Progress is an ‘uncontested good’: Theoretically, that means scientific and technological progress is assumed to be a positive irrespective of any evidence to the contrary; practically, though, it means the moment technological or scientific progress is questioned it will often illicit silence, or ridicule, or in the worst case, abuse.

‘Running on Emptiness – The Pathology of Civilisation’John Zerzan (2002) All religions have problems with ‘unbelievers’, but that response is insignificant compared to their visceral hatred of ‘apostates’.

industrialism took away people's ability to manage and measure in their own time it imposed an order of time externally regulated by clockmakers and timekeepers and with that came the 00:02:28 control of labour which enabled complex industrial systems to evolve to reach its high point of globalized just-in-time manufacturing in the modern world time both dulls the senses and orders people's lives

human-devised measures of time hold within them powerful political and economic forces they track people within the patterns of activity they become habituated to machine time measured and parceled out by industrial society

few grasps their imprisonment by time shifting our perceptions of the world to create ecological change is not simply about abandoning modern technology the true challenge people 00:01:13 face is breaking free of the instrumental mechanism that binds them to the modern world

this chart was of no use to millions of blind people

Someone with a cognitive impairment, for example, might benefit greatly from visuals rather than paragraphs of text, whilst for screen readers user paragraphs of text are the more accessible option.

Blind news audiences are being left behind in the data visualisation revolution: here's how we fix that

The End of the Silicon Valley Myth

Nicola grateri has spent his career fighting the country's most powerful Mafia the indrangata

Regarding climate change, it is as if humanity stands poised before two buttons: one is an economic and cultural reset, while the other triggers a self-destruct sequence. As a community of nations, we can’t seem to agree on which is which. Or, even if we did, we don’t seem to have the collective political will to stop those who seem intent on pushing the self-destruct button—in order, they say, to protect our liberty.

The old humanisms have not so much died as faded away. Alarms about the danger of climate change have been sounded now for so long that urgency is also fading, not the objective reasons for urgency—they burn more brightly than ever—but the willingness or even capacity in many societies to feel it.[19] Indeed, countless Americans won’t submit to a Covid-19 vaccine even though this fundamental gesture of solidarity makes one’s life not merely safer, but better. But as Secretary General Guterres reminds us, there will be no vaccine for climate change. Americans might not take it even if there were. Where can we find the subjunctive politics we need?

The late, great essentialist humanism of progress, economic growth, and individualism thinks that a cup is full only when it overflows. An entangled humanism of the future will say that we should not pour until we know what being full truly means. 

Beware the person, party, or project that claims to be the incarnation of the common good. The common good is imminent within the polis in all its possibility, but it is never the embodiment of any one version of the polis. That way of thinking, always tempting, often deployed, never ends well. The common good is not something extra added on to what other practices of right recognition provide for a society. Instead, the common good shifts the frame and changes the subject of political life from the declarative as is to the subjunctive as if—the corrected fullness of equality, justice, and interdependent mutuality that are already but not yet.

The posture of democratic citizenship is avowal of rights and obligations of membership in a civic community. The rationale for this is the moral and political goodness of a civic way of living and the shared promise of human self-realization through interdependence. As such it is the exemplary, most inclusive form of membership; it is a precondition for the sustainability in the modern secular era of other expressions of membership in our lives—social, economic, kinship, familial, and intimate.[17] Again, citizenship avows—makes a vow, takes on a trust—on behalf of a future of moral and political potential toward which it is reasonable to strive. Citizenship is iterative and ongoing; it provides continuity and provokes innovation; each generation of democratic citizens begins a new story of the demos and continues an ongoing one.[18]

This larger perspective is offered by an analysis of citizenship and the common good. I begin with the idea of citizenship as being a practice entrusted with the preservation and conservation of the nexus of recognitional practices in a society. Then I move to the notion of the common good, interpreted not as a collective thing, a transcendent principle, or an abstract concept, but as the flourishing of the recognitional nexus itself. 

The moral vocabulary that climate activists and public health professionals use is not able to activate the moral and political imagination that effective ecological and health governance require. To respond to the recurring crises that are coming, the governance of complex societies must be able to reach the tap roots latent in their own moral ethos, politics, and motivational structures.

autonomy can shed the problematic individualism with which it has been saddled in the era of liberalism and carbon capitalism and can be reconceptualized as a practice of recognition that is dialogic and critically self-reflexive. As such, autonomy is a practice that recognizes and supports individuality but does not rest on an ontological foundation of individualism. And, needless to say, it does not rest on a foundational collectivist or totalizing ontology, either. Whereas other practices of recognition such as solidarity and care are directed outward toward right relationships with others, autonomy, I suggest, is a practice of recognition directed inward. Autonomy is reflexive: it affirms and attends to the moral standing of oneself. The autonomy of the person is required by both the concept of agency (acting for reasons rather than being forced to act by causes) and the concept of responsibility (neither praise nor blame are attached to behavior that is beyond one’s control). My working notion is thatautonomy is the recognition and authentication of one’s own capability to assume moral agency and responsibility in an interdependent world.

While structural injustice and inequality do impede autonomy by fostering force and fraud, oppression and exploitation, these structural conditions also undermine autonomous self-recognition by impeding the psycho-social development integral to fulfilling the capability to be an autonomous self and agent. This is one convergence of symbiotic theorizing and the recognitional practice of autonomy. Through symbiotic practices, the assistance or “affordances” of the material and social worlds can be drawn on to actualize the inherent potential for autonomous action that resides in each human being.[16]

Let me pose the question in the following way: Is the condition of autonomia fulfilled or undermined by the condition of sumbiōsis? Could it be that autos and sumbios—the most fully realized, best self and the companion—are two sides of the same coin; that is to say, entangled?

olidarity is standing up for and with and as the other. Solidarity is standing up against the power of those who deny moral standing to the other. In so doing, the practice of solidarity affirms the moral standing of others. Moral standing is not only something that the law and courts bestow. It comes into being through the ways in which people treat one another. Conceptually and attitudinally, practices of solidarity shift away from individualism and independence toward mutuality and interdependence.

Such relational practices of recognition avow that concern and respect are due to others as persons of inherent, not simply instrumental, worth.

new way of seeing could lead to loss of dignity, oppression, and even greater inequality; there are many historical examples of that.[10] But there is also the open horizon of new ways of being that are more humane, more authentic, more just. This horizon is what political theorist William Connolly refers to when he says: “Today perhaps it is wise to try to transfigure the old humanisms that have played important roles in Euro-American states into multiple affirmations of entangled humanism in a fragile world.”[11]

The freedom objection to effective climate governance says that we must make a tragic choice on behalf of freedom. We must choose the loss of some present and future lives in order to preserve a way of life, the lynchpins of which are individual freedom, private property, steep social and monetary inequality, economic growth, and energy-intensive production and consumption. Yet the lives some would choose to lose need not be lost if the right and the good—living up to the best in our humanity and being morally responsible—were seen in new ways.

lest we think that our own vital centers are fine, much to their chagrin colonizing nations of the global north are finding themselves colonialized by financial extraction and exploitation in the global economy. In the governance of affluent nation-states, and of regional governmental units within them, the background social and cultural factors upon which any governance—especially democratic governance—relies are literally falling apart, and the wreckage is piling up at the feet of history. 

“Better dead than Red,” as people used to say when I was growing up in America’s heartland during the Cold War.[9] Apparently, it’s better to be dead than Green now. That argument is made in public with a straight face. It is not enough, then, to interpret climate denial (as well as vaccine denial, and even pandemic denial) as merely venal or ignorant, though much of it is that. This denial goes deeper and is more philosophically significant because it is rooted in a broken conception of individual freedom in a political morality whose time is passing, if not already past.

It is not by erecting fences between power and right that governance can be steered toward justice, but by entangling power within solidarity, care, and other modes of right relationship.

Discourse within the public sphere signals the normative will of the democratic citizenry to the steering institutions of governance. It also articulates and rearticulates (expresses and reshapes) the core of the civic, the vital beating heart of a democracy. This core is a political morality of intentional action motivated by reasoned understanding and moral imagination. In the political morality I see emerging, the separation of the political and the normative is subsiding. Conceptually, power and right are becoming entangled rather than bifurcated. 

As I use the term here, “governance” is not limited to the official activities of government alone. Governance in the broad sense is an interlocking system of collective action steering mechanisms ideally guided by impartial rules of law and comprised of the administrative and representative political institutions of government, economic and sociological institutions, and cultural systems of norms, meanings, and relationships. In a democracy, the steering of these systems of collective action is ultimately subject to judgments concerning the justice and legitimacy of current and proposed future governance by a discursive participatory citizenry. This citizenry continually engages in a process of pluralistic debate refereed by reason and the persuasive force of the better argument. Such participatory dialogue is often referred to as the civic or “public sphere” of society. It is a place of norms and ideals—a declarative place of what is the case, and a subjunctive place of what could be the case.

People newly faced with the precarity of future expectations and the loss of attachments to habitual ways of life tighten their grip on them, no matter how objectively unsustainable, and turn toward blaming the other, the victims, rather than extending empathy and solidarity toward them.

the entanglement of human health and global climate change is rapidly manifesting itself in a raft of “known unknowns”—future disruptions we can reasonably forecast without yet knowing the precise form they will take or the extent of their consequences. When extended for a prolonged period of social time, such certain uncertainty breeds fear and a narrowing of intellectual and emotional attention.

Through the media of technology and commerce, progress has come to be understood as that which alters the lives of human individuals by expanding the scope of their consumptive choices and extractive agency. It is time to rethink progress and possessive individualism in the political morality of freedom.

What is propelling humankind into this nightmare, as Benjamin sees it, is not the force of evil or fate. Instead, it is one of modernity’s prized ideals and constitutive achievements: progress.

The future behind us into which we are being thrown is also a maelstrom born out of the catastrophes of the past.

“This is how one pictures the angel of history,” Benjamin writes. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay . . . and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. . . . This storm is what we call progress.”

Entangling Humanism By Bruce Jennings

The issue of human dominance is not simply climate change (as bad as that is), it is the whole capitalist development paradigm that is at the dark heart of maldevelopment—that which undermines and destroys the very foundations of all life on earth.

if sustainability requires a sustainable democracy, then cities may be the places where democracy is most sustainable. Democratic states are seriously compromised and increasingly dysfunctional in addressing climate change. Democratic cities still hold the promise of real change. They kindle optimism in citizens who are pessimistic about political parties and national politics. In sustaining the planet, the world’s cities may be its last best hope.

Moreover, green urban ideas can spread virally on the web and often are the result of city interactions (a new network, CITYPROTOCOL, has become a global promoter of best practices). The bike-share idea began decades ago in Latin America, but today is a popular option in hundreds of cities on every continent.

Much of what they do can be done without eliciting the ire of nation-states. Bike shares, pedestrian zones, insulated buildings, renovated port facilities, congestion fees, car emission limits, furnace specifications, fuel upgrades (from oil to gas to alternative energy) and white paint roofs, for example, are only some of the innovations city officials can promote to effect significant reductions in emissions and pollutants.

here states have grown dysfunctional and sovereignty has become an obstacle to global democratic action—as when the United States (or China, France, or Canada) refuses to compromise its sovereignty by permitting the international monitoring of carbon emissions on its soil—cities have increasingly proven themselves capable of deliberative democratic action on behalf of sustainability, as they have actually done in intercity associations like the C-40 or ICLEI. If presidents and prime ministers cannot summon the will to work for a sustainable planet, mayors can. If citizens of the province and nation think ideologically and divisively, neighbors and citizens of the towns and cities think publicly and cooperatively.

The way out is to restore democracy to its deliberative roots in competent citizenship, to liberate popular government from money and reinstate it as a domain of civic competence and citizen participation, and to help democracy cross borders to address global problems.

democracy today is held captive by nation states that are, in turn, held captive by money, business, and banking interests—and a wholly owned corporate media that, far from informing the public, participate in misleading it.

a benevolent tyrant with an understanding of climate science is more likely to address climate change effectively than a corrupt elected politician who equates her own opinions with science; more bluntly, that China may be more likely to pursue sustainable policies than the United States. How can we address these dilemmas?

our crisis in democracy—a system dominated by big money, special interests, and the “tyranny of me”—impact and morph into our crisis in sustainability.

In our real world of corrupted, minimalist democracy, we privilege individual, special-interest thinking and ask citizens to do no more than express their private preferences. We confound opinion and knowledge and sometimes even seem to think that by denying expert science we honor “democratic” thinking (as if shared ignorance and democracy were the same thing). In this corrupted version of democracy, “now” trumps “later,” today takes precedence over tomorrow, and no one takes responsibility for that greater democracy about which Edmund Burke spoke—the democracy that encompasses not only the interests of the living, but the interests of those who are gone and those as yet unborn. Generational thinking can only be cultivated in a setting of prudent deliberation; contrarily, our short-term present-mindedness shrinks the temporal zone.

A deliberative democracy in which competent citizens participate in policy decisions about the long-term challenges facing their society is an ideal setting for confronting the threat of climate change. Democratic deliberation is designed to help selfish individuals reformulate their interests in the language of the communities to which they belong—to allow them to move from “me thinking” to “we thinking” and to substitute long-term, future-minded thinking for the short-term, present-minded, special-interest thinking. It allows private opinion to be shaped by shared belief and the discipline of inter-subjective (“scientific”) knowledge.

Democracy and Climate Change: How Cities Can Do What States Can’t

We must also remember that place is critical to effective sumbiocracy, as only those with close and intimate ties to particular places are in a position to know their place and make decisions about its health and vitality.

I now offer “sumbiophilia” (the love of living together) as an addition to biophilia. Since we evolved within a pre-existing ecological matrix as an intensely social species and lived in relative harmony with all other life forms, sumbiophilia must also be deeply ingrained within us. If I am correct, then exiting the Anthropocene and entering the Symbiocene, will be a satisfying experience for most humans.

In contrast to democracy, which is by definition anthropocentric and capable only of partial answers to human-biased questions, sumbiocracy requires those who govern (Sumbiocrats) to have an in-depth understanding of total ecosystems and the symbiotic interrelationships that enable them to function.

sumbiocracy (from the Greek sumbiosis, from sumbioun, to live together, from sumbios, living together). I define sumbiocracy as political rule or governance committed to the types and totality of mutually beneficial or benign relationships in a given socio-biological system at all scales (mutualism).

Symbiocene

the early insights of Kropotkin in Mutual Aid find contemporary scientific validation. Kropotkin’s idea was that evolution, although partly consisting of both conflict and cooperation within and between species, was more fundamentally a result of cooperation and mutual aid. This insight can now be re-asserted as crucial for all aspects of human enterprise. As he wrote, “in the practice of mutual aid, which can be traced to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support—not mutual struggle—has had the leading part.”[11]

We are now closer to understanding how ecosystem parameters can be guided by key ecological players in the system to maximize benefits for the life-chances of whole species. In essence, there is a form of “natural justice” that prevails. We now know that, for example, health in forest ecosystems is regulated by what are called “mother trees” that control fungal networks that in turn interconnect trees of varying ages. The control system works to regulate nutrient flows to trees that need them most, such as very young ones.[9] It also works to transfer information and energy from dying species to those that might continue to thrive, thus maintaining the forest as a larger system.[10] These crucially important insights have yet to be incorporated into ecological thinking applied to politics and human societies.

symbiosis has been used to give substance to the nature of the interactions between different organisms living in close physical association.

one of the earliest thinkers to warn us of its dangers was Murray Bookchin, who in 1962 summarized cogently what an ecological understanding of the world means and what it does to our understanding of our place within it:The critical edge of ecology, a unique feature of the science in a period of general scientific docility, derives from its subject matter—from its very domain. The issues with which ecology deals are imperishable in the sense that they cannot be ignored without bringing into question the survival of man and the survival of the planet itself. The critical edge of ecology is due not so much to the power of human reason—a power which science hallowed during its most revolutionary periods—but to a still higher power, the sovereignty of nature . . . ecology clearly shows the totality of the natural world—nature viewed in all its aspects, cycles and interrelationships—cancels out human pretensions to mastery over the planet.[7]

social, political and institutional mechanisms.

eading evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson and influential economist Dennis Snower have long advocated for an improved understanding of economics as a complex system. Across a recent series of major articles, they argue for a paradigm shift away from the orthodox, neoclassical model of economics, which focuses on individual challenges to be tackled through decisions by individual decision-makers and views ‘externalities’ as a phenomenon to be ‘corrected’ through government intervention, in favour of a new multilevel paradigm, based on insights from evolutionary science.

A new economic paradigm for people and planet

‘An Inconvenient  Apocalypse - The Environmental Collapse,   Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity',

What is abrogated here is our right to the future tense, which is the essence of free will, the idea that I can project myself into the future and thus make it a meaningful aspect of my present. This is the essence of autonomy and human agency. Surveillance capitalism’s “means of behavioral modification” at scale erodes democracy from within because, without autonomy in action and in thought, we have little capacity for the moral judgment and critical thinking necessary for a democratic society.

surveillance capitalism represents an unprecedented concentration of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge. They know everything about us, but we know little about them. They predict our futures, but for the sake of others’ gain. Their knowledge extends far beyond the compilation of the information we gave them. It’s the knowledge that they have produced from that information that constitutes their competitive advantage, and they will never give that up. These knowledge asymmetries introduce wholly new axes of social inequality and injustice.

surveillance capitalism, invented by Google in 2001, benefitted from a couple of important historical windfalls. One is that it arose in the era of a neoliberal consensus around the superiority of self-regulating companies and markets. State-imposed regulation was considered a drag on free enterprise. A second historical windfall is that surveillance capitalism was invented in 2001, the year of 9/11. In the days leading up to that tragedy, there were new legislative initiatives being discussed in Congress around privacy, some of which might well have outlawed practices that became routine operations of surveillance capitalism. Just hours after the World Trade Center towers were hit, the conversation in Washington changed from a concern about privacy to a preoccupation with “total information awareness.” In this new environment, the intelligence agencies and other powerful forces in Washington and other Western governments were more disposed to incubate and nurture the surveillance capabilities coming out of the commercial sector.

ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.

This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.”

from the start the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. They were able to see and to take — and to do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening.

I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.

High Country News, Rebecca Nagle reported that for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in past centuries, it has spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in the 21st century. 

Siwan Clark, a Welsh speaker and MSc candidate in Social Research Methods at University College London, said Wales is environmentally suffering because of centuries of British colonialism, particularly during the Industrial Revolution, which had a devastating global environmental impact.Clark said her mother, who grew up on a farm in North Wales, understands critical Welsh words—a language Clark said is deeply agricultural—that “have no context or meaning” for her.“Industrialized farming is inextricable from empire,” Clark said. “If those small farms fail, then the language won’t truly survive.” 

“a huge amount of scientific information in Irish was passed down orally, but was lost to the trauma of the famine and immigration.” Today, only 1.7 percent of the Irish population is fluent. Ó Séaghdha, who said many words in Irish are like “one-word poems,” finds himself fascinated by this bio-cultural knowledge. “The word for swallow is fáinleog,” he said. “It means little wanderer, because the bird migrates during winter. In our languages, we understood bird migration, thousands and thousands of years ago. We had words for phosphorus magnetism before they had scientific books.”

Australian government won’t stop trying to infiltrate these communities with English. Disguised as “education,” the imposition of English is an attempt to reduce the already dismal number of 13 Indigenous languages spoken by children in Australia (from 300-700 languages before the U.K. colonized Australia, in 1788),

“When your language dies, your worldview dies with it. The actual structure of the language holds so much of that worldview,”

Learning a New Language Can Help Us Escape Climate Catastrophe

get control over psychological stress oh yeah why is this so important well the the main problem is you have 00:16:15 high levels of cortisol when you're stressed out psychologically and it it's clear that people who have high levels of really high levels of stress uh are chronically ill

the numbers are 00:14:09 something like that you drop it down to you've got 88 percent less chance or actually it's it's 12 percent chance for most diseases so most diseases are protected by these diets

eating plants

don't eat sugary foods

the one meal one main meal a day he would be grateful for i'm sure

what are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10 year old 00:10:51 self will be so happy for but if he was in front of you right now he'd just be hugging you and high fiving you nonstop the things you're doing that he will appreciate in ten years and then what are a few things that he's 00:11:04 gonna say man i really wish you wouldn't do that right now

there's a twin study they took identical twins genetically identical in denmark and they said okay let's look at them through their life and there were massive differences in 00:08:46 how they looked and how they how long they lived and when they went back to see what the causes were they could figure out first of all that 80 of their lifespan was determined by how they lived not their genetics 00:08:58 you mean the way they felt about themselves the people they hung out with their environment the activities they took on or what do you mean well mostly their lifestyle what they ate did they smoke did they drink did they exercise those did they sleep well all that stuff right 00:09:11 and those that did all the good things the same genetics twins born the same day one could live 10 years longer than the other

dr david 00:05:01 perlmutter on who has a book about uric acid talking about like this is one of the root causes of poor health yeah and aging faster and things like that so alcohol you talk to him a lot yeah yeah 00:05:13 i actually was uh one of the first people to read his book before it came out yeah it's really good it blew my mind i now measure my uric acid levels you can get little test strips uh you can just buy them usually you just piano 00:05:26 you swap spit on it and 10 seconds later you see you see your acid levels yeah and so the the lower the level the better right the higher the level means there's risk for what everything according to david

beer will raise the levels of uric acid which is a 00:04:36 breakdown product of a protein breakdown product then you can pee out um but if you have too much beer and other types of food that contain a lot of this type of 00:04:49 protein you will raise your uric acid level

one glass a day most doctors would say especially if it's red wine it's fine and the alcohol actually can help with cut the cardiovascular system reduces uh 00:04:22 bad cholesterol and more importantly raises the good cholesterol hdl this is for red wine

we've just developed a way to measure that 100 times cheaper than it was before 00:02:44 and i'm going to bring this test to the public so that's people can test their biological at home or something or it should be a cheek swab that's what we're developing so you don't have to prick or take blood or anything you do a cheek sweat exactly and then you would ship it 00:02:57 in or something yeah you'll post it in and then you get hopefully just a week later or less here's your credit score for your body well that's cool and then even better here's how you how do you slow it down and reverse it based on 00:03:09 everything we know about you wow that's cool take you on that journey so do this eat this swallow this that is cool i got to take that test yeah well you can get on the wait list if you want 00:03:21 okay there's a website because we are uh taking names right now we may do some studies with early adopters too that's cool what's up where is it it's called tally t-a-l-l-y 00:03:33 tallyhealth.com and uh the reason i'm excited about it is it's very hard to focus on what works because we have no idea you exercise you hope that it's good yeah is it too much too little if i eat this does it help me we need a dashboard for our bodies and 00:03:46 that's what that's what these give you

there's a new type of test that my colleagues and in my lab we've developed it's called the dna methylation test 00:02:20 it's also known as the horovath test named after my friend stephen horvath

there's one company that i advise called inside tracker

that's a decade off your life

how much does alcohol smoking or marijuana or psychedelics actually affect lifespan

The deep AnthropoceneA revolution in archaeology has exposed the extraordinary extent of human influence over our planet’s past and its future

I'd like to propose is that knowing and perhaps knowing the answer knowing that the endpoint isn't enough to be done and we 00:03:32 need to know how to get there and so how do we get to the solution and what I'd like to propose is that lynn ostrom also suggested in fact you'll see this in her work a lot something special about the 00:03:46 way that we can get there and that is that and so I want to explain what I mean by this why an evolutionary approach and we'll get to what is an 00:03:59 evolutionary approach as well why an evolutionary approach to sustainability science

the tragedy of the Commons is not so much that it's Commons per se but that it's a cooperation problem that he described I 00:01:48 think very clearly that environmental degradation is often a social dilemma is often a cooperation problem and be it a commons or not the regulatory structure 00:02:02 or the the social structure can vary but cooperation problems are are important however of course he said his famous line this paper is you know solution is mutual coercion mutually agreed upon and and so that's 00:02:18 institutions right so the solution is institutions and of course we have other people who have said that very clearly and with a lot of wonderful evidence to back it up Elinor Ostrom being at the 00:02:31 top of that list and and her work on common pool resources and contains this fantastic list of sort of key design 00:02:44 elements that have emerged from studying small-scale common pool resource communities and and these are these are factors that tend to make those communities more successful in managing 00:02:56 those resources sustainably so so that's great

so often we still think engagement social engagement is a distraction from serious practice

can dive deeper into how you how you practice a spirituality that promotes both an individual well-being and the 00:09:02 health of our society and our environment like well it's interesting you ask that question because at the root of it or you could say the the presumption of that is is the kind 00:09:14 of duality or separation between the two right yeah exactly i mean i'm i'm reminded of something joanna macy uh said um the world has a role to play in our awakening 00:09:28 um i think many of us still have a kind of romanticized idea about the path even the bodhisattva path the idea that somehow you might go off to a cave and meditate really hard or something and 00:09:40 then when you're deeply enlightened then you return to the world and become engaged you know returning to the marketplace and i think frankly that's a bit simplistic if not if not naive it's like 00:09:54 the two go hand in hand uh because they reinforce each other you know um i think that when we start buddhist practice perhaps inevitably there there's a kind 00:10:07 of self-preoccupation because what brings us to it i mean there's some some suffering some dissatisfaction in our own lives why else would we spend so much time energy and money you know 00:10:20 making sore legs and backs for ourselves um but as we progress you know as as we get more insight into what's going on then if things are going well we eventually 00:10:33 begin to realize that at the root of our dissatisfaction is the delusion of separation yes from from other people and from the rest of the world

you have to 00:07:05 make that decision for yourself right and yet somehow we also have to transform society well i i think that that's it that's maybe the most 00:07:18 important the single most important thing that buddhi buddhism has to offer which is the ecosatur path frankly or sorry not not just regards ecology but let's call it the the bodhisattva path 00:07:31 or the new bodhisattva path that that what's what's so wonderful about that path is one has a double or dual practice you know we we continue to work on our own transformation but we know that 00:07:44 that's in itself insufficient it's still at a certain point that can actually reinforce the the root delusion of separation that my well-being is separate from yours and other people 00:07:56 so you know we also are engaged out in the world and and what i think one of the really important things about that i think is the way those two reinforce each other that um 00:08:10 it's not simply that they go well together but that if you are working and transforming yourself by being engaged in the world it's helping to overcome our kind of deeply rooted self-preoccupied habits so 00:08:23 i think that that's really important in fact given the kind of very critical situation we face right now may be the most important thing of all that buddhism has to offer

you asked for the main lesson because i i mean i think there are several but but if i had to pick out one i think what i would focus on is the emphasis on personal or individual 00:06:12 transformation i mean if you think of the history of the western tradition i mean i think there's a lot to appreciate in terms of institutional transformation if you think about something like anti-slavery movements and civil rights 00:06:26 movements and unions and more democratic forms of government etc and that's really really important but there's also this question is that kind of collective or institutional transformation enough 00:06:40 unless we also have kind of personal transformation otherwise i think it tends to be subverted if we're still motivated if many people are still motivated by the three poisons of greed 00:06:53 you know ill-will delusion

there 00:03:24 is something really special about going off into the natural world it is especially by oneself i think that it it can enable us to kind of open up and sort of let go of our usual utilitarian 00:03:38 way of relating to everything and and and sort of be able to learn what the trees you know what what the meadows what what the river has to offer uh and i think that's that's really 00:03:52 important

i'm sure some of your listeners may disagree with me but i think we're in the post-denial stage of climate change

how to save our planet the facts

the   true source of economic prosperity is not  financial capitalism investment in education   investment in the real economy in infrastructure  and you know when the in the middle of the 20th   century in the 1950s 1960s when the u.s had were  in a situation of economic dominance over the rest   00:54:32 of the world it was not through extreme financial  inequality except you know you had 19 percent top   income tax rate after roosevelt and but you had  a big educational advance as compared to you   know at that time you had a 90 percent of a court  would go to high school in the us in 1950s 1960s   at the same time it was 20  30 percent in germany or in   00:54:56 france or so and this was this educational  advance which made prosperity historically and and   and we seem to to have forgotten this uh you know  in the us following you know since the 1980s but   so we we have to manage to put this back on the on  this agenda but that's that's of course that's not   that's not easy

you you have to back politicians who are   00:52:41 willing to change this and unfortunately there's  no party that's uh in favor of canceling student   debt or any kind of debt in the united states  because the political parties are subsidized   by the banking in the financial sector so  uh i don't see uh i don't see a way out

there are some sources of energy which  which create a negative value because of   00:48:39 of of global climate change and climate working  and warming and you know all the negative   external effect of using some energy so we have  some to make some of the energy uh sources just   illegal you know we have to keep some of the oil  in the ground we have to stop looking for new oil   and gas so you know so the solution to some of  the of the energy questions we have is just to to   00:49:04 to make illegal you know the use of certain energy  and to to to move to other energy so that's part   of the answer now if we if we have done that  and we deal with with energy that don't have the   the negative this much bigger negative impact  on mankind than their positive productive impact   then you know redistribution of wealth must be  about all forms of wealth you know whether it's   00:49:32 rent or energy or financial assets or i  was seeing you know we we need to have a   permanent circulation of wealth and power so you  know that's the way i i view you know taxation of   wealth is will be a permanent you know progressive  tax on net wealth which in effect will will will   wipe out all the biggest uh wealth right away you  know say up to 90 percent tax per year for you   00:49:59 know for for billionaires but among you know there  will still be some people who want 100 000 dollars   some people who earn 1 million or 2 million but  there will be a permanent circulation of wealth   holdings within within this limited uh wealth  gap that that will still exist and this should   be for all forms of wealth you know whether it's  land or housing or whatever whatever the origin

there's a landlord tax the the  one percent in their day were the landlords you   have to tax away the land rent and make that  the public uh tax base not income not taxes on   consumer goods not taxes on capital because you  want good capital investment you want fortunes to   00:45:07 be made in a good way that add to the economy's  productivity you don't want them to be made in   a predatory bad way uh the whole fight to tax  economic rent and to even recognize that most   income is unearned when you talk about the uh  income disparity almost all this disparity is   unearned income it's economic rent it's not  income that's made by increasing uh production   00:45:33 it's not income that's made by increasing living  standards it's just predatory rent seeking from   special privileges that the wealthy have gained  from government and today it's not the landlord   class anymore as it was in the 19th century it's  the financial class and the raw materials class   uh and uh without dealing uh with this uh  cl structure i don't uh the system is going   00:45:57 to shrink and shrink and we've seen this before  we saw it in rome the same kind of polarization   and concentration of wealth in the roman empire  well the last stage of that is feudalism so we're   back to what rosa luxemburg said the choice is  between socialism and barbarism basically and uh   there's no other way to do it you can't  solve the problems within the existing system   00:46:23 because it's controlled already by the one  percent

you  see a lot of third world debts that uh if the   third world better countries have to pay uh their  foreign debts under as the world economy slows   down they're going to be subject to austerity to  the world banks and the imf's austerity programs   00:35:01 and they're going to be kept in poverty uh is it  really right that they should be kept in poverty   just to enrich the bondholders of the one percent  the one percent will say yes that's why we're   the one percent so that we can impoverish  other people that's our liberty our liberty   is the right to impoverish other people and reduce  them to dependency uh that will happen if you do   not write down the debts uh it's already happening  in the united states to the student debt uh crisis   00:35:30 where students uh have to pay so much money uh as  they fall behind on their student debts that they   can't afford to take out mortgages to buy homes  uh and you're having the home ownership rates   plunge in the united states that's the result of  leaving the debts in place uh the mortgage steps   uh uh are causing shrinkage so there is no way  to get out of this economic polarization without   00:35:54 a debt write down and that's something that  is too radical and uh uh when we talked about   when i was referring to what china's doing i'm  referring to what it's doing today and tomorrow   about uh the uh real estate company evergreen  uh uh china has a choice is it going to leave   evergreen's real estate debts in place and every  grand uh as a real estate company is two to three   00:36:21 percent of the entire chinese economy if it  pays the foreign creditors and the domestic   one percent of china it's going to impoverish the  uh the employees of evergrand it's going to make   housing prices more and more expensive in china  china has had a debt finance housing boom uh   if you leave the debts in place then uh you're  you're going to impoverish china and obviously   00:36:47 china is going to say i'm we're not going to put  the creditors first we're not going to do what   the west does and say the sanctity of debt service  debts are uh that you owe or sacred uh it's worth   sacrificing the economy it's worth plunging the  economy into poverty just to preserve the wealth   of the one percent i think china's uh is going to  make the opposite decision and say we're not going   00:37:12 to commit political suicide we're going to operate  for it's a socialist economy and when it comes to   debt and credit thank god we have our banking in  the public domain and since the public domain the   people's bank of china is the creditor they can  afford to write down the debt without having any   political backlash because it's cancelling that  so do itself uh which is a great advantage uh and   00:37:38 it's also uh as for the private bond holders uh  it's going to say well sorry bondholders you made   loans to a company that was way over leveraged  uh already uh the american bond rating companies   have reduced their bond rating to chunk so you  knew what you were buying if you continued to hold   bonds that uh fitch and other bond raiders moody's  all say or junk and you lose your money well   00:38:03 you took the risk you got a high rate of  interest now you're you're paying the price   that's how markets work uh and uh that really  uh is the argument and i think uh you have to   uh obviously what i'm suggesting is a radical  step just as you're suggesting of taxing wealth   would require the radical step of closing down  offshore banking centers of simply negating uh if   00:38:28 banks would simply erase all of the deposits  they have from the offshore banking centers from   the cayman islands from from panama from uh from  liberia to all the places that began by to be set   up by the mining companies the oil companies  and then were set up beginning in the 1960s   essentially by the cia to finance  the vietnam war by making america   like england the home for criminal capital  for flight capital all this uh all this flight   00:38:57 capital and the kleptocracy that you mentioned  in russia all this really should be wiped out   and if you leave this capital if you leave this  one percent in place the economy is going to be   sacrificed and shrinking is it worth shrinking  the economy just to leave the one percent in place   and if you challenge them that's pretty radical  that's really what i think marx would say today

i think climate change is going to put  a strong pressure in the sense that you know i   think when people see more and more catastrophic  climatic events you know i think attitudes toward   globalization and attitudes toward inequality in  general you know can change very quickly because   00:43:25 you know at some point i think people will  not find it funny at all to have all these   billionaires you know giving lessons using  their private jet doing your space tourism   et cetera you know at some point you know i think  nobody is going to find this funny at all and   there can be a very quick and and fast you know  complete change in attitude following this

they claim they have solved the  problem of multinational taxation but it's it's   a bit ridiculous how little they have done the  minimum tax rate of 15 percent is ridiculously   small and also it's only sort of sharing sort of  rich countries are sharing between themselves you   00:33:10 know the tax base that is currently in tax haven  but countries in the south in the global south   basically don't get anything and i think that's an  that's an issue that's something an area in which   the pressure of the chinese counter model in  the future maybe will contribute to induce   rich countries to to to to to to to have a bit  more you know inclusive attitude towards the   00:33:37 the south also well if they don't do  it i mean you know if they don't do it   in effect china will finance the investment and  the infrastructure investment that is needed in   africa and in south asia and and that's that's  you know this is at some point you know fully uh   western countries will realize that they have to  change something otherwise they will just lose any   any influence and any capacity to influence the  world

as long as the system of  of political finance and you know parties and   campaigns and media and think tank you know  are largely controlled by by large wealth   00:29:11 holders you know our collective ability to  change the distribution of wealth and the   you know through through taxation or that  consolation and or what you know whatever   the method is going to be limited so it will take  major political fights and in some cases you know   changing the political rules of the game and the  political institution to to to changes and and   you know the good news is that this has  always been like this or this has always   00:29:39 and and still sometimes you know it has worked  in the in the past but it has worked you know   i mentioned the french revolution you know of  course that's a huge popular mobilization uh also   in the 20th century i mentioned after world war  ii after world war one well let's be clear it's   only because there was a very powerful uh you know  labor movement a socialist movement and communist   counter model in the east which in the end put  pressure uh on the on the uh and you know and on   00:30:09 the in effect and the elite governing elite in in  in the west so that they they they had to accept   a number of decisions you know which which were  limited in their scope but still which transform   the economic and social system in in a very  substantial way as compared to the pre-world   war one and 19th century economic system but it's  only through this enormous political mobilization   00:30:34 and collective organization and you know it will  be the same in in the past

as you very well say the the  part of the increase in private wealth at the top   was really made um through you know privatization  of public assets increase in public debt   you know there's one one statistic which i which i  stress a lot which is that if you look at the net   wealth of the public sector uh you know the net  wealth of the government so government assets   00:27:25 minus government debt it used to be you know in  the 1970s net public wealth was you know between   20 30 percent of total national wealth so you know  net private wealth was bigger you know was like 70   or 80 percent but still net public waste was 20  30 percent in germany in the u.s in france in   britain in japan so that was you know substantial  part of everything there was to own in terms of   00:27:52 of marketable assets in society belong to the  public domain you know say around one quarter   or between one quarter and one third today so you  know three four decades later it is uh close to   zero or actually negative in in in the u.s or in  the uk in the sense that the public debt is bigger   than the public assets because many public assets  were privatized and and public debt increased   00:28:18 and you know in effect there was a transfer of  public wealth uh two to private wealth holders   and that's a you know that's a very important  evolution which you see the most extreme case of   course will be russia and post communist country  where you know you just transfer all the public   wealth and you make oligarchs out of nothing but  in fact we've all you know all countries have had   00:28:42 this kind of trajectories over the recent decades  so that's really an important part of the story   that i've been trying to tell so you know again  i i don't think we have any disagreement on this

i don't feel like we have any major  uh disagreement about you know everything you just   said michael uh let me say also regarding you know  my book capital in the 21st century you know it's   a book that has lots of limitations and and you  know i have on many issues you know i've tried to   00:26:31 to to to make progress since then so this  was written 10 years ago i wrote capital   and ideology much more recently which i  think addresses some of the shortcomings   but this is and still this book has also a  lot of limitations so you know i'm trying to   make progress all the time and i certainly  don't pretend that all the answers are in   you know one book and that being said i think you  know many many things that you've mentioned you   know again i fully agree with

it's what i write about and that is why what  is it that has created this uh uh disparity   and why is it widened so much since 1980. well  the most obvious reason is uh interest rates   reached a peak of 20 in uh 1980 and they've gone  down ever since well in the late 1970s uh my old   00:16:50 boss's boss at chase manhattan paul volcker  said let's raise interest rates to very high   because the 99 are getting too much income their  wages are going up let's uh raise interest to slow   the economy and that will prevent wages from going  up and he did and that was a large uh reason why   carter lost the the election to ronald reagan  interest rates then went down from 20 to almost 0   00:17:20 today the result was the largest bond market boom  in history bonds went way up in price the economy   was flooded with bank credit and most of this  credit uh apart from going into the bond market   went into real estate and there is a uh symbiosis  between finance and real estate and also between   finance and raw materials and also like oil and  gas and minerals uh extraction natural resource   00:17:48 rent land rent and also monopoly rent and most of  the monopoly rent has come from the privatization   that you had from ronald reagan margaret thatcher  and the whole neoliberalism uh if you look at how   did this one percent get most of its wealth well  if you look at the forbes list of the billionaires   in almost every country they got wealth in  the old-fashioned way from taking it from   00:18:13 the public domain in other words privatization  you have the largest privatization and transfer   of wealth from the public sector to uh the private  sector and specifically to the financial sector uh   in in history uh sell-offs and all of a sudden  instead of uh infrastructure uh public health uh   other uh basic needs being provided at subsidized  rates to the population you have uh privatized   00:18:41 owners uh financed by the banks raising the rates  to whatever rate they can get without any market   firing power uh in the united states the  government is not even allowed to bargain with   the pharmaceutical companies for the drug prices  so there's been a huge monopolization a huge   privatization a huge flooding of the economy with  credit and one person's credit is somebody else's   00:19:11 uh debt so you you've described the one percent's  wealth in the form of uh savings but uh i focus   on the other side of the balance sheet this one  percent finds its counterpart in the debts of the   99 so the one percent has got wealthy by indebting  the 99 uh for housing that is soared in price 20   00:19:37 uh just in the last year in the united states uh  for medical care for uh utilities for education   uh the economy is being forced increasingly  into debt and how how can one uh solve this   taxation will not be enough the only way  that you can uh actually reverse this uh   concentration of wealth is to begin wiping out uh  the debt if you leave the debt in place of the 99   00:20:10 uh then uh you're going to leave the one percent  savings all in place uh and these savings are   largely tax exempt uh so basically i think you  you uh left out the government's role in this   wealth creation of the one percent so your  finance has indeed grown faster than economy   absorbed real estate into the finance insurance  and real estate sector the fire sector finances   00:20:39 absorb the oil industry the mining industry  and it's absorbed most of the government so the   financial wealth has spilled over to become  essentially the economy's central planner   it's not planned in washington or paris or london  it's planned in wall street the city of london   and the paris ports the economy is being managed  financially and the object of financial management   00:21:04 isn't really to make money it's capital gains  and again as your statistics point out capital   gains are really what explains the increase  in wealth you don't get rich by saving the   income rent is for paying interest income is for  paying interest you get rich off the government   basically subsidizing an enormous increase in the  value of stocks the value of bonds by the central   00:21:31 banks which have been privatized and uh the reason  that this is occurring is that uh the largest   public utility of all money creation and banking  is left in private hands and private banking   in the west is very different from what government  banking is in say china

as long as you leave banking and credit in   private hands you're going to have banks trading  their product debt and the more debt they create   the more debt service that the borrowers the 99  have to pay the banks in order to obtain a house   00:22:54 or an education or medical care or just to break  even and the more money they pay to the financial   sector the less they have to pay for goods and  services so as the economy polarizes between the 1   and the 99 the economy as a whole shrinks because  more and more of its income is spent not on   production uh and consumption it's spent just on  bit service

to get rid   of monopoly rent you have to return basic key  uh infrastructure to the public domain where   it was before 1980 so that uh basic needs can be  supplied at low prices not uh creating monopoly   for uh the one percent uh and i guess i'm saying  you have to realize that finance has used as well   00:25:12 to take over the economy and this has to  be reversed uh because uh once you have   uh wealth taking the form of uh claims uh  loans and claims on other people's debt   we'll count you up compound interest any rate of  interest is a doubling time and compound interest   is always going to grow faster than the economy's  real growth and the only way to prevent this isn't   00:25:37 simply to lower the interest rate which you've  done today 0.1 uh the only solution is to wipe out   the overall debts that are stopping economic  growth and these debts are the savings of the   one percent the good thing about cancelling debts  is you cancel the savings of the one percent   and as long as you leave these savings in  place there's not going to be a solution

i think the reason  your book was praised so much uh in the west is   you didn't come up with a threatening political  solution uh and uh when they said this was the   mark book is the marks for modern time that meant  don't read marx read this book and i suspect that   after you put all of this enormous good work  into the uh statistics that you did on wealth   00:15:30 and income i think the publisher probably said  well what are what are your solutions well you   just came up with uh the solution that you uh said  in the book and that's to tax income and wealth   uh this is not a threatening solution because  there's no way that you're going to tax wealth   as long as you have offshore banking centers to  conceal wealth as long as you have what the oil   00:15:54 industry put in place a hundred years ago the  flags of convenience pretending to make their   uh income abroad the fact is uh the one percent  don't really make much income they're ideal if   you're a billionaire you want to do what uh half  of american corporations do you don't make a penny   of taxable income uh that that's uh the whole  problem

think of the yellow vest movement in france a   couple of years ago which was a major tax level  to get rid of a very what i think was a very uh   an equal project to raise the carbon tax basically  on the poorest group in society and and there will   00:11:27 be you know to address uh climate uh challenges  but also you know all sorts of social and   developmental uh challenges uh we will we you know  societies will have to to to to find ways of

there   00:08:24 are two modern episodes which i find particularly  striking in terms of getting that back to zero   or at least you know concerning a big part of  that the french revolution of course is a very   important example so you know this was a time  when the basically the political system did not   manage to make pay those who should have paid  for the public spending which was the nobility   00:08:47 so there was a fight flight toward that because  people who should have paid the tax managed on   how to escape and the solution was the french  revolutions and the fiscal privileges of the   aristocracy the conservation of that through  partisan inflation partly through taxation   and that's sort of one modern episode the other  modern episode which i want to to refer to is of   00:09:12 course uh after world war ii uh you know after  you know in 1945 1950 most rich economies had   public debt which were enormous you know even even  bigger than than today and they made the choices   you know the political choice through you know  very conflictual social movement political fights   00:09:37 in the end the choice was made collectively not  to replace his debt so this happens in various   ways you know inflation in some cases but  but some countries like germany in particular   which is viewed today as as very conservative in  terms of economic doctrine and ideology and which   in many ways is very conservative we'll  see after the election in a few days but   you know it's still going to be quite conservative  probably in any case but in fact after world war   00:10:05 ii developed applied the solution to to  get rid of the debt of the past through   a monetary reform and through progressive taxation  of very high wealth holders in order to in effect   compensate the lower wealth holders for the uh for  the monetary reform and the the loss of links that   was implied by military reform so that in the  end i mean this is not job this was certainly   00:10:33 not a perfect system but as compared to all other  ways of getting rid of past that you know this was   certainly one of the one of the most equitable  or at least or the least unequitable way to   to address the problem and you know i think we  will have we will have other episodes like this

david described  what a revolution is a change of common sense   and the collective imagination and david argued  that the main achievement of the paris commune   despite a defeat had been the transformation  of the common sense about how we live together   00:03:02 so most of what we consider ordinary in our  cities public transportation street lights   public schools the eight hours work days and even  the not yet achieved equal pay for women and men   originated in the paris commune and it  was then considered to be a social madness

if enough of us will change the way we   00:02:33 think about what deb mean then the social design  of our society will change i'll change along with   this

he regards   00:01:35 the idea of isolated individual as a myth  what interested david much more was a dialogue   he believed that it is only in dialogue in the  class of opinions where answers are formed and how   human consciousness is born we humans according to  david are the product of our social relationship   that's why it was so important for him  to be involved in a situation in which   00:02:03 people think and act collectively and david  grabber foundation will follow the same path

Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.

But these models typically focus on a single country and fail to take into account cross-border dynamics, such as movements of capital and currency. For example, if markets are spooked by low growth in one country, some companies might move their capital overseas, which could adversely affect the original country’s currency and increase borrowing costs. Conditions such as these posed severe financial problems for Argentina in 2001 and Greece in 2010. International cooperation for tighter border control of capital movements needs to be considered and the effects modelled.

Storytelling Will Save the EarthEmotional resonance, not cold statistics, will bring home the scale of the climate crisis—and the need for action.

We know the information. But information is not changing our minds. Most people make decisions on the basis of feelings, including the most important decisions in life – what football team you support, who you marry, which house you live in. That is how we make choices.”  “Thought is at the basis of our feelings, and before we have ideas we have feelings that lead to those ideas. So how do we change minds? A change in feelings changes minds.”

“Humans are not computers”  “The mistake we make with the climate movement is we assume that humans are information processors,” said Mr Eno, “as if they are computers and if we stick enough data in, they are bound to respond in one way or another – and that clearly hasn't worked.

he power of the creative industries to inspire movements was largely absent from high-level discussions on climate change, such as at COP (Conference of the Parties), or in communicating scientific findings, such as from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Brian Eno – "We need the creative industry to help inspire climate action"

it really all does 00:06:53 trace back to the start of our what we call civilization our civilization meaning Agriculture and then settlements and cities so prior to that we lived in approximate equilibrium with ecosystems

once we took 00:07:21 control of our food production a lot of things happen so suddenly we had Surplus we needed ways to store that Surplus we had settlements to stay close to our stores and the land that was producing our food we started 00:07:34 accumulating material possessions that led to hierarchies and systems to kind of preserve that status standing armies to protect those stores from 00:07:47 yourselves and other nearby populations it led to property rights this crazy idea that we can own the land and the property rights together with accumulation of material possessions led 00:08:02 to uh want a desire to continue that ownership into further generations and that led to patriarchy scheme which by the way got tied into our our religious 00:08:15 schemes and became monotheism so you have this great paternal um sort of overseer and then you know we had subjugation of humans and animals to do work for us led to all kinds of 00:08:27 ecological problems from Soul soil degradation habitat destruction um Extinction rates far above normal and all the rest all the things that we see today just sort of a connect the dot straight 00:08:40 from this idea of Agriculture so not now that we've kind of dialed up this rate of Destruction it's more obvious what the pattern is showing us which is that this initial impulse to control nature 00:08:54 was itself kind of a flawed um premise and consequential very consequential so since then we've actually been doubling down on that idea of control so that we keep trying 00:09:07 to control more and more but it's never going to be enough we're never going to be full Masters and so it's going to fail it's guaranteed to fail and unfortunately this system that we've constructed is so 00:09:21 huge that the failure is is almost by definition going to be spectacular and awful and lamentable because we just built it up so large

I think it's really kind of the philosophy behind our civilization is not even remotely 00:10:43 predicated on principles of sustainability and just to be clear something that's not designed to be sustainable is almost certainly unsustainable you'd have to get you know crazy lucky for 00:10:56 something that wasn't designed to be sustainable to you know accidentally be sustainable our civilization is very clearly not uh sustainable and I like to think of 00:11:08 flight analogies here so a rock is not designed for sustainable flight it can't continue level on definite flight it can however be launched to soar upward for a while but inevitably 00:11:21 it's going to come back down toward Earth and I think our civilization is very similar because it's also like a rock not founded on principles of sustainability 00:11:34 it can soar upward for a time as we're doing now as we spin Earth's inheritance it's a big spending spree and it's great fun for the paying passengers and lots of 00:11:46 satisfaction but it's temporary and patiently waiting is Earth and what I would call Planetary limits so that's going to find us before long

i'll be talking to you for four weeks 00:06:02 um about what i call losing yourself that is really understanding the idea of no self of selflessness not in the moral sense specifically though that will get there but not having a self 00:06:14 and of what it is to exist as a person uh without a self and i'll be doing this um from a variety of perspectives and one of the things that might make this 00:06:27 set of talks different from a lot of the talks that the barry center supports is that it won't be specifically or uniquely buddhist doctrine i will be relying on a lot of 00:06:40 buddhist arguments because i do that but also addressing a lot of western arguments in western literature and i won't be interested in doing a lot of textual work in fact i won't do any textual work at all even though i love doing that this will be really about the 00:06:53 idea about really how to understand the idea of not having a self and the idea and how to understand what it is to be a person so i'll draw on buddhist ideas and non-buddhist ideas on western ideas 00:07:07 but i won't be specifically giving a course in the history of buddhist thought about no-self nor will i be talking about practice this will be a very theoretical um set of lectures um but i think what i have to say will 00:07:20 be relevant um to those who are coming here in order to enrich their practice but i won't be specifically talking about that um most of what i'm doing will be based on a book that is 00:07:33 now in press called losing yourself how to be a person without a self

by self-alienation what i mean um 01:25:35 is our being in profound confusion about who and what we are about having an idea of what we are that is totally at odds with our actual mode 01:25:48 of existence or nature that's what i mean so i'm alienated from myself when i think that i'm one thing but i'm really something else and these are various ways 01:26:01 of understanding the content of that self-alienation i think that i am toto generally different from the objects of my experience that there's me as pure subject that's one 01:26:14 kind of thing and there's that all of that stuff including all of you folks my computer screen that i'm looking at now my dog lying right next to me all of those things are merely object and i'm subject 01:26:28 so i think of myself as pure subject is like the eye in the visual field i know that that's not what i am i know that i'm an embedded embodied being in a network of dependent origination but i 01:26:40 don't experience myself that way that's a dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a being that i know immediately that i know my sensations 01:26:52 just by having them i know what i think just by thinking it i know what my emotions are just by experiencing them and that none of that introspective experience none of that awareness is 01:27:04 mediated by anything and that's stupid because i know that the only way that i can know myself is through an introspective activity and that introspection is conceptually laden and that i can be self-deceived and that 01:27:18 my psychiatrist might know me much better than i know myself that my wife knows me better than i know myself and that my dog knows me better than i know myself so i know that i don't have that immediate awareness but i think of 01:27:29 myself as having it that's another dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a free agent who can act in a way that's totally uncaused just by doing things because i will them 01:27:43 that i've got this free will that is unconstrained by causality i know that that's crazy i know that i'm a biological organism and that everything i do is caused by previous causes and conditions 01:27:55 but i don't experience myself that way that's another dimension of self-alienation i know that i am a plurality that i've got a brain with lots of different centers of activity lots of different 01:28:07 kinds of cognition happening at the same time of which i'm totally unaware visual processing auditory processing language processing emotions that are subliminal and so forth 01:28:18 sensations that i barely register i know that there's inner complexity but i experience it as a subject of unity that's another dimension of self-alienation all of these are ways that we fail to 01:28:31 know ourselves and all of them cascade from the illusion that we ourselves

illusion of immediacy descartes was big on this one 01:21:51 and udio takara was big on this one in india that somehow i know my own mind my own states my own being immediately directly without anything standing in 01:22:04 between but i know only know other things through the mediation of my sensory apparatus and my sensory organs nobody thinks that when i look at an apple that that redness and sweetness are 01:22:18 immediately available to me we think they're mediated by my eyes and my visual faculty by light hitting my eyes causing stuff to happen on the back of my retina electrical stuff happening in my occipital cortex and i see the apple 01:22:31 that's a lot of mediation right and we think the same thing about every external object but then if i ask my own feelings my own thoughts my own emotions do i know those through the mediation of 01:22:44 something they think no i know them immediately because they're just part of me and we forget that we know them through the mediation of our introspective senses which are just as mediating just as subject to illusion as 01:22:57 any of our external senses um we get the illusion of agent causation something that augustine makes very plain in the western tradition the idea that somehow our actions as the notary public 01:23:11 suggested are uncaused are free and that there's a big difference between things that happen to us and things that we freely do forgetting that our actions are caused 01:23:23 by our desires and our beliefs and our desires and beliefs are caused by our emotions and our values and our and our va and all of that and that if our things were uncaused we'd be these weird 01:23:35 random objects but we think of ourselves as standing somehow outside of the causal nexus even if we know that that is simply insane there's an illusion of unity this idea 01:23:48 that myself is completely simple and singular even though my thoughts and my experiences and my sensations and my actions are plural but there's a unity behind that that there's no that this i 01:24:01 am exactly the same thing that i was when i began this lecture and we know that that's an illusion so these are all of the reasons to shed the self-illusion and why we think of the self-illusion as crazy 01:24:15 and that gets us through the second major part of what i wanted to do tonight

the illusion of subject object duality 01:21:14 because the moment i think of myself as a self then i think that there's me a subject and then there's my objects there's the i and there's its visual field and they're totally different from one 01:21:26 another and that the basic structure of experience is there's me the subject who's always a subject and never an object and then all of those objects and i take that to be primordially given to 01:21:39 be the way experience just is instead of being a construction or superimposition so that's one illusion

now i want to talk about that serpent and really focus um firmly on what the 01:18:05 self illusion is this will be the last part of this little section that self is supposed to be something that stands outside of the world not something embedded in the world 01:18:17 it's the wittgenstein um the austrian philosopher of the first half of the 20th century um expressed this beautifully in his book the trektatus he said that the self stands to the world 01:18:30 like the eye stands to the visual field we don't see the eye but the fact that we have a visual field lets us know that there is an eye behind it but not in the field 01:18:42 the self he said is just like that we see a world we experience a world we act on a world and that tells us that there has to be a subject that stands outside of that world and experiences it just like the 01:18:56 eye stands outside of the visual field that's one of the worst things about the self-illusion is the illusion that we're not even in the world that we're totally transcendent to it that's really weird right i mean when you realize that 01:19:09 that's what you believe in your gut um that is it's like the eye and the visual field um that the self is continuous it doesn't stop as hume said talking about descartes 01:19:22 that it's always present to us that it's conscious it's the thing that's aware of everything else that it's free from causation that we can act freely on our motives without being caused so when you go to the 01:19:34 notary public to have a document notarized and she asks you those beautiful questions is this your free act and deed and if you said no i'm being caused to 01:19:46 do this she wouldn't notarize it would you so you say yes this is my free act indeed and i always just have my fingers crossed behind my back i don't believe in free acts and deeds but 01:19:59 we do take have this ideology about ourselves that we're with our free actions aren't cause we just do them as can't put it spontaneously that we are independent not 01:20:11 interdependent that when your mom tells you you've got to learn to stand on your own two feet that somehow that makes sense that ourselves can stand on our own two feet as independent objects 01:20:24 and mostly the self is what i am i am not my body my body is constantly changing my body was once young and fast now it's old and has a new knee um i'm 01:20:36 not my mind my mind was once sharp now it's dulled and beaten into submission by years of overwork but that i the jay who was once young is still here in this old man's body 01:20:49 so when we think about that self-illusion the self-illusion is partly bad because it's only a root illusion that leads to a whole cascade 01:21:01 of terrible illusions so now i want to really dump on the self-illusion by showing you just how dangerous it is

we're telling ourselves hey no elephant in my house nothing to worry about whereas the self that we really think we have is that self which is always 01:16:36 subject never object always agent never patient that self that is the enjoyer that stands opposed to the world and experiences it that acts on the world 01:16:49 the self that has a mind and has a body but is not itself a mind or a body that's the serpent and chandra kerdi thinks that if we don't pay attention to that serpent if we don't understand what 01:17:02 it is we believe ourselves to be in our heart of hearts we will never succeed in dispelling the illusion and hume also is trying to identify here 01:17:14 the serpent and he's identifying it as the idea that the word self even means anything

hume is not in book one arguing that persons do not exist in fact in book two he's going to spend most of his time explaining what persons 01:17:41 are he when instead what he's claiming is that persons don't have selves

these people think there's this self that they're aware of that they've seen that they experienced it's a thing they know best and he's inviting you to introspect something that you often might do on the meditation cushion and asking when you 01:09:38 look inside what do you find well you find sensations you find perceptions you find personality traits or emotions but you don't find a bearer you don't find the thing that's supposed to be the 01:09:52 self so human um thinks that you actually don't even know what a self is because it's something that you believe is there but you've never actually seen that you've never experienced and hume 01:10:04 human has a very radical view that we might have a word self but we don't even know what it means because none of us have ever seen it

hume thinks that this is one of those many cases where we've got a word that we suppose corresponds to something in the world or corresponds to an idea but we 01:13:25 don't as though for instance i were to tell sarah hey i just got this really cool toy yesterday it's a round square sarah says what are you talking about 01:13:39 and i say well it's both round and square isn't that cool and sarah would say to me you're using words jay but it sounds like total nonsense to me and she'd be right

illusion of independence 01:02:25 part of what it is to be a self part of what it is to me this underlying transcendent atman is to be independent of the world standing against it acting on it but not being acted on by it 01:02:39 taking it as object but always being subject and so we get this illusion of independence and of transcendental freedom that really mistakes who we are and gives us very strange moral 01:02:51 attitudes of praise and blame and anger and pride and so forth

self-alienation that is if i think that i'm a self but i'm really a person that i really don't know who i am just as if i thought that a dollar had 01:02:13 its value intrinsically in the value of the paper and the ink i wouldn't understand anything about finance currency or purchases

self-centeredness once i think that i'm a self then i think that i've got a very different relation to me than i have to anybody else that is the relation of 01:01:46 identity and i think that i occupy a very special place in the moral universe namely the center of it where i have a very special concern for me and only an indirect concern for others

the self is like that the self is like thinking that there's 01:01:22 something that is really underlying the chariot or underlying the dollar that gives it its value and there are some very nasty consequences of the self-illusion of taking ourselves to be 01:01:34 selves

what gives them their value is the role they play in a much larger system that's what we mean by dependence on conceptual imputation that's what we mean by broad 01:00:44 supervision

we can understand the fact that we exist conventionally um but as 00:53:05 neither the same nor different from the various constituents that we have that we can lack any core or self but still have a perfectly good existence just like chariots do and that that kind 00:53:17 of existence is enough to account for our existence through time without positing a persistent self or a soul that is strung along through all of those moments

what i want you to do is to now imagine somebody whose body you would like to have 00:28:23 as your own either for a few minutes or maybe long term i'm not going to ask you why you want that body i don't want to get that deep into your psyche and that might be very personal um 00:28:35 but i'll tell you whose body i'd like to have and for how long just to give you a warm-up feel for this i really would like to have usain bolt's body of a few years ago for 9.6 seconds 00:28:47 because i would love to know what it feels like to run 100 meters that fast now when i form that does i think it's a coherent desire how do i why do i think that because i really do desire it i would love it i'd pay a lot of money to 00:28:59 do that um but what i don't want is to be usain bolt because usain bolt is already the same bolt and that doesn't do me any good um what i want is to be me 00:29:12 j with usain bolt's body so i can know what it feels like to run really really fast now i'm not claiming that this is a coherent desire i'm not claiming that it's 00:29:24 possible for me to remain jay and have usain bolt's body but i am claiming that i can desire it and if you are anything like me for some body or other you can desire to 00:29:36 have it for some time or other if you can form that desire then you in deep in your gut don't believe that you are your body you believe that you have a body and that 00:29:48 you might have a different body just like you might have a different hat or a different cat and if you believe that then you really do believe that whatever you are you are not your body 00:30:01 now you might think well that's obviously true i've never thought i was my body um but maybe on my mind i don't think you really believe that either and i want to do the same thought 00:30:13 experiment to convince you of that now i want you to think about somebody's mind that you'd really like to have maybe not for a long time maybe only for a few minutes um i'll tell you mine again i'm really 00:30:25 big and divulging you know hyper sharing over sharing personal secrets um i would really love to have stephen hawking's mind when he was still alive of course not now um and i'd like to have it only for about five or ten 00:30:36 minutes because what i would really like is to be able to really understand quantum gravity and i can't really understand it but if i had stephen hawking's mind for a few minutes then i could understand it now i obviously 00:30:48 don't want to be stephen hawking for one thing he's dead for another thing he was already stephen hawking and it didn't do me a damn bit of good what i want is to be me jay with his mind so that i can 00:31:00 use it to understand quantum gravity um i think that'd be really cool again i'm not claiming this is coherent i'm not claiming that it's possible but i am claiming that it's a 00:31:11 psychologically possible state to be in to crave somebody else's mind and if you like me can form that desire then you like me deep in your gut do not believe that you are your mind 00:31:25 you believe that you're something that has a mind just like you have a body um and that you possessed that mind and you could still be you with another mind and another body i mean just imagine having 00:31:37 the same bolts body in stephen hawking's mind that would be totally cool then i could understand quantum gravity while setting a new record for the 100 meter sprint um but that's not going to happen alas 00:31:50 um the moral of these experiments um takes us right back to chandragiri serpent i think the moral of these experiments is that deep down at an atavistic gut 00:32:02 level we believe that we are something that stands behind our minds and our bodies that thing is the self the thing that is not the mind in the body but possesses the mind in the body that's the thing 00:32:14 that sean decurity identifies as the serpent in the wall our arguments are going to be aimed at that not at our bodies not as our minds not as our personal identities they're 00:32:27 going to be aimed at that self that we really atavistically believe stands behind all of those that's the illusion that's the thing that causes us to be incompetent morally that causes us to be 00:32:41 confused about our own identities and to be confused about our role and our place in the world

o the chariot doesn't just depend upon 00:56:29 the narrow base of parts it depends upon our conceptual imputation which is an essential idea for child security that what there is in the world depends not only on things 00:56:42 outside of us but also on how we think about things i call that broad super veniance if the chariot doesn't just depend on its parts it depends on the whole scheme in which chariots figure as 00:56:57 objects

ernest becker has made a lot of is offered the same kind of argument which he calls terror management theory um shanti deva rather in the beginning of how to awaken uh how to lead an awakened 00:36:00 life talks about how terrified we are of death how terrified we are of being nothing how terrified we are what's going to happen after death becker doc talks about the same thing and shantideva 00:36:13 argues that in order to save ourselves from that terror what we do is we try to pause it make permanent and self safeguard this self becker does the same thing says we tend to reify ourselves as 00:36:24 a ball work um against terror to somehow manage our terror and but in any case self does seem the self illusion i think i think that idea is quite right by the way that the fear of death which is 00:36:36 deeply wired into us causes us to posit that self causes us to say hey maybe it can live forever maybe it can be reborn life after life after life maybe it can go to heaven things like that 00:36:48 but i also think the idea that affect is deeply related to our sense of self is really there shanti deva makes this point as well as does david hume um shanti deva uh points out that here's when you really decide you've got a self 00:37:02 it's when somebody insults you or hurts you right so somebody says garfield you idiot an and i immediately said wait a minute i'm a whole lot better than that how dare you talk to me like that i don't feel like my body's been 00:37:13 insulted i don't feel like my mind has been insulted i don't feel like my perceptions or sensations have been insulted i feel like i the thing that's got those things has been insulted and i want revenge at that point so that kind 00:37:27 of effect there or if you do something really cool like win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprint like i would love to do um with usain bolt's body um then you think when you're really proud of what you've done the pride 00:37:39 attaches not to my body not to my mind but to me so this idea that affect really brings up that sense of self i think is really important uh hume uh makes the same point in his treatise of human nature for those of 00:37:52 you who want to see this done in western philosophy he thinks that it's pride and shame that really bring up the idea of the self you know i mean when i'm ashamed of something that i'm done that i've done i'm not ashamed of my hand 00:38:04 that wrote badly i'm ashamed of me for having bad penmanship if i didn't give to a beggar i'm not ashamed that my mind did something wrong i'm ashamed that i did i was tight-fisted um and so the 00:38:16 idea that these and these aspects bring up the idea of self i think is very powerful and of course anger as i said earlier is another big one all of these involve egocentric attachment so it's when we're attached to things in a way that really fronts 00:38:29 our ego as the possessor then we find that we're positing that self and so this finishes the first of the three things i wanted to do this evening first was to convince you that you really do think yourself to explain what 00:38:42 that self is and to give some idea of why i think that you have why i think that you think that you have a self um no matter how much you might reject that idea on reflection

son kappa who i mentioned earlier identifies in his great book on the essence of hermenetics two different 00:33:57 kinds of self-grasping two different attitudes that you might have towards yourself he calls them innate self-grasping and self-grasping due to bad philosophy um 00:34:08 and son kappa argues there that philosophical self-grasping is really an attempt to make really good intellectual sense out of a deep illusion you can imagine 00:34:21 that as somebody saying gosh what i'm going to figure out is how drawing arrowheads on lines makes one line longer and one another line shorter right that's a dumb idea right but you can imagine people trying to do that or 00:34:33 somebody's saying i wonder how deep the water is in that mirage over there that's what sankampa thinks we're doing when we're really philosophically arguing that there's a self we're trying to make coherent and atavistic primitive 00:34:46 illusion but there's also that innate self-grasping that gives rise to that illusion it's on campuses it's actually really easy to get rid of philosophical self-grasping philosophical 00:34:58 self-grasping arises from bad philosophy and you can cure it by doing good philosophy so by the end of these four lectures you'll never believe in a philosophical argument for the self i'm sure of that but innate self-grasping he 00:35:10 thinks requires very long time of practice to try to effectively rewire the way that we understand the world

there is a difference between the 00:33:06 serpent and the elephant and that we do atavistically think that we are something other than our minds and bodies and i think that the serpent is real that is the serpent is the illusion illusory self that we need to get rid of 00:33:19 and so even if it's crazy to think that we are such a thing and when we say it out loud it sounds stupid and incoherent that doesn't stop us from believing it because we are stupid incoherent kinds 00:33:31 of beings wired for stupidity and incoherence with the task of somehow trying to unwire ourselves into something approaching inside

so i want to convince you now that you 00:27:18 really do think you have a self no matter how many years you've been practicing

we we can know that the 00:26:37 illusion the mueller liar illusion is an illusion we can draw it ourselves a hundred times but knowing that doesn't make it go away and that's because that illusion is perceptual not conceptual it's a we're 00:26:51 absolutely wired to see things that way and it may well be that we are wired or badly wired um to see ourselves as selves instead of as persons

now i want to introduce you to my favorite 00:24:20 illusion which is going to be important because i'm going to use it as a model for everything that we're going to talk about later when we talk about the self and that's the mueller liar illusion so here we have two lines with little arrowheads and 00:24:33 those two lines those two parallel lines are exactly the same length as one another you can sort of line them up visually and see that um but the arrowheads on each side make the 00:24:44 top line look much larger than the bottom line and the amazing thing about the mueller liar illusion one of the reasons i like it is a it's really easy to draw and b um even if you know that it's an 00:24:56 illusion you're totally sucked into it so um and i'm just always amazed by that right you can just draw this illusion for somebody draw the parallel lines the same length they see that draw the 00:25:08 arrowheads and all of a sudden the lines change in apparent length and i use this because it um it illustrates an important thing about an illusion and this is something that we find again from india as a definition of 00:25:21 an illusion an illusion is something that exists in one way but appears to us in a different way or for being very technical we would say something whose mode of existence and mode of appearance 00:25:33 are discordant but that is just atrociously technical and sensibilitic um so these two lines exist as equally long but they appear to be of 00:25:45 unequal lengths and that would that's what makes them an illusion a mirage exists as a refraction pattern of light but appears to be water so whenever we get that difference between a mode of appearance and a mode of existence we 00:25:59 have an example of illusion and i say that because i want to argue that the self is an illusion that we exist in one way that is as persons but we appear to exist as selves and so we have to come to understand 00:26:11 that illusion in order to begin dispelling it

the atman as i 00:20:34 said it's the witness the agent the enjoyer most importantly it's distinct from our body and mind it's their uh it's their owner and it's a permanent continuous thing unlike our bodies and minds which 00:20:48 are changing from moment to moment so they've got this kind of momentary impermanence but also as you may know they each come to an end we die um but the idea is that the self just 00:20:59 persists and goes on and on um and most importantly most most importantly when we identify the atman we're identifying what you are your essence or your core and so we might 00:21:13 think i change a lot my thoughts change my political preferences change my food preferences change my friends change but i remain the same as a self

the important thing to point out is that when we think of the self this way the self isn't my body or my mind i don't take my body to be myself and 00:17:39 we're going to see that in a moment but i think of the self the target of this analysis the snake in the wall as the thing that has a body the thing that has a mind and of course if we were 00:17:50 operating in india and taking a doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth for granted we would think of it as the thing that in different lives appropriates different bodies and minds um and 00:18:02 but remains the same through those lives but if we're not in a kind of reincarnation and rebirth kind of mood um then we might think that it's just the thing that endures through our entire life while everything else 00:18:15 changes that is um the thing that was me when i was an itty-bitty baby when i was a young handsome guy when now that i'm an old guy um that it's there's something continuous there and we think of that as 00:18:28 the self

snake is this self the atman as we say in sanskrit it's not my body it's not my mind it's the thing that has the body and the mind in 00:16:36 sanskrit literature um we think of that as the subject of all of our experience that's never object the knower that's never known the witness that stands outside the world and sees the world the 00:16:48 agent that acts on the world the enjoyer of experiences and lest you think that's antique sanskrit anybody who's read kant will recognize this as the transcendental subject of the first 00:17:00 critique the free transcendental agent of the second critique or the completely free aesthetic subject of the third critique so you don't have to be indian to think that there's an atman you can be prussian as well

tells a great story says there's this guy um who is pretty sure he's got a snake in the wall of his house and in india um 00:14:13 that's still a problem and it was a much bigger problem back in the 7th century that snakes especially crates but also cobras would in order to get warm take up residence in the nooks and crannies of the stone wall of a house so this guy 00:14:26 is afraid that he's got a snake in the wall of his house and he's in order to dispel his own fear he walks around the house convincing himself that there's no elephant there and chandra charity says wouldn't this 00:14:40 guy be a public laughingstock who tries to assuage his fear of the snake by convincing himself that there's no elephant and what's the point of this weird story 00:14:52 you might ask well the moral of the story is this the snake is the self it's the self that you really do john vacardi thinks believe that you have and 00:15:05 the elephant is all of the things you might convince yourself that you don't have or that the self isn't um in order to really convince yourself that you're a really cool no self person so you might say hey i know my body's not a 00:15:18 self i've really got no self down pat or i know my mind isn't the self i've got myself myself i've got myself really on the right track here or all of these things and chandra kiriti thinks that a lot of the time when we think that we're refuting 00:15:32 the idea of a self we're actually refuting something else and so that the first important thing to do is to identify what that thing is that is the target of 00:15:43 our critical inquiry

the possibility phenomenon is not a genuinely korean problem but a global problem that occurs primarily in the west. neurological diseases such as 00:14:20 exhaustion depression burnout or adhd determine the pathological landscape of many western countries today and korea is no exception 00:14:35 phenomenon particularly pronounced because the country has risen from a poorest agricultural country to a leading industrial nation in such a short time 00:14:47 this deep exhaustion and tiredness is certainly the price

the trip to korea is always a winter trip for me [music] [music] 00:13:16 if you are supposed to be on a subway platform, you immediately understand that you are in a tired society, you could say in a tired society in the final stage 00:13:30 the subways are supposed to be the same sleeping cars in which people decide whether they want to sleep after school everywhere and at different times in korea you can see people sleeping 00:13:44 people apparently people are fighting against permanent overtiredness very many people have long since succumbed to burnout and more than 100 die every year

but it also embodies the materials and labour deployed in China and Bolivia to produce those parts, which existing methods cannot capture.

Using a modified version of Köhler’s method, recent research has found that in 2015 drain from the South through unequal exchange amounted to $2.1 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), represented in Northern prices (Hickel et al., 2021). Köhler’s proxy approach is limited in several respects, however. It relies on PPP figures that do not adequately account for the comparatively high prices of Northern exports; it relies on GDP figures that are affected by the low prices of imports from the South; and it compares Southern exports to prices across whole economies, rather than to those of only traded goods. All of this leads to underestimating the scale of drain (see Hickel et al., 2021).

Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage.

According to the conventional public narrative, colonial patterns of extraction ended with the withdrawal of colonial troops, flags and bureaucrats from the territories of the global South. Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development

the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

Highlights•Rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the global South.•Drain from the South is worth over $10 trillion per year, in Northern prices.•The South’s losses outstrip their aid receipts by a factor of 30.•Unequal exchange is a major driver of underdevelopment and global inequality.•The impact of excess resource consumption in the North is offshored to the South.

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Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015

this has a few sections we're going to first talk about snakes and 00:12:58 elephants then about this idea of the atman it's the sanskrit name for itself the self that's the english word and the soul or suitcase we might say in christian theology then i will introduce 00:13:10 you to my favorite illusion because it's fun and it will help us to get a fix on what we're doing and then i will argue that in fact you do really think that you have a self so there is a point to all of this there 00:13:21 would be no point if we didn't think we had self there would be no point in refuting them and then we'll fight try to ask why you think you have a self so that's what we're going to do in the first part of tonight's talk

the first section i call who do you think you are what a self is and why you really do think you have one no matter how long you've been practicing 00:12:33 second why you really don't have the self you think you have third an exploration of what you are and that's where we'll really talk about personhood

in the third section we're going to focus on the ethical implications of all of this because i think that's really important that's why we do this and then in the fourth part we'll be 00:10:51 talking about what life looks like as a person as opposed to a self and why we should take all of this very seriously

tonight we'll be talking about selves and persons and i'll be arguing that you are a person but not a self um in the second session we'll be considering the poor vapes the opponents 00:10:25 people who are arguing that that yeah yeah jay whatever you said they're still a self and considering their arguments carefully and refuting them decisively and hopefully in that class we drive a wooden stake through the self

i'm going to be doing a powerpoint presentation for which i apologize because i know you're probably sick and tired of these in the zoom world but we do need um to do that in order to 00:09:49 make things work

jay has also done a lot of work in many other areas of philosophy including the foundations of cognitive science and philosophy of mind ethics 00:04:05 epistemology and the philosophy of logic and he's also done work in the methodology of cross-cultural interpretation

the next era in human history should be named the Symbiocene (from the Greek sumbiosis, or companionship). The scientific meaning of the word “symbiosis” implies living together for mutual benefit, and I wish to use this profoundly important concept as the basis for what I hope will be the next period of earth history. As a core aspect of ecological thinking, symbiosis affirms the interconnectedness of life and all living things.

the foundation on which we are building right now is seriously flawed and conducive of nothing but great waves of ennui, grief, dread, solastalgia, mourning, and melancholia. We must rapidly exit the Anthropocene with its non-sustainability, its perverse resilience, its authoritarianism, and its corrumpalism.

“corruptalism.”[6] Even better, perhaps, would be “corrumpalism” (from the Latin corrumpere, “to destroy”). Corrumpalism is the ability to corrupt and destroy the integrity of a social system and its biophysical foundation by perverting all forms of development via the use of misinformation, falsehoods, money, and/or violence to achieve self-interested outcomes that are the opposite of genuine cultural and ecological interests. We are seeing corrumpalism played out in a public way with the recent Volkswagen scandal, the FIFA scandal, the Olympics drugs scandal, the Exxon climate change scandal, the revelations of the Panama Papers, and many more worldwide, from intensely local to global scales. There can be no “Good Anthropocene” given the corruption that has already taken place.

Dominance by powerful vested interests has also become characteristic of what is called democracy. Rule by the people (the demos) has become corrupted by rule (kratos) by the powerful and hence is no longer a democracy at all, but, properly speaking, an oligarchy or plutocracy. It’s worse than that; capitalism is now run by what can be technically called corruption. Corporations and oligarchs use their autocratic power and wealth to influence policy, manipulate public officials, and minimize regulation. It is this form of government that is blatant in most parts of the world but more powerful, if not more subtle, in the so-called advanced countries of the western world.

The concept of resilience has also been appropriated by forces committed to the status quo

Sustainability is inadequate as a concept

doughnut economics does questionthe dominant economic growth paradigm [1,14]. How-ever, Brand et al. [49] see the absence of upper limits onthe social foundation as a particular limitation of thedoughnut, proposing that ‘societal boundaries’ areneeded to address injustice and slow the metabolism ofsocieties that overshoot ecological boundaries. Indownscaling efforts, determining such societal bound-aries would require powerful local leadership and in-tensive public engagement to foster their legitimacywhile also helping to identify the social and culturalresources that can support collective self-restraint [49].Such engagement may also help to counter the interestsof powerful actors who oppose socioeconomic limits orbenefit from greater inequality [69].

Translating the ambition behind the doughnut to localaction is inherently political given the demand for socialand economic shifts that imply a significant redistribu-tion of power and resources [23,65]. Critical social sci-ence research highlights the need for principles tounderpin such decision-making processes, ensuring thatgovernance for sustainable development is transparent,accountable, and responsive, particularly to those whoare marginalised [49].

Thisraises questions about the mechanisms to coordinate andmonitor change across scales, as well as the challenge ofmaintaining coherence over time while wider prioritiesand goals may shift. Given this, and the plethora of localgovernance institutions and arrangements that exist,successfully deploying the doughnut will require re-newed attention to coordination across multilevel gov-ernance regimes [5,53].

he concept of planetary boundariesprioritising scientific expertise and discussed primarily inacademic debates [14], and the doughnut commonlyappealing to policy-makers and practitioners at nationalor subnational scales, neither has the traction acrossspatial scales that has been achieved through the steerby the UN in the case of SDGs.

If the doughnut is to bea practical tool for governance it will need to involve newconversations incorporating political institutions, civilsociety organisations, and the wider public

downscaling poses the additional complexity ofunderstanding place-based dynamic systems to identifypathways that are safe and just over time [26,37]. Incomparison to national processes, where issues are ad-dressed by separate government departments and siloedpolicy agendas [22], local institutions may be better ableto generate integrative place-based policy and action[43,44]. However, institutional capacity and integrationmechanisms may be needed to support these kinds ofpolicies [45]. Applications of the doughnut present fur-ther challenges in this regard because of a need to in-tegrate and respond to changing scientific knowledgeregarding non-linear change, tipping points, interactionsand feedbacks [35], for which it may be difficult toidentify the implications for local contexts.

Downscaling the doughnut may require more attentionto connectivity across scales than has been demanded bypast approaches to local governance for sustainable de-velopment. The task of downscaling global models in-tensifies established challenges around goal setting,indicator selection, data availability and ongoing mon-itoring [18,22,23,26,39] because it requires goal setting tobe informed by an understanding of context-specificsocial and ecological trends and how they interact toinfluence both local and planetary outcomes. There areparticular complications in incorporating a burden-sharing approach that explores the extent to which localactivity contributes to global trends and problems.

We welcome scientific inputs based on new or existing work from scholars around the world to secure our future on Earth by defining a safe and just corridor and addressing this grand challenge on how to define scientific targets and levers of transformation (please submit through https://earthcommission.org/contribute/).

We will then analyze levers of transformation

the Earth Commission's report will be used to underpin the development of science-based targets for business and cities by SBTN.

To put any of these ideas into practice requires the involvement of diverse actors across scales from the local to global (Ostrom et al., 1999). While cross-scale translation is necessary to inform decisions by such actors at sub-global scales, translation is complicated by the spatial heterogeneity of pressures and impacts (Biermann & Kim, 2020) and the value-laden (Biermann & Kalfagianni, 2020; Häyhä et al., 2016) and potentially iterative (Pickering & Persson, 2020) judgments involved in the allocation of these targets.

2030 (UNGA, 2015) provides a global consensus on key justice principles of access and a starting point for an analysis of a safe and just corridor that aims to ensure that “no one will be left behind.

while it calls for reducing inequality, it has yet to set targets relating to how resources and risks should be shared. Although it calls for strengthening the means of implementation, it is unclear how such transformations will actually be leveraged.

A key challenge is to identify systems that enable sharing of Earth's limited resources and nature's benefits to ensure human well-being in equitable ways.

By identifying safe and just target ranges, the question arises: How can we achieve these targets and live within the corridor? Transforming toward a “just” world may be a pre-condition for being able to achieve a “safe” world. Leverage points to achieve such transformations are essential for governing our commons.

We propose that the stricter of the safe and just target ranges for each variable should define the safe and just corridor (Figure 2). Furthermore, we propose to identify a spread of safe and just targets corresponding to different physical risk tolerances and different understandings of environmental justice.

Second, a key question is how biophysically “safe” targets can be achieved while also meeting goals for human well-being and justice. For example, meeting the social goals of Agenda 2030 without widespread transformations may lead to crossing safe targets for the biophysical state of the Earth system (Sachs et al., 2019). Achieving biophysical targets, such as 1.5°C for climate or increasing ecosystem protection, can undermine well-being, if, for example, bioenergy competes with food production, or protected areas undermine local livelihoods (Hasegawa et al., 2020).

First, an “unsafe” world is likely to increase inequality, so “safe” would seem a necessary pre-condition for “just”—but not always a sufficient one. A “safe” target from a biophysical perspective may not be adequate to prevent large-scale risks to humans in specific contexts. For example, there are large risks for many human populations even with a 1.5°C climate target (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018).

Human choices and actions could narrow or widen the safe and just corridor for human development. Considering the complex interactions, feedbacks, and non-linearities within and between societal activities and Earth system behavior, we need to advance beyond previous frameworks such as the “donut” (Raworth, 2018) to understand when “safe” and “just” ranges do and do not overlap.

It is crucial to establish the key feedbacks regulating, or destabilizing, each safety variable, and how they interact on different timescales. To quantitatively assess and combine these feedbacks, an established but under-used approach of calculating and combining feedback “gain” factors (Lashof, 1989) can provide a useful framework.

Identifying safe ranges for these systems in isolation, for example as the planetary boundary framework has done (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen, Richardson, et al., 2015), will not be enough to describe a safe corridor.

An integrated framework is needed that aligns safe and just Earth system variables while also accounting for sub-global scales and interactions between Earth system processes.

We distinguish between scientific Earth system targets, targets at the global or near-global scale that are generated primarily by scientific inquiry but may be informed by societal judgments about risks (Pickering & Persson, 2020), and science-based targets, targets for actors that are aligned with scientific evidence but which may involve negotiations based on responsibility and feasibility (Andersen et al., 2020).