Knowledge Fight - #847: Chatting with Sophie From Mars

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Today, Jordan sits down with Sophie From Mars to chat about an array of topics, from the value of the term wokeness to the sincerity of the Wachowskis.

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I love your word. Knowledge fight. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm without my co-host and today, but I am joined by Sophie Macalister or Sophie from Mars is I've always known you. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, Jordan. It's lovely to be here. I'm on here on my favorite podcast. What a one on a Yeah, people don't know me. I'm Sophie from Mars. I make video essays on YouTube. Someone once called me a video philosopher and I found that phrasing of my job pretty helpful

because I do think too hard about everything and then write it down and then say it on video. So that's probably the easiest way to say what I do. I have my kind of structure of how I make content is like a lot of long projects. So I spend way, way, way too long working on it and then kind of fill the time in between with shorter stuff. So my portfolio of bigger, more noteworthy stuff is like a while ago, I breathlessly defended the matrix sequels with absolutely no shame. More recently, I talked about leftist spaces where there are conspiracy theories.

So I'm very relevant to know what to write. I looked at Jimmy Dore, the Grey Zone, some people like this. And I just released a video called The World is Not Ending, which is about climate change and how the world is not ending. However, some people who are not familiar with me so have no trust, no reason to trust me, might be thinking, oh, that sounds bad. It's not climate denialism.

It is my belief that the way things are gonna shake out. I didn't even occur to me. Yeah, no, that's right. It could be. The world is not Yeah, no, that's right. It could be the world is landing. Yeah, because nothing is wrong. That I would not have seen coming. A friend of mine shared it, and someone in her reply is, is this climate denial?

And I was like, why would you think that she was sharing climate denial? That would be a hell of a ton for her. Yeah, it's kind of twisted in the mushrooms. That was the big thing. Yeah, it's kind of trusted in the mushrooms. That was the big thing. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, we can talk in more detail about it. But yeah, it's a project I've worked on for two years. And basically for reasons that I detail in this two and a half hour documentary essay thing, the monstrosity I created, I believe the world is not ending.

And it's all about combating doom orism. And yeah, as you say, I've incorporated mushrooms throughout as a kind of motif, bringing my interests together. Okay. All right. So then I suppose the obvious next place to go is which one do you think is better? Reloaded or Revolutions, which are we going for here? Well tragically, I have the worst possible take which is the reloaded in revolutions are two halves of one movie that should be viewed in one sitting and a lot of the hate for them. them comes from the fact that they were released with a big gap in the middle, which is not, it's just not the right way to approach them. It's one text.

Reloaded people tend to feel as better because they're watching the first two acts of a three act story where all of the hype and action is being built up. And then revolutions is like all the payoff and it's just one long protracted. And this is how it all worked out, which yeah, to watch on its own is really boring. I admit that. Okay. So then that's not really, you know, that's not really an unabashed defense. That's kind of, that's somewhat embarrassed. Like, well, listen, if they had done a better job, I wouldn't be struggling to defend this movie is basically what you just said.

Yeah, I think cringe is the line killer and I think that we have to approach everything to which house keys do, seeing that like, they had just since see a posting through it all the time. No room to cringe it absolutely anything at all. And you know, bad, terrible, full of mistakes, lazy, awful CGI. These are words people throw around, but do they mean anything? This is what I'm trying to get at. Are people actually describing real objective things about movies when they say those words? I think so That's that's an interesting question are people using objective. I see now

Here's the other thing, you know, you think oh the knowledge fight fan base. We the wank's we talk about conspiracy theories most of the time Swear to God most of what we talk about is movies theories most of the time swear to God most of what we talk about is movies. Alex and Info was the whole right wing sphere. They just it's all movies that they're basically lies off. That's true. You know, so we will I mean yeah, that's talking about reloaded when we're talking about what Alex thinks of the current political climate. Well, I, I just realized my position is having as having this platform for a moment and I just realized my position as having this platform for a moment, and I just want to voice my deep, deep discontent that we didn't get more reset was.

I was so hyped about reset was, and I just like, since, you know, if we're talking about Alex, if we're talking about living in a simulation, if we're talking, right, where's my reset was? Like, I was so excited about it. I can't begin to describe to you exactly how we felt the same. The exact same. When we had finished recording the episode, we were like, I'm kind of excited to see what reset was. Yeah. Of course, the rug was pulled. Yeah, I mean, that is like, I am actually working on a shorter essay

about Alex Jones at the moment. And I've said this to you already that I worry a little bit about running a foul of your rules of how to cover Alex Jones, but I think I'll be okay. But like, these are the kind of questions that I wind up with. You know, I thought it was cute to do a who is Alex Jones intro intro and then I ended up naming all the other sections. Why is Alex Jones? What is Alex Jones? How is Alex Jones? Right. Right. Who is the fascinating stuff?

The most meaningless part. Right. Yeah, exactly. Who is a tornado? Exactly. So as far as all of your professional work has gone, this I want to kind of tie together with the rampant transphobia that Alex kind of spits out on the near constant and is now kind of infected the entirety of that conspiracy space world, right? How is it, from your point of view,

because I spend all of my time looking at all of this stuff, but I'm a straight white dude. It's made by people who look like me. I don't look out and feel an attack on me personally. So I'm not interested in how it is that you consume this whenever it's it's just horrific shit. Well, it's a bit strange because like a lot of this media that goes around like I think in the UK, maybe it's a little different. In the US, I'm sure that there are a

lot more people who are much more directly plugged into like QAnon space, Alex Jones space, and then going out and doing a hate crime. Here it's like there are a lot of, like, a lot of people we would call gannons or whatever, like just dudes who are completely right in the face all the time, and they read the daily mail and whatever else. And it's a lot of, like, mainstream bigotry that actually fuels their hatred. And then we have a parallel conspiracy space of of Tuffs who are doing a lot of the most Alex Jonesy stuff in the UK and yet like not contributing directly to the hate crimes. There's about six or seven guys in between, say,

Posey Parker and someone who like screams at me in the street or whatever, which is a thing that's happened to me a bunch and increasingly over the last few years is just like, you know, this is something I point out fairly frequently is like, the right wing media loves to talk about woke snowflakes, crying, screaming, demanding, whining.

And it's like, my practical experience is that I'm just trying to go to the climbing center to have a little rock climb. And some guy stops and just screams at me in the street, like red in the face, practically, to the point of tears wanting to attack me. It's like, I was aside of this is not the screaming, crying, emotional side.

Yeah, but I don't know How I feel about it as I said like this is kind of why I prefer to do a little bit I have a strange brain and I listen to a bunch of Alex Jones and I'm not As phased as maybe I should be but You know it has had a noticeable effect I can I see the influences of this conspiracy-based stuff. I think that for me, I'm a materialist, so this is putting it together is relatively simple,

because a lot of times you can just look at the money. Who's paying, who's funding right. And it's like the attacks on bodily autonomy and I say bodily autonomy because it's it's not transphobia per se because a lot of people are like well it's politically LGBTQ people are organized into one political block to protect our rights together. But in terms of who's being attacked, like it's an attack on bodily autonomy. And this is why people keep on saying abortion is next, right after transphobia, abortion is next

because states need people. Even more than they need land, the first thing states need is people in order to function. And then they need to control how those people work, like how those people live and work and think and feel and so on. And bodily autonomy is a huge question of that, right? Sylvia Federici's Taliban in the witch,

great history of this stuff in the European, you know, Middle Ages and pre-Christian religions. There were a lot of beliefs of like animism and magic and so on that like were literally tortured out of people because as the enclosures took place to enforce patriarchal capitalism, they needed to do several things, regularize time, eliminate any myths about the mind and body and create a, create a mental structure for people that they believe that the mind and the will is more powerful and controls the body

which is like a machine. And that's crucial to the functioning of the state and to capitalism, right? And so like, and so like people discovering or defending like rights that they have to their own body and life, such as have to their own body and life, such as living authentically as myself as a woman, or for people who may need abortions, getting abortions. These are issues of bodily autonomy and the state controlling them has to do with it, trying to enforce a picture where everyone should be, not only productive, but reproductive, right? So it's very

much all tied together towards states becoming more authoritarian. So it's like we had this this bizarre little bubble that I for one was born into 1996 of the capitalist end of history, like a unique moment of peace and stability, and everything was relatively chill, if you lived in the imperial court, if you lived in the richest countries in the world. And then as that starts to falter and as shit falls apart, especially post-911, neoliberal states need to become more authoritarian and they need to clamp down on stuff. But I don't see it as separable at all. So when I say I'm a materialist, I think that the fact that capitalism is really, really running aground,

it's really crashing into, it's potentially final crisis now with climate change. And at the same time, all these states are becoming extremely authoritarian, and politicians are allowing a bunch of space for demagogues and conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones, to gain massive support, and they're sharing and funding and spaces and platforms. Yeah, I see this as all extremely, extremely connected. Yeah. That sums it up pretty well. Sorry for being more supportive, I suppose. You were just on a roll. I didn't want to cut in and start tearing things apart. No Jordan, please debate me.

Let's go. I have zero to debate. No idea. This is when out of nowhere, I turn out to be the huge staunch defender of United States capitalism and imperialism abroad. That's what I, that's my heel turn for the last moment. I got that. That's a hell of a heel cut. Brother. Extremely unexpected. Yeah. Yeah. The surviving Koch brother runs out, but he's not holding a chair. He's holding a, like a, a comically large check. Yeah. I know. Like this is what this,

all of this, um, piecing this together. It's like, this is what I say on a materialist. Um, people will focus a bit too much, I think, on, on political tendency on the left. And there's a David Graber described, this one's just an in joke for my audience. So if he said David Graber, everybody drink. But David Graber talked about schismogenesis, right? Attendancy when communities of people are near each other, that because your neighbors are like A, you need to be like B,

to contrast yourself. And so, you know, the context he was pointing this out in was like, a lot of evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists will have an argument towards efficiency. If something would be efficient, there's no reason not to do it. But human psychology isn't like that, right? Our neighbors have developed this tool that's more efficient, but we don't use that because we're not them, right? So schismogenesis, this is this tendency. And like, I think that a lot of like what people call leftist infighting is this schismogenesis and people are way too focused on like, I'm an anarchist and I'm an ML and I'm a trutztiaid and I'm a uh a sock I'm a sock down. And I'm in the DSA and I support this thing.

And it's like, well, so we all want a society where everyone gets what they need and contributes what they can, right? Sure. We want a society where our needs aren't mediated by capital anymore because capital is calling the planet. We want a society free of racism and transphobia and ableism and these things, right?

So why are we arguing so much? And that's why I say I'm a materialist. I am an anarchist, but I just will not waste my time arguing too hard. I will talk about stuff that I think is a worthwhile strategy. And this is part of, I don't know, I think that a lot of there's old workurism that I could spend far too long rambling about as in the strategy of the 20th century, organizing the proletariat for revolution. It's all about the workers, the workers of the world, United, etc. It's like parts of the strategy are still useful, but people cling to it a little bit too nostalgically. Whereas if you look at our actual material conditions right now,

people are much more easily organized and mobilized around. But this is something I touch on in the world is not ending about six things, okay? The fossil fuel industry is killing a planet. Finance capital will always find new ways to kill the planet. Fascism is rising up. Borders are violent and murderous by their nature. The way we do justice in society is fucked and far from any notion of actual justice. And we need networks and systems of mutual aid to support each other.

It's about six things, right? And everything more or less falls into those six things, and that's what we should be spending our time on. And this is a point that I make in the world that's not ending because I figured if I'm combating people's depression and humorism and kind of feelings of like absolute certainty, climate change is going to kill us all. One thing that's really important is to not treat depression like sadness. I just struggle with depression a lot of my life. You know, I don't mind saying, I think it's actually important for me to acknowledge if I'm talking

about how I'm talking to people who are depressed. It's something I have a lot of familiarity with, and it's not just being sad, right? When you're depressed, like, it's not so much that you feel overwhelmingly sad. Usually you don't feel much at all. Like you just feel numb and hollow and you can't go anywhere and it feels like you don't want anything. And I think that's like a really crucial part, is a lack of desire. So something that I focus on a lot in the world is not ending is our desire. Like what is it we want, right? Because if we wish so sure the world is going to end and we're all fucked, well, it sounds like we just can't imagine moving to a kind of world that has solved the problem of climate change. If we're saying like, well, we have to stop climate change, we'd have to stop

capitalism to stop climate change. Damn, that's a lot of work. Well, okay, firstly worst case scenario, capitalism causes climate change and climate change is gonna make capitalism impossible. So this is a, to call itself resolving would ignore like the, whatever, billions of people who are gonna die, like it's obviously horrible. Like we can't just let it be. That's a bad strategy, but let's just look at our

like worst case scenario. It is essentially self resolving at that point. It will care of itself from then on out. You are no longer a part of the equation. Yeah, so yes. Sure, sure, sure, but like to use your analogy, like how far we throw the grenade away, or whether we can hold on to the grenade for some amount of time until we find a deep, deep well to drop it down or something like this, right? There are other things to account for. But like the worst case scenario is we will reach a point where we're no longer waiting for the grenade to go off. This is true.

But this isn't like the total of my arguments, right? A lot of my point is like like if there is some kind of point before when capitalism makes capitalism impossible by a climate change where people can see that that's going to be true and so they'd rather jump before they're pushed and move to something other than capitalism Well, when is that point? When does that happen?

And my belief is it's a lot sooner than most people think. But, I mean, I suppose my concern there though, isn't any disagreement I have so much as it is like, I agree completely with you. We should have done that in 1987. Sure. Whenever they knew what was gonna happen, you know, so it's like that, that foreknowledge of,

we will get to this place. That was there 40 years ago. But for who? That's the point, but that's what I'm saying. Did they steal it from us? Did they fuck us over? If we had all known about it 40 years ago, if everybody had had a clear base of knowledge

and we weren't lied to for 40 years, well, we would be blocked. I think that I think it's easy to spend a bit too much time focusing on people denying climate change. Something I've been thinking quite hard about for the while now is the rights politics is not no like the right okay at first blush the right wing's politics would appear to have no climate change in it because they're climate deniers like to be on the right wing nowadays involves denying climate change to some degree. The most center-right people are still arguing

that capitalism can stop climate change, factually it can't. So the most, like the mile, this right wing position is still a climate denial position. But in fact, it's not that they have no climate change politics, it's that they have entirely climate change politics. All of their politics is rooted in the idea

that we're completely fucked. There's nothing we can do because they know that, like, it would have to involve stopping, like capitalism to stop climate change. So they are just focusing on, to put it kind of grimly, the fun they can have before the world ends, like to bring it back to Alex Jones, like everything he says, the transphobia, the isolationism, the nationalism, the kind of bizarre,

simultaneously not-seer-jason-to-n also libertarian politics that he holds on to, is trying to describe a world where he gets to like right around an ATV with a machine gun because they've built the wall and like he's the head of some little cult of proud boys or whatever. It would be fun for him from his perspective. Right. It would also suck and he would probably find out the ways in which it would suck, but he would have turned it to a point where it couldn't be turned back. and he would probably find out the ways in which it would suck, but he would have turned it to a point where it couldn't be turned back. Yeah, and it's all grabbing as much power and wealth and everything as they can, and having as much fun as they can before what they see as inevitable. And that's because they're counter-revolutionaries. There is a natural revolution here to fight against climate change, to stop the conditions that are killing us, that are killing the planet. And counter-revolution emerges when the social fabric like ruptures

like this, right? We have people are like, well, shit should change, shit should become more equal. I do not like how things are, the material conditions are bad, I want something different. And then people who have some degree of power, or perceive themselves as having some degree of power, or relate to the people in power, form a counter-revolution, either organically or artificially. It's on the side of power, so it's often artificially formed

because some state or institution funds it, like props it up, makes it happen. A term that's worth kind of Thinking about in the context of the history of the last 70 odd years is the American global counter revolution because when we say America Assassinate's democratically elected socialist leaders or or the CIA makes coups happen or whatever It's worth viewing this through the frame of America

as it has been enforcing a global counter revolution for the last 70 odd years. Sometimes because they're just afraid of communism, sometimes to increase the price of bananas, to increase the profit margin on bananas by doing a massive genocide of indigenous, my and people in Guatemala, whatever. Yeah, generally speaking, there will be a business person who goes to our government and

says, I would like to be more rich and they would be, they'd be like, okay, how much will you give us to do that? And they go less money than I'll make. And nobody realizes how stupid everybody is. Yeah, and socialism is the absolute epitome of business people losing out, so must be stopped at all costs. I mean, there's bigger epitome of business people, like volcanoes.

That's a good place to make business people lose. That's another one. Oh, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be, That's a good place to make business people lose. That's another one. Oh, there are options. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It is not surprising, though, considering that, to see the faces of the American counter revolution,

the global counter revolution, share the same faces as everybody who's a fan of big oil as fucking Elon Musk. Like these are the faces of people who are, I would say probably like if you imagine a fucking spear, it's these people who grab the LGBTQ plus diaspora and try and stab people at the end of the spear. It is that in order to keep you from doing anything about larger material issues. Right, so I think that when we talk about class consciousness,

something that's important here is like, well, Mark Fisher talked about group consciousness instead of class consciousness. I think this was really useful framing. So he talked about, for example, feminist group consciousness. There's an example where like, you could apply what we call a class analysis to feminism,

men are in a ruling class, and women are in a subjugated class, so maybe to be a bit more inclusive and accurate, cis, hat, men are in a ruling class, and everyone else is broadly in one subjugated class, but there are different shades of subjugation to the nature of that and so on. And you could argue about kind of who is subjugated

in which ways under that. But the point is group consciousness is the broader version of class consciousness. So class consciousness has historically been focusing on like the the proletariat realizing their antagonism to the bourgeoisie and then and what do we do about the peasants and so on and so on. But it's like, well, capitalism's become an absolute fucking mess, right? In the 21st century, capitalism's become an absolute fucking mess. And like the proletariat is, is, is where?

Because like there are still industrial sector workers inside the imperial court. There are absolutely tons of people employed in factories and people doing mining and so on. But the, the largest sector in the Imperial core now is the service sector because the industrial sector got really, really organized and unionized. And Reagan and Fatsula, like, well, we can't have that. So they pushed it all into the Imperial periphery and started importing manufactured goods from

the Imperial periphery instead and changed everything to the service sector, which doesn't have any unions at the same time. So Valley gave us this fantastic sparkling new revolution in the way we do work, which is called the gig economy. Right. And this arguably introduced a new class called the precarious, right, whose employment is so much more precarious than the proletariat ever was that it's worth designating them as a different class, the precarious, because you know a proletarian laborer for all that is shitty and oppressive about their work conditions can rely on them like

on unless they're explicitly fired going to work next week and a gig economy worker can't, right? So this is the precarity. So it's like, it's a huge mess. So is it class consciousness that we need? I think it's group consciousness. I think we need to understand what the broad sides of this are. And I think one way that we can do that is start by latching onto the word woke. I really like the word woke. We've shied away from it really quickly because the right way started using it as an insult for everything that they don't like. And it's like, well, oh no, they don't, they don't, Alex Jones doesn't like things being woke. Damn, I'd hate to be woke.

I mean, I think it's more just that by, by're adopting the word they've removed any objective meaning from it. So the word why are we letting them why are we letting them tell us what the meaning is even if the even if that especially if that meaning is nothing. Because what they're describing is that in the 2010s, there was a huge push towards a general understanding that we can really easily identify the problems in current politics, that there is a colonial imperialist history to the world, that racism is still extremely present, that the patriarchy is still extremely present, that society functions in an ableist way, that capitalism is both harmful to us in our everyday lives and is killing the planet. These broadly define political tendencies that immersion people are more extremely massively

popularized through social media. Social media is a huge part of this. People were able to communicate to each other on a mass scale, unlike anything in history. The closest comparison would be the Gutenberg press in terms of leaps forward of like people being able to share information quickly and easily. And like the Gutenberg press had huge implications for politics across Europe when it was invented. The internet has had as well. And I think that we partly because of the capitalist end of history have been not kind of looking at what's happening around us with a serious enough lens. And like, yeah, a bunch of people became work, became aware of the problems in the world and the kind of obvious solutions to them. And then there

was a massive counter-revolution pushing back against all those progressive ideas that became extremely popularized. I respect, I respect the way that that's framed because it does, it does track. But I, I kind of, I kind of disagree. Simply because the explosion from the internet was not a unipolar thing. It came, it simultaneously. It came simultaneously. It was a big bang. So just as people are being exposed to progressive ideas,

so are they also being exposed to gigantic, massive, racist pieces of shit ideas? I'm talking about the Gutenberg press very carefully here because one of the huge political implications of the Gutenberg press was the Protestant Reformation, which led to an enormous amounts of reactionary violence across the world. Sure, absolutely. And that's kind of the thing there is that it is not...

I want to say it in a very specific, like, kind of narrow way. I don't think that it is good or bad, the internet. Yeah, I think it needs to be gone. It should not exist. Do you know what I mean? Like, it is a thing that I wouldn't wish, you know, I would, Dan and I were laughing about this, but I wouldn't wish the internet on my worst enemy.

Because- That's interesting. At no point in time, can you tell me that an ape is evolved to know things from around the entire goddamn planet. No way. Are we prepared, physically, for this much information? Oh, absolutely. It's not possible.

We are not rational, reasonable, what's the word, sapient beings? You know, we are literally apes with the capacity of apathy, near and depression. And that's it. I do agree. But I also think that the genie's out of the bottle. And I, I do, then it's time to kill. I'll logically agree. You can burn that bottle. Burn the bottle. Well, I think you're taking what what what what really gets called like an anti-sive position, right? Like we have new technologies have emerged and that consequences are bad.

And maybe the solution is that we get rid of those technologies, but like how realistic is getting rid of those technologies, right? As opposed to trying to use them. They melted the list that Jafar was in. Okay. See, we have established precedent. But I think, yeah, no, I think I take a point. And I want to be really clear that I'm not calling the internet inherently and implicitly

good. I like all material conditions. It is simply not calling the internet inherently and implicitly good. I like all material conditions. It is simply something we should try to make the most of. And one of its implications since its invention has been people using it to spread progressive ideas around. I mean, you know, yeah, I'm told again to do the Gutenberg press analogy. Like, what was the, what was one of the most immediate and biggest reactions, the protestant reformation? What was one of the like the, you know, second or third biggest immediate reactions, uh, the publishing of the Communist manifesto? So it's like maybe leftist ideas take a little bit, this is incredibly reductive of history, but maybe leftist ideas take a little bit longer to formulate and say the right way on these new technological informational platforms. And therefore, yeah, maybe every time we find a faster way to communicate with each other,

the first thing that's going to happen is some absolute dickhead is going to be like, we should kill all of the, and a bunch of people will agree with him. And then after a little while, someone will be like, we should share all of the, and people will be like, oh, how, yeah. Well, I think, I think one thing that people leave out often about the explosions of technologies is that the first thing that really happened was a shit ton of masturbating. Oh, yeah. A lot of erotica.

Every time. Every single time. Oh, yeah. Instant. One has driven human technology far more than than the patriarchal capitalist system we have will ever admit. One big hope I have for a feminist, eco socialist future is that we can just finally acknowledge how important porn is to every living person ever. It is astonishing. I remember one literature class I took was about to be the flowering of the written

word. And it was so much like, hey, you know where you got your underground Bible? Same place you got your underground porn. Same place you got like, it was all wrapped up together. You had to get your new testament and your dick-flog and material at the same place on the same network, you know? And it's so fun that it is like that's the internet too.

You get your evil racist hate and your jerk off material. You got two windows open now, you know? It's easier than ever. Again, we gotta get rid of this internet thing. I also, I want to make an addendum to something I said earlier as well, because when I just want to be clear that when I say starting with the word woke can be really useful, you know, when you then say about like, it's become meaningless the way the right way he's used it and so on. This is what I say starting with. I purely think that the important

step I'm trying to communicate is that we with politics that combine wanting to stop climate change, being anti-capitalist, being anti-fascist, being against borders, being against cops, wanting to take care of each other as these six points, which a lot of people agree on. right as these six points which a lot of people agree on need to need to say we all share these points and we need to have some kind of group identity we need some kind of group consciousness that's what i'm getting it and so when i say the word woke i think it's a starting point because i think it's of any word i can possibly find the quickest one to communicate all of these politics together, but it is not necessarily though what I'm not looking for people to fly the woke flag and lead the woke relations to become your enduring contribution to the country. I mean, I find, because I live in in Britain, probably, and you know, you're gonna, you're gonna spit at this, but like probably the place with the most reactionary media climate

on earth. Um, I, I know, I know, I know you're thinking. Oh, what do you mean, Britain has the most reactionary media? Yeah. Oh, I mean, I don't, so here's what's fun about that. I don't disagree with you. And I think it's easier for people to think that the American media is more reactionary because we're louder, right? But what y'all, y'all hide so much more vitriol and hatred,

like even the most even killed person in Britain is screaming the N word at me all over. Oh yeah, it's awful, it's awful. Yeah, well, so this is what I wanted to say. Like, you know, as someone who lives in Britain, unfortunately, I on this wet rock cup and racist barbarians, I would find it personally funny if there were a group of people organizing under the word woke and taking pride in being woke just because of how much the British media hates. Like they talk about

the woke blob and stuff like this. They talk about wokeism and wokery. And it's just like, this is, you know, it would be very funny to me if they're, if they're, someone described it as the right wing are hallucinating a communist enemy. And it would be very funny to me if they're hallucination materialized in front of them, because they probably all just share their pants, like truly and utterly, like go completely bonkers.

Yeah, it does have that vibe of like, if they were confronted with the enemy that they believed they're fighting, they would realize that they are gigantic cowards and would run away. And the only reason that they have the courage to fight this enemy is that it is imaginary. And that the people who they hurt through it are small enough in number that they

either never actually have to meet or, you know, they can... Well, we're not allowed to do that. In political power, I think, is a crucial part. So it's like trans people are small enough in number, but then by contrast, like, well, I suppose migrants are actually small enough in number as well. I was going to say that migrants, like the two probably most focused on groups right now in the British press are trans people in migrants and arguably like the two groups most demonized in British society right now. But yeah, I suppose migrants are actually a small in number as well,

but the point I was going to make is that they are the most like politically marginalized, like the people with the absolute categorically least power of anyone, which is why it's just disgusting on a level. I cannot communicate that people would band together to bully them, because it's just like, how is possible? What's next? Should we just go kick toddlers in the playground?

What is this? How is possible for us to sit here and then have a person with all the power tell us that the people with no power are the ones who are causing our problems is bananas. Yeah, yeah, he wants to take your cookie away. Yeah, the guy with all the cookies. But you have all the cookies. Yeah, exactly. No, no, no, no, these are my cookies.

That guy wants to take it. Yeah, yeah, I, what are you talking about? I, I baked these cookies myself. I, I myself baked them. stole those for my great grandfather. And yeah, I, I, I think I, you know, to pause on bullying for a second, I think it's important to acknowledge fascism as, as, as a political bullying. And this is kind of an obvious enough statement, but the same time,

I think it's important for us to note, right? The bullying is the point if they can successfully bully any group of people, successfully create a climate in which those people's rights are materially worsened, then other people who have just that personality type, they are just a bully, they are a bit of a social fascist. We'll see what's happening there and they'll go, ah, those people are gaining power in a way I can understand. So I'm going to join in with them. And this is why, you know, this is why anti-fascism on every level is so important because it's just, it's, it's simply about standing up to them. And when you say like, we would, they would realize they're complete cowards. It's absolutely true. Fascists are the most cowardly people because

they're bullies and bullies are cowards, right? So as soon as they are as soon as they are visibly outnumbered, they will give up and they will run away and they will stop. They will stop holding these beliefs because they don't even they don't even really hold them. Yeah, it's it's hard and it's hard to really kind of communicate in the moment. Like it is it is the group that they are targeting now. That's what they're bullying now. Yeah, that could be, that is just a matter of date. That's a matter of time. You could go back a hundred years.

Well, again, the people that are bullying you know, the sum degree of material conditions. I want, again, the some degree of material conditions because climate climate change has driven a huge migrant crisis. Therefore, there are more migrants than there were previously into the into the into the rich nations into the imperial core. So materially, there is not a not a basis for hating on migrants. There is no argument for racism, right? materially, but like the material conditions have driven concerns that people latch onto about migrants. The material conditions have driven the state wanting to clamp down on bodily autonomy and that has driven concerns that people latch

onto to create anti-transfascism. But again, it's just about sending up to, it's just about telling to fuck off. That's really it. Yeah. I have this analogy I've been using a little recently about the ways that fascists lie, which I find helpful. And hopefully people will find helpful listening to Alex Jones and Stephen Crowder and whoever else. Oh, Tucker Carlson actually, since you're covering Tucker Carlson recently, this is very

useful for watching Tucker. It's obvious enough to say fascists lie. It's obvious enough to say everything that they say is a lie and you shouldn't trust them and it's obvious enough to say they don't really believe the things that they say and we can find loads of examples where like they'll be anti-trans and they have like trans friends and private or they're anti-abortion and Alex Jones is paid for abortions and these kinds of things, right? But a crucial mechanism here is getting you to believe

that what I say is what I believe. I want you to believe that I believe what I say. So it's like, this is my analogy, it's like you're with your friend and he turns to you all of a sudden and he says, hey Jordan, do you think it would help if I karate chopped you in the throat as hard as I possibly can right now? And you're thinking, help with what? What situation does he perceive me to be in that a karate chop to the throat would

possibly help? You're already falling for the problem here. He just wants to do it because he thinks it'll be fun. And it doesn't occur to you because you think that he's like a normal, reasonable person with like empathy for other people, but no, he just thinks it would be fun to cry to chop you in the throat really hard and hurt you. You know, and this is the same with fascists. They are, they are just seeing an immoral and unethical route to some kind of power or a personal gain. And yeah, lying in this way is helpful to them. And like, it seems a little over-obvious to say, but I just, it's worth saying and repeating.

They want you to believe that they believe what they are saying. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is, it's kind of, I mean, to bring it back to woke, it is like they take words and remove meaning from them. Yes. You know, you and I, I impart meaning to words in order to communicate with the people that we're talking to. Right. Right. See that.

And they remove the meaning from the words. And they try and get you to do what it is they want you to do. Like the Jean-Paul Sacher quote about the anti-Semite. Yeah. That is the whole right-wing politics now. They've adopted this as their strategy for absolutely everything. A really good example of this would be the patriarchy, right? A lot of an enormous amount of the way the patriarchy

is maintained in day-to-day practice is men pretending not to understand that the patriarchy exists, that it still exists or how it works. I have no idea what to talk about. Tell me more. And pretending not to is the same function, right? Making statements like,

women don't have it worse or asking questions, tell me in women don't have it worse, or asking questions like, tell me in what ways women had it worse, or pretending like being told like five times a day you should smile isn't a big deal because it's not the worst sexual harassment you could receive. All of these things, again, rely on pretend like rely on you believing that he believes what he's just said. And so when he says, the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the it serves a purpose to pretend that you don't know. Right, you can't, they're going to say, I don't know, but what they should say is, it is in my best interest to not know. Right, and this brings me to where I'm like,

where I'm a real note about this stuff is the political philosophy going on here, right? So we've got epistemic lacuni, right? So there are gaps that have been created these gaps in how we know things. If people aren't familiar, lakuni just refers to gaps and epistemology is the study of how we know things, right?

So organized ignorance of this kind, even just pretending not to know stuff, is allowing for a space where people leave like a gap in their knowledge. And that's a comforting space within which they can, into which they can withdraw and protect themselves from the obvious consequences of knowing that this is true. So they do know, you know, you know, your Catholic priest has been doing all kinds

of stuff. Right. Everybody suddenly really doesn't know anything about that. How far? Right. Exactly. Yeah. There are, there are, no, that's a perfect example. There are loads and loads of examples and clips you can pull from the last like 50 years of people making jokes on the British national press about Jimmy Savile being a pedophile.

It's just everywhere and demonstrating that they knew. And then it was made clear and published as news and suddenly, oh, nobody knew how could, how could we possibly, and it was like, people were called out on this, everybody knew and this was part of the horror. But it's very much the same situation with a Catholic priest like you say.

Yeah, anywhere there's a position of power and trust that can be abused. You know, it's a Catholic priest or Cosby. It is the same like we have given you culturally so much trust, so much power that for us to to like really reckon with what you actually are we're fuck tons of us up, you know in a way that we'd rather just pretend that you only hurt four or five people, you know, that kind of thing. And yeah, and it's disgusting.

Yeah. And to go on with the political philosophy, because this is like kind of the bedrock of my interest here, like, this is some stuff I discuss in the world is not ending. Okay, so Mark has this formulation for what ideology is. He says, Zyvisin Dasnichd Abhazzi Tunez, which means they don't know what it is, but they are doing it. It's like people are under some kind of magical spell, right? Ideology is happening if people don't know they're doing it, but they're still doing it. But here's the thing, right?

In modern society, a lot of people are aware of their political ideologies, and this is really important to confront. The people can know what it is they're doing. And it's crucially a deliberate disconnect that people manufacture between what they are doing and the consequences that makes the ideology happen. So my formulation is, instead of Zivis and Duss Nickdab,

Zituines, is Zivis and Dussis Nickd's ist, are the Zituines, which means they know that it is nothing and still they do it. So, my example in the video is, if you have someone who works in the finance sector in Canary-Worth in London, odds are they live in one of the shoddly, built, ugly, crappy new-build apartments around London that have these concrete constructions with these brick facades and they're hideous and they're everywhere and a lot of them are being built on London's flood plains. And the finance sector is driving investment, which is driving climate change,

which is also driving and it's also driving construction. So simultaneously, they are causing the building of these shitty houses that are also going to be flooded also by their work. So, you know, my example is this. And living in this finance worker, right? Huh? And living in them. So, you know, my example is this finance worker, right? And living in them. Exactly. That's what I'm saying, right? So, you get up every day, you go to work, you spin the wheels on the big machine that's gonna flood your ugly house because you've manufactured an epistemic gap between what you

are doing and its consequences. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's a pretty good way of describing how we've kind of segregated processing and production throughout every commodity, you know, like the fact that I will never have to look a cow in the eye before I eat it. Right. That kind of concept is by creating that distance, we don't have to confront obviously the truth of it. Or for you and I, as me, as me, as you, we may well know that the

biggest personal consumption change that someone can make in order to combat climate change is to become vegan. But we may well want to stop climate change, but then do we want to become vegan, right? Sure. But, and we may well want to stop climate change, but then do we want to become vegan? No, so we're making an emotional defense, you know, and not a rational defense, but an emotional defense by creating this gap, you know. I'll just carry on eating meat, because it's nothing, what can I do anyway?

It doesn't really matter. Unstill I'm doing. The problem there is that, in terms of inertia right so Climate change has an inertial force beyond anything. I think we've ever experienced in in in truth And so when you're dealing with that you can have a Massive number of people do a small thing or a small number of people do a massive thing.

Right. And you're never going to get enough people to suddenly, quickly stop eating meat in order to make a difference towards it. Whereas, we all know that most of the emissions are caused by a very small number of companies. With names and addresses, sure. Exactly. So, if somebody is telling me, ah, you know what you should do, is not eat me, that makes zero sense.

It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And that's kind of why I get frustrated with that. They're like, here's what we do. We take personal responsibility. Because in its face, it seems like it's the opposite of what you just described. You know, you were we're looking directly at it. When in reality what you're doing is you're looking at a problem that has no effect on anything. Yeah. And going proud to I'm proud of myself. Look at that. I might well my position on this is that I will happily become vegan in a socialist society. So because it will be necessary to end industrial livestock

farming to stop climate change, but it will be necessary alongside a lot of other stuff. And when that stuff's all happening, I'm super happy to become vegan. I will not complain in the slightest. I will tell, I will tell as many other people in my life as I possibly can, hey, this is tough, but we gotta go through with it.

It's gonna save the world when that's happening, but under capitalism, right. But anyway, to return to the word work, again, I don't think that this is going to be the word we start organizing under. But to get back to my formulation of capitalism is going to make capitalism impossible through climate change, and then some point before that, people are going to recognize that that's gonna happen and so they're gonna jump before they're pushed. We can make that point sooner by spreading group consciousness. And I find it fun that like the original metaphor

of being woke to stuff, right? Is this is a metaphor of alertness? And that all of these, all of the right wing, everyone who's organized themselves as anti-woke is fundamentally organizing themselves around the idea of not being alert. They're fundamentally organizing around, go back to sleep, carry on with things up.

When you say about inertia, they are literally arguing for the inertial force. Yep, totally. And they are arguing to just stay asleep, don't look up, carry on. And yeah, I just think that that's the main thing, that's the kind of, yeah, that's the main thing. We need to spread a group consciousness

and then we need to pick one of these six things, or probably a few of them, and dedicate our time to those things. Yeah, it is very annoying how much of my life has just been watching conservatives react the exact same way they said they weren't going to five years ago now, you know, like, hey, she pull everybody needs to wake up to what Obama's doing out there. Everybody. This is what's going on. Hey doing right now. Everybody go back to sleep. You know, it is, it is just like it gets never going to end. It's just spinning around and round. Well, so this is why I say that, like, philosophically,

what interests me probably more than anything is just the philosophy of lying. Like people telling lies, I think that's where some of the most interesting applied philosophy happens in the entire world. And so it's only natural that I would be drawn to political philosophy, because there's a lot of politicians are born liars, right? This is where I work and I find more lies than in politics. It's hard. It's hard to find.

Yeah. I mean, you know, money. Yeah, but that's the politics. The finance and politics are the same thing now. So that's why you. Yeah, but the final answer politics are the same thing now. So that's why yeah, it makes a most sense. Yeah. But yeah, the reception to the video has been good. I think, yeah, I'm very proud of it. It's, it is the best thing I've made so far. It's hard to imagine what I will make that's going to be better than it. A lot of people have been telling me about how much it's pulled them out of their depression.

I've had some very personal comments where people have been talking about, like honestly, like they would depress to the point of suicidality and that it's that it's helped them out of that. Because, and I knew this kind of going in, like climate depression is very real and really, really fucks people up.

But I also could see going in, like we are not actually approaching this question rationally. We are approaching it emotionally because we can see that however this shakes out a lot is going to change about the way we love our lives and we just don't want to think about that, that's scary. So it's easier to just think we're all going to die than to think what is realistically going to happen. Yeah, but yeah, I'm pretty happy with it.

I very, I liked it a lot myself. Yeah, I don't think that's a great place to end it. Could you please tell people where to find it? Absolutely. Well, as you said, I'm Sophie from Mars. So if you just type in Sophie from Mars and Google or YouTube or wherever you want, but is on YouTube on my channel? As I said, it's about two and a half hours long. I appreciate that that is a long video, but it's also something I worked on for two years.

So how selfish are you thinking that's a long time? I mean, if it takes more than two hours to talk about climate change, aren't you just like, it's not that big a deal, right? Yeah, exactly, right. It's like, the dead horse, you know, I'm saying. Yeah, wish it was a, wish it was a simple topic, wish I could sum it up in five minutes, but, you know, this interview has been poking around it and it's already been an hour. So like that's yeah. Anyway, it's Sophie from Mars on YouTube. And if you want to support my work, it's patreon.com slash Sophie from Mars all on word. I'm working on something like AI right the second.

As I said, I've also got some stuff to do with Alex Jones coming up. There's one that focuses on him quite specifically, and then they have another big project I may need to get out for Christmas called Apocalypse Preaches, which will focus on him and a few other people and what they're up to.

Awesome, I'm looking forward to it. Thanks. Thank you so much, Sophie. This has been an absolute delight. I hope people check your stuff out. Thanks for having me. We will see you again. I'm sure we'll talk soon.

That would be lovely. Andy and Kansas, you're on the Earth. Thanks for holding. So Alex, I'm the first time I've called him a huge fan. I love your work. I love you. So Alex, I'm a first time color. I'm a huge fan. I love your work. I love you.