ACFM - ACFM Trip 44: Humility

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

What happens when you lose? In this Trip, the ACFM crew explore the role of humility – and humiliation – in politics. Should we cultivate humility to cope with political weakness? Is fear of humiliation a product of patriarchy? Can humility help us be better political thinkers and organisers? And who’s the humblest ACFM host of them […]

Welcome to ACFM, welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friends Jeremy Gilbert. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today we are talking about humility. So guys, why are we talking about humility today? At the moment, we're in the middle of a general election. This is late June, 24. And the experience of a lot of people on the left,

a lot of people where we are politically of this election, is one of feeling pretty sidelined by the whole process. not feeling that central to what's going on seemed like an opportune way of feeling for us to pick up this topic which we've been thinking about doing a show about for some time. You know, I think we'll need to think about left recruitment and so this idea of political humility, the idea that perhaps we should be, have some sort of humility or about the sort of projects we're involved in and not try to make them the only project. and have some sort of humility in regard to other people who've got slightly different strategies,

but perhaps compatible strategies. I think that's going to be a very useful thing to get in our head as we try to come to terms with the new shape of politics and try to regroup the left to accord with that new shape. Yes, I'm interested in all of that. I'm also interested in what a political humility looks like in left interactions in left-wing spaces. not just, I think, from a position of kind of strategy and, like you guys said, needing to appreciate that there are different ways of doing things, but also, you know, that there are different subjectivities and life experiences

and kind of importance of on one hand trying to, like, hold a line or a general overview of kind of what you're trying to achieve or the world that you kind of vision, but also understanding that there's a multiplicity of subjective experiences and stories that are important to kind of live. listen to in an organizing space. But before we get into all of that, we should mention that you can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our newsletter, which we are now sending out with every new trip, so not more than once a month. It's got bonus content in it and updates from the ACFM crew. To sign up, go to Navarra.media forward slash ACFM newsletter.

And for more music and less chat, follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify, just search for ACFM. And also, please leave us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen on. That really helps us with the algorithm. And to continue supporting us, to bring you even more from the ACFM Cosmos, please support our hosts, Navarra Media for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash. support. And with those notices out of the way, let's now talk about humility. So where shall we start with this one, guys? I thought if we were going to make an episode about humility, we should have at least one song, which is just somebody apologising. And one great,

quite fun, anthemic manifestation of that idea is this track from 1956. This is Texas rockabilly band for Strikes. Good name for a band, The Strikes. Good name for a band, The Strikes. strikes. The song is called Baby I'm Sorry. Say you forgive me. I know I've done. It is a little motto or slogan I'm quite fond of when trying to overcome sectarian. It is a little a motto or slogan I'm quite fond of when trying to overcome sectarian habits among people on the left that nobody on any part of the left in Britain or anywhere in the English-speaking world really has any reason to feel particularly pleased with themselves. I guess this is not true in some localised context. There are some local contexts in like parts of the States and

Australia, maybe parts of the wider UK where people have achieved some things. But broadly speaking, certainly at the level of the national political formations. We've just been consistently defeated for years and years now. So I think it behaves everybody, not to behave as if everything would have been fantastic, if only they'd been listened to. Because almost any political strategy you can think of, someone has tried it in the past 40 years, and it hasn't really worked out. That's not just true on the left, though, is it?

I think it's... We're recording this before the election, it'll come out after the election, but let's make some predictions. You know, the conservative strategy of the last sort of 10 years has completely fallen apart if they had one. The centrist strategy seems to be working out. They've got into government. But I think they're going to come a crop across the rest of this decade, basically. They're going to become very unpopular, etc.

And they have not got a strategy for like dealing with the problems facing the world. I mean, that's part of the difficulty of being on the left, basically, is that I'm not interested in this election because I support, team A or team B, like the starting point is we're in a catastrophic situation as a species and we have to work out a way to deal with that. Do you know what I mean? That's not necessarily a problem on the right or the centre. That's not their main concern, do you know what I mean? Or if it is, it's way down the list. Because we are in a strange situation for anyone who came to politics through the sort of like Corbyn era and we're quite used to the left and left political ideas forcing their way into mainstream discussion. But that's really unusual situation.

Like that's not what normally goes on. Well, it's unusual for our lifetimes. I think it's more usual for the past like 120 years. Yeah, that's an important bit to qualify because there are kind of ideas which now seem extremely left-wing that were kind of mainstream in the mid-20th century as well, you know, like just basic welfare statism. Part of the general condition that we've got rid at the moment, isn't it? Is that people, It's precisely people like our age who are currently running everything, like mine in Kier's 8, your middle class gen Xers.

And their worldview has been conditioned by a specific historic experience wherein indeed the left having any kind of presence in mainstream politics just seems to, has been anomalous. And they think of it as anomalous. And they just can't cope with it not being. We saw them unable to cope with it not being for a few years. but, you know, the rejoinder that was always made by dissenting members of that cohort, like myself in care, you know, the point I kept making to people, like at the start

of Corbinism in 2015, was that actually it's historically more normal in a capitalist society to have people questioning fundamental issues around the distribution of resources rather than refusing to question those things. So it's partly a matter of time scale, isn't it? Yeah, no, it's a good point, actually. The other thing I was going to point out as well, though, is that in a way, the left has been haunting this election, even though, you know, this election has revolved around basically far right positions. It's all about immigration. These sorts of things have been like dominant in the election. Who's going to raise taxes? You know, we won't be raising taxes, these sorts of things. But like Jeremy Corbyn has been this figure who's haunted the election. He's definitely been talked about more than something like climate change, you know, this huge big crisis, which is completely. been completely absent from the election. This is a climate denial election. There's no doubt about that. But Jeremy Corbyn, this specter, he's been like really quite a dominant thing. There's rarely been a speech by Kirstama, which hasn't mentioned Jeremy Corby. I doubt very much.

There's been an article by a centrist commentating a newspaper which hasn't talked, hasn't mentioned Jeremy Corbyn, either to call him anti-Semitic or crazy or something like that. there's a spectre haunting its election and that spectre is the left of the 2010s I think I think that's probably true on a wider scale as well you know European sort of scale things are in a different sort of state but like the spectre of the 2010s left that rose up when it was defeated is the sort of spectre that's haunted Europe I think well it's also haunting America as well sorry yeah yeah that's absolutely completely true yes yes I think it's true on two levels really

I think you're absolutely right that the whole centrist project, the only narrative it has now, with which to legitimate itself, has to do with its defeat of Corbinism. You know, they're more obsessed with having defeated Corbinism than having, than defeating the Tories. They can't narrate their own flimsy sense of legitimacy without having to make the claim that they are the people who have the right to replace the Tories, that because they defeated Corbinism. I think on the flip side, I do think the legacy of the defeat of that political project hangs very heavily over the kind of mood of the country and especially young people. You know, not necessarily the conscious and explicit level, but I think young people now are very much living under the shadow of a terrible defeat of the last political project who have had their interests at heart. It's also interesting to think about what Corbyn represents, because I think Corby represents something more than just even the left. actually. Yeah, I wrote this article years ago when Boris Johnson first challenged Ken Livingston to be mayor of London. I wrote it on Open Democracy. And I said then that it's not just about left versus right, that Boris sort of represented a kind of anti-politics. And Ken Livingston had always represented just the specter of politics. You know, he came to public attention when the GLC were basically accused of politicising all these things like race and gender and sexuality, that at the time it was basically considered illegitimate to litigize. I'm saying this partly in response to your point here about how it's not only left

projects that have been defeated and failed. I think it's a really important point. When I used to say when I was teaching courses for years about the idea of post-modernity, one of my accounts to students was that what we call post-modernity is the historical phase during which it appears that capitalism has simply overwhelmed every attempt to regulate it or control it. And one way of putting that is just to say that, well, really what's happened in the past half a century is that capitalism has simply defeated politics. Capitalism has simply defeated all politics. The only politics that succeeds is politics, which is able to go entirely with the grain of the interests and intentions of some particular fraction of capital for a while.

And Corbyn represents, from that point of view, not just the left, he represents the very idea that politics itself might be capable of challenging. or just might be capable of being a site at which it is possible for people to make rational collective decisions about our future? I think that's completely right. I think I would go one further even and say, yeah, it's not just about the left politics and it's not about what Corbyn represents, but it's kind of like this. It's like a project of quite intense gaslighting of basically running up this story of what

Jeremy Corbyn isn't, which we know he isn't, but is like really the story of being pushed like this is a crazy, anti-Semitic, you know, marrow-growing weirdo, because it's really important to push that story forward to overcome the idea of their kind of being an alternative that's built on justice and integrity, which is really what he's about, do you know what I mean, regardless of whether he was somebody who was ever going to be a good politician or not. You see exactly the same kind of architecture of a debate made with Palestine.

I mean, as soon as you're talking about Israel, Palestine, then there's this whole, like, surge that comes forward, like in the media and by, you know, the right and the center going, you know, these people are terrorists, these people are, whatever. So there is no space to even be able to envisage the issue or the people or the actors involved in the way that they really are. And it's that, it's that kind of extreme violence, I think, which is really important to recognize,

because what you then get, and this is going back to our initial point, is you get an expending of energy on part of people who don't have necessarily a historical consciousness of why this is happening and an intense frustration with this kind of reality because you don't understand the importance of those kind of strategies and architecture on behalf of the right or, you know, like the hegemonic forces. So I thought today we were talking about humility and I thought it would be a good idea to play some music from the ambient tradition, really, because going right back to Eric Sarty

and his practice of what he called furniture music, there is this sense that ambient and minimalist music has been deliberately anti-heroic. He has deliberately assured the kind of self-aggrandizing, self-important heroism, which arguably characterizes music from Beethoven to indeed Kendrick Lamar. So we have one or two tracks from the ambient tradition. One track we could obviously play would be a piece of music by someone we have heard from recently in the Surrealism show.

This is the great French composer Eric Sarty, whose concept of furniture music as music which could simply be ignored. This is very deliberate rejection of the masculinist heroism and self-importance, which he saw as informing. orchestral music culture, we had one of his most famous tracks. We'd have another one. We'd have Nossien number one, perhaps played by Anne Kepheleck from 1988. Nossien, nobody knows exactly what it means. There are dictionaries which include the word Nossien as referring to a dance, which Thesius is supposed to have danced after escaping from the minor tour in the labyrinth. I think it's just a 19th century coinage, and it's supposed to have some. etymological imaginary relationship

to narcissism. I think it's just sort of a made-up word in that proto-serrealist vein. I thought for no other reason that it is a very recent manifestation of that ambient music tradition, which I'm saying today, is so good at eschewing masculineist and heroic tropes in music. this really recent track from this album where

Seminole British Ambient Dub producer Youth has basically set one of Alan Ginsberg's really long poems, Iron Horse to music across a whole album. I came out a few a couple of months ago. It's pretty

interesting and we could play the orb end hate mix from the track of the track which is just called Iron Horse, but it's you know, it's music backing, a recording of Alan Ginsberg, reading, Iron Horse. Well, I think one of the things we were thinking about when we were planning the show was a point we've made quite a few times before and we've organised a whole consciousness-raising workshop around this at the world transformed a couple of years ago. It is the importance just as a way of coping as much as anything else with these sort of circumstances of having a properly historical sense of one's place in the world and one's place in the world.

than one's place in history. Partly it is just a matter of accepting that being relatively marginal, being politically weak, and suffering defeat is the norm for progressive forces. Over the past couple hundred years, no generation has really lived through a period

when over, say, 20 to 30 year period, like the left just experienced sustained victory or victory was more common than defeat. And, you know, we get victories occasionally, and those victories are really important. That's why most of us are even alive. But even those victories are always relatively improbable. They're always against the odds when they're happening.

So from that point of view, I think having a certain kind of modesty, and I think not allowing yourself to believe that your experience of that general condition is somehow worse or more important or less tolerable than that previous or future generations, I think is quite important. And humility is bound up with that, a certain sense of, you know, a sense of accepting that there are huge limits on individual agency, there are even structural, conjunctual limits on collective agency, and those limits have also always applied to everyone who has actually achieved anything.

So I think that is a really important part of developing a kind of way of relating to the world, which is just productive and potentially joyful, but also. it just allows you to survive some of these circumstances. Yeah, and I would add to that as a practice as well, which we'll get to talking about later, hopefully, in this show. But, you know, it's not just about an attitude. It's about how you see yourself in the world. It's kind of like both things.

It's on one hand, you want to be like, well, not all is lost because small actions that I take in a collective force today will have an effect on the future. also to have the humility to think, to understand that it's not just about your own agency now and that it's not just all about you or the specific movement that you're in. There are other factors that are contributing towards like a general force towards, you know, progression or whatever. It's both of those things at the same time. And I guess my interest is like how does that play out in like actual left spaces, which we'll get to talk about a little bit more later.

Kea, do you have anything you want to say on the historical consciousness? Well, perhaps one way to get into is to talk about humility, the word itself, or perhaps the concept itself a little bit. Perhaps it's just a religious form of humility, and that's supposed to be a certain humility in the individual in the face of the, like, the hugeness and the noability of God. And so perhaps, like, the secular version of that would be a certain political humility in the face of the complexity of the world.

So, you know, the world's incredibly complex. And so, you know, when we act in it, you know, it's very hard to shift, et cetera, all these sorts of things. Like, there's a danger in that, isn't there, right? The danger in accepting that is, like, the conservative position that we can't know what the outcomes of action are so we shouldn't try and change the world. That's the danger.

Or even, like, you know, oh, wow, the world is so complex. I don't know where to start. You get the recycling argument. You get the, I'll just do my recycling. Yeah, yeah. Or why bother doing the recycling? because the Chinese will blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and so, like, yeah, so that, and in fact, you know, there is a, we could trace that,

you know, in terms of like that political humility, I suppose what that's arguing against is like a tradition of sort of scientific Marxism in which there's like a strong teleology, right, in that like, right, with Marxism, you discover the laws of history, therefore you can act with a real certainty, actually. You can act with a real certainty that you're on the right side of history and the history is moving in this direction, etc. Once again, you know, that can lead to like a political quietism and it can lead to a volunteerism. There's no sort of absolute politics of that. And then there's this like, you know, there's this shift, perhaps in the 1970s and sometimes associated with like post-structuralism and this sort of thing and like Leotard

and this idea of like what we need to have in politics at the end of grand narrative. the big stories, et cetera, which once again, I think, is a conservative impulse. And so between all of that, there's this thing of like, you do need to act. We need to act because the world is made up of people acting, basically. And, you know, it's that thing of, like, what you were saying now, part of the complexity of the world is that, like, history is not a straight line, right? It doesn't progress along straight lines. There are sort of, like, moments of, like, real jumps and ruptures and moments where

where things that seemed impossible last week suddenly seemed possible, do you know what I mean? So how do you act in the face of those sorts of things, events as Badger and people talk about them? And so, yeah, how do you act in a face of complexity is you need a certain political humility? Do you know what I mean? You need a certain political humility in it's saying, right, I understand that like you have these events and these things happen. And like sometimes when a small group of people do this small action, it can have huge effects. Right? That's sometimes what happens. Most of the time it doesn't. So what's the lesson to draw from that? It's not just to care, well, let's just keep doing small actions. And then one of them might take off it to try to think about how you sort of shape the world or reshape the world in order to make it more likely that your small events will have a big impact. Do you know what I mean?

And try to learn the lessons of like how you shape things so that your small actions, I mean to say, have big impacts in the world. You know, it removes that certainty and that certainty of politics, that basically made people do incredible, incredible sacrifices in order to try to bring about social change in the 20th century. Do you know what I mean? Also brought about like, you know, some pretty horrific outcomes as well. I mean, totally. And I think part of that is, you know, like the famous quote or whatever is, you know, that you start, that we stand on the shoulders of giants, right? But often those giants are not giants, or often that work has been hidden or is unknown. You know, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have contributed to you being able to be the activists in the way that you're being able to, you know, today.

And a lot of that is hidden and a lot of it is undocumented. And a lot of it is not bombastic. And that's okay. Like, it's okay to be involved in deliberative political work that, and, you know, Jeremy mentioned this earlier, and we talk about it all the time, we're trying to balance, like, the work with, you know, survival and being, you know, well in the world. So it's not, this is, this is not an argument for some kind of, like, you know, Protestant ethic, sacrificial form of activism where you should just be like grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding, until you destroy yourself. But I think also part of the humiliation, is understanding that it is sometimes the boring backroom work and the organizing that doesn't involve those big election moments and doesn't involve, you know, like being very close to state power or whatever, which will allow a generation after you to be able to do, you know, the more spectacular documented work. And that's fine. That's fine. And that's the historical

perspective, which is important and which frankly is very difficult to achieve. achieve when you're younger just because of years of service. If nothing else, you know, you have to be incredibly well read as a 20-year-old to be able to like embody some of that experience. And I think that's one of the things that are difficult if you've become politicised in the 2010s. I thought we might play today some music from a musician who's work I really love, but who I once read an interview with at which he said that, For him, the most important spiritual ethic was the ethic of humility, and that somehow this informs all his music.

There's the great classical sitarist Ravishanka. We could hear Raga Jog, again from 1956, actually. 956 album Three Raghas. I mean, I could go on at length about how this, the idea of humility of not fetishizing the self is crucial, really within all spiritual and mystical tradition. actually, this is something that actually it unites in a way both the Eastern, the Asian

contemplated traditions and the Abrahamic traditions in different ways. Let's play Kendrick's Lamar, um, humble. He's not that humble in it. He says, he's basically bragging about how humble is. Yeah, or even, I think he might even just be demanding that the people around him are humble. quite sure. One of the lyrics is, Girl, I can buy your, ask the world

with my paystab, which is like, just fits into the long, long tradition of, like, boasting in hip-hop, basically. You know, this sort of robust, invulnerable, masculine sort of persona that you're supposed to take on it in hip-hop. Is there some sort of irony in this song? I don't know. I can't quite work it out. But anyway, here's a not very humble, Kendrix Lamar.

we play in Tetris am to the B.m. P.m. to the A.m. to the A.m. You just got to hate them. Fonk. If I quit your B.m. I still rock Mercedes folk. If I quit this season, I still be the greatest funk. My left stroke just went viral. Right stroke. Put a baby in a spiral. Sopranos C, we like to keep it on the high note. It's levels to it. You and... This might be a point actually to move on to like something I wanted to talk about. I wanted to raise, which is this idea of the race. relationship between humility and humiliation, because like this fear of humiliation is like, well, it's a really big black political mobilizing affect, basically, but particularly associated with the right, I think. And like one way in which we might understand the distinction between like humility and humiliation is like humility, I think it's like a psychological disposition,

but it's something that's internally generated, right? I don't know if it's not always like a conscious choice. I don't know. Well, we don't need to get into that. Whereas humiliation is something which is externally imposed. It does have to do with agency, doesn't it? When to be humble is to be, is almost like active to a certain extent. Humility is a, is a cultivated disposition. This is very Hegelian here. This is the, this is the Higalian, a master slave dialectic, according to which it is actually the slave who is free, because the master is more dependent on the slave than the slave on the master. And whereas humiliation, is absolutely, it's the removal of agency.

Yeah, it's externally imposed, isn't it? It's the imposition of like shame or something like that is humiliation. There's something internally generated and externally imposed it's something. But yeah, it's the agency as well? Because one of the things that's associated with, like, Christian humility is like meekness. Do you know what I mean? Well, it is, but the, you know, the Christian subject has accepted salvation. You know, that is the agential act.

Ah, okay, yeah, that's a nice way out of that. Yeah, that's good, yeah. But I also think it's about embodying the truth. And I understand discourses of humility and humiliation. I find it very difficult to kind of read these from a feminist or female lens. I think there's something about it which is very male. I'm not sure if it's male or if it's masculine. But like, you know, men seem to really be preoccupied with, you know, not being humiliated.

Fear of humiliation, yeah. Fear of humiliation is a really big thing to men. I mean, I'm not saying it, I'm just trying to think about it. It's not really something that preoccupies, definitely not my, but I think when I think about it through again, like I was saying, a feminist lens, it's not one of the central things. I mean, maybe the issue with women is more one about power and subordination and trying to subvert that.

But I definitely think that being humiliated is like a terrible, thing for the position of like patriarchy. I can see that because I see it played out. I see it played out in like in male structures, whether you're talking about war or power or overpowering or whatever, which is why what Jeremy said about is so important about it being like cultivating humility is quite politically, it's a difficult thing. We're not saying this is an easy thing because you both have to be convinced that you are right with what you're trying to do and to push forward with that in a kind of very active way

but you also have to accept that you could be wrong and you might be wrong in this instance and you have to hold both of those things together and if you take a really kind of crude and I would again say male view of making an argument that's not really what happens you just hold the line and you push forward regardless. Yeah, there's a whole lot of things that are really interesting.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this on the show before, but I always remember this very interesting exchange at the radical theory forum that I organised with some comrades, including Rodrigo Nunes, who we've taught here on the show in the early 2000s as part of the European Social Forum in London. And one of the exercises that my friend Oscar Ray, organized during this day of workshops and talks was involved us talking in small groups with people at the event about the issue of certainty. One of the questions we had to discuss

was how important is it that you are completely certain of your positions? And this guy I was talking to, this was during the Iraq War and he said, yes, it's absolutely crucial to me. I'm 100% certain that the war is wrong. And I said, no, I feel completely, or the opposite, I think the war is wrong, but it's important to me, just as a rationalist, just as a child of the Enlightenment, as a believer in science, that it is hypothetically possible

that somebody could convince me is right, that my conclusions are always provisional. You mentioned Leotard, earlier, Kear, I would point out, Leotard's whole argument is that that that form of provisionality of knowledge and conclusions is just the way science actually works.

and is the way science has been working at least since the late 19th century, arguably since the 70th century. I think there's a lot of caricature of leotaur and postmodernism. There's a particular strand of leotar's thinking, which is that what it means to be what he calls postmodern,

it just means actually being completely non-dogmatic and having a more like a scientist's commitment to provisionality, even in your basic to political assumptions and orientations. And I think that is really interesting. And that is a good way of thinking about humility as a positive ethic in a way, that it has to do with exactly what Nardia said. You do have to act according to a set of presupposition, a set of hypotheses, a set of best

available guesses, but you also have to recognise that they could be wrong. But we're straight away there from that issue of gender, because I think it is really important. I mean, it's really, it's something that lots of sociologists, historians, anthropologists have pointed out that it's absolutely crucial to the working of patriarchal cultures, in almost all patriarchal cultures, this idea that men's status, it has to be maintained, and the humiliation or dishonour,

which is just another word for humiliation, really, is really, really fatal to men's sense of self-wood under those circumstances. And it is, I'm partly just riffing here. I'm thinking about the fact that, you know, Kier mentioned shame, Humiliation is really important to shame. And, you know, one of the interesting features of the past like few decades is that the political movement, which became most preoccupied with issues, issues of shame and its opposite, and humiliation is opposite, is gay liberation and what came after it. And the idea of pride, gay pride, Robert Anton Wilson has this just unbelievably embarrassing and stupid little essay where he questions, he says, why, you know, he says, look, I've got no, I'm not hoping.

homophobic. I got no problem with people in gay, but why would you be proud of it if it's just like an organic fact? And it's an idiotic argument because it totally ignores the history of gay shame, gay shaming and why that had to be resisted. But I do sort of think that it's an interesting diverse, it's an interesting way in which gay liberation, which had such a close and important relationship to women's liberation, does diverge from women's liberation? Because I'm sure, I'm quite sure if it wasn't that gay liberation mainly, you know, the main actors in the early gay liberation were men, then if it weren't for that, then pride would not have become the thing that became the main theme. And it didn't in women's liberation. For women's liberation, it was an idea of

freedom. There's an idea of freedom that becomes more, is more important than an idea of pride. And I think that there is something really interesting there. I think it is really interesting. And I think we're getting at something with like, you know, here's like original statement about this kind of fear of humiliation. So I think what would be interesting now to talk about is what does that imagined humiliation or experienced humiliation look like in a political sense?

So to me, having heard you both kind of respond there, I think there's something about, you know, in relation to like it being, I think, quite male and we're talking about patriarchy and gender, etc. There's something about, which I think makes shame different from humiliation, which is humiliation has something about being put back in your place or being told your place. It seems to me that there is some kind of sentiment and whether we think about it anthropologically in terms of like in rituals or, you know, with older men and young men

or, you know, with men fighting or whatever, and you guys will have more experience so you can elaborate. This is just mostly as an observer. But thinking about how that translates or how that can be mapped politically, what happened with, you know, Jeremy Corbyn is the left was put back in their box. It was like, get back in there. And we've talked about this before and how this materializes in headlines with, you know, every time, you know, the left's voice, you know, is able to raise by one decimal or whatever you get the Daily Mail and the Times, etc., saying, okay, you've had your say, go back in your corner. And I think that says something to me about how that humiliation can manifest itself

and therefore maybe can help us move towards understanding why it becomes difficult to be able to hold some kind of humility if you are, if you're still seeing yourself or embodying a state of political humiliation. Yeah, I think you're right. I would say, I would link this to things we've been talking about already today and say one of the sort of pathologies informing the whole political scene in Britain today

is that Brexit constituted a massive humiliation for the entire, both the political establishment and really the entire sort of middle class, the sort of professional classes in Britain at least. You know, they were humiliated by this more or less inactive, like, political coalition of like petty bourgeois retirees and extremely disenfranchised working class voters. And it was, and it was something, and they haven't really recovered from it. The whole sort of hysteria around and the persistent myth of Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite, I would say that is largely a displacement. And it's a displacement for the feelings of deep, like, collective, but in many cases,

even sort of personally internalised humiliation. It's like millions of sort of affluent, middle-class people who are used to being deferred to and used to thinking it's basically people who look like them who run the country and should always do, you know, suffered a massive humiliation from Brexit. That's partly why I was saying, I don't think it's going to go away, actually, because it was a historic humiliation for them. And they've been taking it out on the left, Corbyn, everyone else ever since. And that's partly, that is what animates the sadism of their treatment, like even just a couple of weeks ago, their treatment of Pfizer-Shaheen. And what's motivating them is that they did suffer this deep sense of

humiliation. When they were defeated, they were defeated by the sort of combined forces of the left in the Labour Party on the one hand, but probably more significantly, the Brexit project. Yeah, although we'd have to put 2017 election in there as well as the, as the great thing which has like, you know, disappeared from history, which must be excised from history. The 2017 election did not take place, etc. But anyway, let's cut, sorry, I went into more conjunctal analysis and Gnadi was rightly trying to get us to this, you know, the question. of what it's like. What's humility and humiliation? Yeah, no, no, I think, no, I think you are helping there. There's just one thing to say on that is that, is that it's, what, what's

becoming clear is that what happens when you are humiliated? You use the word displaced, Jeremy, and I think that's really important, both politically and, you know, on an individual level. Like, it's a well-known fact, you know, historically, when men are humiliated by their bosses in the factory, they take it home and they take that humiliation by humiliating their wives in the case of domestic violence. That's a well-known pattern. And it plays out politically as well. And I think the example that you gave, Jerry, is a really good one, is that if there is an unrecognized, like, humiliation as a class or as a group of people, it is going to be displaced on another group. That group is going to act out politically, so to speak, and use whatever

power they have to displace that or take it out on someone who is not responsible for their humiliation, because they cannot act back and back up or punch up in this specific political case to the person or the group or the trends that have humiliated them. So I do think it's an important point. Humiliation is quite tied to sort of like hierarchical systems. When you live within hierarchical systems such as work, you know, you do suffer humiliations regularly. One of the big political drivers is to pass that humiliation on in some way. So it could be, you know, you go and humiliate the wife, or it could be, you know, that what you actually want is to pass that humiliation onto somebody who's lowering the social hierarchy, right? So that might

mean, you know, anti-immigration politics, whatever. People talk about negative solidarity. In fact, it's Alex Williams' blog post, isn't it, with this idea that, like, you form a level of solidarity amongst certain people on a certain level of a status hierarchy by refusing solidarity with those below you. Do you know what I mean? And that, so it got me thinking about, well, can you have, is it always, does humiliation, the affect of humiliation, does it always lead to bad reactive politics? I'm not quite sure if it is, because it's mainly associated with things such as like resentment politics or like raison timet as, as Nietzsche would put it, basically. And of course, Nietzsche would also be like against humility, I've seen it as linked to like a Christian sort of meekness. and in fact, a way in fact

in which they're sort of the weak control they're strong by rolling onto their backs and acting all meek and all that sort of stuff. But the more interesting question is like can humiliation, the feeling of being humiliated in hierarchical society, can it produce better politics than just

resentment or resentiment politics? I mean, I think the experience of humiliation can provoke people towards democratic and radical and progressive ends, but it has to be like a collective determination to exit the state of humiliation through the exercise of agency. That's the key thing, isn't it, basically? It's an affect based on non-agency.

I feel like what we're saying is, you may have been humiliated politically, but there is still value in you having humility. And in a different way, but both things are true. Like, we recognize that you've been humiliated, but there is value. There is value for you as a person and your ability to cope in the world,

but also politically by taking that step back and understanding that sometimes it's not all about you or what you're doing right now. We could play Loser by Beck, from the artist Beck from the album, Mellow Gold. It's from 1993. It's sort of like a part of a wave, probably, of like these sort of self-objection,

sort of record from the early 90s sort of slacker culture as well was going on at the time and the chorus goes, I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me? Sort of like the anti-boastfulness sort of stream in politics. I don't know whether you could read it as like a sort of like parody of slacker culture.

So I don't get a door I'm a loser baby So why don't you kill me? It sort of fits a little bit into There's this thesis by Joshua Clover That we've talked about before That at that point in the early 1990s There's a loss of like

Of the political program, et cetera And so antagonism Which was previously seen as outside A social antagonism is sort of brought internalised, basically. And there's sort of like a turn towards like, you know, internal self-loathing and these sorts of things. Is that humility? Is that humiliation? I'm not sure.

The other song we could play in, which comes out in 1992, so around about the same time as Beck's song, Luzer, is Creep by Radiohead, which has got the chorus, I'm a creep, I'm a weedo, weirdo, what am I doing here? I don't belong here. but we so we could play that as a further example of that early 90s sort of turn not necessarily humiliation to humility but to something very very close to it maybe we should talk now more about this idea of humility in everyday political interactions we talked a bit about it about this notion of provisionality but there was a lot of talking about this in activist culture especially i would say in the sort of

first half of the 2010. It was a big theme. It was power and privilege discourse. It was like, how do you can, how do you construct situations in which every, in, in, at the level of personal interactions, like everybody feels, everybody feels valued. Like nobody, nobody is, nobody feels humiliated, actually. I have very strong feelings about the power and privileged discourse. And I think a lot of it has come from like liberal American US politics. And I think a huge, hugely problematic, a lot of it, and it didn't achieve the ends that it, you know, it didn't say, it didn't do what it said on the tin at all. If only it created, if anything, it created like paranoia and less solidaristic behavior, at least at the time when I experienced

it an activist group. So, so I'm not a fan of how a lot of that played out. And I think that's circumstantial and, I'm kind of structural specifically, you know, responding to, to power and privileged politics. I think a lot of it was identity politics and not coming from a very, not coming with good intentions, I suppose. Having said all of that, I think it is interesting to try and contextualize our applied and experienced behaviours as they play out in groups and political organising in the historical moment that we're at, you know, and understanding how those tensions are brought in into groups and into social relations and to be able to have a consciousness of that.

Otherwise, it's very difficult to understand why a lot of people behave badly or in a very cliquy way or in a way that sets spaces and meetings and conversations with a lot of kind of expectation of in an out-group kind of behaviour. So that's really what I'm interested in. I'm interested in really thinking, okay, well, what is going, and this is going back to kind of like the ACFM themes of like, how do we engender a kind of generosity and curiosity and a humility in our interactions with other people

in a political space at this conjuncture? Because without that, we're unable to show up in spaces in a way that provides solidarity to other people who might be more difficult, different than us, regardless of what we say we're doing. And you see this all the time. And I think where this becomes easier is if you have an external campaign.

So when we've seen it with Palestine or whatever, it becomes much easier for people to come together and show solidarity to something external, right? But at a moment of defeat or at a moment of humiliation, my observation has been that it becomes very difficult for people in spaces to not hold the line because you're seeing yourself as positing your politics against an enemy that has beaten you down, whereas actually I think there does require these conversations in left spaces where you're like, well, you know, what is it that we need to do now? And does anyone have any new ideas? Which actually,

I think people will perceive as political weakness. or even more importantly, what can we learn from history? Well, I think that's really interesting. I mean, I think it's worth acknowledging that I think, you know, the power and privilege discourse, which maybe I'll elaborate in a moment, what was even meant by that, but that power and privilege discourse in activist groups that was so popular a few years ago, I think it was trying to get people to cultivate a set of sensibilities and interactional reflexes,

which are ones that we would approve of and that we're sort of talking about. But I also think the position that we're moving towards here and that is implied in some of the notes we made when we were preparing the show is that we have a different set of reference points for achieving that sort of disposition and those healthy interactions.

And I think you've already said it. It's humility is quite a good term, humility, provisionality, but also curiosity and sort of solidarity as being kind of ethics that inform interactions. I think that's really important. And I just, I think, I think, I think just on its own, I think having those as kind of key reference points, having an ideal of, you know, open-ended curiosity and assumed and persistent solidarity informing social interactions is more, is functionally much more useful at achieving what people want to achieve than like privilege checking, for example. I totally agree.

And I think it's, again, talking about disposition, it's a, it's an attitude that you go into a physical space or a meeting or whatever with other people. Like, you shouldn't have to label someone as like, this person has had all of these, like, negative life experiences or whatever that you haven't had. And that's, that's why you need to listen to them. It's like, no, actually everyone needs to employ some kind of active listening. You know, these are not skills that people necessarily have. People subconsciously have things to say. And it's understandable that people have things to say because either they've been politically humiliated or defeated

or they have some kind of interesting anecdote or they've come to the meeting because they've got some kind of frustration. Like these are all people come to things like with different energies. So it's not just about, you know, quote unquote, who loud or quieter voices in the room and, you know, the rhetoric of like everyone has a chance, to speak. Like, I understand that these things are good when we try and, and I understand that part of the power and privilege stuff is to allow people to speak, but also, you know, like,

there will be leaders and followers in these kind of spaces. Like, that's fine. I don't actually have an issue with that. I think what I have an issue with is, like, people not being conscious of the energy that they are bringing when there is the context of political defeat. A lot of people don't have the space in themselves to enter a space in a more kind of like leveled, leveled way. Can I just raise an anecdote? Seen as we were encouraged to raise anecdotes earlier, I found myself in a very anecdotal mood. Just in terms of like techniques for cultivating some sort of form of political humility, is that like very early on in my political education, I noticed a friend of mine at the time, a comrade of mine at the time, Phil the printer,

he'd, like, be involved in, like, discussions and, like, would be full-throated in them, but he'd always make sure after the discussion had ended, that you'd go up to the person he was disagreeing with and say, look, we disagree on this, but, like, I respect you, you know that, don't you? Like, we're comrades, we respect each other. And I thought, God, that's a really good practice. And I tried to take it up, not necessarily that I say, I respect you, but, like, you know, like, to sort of, like, be sure that, like, you know, you have political disagreements,

but that's not a personal thing. Like, you know, we disagree with each other politically. It doesn't mean that we, you know, we disagree that there's a personal animosity there to try to prevent personal animosity arising. I found it very difficult to do that online, although sometimes it works, but sometimes it just takes,

you know, basically people are just off on their own thing, et cetera. But I found that a useful sort of technique. I think there are techniques that you can sort of adopt to try to think about, to try to be a little bit more humbled, you know what I mean? An important moment in my political education anyway, when that's just a good thing. should be attacking ideas, not people. We should be attacking ideas and not people, but that's

very difficult these days. Very difficult. One of my favourite Anna days, about that kind of advice is being told when I was really young. I think about 12, like in a pub with some friends of my dad, by being told by some, you know, sort of left doing, you know, complete, so working class, shop steward, exactly the kind of guy you know, Martin coming at the trade union militancy of the 70s. Like saying to me, well, if you ever don't understand a word, lad, Just ask, ask, always ask if you don't understand what people have said. You'll never learn otherwise. That's come to me like dozens of times when I've been in meetings

and like someone in the room has got annoyed because I used a word they didn't know. Or not even a word they didn't know, but a word that they didn't. They imagined some other person not knowing what it meant. Yeah, usually it's that way, right. And usually it's well, really what it is, I'm going to say, what really what it is, it's a word that they didn't get taught at Oxbridge. So they're angry that anyone would be using it. This anecdote of personal humility is suddenly taking a turn.

Well, no, it's not, because it's about the necessary, it's about, you know, that is about human, it is about sort of humility. It's about the important, you know, it's about a sort of ethic of humility and the way that's connected to curiosity, you know, is Nardi raised this, this idea of curiosity. It's really important, I think, because in curiosity is often really associated with an inability to experience humility as any kind of a positive thing and also a tendency and to feel humiliated. One of the things we're sort of gesturing towards here,

I think we've probably all experienced these situations where people felt themselves to be humiliated in ways which might not have been really been appropriate to the situation. I mean, my strong memories of that power and privilege moment or 10, 15 years ago are to do, they are obviously to do with me being someone

who, A, definitely does enjoy, you know, all kinds of privilege, being a straight, white man, you know, professional class. completely rejecting the idea that that gives me a great deal of power. I think that part of the problem with the whole privilege discourse is the way it conflates privilege and power. And it therefore has no analysis of power. It just has an analysis of certain differential social and cultural statuses.

And that substitutes that analysis for any actual understanding of wider notions of power. But being in the situation where I'd been brought into the room, like by someone in the room, because I was perceived as having some kind of authority and some kind of experience, that a lot of other people in the room wouldn't have. But then someone else in the room getting really angry just about the fact that I've been put in that position at all. I've been asked to give a talk, and they just hadn't been involved in any kind of political organizing

that involved people giving talks. And their sense of themselves was such that it was sort of humiliating for them to have to listen to a talk, and they thought that their particular life experience or social identity ought to entitle them to a certain kind of deference from other people who hadn't had that. And I think, you know, my sense was the thing I had to learn to sort of negotiate and navigate was that for completely understandable reasons, there was a lot of complexity to the way people thought about the relationship between ideas like respect, deference, authority, humility, curiosity. So, for example, I think that it's quite easy, especially for a very young people, like not really to be able to understand the difference between respect and deference.

And to just think, well, if somebody is not to. deferring to you, they're not respecting you. And the point about the field of printer dialogue, the analog, anecdote for me, the point about the field of printer ethic is that it's making very, it's trying to distinguish like deference from respect. You're trying to say you can respect somebody while not, not, while declining to defer to them on certain issues and declined to defer them in certain contexts. And of course, part of the issue there is that I think, I think just as you were saying, Nadia, that a certain kind of liberalism can't make any differentiation between a certain kind of liberalism and a certain kind of conservative,

well, most kinds of conservatives, especially. It doesn't really make any distinction between respect and deference because it can't really imagine an existing world of social hierarchy is actually being changed. But also it's not just that it doesn't have a power analysis. I think it functions as detracting from having a power analysis, which is like absolutely seminal and important to any political analysis worth itself. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like if you become bogged down with that kind of discourse, then I think it's a massive distraction. I don't care that, you know, I understand that it's, that it has good intentions, but it's massive distraction. And it doesn't help with solidaristic behavior. And it doesn't,

it, you know, it sets everyone into their identities. And it doesn't help for people to be able to see themselves and other people, which is fundamentally what solidarity is about and a culture. of solidarity is about. I mean, I'd really, I mean, I want to add as well. I think, you know, some of the things that people would associate with that kind of meeting culture, for example, I mean, a lot of them are really important. Like, you've talked about listening nowadays. I think, I think it's completely right. It's completely right that, like, active listening. And especially if you're like, especially if you're a man, especially if you're a man with a particular kind of educational background, someone who's been just trained and cultivated over years to be really,

really confident about talking in a certain kind of social space. It is, like, it's massively important, like, to understand that, in fact, your cultivated confidence can become an obstacle to let you actually learning things from people. And I mean, this is something I sometimes say, when I meet other, you know, younger than me, other very articulate young men, I'll say to them, look, one of the things you've really got to learn in life is you can win the argument and still find out you were wrong. Completely. You can be in that room. And because you're better at debating, you can remember the references, you remember what everyone said better, you know, you make a better argument, you can convince yourself and even the person you're arguing with, you're right,

then it turns out three years later, the person you were disagreeing with, who was a bit more faltering, a bit more stumbling, a bit less articulate, but they had an intuition and their intuition was correct. They were wrong. For me, that is, actually, that is, that has been a really important thing, not just in political relationships, and in personal relationships, actually. It's a thing I've really had to learn. And that, for me, is what a certain cultivation of humility involves, it involves understood. I can win any, I can win any argument if I, if all I'm trying to do is win that argument. But that almost has, that will have almost no relationship to whether I was actually right or not. Yes, we've noticed that,

Jeremy. No, no, I think it's such an important. I think it is, I think it is a really important point, you know, and I say, and it is an important point, especially because, you know, like, you know, I facilitate workshops and consciousness raising type work. And, and, I mean, you're right, we are trying to create a space where everyone has an opportunity to contribute. But it's also just being aware that there is some people who they gain agency through trying to call out other people as like, that's their body of work at an event. So that's how they claim agency, which is not the same as what you were just saying, which I think is really important, which is how do you, what tools and workshop design

or like meeting design or whatever, can you use to create a space where people feel like it's okay to listen to other people and to want to listen to other people? Because that creates a certain politics, which I think is really important. This is the point. It's for me, all of this is very political. Like humility, the importance of it is political. It helps us win. Yeah, this is not just a moral thing. This is a strategic thing, Naddy, isn't it? Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's crucial. And I mean, yeah, and that moment, that moment we're sort of talking about really the first half of the 2010. I mean, one of the historical conditions of that moment was the left hadn't won anything for like 30 years, you know. I mean, people didn't really even have a sense of what an actually strategically capacious left might even look like. People like me, you could like vaguely remember being in like trade union demos and like women's liberation creches when we're little kids. And that was partly what produced that. situation where people were just desperate for any sense of agency, collective or individual. And so, well, maybe at least having a meeting where the men don't talk over the women,

well, maybe we've at least achieved that. And that was something. And that all totally changed during the early years of the Corby movement because actually there was a big collective project. And we'd won something. We'd run the leadership of the Labour Party. And there was a sense of what the stakes were. And all that stuff just went out of the window. And everything I'm sort of complaining, I was sort of complaining about, just stop being an issue for people because there was some, there was more important stuff to worry about. And partly that was, you know, a lot of our analysis, I think it comes from understanding, you know, what we can learn from that moment. We do have to avoid going back into a kind of mentality. And in here, Nietzsche is correct, I think, actually. Nietzsche is correct, which is, you know, you were just in the position of the humiliated and the humiliated who can never imagine, you know, overcoming your humiliation really. God, yeah, that is the dominant affect on the Twitter left, reveling in humiliation, basically. And of course, the challenge for us now historically, and this comes back to what we were

saying right at the start of the show, the challenge is you have to cultivate that sense that indeed we have been defeated, you're probably going to go on being defeated, and you are arguing, you are making all your plans from a position of relative weakness in relation to your enemies. Yes, indeed, that is the case. but victories are possible. We can actually win. You know, we said this in the concluding section of Mine and Alex's book, Gemini, now. We talked about this slogan. Everybody knows this slogan from Gramsci, you know, pessimism of the intellect, optimism, the will. But he didn't make it up.

He was quoting the French, think of Romain-Roulin. But pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, like we suggest there, what does that mean exactly rather than just a trite cliche? It means, pessimismism of the intellect, understanding, yes, you are in a position of weakness. And that is the antidote to one of the worst afflictions of the left and one of the worst, I would say, pathological reactions to humiliation, which is millinarianism, which we haven't really talked about today. But that is also a really frequent tendency. People have experienced an utterly humiliating defeat. What do you do? You simply tell yourself, no, no, it wasn't really a defeat. Victory is

just around the corner. With every eviction, we go stronger. No, we don't. So, And to avoid that kind of millionarianism, but it's also the millionarianism, you know, if the Trotsky is set declaring that we're now in a pre-revolutionary situation because somebody won a strike, you know, over, you know, an incremental pay rise, which happens all the time.

And what's happening in 2014, 2015, with eventually deleterious consequences. So to avoid that, you need the pessimism of the intellect. You need to say, yeah, okay, we're arguing from a position of weakness. So we're all in a position of weakness. But what the optimism of the will means is it's not just thinking if you want it enough, you will win. It's not that. But it is

recognising, look, victories are always possible. You could win. You could win. And if you hold those two thoughts together, it becomes much easier, I think, to have this disposition, which is both optimistic and is open to the potential for collective joy, but is also humble, you know, is also one of relative humility and, and indeed, of solidarity and curiosity, because you have to cultivate those relations of solidarity with as many other groups and individuals as possible. And you have to maintain that sense of curiosity because without it, you don't know. You don't know what might be the path to victory. from her album, Blue, from the very early 70s, I mean, to me, this is like, it is literally

the saddest song. Like, I can't really listen to it that easily. It is really interesting, because it is a song about humility. She's feeling miserable because she has, you know, she's hurt her lover's feelings. Like, I made my baby cry. And to me, this is a, it's actually a really, really important song in the history of sort of confessional female singer songwriting. That is the kind of musical genre, which, finds its contemporary manifestation in the globe bestriding Colossus, who is Taylor Swift. It's such a pivotal moment in that history because the norm in romantic pop music sung by women from the 19th century through to Taylor Swift is for women to give voice to their feelings of grievance

the way they've been treated by men or that being treated by men, or give voice to a hope and aspiration that they will be treated as idealized objects by men. That's completely understandable. But here you have a woman very explicitly taking on the role of the, you know, the agent in the relationship and the person who's caused the pain, who's done the hurt. It's very, very powerful for that reason. I made my baby cry. He tried hard to help me, you know, he put me at ease And he loved me so naughty, made me weak in the knees

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on This is a point we could move on to the idea of generosity perhaps Or like movement generosity or political generosity, something like that the attitude you should have towards other people's political projects. If you have some sort of humility about the chance of your project, that the thing you're doing at the moment may or may not come off, it's always a roll of the dice, it's always a wager, right?

And you're trying to shape that wager so it's more likely to come off or not. But how then do you relate to the fact that other people are trying different things at the same time? And perhaps one of their things might come off, do you know what I mean? You have to have a generosity towards other people's projects because they might be the one to take off and perhaps actually what you might have to do is to say, I think actually their project

is worth supporting now. Do you know what I mean? There's this idea that perhaps one of the modes in which you exercise leadership in a humble way is actually leadership by following somebody else. You know, and saying, yeah, that's a great initiative. I think that's really timely. Let's do that.

I'll change my energies towards that. Or let me think about how my, the project I'm involved with other people, how that can be made more compatible with the other wages that are going on at the same time so that they became amplificatory rather than become discordant with one another or something like that. There's a big problem with this, right? The big political problem is like, how do you act with movement generosity to other people's projects and with humility towards your own?

How does that sort of attitude interact with people who are perhaps slightly more cynical actors or acting in an overtly sectarian way. Do you know what I mean? In some ways, movement generosity can just create room for bad behavior from others who are acting in a sectarian way. Do you know what I mean? That's not something I've got a solution to. That's one of the problems I think we have to deal with

because I think movement generosity is the thing that can act as almost like a force multiplier if you get it right, but it has some drawbacks. Sure, but I think there is something there about really being able to dissect. and understand intention, is that if, you know, if there's a specific group of people whose intention is some kind of entryism, or there's another group of people who, you know, either subliminally or subconsciously or quite consciously are acting in a very kind of misogynistic way, for example, trying to shut down, you know, women from talking about something or, like, in either of those examples, like, it's trying to understand, like,

where it's coming from to try and understand, like, what are the risks of being generous at a particular moment. One of the difficulties, if we think about political humility being this, how do you act in recognition of the complexity of the world? Basically, part of what you're trying to do is to act on the world so that complementarity, etc. fits. You're trying to avoid left competitiveness. One of the things that makes it a little bit more difficult, I think,

is that the fact that so much of politics takes place online these days. And particularly with the algorithms of social media, and that sort of thing, it's quite difficult actually to be, to act with humility or to exercise practices of humility online. The algorithms tend to lead you into, you know, sort of like a hardened persona,

basically, of self-promotion and never admitting that you were wrong and these sorts of things. Do you know what I mean? Like I said, when I tried to exercise, fill the printers lesson in, like, social media, sometimes it does work, and you can sort of work it through

but other times people just take that as a chance to say yes see you were wrong now you're backing off your position by saying you know we should respect each other and all that sort of stuff some people can take it in that way and i think it's it's a little bit like road rage do you know what i mean i always think of like cars road rage emerges because like cars are like that an enclosed space or like a pub a private space but in a public space the road and that's one of the drivers of road rage social media's a bit like that or you know that is that you're quite often you're perhaps you're doing it in your house. It's like a private space, but it's also a public space. So you behave in a way that you wouldn't behave in an embodied space where you're stood next to

each other. The way you drive is not the way you walk, basically. They're very different things. Yeah, but it depends what the stakes are. It depends what the stakes are, right? Is that if you think by behaving in a certain way in social media, you're going to lose your job or you're going to, you know, you're going to be ostracized in a way, like you wouldn't do it. That sort of dynamic you're talking about, it promotes. cowardice. It's basically it's allowing, which I kind of understand why people often step into that space. It's because it's a space where they can have agency to say whatever interesting or absolute bollocks things they want to say with no repercussions. And that creates a problem.

And it makes it very difficult to interact with then the values that we're talking about, which are about solidarity and curiosity and humility and reflection, reflection even. There is no space for that just because we have an analysis of certain dynamics, either in society, whether it or for online, doesn't mean that we're still not subjected and victim to them. And, you know, people on the left just as anyone else are victim to these sort of behaviors and perpetuate these sort of behaviors online. And it's quite difficult, although I always think it should be an aim to try and hack the game, to try and hack the game, to try and hack the algorithm and still behave like, you know, a decent human being online. But people don't,

so I don't spend any time there. We're pointing to some really important paradoxes, I think. I mean, the paradox of sectarianism and non-sectarianism is always really crucial. So you want to avoid sectarianism, practice movement generosity, and that's how you build the coalition, which according to the basic Ramsey model of politics is the only thing that ever wins. And that is not unrelated to the paradox. I find myself talking about to people quite a lot, which is that it's always a paradox for progressive forces for the left that you need to make your coalition as big as possible the reason a lot of people a lot of floating voters a lot of not very aligned people politically a lot of transactional individuals a lot of the reason they won't vote for your progressive government or join your

political social coalition is precisely because it isn't big enough they don't think it's going to win they don't think it's going to they think it'll get beaten it's a waste of time so that puts you in a kind of circular, sort of chicken and egg situation. And it's the same, there's a paradox of non-sectarianism. You know, I remember really laughing when I was a teenager at some of the sort of anarcho-sindicalists sort of papers I used to read, because they are narco-sindicists who are very big on accusing everyone else of sectarianism. They would say, we're not like the trots because we're not really sectarian.

We're not like the Greens, Gannicus, because we're not really sectarian. And I ended up thinking, this is ridiculous. They're just, they're the most sectarian people around. They just think that everyone else isn't. But there's no way out of that paradox because you do have to be as non-sectarian as possible up to the point where some other people are being really sectarian and you can't work with them. So the thing is there's no way out of those paradoxes. One of the great fantasies which informs left thought going back to the early 19th century, at least I would say,

is you find some theory, some principle, some paradigm, which will magically resolve those paradoxes. for you, which will magically absolve you of just having to make a judgment each and every time about which way to go. And part of what it means, I think, actually, to possess a positive kind of political humility is to simply understand you're never going to find that magic key. You are going to have to just keep doing the work every time making the judgment, rolling the dice. You're never going to be 100% sure if you got it right. Were you right to break off that relationship with that group? Should you keep trying? You're never going to know for sure. But those are the paradoxes which every other leftist, every progressive that ever won anything, has also had to deal with.

And it's not true the fantasy people have. You know, Lenin had a kind of magic formula, which enabled him to know exactly which way to go in each juncture. He just, he made some right calls and got lucky a few times. And knowing that is a kind of important political humility, I think. Too far out.