversity, you know, so you need, you need

00:46:58.860 community and strong community, but if in your community, everybody thinks the same way and

00:47:03.100 believes in the same thing and is acting and living the same way, you don't have any resilience.

00:47:09.180 resilience only comes through diversity like real genuine diversity so i'm not talking about you know

00:47:15.300 you've got some sikhs and you've got some i don't know latvian transgender people there and you've

00:47:21.040 got some you know uh differently abled people there and cognitively diverse people there and

00:47:28.200 these are all the people in our community we have diversity but you all think the same way

00:47:32.820 and follow exactly the same rules and logics and everything else you don't actually have diversity

00:47:37.720 all you have is a diverse portfolio of identity capital and that so that's not genuine diversity

00:47:45.640 that's not genuine resilience genuine diversity is it goes down to what people actually are

00:47:54.640 it comes down to a lot of people having very different ideas and talking together and yet

00:48:00.960 somehow still forming a community with very strong bonds and that is uh productive if you have that

00:48:08.840 if you have as many different kinds of people with different capabilities and abilities and thought

00:48:15.080 processes and worldviews uh who can yet cohere uh together around that organizing principle

00:48:24.480 of you know maintaining you know a collective that is individual and diverse at the same time

00:48:34.820 if you have that then you have resilience yeah but I mean that is very difficult in a movement

00:48:41.140 because you expect everybody to be marching in lockstep together you know you're all supposed

00:48:47.040 to be cohering around you know one idea but that's why like I as far as I'm concerned the

00:48:53.760 only really successful movement that's ever existed was Occupy, the Occupy movement, which

00:49:00.420 everybody considers to be a failure and a disaster. But I think that was the most resilient movement

00:49:06.360 ever because everyone thinks it passed away, but it didn't. That was very diverse people,

00:49:14.780 all with different aims and objectives and goals, still cohering together for a brilliant moment.

00:49:22.040 And then everybody thinks it disappeared because the branding disappeared and the name disappeared.

00:49:27.180 But I mean, most of the people I talk to and am involved with have come out of the Occupy movement in one way or another.

00:49:36.020 And in the time after it was called Occupy, in the time since then, have produced amazing things, huge solutions.

00:49:44.940 It's been the most productive and dynamic and fertile ground that's ever happened in a movement.

00:49:52.040 But what that movement did not do was seize power

00:49:55.840 and then just become the institution

00:49:59.840 that it was seeking to overthrow.

00:50:01.480 That's why it's regarded as unsuccessful.

00:50:04.720 See, there's this trick that's happened to us,

00:50:08.160 this illusion, this idea that in order to be a change maker,

00:50:11.940 in order to be an activist, your goal,

00:50:15.480 I mean, basically you have to change yourself.

00:50:17.920 You have to get a group of people, a group of wild people,

00:50:20.940 and you have to domesticate them all into one way of thinking 0.85

00:50:24.220 and gain enough momentum and power together to overthrow

00:50:27.640 the powerful that are making the mess in the first place.

00:50:33.320 But in order to do that, you have to become like them

00:50:35.520 and then you have to basically just take over those reins of power

00:50:38.340 and then keep replicating the same destructive patterns.

00:50:42.740 That's when you're allowed to have a successful movement.

00:50:46.680 So, yeah, pretty much everybody follows that blueprint.

00:50:50.000 even people who are aware of that I've just noticed they do it anyway but I that's why I

00:50:56.540 believe the Occupy movement was the only successful change-making thing to happen in the history of

00:51:03.220 civilization well that makes me feel good personally because I definitely was I'd say

00:51:12.380 the Occupy movement has been in my activist lineage I came out of that it was really the

00:51:17.520 the catalyst for me and um so yeah i think it had issues like anything

00:51:24.460 humans try to do but i certainly felt

00:51:29.520 moved by it yeah so it was nice to hear but you know one thing we were talking about earlier

00:51:39.480 was violence but really briefly so i want to come back there uh and this past year at least in the

00:51:46.600 United States, we've really been reminded of the ways in which the media seems to capitalize and

00:51:53.920 sensationalize civil violence, you know, leading the public to fervently consume snippets of

00:52:01.000 violence through social media and the news. And I do think that in some ways, white supremacy

00:52:07.360 conflates violence with entertainment. But this isn't to make the claim that violence is inherently

00:52:14.100 evil or that this could be chalked up to a misplaced obsession. I'd like to ask you about

00:52:22.440 this phenomenon in context to what you call contemporary monopolies of violence. What are

00:52:28.780 some of the fundamental myths around violence you see rampant in global systems, and do you

00:52:34.660 see the media as one monopoly on violence? Yeah. Well, I guess there's two kinds of violence.

00:52:42.080 there's violence that creates transformation and lifts everybody up so all participants so you

00:52:51.100 know there's no just you know encoder and decoder of the violence and one of them dies um yeah so

00:52:59.460 there's violence that lifts everybody up lifts the entire community up and um you know increases

00:53:06.100 the sort of consciousness or the you know the creative capacity of that group uh and that's

00:53:11.500 sort of a ritualized violence which unfortunately the niche of spectator sports that's a niche that

00:53:18.020 spectator sports is occupying at the moment unfortunately which is actually just twisted

00:53:24.120 around see there's a shadow of everything it's just twisted it around to that no good uh shadow

00:53:29.560 of violence which is not about transformation it's not about creation it's not about um

00:53:35.240 increasing relatedness and making good relation as an outcome uh it's it's about destroying those

00:53:42.580 things you know so there's you know you know there's those forces of creation and destruction

00:53:51.620 in the world and there's supposed to be a tension and balance between these things 0.96

00:53:55.080 but you know the problem is that it's easier to break shit than make shit and at the moment 0.99

00:54:01.860 there's more people breaking shit than there are people making shit it's really hard to make shit 0.99

00:54:07.820 and it's really heartbreaking when someone just smashes it and then while you're putting it 0.99

00:54:12.500 together they're smashing the other thing and then you're almost done and then they come and

00:54:16.720 smash that that's very easy for them to do now that kind of violence that entropic violence

00:54:21.860 that lawless violence that's what it is it's it's violence without law without protocol

00:54:28.620 without anybody overseeing that as a ritualized behavior,

00:54:35.280 you know, to maximize transformation and minimize damage. 0.95

00:54:39.940 You know, if you don't have that, then your violence is just rubbish.

00:54:43.420 And that's just what you see now. 0.94

00:54:45.560 And I guess your laziest people have sort of given into a more easy path 0.99

00:54:53.300 of gaining short-term gratification from breaking shit 1.00

00:54:59.320 rather than the longer-term thriving of making shit. 1.00

00:55:03.620 These are the people who are attracted to those things. 0.99

00:55:07.140 And we have that right now.

00:55:10.560 I don't know if I can use the word metastasize twice

00:55:13.860 in the same interview, but I'm going to

00:55:15.720 because that's what's happened to you.

00:55:17.520 And that's really kicking off.

00:55:20.280 That's going to be not good.

00:55:21.740 you know even in the short term but you know particularly over the next decade as everything 0.63

00:55:27.360 unravels which everything is in this anglosphere um you're staring down the barrel of a very big

00:55:34.240 economic shift uh globally i don't think people have fully realized the implications of that yet

00:55:40.020 of what's uh shifted already like uh people are still sitting in an illusion of a of a normal that

00:55:49.300 was in a lot of cases. They haven't really seen the damage done yet, but we're staring down a

00:55:56.740 very difficult decade. If it was just the economic side, that would be cataclysmic enough, but it's

00:56:03.640 everything else, culturally, politically, and the shift in the habits of people that's been happening

00:56:11.960 since about 1971 that's when all these things came into play so I was born in 72 so I was born

00:56:21.420 into a into a new world that nobody realized was a new world yet you know a particular

00:56:28.660 macro system that was very much designed for maximum extraction that's been horrendous and

00:56:39.100 And we've all been kind of manipulated, sort of neurolinguistically programmed, you know, into this thing.

00:56:46.660 And I guess that's going to be playing out quite horrendously in the short term and in the midterm and probably in the long term.

00:56:55.200 Um, but I'm, I feel quite excited about that though, because, um, you know, I believe that

00:57:01.400 the sooner the thing collapses, the sooner we can get on, uh, starting, starting up the

00:57:07.240 thousand year cleanup and figuring out how we're going to look after each other while

00:57:10.840 we do that.

00:57:12.100 Yeah.

00:57:12.620 I like that vision of cleaning up and taking care of each other.

00:57:17.420 That's yeah.

00:57:19.060 That's yeah.

00:57:20.240 the real hope um if that if i can use that word which i have not used for years because i also

00:57:27.840 see it as being problematic yeah i i have another question for you and i know we are getting to the

00:57:36.380 end of our conversation but i'm just thinking about the western or colonial global system

00:57:44.500 gives us ways of classifying ourselves in a sort of hierarchy of colonized, colonizer,

00:57:52.140 oppressed, oppressor. And I think these histories and stories and recognition

00:57:58.160 are obviously valuable as we reckon with history. But I do wonder at which point do they sort of

00:58:05.500 hit their limit. And I've heard you speak about how these identities really foster an environment

00:58:11.500 where we all become very obsessed with trauma stories

00:58:14.860 and we sort of demand them

00:58:16.880 and then end up reproducing them.

00:58:19.880 And I'd really like to ask you about that,

00:58:22.340 but I also think about how our media

00:58:24.660 is also really feeding us these trauma stories

00:58:27.120 and it's becoming its own language

00:58:29.380 and the perils that it poses.

00:58:32.620 So what does this pervasiveness of trauma porn

00:58:35.060 do to all parties on a collective level?

00:58:37.480 yeah well it it forces us to um you know like we have to upgrade our

00:58:46.160 oh my god we have to upgrade our like trauma credits like personally

00:58:53.840 you know because um trauma narratives are capital as well like personal capital you know identity

00:59:00.920 capital all the rest of it um so we're all forced to dig around in the and and revisit and relive

00:59:07.800 and um inflate and conflate all these things you know out across our entire personal little

00:59:15.260 universe um you know yeah i don't know so i often say that the trauma doesn't happen at the moment

00:59:23.600 of impact. Trauma happens later. Trauma is your failure to make meaning of an event.

00:59:37.020 That's all it is. You have to make meaning around that in the real world. What that means in the

00:59:42.760 real world, under the laws of the land and the laws of physics, what does that really mean?

00:59:47.700 and you know in the patterns of me as an organism that belongs to a species that follows these

00:59:53.840 patterns what does that mean in the picture of that what do we learn from that how do i transform

00:59:59.660 and transform the people around me from that boom you're done it doesn't matter what happened

01:00:04.520 happened to you there's no trauma then but instead we have to actually you know we're expected to

01:00:10.740 where these narratives on our sleeve, you know, it's kind of,

01:00:17.800 that's your past to get into the room kind of thing.

01:00:20.700 It's your capital to enter these spaces where you might be able to compete

01:00:25.100 for some kind of value and kick the can down a bit longer so that you can

01:00:29.200 survive. So, I mean, I don't blame anybody for doing that.

01:00:32.740 That just is what it is.

01:00:34.280 um i don't know it's it's very difficult but basically you do have that you know i was talking

01:00:44.580 about that shadow world the net that's over everything and all of these um dichotomous

01:00:50.660 identities so colonized colonizer um these are our shadow images in that net because

01:00:58.620 when you get beyond that and you look down and in you know uh to that real world to that what

01:01:06.920 you call in the wild you know we are organisms we're a species and that is patterned uh similarly

01:01:15.580 everywhere with amazing individual unique expressions and then regional expressions

01:01:21.100 you know as well because we're um we're mirroring very diverse bioregions and ecosystems you know

01:01:28.600 know in our patternings but there are there are common patternings right across that allow us to

01:01:33.980 flow and move and trade and hybridize across and between all of these systems and keep them

01:01:40.140 vibrant and vital you know and that's what we do you know so beneath that we are beneath that net

01:01:48.120 of like these shadow identities um we are something else you know much

01:01:56.620 uh much more vibrant um beautiful glorious things we are um and you just glimpse that

01:02:06.860 every now and then and i think anybody who's glimpsed it um is never the same again because

01:02:12.820 you know what your potential is you know as a species and you know what your ecological niche

01:02:18.340 is and every cell in your body every molecule is you know crying out for that you know to be that

01:02:25.500 to live that to get out of the cage you want to get there and then do that be that um but

01:02:35.680 yet we are you know as much in our shadow in that net of the anglosphere around the planet

01:02:45.400 um as we are in in the other side even when we're there so um yeah i guess we just

01:02:52.700 it probably sounds like i'm working towards a solution for you here and i'm going to give you

01:02:58.860 this amazing tip and you'll be inspired and go oh my god that's amazing i'm going to do that but

01:03:03.960 I'm not. I don't have the answer for that yet.

01:03:06.620 That's just going to have to work its way out.

01:03:10.340 It's weird because that shadow world is also part of creation.

01:03:14.380 It's just in a weird moment of imbalance and disequilibrium at the moment.

01:03:21.360 So I guess we'll see where it all ends up

01:03:23.800 as the sort of mud settles to the bottom of the pond.

01:03:33.960 Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast.

01:03:39.060 The music you heard today was by 40 Million Feet,

01:03:41.980 Marty O'Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra, and Violet Bell.

01:03:46.640 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glassbell.

For The Wild - May 26, 2021

TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Unbranding Our Mind ⧸235

Episode Stats

Transcript