It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 18

Episode Date: January 22, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison, and today I'm going to be talking about some really big things and ideas. But hopefully I'll be talking with them in a way that contextualizes them and makes you remember that despite their magnitude, they're still

very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll get started and eventually it will kind of make sense. So right now, we are all living in one massive liminal space. For those less online than I am, I'll explain what I mean. Liminal spaces became an online meme around late 2019, as a term to describe a certain type of picture that features architecture, or like just a place that looks off, familiar, eerie, lonely, yet mesmerizing and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on the liminal space subreddit for a while now, and there's an undeniable allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and rooms

and the effect that they have on me. Describing what makes a liminal space photo a liminal space photo, as opposed to just any other regular photo of a building or a room, can be tricky, because in part, the point is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking too much about the why. They're not spooky or scary in the traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space photo, and where it gets its name, liminality, is a good place to begin to understand what type of feelings these pictures are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a transitional phase, and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being inside of a threshold,

not on either one side per se, but somewhere in between. Now, that threshold can be many things. A literal, transitionary threshold between certain places is a common one. This can include stuff like hallways and airports. One of my favorites, though, is a threshold between time, an ambiguous, unspecific nostalgia that you can't quite place, but it feels awfully familiar, like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird, indoor, squishy playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room designed for a very specific, special purpose, but now no longer serving that.

It's empty and out of date. An abandoned mall or cheery birthday party room at an arcade photographed desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects of liminal space photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned. Usually, they have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality, like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting. And even when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like a Windows computer screensaver. One of the most popular liminal space photos

is of an underground bunker in Las Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's outside, despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a certain type of cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of synchronicity that is difficult to describe otherwise. Almost never is quote-unquote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly exclusively

focus on very human constructs, particularly ones that no longer serve their intended use, or maybe never did in the first place. So what do I mean by we're all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we are in between a historic economic and technological boom, one that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old, but on the other side of this valley is global climate catastrophe and destruction and change the likes of which humans have possibly never seen or at least remembered. We're in the transitionary period between these two states, and that disassociation of not being fully in either one, that cognitive dissonance, can be kind of mind-boggling. It's like the nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak, or that weird feeling of being alone in

an empty church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate change transcends a regular perception of time, space, and with that, cause and effect. It's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon, or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher Timothy Morton dubbed these massive space-time altering objects as hyper-objects. Now, Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly, so really the only way to discuss it or get into the topic is to orbit around it, associating with adjacent ideas or words, to get close enough to the topic to partially understand

it, even if you can't get quite there. Other possible examples of hyperobjects besides climate change can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere, or the solar system. But hyperobjects don't need to be just massive celestial things. They can also be the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth, or the very long-lasting product of direct human manufacture, such as all of the styrofoam or plastic bags in the world. It can also be the sum of all the whirling machinery of capitalism or the state. Hyperobjects then are hyper just in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly manufactured by humans or not. And

hyperobjects aren't just collections, systems, or assemblages of other objects. They are things in their own right, and they affect more than just humans. They don't come into being just because humans notice them. They will have effects on the world whether or not they are observed. One of the more obvious differences between hyperobjects and ordinary objects is that you can't ever actually see a hyperobject in its totality. You can only ever witness a small extension or piece see a hyperobject in its totality. You can only ever witness a small extension or piece of a hyperobject. Now, this makes thinking about them kind of intrinsically tricky. It's like only seeing a fragmented shadow of a thing, and the effects that that thing has

on all other things. Now, the more contrarian listeners might protest that we never see all of any object, even ordinary ones. Now, it's obviously true that everything we see has a negative side, the part behind that we can't actually always look at, but can reasonably assume is there. Now, the difference is that hyperobjects transcend not only a regular conception of physical reality, but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a coffee mug and rotate it around in a pretty short amount of time and witness each side and angle. Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could make a 360 scan so you could see a projected version of the entire object. Or, you know, more simply, just get three people in a room to all look at different sides of the entire object. Or, you know, more simply, just get three people

in a room to all look at different sides of the mug, thus forming a consensual reality-based understanding of the whole object. Now, not only can you not hold a hyperobject, but even if you could, the temporal effects would make it impossible to rotate it around to witness the totality of what's being held, and it would be way too big for multiple people to ever witness all sides of the thing. Quoting from Morton's book, Hyperobjects, the Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, quote, consider raindrops. You can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive your particular anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head,

and global climate? Not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system. I can think of and compute climate in this sense, but I can't directly see or touch it. The gap between the phenomenon and the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world. Humans have been aware of enormous entities, some real, some imagined, for as long as we have existed. But this book is arguing that there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. These entities directly cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue. Hyperobjects seem to force something on us,

something that affects some core idea of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomena such as meteors and blood-red moons, tsunamis, tornadoes, and earthquakes have terrified humans in the past. Meteors and comets were known as disasters. Literally, a disaster is a fallen, dysfunctional, or dangerous, or evil star. Disastar. But such disasters take place against a stable backdrop. There is the Ptolemaic-Aristolian machinery of the stars, which hold fixed stars in place.

It seems as if there's something about hyperobjects that is more deeply challenging than these disasters. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old models of the disaster, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. A deep shuddering of temporality then occurs. For one thing, we are inside hyperobjects, like Jonah and the whale. This means that every decision we make is in some sense related to hyperobjects. These decisions are not merely limited to sentences and texts about hyperobjects. When I turn the key in the ignition of my car, I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration to Mars,

they are relating to global warming. I am one of the entities caught in the hyperobject that I here call global warming. Different hyperobjects have numerous properties in common, but for our purposes, we're going to discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyperobjects are viscous, meaning they stick to beings that are involved with them. They are non-local. In other words, any local manifestation of the hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject. They involve very different temporalities than the human-scale ones that we're used to. In particular, some very, very large hyperobjects have a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate space-time vortexes due to general relativity. And hyperobjects occupy a higher-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to

humans for stretches of time, and they exhibit their effects inter-objectively. That is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyperobject is not just a function of our knowledge. It is also hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as humans. Now, I'm going to go into the five different points of similarity in more detail to kind of help flesh out what these things, hyperobjects, what they are and how they might actually be a useful way to think about really big stuff. So first off, viscous. Hyperobjects adhere to any object they touch, no matter how hard the object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object

tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes. The more you learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up noticing it in the world , but the more you know about climate change, the more you realize how perversive it is. The more you discover about evolution, the more you realize how much our entire physical being is caught in its meshwork. Immediate, intimate symptoms of hyperobjects are very real, vivid, and often painful. Yet, they carry with them this trace of unreality. A good example of hyperobject viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can't. They seriously

undermine the notion of a way. There is no a way. Flushing vomit down the toilet doesn't make it disappear. It makes its way to the ocean, or the water treatment facility, and eventually just back to us. Again, I'll quote from the book Hyperobjects, quote, light itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartre's jar of honey par excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us. Again, it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it.

This is it, folks. This is the ecological interconnectedness. Come in and join the fun. But I see that you're already here. Unquote. Yeah, that is, uh, that's fun. Um, the next point of similarity we're going to discuss is the molten or Gaussian quality. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such an extent that they become impossible to hold in the mind. Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent.

The size of hyperobjects can make them basically invisible, just because they're so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in Southern Oregon, one of the deepest lakes in the world. But it's not just deep, it's also very, very clear. So the water is so deep, yet so clear, it's like you're swimming in the sky. It's like you're swimming in nothing. It would be like if you approach an object and more and more objects emerge. Because we can't see the end of them, hyperobjects are necessarily uncanny. They have to be.

Just like my favorite liminal space photos, hyperobjects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in hyperobjects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and a familiar strangeness. Next up is non-locality. Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space, such as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality of the hyperobject. For example, climate change is a hyperobject

that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations. Objects don't feel climate change, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, non-locality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations that they produce. Quoting Morton again, manifestations that they produce. Quoting Morton again, For a flower, nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade of red. Level warming, for the tomato farmer, rots the tomatoes. Plastic, for the bird, strangles it as it becomes entangled in a set of six-pack rings.

What we are really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that are directly causal. The octopus of the hyperobject emits a cloud of ink as it withdraws from access. Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of its effects and affects. These phenomenon themselves are not global warming or radiation. Action at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the map with the territory. Hyperobjects cannot be thought up as occupying a series of now points in time or space. They confound the social and psychic instruments we use to measure them.

Even digital devices have trouble. Global warming is not just a function of our measuring devices, yet because it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's hard to see it as a unique entity. And yet, there it is, raining down on us, burning down on us, quaking the Earth, spawning giant hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces. The raindrops falling on my head in Northern California,

the tsunami that pours through the streets of Japanese towns, the increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor. Like a moving illusion picture, global warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift for us to see it. Convincing some people of its existence is like convincing some two-dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples, based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So, our sense of being in a time and inhabiting a place depends on forms of regularity. The periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun coming up. Only now we know that it doesn't really come up.

It's now common knowledge that the moon's phases are just the relationship between the earth and the moon as they circumnavigate the sun. Hyperobjects seem to phase in and out of the human world. They occupy a higher-dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on our regular 3-dimensional human scale basis. But they might appear differently to an observer with a higher-dimensional human scale basis. But they might appear differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view. We can only see pieces of a hyperobject at a time. The reason why they appear non-local and temporarily foreshortened

is precisely because of this trans-dimensional quality. We can only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a case of radiation sickness. If an apple were to invade a two-dimensional world, first the stick people would see some dots, as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then a rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting circular blob, diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point, and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly see climate change. You would need to occupy some higher dimensional space to see the hyperobject unfolding explicitly. Like the people in the two-dimensional flatland,

we can only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with our world. The brief patch called Hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans. The brief patch called Drought burns the plains of Russia and the Midwestern United States to a crisp. Our bodies itch with yesterday's sunburn. But don't relegate hyperobjects as a simple abstract notion. Thinking of hyperobjects as transdimensional, real things is valuable. Global warming is not simply a mathematical abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world. Hyperobjects don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects. or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects. We tend to only think about hyperobjects as they phase in and connect to other, more static objects. This is a mistake

and contributes to non-action. Whether or not we perceive objects and hyperobjects connecting doesn't affect the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyperobject. What we experience as the slow, periodic reoccurrence of a celestial event, such as an eclipse or a comet, is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on our social and cognitive space for a while. The gaps I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware of the hyperobject and moments at which it isn't do not matter in relation to the hyperobject itself. Okay, and now on to our final point of similarity, interobjective. Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. It's all an ecological mesh of

interconnectedness and interobjectivity. For example, climate change is formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet, climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and the sea level rising, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than connected to an object that predates its own measurement. Hyperobjects exist in and between objects and things we deal with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined. Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a shadow-like local manifestation of it.

A mesh consists of relationships between crisscrossing strands and the gaps between strands. Meshes are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things, an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born, it is instantly meshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. The mesh isn't inside of all things, but is on the edge or floats on top of all things. Interobjective mesh is the extra-connecting layer between the mass and the mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia. Interobjectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front of objects, in which relational phenomenon can emerge.

The massiveness and distribution of hyperobjects simply force us to take note of this fact. Hyperobjects provide great examples of interobjectivity, namely, the way in which nothing is ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. This means that for every objective system, there is at least one entity that is withdrawn

from the relationship. We see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaur's reality exists interobjectively. There is some form of shared space between the rock, ourselves, and the dinosaur, even though the dinosaur isn't there directly. The print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot-shaped hole in a rock by humans 65 million years later. There is some sensuous connection then between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human, despite their vastly differing timeales. The dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather, the footprint is a trace of the hyperobject evolution that joins me, the dinosaur,

and the mud together, along with the intentional act of holding them in the mind. the mind. I found the hyperobject banner as a useful tool to help my brain think about things that are just too big, things that have effects so spaced out in time that using our ordinary models of thought are just inadequate. It can also reconcile the opposing views that cast climate change as the very real series of disasters, or a complicated interlocking mesh of systems that can feel very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the real-world impacts things like hyperobjects can cause. Sometimes we forget that climate change is a thing we interact with every day and can inform choices we make. Now, the almost impossible-to-comprehend

totality of our situation is not great for mental well-being. You can end up tailspinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping, denial, and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into a void of negation. Things that are hyperobjects fundamentally break our conception of reality, temporality, and cause and effect. And it's already a really weird time to try to suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and services trying to usurp the real. That's what marketing is. First we had the internet with its limitless possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world of social media with all of its fractured and fractaled realities. There's immersive gaming and the allure of getting lost within thousands of unique worlds.

And now we have VR, AR, and the metaverse. More layers of digital fabrication trying to be passed off as an almost hyper-reality. A promise to make a reality even more real and immersive than our status quo. The internet itself is another hyper-object, and all this extra reality can take a strain on the human mind. Derealization, the perception that actual waking reality is an artificial construct, the feeling of being de-attached from your surroundings, like the world's made of cardboard or you're looking at everything through a cloud of fog, is becoming more and more common, especially among so-called Gen Z, the generation that grew up with the internet being a staple of life.

Now, how we got here is a disassociation between humans and what we call nature, or the environment. The problems aren't getting fixed because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as the effects are from the cause. That resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. All of the worst effects of climate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years. And that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance. I don't know how to understand that. And that makes making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet also urgent. It's both and it's neither and it's confusing. The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. It produces this lack of immediate and close in proximity consequences.

It produces this lack of immediate and close in proximity consequences. We must purposely remove these layers of separation and abandon our anthropocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature. It's the same thing. We are all part of this big mesh. This sacred idea of nature isn't natural and can never be naturalized. of nature isn't natural and can never be naturalized. We have to learn how to have an ecology without nature, without nature as a separate thing. To have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this idea that nature being separate from us, once and for all, we have

to kill the Anthropocene in our own head. A quote from one of Morton's other books, titled Ecology Without Nature, putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical act of sadistic, possessive admiration. Unquote. So within Morton's branch of philosophy, reification, the making of a thing into a thing, is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sensual appearance for another object. Reification is reduction of one's entity to another's fantasy about it. Nature is a reification in this sense,

and that's why we need an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn nature into something more fluid, it might work. Now, most of our modern political discourse can be boiled down to what things are real and what things are not. Hyperobjects and climate change don't just play into this debate, but crash into it, decimating all the other toys in this sandbox. As Morton says, the threat of global warming is not only political, but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And oh boy, do we be experiencing the simultaneous disillusionment of reality and the overwhelmingly real presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The worry is not whether the world will end, but whether the end

of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. The idea of the end of the world is very active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind of fosters its own negation. The end of the world is coming idea is not really effective, since, to all intents and purposes, the being that we are supposed to feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone. This does not mean that there's no hope for ecological politics and ethics and a better future. Far from it. In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly held belief that the world's about to end, unless we act now, is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence

here on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyperobject concept is to then awaken us from this dream that the world's about to end, because action on Earth, like the real Earth, depends on it. The end of the world has already happened. Using the hyperobject idea helps sort out these overly systematic things into a package that I can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language for a feeling, being able to name it that is empowering, a way of finding a handhold in the dim light of confusion rather than scrambling around in the dark. So how would you convince two-dimensional flatland people

of the existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world? Now, hyperobjects can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around climate denial. You can't point to something like rising sea levels and say, that is climate change, because yeah, that isn't climate change the hyperobject. Rising sea levels are just an environmental effect, and since the effects are so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of room for cognitive dissonance when people point at extreme weather and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology, our seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations, missing

the fact that almost all of our problems don't have a shared root cause, but instead are just part of a massive shared bungee cord-like mesh network. When so many local manifesting problems and natural disasters are blamed on climate change, even if you believe climate change is the cause, which it is, it still feels weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's such an amorphous, shapeshifting, time-traveling idea that for the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing very real physical effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard for them and their understanding of reality. For many people, rejecting hyperobjects is a lot easier than thinking about them. Because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to problems so displaced in time

is not only difficult, but encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the air right now won't reach their full effects for decades and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem. In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The cause is our brief luxury, and the effect is terraforming the world. And we are right now caught in between, the uncanny hyperobject of all liminal spaces. The end of the world has already happened. We are on the path and about to enter a new world. We are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal

space hallways. The door behind us is closed and at the other end of the hallway is a black hole. We cannot backtrack and re-enter the door behind us. Already are we getting sucked forward into the hallway, but there are many doors ahead of us, and we get to choose which one to open. At this point, we have passed some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked into thinking that there are none left. We must not focus on preserving an old way of life, but instead need to carefully carve out our new reality. We need to pick our new door. Well, that is my essay read thing episode amalgamation about hyperobjects, liminal spaces, and our new reality. I hope you found some of the ideas useful,

despite their kind of abstract and anti-abstract nature. If you want to learn more about this, I would recommend reading Timothy Morton's book, Hyperobjects. It is an academic read, but it's not that bad. I would recommend picking it up if you want to learn more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them more in the future. Thank you for listening, everybody. See you on the other side. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast

for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong

though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome to It Could Happen Here podcast. I'm Robert Evans.

Sovi, is that it? Unfortunately. I'm so sorry. All right. I just apologize really quick because that's a lot to take in. No, that was a good introduction. That was a good introduction. We got across the gist of what's happening. Who else is here with you, Robert? That's a great question. Is Garrison here?

Yeah. I think they are here. Is Chris here? I think he's here. Is St. Andrew here? I am indeed. Excellent. Why don't you take over and do my job for me?

That sounds great. Awesome. Actually. Good idea. Fantastic. Hey, what's happening, everybody? I am St. Andrew. Back to guest host yet again.

Last time we spoke about, you know, soft climate change denial and continuing with the theme of me talking about whatever I want to talk about as per contractual obligation. Today I wanted to explore a concept that I brought up in one of my recent videos, self and community actualization. Yeah. Right. So first we need to get into some context, of course. I mean, when most people hear self-actualization, they probably think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? The famous pyramid that management staff tend to use

and hang up in their offices and such. Los Angeles yoga ladies. The context in which I've heard self-actualization the most. Yeah, that whole goop kind of vibe. Yeah. But yeah,

self-actualization, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the old psych 101 stuff. I mean, it's traditionally represented as a pyramid, but it was never how Maslow himself actually depicted it. It was actually something that later interpreters of his work ran with and popularized. popularized um and so that as a result of that pyramid there are a lot of you know critiques of maslow's theory that don't quite engage with his theory but rather engage with like interpretations of his theory by other people but um you know i think it's still an interesting way to depict human needs and i think it's a good launching point to start thinking about and start discussing,

you know, human needs. Where do you all think you are on the pyramid right now? Just for posterity's sake. Oh, right up on the tippy top. Oh, for real.

I mean, I've been, I've been, I've been very lucky to do exactly what I want to do for a living most of my life and now I own goats so it doesn't get any better than that

including one absolute unit yeah he's fucking massive he's a chunky buddy what about Garen? I really don't know. I don't spend too much time thinking about models like this,

especially around my own goals and where I see myself. But I don't know. I'm doing... I'm relatively stable with my actual physical needs.

So I guess, yeah, just trying to figure out what I actually want out of life like a lot of younger people do, I guess. Right, right. So I guess that's more on the esteem or self-actualization side of things. Yeah. I'll start on that line.

And it's harder because you can say like well within the context of like what is possible i'm i'm i'm where i want to be and i'm doing stuff that i i i want to be doing but also everything's feels like a disaster around me all the time because yeah the times i'm in which makes it difficult to be as... Right. I was about to say, is anybody really on the safety needs category of the pyramid? Some people, absolutely, yeah. In this group.

I mean, yeah, we are. That's just it, right? There's a weird disassociation between what's actually going on and what we know could be going on in like the larger sphere that's fair yeah yeah that's that's a very good way of thinking about it is like yeah my immediate needs are met am i very concerned that large chunks of the places i love will be unlivable

and you know there will be a that we And, you know, there will be a, a, that we're kind of staring in the face of a variety of calamities that, that could, uh, make everything worse for me and everybody I care about. Absolutely. But I can't do anything about that right now.

The other thing I was going to point out is that, uh, with like, with like the physio needs is that includes sleep. Oh yeah. Once we get to that includes sleep. Oh, yeah. Well, once we get to that. Now you're talking about being the sun shining down on the pyramid, and who gets up there?

The sleep scientists have had their pockets in big bed for far too long. That's right. Far too long. Exactly. Apologies, Andrew. Please go ahead. The cozy industrial complex is the problem. problem it's fine i was just gonna say something else today i was gonna say that um you know the pyramid as we are discovering in

this conversation doesn't really accurately map out you know needs and human psychology really because i mean not just because our brains aren't shaped like pyramids but also because at any point in time we can be straddling multiple um sections and parts of the needs so for example we could all be breathing air and drinking water and having our food and stuff met right now um and you know you might be like really respected and stuff in your field um and you might have a certain a good sense of self-esteem and stuff but then at the same time you know you're not in a safe place yeah or you may be dealing with like a debilitating health condition or you may be lacking certain resources that you need to like thrive right so and then or maybe you know you have your

food water shelter sleep all that and you know you're secure and you have what you need and whatever but you have no friends you know you have no intimacy no family no sense of connection with other people so you're kind of like living in this bubble just floating through life you know i mean your bubble is safe it has what you need but there's now that social aspect yeah and um i think what's interesting about this is because as we start to talk about maslow's hierarchy of needs we start to see the structural and societal um impact on you know our psychology and on our needs right because if you want to talk about our safety needs for example or let's get straight to the um to the bottom to the basic if we want to talk about our safety needs for example or let's get straight to the um

to the bottom to the basic if we want to talk about our physiological needs water is now a packaged and commodified product right food is something that is inaccessible to many not because we don't have enough food but because the distribution of it to meet the needs of all is not what's prioritized on the capitalism right there are people who are lacking in shelter you know um and a lot of people are sleep deprived by the systems we're living in yep and same thing with safety you know um we are basically literally threatened by climate change and you know we are atomized from our relationships and stuff because so much of so many of us have to work so hard you know every day five days a week or more eight hours or more per day and it really just strips us of our

social connections and with our esteem needs we're sort of stripped of that by you know these commercial messages that we get about like you're not this unless you have this and bye bye bye kind of thing right and then self-actualization isn't even really a thought for a lot of people because they're still busy trying to reach all those other things um or they don't even have the time to think about how they can become who they are um and we we get into that a bit more later on in this discussion but they don't really have the time or the sense to think about that because they've been so restricted by their circumstances right and on top of that restricted restricted by the messages that they would have gotten, whether it be in the school system or through ads or whatever the case may be. So I think looking at the pyramid, of course, it's incomplete and there are issues with it, but it does illuminate some interesting things that we're dealing with right now.

I mean, yeah, it definitely is easier to self-actualize and have esteem once your needs are met but i think definitely there's an ability to jump around especially when you know you have like large-scale depression and alienation and disassociation like it's a weird weird sense where you can kind of hop around the pyramid quite quite often even if you have certain things met this doesn't necessarily mean you have something you know above or below yeah like i i've met i when it comes to like actual people that i associate with you know all of whom are folks who have to like have to work in order to live uh i don't think i've ever heard anyone talk about happiness in terms of like self-actualization it's always in terms of like when i get my student loans paid off you know when i get my

when i'm able to take care of this health problem that i have like when i have enough money it's basically everything boils down to for most people when i have enough money to not be uh as suffering as much from this specific thing or to not be scared about not having enough money, which is, I think, more what I get from people when they're talking about aspirational goals than I would like to do this thing that fulfills me as a person. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like any kind of actual self-actualization becomes this not just a luxury but a luxury that's just unimaginable yeah exactly exactly some people can't even imagine i know people who have just basically given up on like ever being able to repay their loans right like they've just resigned themselves to like this is my life now for all eternity this is this is it you know and i can't blame them who can really blame them when that is the reality you know for a lot of people taking themselves out of debt is not possible even if they did get a whole bunch

of the money or able to like pay off a bit more per month you know they still have interest rates they're just like so widely exploitative that they're basically serfs for the rest of their lives of course we had to have that brief moment of damn the system sucks as is typical on it could happen here but um i want to shift our attention now to another society and another culture that has approached this human needs and human psychology and human society thing differently right um what's been coming to a lot more people's attention lately is that um abraham maslow, he was actually partially inspired to develop his theory by his stay with the Siksika Blackfoot.

And I went into some of the details on the video on my channel, rethinking Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so I go a bit more in there. But basically, what he discovers, what I get to in that video, is that, well, firstly, some cultures view us as being born self-actualized, right? Like the Siksika Blackfoot. Yeah, and that's the Blackfoot, just for a little bit of context, are an indigenous people. I think Confederation is how they tend to refer to themselves.

is how they tend to refer to themselves. And like Montana, I think Idaho. I'll go to Canada as well. Yeah, up in Canada. Yeah, kind of like Idaho, Montana, and parts of Canada. Like that's Blackfoot territory. There were also, Maslow spent time with them. L. Ron Hubbard lied about having spent a lot of time with the blackfoot so fun fact i didn't know that oh yes there's a lot of scientology law i have yet to catch up on

yeah yeah but um yeah so you know with maslow's model self-actualization is essentially you know self-fulfillment right the tendency for the individual to become more and more what one is and to become everything that one is capable of becoming. So it's like fulfilling your potential as a person, as a partner, as a parent, as a talent, as an artist, as a whatever. Just fulfilling your potential as a person, right? But to say that we are born self-actualized um that framing more looks to seeing us each as born in the world with a spark of divinity because

of course this is tied into their spirituality um born with a spark of divinity and with a great purpose embedded in us and what self-actualization is linked to in these cultures, inextricably linked to that is, is community actualization, right? So community actualization is a concept that places the actualized individual in the context of community. So instead of just upholding the individual alone,

which Maslow's hierarchy has been critiqued for sort of doing, community actualization incorporates the web of relationships that supports each of us as individuals. Basically, it recognizes that we cannot be self-actualized solely as individuals if there's not a broader network, a broader web that is supporting us. We're not islands standing alone. Yeah,

we were touching on that point a bit previous, but less eloquently. It's much easier to have the ability to actualize your goals into actions when you are less alienated and you have and you

have all these other things around around a community yeah exactly it is that i think like the lack of community self-actualization is is kind of what we were talking about in terms of like yeah things are seem things are great for me in as much as things are great in the system we live in. But I don't feel that. Yeah, you can look outside and you're like, everything's actually really bad. I'm just kind of in my little bubble. And I'm trying to expand my bubble to be around and help more people. But it can be overwhelming sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, it's only so much one person could do. And that's kind of the whole point of community right our community supports our basic needs and basically equips us to manifest our purpose so it would the community would be there to for example and we could get into this a bit more design a model of education that supports us in expressing our unique gifts right another part of the six-decker blackfoot philosophy involves cultural perpetuity where there's an important consideration of those who came before and those who are coming after seven generations forward and seven generations backward as i had it explained to me. So that is something that I think would have been useful when it came to discussions of climate change.

And it's very relevant now because we are seeing the older generations basically chugging and being like, you know, well, it's Gen Z's problem now. Y'all can take care of it. Y'all are the future. it y'all the future kids all right all that yeah when they basically on the download saying fuck them kids you know yeah wait can i say that or yes oh yeah yeah yeah no you can always say fuck them kids i say that to garrison all the time all right yeah yeah but speaking of kids um i think we could compare and contrast basically

how childhood is approached in our society versus how it would be approached in a society that values community actualization um i mean and i'm just speaking from my experience here of course you're free to talk about your own um i from like primary school and stuff i remember it constantly feeling like i had to compete with my fellow um classmates i mean you know i was friendly and stuff with everybody and stuff but you know i was friendly and stuff with everybody and stuff but since i was like usually at or close to the top of my class i always felt this kind of pressure to just beat them out and continue to be the best gifted kid ever you know so there was a sense of like constant competition with others that wasn't really balanced out with a kind of um collaborative sort of approach to like basically training us from like an early age to learn to cooperate and work with people as people and as comrades you know although comrade is a weird way to put it but yeah

i just remember there was a sort of sense of sort of atomization that undergirded that sort of educational approach i feel like that's pretty uh universal in a lot of a lot of parts of our modern world. We definitely really embed that sense of competition into very young kids, whether that be in school or wherever. Because yeah, that was definitely my experience even in private school in Canada a long time ago.

And I know that's a thing across the ocean as well on the other side of the pond. Yeah. We are back. That doesn't sound like us. Are we? Are we really back? Sorry, it's 10 a.m. Robert. we really back sorry it's 10 a.m um robert all right so when we look at like childhood and education and stuff in a society that would value community actualization um what sort of things do you guys think we would be seeing in that sort of society? What sort of approaches do you think would be embedded from an early age?

I'm trying to put it into words. So kind of one of the things, I'm currently in a living situation, right, where I'm working with a group of people on a chunk of land. And so every week we do projects on it to make it better, which is tremendously

satisfying. And I think in a society where that kind of self-actualization, like you've been talking about, was more common, kids would feel that way about doing things that improve their community, like that take care of the people around them that make you know wherever they live um a better place to live like that would be that would be in the same way that like i go out each week and thinking that will be a fun thing to do uh to like to improve the place that i'm living i think that would be kind of um a common feeling like that would be a common activity as a kid to go engage in projects like that yeah and i mean we already see children doing that right except they do it in minecraft yes yeah i mean like the impulse is being directed somewhere currently this isn't a thing you have to

this isn't a thing you have to like splice into kids little brains to make them want to do it kids love making shit exactly like you give a child an opportunity and you sort of facilitate that, like, they are very, a lot of them, I can't really generalize, because I know some kids were like, oh, you do what you gotta do. I wanna stay in my corner.

But there are a lot of kids as well who would be, like, very, very willing to be helpful. You know? They really, like, they just adore being a helper and being someone who can support, whether it be in the kitchen, you know, with like a little broom or whatever, sweeping,

whatever the case may be. So it's not like kids don't want to be part of a community, you know, because we are social animals. It's just that right now it's directed at like Minecraftcraft servers or whatever yeah i think one of the things that i would really focus on because this is just kind of in my experience is teaching young kids how to cook um and then having them cook or at least help cook food for other people i think it's a really great kind of skill to learn, but also it,

it does this weird thing to your brain when you do that is like you, you get very happy when you cook food for, for other people. Yeah. And I think it's, it's a really good kind of emotional impulse to give kids is like, Hey, this is,

you can make people feel good by doing things for them. And because that makes you feel good and it makes them feel good and then that really builds that whole sense of community. Yeah. Because it cultivates selflessness. Yeah, yeah. Some kids can be a little egomaniacs.

But both selflessness, but it also teaches you to do stuff for yourself as well, right? It's a good skill to also be self-sustaining. So I think that's why I really enjoy teaching kids cooking. I used to be a culinary instructor because I'm really just passionate about

that specific thing. Yeah. I mean, for me personally, I develop an aneurysm whenever anyone's in the kitchen with me. Yes. There is definitely moments where if there's too many people in a kitchen, that is frustrating.

But if you do it right, you can get a 13-year-old cooking you an entire really, really nice holiday dinner, which is what I was doing when I was 13. I was cooking all of the holiday dinners for my entire family because I wanted to learn cooking. So it's definitely possible if you're a parent and you want less time in the kitchen, teach your kid how to cook.

Yeah. I mean, I come from a family of child cooks, right? I remember this one time, I think I was making a carrot cake with my mom. But I was used like a carrot cake with my mom but I was used to like licking my fingers when you know you make that cookie dough and stuff

but I licked my fingers when the when I cracked the egg and she was like stop you can't do that so I just remember that was one of the experiences in the kitchen really stood out to me a lot of other lessons lessons will be learned about like bacteria

um yeah you know it's really it's a holistic learning experience you know knives yeah you like you get to learn how to use knives get to learn about heat you know there's a lot of a lot of good lessons you can learn inside i get science, safety, chemistry, you know, a whole bunch of stuff all mixed in there. You know, even math. Even, absolutely, fractions. It's one of the only times I use fractions is in cooking and baking. Yeah, I mean, as embarrassing as it is, I use Google when I want to convert measurements still. But, I mean, it's just there.

It's more convenient. But, yeah, I i absolutely agree that example you know like the use of like cooking lessons and that sort of thing to support um to support like kids self-actualization and also community actualization because of my experience the thing i default to is different versions of like the youth liberation argument but because of how people have been using that term on twitter right now i don't want to talk about it because it's been causing a lot of like really dumb fighting about what that term actually means and who coined it and like that kind of stuff but that's kind of where i default to in terms of like what self-actualization could be in a community setting youth liberation is one of those things i'm really passionate about um

and i honestly don't know who coined it or what discourse is happening about it right now but it definitely um informs my approach and ends up influencing like a lot of the things that i discuss like whenever i talk about like an issue or whatever um in society a lot of times it really boils down or starts from an early age it starts through the education system or is fostered there or incubated there so i think um a lot more discussion should be happening about the place of young people and the education system and stuff, alongside, of course, all the other struggles

and discussions and discourses about struggles we've been having. Yeah, I'm just trying to view anarchistic, liberatory frameworks as like trying to achieve that self-actualization and to some degree like the the like esteem level and then also like the community and belonging level um even if you don't have all of your physical needs met all the time is how these types of frameworks can almost just jump around that and be like, despite me not having all of these base needs met,

if I have a radical model of the world, I can still try to achieve that type of freedom because I can work outside the box to get it. Yeah. And I think that's kind of what I was trying to get it um yeah and i think that that that's kind of what i was i was trying to get at this at least on you know like like a like whether it be like a youth lib framework or just like general like radical anarchism in general yeah and i mean parts of thinking outside the box involves you know looking at other people who have thought outside the box, who have reinvented and reconsidered

and sort of transformed their approach to things like education and childcare and really all the aspects of society that we take for granted as, you know, just being a certain way. You know, when we talk about things like education and childhood and the place that plays in uh community actualization i tend to think a lot about you know all the things we can do to not fit into cap into capitalist modes you know to really facilitate folks potential not just through the cooking classes for example but even through you know workshops and field trips i mean field trips now are just kind of like this thing that you know

kids go to from time to time and they have to walk in a single file line and all these different things but what i envision when i think of you know learning is something more akin to like less restriction to just the four walls of a classroom and more the whole world is your classroom yeah the whole world is a place where you know you can explore and you can roam and you can develop yourself you know without all these barriers and controls to be place on kids that end up suffocating their imagination of what things can be. And I mean, when you have that sort of educational model where, you know, the youth are able to explore different avenues and direct their own education routes, you know, you also end up, which is what has happened in education models that we've seen throughout many

different cultures of the world you see that it facilitates relationships with the community members right and everybody benefits because you have for example wasn't exactly something like apprenticeships and you have you know for example people getting support from the kids in the kitchen or you know in the workshop or in library or whatever the case may be and not only the kids developing their skills but they're also developing relationships with different members of the community with different backgrounds with different experiences and it really serves almost as i see it as a way to guard against um this sort of style of parenting where that we've kind of seen popularized lately where like the child is basically the exclusive property of the parent and you can't tell anybody how to raise their child and the parent always knows

best and that kind of approach i think it's a good antidote to that because the child being exposed to a lot more of life and of people um i think that to me um is the sort of youth liberation route that I see developing. It requires, of course, a total transformation, but no proposal can really be approached in isolation. Yeah, and it's easier to achieve when you're around other... It's easier to achieve once...

If you are already in a community where these things can be fostered, then it's a lot achieve once if you are already in a community where these things can be fostered then it's a lot you know it's a lot less of a lofty goal yeah i think that there's a kind of interesting i don't know if case study is the right word but there's part of italy that had a really really long-running like anarchist education experiments and so they were basically able to sort of reform local school systems and it worked but you know and they produced a bunch of really good schools and you know the schools are based on sort of like cooperative learning etc etc and you know i mean the model still exists today but and you know it's like yeah they made some of the

best schools in europe but the society around them didn't change and so sort of bizarrely they ended up making these schools that like produced you know they're very good schools they produce extremely good students but then they also like produce an extremely you know well-educated and good like capitalist cadre basically and so i think there's a sort of you know if we go back to sort of the community aspect of this is like yeah there's there's a sense of which even even if you have you know you you get some form of self-actualization you get some form of sort of you know communal and cooperative like education for children and stuff like that the the whole society has to move with it or otherwise you just wind up sort of feeding the beast more effectively.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean that is that you also see that kind of problem with like the WeWork guys, right? The – Adam Neumann and the two co-founders of that came out of an Adams case, Akibets in Israel, which started with from kind of socialist foundations. And the other founder had grown up in like a commune in rural Oregon. And they both wound up making like this ultra capitalist real estate company. there's there's a lot of value in kind of like carving out sections of of culture uh for the things you believe in to try to um get shelter from the storm but yeah as you were kind of noting chris um it does it does also just wind up kind of reinforcing the dominant social system um if there's not a kind of more basic upheaval of of the way things work yeah if there's not a kind of more basic upheaval of the way things work.

Yeah. If there's no political philosophy undercoating it, and there's no connection with broader social movements and sort of confederation with other projects, it could very easily be co-opted in isolation. Yeah, and I guess that's what happened to self-actualization as a concept for the most part is that it got taken over by kind of weird grifters and yeah like self-care yeah yeah

and take these concepts and just sort of twist it and transform it into um you know capitalist ends it's even something like um like with there's been some interesting discussions happening surrounding like luxury and what luxury means around certain um within certain circles on twitter um and kim um kimberly foster from for harriet excellent youtube channel um she mentioned that to her at least in this long but really good video she spoke about how luxury to her was basically um you know finding the ability to rest when you need to rest and to be able to be supported um whereas luxury now well luxury is by popular understanding is more so about consumption and consumerism so even when you have something where like, and this is specific to the black experience,

of course, because for a long time, you know, black women have been expected to like toil and labor and support, not only their communities, but also, you know, during the era of slavery,

also, you know, their white masters and that kind of thing. There was a push for the black women luxury movement to sort of reclaim you know a space for black women to just be able to enjoy themselves and you know be themselves but that quickly became something that was just like oh you know just get the bag um just the sort of hyper capitalist hyper consumerist bougie kind of approach to luxury where the original roots of the movement

which was about finding rest was sort of lost and i mean that's a bit of a tangent so i'll try to connect that back to what we're saying um I think when it comes to things like rest and the ability to rest, I think that that can only really be found in community. And if there is a lack of community support to pick up the slack when you need to rest and you need to revive yourself and you just need to recharge um barring that of course rich people can pay for a sort of a full community in the sense of having you know nannies and maids and butlers and tutors and all

these people to basically support their lifestyles and support their freedom but most people lack that and so i think part of self-actualization as you're mentioning earlier um is the ability to rest and i see that as linked with community if that makes sense i yeah i think that definitely ties into our recent discussions on anti-work and how anti-work is a lot more feasible if you are in a community support like network and right and you have people to rely on um yeah and definitely like you know self-actualization as the ability to like to just rest when you want to is a very uh is a very powerful uh thing and very enticing and that definitely plays into the whole like anti-work like uh idea i guess yeah i mean to connect the anti-wield thing to just general, you know, unionization and striking efforts, right?

Like I was seeing people calling for a general strike the other day. As if we haven't learned our lesson. But they were calling for that. But what they were not realizing was that without these structures in place to support striking efforts it's not gonna be enough you know if people cannot support themselves and their families the strike cannot last you know it's only with this community and with the community coming together to support people can they you know not just fight for the rights in the striking and unionization context, but also to be able to find leisure, to find rest, as with the anti-work discussion.

And to sort of turn this to a discussion on organizing more generally, we are, at the end of the day, a very communal ape. at the end of the day, a very communal ape. And if we were to just focus on ourselves as individuals, I think as capitalism in its antisocial nature expects us to, I think we would all suffer as a result. You know, our goal as people, as any one person should be not just to uplift ourselves, but also to enrich the worlds of those around us and to cultivate the community that as we support, they will support us and I mean as we prefigure this sort of

culture of support of care and of empathy and that sort of thing I think our organizing efforts would as a result

be a lot more powerful, be a lot more potent, be a lot more enriching, and a lot more imaginative. So, unless any of you have anything else to say, to sort of bring this to a close. Yeah. To sort of bring this to a close, I just want to leave us with some food for thought in terms of how we can incorporate community actualization in action. Because it's one thing to say, oh, it would be wonderful to have a community to support you and that kind of thing.

But a lot of people are pretty isolated on stuff right now um so i guess i actually put it into sort of a five-stage kind of uh approach starting with firstly facilitating collective belonging among diverse groups right so we want to look at bringing people together obviously they would have different backgrounds and different needs different ones different personalities but bring people together um whether it be at work or on the block or at school or whatever the case may be just for a cookout or for a lime or any kind of party or interaction obviously depending on where you are that may not be the safest thing to do considering covid and everything but to just bring people together not even necessarily to

proselytize to them about anarchism or socialism or whatever but at the very least start connecting the nodes and start connecting the different parts that can eventually come together to become something greater you know i mean you don't need to wait for a calamity this sort of thing to happen but of course we have seen as well where natural disasters have brought communities together that weren't together before um i think however it'd be better to like not wait for that kind of thing to happen and to just you know bring people together from now start some conversations conversations, get things going. And then from there, you want to be facilitating solidarity in struggle.

So whether it be, I know solidarity is a bit of a buzzword now, or at least it's become a buzzword, but I think whether it be with disaster relief funds or solidarity strikes and protests or, you know, with basic mutual aid support, you know, whether it's material or emotional solidarity in struggle, I think that is another crucial part in, you know, building community and incorporating eventually community actualization. you know, building community and incorporating eventually community actualization. Because what that does is it shows others that I have your back and, you know, others able to see that, you know, they can have mine as well.

It helps to build that sense of trust. You also want to sort of cultivate probably a sense of community pride and a sense of being able to rely on community networks so you know we spoke about mutual aid networks but also things like um skill shares or workshops or um material support you know if somebody needs food being able to support for them to know that they have people they can go to to support them in their time of need that is powerful you know not many people forget that not many people forget the time that they were at their most dire point and you know their community stepped up to support them you know if you want to see a insurrection in our lifetimes um you don't start guns blazing. You start with a creative food.

You start with a helping hand. You start with money if people need it. And then from there, you get into the realm of community achievements where your community is collectively able to celebrate the things that we've accomplished together you know whether it be establishing a community garden that is able to supplement people's um fresh produce supply or whether it be that you know communities come together and they've fixed

something that was broken on the street or even that they've come together and were able to train people with like some really helpful skills where they're now able to support themselves and bring other things to the table as well and And then from there, I think that sort of approach would foster fulfillment in community and prefigures community actualization. Yeah, I mean, and this is all it's a big topic. And it's a much bigger topic than just like what changes do you want to make around the edges?

Like what things should people advocate for or even just like advocating that that the system be torn down? Like as as was kind of evident when you asked, how could we build a community in which like kids feel more self-actualization from engaging in the community um and there was that kind of blank moment the the when you actually talking talk about like reconfiguring society at such a fundamental level um it's it's a big topic um and it's it's one that i think it's important to introduce to people the idea that like hey we really ought to be we really got to figure this this out this is this is important to like everything we we say we believe um answering this question is going to be key uh and it's it's it's a tough one um so I don't know. I think sometimes people come into episodes we do on stuff like this, like looking for, OK, well, how are you? What's your suggestion for how to do that? And at the moment, like I agree with the.

How imperative this is, but in terms of actionable stuff, it's a big open-ended question in my head. I mean, I think Andrew laid out a lot of the stuff that we've talked about, both within our kind of own community groups, in terms of the things, in terms of connecting nodes and all the steps that we can do to have there be more connecting branches of the tree and how to strengthen those. I think it's a good... We don't know what your community is like or what your situation is, so all we can really say

is here's the broad things that you can try or have worked for other people in the past and then based on what your situation is you can apply those plugables yeah you want to plug your plugables St. Andrew yes of course well you can follow me

on Twitter at underscore St. Drew and of course on YouTube St. Andrewism check out my stuff. I have the video on rethinking Maslow's hierarchy of needs and some other fun praxis-y

things as well. Check it out. Check it out. And stay thinking about stuff. Yeah, thinking is good. Yeah yeah thinking is good yeah thinking is good welcome i'm dan drell won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.

This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome, It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sort of how you can put them back together this is again

another mostly things fall apart episode um here with me is garrison hello hello and joining us today to talk about well a pretty wide range of things but about the drug war in mexico about paramilitaries and i guess also guess about the narco state is alex avenia who is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University and has written several very, very good articles that I've read recently. Alex, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, thank you for joining us.

So I wanted to start by talking about an article that you find has come out fairly recently uh that is about essentially the transition particularly in guerrero from i guess the the sort of 60s 70s uh dirty war in mexico to the drug war and i i guess i wanted to start from because i don't i don't think this is a history that's particularly well known um i i want to i guess start with sort of an overview of how we got into the sort of dirty war in mexico in the 60s because i think i don't know like i think if anyone if people know stuff about this it tends to be the very dramatic sort of like massacre in 1968 but it's been it went on for longer than that and has a sort of deeper history so can you bring us into that yeah for sure um so i'll start off by saying that generally if when most people think about

dirty wars and and cold war latin america uh mexico is probably the last country that they think of having one, right? Like there's a certain exceptionalism that Mexico has enjoyed until relatively recent, relatively recently, amongst academics and especially historians, right, where we're in the last 10, 20 years, we started to uncover Mexico's own version of a dirty war that we are more familiar with in other places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, etc. Mexico's dirty war, though, and if people know a little bit about this period, like as you mentioned, right, they know about the infamous

student massacre of Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968. But, you know, my research focuses on the southern state of Guerrero. It's on the Pacific Coast. It's made famous by the resort city of Acapulco. And I wrote a book in 2014, published a book in 2014 that really traced the emergence of armed resistance in the, of the Mexican state practicing systematic state terrorism against political dissidents, and in my case, armed guerrilla dissidents, who enjoyed the backing of dozens of rural communities and even urban poor working class neighborhoods in places like Acapulco in the late 60s and early 1970s. That's a very regional story, right? That's another thing that kind of distinguishes the Mexican Dirty War from other Latin American cases is that the Dirty War was localized to a few major cities

and then to very specific locales in the countryside, Guerrero being the most bloody theater. The way that these guerrilla movements emerged, they really began as these popular civic-minded social movements in the late 50s, early 1960s. And they protested things like political authoritarianism and economic injustice. But they did so essentially within the confines of the Mexican constitution. They followed the law. Mexico has the characteristic in Latin America of having the first great social revolution of the 20th century. You do have a post-revolutionary government that emerges from the 1910 revolution that has to pay lip service to the radical traditions,

to the revolutionary traditions that came out of that movement. And for that reason, the Mexican constitution that was passed in 1917, in its time was the most radical social democratic constitution in the Western hemisphere. And peasant communities, campesino communities in the state of Guerrero believed the letter of the law. So when they started to protest,

authoritarian state governors, police violence, army violence, economic injustice in the 60s, they followed the rules and they followed the laws. And each time that they did so, they experienced pretty horrific instances of both state violence exercised by the military and the police, but also everyday forms of violence practiced by, you know, gunslingers who were working for landed elites. And that then radicalized some of these social movements into two separate guerrilla movements that were led by rural communist school teachers, Genaro Vazquez and Lucio Cabañas.

And Lucio Cabañas' movement in particular, the Party of the Poor, they ended up creating a guerrilla force of about, the high estimate is about 300 fighters. A more realistic estimate is somewhere from 150 to 200. But the key is that in Coastal Guerrero and in some of the mountains, mountain communities of Guerrero, they obtain a pretty substantial amount of popular support, which then leads the Mexican government that had been ruled by the PRI. And it was ruled, Mexico was ruled by the PRI for like 80 years. They sent in the military and they waged this pretty horrific counterinsurgency that did things like disappear people, torture, rape. They razed entire communities. And that's generally what's

known as the Dirty War in Mexico. Its rural theater, its main rural theater was in a place like Guerrero, where we think there was almost a thousand disappearances from 1969 up until the early 1980s. Yeah. And one of the things that interested me a lot sort of reading through this was that it's sort of weird for an insurgency in that you get aspects of both kind of the kind of like classical 70s urban guerrilla movement, but it's also, it's very much a rural movement.

You have, you know, I mean, like one of the stories you tell in this is about, you know, like a group of people who did one of the you know like the the classic urban 70s thing which is that you know they they they did they did a bank robbery and then two people get tortured and the rural gorillas sort of get hunted down and i was i was wondering about the the dynamics of this because it seems like like there's it seems like you have these groups that are kind of unusually moving back and forward between having bases in cities and having bases in these rural areas?

Yeah, that's one of the... So usually when folks think about these guerrilla movements in Guerrero during the 60s and 70s, they think of them primarily as a, you know, fairly typical rural guerrilla movement as you just described. But these two movements,

one led by Lucio Cabañas, the Party of the Poor, the other one by Genaro Vazquez, the ACNR, Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria, from the very onset, they tried to connect the rural to the city, whether it was cities in Guerrero, like the resort city of Acapulco, particularly working class neighborhoods on the outside of the city, or the state capital in Chilpancingo, which housed the state university. Right. So both of these movements made pretty substantial inroads into that community and then also into Mexico City. So they tried their idea was not necessarily to start as a strictly as a strictly rural movement. But their idea was always to expand, because I think, to the cities, and I think quite rightly, they perceived that what the Mexican state was going to do to them

was try to corral them in the state of Guerrero and prevent them from logistically and politically expanding beyond that. And in the end, they were, that's exactly what happened. And that's how these movements were ruthlessly crushed. That and it took a lot of terror to separate these armed movements from their popular base of support. But a lot of this has to do with the fact that both Vasquez and Cabañas were schoolteachers. And they were involved in union movements that were national in scope. They were in move, they were in, you know, Lucio Cabañas was in the Mexican Communist Party, right? So he had extensive urban experiences and networks throughout the country. So their perspective was always to connect the rural to the urban, particularly because Mexico by the 70s was a rapidly urbanizing country, right? It becomes for the first time in

its history, well, first time in its post-colonial history, it becomes primarily an urban country. So they tried these really interesting experiments to try to connect the two theaters. But as you mentioned, right, they did that typical 1970s thing of robbing banks, and their terminology was expropriation, right? But that then exposed them to police actions. And anytime any of their militants were captured, they were immediately tortured information, you know, that they were interrogated horrifically. And that intel was used to hunt down their comrades up in the mountains in Guerrero. Yeah, and I think that that's a good place to move towards sort of the other side of this, which is partially the Mexican state response, but the part of it that was really interesting

to me was about how, you know, so, so part, part, part, part of what these groups are fighting are these sort of very, very local, like sort of landed elites. And I, I, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how these sort of local elites merge are able to merge with and sort of like co-opt in a lot of

ways, the, the military units that are deployed. Yeah, that's one of the biggest. So let me see how I can answer this question, because there's so what I try to do in this article and is part of my broader ongoing research is to kind of connect the violence, the state violence of the Mexican dirty war as it as it happens in Guerrero in the 70s with with with something else that's happening simultaneously,

which is like the so-called drug war and the exponentially increasing cultivation of drugs in a place like Guerrero, particularly marijuana and then opium poppies that are used to produce heroin. So what I try to do in the article that you're referencing is kind of to show there's a longer history in Guerrero of how power is exercised at the local level and how some of these local landed elites are able to weather the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

They're able to weather the agrarian reform efforts that occurred in the 1930s and 40s. And really these families, one of the things that captures my attention of Guerrero is that these families, one of the things that captures my attention of Guerrero is that you can tell who's in power by just by almost by looking at their last name, because there's this remarkable continuity in the state of who has managed to exercise power at the local level, political, social, and economic power for decades now, for generations. And you can track how power works by looking at families. And what I do in this article is to look at a couple of landed elite families that had managed to stay in power for decades. So there's certain that landed in this article I focus on one municipality called Coyuca de Catalan, which is in the hotlands region of Guerrero. During, you know, probably from about 2008 to 2015. It was in the top three in Mexico for opium and

heroin production. So it becomes this massive drug producing region. So I go back in time, and I kind of trace like, who was in power in this region, who owned land, who owned the resources throughout the 20th century, and how they were responsible for essentially creating this little narco fiefdom, as it currently exists exists and trying to figure out which families were involved. So on the one hand, you have these families that have been in power from like the 1920s and 30s, and they're still exercising power. And then when we get to the 1970s, and you have this horrific dirty war, this counterinsurgency that the state and the military are waging against communities in Guerrero, that opens up new possibilities for new families to come in

and to ally themselves with locally stationed military units. And they work together to wipe out guerrillas and guerrilla supporters. And at the same time, they start to, you know, kind of dip their toe into this world of narcotics production. Because really Mexico in the 1970s, especially by the mid-1970s, it becomes a number one provider of marijuana and heroin to the United States. And this is part of just a broader global history of narcotics, right? There's U.S.-led drug interdiction efforts in places like Turkey, Afghanistan, and in Southeast Asia. And efforts to suppress the drug production there creates this, you know, what people usually refer to as a balloon effect. It just displaces the drug production somewhere else because the demand in the US is

still there. And that creates in Mexico, the number one provider of narcotics by the mid 1970s. And that then has an impact locally in the place of Guerrero, which is again, simultaneously experiencing a guerrilla insurgency, a dirty dirty war and then also the ramping up of drug production one of the most interesting parts of this that i didn't know about was about how i mean like how how explicitly because i i've read a lot of well not a lot but i've read about a lot of how particularly like after like when when the sort of after sort of the the various upheavals 2006 in mexico with the oaxaca uprising with the zapatistas making a bunch of moves and the cpu presidential election about how you get the drug war is the sort of like military solution

to these leftist movements but i was interested in how i mean incredibly explicit they are about this like the the the the anti-guerrilla operations are – like they don't call them anti-guerrilla operations. They talk about like bandits and like they're explicitly like, no, no, no, this is an anti-narco operation even though they're going and massacring like essentially peasants and occasionally guerrillas but just a bunch of just random like campesinos. Yeah. just a bunch of just random like campesinos yeah yeah there's a there's a a great quote that i got from for in this article um you know there's this wonderful researcher in mexico carlos flores who has a really good book on kind of like the the failed state in mexico and drugs and military and in that study he managed to interview a military participant in the dirty war in the 1970s and he he has this great quote that i included in this essay which he says this military guy says basically look with

the marijuana growers we had no problem we had no beef uh but with the gorillas we had to fuck them up and for me like that that direct quote kind of encapsulates like what the drug war in mexico has been historically and in its current form. Like, and this is something that I learned from people like sociologists and journalists, Don Paley, right? Like the war on drugs is a war on poor people. And it becomes in the 1970s, it becomes a really useful cover for the type of horrific violence that the state is practicing in a place like Guerrero against these popularly supported guerrilla insurgencies. So publicly and to the international audience and to its own domestic

national audience, the Mexican state is saying, look, we're not waging a dirty war. We're not waging a counterinsurgency. We're fighting a war against cattle wrestlers, against cattle thieves, and against criminals, against drug dealers. When in reality, they're waging a war against poor people who are supporting these different guerrilla insurgencies led by these rural communist school teachers. So that's, and that's in the rural theater, right? It's really interesting when you think about how the Mexican state in the seventies

will criminalize urban guerrilla movements. You know, Mexico had like 38 guerrilla movements in the 1960s and seventies. That's just like, people don't really recognize that, right? Like 38 to 40 different rural and urban guerrilla organizations. The big urban one that managed to create, I don't know, 10 to 12 different focos or fosa was the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre,

the Communist League of the 23rd of September. They became such a big threat in the urban theater that the Mexican president, Luisa Echeverria, devoted his 1974 State of the Union, basically the Mexican version of the State of the Union. He devoted a pretty good chunk of it to these, quote unquote, terrorists. Right. So for the urban guerrillas, he referred to them as terrorists. And then he does this thing where he says, you know, most of these terrorists are unpatriotic. I'm going to paraphrase some of his language. are unpatriotic. They, and I'm going to paraphrase some of his language. They reveal high indices of homosexuality of like, just basically othering them to the point that they're seen as like the

most despicable other in Mexico, in Mexican society. And that then opens them up to getting wiped out. Um, which is, it fulfills a similar function as calling the, the, the rural gorillas, nothing more than cattle rustlers, cattle thieves, and narcos, right? So it's all this counterinsurgency, like discursive strategy that justifies the elimination of these people. But at bottom, these are just wars against – the drug war is a war against poor people. And you see that to this day. one of the things that really animates my research about the history of drug wars in Mexico is that I really want to push back against, you know, journalistic treatments that will say, look, Mexico's war on drugs began in 2006 when President Felipe Calderon, you know, launched the military against these different drug trafficking organizations. And, you know, historians like

myself who work on this were like, wait, no, Mexico's had a series of drug wars, right? There's a historian, Alec Dawson, who talks about, has a really excellent book on peyote. And he talks about how the war on drugs begins in like the colonial era, right? In terms of how the Spanish colonial state criminalized indigenous consumption of drugs like peyote for their own ritualistic cultural practices. The 1970s is another moment where you have a form of drug war that the Mexican state exercises. But from my perspective, it's almost like a cover as a way to wage war against political dissidents and armed guerrilla challenges to its rule in Mexico. Yeah. And I think that's an important way of looking at it also as just a way to understand why you know like if you're looking at it from the perspective of like a policymaker it's like oh

well we spent all this time doing the war on drugs like why are there more drugs and it's like well yeah because i mean the point isn't really about like i mean i think okay i want to make a caveat here which is like it's not like there's a such a thing as like a quote-unquote good war on drugs that you could wage like there's no there isn't a version of this that's like oh no if if we actually just try to like focusing on stopping these people it would work but it's like no but simultaneously yeah it's that the the the goal isn't really about like it's not about drugs it's just about killing poor people and i think yeah i think that's that's a good way of framing it and i think also it's an interesting way of

looking at why you start to see these sort of supposedly like anti-narco units just immediately start doing like immediately get into the trade yeah yeah well because they're like they're positioned to make a ton of money off of it yeah like it's yeah they're not dumb yeah yeah and i think i don't know this is an interesting question about like the structure of the state here too because you know like like in chicago this is another like this is a thing that happens all the time is yeah you get these you get these anti-drug units that are, you know, incredibly specialized, they get a bunch of money, and then they immediately turn around and start, like, just do, like, just enter into the drug trade. to be these these very these these very interesting sort of alliances between paramilitaries cartels the police and the military that open up and i uh this this i know this is an incredibly broad like it's a question you can like you know devote academic disciplines to but i was wondering

how how you look at the state in the context in a context like this because yeah i mean in a context where you know it's not the state doesn't really have monopoly on violence right yeah no that's a that's a huge question and there's how you i mean essentially the question is like what is the state which is yeah that question always terrorizes me yeah uh. And how you answer that question then leads, has consequences to how we think about things like the drug war or, you know, violence in Mexico or a variety of different things, right? But so what I, what I do in this article is on Coyuca de Catalan is to just simply look at what the state looks like at the local

level, right? Particularly like its repressive apparatuses. And what you see in a place like Coyuca de Catalan, because you see kind of like it's a multiscalar issue, right? Where you have generations of conflicts over land and land tenure and who gets to control rural markets, who gets to control access to rural markets and rural production, right? So there's already like a built-in structure that's exploitative, that has somehow managed to weather a big social revolution and a grand reform effort.

And on top of that, then in the 60s and 70s, you get, you know, industrialized narcotics production placed on top of this pre-existing structure, right? So it's should be no, it's almost like no surprise then that, you know, the gunslingers that used to work for landed elites will now serve as not just gunslingers for landed elites who are terrorizing campesinos, but now they're also going to work with like local narcotic, you know, narco farmers, drug farmers, and traffickers. And then at the same time, they're going to do their best to co-opt, to buy off, you know, military units that are stationed at the local level, police units that are stationed at the local level, local judges,

local magistrates, local political officials. And it creates a very dense network at the local level of people who are working together, uh, to maintain power, but at the same time, uh, make sure that this really profitable political economy of narcotics is going to thrive. And this is at the very local level, right? So in some, in some ways, those local interests of the quote unquote, the state are, will conflict with the state in Mexico city and how to resolve those tensions and becomes a big deal. So that the quote unquote the state will conflict with the state in Mexico City. Yeah, yeah. And how to resolve those tensions and becomes a big deal. So the guy that the military participant

that I referenced earlier, he was actually sent in from outside of Guerrero into Guerrero to wage counterinsurgency. And he talks in this book about how they didn't know what to do when they see their soldier comrades obviously collaborating with local narcos, about how they didn't know what to do when they see their soldier comrades, you know, obviously collaborating with local narcos, even though this guy and his unit have been sent in

to wipe out the narcos. So what ends up happening is that the goal is never to eradicate the, from a national level, from a state national level, the goal is never to eradicate the drug trade in Mexico in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The goal is to rationalize it. The goal is to control it. And the goal is for the state to be able to maintain power over it. And this leads us to what some scholars would refer to as a plaza system, right? That different narcotic trafficking organizations will control different parts of Mexico, but the overall power, you know, they have to kick back to, um, is our different state officials. Um, and that there's a recent really great book, uh, by Ben Smith called the dope that just came out. It's really like the

first really good English language, big history of, of the Mexican drug trade. And he essentially, he says that like the Mexican state is a racket. It's a racket and it's ensuring that this drug trade exists and it's centralized and it's rationalized in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But by the 90s, it starts to lose control as the state itself is neoliberalized and becomes smaller and its capacity to control these different groups becomes weakened. So that's like the big national level, right? And then that takes us to the scale of the international, which is a whole other thing. But at the very local level, what does this look like? It looks like if you're a drug farmer, right? Because another thing in Guerrero is that these

drug farmers are like small scale, right? They're small scale. They have a little bit of autonomy, but they're small scale, but they're selling their product to these traffickers. And these are the traffickers usually that will have connections to local landed families, will have connections to military, to police, to politicians that will ensure that this economy will continue to thrive in a profitable way. By the late sevents, and this is something else I think that I need to do a little bit more research on, but you see it happen elsewhere in Mexico, especially in the Northwest, in a place like Sinaloa, which is usually seen as the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. But I think in the late 70s, both in Sinaloa and in Guerrero, the dirty war and the sending of the military en masse in a place like Guerrero,

it not only takes out armed resistance to the Mexican state, but it will also take out small scale narco traffickers who don't want to play. They don't like the rules that the Mexican state is imposing upon them in order to make money and traffic drugs. So I've seen a couple of documents where, you know, secret police spy agent documents where they say, okay, yes, you know, yes, these campesinos who are accused of being guerrillas, yes, we are disappearing them. But apparently some small scale drug traffickers are also being disappeared because they don't want to go along with the rules being imposed by the Mexican military. And that's something that you see in Sinaloa in the late 70s when

something called Operation Condor gets launched and you get thousands of troops and federal police who go up there. And instead of eradicating the drug trade and getting rid of these different traffickers, what they do is they centralize it, they rationalize it. They make it more efficient. I mean, that actually, so in a counterintuitive way, it's state violence that actually leads to the formation of things that we think about as cartels and not the other way around, right? Because the very trade begins within the confines of the Mexican state. In part two of this interview, we're going to drill deeper into that question and look at how the state's attempt to get in on the drug trade created the cartels

and how they sort of lost control of them, leading to an incredible increase in paramilitary violence and death and destruction. And on that happy note, this has been It Could Happen Here. Join us again tomorrow for that. And in the meantime, stay safe and don't die. If you want to find us, we're at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. You can also find other work that we do at Koolz on Media on Twitter, if for some reason you want to continue venturing onto the Hellsites.

Goodbye. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture

in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is often and today about state and paramilitary violence. And we're back with part two of our interview with Alexander Avenia about the state and paramilitary violence in the cartels in Mexico. The immediate thing I was thinking about this was it reminds me a lot of some stuff I read a while back about smuggling people over the border and about how the american militarization of that like destroyed because it used to like as as the u.s tries to

like make the border more and more unsafe it becomes harder and harder and it means that like the people who can actually do it like you know you need to have access to more resources and more like technical capability and that sort of like and that that also in a lot of ways help the cartels because you know well it's like okay so who actually has a bunch of organizational expertise with smuggling routes and a lot of money and it's it's and i think that's like it's an interesting way of looking at what the the national application of state power in these like it does which is that like it it seems almost like what's happening is that so when when you get these massive exertion

to state power it's not that they like flatten like you know it's not that they just sort of wipe out our resistance what they do is they yeah it's what you were saying is like they they centralize the drug trip but like they they centralize the drug trip but they also they centralize the sort of violent apparatuses and it means that yeah like yeah if if you're going to survive that you have to be like incredibly efficient and incredibly violent and you have to also sort of start like you you have to start playing with it like playing by the rules of the state of exception which is you know and that's that's like how i guess the the violence level and the organizational centralization happens

yeah i think that's right yeah no i think you're i think you're right and i think it's also becomes part of the to add i mean so to add you know fuel to the fire even more so, it's become a strategy of like the DEA and counter narcotics forces in Mexico to do what you just described, but then also to sow dissension amongst the different drug trafficking organizations. Right. So that then also increases the violence. Right. So if you can get you know, it was it was pretty well known that in Chapo, for instance, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel until – well, let's not say leader. One of the most prominent traffickers of the Sinaloa cartel until recently, he was giving up people. He was giving information on rivals to the DEA and to other counter-narcotics forces. And that's part of the strategy. The strategy is to fragment these groups.

And that only increases the violence. And you see that violence at the very localized level. And this is what Guerrero is suffering from right now, right? Guerrero for a long time was under the control of one single drug trafficking organization slash family from the state of Sinaloa, the Beltran Leivas, right? They were originally aligned with, they're actually cousins with El Chapo Guzman's family. They had a falling out in the mid 2000s and they went to war. And that had disastrous consequences for the people of Guerrero because it fragmented the drug trafficking organizations and it forced different local groups to take sides.

And that's kind of how I end the article that you're referencing, right? Where different local groups start to take sides and that increases the level of violence at the local level and communities suffer greatly. And that's also a consequence of like the kingpin strategy, right? Like this idea that if you take down the perceived leader of a drug trafficking organization, that's somehow going to have an impact on drug production. Yeah, no, what actually happens that it it fragments the organization and it creates more violence at the local level, while at the same time, it gives a chance to like ex-DEA agents

to go on like, you know, national media and be like, oh yes, the capture of El Chapo is going to have a great impact on the drug trade. No, it will not. Like, it just increases the violence. And I think that the thing

that's very clear from this article, and I think it's clear if you, you know, if you look at the drug trade, is it's like, no, it's largely economic stuff. And like like one of the things you're talking about is is you know is that these peasants who are the people who've been able to hold on to the collective land basically get forced by the land banks to like produce sesame and it's like they can't make any money off of it and i i i don't i don't know how directly it looked to me a lot like like that was

directly one of the things that starts to to lead to the shift of the drug trade there because you have all these people locked into this crop that like just can't support them. revolutionary Mexican state to really help spur agricultural production at the level of these small holding peasants and these rural communities that are these ejidos who have received land from the Mexican state. If anything, most of the state subsidies and the state structure, state support for agriculture from the 40s, you know, up until the 80s, that was all directed to big agribusinesses that were producing export crops in places like Sinaloa, right? They're producing winter crops for the American market or winter fruit for the American market, right? So in the absence of like meaningful state support for small holding agriculture, that small holding agricultural sector that is meant to feed Mexico, you know, some of these farmers in a place like Coyuca de Catalan,

they'll say, okay, well, we were growing this thing that the agricultural bank is telling us to grow sesame, but we're not making a lot of money off of it. But on the other hand, by the late 60s, they see that marijuana production is really increasing due to American demand. If I can do both things, you know, I'm going to make a lot of money and I'm going to allow my family to make a pretty good living and I'm going to allow my family to make a pretty good living while staying in the countryside, while not having to migrate to Mexico City or while not having to migrate to these agricultural fields in Northern Mexico or even into the United States. So because it's like really rational economic response to a broader

macroeconomic situation that has put them in that position. And you still see this to this day, right? These small farmers, they still own their land, they'll grow certain crops on it, and it's almost serves as a shield for, you know, the opium poppies that they're growing on the same plot of land, but in a part that's a little, you know, harder to access, and it's a little bit more hidden, right? But it's trying to find a way at bottom to make a dignified, you know, how to make a life of dignity for your family when you're living in the countryside,

when you're living in a place like Coyuca de Catalán and Guerrero. And then you see that, you know, the gringos are going crazy over Acapulco gold in the late 60s. And you have, you know, North, you know, gringo traffickers coming into Guerrero with new seeds,

or you have Sinaloenses coming into your state saying, you know, grow these, here are some marijuana seeds, grow that strain, you know, and they can buy off, you know, local politicians and soldiers and police.

That's one of the ways that you get the emergence of industrial proportion production of marijuana and opium poppies in Guerrero in the 60s and 70s. And again, at the same time that this massive dirty war is being waged against two different peasant guerrilla movements, right? So it's like a really messy social matrix that's occurring at the same time. I guess one other thing I wanted to talk about was about how the political parties sort of work into this because i guess like my experience with this sort of like the the the kind of like narco

state fusions with like 20s and 30s china and there it's like like you're you're i don't know i mean the the the the communists have an actual independent political base outside of, like, the Green Gang. But, like, the KMT, it's, like, this is basically just a, like, this is just, like, a narco organization with, like, a flag planted on it. And I'm wondering how, like, on what end of the scale we're working with, with the PRI and also, also like with, with the other Mexican parties, because it seems like there are like parts of like a functional state app, like a party state apparatus or like a party apparatus. And then parts of it that are just like,

this is a cartel. Yeah. It's, it's, that's a huge question. It's, it's, um,

yes, I've really resisted. No, no, it's all good. I've, I've stopped understanding this within the framework of like a narco state, right? Because to think about a narco state, you really have to think about how a state was captured by these drug trafficking organizations.

And, and I historically, and currently, I don't think that describes what's, what's happening in Mexico. Um, I think what you would, and again, it goes back to the question of what is the state right like that question is going to drive me like just it's gonna i'm gonna be thinking about this decades down the road right but because you have you know you it depends on what part of the mexican state you're also referring to right so if we're talking about the military the military has all segments of the military have always had an important role to play in the production and trafficking of of narc from Mexico into the U.S. From the from like the 1910s. Right. The military governor of Baja, California, this guy by the name of Colonel Esteban Cantu.

He was helping traffic opium into the United States during the Mexican revolution, right? And this has been a constant, right? The guys that I talk about in my article, this guy who ends up, he's a general by the time he's arrested in 2002, but this guy, Mario Acosta Chaparro, he was like the main counterinsurgent theorist and bright mind of the Mexican military that gets sent to Guerrero in the 70s to wipe out these different guerrilla movements. But after they wipe out the guerrilla movements, he stays on. He serves as kind of like the leader of the state police forces. And what does he start to do? He starts to buy up land, allegedly, that will start producing opium, poppies, and marijuana. And this guy from the late 70s up until he's arrested in 2000, it's pretty clear that he had been collaborating with

different narco-trafficking organizations. He gets arrested by his own military in 2000 because it was pretty clear that he had been protecting and collaborating with the Ciudad Juarez cartel and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. So, you know, one of these like anti-guerrilla, anti-narco narcos that will actually go to jail for about six years because it was pretty apparent that he had been for a long time collaborating and protecting the different narco trafficking organizations. So that's the military. Then you have like the secret police that gets formed in Mexico, the DFS in 1947 with the help of the FBI. Mexico, the DFS in 1947, with the help of the FBI. The DFS becomes like this political police that the Mexican president can use to tamp down on political dissent. They're the ones, you know, spying, surveillance. By the 60s and 70s, they're also torturing, disappearing. And with that level of impunity and power, they also get into the drug game by the 70s and 80s. You have the federal judicial police. They're the ones who control for this during this 50s,

60s, and 70s, really. They're the ones who are controlling the kickbacks that they're receiving from narco-traffickers until the military moves in the 70s and takes over for them, right? So the repressive apparatuses within the Mexican state of the 20th century play a really key role, if not the role, in helping foster, create this political economy of narcotics. not the role in helping foster create this political economy of narcotics. Now, how do we view that in relation to the PRI, right? The party that emerges from the Mexican revolution, the party that will rule Mexico generally will say from the late 20s up until the year 2000, well, you have pretty important political officials within the party throughout the 20th century that are directly linked to narco traffickers and directly linked to military officials who are obviously involved in the game as well. But at no level

can we say it's a narco state because the narcos haven't captured the state. It's actually the other way around. It's the Mexican post-revolutionary state that's trying to get its hands around this thing that's growing within its own confines, and they lose control of it like by the late 80s and 90s they've effectively lost control of this thing and that's when you see the rise of of these um highly centralized drug trafficking organizations like this you have juarez cartel that's making a ton of money off of cocaine so i guess it seems like it's almost like you're dealing with from from from the very very local level where you have these sort of landed elites and their gunslingers, it's like, it's this almost sort of like, like, miniaturized fractal version of the state where it's like, you're getting these like, very, very small sort of like, you know, like, almost like feudal domains and they sort of expand upwards and stand upwards but yeah and i guess the interesting part to me is is how like the paramilitary dynamics of that and how how the power of these sort of landed leased into power like how how it's like like the the the power

like the the use of power from the top seems to strengthen them where you know if you're looking at this from like like how how this is supposed to work in theory if you're someone who actually is like trying to eliminate the drug trade you'd think it'd be the way around that like the application of power would shatter but it sort of doesn't it causes these like these these buildups these apparatuses and then they fragment they rebuild again but it's you're not ever actually dealing with these sort of like micro state. Like, yeah. Yeah,

no, I think that's exactly right. And if anything, the paramilitarization is also like a, like a long, it's a process, right? So like the first,

if we can use this term, the first paramilitaries were, were used to wipe out a gray and reform minded compass campesinos in the 30s and 40s. But you don't really have a paramilitarization of the drug trade in Mexico to a certain extent because you have the military and the police to do your dirty work if you're a nautical. That's a more recent phenomenon that you start to see in the nineties and especially in the 2000s. So right. The case that everyone points to are these, um, the elite of the elite in the Mexican military, the, the goths, these guys are like the, the, the Navy seals or the special force,

you know, the army Rangers, the Mexican military, uh, a bunch of these guys in the mid to late nineties decide, you know what? We don't want to work for the Mexican military. We're just gonna, uh, we're going to desert and we're going to go hire ourselves out to the Gulf cartel. And they become really the first like paramilitary wing of a major drug trafficking organization. And these are guys, some of which probably most likely were trained at the School of the Americas or received American specialized training.

Now switching sides and protecting a pretty powerful drug trafficking organization like at the time in the 90s, that was the Gulf Cartel. And these are the infamous Zetas, right? These are the Zs. They're called the Zetas because that was like their military code. There was always a Z in front of a number. So Z1 was kind of like the leader, the first guy who took 12 or 13 guys with him to desert and they hired themselves out to this drug trafficking organization and they become like the paramilitary unit the rest of the group see that and they're like oh shit like we gotta catch up right because these like and these guys the gaffes you know they have counterinsurgency experience you know they were the ones who were

fighting against the zapatistas and chiapas in the early 90s, right? They were the ones that they were sending to, yeah, they were the ones who were fighting against the new cycle of guerrillas that emerged in Guerrero in the mid 90s, the EPR. And then when they're used for counter narcotics operations, they look at the situation, they say, you know what, we're not going to fight on the side of the military, we're going to hire ourselves out to this Gulf cartel, we're going to make a ton of money. But they have a lot of skills, right? So the rest of the drug trafficking organizations see that, and they're like, we got to play catch up. And you see the paramilitarization of this conflict. And in certain parts, that's what's driving, I think has played a really big role in driving some of the bloodshed and violence that we've seen in Mexico, particularly since 2006.

some of the bloodshed and violence that we've seen in Mexico, particularly since 2006. We can speak of probably 400,000 homicides since 2006, at least 100,000 disappearances. A lot of that has to do with the people who are fighting are paramilitaries, right? They're receiving training from Colombian military advisors. They're receiving training from Israeli military officials. They're receiving training from Guatemalan special forces, these guys called the Caibiles who committed some of the worst atrocities during the Guatemalan conflict of the 70s and 80s. My family's from Michoacan, which is a state north of Guerrero. And I remember when in probably 2005, 2006 or 2007, I was down there doing research in visiting family, and they reported on the arrest of two Guatemalans and two Colombians in this random, far off part of Michoacan. You're like, what were these two Colombians and two Guatemalans doing there? Well, they were most likely like special ex special forces in those countries, militaries, who had been hired by local organizations to train their soldiers, to train their paramilitaries. So that's, I think, that has driven a lot of

the violence, right? And you see it in terms of techniques they use, the weapons, the armament, the logics of how to take down their enemies. Yeah, I remember I read an article like, take down their enemies yeah i remember i read an article like okay i've literally lost all sense of time i i think it was like mid last year about a cartel just basically running a military operation just shutting like just shutting down a city um god i really wish yeah that was pre-pandemic that was yeah that was pre-pandemic oh my god yeah i remember because i was on the day and the day after it happened i think i spent way too much time on twitter talking shit to people um that was when i think you're referring to when the uh uh detachment from the mexican military um in the city of culiacan which is the capital of sinaloa, Culiacan is seen as like, if Sinaloa is the cradle of the

Mexican drug trade, then like Culiacan is the capital of it, right? I think you're referring to when a Mexican military detachment tried to arrest one of the sons of his chapel, right? And they actually found him, they localized him, they located him and they tried to arrest him. And like the hills just came down on the city of Culiacan and you had hundreds of narcos or paramilitaries who came down and essentially forced the military and the state to hand over El Chapo's son to them. And the reason why I was like, you know, spent way too much time on social media going after people is because people said, oh, this is an example of a failed state. Oh, look at the new president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He's lost control of the state. He's kowtowing to narcos. And it was much more complicated than that. And something similar had already happened in the previous administration, particularly in

the city of Guadalajara, where they even shot down a military helicopter, a police helicopter, and they essentially shut down the entire city because one of their leaders had been captured. Okay, so one of the things you talk about at the end of the article is about this environmentalist group that gets, like, they all get arrested, while their lawyer gets killed after he starts talking about, like, connections between business owners and the party in the narco trades i guess what

what do you how do you sort of like like how how do you leftist movements sort of navigate this space because you have it seems like you have on the one hand you know you you have all these paramilitaries and then you also have a state that is like incredibly violently hostile to you and i guess i don't know like i i guess you sort of have the zapatista model of this combination of sort of like armed struggle and social pressure but i guess like how how do people navigate this sort of like it seems like a like a really disastrous like yeah place to be trying to do leftist politics and yeah it's it's really difficult right and i think that's again going back to the the thesis that the war on drugs is actually a war on poor people it's um you know leftist movements dissident

movements in mexico have to well for one i'll say this in a place like guerrero it's these movements that have provided i think the the most accurate like x-ray analysis of what the state is at the local level right so um this this guerrilla leader that i talk about in the article comandante ramiroamiro, who was around in the late 2007, 2008, 2009, like, based on his travels in the mountains of Guerrero, and kind of like the actions that he was engaged in, for him, it was very clear that the military was collaborating with all narco trafficking organizations, not just the one, not just like the most powerful one, right? So at the national level, there was a lot of discourse of, well, this dark drug trafficking organization

is going at it with this one. And a place like Guerrero, this guerrilla leader looks at the situation. He's like, actually, they're all working together. And not only that, but they have the police and the military. And what are they doing? They are going after poor communities up in the mountains who don't want to grow opium poppies or who want to organize a different way, an alternative model of living, a different way, an alternative model of living, of social reproduction. What they'll say is, you know, what the military is doing in terms of drug interdiction is they'll only go and burn some opium poppy fields and not others. And that's because the owner of that opium poppy field that they burned didn't pay up. So, you know, now current movements in Guerrero, particularly indigenous movements in Guerrero, particularly indigenous

movements in Guerrero, there's a recent report that an indigenous group just put out, and they're linked to the Congreso Nacional Indigena, the CNI, I can't remember the acronym, where they talk about a criminal state existing in the part of Guerrero that is known as La Montaña, which is a heavily indigenous area on the border, on the eastern part of the state. And what they say is what we see here is an alliance between narcos, political parties, military detachments, and transnational corporations. And in Guerrero, those transnational corporations usually have something to do with mining and they're usually Canadian so how do you navigate that like that is like like the the correlation of forces if we want to use that kind of terminology like from a perspective of a

of a group that that wants to resist this it's it's it's damn near impossible right like you have everything going against you and yet in Guerrero people are still resisting right you have the students of Ayotzinapa they're still protesting they're still organizing even after the disappearance of their 43 comrades back in September of 2014 and we still don't have a clear answer as to what happened um you still have you know you have the model of of autonomy that like that that certain indigenous communities like the community in Cheran and Michoacan have practiced, which is essentially they kick out all political parties, they kick out all police officers, and they self-organize at the communal level, almost like a community police force. And you see that in Guerrero as well. There's challenges with that. That usually brings on a lot of violence. And the people of Cherán have really suffered for trying to protect themselves. They've suffered a lot of casualties. And there you have this combination of narcos and illegal logging.

So the community there, on the one hand, is trying to protect their ecology, but they're also trying to defend themselves from narcos who have taken over local political parties and they don't want them in their town. In Guerrero, you have community police forces and you've had them since the 1980s and 1990s. But that's raised a lot of issues in terms of what happens when one community police force gets co-opted or corrupted by a political party or by even a narco. And then that group is used to hit against other community groups who are still trying to organize for a radical alternative. So on one level, it's really depressing, right? Because everything is stacked against groups and communities and organizations in a place like Guerrero who want a better world, who want to create a better world. But in the longer scope of Guerrero's history, they still resist. They still resist. And to me, that's one of the things that fascinates me about this place and about its people, about its communities, that the odds have always been stacked against them. And nonetheless, they still resist. They still try to, against overwhelming odds,

they still try to carve out a better, more just, more dignified existence for them and for their communities, even at great risk for their wellbeing. And they're willing to risk everything. So they're still there. They're still there, even though the forces that they're facing are extremely powerful. Yeah.

I think that's a surprisingly hopeful note to end on, which is that, yeah, it's even in like, you know, places with just incredible concentrations of violence and different kinds of sort of power against you that people continue to fight. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's one of the lessons that we definitely get from a place like Guerrero or a place like Chiapas, right, with the Zapatistas who are still there, who have still managed to – I mean, they've managed to reproduce themselves generationally, which is really difficult for an armed insurrectionary group, right? Like they've managed to do that and to carve out at great cost as well, right? They're currently right now suffering. They've been suffering for more than a decade, a low intensity warfare that's been waged by the military and their paramilitaries yeah uh but they're still there with their example right and i think part of the power of them and the people in guerrero is is their example alone is threatening to power to the powers that be and and that's why that there's always an effort to exterminate them so just by virtue of surviving and and defending themselves um that's like a small it seems like a small thing but but they're providing an alternative and i think that's where their their example is really important and and i i

think i think there is i think there's a real argument that the whole sort of the whole sort of anti-globalization like that wave of struggle like is something that was kicked off by the zapatistas and like and not just on the sort of like they were the first people to go into revolt but it's like i mean explicitly like the the way they brought you know like social movements from across the world together and the way they you know the way that they like had they got the way they got people talking the way they had people training each other the techniques and the sort of ideas that they were exchanging that they like like they they set off like a wave of revolt that lasted for like i don't know if you started in like 1999 and like

the end of it's like 2006 yes yeah it was incredible yeah no i think they they're and even if you want to go this might take us off topic a little bit right but like scholars who focus on like venezuela would say actually the first one was the caracas right in the lates, when you have a popular rebellion in Caracas, Venezuela, against neoliberalism, against neoliberal austerity measures, right? And then, so I've had that. I've had talks with friends. I'll be like, yeah, the Zapatistas were the first ones. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. It started in Caracas in 1989, I think, as the Caracas.

But yeah, no, I think their global example continues to be a really powerful one. For me personally, it's like, I still remember my parents had, my parents are migrants from Mexico. They had this big satellite dish in our backyard so we can beam in TV stations from Mexico. And I remember January 1st, 1994, we woke up groggily to celebrate New Year's

and my parents turned on the tv to see mexico city news and there was marcos right and there were the zapatistas um and there were then the mexican politicians saying no don't believe what don't believe your eyes this isn't you had a guy i remember you had a guy go on tv i think saying something like this is not an indigenous movement because if it was an indigenous movement, they would be using machetes, not rifles, something really condescending, like the level of racist condescension that came out of Mexican politicians in response to this movement was super high, right? But I remember I was in junior high, and I remember seeing it,

and I'm just like, there has to be something wrong for these people to do this. Right. And that just led me to want to do more research and to do more reading. And that I think is really powerful. And I think I still think it's really powerful. So the more we can get the word out about these movements in Guerrero and Chiapas and other parts of Latin America, I think, I think it's still really important. And I think especially today, we really, we do need a bit more hope in these dark pandemic times. Yeah.

I was trying to figure out a speaking of hope segue, and I couldn't, I couldn't quite get it. Do you, do you have anything that you want to plug? Where can people find you? Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me on. This was, this was a lot of fun. You can find me on, God, like you can find me on Twitter. I think the pandemic, my Twitter consumption has really gone up. It's been awful, but you can find me at Alexander underscore Avina. Yeah. you go on my twitter page you'll see you'll be able to get the link to the to the article that we've been talking today um about about the drug from dirty war to drug war in guerrero um i recently published a book review of of this really fascinating book on the the connection between the israeli arms industry and like cold war latin america so you can find that on my page uh but yeah it's i don't really have anything else to plug whenever i finish this damn book on dirty words and drug wars uh have me back on and yeah

definitely tangible to plug but right now it's just short little articles well thank thank you again for coming on the show um yeah this this is this has been it could happen here you can find us in the usual places if you want to venture on social media for some reason, please don't. It's a bad place. But yeah, thank you and goodbye, everyone. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

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