Upstream - Post Capitalism w/ Alnoor Ladha

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

“Post capitalism is not simply another ‘ism’ to replace previous ideologies. It’s not a euphemism for socialism or anarchism or Nordic capitalism—although it may contain some elements of each. Post capitalism is a conceptual container for social pluralities based on shared values that stem from an experience of the shortcomings of the existing system and the lived experience of life-centric alternatives.” These are words written by today’s guest, Alnoor Ladha, along with his co-author Lynn Murphy from their book Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse. We’ve brought on Alnoor to share more about what post capitalism is and how we can embody it and encourage it in our lives and activism.  Alnoor is an activist, journalist, political strategist and community organizer. He was the co-founder and executive director of The Rules and he is currently the council chair for Culture Hack Labs and co-director of the Transition Resource Circle.  In this conversation Alnoor takes us upstream to the ontological root causes of colonialism and capitalism, he describes the importance of cultivating what he calls spiritual-cultural praxis, he cautions against the commodification and exploitation of plant medicines, and invites us to study culture, become conscientious objectors of capitalism, and contribute to the collective prayer and movement for co-liberation of all beings. Further resources and related episodes: Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse Upstream: Buddhism and Marxism with Breht O'Shea Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.    

Before we get started, we want to invite you to take a new course that Della recently co-created on Cooperative and Regenerative Economic Design. This online course, co-facilitated by Della and Emma Woods of Flourish Economics, will run for eight weeks from the end of May to the beginning of August, include core texts, reading ideas, and interactive live sessions to help you unlearn the assumptions underlying mainstream economics and locate your unique contribution to post-capitalist economic systems change. Upstream listeners will receive 25% off of tuition through the link in the shown-outs. Thank you. Ah Ah Post-capitalism is not simply some totalizing ideology.

It's more of a plurality. It's a polycultural approach. So if late-stage capitalism and this current brand of capitalism, which we could call neoliberalism, in the last 70 years this kind of accelerated snowball effect of industrial capitalism, that dominant sort of form is essentially the soil and the conditions by which post-capitalism is created. So if the dominant culture can be described as monoculture, if we allowed the system to go to its logical

conclusion, we'd all have Apple computers and Microsoft Office and Nike shoes and we'd listen to Beyonce or whatever corporate capitalism wanted us to listen to and be eating GMO Monsanto foods and you know that's kind of its trajectory. And so the antidote to monoculture is polyculture. Many ways of knowing and being, seeing and relating to the world, many tongues, many approaches, many cosmologies, many ontologies. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Post-capitalism is not simply another ism to replace previous ideologies. It's not a euphemism for socialism or anarchism or Nordic capitalism, although it may contain some elements of each. Post-capitalism is a conceptual container for social pluralities based on shared values

that stem from an experience of the shortcomings of the existing system and the lived experience of life-centric alternatives. These are words written by today's guest, Elnur Lada, along with his co-author, Lynn Murphy, from their book, Post-Capitalist Philanthropy. We've brought on Elnur to share more about what post-capitalism is and how we can embrace it and encourage it in our lives and activism. and how we can embrace it and encourage it in our lives and activism. Al Noor is an activist, journalist, political strategist, and community organizer. He was the co-founder and executive director of The Rules,

and he is currently the council chair for Culture Hacks Lab and co-director of the Transition Resource Circle. In this conversation, Al Noor takes us upstream to the ontological root causes of colonialism and capitalism. He describes the importance of cultivating what he calls spiritual cultural praxis. He cautions against the commodification and exploitation of plant medicines and invites us to study culture, become conscientious objectors of capitalism, and contribute to the collective prayer and movement for co-liberation of all beings. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded.

We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes at least once a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalogue of episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one time donation at our website upstream podcast dot org forward slash support. Through your support you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this

whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to find so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Del in conversation with Alnoor Ladaf. Welcome, welcome to Upstream. Let's start with an introduction. How might you introduce yourself for our listeners? I would just keep it simple and say, my name is Elnur Eladda. But if you want me to say more, of course I can.

What would be some of the things that feel relevant to an introduction today? You know, I'm personally of the school that introductions and biographies reify the ego. And, you know, I come from a Sufi tradition and in our practice, the main aim is the transcension of subject-object. And this is why we do zikr, which is remembrance, the form of mantra, and other spiritual practices, silence, meditation. And then, you know, I engage in the Western world and I was socialized in the Western world. And so I'm always slightly uncomfortable with all of the

the need to credentialize. And you know what I'd say is if ideas are interesting, then they're your ideas to remix. And if they're not interesting, and you need to look at my biography to see what credentials I have in order to validate that, then you know, that's that's your journey. You can go on. Well, at least I heard you name your Sufi background that felt relevant and important to weave in today. So I hear that. And post-capitalism is really what I thought we'd focus on today. I'm wondering what were some of the first moments you either heard of post-capitalism or felt connected to it or felt it was relevant. What was your introduction to that theme, that word, that idea?

So I grew up in the anti-globalization movement that had a culmination moment in 1999 at the WTO protests in Seattle. And there was a lot of anti, right? And a lot of critique, rightfully so. And so I kind of sat with this non-dual discomfort with the notion that I was a product and I am a product of globalization and late stage capitalism.

My parents were East African immigrants to Canada. I grew up and was socialized in the heart of the empire. Let's say that the kind fascist version, the Canadian version of it. And I also and still do stand against the ideological underpinnings of capitalism, including colonialism, imperialism, genocide, perpetual growth, all of that, patriarchy, heteronormativity, all of the kind of key tenets that prop up the existing system. And simultaneously, I saw indigenous cultures, mystical traditions, resistances of all kinds, influenced and informed by capitalism, but living outside the value structures and the incentive

landscape of the dominant culture. And so in the book, Post-Capitalist Philanthropy, and when I refer to post-capitalism, I'm not talking about post-capitalism in a kind of linear sense, some temporalism that comes after the existing system. I'm referring to it in the way that academics, for example, talk about post-modernism, informed by modernity. So post-capitalism is informed by capitalism. I think we have to be good students of our culture. We need to understand the limitations and consequences and impoverishment of the capitalist superstructure in order to create

outside of the constructs of capitalism. And so, that's how I'm referring to it. of capitalism. And so that's how I'm referring to it. And in the sense you could say post-capitalism is not simply some totalizing ideology, it's more of a plurality. It's a polycultural approach. So if late-stage capitalism and this current brand of capitalism, which we could call neoliberalism, in the last 70 years this kind of accelerated snowball effect of industrial capitalism, that dominant sort of form is essentially the soil and the conditions by which post capitalism is created. So if the dominant culture can be described as monoculture, if we allowed the system to go to its logical conclusion, we'd all have Apple computers and Microsoft Office

and Nike shoes, and we'd listen to Beyonce or whatever corporate capitalism wanted us to listen to and be eating GMO Monsanto foods. And that's kind of its trajectory. And so the antidote to monoculture is polyculture. Many ways of knowing and being, seeing and relating to the world, many tongues, many approaches, many cosmologies, many ontologies. But what they do share is they share a set of values. They share a set of values around reciprocity, generosity, cooperation, communalism, mutual responsibility, mutual aid, solidarity with

all life. Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I'm hearing this word post-capitalism, and in hearing it, there's no hyphen there, just to note that, that it's not necessarily after capitalism, but that it's in reference to, and we'll get to how it's actually not after capitalism because there's ways that it's alive today and has been alive in the past. And then I'm hearing that it's a polycultural approach, many ontologies, many epistemologies, many roads up the mountain, so to speak, that it's pluralistic. And also that it's based on values, which when I read in the book, I was thinking of the intrinsic values from the Common Cause Foundation, right? The extrinsic values and the intrinsic ones, the

values like generosity, kindness, altruism, solidarity, care. So those are, yeah, some ways to describe post-capitalism. Maybe can you say a little bit more about that piece around it's not necessarily after capitalism, but that it has been alive and is alive? Like, can you go into that a little bit more for us? One way I think about capitalism and we'll use capitalism, capitalist modernity, late stage capitalism and neoliberalism interchangeably. And of course, they all have their nuance. capitalism, capitalist modernity, late stage capitalism, and neoliberalism interchangeably. And of course they all have their nuance, but for our purposes, let's think of neoliberalism

as just the latest chapter of capitalist modernity and capitalist modernity starting 5,000 years ago with the invention of the city-state and hierarchy and patriarchy and perpetual war. And there have been cultures, of course, that have always been outside of that. Most Indigenous cultures, hunter-gatherer cultures, mystical traditions, spiritual traditions, and many others. And even in this sort of more brief period of the sort of neoliberal era since the 70s, we see massive experiments in post-capitalist living. We have the Zapatistas from the early 90s, this sort of 1.5 million person indigenous community in Chiapas in the food basket of Mexico

declaring their independence in the 90s. And of course, then having to go to war with the Mexican government and the CIA and other apparatchiks of the Western system. We have Rojava in the Middle East that recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary, which is the Kurdish autonomous movement, five million person autonomous zone between Turkey, Syria and Iraq. We have, you know, even the smaller impulses of the eco-village communities, places that have a deep structural critique

of the existing system and are trying to live outside of that, putting lands in stewardship, community land trusts, creating their own currencies, having strong bioregional localist impulses like mutual aid networks and food sovereignty. We also see this in large mass movements like La Via Campesina, the farmer-peasant movement, the world's largest social movement. So they're deeply informed by the values of capitalism. And then through those critiques and the sort of embodied understanding of the consequence of capitalism and what it does to us, its colonization of mind, body, soul, psyche, heart,

as well as its destruction of the living world and the ecologies and the biomes that we live within. And then they're actively creating these experiments outside of that system. And so the two feed each other in this discursive way. And you know, similar to if we look at just Rojava and Zapatistas, for example, as like sort of two of the modern archetypal examples of post-capitalist living, what they share in common is that they have, you know, a deep indigenous mystical ontology at its core, right? The Zapatistas are mostly Mayan, Rojava, even though it is mostly Kurdish,

holds lots of other minorities, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Christians, other denominations of Islam, and Christians as well. But there's a kind of a deep mystical underpinning. So that's one. Obviously, I mentioned the critique of capitalist modernity, which is at its core. The term capitalist modernity comes from the work of Abdullah Oshalan, who's the founder of the PKK and the father of the Rojavan Revolution and Kurdish independence. So they share that and they also share kind of a horizontal anarchist approach to governance. And lastly, you know, part of their critique of patriarchy and heteronormativity that is baked into capitalism is that they often have female-led and elder-led councils that inform the democratic ongoings of

how decision-making happens and how governance happens. Thank you for those examples that have existed and currently exist. And I'm reminded of the two feminist economists, Gibson Graham, who wrote about post-capitalist realities as though we perform diverse economies, right? And there are ways that we perform capitalism, but when we think of capitalism as all pervasive, it's capital-centric and even gives capitalism more power than necessary. And there's actually ways that each of us, even those who are not in the Zapatista region or in Rojava actually participate in these diverse economies every day, such as the sharing economy and land trusts, worker cooperatives, mutual aid, et cetera.

So yeah, thank you for reminding me of that. Anything more you might say about that? You touched on this before in our correspondence around the idea of the complex adaptive system. So one way to think about the dominant culture and its political economy of neoliberalism is to think about it as a complex adaptive evolutionary system.

So it's alive, but not the way in ecology is alive, the way Frankenstein or AI is alive. It's a manmade construct, and I'm purposely not saying human made. So it's a man-made construct and it has a set of rules and those rules are generative. And so the invention of debt growth-based currency, the invention of compound interest, there's certain generative outcomes that happen from that. So if you have a head start on capital, i.e. you're a descendant of Western Europeans who invented debt-based capital, you have an exponential reward on that capital compounded over 500 plus years.

If you have debt, you receive exponential debt. And so we say, okay, well, what the complex adaptive system does, any complex adaptive system, it wants to survive. So it finds those who serve its logic and it pulls them to the top. We're told there's a merit system. You go to the right school, you get the right job, you will somehow be rewarded by the system. But it doesn't actually work like that. What the system does, it rewards those who are best willing and most likely to serve its outcomes. But what are its outcomes? We just have to look around us, right? It's short-termist, greedy, extractionist, acquisitional, forces expropriation on others and dispossession, and is a kind of winner-takes-all,

zero-sum logic. And so the people who are willing to do that, the bidding for that structure, who are willing to align themselves with the incentive landscape of that structure will be rewarded. And it sounds somehow theoretical or esoteric, but it's very simple, right? Instead of looking at the cover of New York Times Magazine or Fortune as these people are somehow successful, which is the neoliberal spell and the ideology that's pushed, these people are actually the most willing subjects of neoliberalism. And so it's very applicable in the sense we see it applied on a day-to-day basis. And when we think of how capital mediates every aspect of our lives, right, where we grew up, what we do for a living, what our parents did for a living, how much leisure time we have, what's the socioeconomic, racial, gender background of our neighbors, all of that is being mediated by capital. And we don't want to, it's sort of a

non-dualistic proposition, right, that we can diminish the power of capital by withdrawing our support of that system and engaging in these other forms of cooperation, as you say from worker co-ops to land trusts etc, gifting, mutual aid and simultaneously we've been forced and coerced into a globalized system where we used to have many ways to acquire goods and services, hunting, bartering, gifting, trading, fishing, foraging and now there's one way to acquire goods and services primarily, which is debt-based capital. And that is deeply tied to the onslaught of colonialism in the 1500s.

So debt-based currency, the establishment of centralized banks, all the Vatican, all the major European powers, and then later the US established their central banks at the same time as colonialism, at the same time as the so-called perfection of seafaring technology, the guns, germs and steel theory. So all of these things kind of coalesce at the same time and part of the sort of colonialist impulse was not simply which European nation would take over which geography, but it was really about imposing two things in addition to imperialist rule. It was about adopting that particular currency. So I had an Alaskan elder here a couple of months ago, a Yupik elder. She has to pay

$2,500 a year in US currency to have the right to fish on her ancestral waterways, to do salmon fishing that her ancestors have done for millennia. And that is very purposely done. So she has to go work a bullshit job within the system in order to pay that money back. And then of course, the missionary impulse of Christianity. So coloniality, Christianity, and capitalism came as this trifecta. Yes, it did, absolutely. And I really hear what you're saying about the system is self-reinforcing or that it incentivizes and rewards those who participate in its operating values and principles. And when I hear that, I think about Joanna Macy's frame as business as usual, and that it's easier to get the bullshit job or to invest in extractive and exploitative investments or to purchase things

on Amazon. They're so seductive, easy, quick, even cheap. And I use that in quotes, because there's also a huge cost, you know, human and other than human. But you know, it's like this moving sidewalk of oppression where if you do nothing, you're still moving on that sidewalk of business as usual. And the system rewards that behavior. And those who are playing that game are winning. And so one thing that comes up for me is as I visited places that are post-capitalist, for example, Mondragon in Spain, the world's largest cooperative ecosystem, is that I saw the ways that Mondragon was trying to compete within capitalism and that that was detrimental to it, that it couldn't compete, having more cooperative values and trying to be more environmentally and equitably just. It had

so much trouble and I had this feeling of like, wow, we really too moved to post-capitalism, we cannot win by competing in capitalism at capitalism's own game. We need to change the rules or the goal or all of that. So I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more about, you know, knowing that the system rewards that behavior and incentivizes that and those who are at the top are the ones who are the the easeful players of that game. What is the way that we turn around on the moving sidewalk, that we go the other way, or that we somehow move towards this post-capitalist reality more fully? That's a great question and layered, right?

Because when we talk about capitalism, we're obviously not just referring to markets, right? Markets and exchanges have existed even before proto-capitalism. We're talking about a very specific system that prejudices capital above all else. All that matters within the capitalist system is the expansion of capital.

Everything else is a so-called externality, right? The euphemism that economists talk about for so-called unintended consequences, which many have argued is just simply the logical outcomes of capitalism, including ecological destruction, species extinction, spiking pandemics, rising authoritarianism, etc. Because whatever serves the context of increasing capital will be the thing that the power elites gravitate

to, right? Every dollar of wealth created since 2008, about 93 cents ends up in the hands of the top 1%. So by definition, growth creates poverty and inequality. Every dollar of wealth created heats up the planet because we have a fossil fuel extractive based economy. So by definition, capitalism creates climate change. And so the difficulty of being in this moment is, you know, it was easy to be a conscientious objector in 1940s Germany, right? There was a mustachioed fascist and there was a very clear ideology and we could say, you know, I'm against the Nazis, I will not

participate in this system. But when the system is as subtle and seductive as the complex adaptive system is, we are enmeshed in it in all sorts of ways. And so I'd say, you know, the first step, as with many of the post-capitalist experiments, is to really be good students of our culture. If we spent a third of the time, we did understanding the political economy and I would even say the esoteric dimensions of the political economy it's active colonization of our bodies at a cellular level the mimetic real estate that's taken by

Concepts like the invisible hand, you know the notion that we are inherently competitive that we are red in tooth and claw and That if we just serve our own interests, somehow this perfect equilibrium will be created. We have mostly internalized that, right? We've been socialized, conditioned, and trained to believe aspects of that, and it is repeated everywhere. It's repeated in the media, it's repeated in, you know, every economics textbook, every social science textbook. There's a neo-Darwinism smuggled in to the dominant ideology. And so if we spent a third of the time that we do on, let's say, self-help books, reading Joe Dispenza or Tony Robbins or whatever people read these days, we would already have a revolution

on our hands. So that would be the first thing I would say is just being in this active spiritual political praxis of really understanding the culture and what it is doing to us at a cellular level, at a communal level, at a superstructural level. The second is, and I think this will be a natural outcome of studying the culture, is to be a conscientious objector. And it's much more difficult to do in the context of a complex adaptive system, but it is possible.

And there are more and more people, communities, even nation-states who are moving in that direction. And we see this, for example, in the degrowth movement, this kind of heterodox economics movement that sort of deeply understands the ecological aspects, right? It came from ecological economics. So being a conscientious objector can happen not just at an individual level. This is not just like a neoliberal choice thing, right? When every aspect of our lives is mediated by capital, when abstraction is the dominant cultural milieu and modality, we have to actively do that work.

And that's going to look different for different people. You know, I'm not really in the business of subscribing what one should do, but I think that will be a sort of natural outcome. And then the third I would say is to actively create embodied cultures of post-capitalism. And that does not mean you have to convert everyone around you. Embodied cultures can be created by three people coming together and saying, we no longer want to live in transaction and commodification and extraction. We want to actively create futures worth living that are in symbiosis with the living world

and the living cosmos. One of the things that I read when I was preparing for this conversation was that you resigned as a conscientious objector to neo-colonial philanthropy. So I loved that title and that certainly relates to what you just shared, what you just invited in us. And also in the book with Lynn, you both shared a summary of neoliberal premises, which really I see as some of the things you're talking about where it's like, what is it about mainstream economics, the assumptions underlying mainstream economics that we've been taught, that we may believe to be true, even if it's not obvious or conscious to us. And here are some of them, that humans are inherently selfish and competitive, that material wealth and power determine well-being, meaning, life success, and virtue.

And hierarchy is inevitable and in fact necessary for order. Those are just a few, but I just read them to invite when we're listening to see, oh, is that something that I know, that I know that I'm thinking is true or that I didn't even know that I thought was true or that I'm actively working on learning the truth of that. So just making them kind of obvious or clear and then inviting us to explore those in our own lives. I'm really grateful for your, like really just breaking them down in a way that's very simple.

And maybe just a point of clarification. So it was Lynn who retired as a conscientious objector. She used to work at a big foundation. And I guess I did in some ways by refusing to engage in the game of fundraising within philanthropic institutions. And yeah, we do this in our different ways, Lynne and I, and many people have done it differently. But you know, part of the reason we wrote the book on philanthropy is not because I'm necessarily interested in philanthropy. My background was as an activist organizer.

And of course, as a result, I had to engage with institutional philanthropy, right? Which is both an externality and an extension of neoliberal capitalism. A few people have amassed all this wealth and now they're deciding the agenda for civil society and social movements. And Lynn was on the other side of that as somebody who was writing checks and cultivating

ecosystems around development and education and she walked away from that. And myself and many activists like me have had to find ways to operate outside of philanthropy to do our organizing, and our activism, and our social movement work outside of those constructs. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Al Noor Lada. We'll be right back. By the warming sea Buying something in a bag Walking through the war To the corner store Everyone was poor and sad So I took the fight, lay long dead night I was sick of fear and shame

And I know it all could be your fault But I need someone to blame After the revolution We'll have a better life You'll be a better husband I'll be a better wife We'll have accumulation We'll take away What will always be this day Well, the world is small

And I fucked it all Long before we came around Now we work all day Try to catch a break But there's nowhere to be found And it's hard to love love, like you won't give up When the whole thing's coming down After the revolution, we'll have a better life You'll be a better husband, I'll be a better husband I'll be a better wife

We'll have accumulations We'll take a holiday We'll always be in stress Might win there for that learning bread When they all knew what was fair Now we try to fade but it don't seem right Right by the wall And you'll free us After the revolution We'll have a better life You'll be a better husband I'll be a better wife

After the revolution We'll have a better life You'll be a better husband I'll be a better wife We'll have a jubilation We'll take a holiday Won't always be this way I'll always be this way

I'll always be this way I'll always be this way That was After the Revolution by Carsey Plantin. Now back to our conversation with Al Noor Lada. So this show is called Upstream and it comes from a metaphor around the challenges of our time and then going upstream to the root causes. And so I'm wondering, I would love to hear your journey on this. If you can start with what is it that's happening in the world right now that's breaking your heart that you're really troubled by or moved by. And then if you can go upstream from that, what are those root causes as far as upstream as you want to go that you're seeing the kind of the causes or the reasons for what we're seeing in the world? Thank you. Maybe I'll bridge the two because I sort of deflected your question around the tenets of neoliberalism through the conscientious objector clarification. So something that breaks my heart and is also related to my journey is understanding that neoliberalism is not a political philosophy but really it is a

theology. It is a religion. It is a way of seeing the world and it proffers answers to all the major questions that a theology or cosmology would do. And so there's a point of view, as you said, on human nature and how we need to socially organize to optimize for the best outcome. And of course, in the case of capitalism, that is the expansion of GDP. But also our lens on the world, what we describe as ontology. Ontology is just a philosophical term.

Onto comes from the Greek vision, also being, beingness of the world, the is-ness of the world, our sense of what is real and why it's real. And a simple way to think about ontology is the manner by which we approach. So the manner by which we approach is more important than the thing we think we're approaching. So my laptop, for example, is placed right now on this wooden

table. Now the dominant ontology is based on what I would call the unholy trinity of separation, materialism and rationalism. So what it tells us is, and what it does is it imbues our gaze. So the very gaze by which I look at this table is that I as a human and separate that we are anthropologically superior, we are on top of the evolutionary ladder as opposed to let's say the youngest species in evolution, which would be a more humble modest way to approach the situation. The materialism part is that we believe that we can reduce the entire material world to its constituent subparts. The entire world is reduced to the atom, the atom to

the proton, neutron, and electron, and now with quantum physics it can be reduced to the quanta or the photon or the quasar or what have you. And that science is going to achieve this grand unifying theory of everything. That is the arrogance baked into the Western arrow of progress, that we will eventually understand everything. We're gonna crack this grand unifying theory. And the rationalism is not only will we crack this theory, we are entitled to do so with our limited human neocortex. That we have the right to categorize and instrumentalize the lifeblood of this world.

And seeing the replication of that ontology in everything we do is probably the most heartbreaking aspect of capitalist modernity. Every problem we try to solve, we create a thousand new problems because the core ontology is unchanged. So now, you know, the kind of tech utopian worldview is that, oh, well, geoengineering is going to fix climate change.

Totally unaffected by the thousand consequences that come from interfering with a complex ecology and ecosystem in the ways that are proposed, or carbon capture or cryptocurrency. And all of these things are just subsets of capitalism itself, even science and technology. Who's determining the agenda? What school did they go to? Who's funding it?

What are their research priorities? All of it is a replication of neoliberal logic. And when we look at, let's say, the genocide in Palestine and the massive unjust crises that are happening all over the world, Yemen, etc., they all are sort of microcosms of this broader ontology, right? The idea that we can transplant six million mostly Western European white Jews to the middle of the Middle East and create an iron dome of protection funded by US and European military money and turn that into

the military industrial complex torture and innovation hub of the imperialist West. And that Israelis are gonna be able to go to the beach and live this very high quality of life. And then there's these zones of sacrifice all around it with brown and indigenous people being the victims of that quote-unquote neoliberal sacrifice is part of the western ontology of separation materialism and rationalism. Some people are worth saving, there are chosen people, and every major issue we look at is related to the ontology of capitalist modernity.

Now, we even take something like COVID. Now, whether you believe COVID was created in a Wuhan biological lab as part of warfare or whatnot, zoologists and epidemiologists are telling us there's going to be at least a 10 times increase in zoonotic viruses like COVID because the more we encroach on the natural world and we destroy natural habitats, species that were never supposed to interact are now interacting. And new viruses are being born, species are being displaced, other necessary keystone species are going extinct, right? We're in the midst of the sixth great extinction, thousand times the baseline rate of ordinary extinction. And you know, you remove one thing from an ecosystem and you can have collapse.

We are now mitigating for a three degree rise in temperature by mid-century. That is correlated to 40% of all biodiversity going extinct. 40% of the living world will no longer be with us. And this will not be necessarily dogs and zebras and things we can see, but it's the phytoplankton, it's the coral reefs, it's the pollinator species, it's the insect species, it's all of these keystone species that have evolved over billions of years and we've all benefited from this stable period of the Holocene that came before the Anthropocene. And so part of the Anthropocene is the replication of capitalist modernity's ontology. And I would say that that is the for me the core heartbreak. And we even see it in activism, we see it in

social change, we see, you know, all the do-gooders replicating the system. Yes, thank you. Thank you for going into the heartbreak. And then what you find when you go upstream, this ontology of separation, of materialism, of rationalism. And I'm wondering this idea then of going to an ontology of remembering, like reconnecting ourselves or to liberation. We can hear that, but what does that feel like? So I'm wondering if you could, you know, you described your computer on top of the desk and how it feels in the materialism, separation, rationalism, ontology. How would you describe that same picture, but in a liberation ontology or a reconnection ontology frame?

Yeah. So if this computer is on this wooden table and I'm seeing it from the ontology of capitalist modernity, it is simply dead inert matter and I'm entitled to do what I want with it. Everything is for human pleasure and extraction and our purposefulness. And there are many other ontologies. So we take one ontology. If we take an indigenous worldview or a mystical worldview, this table is actually kin that I am in relationship with. It has sacrificed its life to be in this relationality with me. At the very minimum, I owe it the reciprocity of dialogue, of consent, of care, of mutualism. And we can say that the antidote logic or an approach to one antidote logic would be not to necessarily amputate the unholy trinity because there's a role for the ego and the belief that we are in individual bodies and non-dualistically that's true. And at the same time let's say we could superimpose another Trinity and we would

create some kind of Merkabah and the overlay of this other Trinity could look something like replacing or let's say ameliorating or augmenting separation with the notions of interbeing or interbecoming or collaboration, understanding that none of us are free until all of us are free. Our healing and our freedom are bound together. And you know this is not just like a shift of a key that you can just simply move from separation to you know an interbecoming ethic. It requires political spiritual praxis. Cultures worthy of the word culture created their entire civilizations around being able to hold and to, let's say, cultivate humans. Humans are not born. Humans are cultivated in cultures that orient them

to the times that they're born in. And this is why they have ritual and ceremony and initiation and elderhood to be able to acclimatize beings into the context they're in. And then if we look at an antidote to rationalism, that might be relationalism, right, that there is no objective truth with a capital T, because we've invented the circular logic of the scientific method. Now I'm not against science, you know, I study philosophy of science in grad school, but I think of science as the floor of understanding. It's one modality for consensus. It is not the ceiling of understanding.

We thought the earth was a billion years old, not more than 150 years ago, and now we understand it to be 4.4 billion years old. And true scientists understand that, that it's always a moving set of dynamic constraints and knowledge is subjective, it's temporary, it's reflexive, it feeds on itself, that there's all forms of biases imported and there's a line from David Abram in the spell of sensuous and I'm paraphrasing it but he said something like, there is no objective truth with a capital T, there's only the quality of relations. That truth is subjective relationality and we learn from hearing other people's diverse subjective ontologies. And that only can happen through deep relations.

And not just with other humans but the more than human realms as well. And then the last part is the antidote to materialism looks something like animism. To see the world as alive, as having agency, as having its own Enteleki, as worthy of dialogue and consent and reciprocity. And you know animism, especially coming out of the Western anthropology, was considered a pejorative. It was seen as archaic, it was seen as primitive, but it's much more sophisticated than dead materialism. And even Earth system science and quantum physics and evolutionary biology are catching up to this. Even if we take something like the Gaia hypothesis. How could we have inert, dead, inanimate sub-beings within

a Gaian whole that is living, breathing, and conscious? Using their own logic, that would be fallacious logic if we stick to the axiomatic premises of scientific materialism. Yeah, I'm thinking of Thomas Berry, the universe is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects. And I'm thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer and in Braiding Sweetgrass, the grammar of animacy to think of things not as nouns, but as verbs, like that water is behaving Bay-like instead of it is a Bay. Because when we say a bay, we're trapping the water between its shores and proclaiming it dead. And then I'm also thinking of Sophie Banks, a teacher at Schumacher College. She would start her lectures by writing truth with a capital T on the board, and then she would cross

it off. And she'd say, what I'm about to share is not the truth. And I just love that. What a gift as a participant, as a student to hear from the person sharing that they are not an expert and this is not the truth with a capital T, that it's really an exploration and that we can bring in our beginner's mind and our inquisitiveness and our inquiries and our lived experiences and our bodies into the classroom, into the learning. So thank you. Totally. You made me think of I have a dear elder brother named Teokas in Ghost Horse, who's a Lakota elder, and he is really a sort of master practitioner at animistic language. And he often talks about how English is such a binary reductionist language that's majority nouns. So everything is thingified, right? And person, place or thing. And old Lakota, which only a very small group of people still

speak because when the English came, they brought their linguists to bastardize Lakota. But old Lakota has all verbs. So it's an active language. So you wouldn't say there's a storm coming you would just say storming and It's inherently animistic because it removes the this sort of subject-object separation Yeah, you're reminding me of a Meditation teacher, you know one said, you know, I am NOT like they wouldn't like Della Duncan I am the phenomenon right now of countless coordination of beings that in this moment is described as like Della Duncan. I am the phenomenon right now of countless coordination of beings that in this moment is described as this Della Duncan phenomenon. So I'm just reminding of asking you to introduce yourself at just the complexity of that when coming from a different

ontology than the one that is the dominant one. Right, right. And it's very delusional, right? We are more like rhizomatic tendencies than some finite atomized being. Like even our notions of where our boundary lines end and where the so called objectified world begins are totally delusions. They're constructs of our ontology. So, you know, you brought up spiritual political pra, and that's in your book as well. And I just love that phrase. And it reminds me of an interview we did with Brett O'Shea, who talked about the Bodhisattva Revolutionary. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about spiritual political praxis.

And what does spiritual political praxis mean to you? And what invitations for others might you offer by way of exploring this in their own lives? So even the notion that the spiritual and the political are somehow two different domains of our lives is part of the neoliberal construction. What it does from a pedagogical perspective and educational perspective is that it moves towards these specializations. So when we go to university, you just go into higher and higher abstraction, higher and higher specializations, and then you're considered an expert in this one unconnected domain to

the whole. And so now we've separated politics and economics, which even a hundred years ago was unthinkable. We've separated in philosophy epistemology, the study of knowledge, why we think we think what we think, to and from ontology, how we see the world, from moral philosophy and ethics, how we should behave in the world. And Karen Barad, the quantum physicist and philosopher in her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, talks about an onto ethical epistemology. That we cannot separate how we see from how we behave, from how we think we think what we're thinking, because all of these things are

entangled. And it's the same with the spiritual and the political. Everything is mediated by the political economy. Everything is mediated by capital in our globalized world. So even, you know, who decides the economics of an ashram? Where is their funding coming from? Who gets to go to the mountain and do the 40 days in silence? Who provides the food for that person? Who provides the transportation from that person? You know, all of it is interconnected with the sort of very means of production. And so we can't separate the spiritual and the political

because the political and the economic and the ethical are mediating our spiritual lives and vice versa. So even the notion of the inner outer split, and we hear this often in the new age communities, right? All you can do is take care of yourself, right? All you can do is take care of yourself, right? All you can do is evolve yourself. And the neoliberal constructs, even when you get on a plane, you are told you put your oxygen mask on first

before you take care of the person beside you, right? It's very deeply embedded. Whereas I think of the Buddhist line that says, enlightenment doesn't happen in a cave, it happens in the mouth of the Buddhist line that says, enlightenment doesn't happen in a cave, it happens in the mouth of the lion. It's not in these like isolated places of spirituality or meditation in the ashram, in the church, in the mosque, in the temple, what have you, that sort of spiritual evolution happens. For me, as somebody who grew up as an activist and an organizer, I've had my deepest spiritual experiences doing nonviolent direct action,

organizer, I've had my deepest spiritual experiences doing nonviolent direct action, being in mass protests, in having to bring farmers and peasant farmers to negotiate with the World Bank. Being in the face of evil in that way, being in the mouth of the lion, it sort of pushes my spiritual process because healing is not happening absent of a context, right? And so, and I don't try to do it purposely or often, but when I overhear for example someone listening to a Joe Dispenza podcast and they're talking about the manifestation of abundance and wealth and all of that, it's like what context are we doing this in? Who is this acquisition for? Who is this abundance for? Who is this healing for? And what I like about the notion of spiritual political praxis is

that it's deeply embedded within a co-liberation ontology, within a notion that yes, I do, I have incarnated in an individual body. I have a very particular epigenetic, genetic, cultural heritage and endowment, but that does not make me separate and special. That makes me a part of a diverse whole and incarnating into a male body or a female body or a trans body or a black body or a brown body or a white body or an indigenous body or what have you is simply an omen of what our marching orders are, that we have to do the redemption work of our lineages and do the redemption work of our lineages and do the redemption work of our ancestors actively through us.

And we have very different karmas incarnating, let's say, Della in a European body as at least female appearing, right? And me in a male body of Arab, Persian, Indian descent with all the privileges that come with that, right? I'm not so dark that I offend the white supremacist impulse, but I'm not so light that I can be considered exotic, right? There's a milieu that we're born into, right? There's cultural constructs that we're born into that value certain aspects. The fact that I was socialized in the West and I went to their schools

and I can speak the language of power elites gives me certain privileges. And part of the spiritual political praxis is to understand that privilege by understanding the context and then actively using my inner life and my spiritual work to anchor in the prayer of the collaboration of all beings. And there's no one way that's going to look like, right? Often, like, if someone comes to me and they're a musician and they're like, how do I become more political? And how do I show up to occupy Wall Street or whatever? I'm like, you can do the work you're doing, but be informed by the context you're in. Like, if you don't have a critique of capitalist modernity, you are contextually irrelevant. And if all you

have is a critique, you're spiritually and creatively impoverished. We have to move beyond the critique and that requires an ongoing spiritual political activity and engagement and interaction with the world. And you know I mentioned Karen Barad's book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, which is this kind of phrase quantum physicists use, right, that the Universe Halfway, which is this kind of phrase quantum physicists use, right, that the world locks into superpositions of possibility through our attention, our intention, our consciousness, and what have you. And it's another aspect of science that's been co-opted by the new age, right? Everyone is an expert in quantum phenomena now and quantum field theory.

And it's like, yes, okay, on some level that's true, and that's not absent from our political work. And you touched on this when you were talking about non-neutrality. And Howard Zinn famously said, you can't be neutral on a moving train. That there is an ideological impulse. It is this invisible architecture of neoliberalism. It's the oxygen that we're breathing. It's the oxygen that we're breathing, it's the water we're swimming in. And how do we be informed by that context and then move into our spiritual practice that way?

Right, because if we keep on with the neoliberal separatist worldview, then we'll go to our Sunday sermon or ayahuasca ceremony, being like, what can I get out of this? How do I pray for more abundance? How do I get the Ferrari, what can I get out of this? How do I pray for more abundance? How do I get the Ferrari? How do I get the pay raise? And we see what's happening even in the psychedelic space, right? How these sacred plants that were attended by Indigenous cultures in the face of onslaught and colonialism and rape and pillage and destruction held on to their sacred

practices of being in symbiosis with these teacher plants. then we come to the last you know 30 years and everyone now wants to co-op these plants and isolate their alkaloids and sell them for a profit and the consequences are vast and enormous and we're just perpetuating the Western disease, the wetico, the cannibalist impulse into everything we touch and so this requires inner work but it also requires approaching that inner work in different ways. And so there's infinite ways to get there, right? Meditation, yoga, and other physical practices, silence, mantra, tantra, yantra, psychedelics. You know, I am a McKennaite in the sense that I believe with Terence McKenna that psychedelics. You know, I am a

states and that if we are going to engage in sacred medicines, it should be done through leadership of indigenous peoples who have stewarded these medicines, done in respectful ways, and be done ceremonially, and be done in community, and be done with shared prayer, not simply the prayer for our own healing. Yes. And you brought up this word entitled, and that leads me to one of the most powerful phrases in the book that I had never heard before and I just really appreciated it. It's a Sufi proverb, you are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing. So to close, I'd love for you to share what that means to you, how that shows up, and any other invitations related to that or anything else from this conversation to go forth with. So the Sufi proverb is often attributed to the great mother, to Allah, speaking to her

children. And so she says, you are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing. You're entrusted with the bounty of the living world, oxygen, soil, food, each other, the more than human realms, but you're not entitled to it. And they're very different energies. With entrustment comes responsibility, comes accountability, comes sobriety. With entitlement comes ownership, the desire for certainty and control and we see that everywhere in the Western world the entire notion of private property is based on the notion of entitled and

We see it in just the way we Interact with the world when it's cold we put in heaters when it's hot We put in air conditioning we paved cement over every corner of the world. We prune our little gardens and that control and certainty and entitlement cement over every corner of the world. We prune our little gardens and that control and certainty and entitlement belies a lack of understanding what it is to be bequeathed and entrusted with a collective inheritance. You know, 4.4 billion years of the Earth's evolution, 13.8 billion years of the universe's evolution, that is a spiritual, cultural, evolutionary endowment.

It is something that we are being entrusted with, not to do whatever we want, but to be in dialogue with the living planet, to put our head to the soil and ask for direction, to speak to the animate earth and get our directions, not invent a prime directive of capital growing at all costs and then call everything else an externality. That is the logic of entitlement and entrustment asks something else of us. And to access the realms of entrustment also requires ontoshifts. It requires these ontological shifts into other ways of knowing, being, relating, seeing the world, interacting with the world.

Thank you. Any other last invitations or anything else to share before we close? Perhaps one thing to say is an addendum to that is if we are fractal nested parts of a living whole and the world is alive and the universe is alive then we can declare who we are to the living world by our behaviors and we are doing that at every moment whether we know it or not whether we are accessing reciprocal dialogue or not we are declaring who we are when we do our Amazon.com shopping you you know, or a high-velocity trading or our short-haul flights or what-have-you. This

distinction between the ethical and the ontological and the epistemological are just human constructs. Our very embodiment is what is creating superstructures of possibility and by refining our praxis, our behavior, our practice of theory and action, we create new superpositions of possibility. And we are at a bifurcation moment, right? We're seeing extreme light and extreme dark. We're seeing the rise of authoritarianism, the kind of last throws of late-stage capitalism and imperialism becoming ever more desperate, ever more psychotic, and there's a huge part of that which is about our identity.

You know, I know many radical progressive people who were born, for example, in a Jewish upbringing who have never activated their Jewish identity. Like, you know, I'm explaining to them Shabbat dinner on Friday night, right? And as soon as October 7th happened, they sort of collapse onto their Jewish identities and the tribalism and the inability to have a structural, historical, constellational, broader contextual worldview just disappears. And we are declaring what archetypal role we want to play at the end of history, at the end of time as we know it. And so, you know, the thing I would say is that there is no such thing as Jewish blood or Islamic blood or Christian blood, just as there is no such thing as capitalist blood or socialist blood or communist blood. These are human constructs. Evolution is a very long process. Four thousand years ago when somebody

invented the Abrahamic monotheistic traditions, the next day our blood did not change. And yes we can track our genetic markers to geography but it's just geographical. That's just the physical migration of our ancestors. Just because 23andMe tells us we have Jewish blood, that does not mean that's true. That's another construct imposed upon another construct, right? Even the idea of the nation state that I'm somehow Canadian or Israeli, these are man-made constructs. And some of these constructs can be useful. I honor the beliefs my ancestors held because they were products of their context and their consciousness. And so they needed those practices, they needed to believe in Allah in a certain way and

even their particular definition of what Allah meant was subjective to their bodies and their histories and their contexts. And so there's aspects of their history I honor and as somebody who is now incarnated and my ancestors lived through me, and we're at the edge of consciousness now, right? My ancestors were not born in a time where they understood they were in the Anthropocene or in the sixth grade extinction, or the fact that we might be the last human beings left or our children might be the last human beings left. Those are very real possibilities now. And so I have to synthesize and refine my ancestral endowments to be relevant, to be contextually relevant to this moment.

And if I'm not in solidarity with all life, if I'm not promoting justice and care and communalism and mutuality, then my beliefs have reached their limit. And this is the crucible of the moment, is to recast our identities from the small-f self from the atomized individual into the Congress of life, into the larger whole. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Alnur Lada, an activist, journalist, political strategist, community organizer, and co-author, along with Lynn Murphy, of Post-Capitalist Philanthropy, Healing We wealth in the time of collapse.

Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Carsey Blanton for the intermission music, and to Carolyn Rader for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes at least one a month, but usually more, at patreon.com forward slash Upstream Podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one-time donation on our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support.

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give us a 5-star rating and review. It really helps to get upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you. I'm not gonna let you go I'm not gonna let you go I'm not gonna let you go I'm not gonna let you go I'm not gonna let you go I'm not gonna let you go I'm not gonna let you go I'm not gonna let you go