ACFM - #ACFM Trip 10: How It Feels to Be Free

Episode Date: May 10, 2020

Nadia, Jeremy and Keir search for the feeling of freedom, moving from Nina Simone to Buddhist House via Jeremy Clarkson. Edited and produced by Olivia Humphreys, Matt Huxley and Matt Phull. Texts: Isaiah Berlin – Two Concepts of Liberty / Simone de Beauvoir – Second Sex / Wendy Brown – Undoing the Demos / Adam […]

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. And on the podcast version of this show, you'll get the stimulating and mind-expanding discussion from our hosts, but you won't get the music. That's because of the way rights and licenses work in the digital age. So you're really only getting half the picture, but there is an easy way to fix that. If you head over to the Navaramedia.com website, you can stream the full show. It's easy enough just to follow the link in the description of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the standalone discussion in this episode of ACFM. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Kier Milburn.

Hello. And today we're talking about how it feels to be free. So why do we want to break on the chain's holding me? So why do we want to talk about this now, Keir? Well, the most obvious reason we'd want to talk about this, about freedom now, what it means to be free, is we're all locked in our houses. And we're in this period of a real strange historical irony where the people demanding what, at first glance, at least,

to be the most draconian restriction on freedom for hundreds of years, perhaps. The people who were demanding that were the left. That seems like a strange thing. It was the left who were demanding that the state closes, pubs, etc. And to some, mostly it was the right who were demanding that these things stay open. You know, that seems like a strange thing.

It seems like a strange position. Normally it would be the left who would be the sort of civil libertarians. Well, people have been making these lots of comparisons with the sort of onset of World War II given that it's, you know, that's probably the only precedent

for the scale of kind of immediate alteration to everyday life and sort of government action that anyone can think of in this country, but that parallel would really hold there because during the first year of the war, it was consistently, it was the left and the nationalist

sort of wing of the Tory party. who were demanding more action, like more alterations to daily life, more full-scale mobilisation. And it was the liberal right, it was the liberals and the kind of liberal wing of the Tory party who had basically been sort of hegemonic for the previous decade, who were constantly, who were resisting that, and also who partly they resisted it on the grounds that they assumed that the English people were kind of naturally individualistic and resistant to authority and any form of collectivism and just wouldn't tolerate. it wouldn't go along with it and they turned out to be totally wrong and that was really

the conditions under which they really lost grip and lost really lost a kind of hegemonic position for a generation and it's really I mean one of the things that's been reported that I've seen which is kind of interesting is that the government have been disconcerted because they also have expected people wouldn't comply because their image of what British people are like is that they're sort of thatcherites and they're individualistic and selfish and won't cooperate with a general project of alteration of the patterns of daily life. And in fact, it's turned out that there's some statistical comparison has said that the British have been the most compliant population, like in the developed world, like with high levels of lockdown. So there's

this, there is a really interesting parallel there. And it's not really a curtailment of freedom in the same sense. It's a curtailment of certain kinds of individual behaviour. But really, you know, what was going on with the demand for a full-scale lockdown was a sort of democratic demand for a democratic collectivist reorganisation of behaviour in relation to, you know, a conscious and kind of, you know, mindful, you'd even say, sort of reorganisation, you know, shared reorganisation of behaviour in response to a crisis. And, you know, the types of freedom, which we were insisting should be restricted are really, you know, forms of behaviour, which are mostly, you know, not that enjoyable a lot of the time and are compelled by, you know, the reality

as a capitalist existence most of the time, you know, sort of having to go, you know, it's not a great, you know, we're told by neoliberal capitalism and in fact by liberal capitalism going back to the 18th century that, you know, it's of the highest form of freedom is to be able to buy whatever you want, whenever you want, and go to the shops and choose what you want from loads of other things. And, you know, it's a cliche of kind of left thought,

both sort of radical and just social democratic left thought, that it's not really a form of freedom. A lot of the time that feels like a kind of neurotic compulsion that you're forced into. And a lot of the time it's, you know, it's more liberating just to be able to told, right, you know, you're getting your Ricardo delivery on this day every two weeks. These are the things you can choose from.

That's it. I think very few people are getting an Arcado delivery. I'll just say that. There they are. Very few people are getting an Accord of delivery. But also I think while I agree with you, and I think you put it very well, Jeremy, I think shitloads of people are just buying stuff online. I mean, people, the online sales of stuff from Amazon,

because people are filling, sorry, I feel like I'm starting to take this role as, like, the person that brings, like, the cynical point of view. But there's loads of people buying stuff online and where they can afford to, of course, there's a lot of people who can't afford to and are struggling because they can't get their basic needs met. But there's loads of people buying stuff online and they're filling that void through, you know, a new Amazon delivery every day as if it's kind of normal. So that's happening. But if we start thinking about, like, being locked in our houses, it means we are freed from, you know, the apparent freedom of compulsive shopping. You know, for many people, you're also freed from the compulsion to go to work.

Now, that's a huge expansion in the realm of freedom. I've not really been finding myself with much extra time. I must admit, but then again, you know, I can do my work at least some of it from home. But this is the thing is that I feel like with that question, I think it's like I don't want. us also to talk about people in the other without like recognizing what it's like for ourselves but also like

in the converse of that recognizing where it's where it's a distinction so so so like for all of us there are loads of people who are now furloughed that's that's significant you know that's significant and I think that

definitely hits on that that main point about work because you're suddenly being paid to not work. This is huge and unprecedented. I don't know what the percentages are, but that's really interesting as a social phenomenon. There's loads of people who are having, and I don't know what the percentages are, but there are loads of people who are having to work from home who are finding it easy to work from home. There are other people who finding it more difficult

to work from home because of, you know, social reproduction, like being around your partner, they're not being enough space or living with loads of housemates or whatever. ever again that's interesting to look at so um and then there's there's people who are still working and they've always worked from home and things don't really change and then there's the people who are having to go to work so those those seem to me like the categories um in terms of work i mean definitely for us everyone that i've spoken to from our kind of like crew of people all say like we're incredibly busy and we don't have more time that that's what i've heard. I definitely have a different kind of time, but yeah, I mean, you know, I don't have a

permanent job at the moment, but people who do must be really busy. So I imagine lots of people who are furloughed, etc. or who, you know, run small businesses and are waiting for their check from the government to come in June or wherever it's going to arrive. And they've got some free time, but it may not feel like freedom to them, because I imagine a lot of them are incredibly stressed and worried about what the future holds for them, you know, and that, that there's a lot, there's all this research about how, um, you know, if you, if you take somebody out of poverty, their IQ rises by something like 10% straight away. Nothing to do with like the food you eat or anything like that is just that the stress about being poor. Yeah. Well, yeah, but it's also that

like, you know, when you're constantly thinking about like how are you going to manage everyday basic needs, like where's your next meal coming from? You do not. You're like, that takes up your cognitive load and you do not have the time for like more abstract thinking which would be measured via IQ tests, etc., etc. That's really interesting. I think it's the same with your experience of freedom. It's like you might have free time,

but you're not going to experience that as freedom when you're absolutely dashing around thinking about where your next meal's going to come from. I can never remember the name of the person who wrote it. Billy Taylor. Oh, yeah, Billy Taylor wrote. I wish only how it would feel to be free. And it, you know, it was coming out of the moment of the civil rights movement.

But it's most famous for, you know, Nina Simone's recording of it. I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart. Remove all the bones. that keep us apart. She famously performed it. The first time it was widely heard by a lot of people was when she performed it at a civil rights rally in the mid-60s

and she recorded it in 67. And it's obviously just, you know, it's an extraordinary kind of, you know, pain to the idea of the idea of freedom and the idea that freedom's a desirable state but not one that it's possible to feel under present conditions and then i don't know i think the version we're probably going to play as cold blood as like in early 70s they're sort of white and a heavy funk band and it's just a big you know

it's a great sort of dance floor your very big building kind of dance floor so around her I mean for me always the place to start when thinking about the history of freedom as a central concept I mean you can go back a really long way you can go right back to ancient times and basically what freedom is contrasted from slavery

and being a non-slave is basically what it means to be a sort of full human being but also you know then it becomes really an important term at the end of the 18th century. And for me, it's always sort of remarkable that when you think about concepts of freedom, you can't really separate them from that kind of the French revolutionary triptych,

you know, the motto of the French Revolution, it's supposed to be liberty, equality, fraternity. And fraternity is kind of gendered, and it would be more accurate. But what you can reasonably say what they meant was more what we would call solidarity. And obviously, basically the liberal tradition is all predicated on the idea that there's a necessary trade-off between all those things. And you can only maximise freedom by limiting equality and solidarity.

And it's okay to limit solidarity and equality to maximize freedom. Then the conservative tradition also agrees there's a trade-off and has, you know, varying, you know, and basically wants to maintain solidarity by limiting inequality and freedom. And then I would say the radical tradition is really, is always constituted by believing that, actually they're mutually constitutive. If you understand them properly, then, you know, more equality actually means more freedom and it means more solidarity and vice versa.

Or at least the sort of utopian strand of the left tradition, which I think we sort of belong to. Maybe there are versions of left is like authoritarian socialism, we sort of agree with the conservative tradition that you have to limit freedom to create conditions for equality and solidarity. But I think we're really sort of, committed. And obviously it's been, I mean, it's a real, I know, like, I mean, even in our own sort of political writing, actually, it's a big, it's a really frequent term of reference

with both me and Keir, like some idea of kind of radical freedom, an idea of freedom. That's obviously also the more, the 20th century kind of version of that big debate is around, is, as I, Berlin's famous distinction between negative and positive conceptions of freedom. So, But again, the liberal tradition is only concerned with the negative conception of freedom, meaning freedom, what freedom means is freedom from certain things. So it's freedom from constraints. It's free, and it's the freedom of the privileged, you know, white, wealthy man, you know, to do whatever, to do whatever he wants. The negative positive freedom distinction is basically comes out of social democratic critiques of that from classical liberalism in the 20th century. So, I mean, not just

partly under pressure from the Labour movement, socialists, Marxist, communists, the liberals themselves have got to confront the fact that actually there's no good just defending the freedom of people who've already got privilege and wealth and power, because everybody else is clearly not able to exercise freedom in the same way. So even the liberals from the early 20th century

start saying, well, actually we've got to create material conditions which make people able to actually exercise freedom in a meaningful way. And then, so Berlin caused this positive freedom. So it's freedom to, the freedom to actually do something. is the freedom, you know, is different, you know, is really the social democratic and the socialist idea of freedom. It's no good just being free from things. And then I think, I mean, and I would say like for people like myself and really people in the kind of, you know, communist and anarchist traditions,

that you really, you want to take this even further to some extent and recognise that, well, actually, I mean, the way I always put this is to say, actually freedom is a sort of, as a sort of abstract quality. is a sort of highest good for me but I want to conceive of freedom as not a property that belongs to individuals and their choices. It's somehow a property that belongs to situations and they're always collective situations and they're and of course then it becomes

quite hard to say well how do you know it when you see it like what does that even mean but the most obvious answer to that question is well that you know freedom is what characterises situations in which certain kinds of novelty become possible like certain kinds of invention and creativity become possible And I think that is that sense of enhanced possibility and capacity, I think. And that is, I mean, to me, that is a sort of radically non-individualistic, sort of conception of freedom.

I don't know, what do you think here? No, no, I, yeah, I totally, totally agree with all of that, yeah. I'm just suddenly, I suddenly sort of like thinking, hang on, I mean, in whatever circumstances, do you experience something and then sort of self-reflectively think, this is freedom and not and how can you distinguish that from collective joy and I seem to be leading myself to this idea that there is a more there's an intellectual self-reflective layer to freedom which is not necessarily there to collective joy

because joy is one of those experiences of expansion of freedom or the expansion of your capacity to do things it's not quite the same as freedom now And I'm wondering whether there is a need for that to be linked to, like, a level of understanding. It's a vent diagram. Well, maybe that's true, but people do often. I mean, you know, if you talk about what's usually our most typical on sort of, you know, easiest example of collective joy, you know, people on the dance floor. I mean, it's the feeling of freedom.

It's, you know, only when I'm dancing can I feel this free, you know, is that is the thing people often report. Definitely for me the crowd Like some people hate crowds I fucking love it I don't like I think I think part of the reason You tell yourself that you go to demos

Because of your left wing politics Or because you care about the subject matter Like I really really do Like I'm not I'm not negating But I only go on demos for things that I care about But I'm sure I also go for demos Or at least I did for 20 years Because I was addicted to that feeling

of being in a big crowd. And I, you know, for the vast majority of demos that I've been to, I've played samba. I've played samba and samba bands for 18 years. And there's this one clip that somebody put up on YouTube from 2011 of called Under the Bridge. And it's this thing where, and this is going to be related to DJing as well, I think, is that people, most people don't know that what happens to sound

when you're playing in a massive percussion band outside once you walk under the bridge. But we know as a band what happens when you walk under the bridge. So if you're playing samba in a demonstration, the Mestre, the person who's leading a samba band at the front tends to know to like drop the beat while you're under a bridge because the acoustics are so intense that the crowd goes completely fucking mental. And the ability of bringing that joy to people, also the feeling of like being in this massive crowd and just losing your head in it and being

able to give people that joy and just being completely out of yourself, which is very much a sense of freedom, which is linked to collective joy, is one that I get from the crowd. I mean, definitely playing sambat in the crowd. Like nothing, nothing, I think, rivals that for me. Well, that's really interesting. And we've both been talking about these sort of, you know, the idea of freedom as being, you know, freedom from yourself. And, you know, you're out of yourself. And, I mean, the freedom for Aristotle, right through to Spinoza,

you know, through to a lot of modern thinkers, is the freedom of reason, you know, is you're free from passions, you're free from irrationality, you're free from anybody else getting, involved. And I think there is, but there is a kind of interesting continuity between all those things, which isn't, you know, they might seem like just to be opposed to each other, but I sort think they're not on some level. I feel intuitively. Because for me, when we were talking about

the question, like, when do you feel free? I kept thinking about the fact, well, also, the other scenario in which, you know, people often talk about freedom is, you know, people talk about, you know, doing meditation and doing yoga and doing Tai Chi. They're all things I've done, you know, a fair bit and people talk about a feeling of freedom coming from them and I know exactly what they mean and when I think about when I when do I feel free that is really the most intense experience of it and it's really interesting to just but to think like well for experientially what what do I mean and it is actually about a feeling that I'm very sort of connected to everything around me but also very kind of self-possessed in a certain way or or not I feel like all kinds of shit that

would normally be imposing on my attention isn't imposing on it like mostly just capitalist detritus you know you know Twitter or just you know the desire for a snack I shouldn't really eat and all that stuff and um and the sense that that is freedom is really well this comes back to one of the very first things

we talked about actually like when we started talking about the kind of acid carbonous acid communism stuff because that you can sort of you that can be interpreted that's a kind of experience that can be interpreted or contained or produced in two different ways like it is one way in which it is basically allied to, it's on a continuum with the experience of being in the samba crowd or the dance floor in that you're sort of free from a particular mode of being in the world, which is both

individualised and self-oriented, but it's also neurotic and it's neurotic in its narcissism. And on the other hand, you know, if it's done sort of wrong from our point of view, then that kind of, you know, mindfulness, as we've said before, just becomes another version of that neurotic narcissism. Me and Bobby McGee is the song was first, it was written and performed by Chris Christopherson. The best known cover of it is Janice Joplin, sort of great late 60s, rock singer.

It was a really popular tune for the Grateful Dead as well. And it's famous for this line, isn't it? Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing, I mean nothing, honey, if it ain't free Yeah, feeling good was easy love When he sang a blues You know, feeling good was good enough for me

Good enough for me and my bobby, yeah And that became And that became an anthemic kind of line for the counterculture and it really does resonate with the claim we're always making that the counterculture wasn't primarily about individualist libertarianism. It was partly, it always was based on a critique actually of kind of liberal consumer capitalism. And that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

I mean, it's saying, isn't it, that, you know, it's saying that it's a critique in one line of the whole bourgeois conception of freedom that, you know, if you're to be free, and of the negative conception of freedom. So to be phrased, to be absent of any attachments to or responsibilities to other people, the wider community. You know, and for most people, that would indeed

just mean you've got nothing left to lose. You've got nothing, all the things that the bourgeois concepts of freedom liberates you from are actually the things that make life worth living for most people. I interpreted that differently, actually, because it's a song about two drifters, you know, sort of call and response sort of things. I was thinking of it more as when you've got nothing less to lose,

like the condition of the proletariat for Marx or whatever. So basically, you know, the proletariat is free in a couple of different ways. You know, it's free from like serfdom, etc. But it's also free from... No, yeah, nothing to lose but your change. Nothing to lose but your change, yeah. And it's like, so it's like the big fear for the bourgeois, the bourgeoisie right through like early capitalism was,

the proletariat have got no investment in this. society staying away it is. They've got nothing to lose. Therefore, you know, they're a dangerous class, the most dangerous class, which is why you need to give them a little bit of property to sort of get them interested and align their interest a little bit more with the maintenance of the system, which is basically, you can see through the 20th century. Well, that's true. And you can also read it in terms of the West Coast counterculture's particular appropriation of Zen Buddhism. You know, it's kind of Jack Kerouac and writing about the Dharma Bums. And in that case, it's a positive thing.

You know, to be a drifter, to be a hobo, is to be the person who has no attachments and therefore has nothing left to lose and therefore is free. I've got to say, I think the song, it's a mournful song, though, about the condition of being a drifter, I think. I don't think it is celebrating it. I think it's critiquing that assumption, actually. I think it's the hippies critiquing the beatnik's belief that it's cool to have no attachments and just be on the road and drifting because it's kind of sat, it recognizes it. But I think it's sad about it. I've always heard it that way, especially from, you know, Janice Joplin's sort of interpretation of it. Janice Joplin's version was released posthumously, which adds an even more tragic tone to the whole thing.

Yeah, it does, yeah, it does. Like there's some key things for me that when I have them or don't have them, like I feel the restriction and the bind versus I feel like I'm free. and they are related to like policy and society or whatever but like for me freedom firstly is is not being reminded that I'm a woman by the world so that's not the same as not remembering I'm a woman or not feeling like a woman it's the being reminded that I'm and that I'm not a person I'm a woman so for example like in on a on the burner which James Butler is does this this from Navarra does this this great little thing in the morning which I'm a big fan of and there was a point where he said you know maybe what you should do is you should go out and have a walk at night as part of your you know your daily walk for COVID and I thought I can't go out and do a walk at night because it's not safe for me I can't I don't have that and that's where

the world reminds me that I'm a woman now maybe Maybe there would be certain places that I lived in, and to be honest, when I lived in Argentina for three months, because there were these big avenues. I mean, fuck, I walked every single night for hours because I felt like I couldn't do it in my daily life here. So that's one thing, is not being reminded by the world that I'm a woman. That's really important. So feeling safe is a necessary preconditioned to feeling free. That's what you're saying. Oh, that's interesting.

I've actually not thought about it that way. But feeling safe is not sufficient to feel. free but it but it is necessary yeah and related to that is the freedom to control my body like to have an access to an abortion to not have my body be under somebody else's control which is a huge thing but also I think related to the body but not necessarily to being a woman is the free the freedom I feel from having a strong healthy body that I can run and jump and breathe with like a lot of people don't have that and that's very constricting to not not be free with your body.

And finally, I think not being in love, like freedom from love for me is a really big one. I definitely do not find romantic love freeing. I love, but I feel a very restricted person when I'm in love. So those are my thoughts and what it feels to be free. I think it does open up this really interesting thing about, like, freedom. Freedom is not always experienced as a pleasant thing. You know, it can be hugely disruptive and be massively resisted.

Do you know what I mean? That's a really good point. And it also, that's the thing I was going to say before, actually, about thinking, you know, the experience of freedom, you know, after sort of meditating or something. Because, of course, there's this whole, the whole line taken by sort of Orthodox Buddhism. It's actually, that's the only way you can really be free is to be a monk. and have this completely regimented life you're completely free from any kind of attachment

and one of my sort of and one can easily imagine where we are right now with the COVID crisis and the public response to it and the looming threat of climate change and the growing power of Californian techno-capitalism

one could really fear that what we're heading to for the next phase of sort of capitalism is actually something which isn't all well it's old as Huxley It's brave new world. It will be a world in which we're basically ruled by this sort of benign technocrats. You know, we've all got Amazon vouchers every week.

We're all allowed to do psilocybin, you know, smoke weed. And we're positively encouraged, you know, to do two hours of yoga and meditation a day. Like I've previously said, you could only do, you would only do under post-capitalism. But we don't have any, you know, we don't have any real involvement in the decision-making, etc. I mean, it is, you know, that sort of Californian dream, you know, that could be. where we're heading and that would be the conditions under which lots of people would get to experience lots of the kind of freedom we've been talking about positively today you know you get to feel a sense of security you get to sit you know a feeling of kind of health and fitness you're not ruled by

the tyranny of choice blah blah blah and yet i would hate it yeah that's that's that in fact is the future i now i currently think is it's the job of the left most like vigorously to to refuse and resist like but then there's a question well why you know what why is that you know why Why do we not want that then? Why do we not just want benign technocrats, you know, allowing us to just do work four-day weeks and do loads of exercise and be healthy, but not really having a say in anything?

I mean, that probably is one of the big strategic problems is, you know, how do we connect democracy to a lived sense of freedom? So sometimes it does feel like that because you're getting connection to other people, but quite often democracy is experienced as, as a lack of freedom most people just want lots of things in the world to function

you know the infrastructure to function etc so they can go on and make more important decisions but ultimately you need to have a you need some sort of control over how that infrastructure and all that like you know hidden conditioning works I mean the thing that capitalism doesn't let us and especially neoliberalism doesn't let us have is precisely the opportunity to make democratic decisions with groups of other people that have some real effect on the world. I mean, that's, you know, that's the fundamental premise in my book Common Ground.

And that's the freedom it doesn't give us to, like, cooperate meaningfully with other people in a collaborative way. I put on social media on Facebook and Twitter for songs about freedom. One that came up a lot was Richie Haven's Freedom. And people were particularly just sharing this video of Richie Hayes, Stephen's performing this song, the opening song at Woodstock. So you can see how it's got like an iconic position in the counterculture in that respect. Well, that was, I mean, the freedom, I mean, this is so much a persistent theme for us, but freedom and the nature of freedom, it was the fundamental question posed at the end of the 60s.

Because what, I mean, everybody's, the reaction against the Postal Settlement and Fordism was, for everybody, was framed in terms of the lack of freedom that it offered to so many people. But the question of what freedom people wanted instead of what they had then, you know, was really divergent. So, you know, the counterculture, you know, the women's, women's liberation movement wanted one version. of freedom, which would actually be sort of what we would think on as a sort of radical democracy and kind of the opportunity for, you know, form potent collectivities, as I would put here. But then, you know, there was also, you know, the neo-liber, the proto- neoliberal version of freedom. It would just be kind of individual freedom from the kind of burden of being a taxpayer

and a, you know, responsible member of social democracy. But it's really, it's so poignant at that moment, the whole question of freedom. And of course, the new right take it up. And we haven't really talked about it. I mean, Thatcher and Reagan, you know, a big part of their appeal to certain constituencies is their promising freedom. You know, they're promising freedom, but it's the freedom, it's, you know, it's the freedom from the state.

It's freedom from having to be a taxpaying member of a society to some extent. What songs would you associate with that? Well, it's really hard to say, isn't it? It's like rush or something. Yeah, well, they didn't produce good music. That was one of their problems. I mean, I'll say, I'll mention it. I mean, a record from the 70s,

which fits into all that narrative in a really interesting way, is Asford and Simpson, stay free. The chorus is like you've got to stay free. But it has this, but like a lot of those disco songs, it has this very deliberate ambivalence that on the one hand the chorus is kind of fun to sing and you think about, you know, sing along as a crowd

and you think about how you want to be free but also the lyric is actually a critique of someone who is just a casual individualist who doesn't want to have any attachments who doesn't want to be tied down and it's a critique of, it's basically saying well that's a shallow way to live

and if that's how you live you're not really going to be happy so it's really sort of interesting and that again, you know, I mean, there was this real, you know, there's obviously, there is a real sophistication, I think, to the way in which people coming out of things like gay liberation are thinking about those things in the 70s, because they're having to think about the fact that they both want to be free just interpersonally from, you know, traditional moral constraints, but they also want the freedom to, you know, to form relationships publicly and to, you know, to be kind of part of a community. So that is really kind of interesting. I mean, that kind of, it's an interesting question. in that Thatterite Reaganite moment, though, actually is it, like the early 80s. I mean, what is, you know, there are, you know, there are, there are some, in music, there are some heroic assertions of sort of individual sovereignty, but they're really vague.

The sort of spandau ballet, I always think of as, like, you know, the Thatcherite band. But gold is such a good song, though. Yeah. I know, it is, no, it's a good anthem. I think I must be getting old. Because one of the ways I've been thinking about freedom recently is pairing it with responsibility. right and I think that links to this idea it's just that you've had COVID mate I know you're in denial

I know that you're in denial that you have and I think you're coming round to it but I think I think you know you've had it mate you've had it no but I'm trying to think through this whole like what is this consciousness raising project it is about trying to understand your position in the world

your effect on the world and how the world affects you to expand your realm of freedom but like that it's also about understanding the impact that your actions have on the rest of the world and that's where the sort of responsible responsibility comes into it's not neoliberal responsibilityisation which

strips away all politics and says it's your individual character that's produced that right and that all a neuroticism that comes or the neurosis that comes with that right it's the opposite direction it is like you need thinking and study and reason to try

to work at how you fit into this sort of like the political structuring of the world, etc, etc. And so one of the ways I've been thinking about it is like we always associate youth, the period of youth with like a certain kind of freedom, right? Because it's

the period of time where you escape responsibility. Do you know what I mean? You're no longer... In theory, in the West. Well, in theory and like barely in the West and it may only be like a... It might be something produced from a post-war experience. of a certain section of society. But the theory is something like, you know,

you're under the control of your parents when you're a child and you're not supposed to have any responsibilities. It's supposed to be this time of innocence, it's all this sort of stuff. And then when you're an adult, you have your own family, you have a job,

and all those responsibilities. So there's this time of self-reinvention in the middle, which is called youth. But, like, that's a pretty childish version of freedom, right? And I've been increasingly thinking that, like, Like one of the things that this, that the, this current pandemic and lockdown has really brought home to me is this, is this, that there's a sort of Jeremy Clarkson type idea of freedom, right? Which is, do you want to tell, do you want to tell listeners who that is if they don't know? Yes, for listeners outside the UK, Jeremy Clark's.

But loads of listeners, it's not, a lot of people won't know who he is. I promise you. For listeners with a good fortune not to know Jeremy Clarkson is. Thank you. He started off as a journalist writing about motorcars and he did a sort of program about motor cars called, what was it called? Top gear. Top gear.

Jesus, that hypnotherapy to block Jeremy Clarkson out of my mind has really worked. Yeah, top gear. And like basically he sort of worked. My friend nearly got run over by him. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Basically, it's that idea. It sort of bleeds into that sort of like right-wing, anti-wokeness conception of freedom, basically, right?

Which is sort of... Fast cars. So it's like, yeah, freedom to, like, you know, freedom to do what you want to do. I'm going to drive my car around really fast. You know, I don't, I'm not going to really care about the consequences. And in fact, I'm going to take the piss out of people who do care about the consequences for all this sort of stuff. you know, basically that is

that whole ideology and so that, like what we can think about that, that whole ideology is like a machine to preemptively prevent consciousness raising, right? Because consciousness raising is the opposite. It's basically, let's think about like the preconditions that make our sphere of freedom

possible and what are the constraints, the structural constraints which are limiting our conception of freedom. You understand those and then you try to work to remove some, of those constraints or to alter the preconditions so that the realm of freedom for everybody is increased, do you know what I mean? Yeah, and related to that is what is your freedom to depend on for you to be able to get in your and drive your fast car, but who's cooking your meals, who's cleaning your streets,

who's all of doing all of these things? Like, do you know what I mean? Regardless of what you think about the driving, the fast cars in itself, it's the attitude and arrogance that comes with it. Yeah, totally. But it's all based on the idea of, basically, I think it's based, I want to just make the point about, like, that is anchored in a lived experience of freedom or sort of autonomy, right? Which is, you know, basically the sense of act, the actual sense of freedom that is possible for me to do all these things. And if somebody starts to point out, the consequences of me doing those things, then I experience that as a limit to my freedom. They're trying to stop me doing things, which is where the whole anti-wokeness thing comes from. And like, I think what's happening at the most, moment, because we're all locked in our houses, suddenly we can, all of those sort of preconditions, all of the sort of hidden work that goes in, which allows us to have this freedom, which is like infrastructural work, all of the postmen, except, post people, postwomen, post people, whatever.

How do you say that these days? Postal workers. These days. These days. Jesus Christ, I'm channeling. Jeremy Glemson. You can't even talk about it without much of it. It's political correctness gone mad. A post-person just sounds weird. Post-person sounds like a post-humanist. Yeah, it does. What I'm trying to say is that there's lots of work that goes on, which is normally obscured,

which permits your sense of autonomy, right, if you've got a bit of welfare, except, or whatever. And lots of that is like this infrastructural work. Some of it is like what you call the social reproductive work, who's doing the dishes, who's doing the cleaning, etc. Most of the time that's hidden, you don't have to bring it to mind about,

you know, oh, is my freedom based on that? All of a sudden, you cannot ignore it because... They're the key workers. Well, no, but that work can kill you. In fact, you not only have to recognise it, but you have to recognise the conditions under which that work takes place because all of a sudden, the conditions of the workers in the Amazon fulfilment centre

could make the difference between you catching COVID-19 or not, and therefore make the difference between you dying or not. So all of this hidden stuff suddenly becomes visible, which I think puts a lot of pressure on this sort of, that sort of, that anti-woke version of freedom. Because that anti-woke version of freedom is also related to this idea that, like, we are responsible for our own outcomes in life. Do you know what I mean?

So Wendy Brown talks about it as neoliberal responsibilityisation. Whatever our outcomes are, we're responsible for that, which is like the elimination of all. politics and structure, and it's reduction just to personal characteristics, I suppose. Like that whole anti-wokeness, right-wing libertarian version of freedom is sort of like stuck in some sort of perpetual adolescence version of freedom, do you know what I mean? And in fact, when you become an adult, the adult is learning to take on the responsibilities that come with recognising your position in the world, do you know what I mean?

And in some ways, in some ways that gets, that's been interrupted by the sort of way neoliberalism structures the world, do you know what I mean? I just remembered the book by Adam Cotsco Why We Love Sociopaths which is a little book and it sort of looked at contemporary TV basically. It looks at contemporary. Yeah, it's quite good

that one. Yeah, it looks at contemporary TV and says look all of the heroes or many of the heroes are contemporary TV and this was in the 2000s so it's probably like a decade of a date. They're all like sociopaths of some sort and he'd point to like Tony Soprano or even Homer Simpson who's like a bit of a sociopath of various

different types and he says like what's going on there and the other sort of person or the other sort of a realm of TV who would point to is like the apprentice etc and who hosted the apprentice in the US it was Donald Trump right and so he's so the sort of argument

could go some this is written before Donald Trump was president of the US but like what Donald Trump performs is a certain type of freedom And it's like a fantasy version of a sociopath freedom, which is sort of like, you know, the freedom of, you know, what would it look like if I basically didn't give a fuck about anyone else? And not only didn't give a fuck about anyone else, broke all the rules, could, you know, and the rules just didn't apply to me, et cetera. That would look like a certain form of freedom. And that's the freedom that Donald Trump sort of performs, you know what I mean?

The more he breaks the rules, the more he seems to be immune from like either social shame or, um, or, you know, being held to the rules of politics and all that sort of stuff, the freer he looks, do you know what I mean? There is a sort of form of like this sort of sociopathic freedom that Boris Johnson sort of performs it to some degree, but, you know, not so much, I think. I mean, this is Richard Sennett's, you know, argument in the corrosion of character. It's the sort of advanced post-faudism just remove the conditions, which actually allowed most people not to be sociopaths, you know,

by taking away stable jobs and taking away, you know, sort of stable communities. And it's really true. And I think it's one of those things which can, you know, it can manifest itself in dangerously reactionary forms, you know, the desire people have to be able to be part of a group and have the conditions of being able to take responsibility for other people. But it can also, you know, manifest itself in socialist forms. Yeah, that's really interesting.

I mean, that's one of the things about COVID. I remember tweeting this in the first week. One of the things about the COVID experience is, I like it. Yeah, I know you love it. And, you know, one of the things that was going on in the first week, especially with all the mutual aid groups, is people were just obviously delighted and relieved to have the opportunity to, like, do something for other people,

which we're just inhibited from doing by contemporary capitalism. I've always felt it was inevitable at some point we would talk about Loaded by Primal Scream So loaded by Primal Screen But it's by Andy Wetherall. So loaded notionally by Primal Screen But in fact, it's by Andy Wetherall And the story of it is,

Andy Weatherall gets, he's DJing and he meets some of primal screen, Bobby Gillespie, I think, at a rave. And they ask him to remix a song of theirs, I'm losing more than I'll ever have. And he's never remixed anything before. And he comes back with some, like, boring mix of it. And they say, no, no, just destroy the whole thing. So when he produces loaded, it's basically got none of the, hardly any of the original song on it. And he just, you know, clips from different things. and it's sort of it's sort of famous for the for the opening sample

which is you know just what is what just what is it that you want to do we want to be free you want to be free to do what you want to do we want to get loaded we want to have a good time we want to have a party and that's a sample from i think it's probably peter fonder saying that it's from a like 60s motorbike film called wild angels and like so a lot of this is you know you can see how in the 90s that like it was called like 88 1988 was called the second summer of love and there was lots of self-reference or consciousness conscious self-referential sort of referencing of the concepts of freedom around in the late 60s etc probably in a more in a more a depoliticised form you'd say and so you probably what you might put alongside that is the soup

dragons I'm free from 1990 which you know the video of which is like real sort of like self-conscious psychedelia, etc. You know, it tells you something about the sorts of the sort of sense of that early 90s and the sorts of freedom that people were reaching for, they were basically reaching for the sort of the 60s type of conception of freedom, but like in a stripped into a large degree of the sort of more overt political elements to it. Would we, do you want to talk about like that gala freed from desire that? That's probably from 1990, 91 or something like that as well, isn't it?

How does that go? Is that free from desire, that one? Yeah, yeah. I love that song. My love has got no money, he's got his strong beliefs. My love has got no power. He's got his strong beliefs. My love has got no fame.

He's got his strong beliefs. My love has got no money. He's got his strong beliefs. One more and more. I mean, at the time, I used to sort of joke about it, being Buddhist house, but it is. Like it's, I mean, the chorus is there, my love has got no money, he's got no strong, he's got his strong beliefs. My love has got no power. He's got his strong beliefs. And it's critiquing, you know, people who want more and more and more. And it's, you know, and the line is freed from desire. It's absolutely the Buddhist, not just Buddhist, it would have to be said. It's the whole, the every contemplative tradition, including anti-consumerists. But it's also, but it's a language which would have been, I mean, I'm sure it was constantly Buddhist.

I mean, I'm sure it would, Buddhism had enough currency in popular culture that you wouldn't use the line freed from desire. You wouldn't use that mind and senses purified unless you'd been immediately influenced by sort of some kind of Buddhist practice, even though mindfulness wasn't a big thing at the time. So, yeah, so it's anti, so it's, and it's basically advocating, you know, the experience and the practice of being, you know, anti, indeed, freed from any kind of desire for consumer goods or attachment or power or fame or money and just experiencing a sort of, you know, that kind of freedom. And, you know, and it was a sort of dance for anthem. And it was really, I mean, it was a sort of pop dance or anthem. I mean, I remember hearing it mostly kind of quite cheesy sort of gay, you know, gay nights. it was a big thing you wouldn't get it at kind of serious rave clubs

but I remember thinking it really seemed to be trying to capture something about the sort of what a lot of people felt rave was supposed to be about the lyrics of most sort of rave songs didn't

I mean the lyrics of most sort of rave was sort of quite cheesy you know really was sort of you know either just meaningless or sort of cheesy romance or something

and yeah it was really of extraordinary I mean in terms of that, what you were saying about responsibility and, and, you know, neoliberalism here, I think that's a really good point.

I think that's really nice, the fact that what we're, what we're after with consciousness without ideal of a raised consciousness is it's not irresponsibility, but it's a completely recalibrated notion of responsibility. Because on the one hand, you know, I mean, for me, one of the

first, you know, the first effects of consciousness raising. That was, you know, anything that looks like contest numbers raising for me for students or whatever is that they they free themselves from the effects of responsibility like they learn to recognize that the that their problems like their emotional problems their social problems are mostly not their fault they're not their personal fault they're a result of social you know wider social forces but on the other hand you also want people to have a certain sense of agency and you want people to have a sense of agency

that they it is worth trying to do things in the world it's trying to do things with other people being part of groups, et cetera. And then, but also there's a kind of third layer beyond that where you also want people to recognize and look, the way historical change works is we all try to do shit and most of it doesn't work. And then we dust ourselves off, you know, have a break, dust ourselves off and try again.

And it's only because we keep doing that and we live with it and we don't get too miserable that anything ever actually gets done. And most, and 99.99% of historical progress is outcomes that no one really exactly wanted and weren't exactly what anyone predicted. but they wouldn't have happened if people hadn't had a go. You know, if people hadn't had a go

at doing the Great General Strike of 1926, we would never have got the National Health Service. You know, even though most of the people who did it probably felt like it was just a failure and a defeat, and they weren't even really related. And that is to have achieved the form of raised consciousness that we all won them. It's to sort of got yourself into the position

of being able to kind of live like that, I think, that you live in that way, which is hard. But it's also, like, I'm always coming back to this thing. There's also why I'm so kind of interested in things like Buddhism, because I sort of think at least certain strands of Buddhism. They're sort of after something very similar and that you're after this relationship to the world and events in which on the one hand, you have no, you're completely detached from any notion of personal attachment and responsibility. On the other hand, you cultivate this quality of compassion where you are completely involved

in, you know, other people and your effects on other people all the time. And yet you are somehow free from any sort of, you know, self-destructive, you know, sense that, you know, sense of ownership of those effects. And I think, but I think, you know, clearly that's not the only way to get it. You know, you can get it through, you know, a kind of mature form of activism. That is sort of what freedom feels like, isn't it, as well, at its kind of highest level. I mean, not that I can claim to experience that for more than about five minutes and a month. but I'm still free in leaving me

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