It Could Happen Here - Parasitism with Andrew

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Andrew and Mia talk about the political of viewing humans as parasites. Sources: Progress by Samuel Miller McDonald Worshiping Power by Peter GelderloosSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And they also maintain their whole, of course, through ideology. The sets of ideas about the world carried through religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture, etc. And to some extent, they maintain their whole through violence. And so we can, and I believe we must, break free from this parasitism. I believe there are other ways of relating with each other with nature, and I'll talk about those ways at the end. By the way, hello, and welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined today by...

Mia Wong, also here. Yeah, we're doing great intros. Yippee. So I want to talk about paracism, the development of paracism over time, as discussed in Samuel Miller McDonald's book Progress, which I highly recommend, quite an enjoyable read. So I actually really first heard about that book years ago before it was even out, and I had reached out and I was like, oh, I would love to, you know, get a copy as soon as it's

available and talk about it and stuff. And, you know, I was at that point in my life, I was really voraciously consuming these kind of grand narratives of history. And of course we know the flaws with these grand narratives. They have limited explanatory power. But I still found use in these narratives, in understanding aspects and angles of our history, at least when you take a critical approach to them.

Because, I mean, history is, as the name implies a story, you know, there are many interpretations and frameworks that can be used to explain or better understand different answers. aspects of history. And so progress offers one framework through its three eras of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different forms can coexist, forms can come and go. It isn't this sequential development as is sometimes posed, but there are trends that we can observe. And so these three phases the McDonald discusses identifies particular ideas of progress, forms of parasism and agents of history.

And I think it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics, and ecology that intertwined to make up history. Obviously not perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist-adjacent approaches to tracing the development of the state.

in history. Peter Galiluse had worship in power. James C. Scott has against the grain. And in progress, although I don't think he is anarchist or anarchist adjacent, in progress, McDonald's starts with the beginning of recorded civilization in 3,000 BCE and looks at the way that many early states developed from a blend of religion, politics, and daily life. So, I mean, humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years before recorded history, right?

They spread across the globe. They experimented with all kinds of different social, political, and economic organizations that are now lost a time. And the dawn of everything by David Greber and David Wen grew kind of wrestles with some of this. In the early years of recorded history, there were many manners of approach to state development. From roughly 3,000 BCE to 1400 CE, this is the first phase of McDonald's timeline. Human societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesonarica, and medieval Europe saw a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. McDonald calls this phase heaven in the book, not to co-sign it as an ideal, but to illustrate

the prominence of religious power in this time period. And me, I know even posting recently about the impact of religion and the seeming hesitant people have nowadays about actually engaging with what it means materially for the experience of domination in our day to day lives. Yeah, well, and there's something you can look at sort of in that period is the emergence of states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes. as the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems

Graber talks about this, I think in debt actually where a bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become like credit are these things that are developed in order to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes. And so you have the situation

where, you know, the things that are going to become the building blocks of economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history are developed in order to fuel these sort of hierarchical massive complexes where like

just staggering amounts of resources are like fueled into these sort of temple complexes. And that's a, you know, that's a thing that continues to current present day. Indeed. You know. Indeed. We have temple complexes.

Yeah. Like what is? We have temple complexes in the sense of megachurches nowadays. Yeah, yeah. It's like what is, what is the megachurch but like the temple complex is farce? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. That's the thing, right? Like, we are seeing an echo of this historical time period, even in the present.

Because the idea of progress in this time and in these places was about progressing toward a higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods, you know, ensuring that different groups of people were in their proper place in that order. And so you had the development of religious laws and theologies. and monumental architecture, which established this particular kind of order. And when disaster struck, whether it be floods or droughts or invasions, this was a sign of the times, perhaps, that the order was breaking down. And so it's really funny to me that, you know, in this progressive account of the idea of progress that McDonald's talking about, you know, even the earlier ideas of progress have not entirely gone away.

You know, they haven't been replaced by the next era. They have just taken on subtler forms and sometimes not as subtle forms. Yeah, there's a concept that the journal Chuong uses where, I mean, they're specifically talking about like the ways that elements of like the Chinese, I guess you call it the socialist regime are sort of taken and then used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing from biology called exepation where something like evolutionarily, was used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a new thing. So it's like, you know, you've like, Finn becomes hand. I'm a lot of great biologist, but this is this kind of thing where like you have this situation where like, yeah, elements of like the old notion of what progress was of like the sort of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are like

excavated by the next thing that's going to happen. And that's taken by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing. And we still have our sort of like versions of it that have been taken through like countless numbers of world systems. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely see that. Of course, there were differences in how they would have, I think, approached religion

and thought of religion compared to how we do. Yep. Psychologically, in a time like that, they didn't really have this more prominent and culturally accepted secular mindset that we have today, where religion could even be seen as something separate from everything else. You know, for them, religion was how reality worked. The seasons, the harvest, illness, victory in war, all of this was interpreted through a sacred lens. People knew what place they had in the cosmos, or at least thought about it in that lens, and they understood what role they had in the divine hierarchy.

On a material basis, though, because I mean, we do have to think materially and not solely ideologically, these societies engaged in what McDonald called continuous and regional parasitism to extract resources like food, labor, and land. And the agents of this parasitism are city, states, kingdoms, and empires. On the city-state level, you had them dominating their immediate hinterlands, and on an empire level, they're conquering neighbors, done for either integration and taxation, or tribute or slavery. But due to the limits of the technology of the time, you know, they didn't have the instant communication and fast transportation that we do today.

There were limits to how far an empire could spread. Even the largest empires had their limits and would often devolve power or fracture. Tensions would begin to build as growing empires struggled to uphold central authority. Belief systems came into conflict and contact and intellectual traditions developed. over time, governance would get more bureaucratic, religions would face reform due to challenges

from within, and by the time that we approached the late medieval period, around the 1300s and 1400s, and these from a Europe-focused account, or old-world focused account, the world is indeed changing. The transition has begun from this heaven phase to the next phase in McDonald's freewood. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IHart Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash.

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Me. Is there anything to the idea that, because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard's, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You love me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny Welcome to my new podcast Learn the Hardway with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Kear Games.

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embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As in the nation, phase from 1400 to 1900, where we move away from a world of cosmic order to a world more distinctly human, a world of human order. Religion persists, of course, but authority has begun to move from the heavens down to Earth. An earth that could be observed, could be measured, navigated, and controlled by human beings. And so we see this in this time with the emergence of the sciences and the emergence of,

you know, newly minted political theories. And the idea of progress in this time was redefined as expanding knowledge, increasing efficiency, mastering the environment, hence the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, advances in navigation and so on. And consequently, parasitism as a process becomes more disbursed. extraction would stretch across continents and would be carried by maritime tree roots, taking resources from different parts of the world, including sugar, cotton, spices, metals, and labour, all flowing through increasingly complex global systems and increasingly industrial

supply chains, as wealth starts accumulating in certain regions thanks the extraction of others. you know, the rich is being built up at one place because of the poverty being developed in another place. As the agents of this time of the kingdoms and empires, but also newly minted corporate charters and nation states. And to be clear, I'm not trying to say that these are the sole agents of history in any of these particular periods, but just that they were significant. but I don't want to deny the role of, you know, the politics from below the rabble, as Greba sometimes refers to them, would have also shaped the development of history. Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too, and it's something you were talking about from the top. But as with all of these sort of like really, really broad, sweet looks at history, this is capturing trends in a few places in the world as the,

moved, there are obviously many, many, many other things that are also coexisting with all of these systems at the same time. The entire world in like 2000 BC is not just like mirror images of like the Shang Dynasty everywhere, right? Like there's a whole plethora of different systems that are interacting with each other from, I mean, I can't even, there's just an unbelievable sort of diversity of like cultural forms, some of which are states, some of which are not. But yeah, when you're doing a macro history like this, you are looking at certain sets of them and matching patterns with them, but that also is not, we're also not saying here, but that's literally everything that is happening on earth because it's not.

Yeah. But yeah, just, just want to get that in for the people who are going to get very mad about this. We are aware of the presence of other narratives. We have, we have, we have done our postmodernism training. we have done our historical archaeological stuff. I just putting this note in. Of course. Of course.

And like I was saying, they had these other agents. But for this particular narrative, we're focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters, and the nation states. And in a nation states, we take them for granted now, but they really were not always a thing. You know, the idea of a group of people with a shared identity, language, culture. and history being artificially, I would say, unified under a state that has to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know, you didn't have this concept of France until France was built and the whole world has suffered as a result. You know, you didn't have this concept of Italy, you didn't have this concept of, of Nigeria, you didn't have this concept. These nation states

had to be constructed. Yeah. Even China, which is seen as like the sort of archetypical example of this, like we have a bunch of records of people in the 1500s.

And I think even through the 1600s, like going and talking to people in China and being like, yeah, you're in China. And the people are talking to her like, what the fuck is China? Like, what are you talking about? Like, we're like under this ruler, who's under this ruler,

who's under this ruler, who's like, yeah, exactly. You know, so yeah, these things have to be constructed and they were constructed a lot more recently than people think. And then to actually get people to identify with them also has to be constructed over generations in some cases.

Yeah. And usually by, you know, a process in which, I mean, the only way to cause people to have a positive identification with like a specific new bounded national territorial identity is to have it be posed against an other. So, yeah. One of these, one of these also like the question of the national, national, like the 20th century national liberation movements is when you get like,

for example, like pan-Arabism. It's like, okay, like whose national liberation is this? Sure as fuck is not like the Kurds or Yazidis. It's, you know, yeah, this is, all of which is to say what you were saying, which is this is a violent and bloody process that is a lot more recent that people understand. Absolutely. This time also saw a lot of revolutions. Bloody, indeed.

you know, the rise and fall of old powers and new powers. And this is also a phase, I think, that could be marked by its contradictions. You know, you had this rise and tide of ideas like liberty and rights and, you know, liberalism was developed in this period, as was socialism. But you also had, obviously, this vast industrial exploitation of peoples and ecologies. We saw the development of the sciences and scientific classifications, but you also saw how that gave way to pseudoscientific justifications for inequality. You know, the great chain of being, the idea of the whites being on top of everyone else.

Yeah. You saw self-determination for some and self-determination, not so much for others. As far as time we reached the 1800s, the pace of change was exceedingly dramatic and volatile. Industrialization, urbanization, communication, and transportation converged to compress time and space. We see the booth of new ideas and reformed relations, and by the time we reach the early 20th century, a new phase is taking shape. We are now in what McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning from 1900 to the present day. The system, the machine, whatever you want to call it, is this vast, interconnected set of systems. systems that organize how we live, produce, consume, and even think.

The system does not have a single king or a figurehead that you can point to as the big bad, despite, I think, people's efforts to try and find a big bad. It's really a web of processes and incentives and networks and complex bureaucracies and global markets and industrial and post-industrial economies and mass communication and the underground economy and all these different things chugging along almost like It's beastly bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive the alliteration. I'd like to throw out of poetry every once in a while.

It rocks. So the idea of progress becomes very economicistic in this period. It's focused on growth, output, productivity, efficiency. Our entire economy is basically organized around these metrics. That's the thing that people are worrying about when they're on Fox business or whatever, the financial times, whatever species of dialogue about the economy. The focus is not on actually

all our people's needs being met. It's what's growth looking like this quarter? How efficient are we exploiting the planet? Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that clip on CNBC that we played in an ED a few weeks ago whenever this is coming out

where the CNBC anchor goes, Trump has threatened to wipe out a civilization. What does this mean for investors? Yeah. I saw that. I saw that it's horrifying. Haunting.

Haunting shit. The way that our economy has been built around these metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea of progress in this time tends toward the economicistic. You know, the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism, and so on. And parasism in this system phase. is, as the name implies, systemic. To quote directly from the book, contiguous parastism had captured energy

from indigenous societies and native, wild, and domestic species. This is the parastism of the first phase. Disparate parastism, meanwhile, had captured energy from indigenous societies, imperial subjects, and both exotic, wild, and intensively domesticated species abroad. And that's the second phase. And so the new form networked parasism captured energy from all of these as well,

but with the addition of ancient species of plant to animal in the form of fossils. This enabled concrete energy capture through increasing electrification, and then the digitization of extraction and production, and abstract energy capture from extremely large, dense populations of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this system were built in the 19th century, It was only in the 20th century that it came to dominate, end quote. So this parasism is networked on another level. You know, it flows through global supply chains.

It extracts fossil fuels, you know, coal, oil, gas power, maintains the entire economy, maintains transportation, industry, agriculture, digital infrastructure. All of it, a whole world, as we've seen, has been built around these fossil fuels. and something as simple as blocking a fairly small street can have a dire impact on the entire world, much of which is yet to be felt even as the straight has now been reopened. Well, it's not been reopened. About to be seemingly.

I mean, Israel did violate this East fire though, right? So it probably will not be opened again. Yeah, I mean, even before that, it hadn't been. reopened. I don't know. I have no idea when this episode is going to come out. So I am standing for the record here. Yeah, it's very hard to comment. It's impossible. It's like, not impossible. It's extremely difficult to figure out whether the straight is open on a hour to hour basis. Yeah. Like, I don't know what the fuck. The straight's going to be like, I don't know. Like maybe someone will have like filled the straight in by the time this episode comes out. Like,

who knows? Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I've been so straight-pilled. That's a fair point. That's fair point. I guess the point I'm trying to make is, even in the hypothetical scenario, where the straight is fully open, we're still going to feel the impact of that brief period of closure. Yeah, for years. Yeah.

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help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends

on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hardway with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Kear Games. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month,

I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking. Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing.

And we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we've done enough. Because people scoreboard watch. Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross. Because you find it important to be a good person while you hear on earth? Are you a good person because you're afraid?

Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Kear Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hardway.

Open your free iHeartRadio app. Search Learn the Hardway and listen now. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashed. human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having

trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This system phase, by the way, it's not just on the whole extraction of resources, of land, of labor. You also notice that it extracts our attention as well. Through the collection of data, through the increasingly efficient ways that it seeks to draw out our eyeballs for the sake of advertising, for the sake of profit. And this unprecedented scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's merely borrowing from the future and from a million year-year-old ecosystems. Eventually, that debt is going to catch up on us. In fact, it already has begun to catch up on us.

We're not in the when climate change happens in the future. It is happening right now. And the nation states are carrying on business as usual. And business is booming. You know, the agents of this parasitic phase do not care. This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these massive transnational entities. And what you'll notice about this period is that they are the agents of this time, even sometimes more than countries.

some of these corporations have more power than entire countries. And so the advent of mass communication and globalization, we also saw ideological coalitions, which could be seen as another agent in this phase. You know, the government, institutions, media, tech giants, and movements that share a particular worldview and shape the narratives that determine what people, be it workers, consumers, users, or citizens, believe it's normal, necessary, I did never tell them.

as a person living in this time it is very difficult to see it you know you get used to a certain system it's you know it's like water to a fish yeah if you're abstract intangible like what are you talking about this there's nothing besides this can be the reaction you get sometimes and it is not on anyone individual to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system the biggest picture nobody i think sees all the machinations of the entire system But nevertheless, the system sees you. You know, it sees you as part of its functioning and to kind of bring it to close. What I want people to take away from this is that, you know, you can be and you are an agent in history.

Yeah. Now, whether you are an agent of history that serves as a cog in the machine or you are an agent of history that serves as a wedge in the machine, that's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth, deep inequality, technological advancement, military might, environmental strain, atomization. The 2020s have been a whirlwind of a decade already and it's not even over yet. Oh, God. Still four more years. Yeah.

This decade sucks. It really does. It really does. It really does. But this system is not. not unassailable. Yes, it can and it does adapt to our ruptures, but it is a lot more fragile than it puts forward, you know, to borrow from, I can remember who said it. The concept of paper tiger, it comes from Chinese mythology or Chinese military philosophy, right? Yeah, like,

I know Mao talks about it a lot. I don't actually know where it's from, but yeah. Yeah, but I say that to say that it's a paper tiger, you know, a particularly sturdy paper tiger, but a paper tiger nonetheless. Yeah, and never have the people who are attempting to ride the paper tiger have, like never in the entire like history of modern capitalism, has it been ridden by people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing. Like never have people who understand the system so poorly been in charge of it. And they are, you know, they are already. already kind of tearing it apart because they don't understand it at all? Yeah, I think one of the one of the signs of that was just the idea that you can kneecap your

country's soft power mechanisms entirely and bully every other country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen. I mean, honestly, the U.S. has not faced the consequences that it should for the things that it has done in this year alone, that alone in its second. decades of history. Yeah. But, I mean, when you saw the deconstruction of US aid, right, which was one of the US's primary mechanisms of having sway in other countries, building up goodwill in other

countries, and also, you know, intervening in the domestic politics of other countries, to break that down, like a bull in a China shop, when that was really like one of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal world order float. It really, I think, is an indication of the incompetence with you know this. Yeah, and then even on top of that, I think on an even larger scale, right, the entire premise for, I mean, like the entire premise of the Pax Americana, right, the entire premise of the post-World War II American order was that the U.S. Navy would keep the world's oceans open for supply chains. Yeah. That was the whole thing. And it worked exactly as long as the U.S. never actually had to fight a war over.

over the sea lanes that it couldn't militarily control, and then we fought the one war, which would prove that we cannot, in fact, secure the sea lanes for global capital? Apoccal transformations are happening in, like, the very structure of global capital, because these people think that, like, the idea of not using your military power

and then reaping the, reaping the world-spaning, like, trillion, trillion-dollar rewards of this. Like, they thought that shit was like girl shit. Yeah, I mean, the whole point of what, I think part of the point of investing in an honest military might is so that you don't have to use it. Yeah. It's just to try and scare people into just bowing down.

Mm-hmm. You just station your troops outside their territory and you're like, yeah, are you going to really try and challenge us? Yeah. And then you went and stomped all over somebody and obviously had to stand up and defend themselves and now everybody's seeing what it is, you know? Yeah, and it's a situation too where, like, yeah, like Iran has always technically had the military power to, like, control the Strait of Hammuz. But they never did because the consequence of that would be the U.S. bombing their cities.

So the only way you could possibly lose control of the Strait of Hramus is if you bombed the cities first. So all you had to do was not do that, and it would be fine. Yeah, but I mean, the little girls in the school were Hamas now. Oh, God. Yeah, it's just... It's just a tragedy. God, it's really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves in the balls

because they just, like, wanted to go kill a bunch of brown kids. You know, this is an unfathomable horror. And also, they so clearly have no idea what the fuck they're doing that it makes a lot of things possible. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is, you know, what comes next? we're seeing, like as you said, epochal transformations

just in this year alone. This phase to be in currently as defined by McDonald is not going to last forever. You know, unlike previous phases, however, this phase has been imposed truly globally. There's no longer a

hinterland that one can escape to. Yeah. And so what comes next can be fragmentation. It can be some kind of devaluing evolution or calcification or it can be a social revolution and the moment and the cogs and wedges in this moment are actively deciding that but i think we can do without this parasism yeah as mcdonald notes there are other ways of relating with each other and with nature he borrows from the ecological language

of commensalistic and mutualistic relationships in mutualistic relationships organisms benefit each other. And for example, we provide hives and protection where bees pollinate crops and produce honey. And in commensalistic relationships, one organism captures energy from another while doing neither harm nor good to the other. There's lots of animals and plants will make their home among trees while neither harming nor helping the tree itself, although some of them do end up helping the tree in more indirect ways. But finally, in parasitic relationships, which is the kind that has proved disastrous for our world. One organism that being us has captured the energy of another or of multiple others to those others detriment. Our system has put us in the position of essentially being

mosquitoes on planet Earth and not in the role that mosquitoes play in the overall health of the ecosystem, but literally suck in more blood than the system can sustain. And so we have to shake things up. We have to emboldened, I think, new forms of relations and what those relations look like are up to you. As usual, all power to all the people. Peace. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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