Ideas - Astra Taylor: The Hidden Truth of the World

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

In conversation with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed, the 2023 Massey lecturer Astra Taylor explains how her early years in the unschooling movement shaped her worldview and how Occupy Wall Street taught her that 'thinking' and 'doing' go hand in hand. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 7, 2023.*

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. I love a good epiphany. I'm an epiphany junkie. Like, oh, wow, now I see the world that way.

And this is the 2023 Massey lecturer, Astra Taylor. She's a Winnipeg-born writer and filmmaker who now lives in the United States. As other thinkers have inspired me and tickled my brain, I love the idea of prompting epiphanies in other people. This month, Astor will be sparking epiphanies right across Canada as the Massey Lectures go on the road. And her lectures, titled The Age of Insecurity, will be available on air and podcast in November. In the meantime, we wanted to give you a taste of how she thinks and of her double life as a public intellectual and a political organizer. I mean, I think I do have this idea, again, of having kind of skin in the game, you know, like, who would I be to talk about democracy

if I wasn't also trying to democratize our society at the same time. And I think maybe that is the unschooling ethos, which is you learn by doing. On Ideas, my conversation with Astra Taylor about the moments that have shaped her thinking, from her childhood and the unschooling movement to her involvement in Occupy Wall Street to co-founding a debtors union. What unites all of Astra's work

is her commitment to questioning how the world functions, refusing to take the status quo for granted. It's an ethos that's embodied in this quote from her late friend and collaborator, anthropologist David Graeber. The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make

differently. There's all sorts of ways to structure democracy. This is not the be-all and end-all. It's kind of the message that, you know, this is something we are inventing as we go, and let's have a bit of imagination. We're calling this episode The Hidden Truth of the World. The Hidden Truth of the World. When you look back on your childhood, how would you describe the political background? So I was born in 1979, which means I was a little kid in the 1980s. So I was growing up against the backdrop of Reaganism in the United States. I lived first in Tucson, Arizona, and then in Athens, Georgia. Factorism in the United Kingdom. So the

rise of a newly emboldened right wing. I do vaguely, I mean, I remember hearing the name Ronald Reagan. I remember learning to ride my bicycle and a kid screaming Reagan as we took off. learning to ride my bicycle, and a kid screaming Reagan as we took off. But there was a big gap between my household's values and the wider political scene. So I grew up in a very countercultural household. My name gives that away. My name is Astra. That's a rather hippie-ish name. So in a way, I was living in a kind of 60s counterculture, but amidst the bigger backdrop of the 1980s. Did you recognize at that time that being in that culture? I knew that there was something different about my family, for sure. You know, I always had the ability to go to school if I wanted to, but it was a choice that I had. And my siblings had the

same choice as well. Otherwise, we unschooled, which is a word for basically not doing school, we didn't homeschool, we weren't doing school in the home. We were able to stay home and play. And the idea was that we would have the space to be curious and kind of educate ourselves with the support of our parents and a broader community. So I knew that that was strange. Most kids don't have that choice. And I would go out into the world and there wouldn't be other kids until, you know, two, three, four o'clock in the afternoon on weekdays. And there were other other signs that we were different. I mean, certainly normal kids, as we called them, saw right away that there was something off about us and something strange. It took some time to

come into a deeper political awareness. But I did that rather, I guess, at a rather young age, because I think that I have a political inclination. You know, and I started working as a little kid on issues of environmentalism, environmental justice, you know, animal rights, which is something a lot of kids get into, and started sort of forging a political consciousness in a way, you know, doing sort of what I'm doing as an adult now, but just the little kid kind of silly version of it. This unschooling ethos or this alternative perspective on the world was 100% an inheritance from my mother, who was born in Toronto, but her mother, my grandmother, took the family in 1969 to Whitehorse in the Yukon, took the family in 1969 to Whitehorse in the Yukon, where my mom found her way to this amazing alternative school in Carcross in the Yukon. And so as a teenager, spent this formative year at

a school that was part of a much broader trend across North America. There were thousands of educational experiments popping up in the late 60s and 1970s, where people were wrestling with exactly the ideas I've been talking about, you know, creativity, intellectual autonomy, running schools democratically, sharing power between students and teachers, you know, letting students have some say or all the say over the curricula, trying to think beyond grades in terms of measuring progress and success. So the kids at the schools had sat in on various committees, committees that helped raise funds, committees that helped clean the school,

committees that helped build things and grow things. And my mom was on the sort of pedagogy committee, which is a fancy way of saying kind of the philosophy of education committee. And those ideas she encountered, she brought those down to Georgia eventually. And now as an adult, I mean, I should say that, you know, I in no way am a sort of unnuanced booster of unschooling.

In fact, I spend a lot of my time advocating for public investment in education. I really believe in education as a public good. I believe in the common good. I think there are things we need to learn in common to have a functional democracy. And so, you know, I think one of the many tensions that I'm wrestling with in my work is the tension between the sort of individual autonomy, creativity, the ability to pursue your passions, and then the need, again, for those common things, for public institutions, for holding space where we can learn together and create, you know, shared touchstones and values. And, you know, years of

my life at this point, you know, I've spent more years fighting for public investment in educational institutions than I did as an unschooler. But my unschooling ethos really infuses that, right? It's this idea that while we should all have the support and the security to be curious, to learn things, to pursue knowledge, that in a way I got this little window into as a kid. Notwithstanding the fact that, as you say, you are an advocate for equal public access to education, could you speak more to how unschooling still shapes you in the way you think beyond the question of education? Oh, I think fundamental, you know, one sort of fundamental attribute of the philosophy about unschooling, which I'm very attracted to, and I see the,

again, I see the complexity of, but it's the element of trust, right? And it's this idea that, well, let's actually give people some breathing room. Let's trust them. And so a profound, you know, sort of insight from a thinker, an educator named John Holt, who is credited with coming up with the term unschooling in the early 70s, I think. And he basically said, you know, the human animal is a learning animal. We are all curious. I mean, look at babies who have this amazing drive to learn to crawl and then to walk, who are constantly engaging the outside world, right, with this marvel, this sense of awe, who learn to speak, not by being taught. You don't send your babies to baby language college, you know. They learn by doing, by trying.

And, you know, we all carry that instinct throughout our lives. And there are situations that can kind of foster that and unleash it. And then there are some that try to curb it and control it and constrain it and direct it in very, you know, instrumental ways or ways that just might not work for everybody. So that I think those two things, trust and a kind of recognition of kind of the different styles people have and different interests, I think is, you know, I think the question is sort of not how much trust should we give people, but actually, when is it okay to roll that trust back, right? And so unschooling starts with a kind of abundance of trust, and then maybe takes

it away. Whereas a lot of our conventional systems, including public schools, you know, like kind of act like it's this very scarce resource, and you have to earn that trust and earn that freedom. So those experiments exist, I just think we should expand them and democratize them. As I started thinking more about issues of politics and democracy and economics, I was like, actually, you know, that trust is actually, I think, a really essential feature of a healthy society. And I think flipping that and saying, okay, let's begin from a situation where we trust our fellow citizens instead of one of kind of cynicism and fear and doubt. Yeah. So clearly that had a very significant impact

on who you are, just that experience and thinking about it. I wonder if you could speak to how much the act of crossing a border, of living in two different worlds also influenced the way you think and who you are today? Oh, that's such a good question. Because I don't think we, we sometimes don't think of, I don't know, being in the counterculture, right, as being in a

different culture. But it really was because we're talking about Georgia. And it, you know, it was a liberal college town, but definite, definite sense that we were going against the grain, that we were sort of outsiders. And I think that has given me a sense of curiosity about other people's perspectives and a desire to sort of reach out and bridge that divide. And so a lot of my work is trying to, you know, communicate a different perspective on society, of my work is trying to, you know, communicate a different perspective on society on values, on the wider world, to people who might not agree with me, or probably don't, right? You're comfortable in that space. Yeah. And trying to say, okay, like, instead of instead of acting like my perspective is the dominant one, or the only one that a person should have, because I know it's not, there's a lot of

evidence around me that, you know, I'm not, I'm not representing the mainstream. What I bring to a lot of my writing and my filmmaking stuff is that since we're shifting perspectives, let's look at things that we take for granted in a different light. And that maybe comes from a kind of outsider upbringing. So jumping ahead to, to 9-11, of course, that year changed everything. It changed life life the world over. And I'm curious what it might have done to change. What change did it prompt in your political thinking? Yeah. I mean, 9-11 is certainly a turning point for our global politics. And on the morning of 9-11, And on the morning of 9-11, I took the subway to lower Manhattan because I was working at the time I was, I guess, 20 or 21 and working at a book publisher. And, you know, I remember walking the streets.

People were in crowds. We could see the Twin Towers collapsing. And I remember thinking, wow, you know, one of my strongest thoughts from early that morning is just like, I'm so naive. I don't understand what's happening. I need to understand this. Of course, I felt the terror and sadness that everybody's feeling, but also the sense of like, I do not get this. What is going on? I need to understand. And, you know, that was such a formative couple of years in so many ways. I mean, some people probably remember the global justice movement, which had just been picking up steam, the famous battle in Seattle, there were protests in Canada, protests in Europe,

protests in the United States, you know, I had just been sort of paying attention to that. So all of the that protest movement, you know, that was, you know, an early casualty of the war on terror, too, it was the sense that we can't, we can't protest, we just need to all get in line. Then, you know, of course, there were immediately in the United States, the drums of war started to sound and there was the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, you know, just paying attention to the discourse, again, through the eyes of a young and admittedly naive person, there was all of this talk from political figures in the United States about one bringing democracy to the Middle East by force as a kind of retribution democracy as through the act of occupation as an act of retribution. And the talk a lot of security, this politics of

security, we have to sacrifice our civil liberties liberties and the civil liberties mainly of Arab and Muslim people to have our security, right? To be safe in this dangerous world. I talk a little bit about this in the Massey lectures, just in a few paragraphs, but I got a rather amazing and very distressing job associate producing a film that eventually was released in 2004 called Persons of Interest about Arab Muslim detainees after 9-11. And I basically spent quite a few months going into communities that were where people had been subject to arrest and illegal detention to talk about their experiences. And so I was really learning about this on the ground through people's firsthand stories about this idea that you have to sacrifice basic political freedoms

for security. And what that ended up being is folks were just living their lives, happened to be Palestinian or not have the proper documentation, and they would end up being held in solitary confinement, they'd end up having their lives destroyed. And so, you know, I think you can see both my work on democracy, my film and my book on democracy, and in a way, this meditation on security, as responses to that period, and what I saw is the corruption of these words, to the point where I didn't like either word, like, during, I would say, you know, whatever, 2001 to 2008, hear the word democracy, hear the word security. And I kind of go like, ugh. They were very tainted. And, you know, but you'll never, in my opinion, you can never sort of find perfect pure language, right? Because that's

the great thing about language. It belongs to all of us. We can all use it. All you can do is wrestle over it, reclaim it, try to suffuse it with a different meaning. But I do think, you know, here I am, right, 20 years later, and I'm still kind of responding to that period. That's a really long echo. Yeah, yeah. But because, but, you know, my echo is so small. I mean, look at the, you know, ongoing refugee crisis, look at the millions of people displaced, and that's still reverberating in our politics in really, you know, destructive ways because of the prevalence of anti-Muslim hostility.

And, you know, so it's still in our politics. This is the thing, the past has never passed. And that's not very recent past, right? 20 years ago in the scope of history is nothing. But I think it would actually be really good if we all talked about it more. And the 20th anniversary of the war in Iraq just happened, right? And we sort of kind of had a few headlines, but I don't think we had the discussion that we actually need to have as a society about that and about the consequences for our political and ethical lives today. Yeah, which is in itself enough of a long conversation with the few hours of this episode. But I wonder if I could narrow it down just a slight bit more and look at you, the person, and how that event, I'm not going to say reinvented, maybe reshaped where you saw yourself

in the world. Yeah. And your role in society. My brain just went in like two or three different directions at once because there's actually so much that came from that period. One, you know, the immediate fostering of fear, xenophobia. I mentioned the global justice movement, the fact that protest movements,

even when they're gaining momentum, are so fragile that something can happen and just take that wind from the sails. After 9-11, you know, if you protested in a major city, you would get what was called kettled. You know, you sort of get surrounded by this netting or you would be put in what they called a free speech pen. And so it was very demoralizing as someone who wanted to be part of social movements to engage in protest during that period. So that was certainly a critical thing. And then on a personal level, working on that film did make me think a lot about accountability to the subjects you're engaging, about the ethics of filmmaking. And I think you see in my work that is mine, a commitment to the causes that I'm representing.

And I have a bit more skin in the game. Like, you know, I'm actually, I'm organizing for economic justice. I'm not just a writer or a filmmaker. And I felt a bit uncomfortable with kind of parachuting in and not having accountability to subjects. having accountability to subjects. And so I think that also shaped my, I don't know, my, you know, ethics of filmmaking and representation and writing is like, how do you stick with the trouble that you're trying to communicate in the stories you're trying to tell, and not just bounce? Yeah. You, afterwards started a major project about democracy itself. What is it that made you think that democracy was an idea that could be redeemed and reimagined? And this was something

that was reflected in the very title of the book. Yeah, the title of the book is Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. And that is trying to get at, you know, my sort of ambivalence towards democracy. And the fact that we don't have what I think of as a democracy in Canada or in the United States. But nevertheless, a lot of democratic progress has been made. And that progress can be undermined and rolled back and sabotaged. And so we need to protect what we have so we can build on it and keep reaching towards that democratic horizon. I mean, there's no doubt that book is formed of two. And that project, it's a twin sort of film and book project, is born of two things.

The war on terror, the shadow of the war on terror, and that corruption of democracy that I was talking about. We're going to democratize the Middle East. And my experience in Occupy Wall Street, which had a very romantic view of democracy. And it said, you know, down with representative democracy, that's corrupt. So we're going to do direct democracy. And by invoking direct democracy, they also, Occupy was also part of a long tradition of kind of starry-eyed idealists thinking, okay, let's get rid of any mediating structures, do this face to face, that'll be the real thing. Well, direct democracy, in my experience, also has a lot of flaws,

problems in terms of, you know, how do you scale it, but also just, you know, who's able to actually be in the room having this amazing face to face democratic deliberation, who has the time to do it? What really is wrong with representation? How could we do representation better with more integrity and more accountability? And I got very swept up into Occupy, I think precisely because for the decade before from 9-11 to 2011, right? So Occupy Wall Street was almost a decade plus 10 days after 9-11. and it signaled a new era where you could actually protest in New York City without just getting arrested or getting kettled or putting a free speech pen and so I kind of threw myself into it because I thought well I've been waiting for something like this the economic justice message the the message about the corruption of democracy totally resonated but in the sort of beautiful chaos of the movement there were all of these philosophical questions being raised. And so I hung on to those. And so two, two offshoots came out of Occupy for me. One is actually organizing, became part of

this coalition that was being forged that started organizing around indebtedness as a new form of political leverage, a new form of political identity, and then a kind of philosophical offshoot, where I went in and started thinking more rigorously about direct democracy about, you know, what democracy has been what it means to us what it could be what the inherent paradoxes are. And, you know, that project sort of only culminated in 2019. So how did how did you arrive at that? I remember you saying that to me at the last time we talked, actually, or back when we met you in New York, that it was important to you to embrace both the protest and the theory behind it. Not everyone does that. It's a far more exhausting process. How did you arrive there?

Why did you need to go there and do both? I mean, I think I do have this idea, again, of having kind of skin in the game, you know, like, who would I be to talk about democracy, if I wasn't also trying to democratize our society at the same time. And I think maybe that is the unschooling ethos, which is you learn by doing. And you don't only learn by books. And, you know, I love books. There's one thing about me is that I love books so much. But, you know, when it comes to these matters, like you got to get your hands dirty. And it's and I really do not like the division between theory and practice. I'm like, by trying an idea out, you actually learn more than you kind of reflect, experiment again, I just see it as the way, right? It just makes the most sense to me. It probably does have to do with the way I was raised and the sort of experience of learning

that I'm accustomed to. And I, you know, I think things need to change. I mean, wealth concentration, as Occupy helped point out, is out of control, and it's only worse 10 years later. And that's because we do not have the political formations and political strength to counterbalance what is essentially, you know, the unchecked power of the billionaire class. And, you know, so that's real. I do actually want to see change. But I believe that to engage in that action, to engage in that practice, we do need theories. We do need, you know, we do need to know what it is we're talking about. You know, we need to have some critical conception of the words we're using, like, what do we mean when we say the word democracy? And so yeah, to me, they just go together and feed sort of different parts of

me and, and, and my, my interests. And hopefully, it makes me a better organizer. And hopefully, it makes me a better public intellectual as well. Yeah, you actually pose that question to all kinds of people on the street and elsewhere and experts. Did you come up with anything that's useful as an answer to that question of what is democracy? Oh, I came up with with so many useful questions. Sorry, I always have useful questions. No, I did. I came up. I came up with a lot of useful answers and answers that surprised me. Because again, I was partly ready to jettison the word democracy. I mean, to just, you know, it was so corrupted to me precisely for all the reasons we discussed. One spirit I took into that project, into the film especially, was that I tried to engage every person I encountered as though they were a philosopher.

So, you know, for context, I had made two previous documentary films. When Occupy started, I was known mostly as a documentary filmmaker and made films about philosophy that featured philosophers, you know, academics, people who were known for writing important tomes and teaching at fancy, prestigious universities. And What Is Democracy has some well-known political theorists, the political theorist Wendy Brown, who's at Berkeley, Cornel West, the philosopher, and other figures. But it has a lot of, you know, quote unquote, regular people. And when I went into my interviews with them, I really tried to approach them as if they were philosophers too. You know, not just, you know, what do you do?

What troubles do you have? You know, tell me your sob story. But what do you think about the world that you're living in? And it really, as an approach, it really paid off because it turned out that people had profound ideas about the world that they were living in. And often, you know, without using the language of traditional political philosophy, invoke the same dilemmas. So I spoke to an amazing young refugee from Afghanistan who gets precisely to the tension between liberty and security, as though he's invoking, you know, Thomas Hobbes and

the great liberal tradition. But, you know, he's theorizing from his lived experience. You know, I encountered a barber who had been in jail for many years, and he quotes Machiavelli. I mean, it's just sort of, and these were not, it wasn't like I filmed 1000 people and whittled it down to 10. I didn't have the budget for that. I think it was that I, in a kind of Socratic way, was able to draw out the philosopher in everybody. And one thing that also stuck with me was just how grateful people were for being engaged in that way.

In a world where people often think someone with a camera is going to do a gotcha interview or try to make them look silly, I really tried to approach people, even people I disagreed with, with a kind of respect and curiosity, because I think that's what actually democracy requires. Democracy is not a system where a philosopher king, and I'm kind of invoking Plato here, right? A philosopher king rules over us. It's actually a system where we all have to think, deliberate, and govern together. And that's philosophical. And the ultimate insight I got from them was, okay, let's keep working on this democratic project together. On Ideas, you're listening to my conversation with the 2023 Massey lecturer, Astra Taylor.

The Massey lectures are on the road this month, and there are still tickets available in Halifax, Whitehorse, Vancouver, and Toronto. Head to cbc.ca slash Masseys for more information. And if we're not coming to your city this year, you can hear Astra's full lectures on ideas this November. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it.

Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Astra Taylor is a Winnipeg-born writer, filmmaker, and political organizer, and the 2023 Massey Lecturer. In her lectures, The Age of Insecurity, she looks at how insecurity shapes our world today and tries to rethink insecurity and security from the ground up. In many ways, it's a classic Astra Taylor approach. Take concepts we think we understand and then start pulling them apart. I first met Astra in New York City in 2019 when she was taking precisely that approach

to the idea of democracy. She's the author of a book called Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone, and the director of a parallel film called What Is Democracy? And the sort of the B story behind that, which I found completely fascinating when we last met is that, you know, often people reduce the idea of democracy to the actual act of voting. And until that point, you would actually for a variety of just odd circumstances had never voted anywhere. Talk to me about that and how that shaped your thinking. Yeah, I think and it was a non principle, I think, you know, I think vote to me, you know, it's what you said is exactly right for a lot of people, the sort of assumption of what democracy

is, what democracy is a system where you vote for your, for your leaders. And that's a very thin, diminished conception of democracy. I mean, my, my view is voting's easy. You know, you do that one day and there are forces that are trying to make voting harder through voter suppression and stuff like that. But in general, voting's easy. Do it. But you got to do a lot more democracy than that. You know? But yes, because of being Canadian, I hadn't, through complicated reasons, I hadn't sort of claimed my US birthright citizenship. And so I, in my late 20s, I hadn't voted, been allowed to vote. You know, and as I said, I'm a very politically minded, civically minded person. So I naturally just had to find these other ways of being a democratic

animal, through organizing through a media through, you know, promoting ideas through promoting different actions. I think one of my favorite parts of the film is actually where this Greek scholar talks about the fact that elections actually might be undemocratic. And she's invoking here the traditions that were practiced in ancient Greece, and specifically citing Aristotle, who said, you know, elections are actually aristocratic, because the most charismatic or the richest people tend to win them. And if you really want a democratic system, you should use sortition or what is lottery, just randomly selecting citizens to serve together, right, without this contest that tends to be corrupted. And so I think that's really, you know, that was one of the sort of provocative democratic

ideals in the film is, okay, what we think of as the horizon of democratic activity, which is periodic elections that are free and fair, might actually be a pretty aristocratic mechanism. And maybe one day, 100 years, 200 years in the future, we'll look back and be like, wow, can you believe those people thought that was democracy? And so different scholars have suggested, for example, maybe having one house that is selected by election and one house that is selected randomly as a way of counterbalancing each other. There's all sorts of ways to structure democracy. This is not the be all and end all. It's kind of the message that this is something we are inventing as we go. And let's have a bit of imagination.

Yeah. And that's a perfect word for it. I felt that your imagination and in what and how we view the place we live in and the things we do as democratic or undemocratic was far wider than the average person. So I remember walking in a park with you or sitting on the ferry, you know, crossing, you know, crossing on the water, you talking about all these little spaces as being not just public, but democratic spaces. And the truth is, we don't spend most of our time in democratic context. I mean, the workplace is not a democracy. It's a dictatorship, you know, and this is something political philosophers have

discussed, you're under the rule of the boss, schools certainly aren't democratic, as we discussed earlier in the interview, you know, kids don't really have a say over the curriculum, or how they're ranked and measured and judged, or really what their their ambition should be. And a lot of our ostensibly public spaces like parks are also not necessarily democratic. I mean, certainly in that period after the war on terror, I'm talking about when you you couldn't exercise free speech in a public space without being put in a free speech pen didn't feel like the apex of democracy. So I think, you know, yeah, one one thing I'm trying to do my work is say, okay, well, how we sort of what's the next level we can push to instead of trying to reach, I don't know, some utopian idea of what a democratic society

would be, you know, writing some blueprint for a future that might not ever come to pass sort of what's the next level? What can we what could what can we what are people already doing that we can build on in the here and now? So you know, in the workplace, people have workers co ops, where they share power, they're, you know, again, these progressive theories of democratic education, you know, and in terms of democratizing public space, making it actually accessible to people, right? First off, protecting it, protecting it from privatization, making it something that people can actually use. Having public restrooms would make a public park more democratic. Making sure there are ramps so that people with different embodiments can use it.

Having it be open 24 hours a day so that people who need, for whatever reason, to sleep rough have a place where they can stay. So there's actually public space that the public can use. You know, ideally, there's public housing and all sorts of other services. But to me, this is, these are all key components of democracy. And occasionally, you know, occasionally an audience member of the, you know, watching the film, kind of get up after the film and be like, I don't get it. This film's about democracy. Why do you have all this stuff about space and feelings? You know, like, it should just be about, yeah, the procedural mechanisms of voting, you know, and I would be like, you know, widen your frame, man, this is all this is actually all the stuff of democracy. And we need public things. I mean, you know, to me,

you know, human beings do this and also societies, right? We build, we build structures that are supposed to be awe inspiring. And I love a good, beautiful building. I love a good, beautiful church. I love wonderful architecture. But a beautiful public park is a kind of cathedral to democracy, a library that is not underfunded and under attack, but is welcoming and has all kinds of resources and is used by all kinds of members of the community. That's a cathedral to democracy. These public things, these public spaces really, really matter. And when we're in them, it can help sort of ignite that democratic spirit. That's a beautiful, beautiful thought, a cathedral to democracy.

The ferry. That's why I took y'all on the ferry. I was like, look at this public ferry. It's like, who needs a yacht when you can ride a ferry around the East River and get this beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline? I love it. I did, too. Last thing about Occupy is the whole movement kind of made the idea of inequality a central part of the political debate, of the democratic debate. In your Massey lectures, your new book, you argue that talking about inequality is important, of course, and you've done a lot of that, but it's not enough, that we also need to talk about insecurity. In a nutshell, why is that? Yeah, I'm so grateful to Occupy for putting the

That's Shell. Why is that? I'm so grateful to Occupy for putting the issue of inequality on the global agenda. And the conditions were ripe, right? It was a few years after the global financial crisis. And so this was something that was not just emanating out of this park in lower Manhattan. Occupy Wall Street was inspired by all of these other global movements about inequality, the movement of the squares in Europe and Spain and Greece, and of course, the Arab Spring, those were sparked, you know, not just as as revolts against authoritarian leaders, but in the context of

food insecurity, and poverty, right? Because again, we cannot separate inequality and poverty from the problem of democracy and the fact of political corruption. So all these things were being felt on a global scale. And, you know, but I think for protesters to get a concept like inequality and also class, by talking about the 99% versus the 1% onto the American agenda was an accomplishment because those conversations had been so banished from the public sphere. And inequality is absolutely critical.

And my work on democracy focuses on that. And I'm hardly unique in this, right? But on the way that the concentration of wealth has a corrupting effect on democratic processes. Why? Because if you have money, you can buy political power, you can buy influence. And if you're poor, you have less of a political voice. That's all absolutely urgent and true.

But the more I organize and the more I attempt to work with others to build the kind of formations and political coalitions and political consciousness that you need to try to engage the political system and change it and make it less unequal, the more I realized that you have to actually talk about how people experience the day to day, how they feel. People feel insecure. You don't feel inequality, right? Like, I mean, it's true. You can be like, it's not fair that that person is living off their unearned interest and

they're and I'm working 80 hours a week and I can barely keep a roof over my head. That's important. But, you know, there's a kind of, you know, it's very present in Canada. It's heightened in the United States, but it's also felt, you know, all over the Western world, the sense that there's not a robust enough safety net. It's getting harder and harder to achieve upward mobility. And there are a lot of risks on the horizon, or actually in the here and now. Climate change is a big one, of course, but just a sense of growing instability and risk. And so I think insecurity is a really important complement to the discourse of inequality

because it talks about how people feel. Inequality is a snapshot right now that says the poor have this much, the rich have this much. Insecurity actually has a longer horizon. Insecurity is about how people feel now, but also how they're thinking about the future. It's future oriented. Inequality, again, encourages us to look at the haves and have nots, to look up and down. Insecurity encourages us to look sideways, and to see potentially powerful commonalities that I think are really essential if we want to band together and create social reform. You're currently the co-founder of the Debt Collective, which is a debtors union that

fights to cancel debt. What does that mean exactly? And why is it such an urgent political right for you right now? Yeah, the origins of the debt collective go back to Occupy Wall Street. And, you know, we were talking about inequality and the 99% and the 1%. Those were kind of the big ideas coming out. But when you spoke to people at the camps across the country, and actually, this held true in many of the encampments in Europe and beyond, too. They were struggling with debt. That was the problem. I mean, they had medical bills they couldn't pay. They were struggling to pay their student loans. They were struggling to pay their rent. Millions of homeowners were underwater on their mortgages or

getting foreclosed on. And so it was just evident that there was something there. And I was in debt at the time. I had recently defaulted on my student loans. And we were in a global economic crisis, right? So when people lose their job, what happens? You can't pay your bills. You fall behind. You fall into arrears. It happened after COVID, too. We're having a huge explosion of household indebtedness in the U.S. and in Canada and beyond. And, you know, I wasn't the only one to think this, but I sort of came together with a working group and we're like, there's something here. This is what people are wrestling with. What we understood was that there was a huge amount of shame and stigma. People weren't exactly eager to talk about this, but once

they did, it was very cathartic and powerful. And it was also a very quick conceptual leap to the solution. You know, in Canada, people are not destroyed by medical debt. Why? Because there's a public health care system that desperately needs to be improved and protected. In the U.S., it's the leading cause of bankruptcy. But in both countries, people are buried under mountains of credit card debt, increasingly, you know, having their futures mortgaged by student loans and so on.

And the solution, again, is to have public goods. You know, when there is well-funded public colleges and universities, then people don't have to take on student debt. When there's public health care, people don't get buried by medical debt. don't have to take on student debt. When there's public health care, people don't get buried by medical debt. When there's social housing, then people are less rent burdened and less inclined to have to take out mortgages that might then have detrimental economic effects. There's a huge amount of untapped potential here. This is something we could start organizing around. You know, from my perspective, too, it was clear that debt, when you get into the nuances of it, has a strong component that actually could allow us to connect to all of

these other movements. You know, it connects to labor rights and the problem of low wages, because obviously, if you're underpaid, then you have to borrow. So there was natural sort of commonalities or points of connection with the labor movement. And that's also, you know, thinking strategically, be like, how do I connect what I'm doing with other movements so that we have more power together. So we started what we call the Debt Collective. It's the world's first debtors union. And we have a growing membership base. People of all ages, all races, across a wide geography.

You know, last night, for example, there was a really beautiful meeting of our older debtor caucus. So people 50 years and up, some in their 80s, working together on building a new kind of political consciousness, but also fighting for social policies that would eliminate this problem by providing the things that people need to have flourishing lives. And the specific thing that you are trying to build on is the idea that this isn't what you're asking for is not debt forgiveness, but debt cancellation or, or that kind of language. Can you just explain quickly the difference between those two ways of thinking about debt?

Well, like everything, once you start following the strands back, you realize that there's really nothing new under the sun. So the idea of debt as a shameful condition and a moral failing is ancient, where it goes back 1000s of years. In fact, in my work on democracy, you know, what I, I discovered what lots of historians knew was that actually debtors revolts were some of the biggest catalysts for democratic reform, going back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So debt... Did that make it more compelling for you to get involved? I didn't know that during Occupy, right? I didn't know that until I was making the film. And I think ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So debt, did that make it more compelling for you to get involved? I didn't know that during Occupy, right? I didn't know that until I was making the film. And I think what I did was I brought a kind of debtor's lens to my research on democracy. And then I realized

how instrumental it was. I mean, the famous political reforms that set the stage for democratic Athens, and the reforms of Salon, famously, it was the debtors' revolt. Again, you would not have the brief Roman Republic, you know, if it wasn't for debtors rising up together and saying, you know, we're being exploited, cancel the debts. So this call for debt cancellation is actually really ancient. It's very democratic. I had no idea either how much the founding fathers of the United States loathed debtors and feared debtors revolts. There were just debtors revolts that were very progressive happening in the colonial

period. So little did I know that we were just the latest iteration of this long history, which I found really fascinating because I thought we were coming up with something new, you know? No, we weren't. And where was I going with this? What was the question? I got so excited. But just the difference between... Oh, forgiveness. Oh, forgiveness. It was a wonderful introduction. Yeah. Right. Wonderful introduction. So shame has been a major tool of, you know, what we could call the creditor class. Now, you're in debt because of your bad choices, not because we've rigged the game to bury you with debt.

And so at the Debt Collective, we don't ask for forgiveness. We ask for cancellation, relief, abolition, justice, because we do not think that the majority of debtors have done anything wrong. If you are a young person going to pursue an education, that's not a crime, right? If you are someone who gets cancer in the United States and then has a $500,000 medical bill, you did nothing wrong. So who should be asking for forgiveness here, right? If you are a victim, if you are a single mother and you have no choice but to take out a payday loan at an extortionate interest rate, right? Because it's that or sleeping on the street with your kids. You know, I'm not

sure that you really need to be asking for forgiveness. The problem is that we have laws that allow for the predatory interest rates to be charged in the first place. So we're trying to challenge that bogus moral framework and to talk about, you know, what we're actually entitled to, and who owes what to whom, because there are some debts that we do need to pay, right? We need to pay our climate debt, we need to pay reparations, you know, so maybe some debts are illegitimate, some debts are illegitimate, but let's have a discussion about it. Let's do a kind of moral accounting, instead of just taking the status quo for granted. So in the process of undergoing or participating in this moral accounting, how does that change your thinking about the word solidarity?

Yeah, well, that is one of my favorite words. It's a word that comes up. You know, it's interesting, unlike security and democracy, which I'm ambivalent towards and trying to maybe reclaim or wondering what actually could be salvaged in those terms. The word solidarity is one that I like, but I actually felt was just deeply under-theorized, right? We use the word solidarity without really knowing what we mean by it or its history. So that's my next book coming out in March, which I've been working on for the last three years with a brilliant co-author. In all your free time. In all my free time.

So what I love about solidarity is the idea that it's people coming together, building power, creating change. Obviously, solidarity is the rallying cry of the labor movement. But what hooked me on it as an intellectual project, and this is something I learned from my co-author, Leah Hunt Hendricks, is that the term goes back to ancient Rome, where it meant a debt held in common or insolitum.

That's the concept that's the basis of the modern word solidarity. What does that mean? It means that, for example, imagine a group of farmers, they would take on a debt together and all be on the hook for it. So they had to either bail each other out, or they would all suffer the consequences. And so as somebody who works on debt, I'm of course, very attracted to that, right? That fundamentally solidarity means like a social debt, a debt held in common, which then gets me thinking about what are our real obligations? What do we owe each other, right? Again, who owes what to whom?

How can we honor our social obligations in that honoring our social obligations might mean resisting predatory debts. But solidarity is not just a warm, fuzzy feeling or an affect or, you know, I feel your pain, right? It's we're actually bound together in a material way. And, you know, I'm on the hook for you and you're on the hook for me. And when we enact that, you know, we have tremendous power. We have the power of solidarity. You know, solidarity, the last thing I'll say is that, you know, what I've come to,

and it's so clear, I think any organizer knows this, but this is the main theme of the book is solidarity is not spontaneous. It's not something that just magically emerges. It's something we really have to work to cultivate. We have to build bridges. We have to build new identities together and new conceptions of ourselves. And that's why it's so important that we not just sort of invoke the word and then let it go. But we need to think hard about how we actually unleash this amazing potential and help solidarity manifest in the world. And insecurity, to go back to the insecurity book, I think some acknowledgement of our shared vulnerabilities or shared insecurities can actually be part of the process that helps us see those commonalities that can help us create more solidarity in the world. Since you were talking about the lectures, I am kind of curious, when you hear the words Massey Lecture, like, what did they mean to you? Why was it important for you to be part of that? Oh, what do I hear? Oh, I hear Doris Lessing. I mean, I hear Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky. Oh, my God, who else? There's so many great ones. I mean, I hear the Pantheon. And, you know, I'd actually never heard the lectures. I'd read them. So for me, they were books more than anything else. And again, I'm a book person. And I love, I do love a short, powerful book. And writing short is hard. It's hard for me.

Yes, it is hard. because that's not really necessarily the stratosphere I see myself in, right? But I really was honored and excited to try to write something that would speak to our times in that framework, right? Knowing that you're speaking to a wide audience, that your task is to kind of synthesize the moment and expand people's perceptions. I have a really strong memory of around 9-11 reading Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing. You know, this really helpful book, like,

you know, are we caging our own consciousness, our own conceptions of things? And, you know, a book that is, on the one hand, pretty simple, but has a really deep message and takeaway. And so that book, you know, left quite an impression on me. And I think wanting to write something that might have the same effect on someone else is sort of my dream. And what I strove to do with these talks. I have a sense that that's precisely what this lecture series is going to do. Politically, you know, I am ambitious, I would like to do more than change the conversation, I really do want to change policy, and people are desperate. When we live in desperate times,

we're all, you know, anxious about the future for good reason, because the economic signs are pretty dire. Again, inequality is continuing to spiral. And the climate has reached a really terrifying tipping point. And we need to change things, we need to change the way things are structured, we need regulations, we need to get money out of politics. We need to reweave the social safety net. And that is something I can't do by myself. And that is why I want to help build the institutions that can push that needle forward. And it's hard. It's hard work. We're in a period of backlash. It's Sisyphean in many ways. But I think it's hard. It's hard work. You know, we're in a period of backlash. It's it's Sisyphean in many ways. But, you know, I think it's really important work. And if I can look back at the end of my life and be like, wow, I actually helped, you know, maybe I didn't win the policy myself, but I helped lay some sort of brick along the way that made it possible for someone else to get there.

I will be I'll be proud in the end. Astrid Taylor, it's a privilege watching you lay those bricks. Brick after brick. If we all do it, we'll have a Roman road. Just we need more people. Thank you so, so much. What a pleasure. Thanks.

Thanks for having me. On Ideas, you were listening to my conversation with the 2023 Massey lecturer, Astra Taylor. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Philip Coulter. The Massey lectures are on the road this month, and there are still some tickets available. We'll be in Halifax this Friday, September 8th, at the Neptune Theatre. will be in Halifax this Friday, September 8, at the Neptune Theatre. On Wednesday, September 20, we'll be in Whitehorse at the Yukon Arts Centre. In Vancouver, we're sold out on September 22, but I'm excited to announce a second event the following night.

On Saturday, September 23, I'll be moderating a panel discussion about ecological insecurity with Astra Taylor, Jennifer Grenz, and Candice Callison. The Massey Lecture Tour finishes up in Toronto on September 27th at Kerner Hall. Head to cbc.ca slash masseys for more information about how to buy tickets. And if we're not coming to your city this year, you can hear Astra's full lectures on ideas this November. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you like the episode you just heard,

check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.