It Could Happen Here - Civilization with Andrew

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Andrew talks with James about the concept of civilization and how we can use it to understand our shared past and future.    Sources: Against the Grain by James C. Scott Civilized to Death b...y Christopher Ryan Wild Thought by  Claude Lévi-Strauss Ishmael by Daniel Quinn The Botany of Desire by Michael PollanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack.
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Starting point is 00:01:33 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, everybody, Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes here from the Amy and T.J. podcast. We are your one-stop shop for the biggest newsmaking headlines of the day. We've got you covered. Yeah, there's a lot of news happening these days,
Starting point is 00:01:50 and some of it's breaking. We are on top of it every single day. There's a bunch of true crime going on out there as well, and so much of it dominating on social media. We have our eye on it all. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All Zone Media. Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were learning about growing up?
Starting point is 00:02:21 Oh, man. So many. I guess I enjoyed, like, Celtic things because that's, like, part of the world I'm from. Wasn't even without Celtic. I think she was Celtic. a Celtic warrior, queen, Bodicea. Bodecia is how people used to say. Budica, I think, is more accurate.
Starting point is 00:02:39 That speed. Like, she was someone who had resisted the Roman invasions, right? Yeah, that's right. Where my dad lives is like where the Romans built their border wall, called Hadrian's wall. And it's just kind of cool to be like, you know, the Romans brought their colonialism to all of Europe and they got here and that and I can't fucking do it.
Starting point is 00:03:01 It might have been they got to that part of the world and they were like, it's raining so fucking much I want to go back to Italy. But yeah, it was always interesting to me to think of like, you know, the amount of a modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization and then these people who were able to resist it.
Starting point is 00:03:19 Yeah, I remember as a child, I was a really big fan of Egypt, of course, I guess classic. Of course. Greece, you can't go wrong. Babylon, big fan. I like the bards. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:33 You know, very cool. Yeah. As someone who, you know, I grew up, like, with a voracious appetite for those living long ago, how people live in the past, like, historical books, how people dressed, what they eat, how they live day to day. And a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me as humanity's great achievements. You know, the American deficit. architecture, the advances in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on. But as I got older and I started reading more history from below rather than history through the lens of kings and empires, I learned more about life before civilization and outside of empire, and I
Starting point is 00:04:25 really became less interested in civilization as something to be held up at. as the pinnacle of what he won't Saki-Bulov, although I am still very much interested in it as an idea and how we think about and talk about it as an idea. And so this is It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage or Andrewism on YouTube, joined again by... James. People have already heard be sounding off,
Starting point is 00:04:54 but yeah, it's nice to be here again. Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice. Yeah. And I want to talk about the meanings. of civilization. If I were to ask you if you were civilized, how would you respond? I think I aspire not to be, but like I have been raised in a society which very much proposed this binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized, right?
Starting point is 00:05:21 I guess savage is a word you could use if you were looking at how that society portrayed it, right? And like, even though I think British education and stuff wouldn't use that word any more. more, it says a lot about like the state and its desire to shape narratives in its favor. So I think I would aspire to decimilize myself, I guess. I'm not like anti-siv in like big scheme of things, but I think in the in the way that it's often used to describe indigenous peoples or people who are not under control of the state. I don't like that very much.
Starting point is 00:05:53 Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people, they'll probably just be like, yes. They would say yes, without hesitation. You know, obviously we're not most people. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being, you know, the savage, that is something that has kind of fallen out of fashion. You know, that exact binary of civilized and savage is not in vogue. You know, it's not treated as something that you see. And yet we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold.
Starting point is 00:06:29 So we still say, you know, we are civilized, and it's a civilization, but you wouldn't as much see descriptions of the alternative, of the barbarian, the uncivilized, the savage, the primitive. I think you can ask people like, what is civilization, what do you mean by being civilized, and it's a bit shaky. You know, it's one of those concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced, that not many people stop to interrogation. You know, we throw the word around all the time when it can mean cities or technology or modernity or law or culture or the state or simply not being barbaric. Historically, it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks, I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian. Yeah. You know, China infamously treated everything.
Starting point is 00:07:29 outside of China as the barbarian. Yeah, isn't it like a literally onomatopoeia? Like people are saying like bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. I think I've heard that story as well, yeah. I'm not sure how true it is. Yeah, I'm not super familiar with, like, the, like, sourcing on that one, I guess. Yeah, but, you know, the distinction of the civilized in barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history to justify conquest and,
Starting point is 00:07:59 colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the human race. White man's burden, quote, and quote, was to bring civilization to the less advanced people. Civilization being, of course, the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development, which to me is itself a hubris because I think that presumption that we made it, you know, we reach where we go and, you know, what we figured out here, this is it. Yeah. You know, I think that is a very damaging way of thinking. Definitely.
Starting point is 00:08:34 And it's something that I think is embedded into a very popular perception of what civilization is. You know, usually historically civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture. and of course the state. Buried in many of these associations is the assumption that hierarchy is advanced, that this way of structure in human society
Starting point is 00:09:08 is the destination we will always headed to. We have this term in anthropology, stateless, the presumption being that lacking a state is itself, something that perhaps needs to be rectified. I'm not saying that every anthropologist
Starting point is 00:09:25 takes its perspective, but, you know, the words that we use carries in connotations. And I think that for some people, particularly people, raise in a civilization context, it's like, oh, yeah, they haven't reached where we have reached yet. They haven't gotten there yet. They haven't evolved to a point where they've developed a state yet. But that is the trajectory that they are on or are supposed to be on.
Starting point is 00:09:47 Yeah. The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions your society has, the more advanced it is presumed to be. And then of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington, who used civilization in this very broad sense as cultural identity. Yeah, I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington as a human being and as theorist. As do I, I mean. I think we all do.
Starting point is 00:10:16 To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam as a civilization. Hinduism as a civilization, orthodoxy as a civilization. And then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is just one civilization, Tim. Yeah. I love that, like, Islam is a civilization and also, like, south of the Sahara is a civilization as if never the two shall meet, right? Like, famously, there are no Muslims in Africa. Yeah. The maps that I've seen, he does have, like, Islam in Africa as well.
Starting point is 00:10:53 If you ever look at the map, the map is awful. The map is just awful. Yeah, the map gives me fucking, yeah, like, it admittedly has been a long time since I have engaged. Yeah, Muslim and African. I guess, yeah, he includes a horn of Africa in Muslim. Fucking unbelievable. Yeah, Confucian.
Starting point is 00:11:13 Japan just exists as like a, like, every other culture is, like, massively homogenized, and then Japanese is, like, completely unique in this little bubble. Yeah, yeah. This is such like, I'm sorry, like, that's so weeb coded to me. Yeah. It's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged with the world coded, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh yeah, the entire continent of Africa, sure, fine, whatever. That's Africa. Japan, though, like, Japan is distinct from Korea, from China, from the Philippines, from all of Asia. Japan is its own thing.
Starting point is 00:11:53 from these places it's had exchange with for centuries. Yeah, and then like the entirety of North America, Greenland, Western Europe, and Australasia is just Western. The indigenous peoples there don't exist, right? Like, the differences in those cultures. Yeah, well, Western is called for white, so... Yeah. It's not surprising.
Starting point is 00:12:14 Yeah, that's definitely what he's doing there. His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated on clashes between the civilizations, hence clashes of civilizations being the title of his book. Yeah. I don't find it very convincing. I don't think you do either. Yeah, no, I'm not buying it, to be honest.
Starting point is 00:12:36 Yeah, it treats these big cultural blobs as if they're unified entities and discrete entities when, you know, history has been a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence by green, and transformation. Yeah. The music you love, radio stations, everywhere you go,
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Starting point is 00:13:31 Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing to receive. It's raw.
Starting point is 00:13:51 I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary
Starting point is 00:14:13 on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats, those are moving south. So you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
Starting point is 00:14:29 wherever you get your podcasts. College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break your heart. And that's why we make the Solid Verbal College Football Show. I'm Ty Hildenbrand. He's Dan Rubinstein. How's it going? Every week we preview the games that matter, sort through the biggest storylines, and tell you what to watch before kickoff. There's a lot to keep track of.
Starting point is 00:14:52 Who's for real? Which upset is hiding in plain sight? And which storyline is about to take over your group chat? And when the games are over, join us in the aftermath too. We're going to react to what happened, talk about the biggest results. Of course, we'll cover the playoff picture and all the little details you might have missed while flipping between like 12 games at once. Whether you know every coach and coordinator or just want to understand why everybody is yelling, we're here to help make sense of the madness. Listen to the Solid Verbal College Football Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or we're
Starting point is 00:15:29 wherever you get your podcasts. Dear honeies, this is goodbye. In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Patra Mather's and her husband, Michael, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know that they had died. By suicide. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Patra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love.
Starting point is 00:15:56 Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left? behind. I would have given a million reasons to not leave this world had I known. I keep coming back to I truly hope that Petra was a thousand percent on board with the plan. Do you think of him as having killed her? Yes, I do.
Starting point is 00:16:18 I hold Michael responsible for my mother's staff. I'm Leon Nafeck. And I'm Alice Gregory. Together we set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael's letters. one married couple trying to understand another. Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, for another perspective, I want to share on the subject of civilization. We have David Wengru, who many of you may know as the co-author of The Dawn of Everything.
Starting point is 00:16:54 And for him, he argued that if we're going to keep using the word civilization, we should think of it as a product of interaction between societies. So through trade and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration, civilization is like an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I think that is a somewhat idiosyncratic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach to the idea. Typically, people do think of civilizations as discrete entities, though. Yeah. At least in Lehman's perspective, but the field of anthropology and historical research I know is rife with comparative studies and, you know, investigations of those very exchanges between societies. So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective, I see why he would want to put forward
Starting point is 00:17:51 that reframing. And the thing more definitions of words and connotations and stuff is none of it is really objectively correct. The orders point into different things and the way that we use, language is always going to be subject to debate. I think the fact that we can't even agree on what civilization exactly is should probably make us a bit more cautious in how we make sweeping claims about it. And really, I feel like I hear about many of the words that we throw around so casually. But one consistency I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this
Starting point is 00:18:26 packaging with, of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement and development. which of course begs the question advanced according to whom? You know, measured by what standard? How do you actually quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another? You know, if the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies or industrial output? Then, yeah, sure, modern states score very highly in terms of advancement. But then we can ask, you know, why should those be the specific metrics we use? Why not measure the advancement of a society according to how much.
Starting point is 00:19:03 leisure its members enjoy, or by how equal they are, or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem that they're embedded in, or by how much freedom regular people have over their own lives. You know, we can pick different measure and sticks and get different winners and losers in this competition of advancement. But the measure and stick we're working with when we speak a civilization clearly isn't very helpful for many of us. All societies are not working with the same measure and stick, despite the efforts to impose this capitalist, neoliberal measure and stick on everybody. You know, we have countless experiments and examples of different ways of organizing life across history. Some lasting for centuries, others millennia, some expanding
Starting point is 00:19:48 into empires, others staying small, some prioritizing equality, others prioritizing hierarchy, accumulation versus mobility. You know, we can't assume that all of humanity is trying to reach the same predetermined destination. So the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really cut it for me. But the language of civilization does work for the people that it serves. The people who see their society as the highest stage of human development, which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest and so on to bring development. And same attitude, which is extended to people by European colonial powers to invade these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them, to treat them as a lesser on the ladder of human development.
Starting point is 00:20:41 That very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself as something wild and unproductive and waiting to be mastered by civilization. But one thing is really stuck with me in reading, for instance, James Scott, which it talks about this and against the green, it's just how fragile and not inevitable this civilization development was, you know?
Starting point is 00:21:10 These early states very often collapsed, very often fragmented, and for many people, in those contexts, the collapse, quote and quote, was an escape to freedom. You know, it was
Starting point is 00:21:26 something that gave them an opportunity to disperse and to create, smaller communities and to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations to rulers. And so with all that history in mind, I find the concert of civilization, you know, something to think about, but certainly not something to idealize. Yeah. Something that just came to my mind is a speech that Derruti gave to the cops on the eve of the Catalan Revolution, right?
Starting point is 00:21:55 So 19th of July. So the cops have been sent, right? They know that the military is going to rise up against them, right? They know that in the coming days, that they will either have to fight their own military or accept the end of this like liberal democracy in Spain, right? This republic in Spain. The Catholic government has still sent the police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right? Who are the most capable people of fighting this coup?
Starting point is 00:22:23 They would rather state than no state, I guess, right? Like the state's always going to have more solidarity with the state than it's its constituents. And he says to the COBS, sometimes when we're given an order, we have to disobey it. And even if the order comes from a very big and important person to translate, obviously, and paraphrase to, we civilize ourselves with disobedience. It's a really interesting phrase, right? Like to him, I guess, the concept of civilization is dignity and, like, autonomy. the person who is given up their autonomy to the state is not civilized because they have given up that autonomy
Starting point is 00:23:02 and allowed the state to be the one that makes their decisions for them, right? Like, it's an alternative use. It's like an inversion, basically. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Like, he's taken that term and said, like, it's fundamentally uncivilized of you to allow the state to be the one that makes the choices for you. It's just a really interesting, yeah, inversion of the terminology.
Starting point is 00:23:27 Yeah, yeah. I think it's curious because when I look at, for instance, there's this book Civilized Death by Christopher Ryan, and he uses this concept of human domestication. Okay. And he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively bred and conditioned animals to fit into environments that we designed for all on purposes,
Starting point is 00:23:52 civilization shaped us to fit the needs of these large hierarchical systems. Okay. You know, we told routines and obedience and punctuality for activity, dependence on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting to me that, you know, by Duryouty's Freeman, the domestication of civilization is precisely what makes us uncivilized. Yeah, like the forced pacidism, I don't know how to say it, Like, it is what makes us uncivilized. It makes us undignified. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:24:25 And I guess that is another use or connotation associated with civilization that he's utilised in there, which is civilization as dignity. Right. As being upright or dignified as a person, to be civilized is to be, you know, a certain standard or caliber of person. Yeah, exactly that.
Starting point is 00:24:46 Yeah. And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions over which we have very little control over. Yeah, it's like, is it interesting, like inversion? I'm not sure how useful it is.
Starting point is 00:25:04 Like, I'm not sure if it's a term that anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting, you know. First thing, even if I find that an invasion is not necessarily practical in terms of day-to-day communication, I think playing with concepts. You know, tinkering with concepts,
Starting point is 00:25:22 invuting them, I think it's still useful in better grasping them. Yes. In better formulating our sense of what they are and what they are not. Yeah, definitely. Like, the meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right? It's not like a fixed thing. And obviously, we have these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words. But, like, language is just a way of communicating concepts.
Starting point is 00:25:47 And so, like, we co-create that. meaning as we redefine those concepts. Exactly. The music you love. I heart radio. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about.
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Starting point is 00:26:25 Everywhere you go. Oh, it's great. Download the free IHard Radio app today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real.
Starting point is 00:26:44 Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not. going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.
Starting point is 00:27:11 Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. and download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break your heart.
Starting point is 00:27:37 And that's why we make the Solid Verbal College Football Show. I'm Ty Hildenbrand. He's Dan Rubinstein. How's it going? Every week we preview the games that matter, sort through the biggest storylines, and tell you what to watch before kickoff. There's a lot to keep track of. Who's for real?
Starting point is 00:27:53 Which upset is hiding in plain sight and which storyline is about to take over your group chat. And when the games are over, join us in the aftermath too. We're going to react to what happened, talk about the biggest results. Of course, we'll cover the playoff picture and all the little details you might have missed while flipping between like 12 games at once. Whether you know every coach and coordinator or just want to understand why everybody is yelling, we're here to help make sense of the madness. Listen to the Solid Verbal College Football Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon.
Starting point is 00:28:36 People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Richard Pryor. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archive. We're talking iconic moments in broadcast history. I'm not just a boxer. I'm educated. I can talk all week. on millions of subjects. And forgotten interviews that change how we see these giants of our culture. Well, if changing the system from the ground up is revolutionary, then I'm revolutionary.
Starting point is 00:29:04 We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I mean, when I go on stage, I like to dress the slutty as possible, because it makes me dance a bit for some reason. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't good for us.
Starting point is 00:29:37 I say that after stretching my back with great futility as I spent most of my day sitting. Yeah. Working at a desk. You know, a lot of people are working jobs they find meaningless, simply because they need the income to survive. You know, they are spending most of their waking hours indoors, are exposed to fresh air. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:02 If they even have fresh air outdoors, because many of us live in urban environments where the standards of air quality are not the best. Could also speak of the rates of stress and loneliness and anxiety and depression and burnout that have continued to rise even as our material wealth as societies, not necessarily as individuals, but as societies and our technological capabilities.
Starting point is 00:30:29 have both increased. I don't think you have to be a primitivist and advocate for some return to prehistory to recognize the negatives, the race here. And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization have genuinely improved people's lives, you know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes, the internet, especially for disabled people in those medical conditions. They would otherwise be untreatable. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:57 You know, these are very beneficial innovations. Yeah. I just don't think that civilization, as we have structured it and conceived of it, has a monopoly on innovation. In his book, Wild Thoughts, Claude Levy Strauss had made the point that many of humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication. They were developed long before we conventionally think of as civilization. human beings have always been creative, we've always experimented, we've always invented, and we always will. Nothing we can or should go back, because I mean there are billions of us now, mostly in cities that are far from ecologically sustainable. But I think if we keep the history of our diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward, we can try to preserve what genuinely enriches human life while leaving behind the Institute.
Starting point is 00:31:55 and assumptions that no longer do. By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint for the future of our species? No, I don't think I do other than working it out together. Yeah, I mean, either. Hoping someone might, I guess we'll have to figure that out together, exactly. Yeah. Maybe that is a blueprint.
Starting point is 00:32:21 Exactly. I'm really not interested in seeing that there's like one correct society. that everybody has to adopt. Yeah. I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity of human societies that have existed. And we can use that not for mimicry, but for inspiration, you know, to realize that we too can pursue these uncharted territories and develop something new or to take old concepts
Starting point is 00:32:49 and stretch them into new forms. Yeah, definitely. The author Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael-Win, in his book Ishmael had made a point that tribes can be defined not by hunting and gathering or ethnicity, but as a social organization that allows people to make a living together. And so by this definition, you know, people still today create tribal forms of organization all the time, whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups, intentional communities, wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs and shared purposes.
Starting point is 00:33:23 But one thing quite emphasizes is that these kinds of societies can be very flexible. You know, when these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can change them, we can walk away from them. We're not tied to them in the way that we are basically bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social contract with today. And so really for me, that's what I want to focus on, a world where people have greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation, a world where organizations are things that people can freely join at reshape and split and leave and they no longer saving their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and, you know, mega city concentrations. I just want to know, you know, how we get from here to there together. And to me, that is something that requires, as I said many times before on this podcast,
Starting point is 00:34:23 and on my YouTube channel, it requires opposition to systems of domination, through confrontation and non-cooperation, through things like strikes and boycotts and other forms of resistance. And it also requires, on the other end of that equation, that we prefigure the world we want to live in by promoting certain ideas and philosophies,
Starting point is 00:34:46 but more so by building the actual relationships and institutions, we want to live. in and be a part of. And I think that these are two processes that will reinforce each other. You know, people will see and in experience different ways of organizing their lives, and that informs their ideology. They become more confident that these alternatives are possible, and it drives them to push them in new directions.
Starting point is 00:35:13 So I see a lot to say that the idea of civilization had its place and has had its time, but I think that we can let go of that old idea, you know, that we don't have to assume that there is no other alternative. And I think that requires not just a rejection, but an active replacement. To make the cracks of the old order apparent, and to make the idea, the omni idea of, liberalism, capitalism, and civilization, unconvincent by the presentation of this other alternative. I know some people might call that next thing a better civilization, but I would prefer to be, you know,
Starting point is 00:36:06 didn't bind ourselves to that old terminology. At least that's how I try to approach it. And what about you? Yeah. I don't think we should be beholden to these things that can hold us back, right? And as you say, we should be more focused in, like, building the world that we want to live in. And not so much of building the world we've been told we should want to live in. Language can turn into a way of seeing the world.
Starting point is 00:36:31 And I think we need to be careful of letting language determine how we see the world in a way that inherently limits our ability to create a better one. And I think this is a concept that we need to be very careful of when it comes to that. And just like the inherent bigotry, that came with a lot of civilization narratives, right? Sometimes I do like the idea. Scott talks about this a little bit, right? But in fact, it is people in states who were domesticated
Starting point is 00:37:00 and they were domesticated by grain crops. Grain crops brought those people in, forced them to live in a certain place, force them to live in a certain way, or so they could tend and care for grain crops, right? Yeah. Like, I think maybe it's flipping that around might help people understand a little bit.
Starting point is 00:37:16 Yeah, I think there's a, I forget the name of the book, It's a botany of desire? Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before. Yeah, I read that couple years ago. And I think it was on that very subject. The idea that the plans that we've raised have in some ways domesticated us. Right.
Starting point is 00:37:40 Just as we have domesticated them, it's been a reciprocal process. Yeah, I like that idea. That, I think, was like, a theme or an element of that book, if I remember correctly. Okay, nice, yeah. or maybe it's a theme that I read into it. Right, either way. I think it's a use, sometimes a useful way of seeing the world. And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well.
Starting point is 00:38:00 Play around with concepts. Tinker with them, flip them upside down. And I think that is also how we innovate, how we create new things, new meaning. You know, there is this, I think it's a proverb or it might be in Ecclesiastes, but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun. Yeah. So it's like creativity is just the ways that we repoop us, what already exists. We build upon everything that Kimi for.
Starting point is 00:38:29 And we have to be willing to play around with it if we want to get to that point of innovator. Yeah. That's pretty much what I have for today. All about all the people. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website. coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Starting point is 00:39:00 You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that? Yes. It's real.
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Starting point is 00:39:35 I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko. So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's, this is the podcast for you. Listen to Therapy Gecko on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break your heart. And that's why we make the Solid Verbal College Football Show.
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