Rev Left Radio - Interpreting 'Firefly': Libertarianism Vs. Anarchism w/ Dr. James Rocha

Episode Date: June 26, 2017

Dr. James Rocha is a professor of philosophy at Fresno State University. He wrote a paper entitled "The Black Reaching Out: An Anarchist Analysis of Firefly" in which he argues for an anarchist interpretation of the show over the more prevalent libertarian interpretation on the show. Him and Brett discuss the paper and the arguments therein.   Topics include: Anarchism, Libertarianism, morality, feminism, the genre of Sci Fi, analysis of the State, and much more.   **Please take the time to rate and leave a review on iTunes! This will help expand our overall reach.**     Donate Follow us on: Facebook Twitter (which we are new to, and trying to build up): @RevLeftRadio or contact us at Revolutionary Left Radio via Email Random Songs of The Week From Friends: Featured as the outro music Hands by Warbonnet Organizations affiliated with the podcast: Omaha GDC NLC   Thank You for your support and feedback!

We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn. We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. This is not my fault, and I think that's part of the distancing from people who don't want to admit that there's privilege.

When the main function of a protect and serve, supposedly group is actually revenue generation, they don't protect and serve. It's simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house, that can result in us not having clean drinking water, why should those be in anybody else's hands? They should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions. People are engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back, and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and dedicated comrade Brett O'Shea. Before we start the show today, I just wanted to give a shout out to two Patreon providers,

E&B and Thomas DeHart Thank you guys so much for tossing a few dollars our way It really helps the podcast And we really appreciate all the support we can get You know, we're working class people We don't have a lot of time, money or energy So anything helps Thank you guys very much

Let's get into the show Today I have Dr. James Rocha from LSU on He wrote a paper analyzing Firefly From an anarchist perspective I don't want to speak for him So I'll let James introduce yourself. Hi, Brett. Thank you very much for having me on.

So my name is James Rocha. I am actually formerly of Louisiana State University. I am now at an assistant professor at Fresno State. And I work in the philosophy department. Of course, any view I express today will be my own personal view and not representative of any institution or department I work for. But I teach in value theory, widely construed so that includes ethics political philosophy philosophy philosophy of law philosophy of race

feminist philosophy awesome so what got you into political philosophy and the application of it to popular culture so so i guess i started out doing metaphysics and kind of doing the standard philosophy stuff and there was a part of me that didn't really feel like what i was doing philosophically was connecting to important issues in real life. And philosophy already, whatever you do, it's abstract, it's conceptual, it's not going to be, you know, doing stuff in the world as much as it's thinking about the world. But I decided I wanted to do something that connected more to issues that matter to people. So I got into value theory, looking at morality, looking at political philosophy, because I felt

like these were the issues that made differences in subtle ways in the background, kind of of conceptualizing things that people do care about and in terms of pop culture in particular one of the one of the great things about philosophy is we write all this really interesting stuff and and we have these great ideas but no one reads it no one reads anything we do we're writing philosophy it's difficult it's hard and and largely it's boring so i wanted to do some philosophy that connected to things that people would read about so i started writing a lot more about TV shows and movies and music kind of taking the philosophical ideas and applying them to areas of life where people are already interested and engaged and kind of showing them

this is why philosophy matters this might be why you might be interested in philosophy so there's these connections that hopefully draw people into philosophy and then they'll go read the more boring stuff later yeah um as you know i have a degree in philosophy myself nowhere near your level of training but i have a bachelor's degree in philosophy and some grad school experience And I share that feeling that a lot of academic philosophy is kind of sequestered away in these ivory towers. And it's inaccessible to large chunks of the population. Part of what I try to do with this podcast is to bring some of that political philosophy to, you know, everyday average working class people help educate them, help educate myself. You know, a lot of the people like I interview you, I learn a lot with these interviews as well.

And so it's just bringing that philosophy down to the people. And because I truly believe that a lot of people are interested in philosophy. A lot of people have like intuitive questions that can connect up easily to philosophy. But the structure of academia is such that it often excludes anyone that is not inside of academia. And that's unfortunate. And we, we have an obligation, I think, to bring philosophy to the people. I think that's very important. And that's exactly right.

I think philosophy is important. Like I said, it's often boring, it's often hard. And there's also this role that academia is playing to kind of keep it away from the people. So, but, you know, there's a lot of theorizing going on in philosophy about what it means to create a society, what's wrong with the society, what's wrong with the society we're in. And so that material, that's very important. I think it's what you're doing with this podcast. It's bringing that out and hopefully showing people what those important philosophical

theories are and how they apply to real life. Absolutely, that Carl Marx quote, philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world. The point is to change it. I love that quote. Exactly. Well, before we get into the paper, maybe you want to go ahead and tell the audience what your political tendency is, if you really have a concrete one. And has it ever become an issue in academia or inside your career to have maybe anarchist

leanings or whatever your tendency is? So I'd say I'm definitely on the far left, whatever that means. I'm not sure that there's a particular system that I would put myself in, but I certainly appreciate that there's a lot of far-left systems, such as anarchism, such as Marxism, that have very good critiques of society, and that we need to read those critiques, we need to analyze those critiques because they're largely right. and so I'm definitely in the camp of I'm on the far left I need to read those critiques I think the harder question and I think it's something we might get into as we go on talking about

the TV show is what system's the right system to build a society and that's both a question that's off in the distance first we have to figure out how to fix the problems and get there but also I feel like that might not be something of philosophers in the right position to answer yet because I think the building of a society is going to have to take the people in the society and so it's hard for me to say I'm this when this implies this is the way the system should be when I don't know what the system should be I just critique the current one absolutely absolutely so let's get into it because we have a lot to discuss here and there's going to be a lot of philosophy inherent in this discussion the show Firefly do you want to say a little bit about

the show itself for some people that might not have heard of it yet Sure. So Firefly is a show by Joss Whedon. Josh Whedon became famous when he made Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He followed that up with Angel. I believe Firefly is his third show. It was on the Fox Network, and from the beginning, it was off to a bad start. The Fox Network decided to air the show out of order. So the first episode that aired made no sense, and it just lost fans from there.

it only lasted for one season they canceled it at the end but it grew this huge following and then they end up getting to make a movie out of it and and it's a great show especially if you're watching an order the show is about this group of the group of people who are on a spaceship the spaceship is called serenity it's a the type of spaceship it is is a firefly it's kind of a mixture of a western but it's in outer space and the distant future and it's got all these places elements I think we're going to be talking about, but it's also kind of a show where it's just a group of people going on adventures and having a good time. Yeah, and a lot of people have argued that Firefly is a libertarian-themed theme show, libertarian in the American sense of being right-wing libertarian, you know, pro-capitalism, pro-unfettered free markets, et cetera. Can you tell us why this perspective is so prevalent? And then maybe we can, after that, get into what exactly libertarian?

So this is purposeful. So one of the things I do, when I'm doing a philosophical analysis of a TV show or a philosophical analysis of a film, I'm often creating an analysis that I don't believe was intended by the people who made it. I'm also, I'm often saying, look, we could read this this way. It wouldn't it be interesting. In John Sweden's case, he does a lot of things purposefully. I don't know how purposefully, but, There's a lot of philosophy in Joe Sweden's works that's very purposeful. So, for example, all of his shows have some elements of feminism. We might come back to that later in this discussion. There's also the last episode of Firefly is a very purposeful existentialist episode. He wanted to make a TV show that was existentialist for one episode. And so he set out to have a philosophical episode of the show. And I think it's a wonderful episode.

That's Objects in Space. now it seems that if it seems as if firefly is meant to be a libertarian show it's got these two characters that the lead of the show the captain the ship is a man named mal reynolds who's played by nathan philean and mal reynolds has this kind of libertarian outlook on life and i think it's very purposeful he'll often say things that sound libertarian and i I don't think that's a mistake. I think there's a certain sense in which Mal is a libertarian. Also, Jane Cobb, who's also on the crew, he's played by Adam Baldwin. Jane Cobb is quite clearly a strong libertarian. I'd say he's maybe a narco-capitalist. He's almost certainly at least a Randian.

And he's very clear about that. And so the people who watch the show and say, this is a libertarian. show, they're not, they're not crazy. There's lots of elements in the show that are libertarian. Those elements are right. They're interpreting those characters right. I think in the end, it's the wrong interpretation of the show. In fact, I think the show is a criticism of libertarianism, but that criticism is much more subtle. So it makes sense that a lot of people look at the show and go, look, this is a libertarianist show. Now, your question, what is libertarianism? you kind of set that up yourself, and I think I'm not going to say much more than what you've already put out there.

I think as you pointed out, this word libertarianism, it's used in different ways and in extremely different ways. So in the more leftist or way that's more common in Europe, libertarianism means something much closer to how we usually use anarchism. In the right-wing way, which is in my paper I make it clear, I'm talking about the right-wing libertarianism. I'm just calling it libertarianism so that I don't have to keep saying right-wing libertarianism. Right-wing libertarianism is this idea that liberty has this trump value. Liberty is their primary value, and liberty is going to trump any other values that come along. And part of what this means is not that we're getting equality of liberty as a left-wing libertarian might look for, but a sense of people are out to maximize their liberty and that's okay as long as they're not stepping on other people's rights to do the same now i'm just going to preface this before we say too much i'm not a libertarian and i shouldn't i have biases because i don't really like libertarianism and so if if i'm not the best representative of libertarianism out there that that's fair but i'm going to try my best to be charitable

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's about, I don't think anything we've said so far would turn off a libertarian. I have many libertarian friends. I'm in debate forums with libertarians. I know the philosophy well. It is one that is as a hyper focus on liberty, sometimes to the exclusion of equality or consciously to the exclusion of equality as a predominant value to be pursued. But it is interesting to think about morality in the libertarian conception. So in your opinion? What role does morality play in libertarian philosophy? I think one of the things to be praise about libertarianism is that it does have a moral theory. I think that there's a lot of political philosophy out there. There's a lot of political theories out there that lack a moral

theory, and that often makes it difficult to understand what we're really going after and what we're really grounding ourselves in. So I'm a big fan of having a moral grounding, and Libertarianism definitely does. I'd say the moral grounding of libertarianism kind of starts with the idea of self-ownership. And that's a pretty intuitive idea that we all own ourselves. And then it just branches in a way that at least seems intuitive that if we own ourselves, we also own the stuff that we can get in a legitimate way. And I think the third step after that is we can then consent to limit ourselves, to give up some of the stuff.

we own to give up some of our own liberty in order to get other things so we own ourselves we own stuff then we own rights and privileges that we gain through making consensual agreements with others what's interesting about libertarianism is that's about it for their moral philosophy they kind of stop it there and where that might seem more or less intuitive to a lot of people the idea that stops there that might be a little more controversial but at least there is is that moral theory and at least there is some intuitive pull to each of those steps and again I'm trying to be charitable I don't necessarily agree with those steps especially the second one where we extend to property but I at least acknowledge it's an intuitive moral theory in the

background of their political philosophy yeah and it's the foundation of the notion of property that they if they start from those those points of self-ownership and objects that you own are extensions of that self-ownership then it stands to reason that owning a business and workers a wage and profiting off of their labor is okay because you own the property that you're profiting off of and you can pay a wage and rent out workers and whatnot right and the workers are engaged in a consensual agreement they're giving up their part of their liberty in exchange for part of the owner's property it seems like those three steps are going to get you a lot and to be fair we have to remember those three steps do get you a good amount of morality we're not going to be

able to steal, we're not going to be able to murder, but at the same time, you know, people who don't like the view will say that those three trips might not be enough for all of morality. Yeah, and especially when it comes to the concept of consenting to a wage labor employer relationship, the libertarian conception of that is one of a total, you know, consent of being of voluntarily engaging in this sort of setup. The left-wing critique of that, is where there's wealth and equality, there's power inequality, and a richer person can leverage their wealth against a poorer person to get that poor person to work for them.

And so in that context, a left-wing person would say, it's not really consent. There's an implicit economic coercion at the base of that relationship. Libertarians would reject that left-wing criticism, and they have all their arguments and whatnot. But what role does morality play in anarchist philosophy, and maybe a way to set that question up is, in what ways do anarchism, left-wing anarchism,

differ from right-wing libertarianism? Good, and of course, as you know, anarchism, too, has this both left and right sense. Yeah. Though usually when we use anarchism, we tend to mean the left sense of anarchism. Now, so the right sense being the more anarcho-capulist view. So, in an important way, like I said,

I'm a fan of political philosophy, having a moral grounding, I think on both sides, you're going to have a hard time making sense of the next society without figuring out the role morality is going to play in making the next society work. The idea is both sides, the libertarian and on one side, the anarchist on the other side, both sides believe that they agree with their critique of the state and the state system. And in that, but the state system kind of feels like you can't allow too much liberty. So status tend to believe, you know, liberals, conservatives, status in general, tend to believe that if we allow too much liberty, we're going to get chaos. And so that's where we get

this idea that anarchism is chaos. And we, for some reason, we all similarly think that libertarianism is chaos, but it makes sense to think that they are. Now, both views are both libertarianism and anarchism are presenting views that are theoretically based, but they're also making a sort of set of empirical predictions. They're predicting how people are going to react as society changes. So in that sense, in order to know how people are going to react to a new society, we need to know what role, the morality of the people will play in the new society that they bring in. In other words, what I have in mind is, under a state system, we use the police force to force morality on people.

We won't have that kind of police force, especially in an anarchist system. So the idea that we're going to have neighbors getting along is going to require something other than the police coming and hitting people over the head with a stick. We're going to have an idea of there's a reason that neighbors are going to get along in an anarchist system, in part because we believe in solidarity. We believe that they're going to trust one another. We believe that they're going to have moral relationships with each other. And the difference is the libertarian is going to have to have a picture like that, too. But at the same time, the libertarian picture has only those three steps for morality. And so it's harder to imagine what the moral workings will be

that will ensure that people aren't hitting each over the head. Right. Because it's one thing to say it would be wrong in all three systems to come over to your neighbor's house hit them over their head and take stuff from them. But there needs to be workings in place to say, well, why will people feel that's wrong? And for the anarchists, I think a large part of the answer needs to be, people will feel that's wrong because anarchism will develop a sense of solidarity, it will develop a sense of mutual aid, such that in an anarchist society, our morality will grow in a way that will want to help each other,

that will want to work together. And the anarchist will say the reason we don't believe in that, the reason we're hesitant to accept that, is because in the state society, our morality has been hampered down, our morality has been obscured, and that it's only in the anarchist society that we're going to see kind of a true morality develop. So I think in this way, morality is essential to understanding anarchism because it's essential to understanding why anarchism can make sense, even when there's no police force hitting people over top of the head. Right. Yeah, and a big argument on the left is once we start to alter the economic base of a society, we start altering the incentives inherent in that society, and that could give rise to, that could emphasize different aspects of quote unquote human nature. In a capitalist society, individualism, competition, the rat race, some level of greed and selfishness are incentivized. And so a lot of libertarians are people that will argue that left women, philosophy is against human nature, will look at that situation and say, well, this is just how human beings are. A left-wing person would say, that's not the only way they can be. If you look back in past societies, there's examples of them operating much differently. And there's ways that we can institutionally incentivize different behaviors and therefore different moral outlooks,

different moral worldviews. There's one thing I did want to touch on here is that in some realms of Marxist, Leninist philosophy, and in the individualist egoism, sternerite sort of forms of individualist anarchism, there's an explicit urge to downplay the existence of morality that ties back in with materialism. I don't want to go too deep into it. But whatever you think of the ontological status of morality, the fact is it plays a very important part in people's lives. And when you're trying to argue for an alternative system, it's necessary that you weave in moral arguments to win over hearts and minds. People want to be touched on that intuitive level, you know, regardless of it's, if it's,

you know, an objective fact about the universe, it doesn't matter. It's a subjective fact in humans' minds. And you would, you know, be undermining your movement if you refuse to address it. That's exactly right. And I want to touch on two points there that you made that I think are connected. I think it's, it makes sense to have suspicions. of human nature, just like it makes sense to have suspicions of morality, both of these suspicions are grounded in the idea that, first of all, these concepts, these theories tend to be appropriated and misused, so that people want to say, this is human nature, therefore this follows, and it's always something horrible that follows, right?

This is the way morality should be, and therefore something horrible follows. And so I think it's important, especially with respect to human nature, but also with respect to morality, I think it's important to see that what humans are like and the way in which we look at morality is always situated within a given system. And so that there might not be a human nature, but there's a nature under capitalism, there's a nature under socialism, there's a nature under anarchism, and so that the nature of the person is dependent on the type of situation in which they grew up, it's depending on the type of influence that they've gotten from whatever propaganda system they are surrounded by, because we're all surrounded by propaganda systems. That's in part why I'm so interested in television and movies, because those are key parts of it. of our propaganda systems, and sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, but they're always propaganda systems. And so I think when Marx, Marx in particular, but Marxists in general, when they're critiquing morality, I often think that they're critiquing capitalist-based morality.

And you can critique capitalist-based morality without having to critique morality itself. But it's also fair to say, it's really hard for us who've grown up in the capitalist system to separate capitalist-based morality from morality itself. Because the way we see morality is always through this prism that the capitalist system has created. And so both for what human nature means and what morality means, they're relegated to a system. But for me, I think there is a sense of morality that gets beyond the system. But it's really hard to understand what that is, and it's probably very basic stuff, stuff like do not murder, and probably stuff like if someone falls in a hole, help them out of it.

But now I'm being really controversial. Okay, absolutely. And I think going off of this, this question kind of in your paper you address this notion of negative versus positive liberty, negative versus positive duties. How are right-wing conceptions of anarchism different from left-wing or egalitarian forms of anarchism? And how does this negative versus positive aspect come into play there? So good. So I think there's two ways to hash this out. One way is to think about, like I said, for the libertarian, one of the big steps is the way in which self-ownership extends to property.

So the anarchist is going to critique that and in part say, look, that is a step. That's not something that we can just assume. That's not natural. That's not like we were just discussing. That's not human nature. There's a question of how property should be arranged. So when we're looking at the libertarian system or we're looking at the right-wing anarchist system, we're looking at a system that takes a choice that property should be held in private hands by individuals.

The more left-wing or galitarian anarchists just denies that choice. They say, no, property, depending, and they're going to differ on how we figure out what property means, but to some extent they're going to say property is not something that can always be held by individuals. Property is something that if we're going to all have liberty, if we're going to share in liberty equally, and everyone's going to be able to have some liberty to do to follow what they choose in their lives, then we're going to have a sense of there's some types of property that's held in common. And that this is not a wrong view of property, it's not a natural view of property, it's just a different view of property. And so one way in which to differ the two sides is how do you look at property? It's probably something that has to be held in private individual hands, or is property something that can be understood in common where at least certain things such as the means of production are shared. Now, the other way to look at the distinction is to distinguish between, as you said, negative and positive liberty, which has a corollary in negative versus positive duties.

So the idea is that your negative duties tend to be things where I tell you don't do this. So do not murder, do not steal, do not kidnap. Do not tread on me. Sorry? Do not tread on me. That's sort of negative interpretation. Exactly. So negative duties have this construction of do not.

Whereas positive duties in opposition tend to lack the not. do give to charity, do help a friend in need, things like that. So if those are the negative positive duties, your negative liberty is defined as the liberty you have when no one is interfering with your liberty. So you will have negative liberty if you are stuck down in a hole and can't get out, as long as no one pushed you into the hole. Because no one is interfering with your liberty while you're in that hole, you just can't get out of the hole. So positive liberty, in contrast, is the idea that you have the ability

to actually do worthwhile things, where you get to decide what worthwhile things you want to do. So that's just a conceptual distinction, but going back to the ideological divide between left and right, the left libertarians and the left anarchists will embrace both positive and negative duties, positive and negative liberty, whereas the libertarian and the right, right-wing anarchists will argue that no, positive duties and positive liberty will end up just being constraints on the self-ownership and the ownership of property of others. Because if someone has a positive duty to help somebody in need, that means they have to give up something of their own in order to help that person in the need. And so that they see this conflict between the positive

duty and the negative liberty and they feel that the negative always trumped over the positive so that morality ends at leave everyone alone you don't have to help anyone no one can make you help anyone and that's just the end of morality so the contrast in terms of positive negative allows you to say that the left wing has both positive negative whereas the right wing is going to not just have negative trump over positive but deny that positive really plays a role of morality at all yeah and one concrete example of how this plays out in real life is the health care debate. On the left, you'll have people arguing that people have a right to health care, a positive right. The libertarian side will say, you don't have a right to take my money to fund it. And so that's,

like, don't do this to me on the libertarian side. We should provide this for people on the left wing side. So that's an interesting way to kind of concretize that disparity. Exactly. And let's be clear when we talk about property, I don't want to hang on this too much. Maybe we'll have an episode of this in the future. But there is a distinction we made between private property and personal property. And when we're discussing property in this context, we're talking about private property in the sense of owning a business and then employing wage labor to profit off of the labor of others to come into that business. We're not talking about your toothbrush and your pet dog spot and your computer at home. That's personal property. Most left-wingers totally carve out

a space for personal property we're just critiquing private property and that's something that i think people should really keep in mind when we go forward um and there are some anarchists though that will say that both private and personal property are problems true yeah there there are critiques there for sure um so let's get into the show now because we i think we laid a good foundation of ideas to springboard and from now on we're going to we're just going to refer to libertarian being right-wing libertarian and anarchism being left-wing anarchism so we don't have to jumble over our words, as you say in your paper. So you argue for an anarchist interpretation over the more prevalent libertarian interpretation of Firefly, it might help to start getting into character

analysis and maybe flesh out this difference and how the characters manifest in that theme. So Mal, early on at least, he's the main character, he stands out as the embodiment of libertarianism. And in your paper, you say, from an anarchist perspective, Mal has merely recreated the problem of governments in reference to the way he runs his ship. Can you explain that and situate Mal as a representation of libertarianism? Sure. So just a little background. So Captain Mal is the captain of the ship. He owns the ship. He bought the firefly that he named Serenity.

He had previously, he is a captain because he had previously fought in the war. the Great War of Unification, where there were two sides. The Alliance, who wanted to kind of control the known universe, and the brown coats? The brown coats. Yeah. Is it the brown coats or the red coats? I forget. Brown coats?

The brown coats. Yeah, that's right. So the Alliance was fighting the brown coats. The brown coats were representative of the border worlds that did not want to consent to join the Alliance. and so the alliance was trying to incorporate the entire known universe these border worlds were saying no not us we don't want to join up and so mal joins the brown coats the show doesn't really tell us exactly why he joins the brown coats but we get the sense like i said it makes sense to see him as a libertarian and so we get the sense of he joined the brown coats because the alliance is trampling on the liberty of the outer planets to decide their own face They've decided everyone should be under one rule. The alliance can bring in technology. They can bring in health care.

Health care becomes one of the issues in the show. The alliance is willing to come in and clean up these outer planets that largely are a mess. But the outer planets, a lot of them say, no, we don't want the alliance. Mal joins up and fights for the brown coats. He ends up lose. The brown coats lose. There's a famous battle of Serenity where Mao is one of the last soldiers fighting. along with one of the people who joins him, Zoe, they lose the battle.

He ends up trying to flee, so he's now living aboard his ship, running odd jobs to kind of make a living fleeing from the alliance. Now, when I say that he recreates the problem of governments, we're going to this idea that the anarchist critiques government in a similar way to the libertarian. Both the anarchists and libertarians see governments as encroaching on freedom. They both agree that freedom is valuable, people should be able to figure out their own lives, but the government's constantly coming in and telling us what to do, and the government also threatens us. It doesn't just tell us what to do, it threatens us, and it says, if you don't do what we tell you,

we're going to lock you in a tiny little room and give you horrible food. So in this sense that both anarchists and libertarians are worried about this kind of critique, the difference between the two views is that a libertarian is only worried about critiquing the government telling you what to do, but they're not worried about your employer telling you what to do. Having a boss that tells you, you have to do what I say, or else you're going to lose your income, maybe starve, who knows. so the anarchist is worried about all forms of hierarchy the anarchist feels like people should figure out their own lives

they shouldn't have a government telling them what to do they shouldn't have a boss telling them what to do so now this character he's very much an opponent of the alliance he feels that the alliance is just a meddlesome government and he stands against them but on his ship he runs his ship he's the one who's in charge he makes the decisions There's an episode where they, they, Simon, Dr. Simon Tam, who's played by Sean Maher, is going to, needs to operate on one of, on their mechanic, Kaylee Fry, who's played by Jewel State.

And Simon says he will not operate on Cayley unless Mal agrees to fly the ship away because Simon and his sister are in danger. Mao decides that he's going to kill Simon for this. Another character, Wash, played by Alan Tudik, says, can we please vote on this killing thing? And Mal says, no, it's his boat. He decides, right? And so the idea that we should have a democracy for a political situation, but should not have a democracy in a situation where someone owns a thing, that, you know, Mao becomes the boss. He's the owner of the ship. his boat, so there's no democracy on the ship.

That idea that democracy only makes sense in one scenario, the political, not in another scenario, the economic, it's a very libertarian idea, and it's a very much an idea that anarchists are going to reject, because why should it matter who's stepping on you? Why it should it matter whether it's your boss stepping on you or whether it's the president Trump stepping on you, whoever's stepping on you, it's a problem. Yeah, absolutely. And I think you hint at this in your paper, if not outright explicitly say it, but part of what the show is is Mao starting off as the embodiment of libertarianism and then through his interactions with other characters and events throughout the show, there's almost a sort of blossoming of anarchism that comes out of him or at least at the creators of the show are trying to add that dimension of more anarchist perspective over time where if you look at a show like Breaking Bad, you start with a a good guy who breaks bad, that's the point of the show, who descends into immorality.

This can kind of be an analogy to that where you start from libertarianism and evolve into a more anarchist perspective. Is that one way to look at this show and the development of the main character? I think that's exactly right. And I think that's why I prefer a non-libertarian interpretation, because I think Mao, he's the star of the show, he's a libertarian, but he's learning. And one of the things, as I mentioned, Dr. Simon Tam and his sister River Tam, who's played by Summer Glow, they are fugitives from the Alliance. The Alliance wants River in particular because they've run some scientific experiments on her to make her into a some, we don't really know what, but they've given her superpowers of some kind.

And so they really want her back. They're searching for her. There's different points in the show, especially in the first episode, Serenity. there's different points in the show where Mal kind of thinks why not just give them back why not give Simon and River back he hates the alliance he doesn't want the alliance coming after him as long as he has River the alliance is going to be after him eventually the alliance is going to catch up to him so why not just drop them off on some planet somewhere and then and then be rid of them and at the beginning like I said he's ready to do it he's willing to do it

As the show progresses, the more opportunities he has, the less willing he is to do it. And there's another character, Shepard Book. He's a shepherd, so he's a religious man, although that's interesting in itself. He's played by Ron Glass. Shepard Book has these conversations once in the show and then again in the movie, almost identical conversations, where Shepard Book asks Mal, why do you keep rescuing Simon and River? Why don't you just drop them off? and Mal can never explain it to him.

So there's this underlying belief in Mal that he has to do the right thing. And it's not, as I argue in my paper, it's not because he's consented to help them. He doesn't feel that he has. And it's not because there's any self-ownership related issues. It doesn't seem to help Mal he wants to get away from the lines. But he feels this pull. These are people that if they get caught, horrible things are going to happen to them. He has to protect them. And so book, like I said,

a couple of times asked him, why do you do it? And Mal never has an answer. And I think that's the show we're representing he's a libertarian on the surface, but deep down he knows there's something wrong. He knows he has to be a good person going beyond libertarian morality and do the right thing, where the right thing cannot be really encapsulated by libertarian moral views. And so I think that's what's interesting about the show, this tension between who Mal is becoming, where he doesn't even seem to realize why he's becoming this person who has moral values that go well beyond libertarian moral values. Yeah, and it seems that the other characters, the explicitly non-libertarian,

way more morally motivated characters at different points throughout the show kind of help bring that out of him, or, you know, Shepard Books' role is kind of to question those things and make him be uncomfortable when he tries to, you know address that cognitive dissidence of you know his his so-called philosophy with his more moral urges so I think that's really interesting I'd never thought about that until I read your paper yeah the tension between Jane and Simon maybe you want to introduce them before you answer this question but the tension between Jane and Simon in the show is interesting

Jane almost represents libertarianism in its most amoral and depraved form as you said earlier anarcho-capitalism almost while Simon the doctor is deeply altruistic. The whole show is based around him, sacrificing everything for his sister. It's almost as if Jane sits to the right of Mal and Simon sits to his left. What are your thoughts on that dynamic? I think that's exactly right. And Jane, like you said, he's the most clearly libertarian. He doesn't have the kind of reservations that Mal has. Jane Jane does betray Simon

He sells out Simon to the alliance He ends up backfiring on him And there's an interesting exchange where In a later episode Simon has Jane on his table And Simon needs to operate on Jane To save his life

And Simon tells him Look I know you betrayed me I don't trust you But you can trust me Because I'm your doctor I'm going to care for you whenever you're on my table, I'm going to do the right thing and do a good job of helping you. And so there is this kind of sense that Simon, even though he knows Jane endangers him, Jane has betrayed him once. He believes Jane will betray him again, but he always feels Simon feels he has to do the right thing.

He has to save Jane's life because they're on this ship together, they're working together. He's going to help Jane whenever Jane needs help, even though he doesn't. trust Jane. Jane, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be growing at all throughout the series. Jane is looking for ways to betray Simon. Jane is always out for himself. There's a great episode where they get a request for help from a group of people on a planet, and they're told that they don't know whether those people will be able to pay them. Jane's immediate response is, then why would we do it? And they tell them, well, everyone gets to make their own choice. Obviously, since we don't know if we're getting paid, then there's no reason that everyone

has to go. This is the episode Heart of Gold. And everyone, though, besides Jane, immediately agrees. These people need help. They don't care if they're getting paid. Everyone besides Jane agrees, they're going to go help these people. Then Jane is told, by the way, these people are prostitutes and they've offered to pay in other ways and then jane's immediately like let's go so jane's willing to take payment sexually but he was not willing to take the job without payment where's everyone else on the team including mal said these are people who need help let's go help them yeah and there's the episode you talked about in your paper with i don't want to get too deep into it but the mudders and there was an act of self-sacrifice on the behalf of one of these mudders jumping in front of a bullet to

save Mal was it? To save Jane. To save Jane himself. And Jane physically could not comprehend that action. He's so amoral, he's so detached from moral reasoning that it just totally stunted him and he didn't know how to react to it. He couldn't figure it out. Yeah. And the mother, the mother dies to save Jane's life. And this is after the mutters had made Jane into a hero because they thought that he had given he had left money for them but it was an accident he hadn't left money for them he had dropped the money out of his ship accidentally but they made him to a hero they had a they had a statue of him they had a song about him which he loved and at the end of the episode it's exposed that he's a fraud immediately after it's exposed he's a fraud someone goes to shoot him the mutter jumps in

front of the bullet takes the bullet and jane is just flabbergasted it makes no sense why someone would sacrifice their lives for him jane And I think that's just a telling moment because he can't comprehend what it would mean to sacrifice your life for another person. Yeah. I don't want to play armchair psychologist here. There's an element almost, if it's taken so far in that direction, which Jane is a representative of, there's almost a sociopathic inability to morally reason. I'm not saying that Jane is a sociopath necessarily, but there's just such a lack of empathy. and such a lack of motivations outside of money or sex or, you know, the most base incentives.

I don't know. It's interesting to think about it in those terms. No, I think, like you, I don't want to go too far, but I do think, like there's something interesting, and I think this comes up less with Jane than it does with them out, but it comes up in characters a lot where the reflective, thoughtful person who has the wrong values will choose to do, wrong thing, but often they'll do the right thing when they're not thinking about it. I think that's what differs them from sociopaths because they won't have, they won't embrace these libertarian values when they react automatically. Right.

It's more when they process, these are my values, I must act for them, that they end up choosing these amoral choices. Right. And there are little rays of sunshine throughout the show where Jane shows just little, little bits of humanity. yeah exactly okay so the creator of the show as you talked earlier joss wiedon he's expressed firm support for feminism past shows of his like buffy the vampire slayer manifest this theme often how does feminism come into play and firefly and what characters represent feminism most fully throughout the show i think i think in a certain

way we've we've talked about jane and mow as the more libertarian characters I feel like almost every other main character on the show is in some way more anarchists or more feminists and kind of a combination of both. I think there's so many issues, and obviously we don't have time to get into all of them. But, like, Zoe, who's played by Gina Torres, is married to Wash, who's played by Alan Tuddock. Their marriage is fascinating because Zoe, she comes from the war. She had fought alongside Mao. she's the fighter she's strong she's courageous wash is very much he's the pilot of the ship but he's not a strong guy he acknowledges that he needs his wife to protect him he acknowledges that

she has more of the masculine traits he doesn't and so they have this very interesting kind of feminist relationship where there's no attempt for for wash to put himself above his wife he acknowledges his wife has strengths that we tend to characterize as masculine, whereas he has strengths that we tend to characterize as feminine, but this doesn't change anything about them sexually. It doesn't change anything about their drive to love each other, to have sex with each other. They just have this great feminist marriage. I also think a lot of the female characters on the show, like I think Kaylee, Kaylee is a fascinating character.

She's the mechanic. So again, we have this mix of just because she's a woman. It doesn't mean she can't be the mechanic of the show, but there's also this episode, Shindig, where she gets to dress up in a dress, and she wants to feel, she wants to embrace her feminine traits in that episode, other episodes she prefers to embrace her more masculine traits. So this idea of breaking down, are there really masculine traits or feminine traits, it's a common theme throughout the show. But I think it's also interesting that a lot of the male characters on Firefly, I think more so than some of the other shows, more so than Angel, more so than Buffy even, the male characters on Firefly, I think are easier to characterize as feminist male characters. So I think we talked about Dr. Simon Tam. he's the nurturer he's the caregiver he's given up his his career he was a famous doctor in a major alliance city he gave it all up for his sister so he he's putting family ahead of career and and he's

always caring for the other members of the ship so you have these characters who are seen from a much more so i think in a certain way dr simon tamp he represents feminist ethics of care and so you get these male characters that are much more in touch with their feelings, their emotions, and more so than, like, for example, Buffy, Giles is kind of like that. Zander's definitely not. So, in Angel, there's almost, most of the male characters are very far, including Angel. They're very far from being feminist characters in a clearer sense. So I think both the female characters and the male characters, putting aside, of course, the libertarian characters, Mal and Jane, the rest of the main characters on the show, all are feminists,

I think, in interesting ways. Yeah, and I really love this idea of breaking gender roles. It's clearly done consciously on the part of the writer and creator and the writers or whatever. And it's really refreshing and it's really human to see, as you say, Kaylee, you know, she's always working on some mechanical part of the ship, greasy suit, but then she has this beautiful moments where she wants to feel beautiful and she there's almost an innocent love of that femininity and it's it's really kind of a beautiful human moment and then Zoe Zoe's relationship with her husband like you said earlier those dynamics are so inherently progressive because they break down these long especially in pop culture these long played out stereotypes of men do this stuff women do this stuff and then there's

the conflict between the two but I think that is one of the most low-key feminist parts of it is just this automatic break it's not even like it's not the show doesn't call attention to itself it doesn't call attention necessarily to the fact that these are breaking down gender roles it's just there just presents it as this is how things are and and there's a normative sort of implication these are how things should be and we shouldn't worry about that exactly and the one character that that i haven't talked about yet was uh is anara sierra who's played by marina bacharin um and And she's the, they don't call her a prostitute, they call her a companion, but she is a, she's, in a certain sense, she's a prostitute in a very high class way. And one of the things that's interesting, when they go to the planet Heart of Gold, those are, they're also prostitutes, they're also sex workers, but not in a high class way.

They're forced into a horrible situation where their sex work is being exploited, whereas Anara, she's, as a companion, she's part of a guild, her sex work is protected, and there's rules that everyone in the guild has to fall, and she's, in fact, she empowers the ship, because as a companion, she has so much respect that she can go places, and the rest of the team, Mal and his ship, they can only go places because Anara is with them. And so she has this central role as she's a sex worker, but she's not treated in any bad way by their society, although Mal treats her in a bad way. Mal is very rude to her, but in general, the show kind of represents here's a way in which we could respect sex workers, even though it acknowledges sex workers aren't necessarily respected in the society in which we lived. Yeah, there's a, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. There's a past. There's a history between Mal and anara, correct? Is there a romantic past, a history there? There's a constant tension. Yeah.

There's a sense in which, will they get together? Right. And I don't want to really do a spoiler, but, you know, that is the question. Will they get together? And in a sense, it's a strange question in part because Mal's a jerk to her. Yeah. He constantly, you know, to use the word he uses, he constantly refers to her as a whore. and also she has a set of rules that she gives him when she first meets him

and one of the rules is he cannot step on her part of the ship without her permission and he constantly does that and so they do have this romantic tension but there's also kind of a rudeness that he displays towards her yeah and my analysis of that and maybe i'm off base here but my analysis is almost as if the writers of the show are trying to to show a fragile masculinity um because Because of this romantic tension, because Mal views her as a potential romantic partner, that conflict with his feelings for her and her job as a sex worker brings out this ugly side of Mal. And it was really the ugliest side of Mal you'll really see throughout the show is the way he treats her.

And I was always taken aback by that and turned off. But I think that's done purposely to point out this sort of jealous rage that lies at the bottom of so many male's views of their romantic partners and how this sense of I own or I want to own you, and I can't, therefore I'm going to be an asshole to you, or I'm going to try to degrade you. What do you think about that? I think that's very interesting going back to the principles of libertarianism because you have the self-ownership,

then you have the ownership extending to objects, then you have consent allowing the ownership to kind of extend to people. And so it's kind of hard when you see the world from an ownership perspective, When ownership is your basis for looking at the world, and then when you start looking at relationships, you kind of get this, not directly. I'm not saying libertarianism is committed to this, or that all libertarians think this way, but there's this danger of, if I look at the world from an ownership perspective, then the boss owns their employees, does the man own the woman? And her being a sex worker makes that very difficult, I think, for Mal, because she can't be owned in the sense that he would want to own her. But it is that kind of ownership thinking that's kind of bleeding over to other areas because we have a moral theory that starts and is thoroughly run through the idea of ownership. And where you get to employers-owning employees, you're in dangerous territory where you're thinking about people in the wrong sort of way.

And that's going to be especially dangerous when you start thinking about what's supposed to be loving relationships. Yeah, that's extremely fascinating stuff. And it's amazing that these shows can layer so much into their shows. And that's what makes these so wonderful. I think it's worth pointing out that unlike, say, Star Trek, the dominant economic paradigm, even in the show, in the future, it's still capitalism. There's still this, this, this, this internet, or I guess universal trade capitalists. There's rich people.

There's poor people. Rich planets, poor planets. Sex work is conceived in the conceptions of, of capitalism. So there's very, very poor women who have to turn to it for their own economic safety. And then there's some women that are more padded by economic comfort that they freely choose sex work. So it's not, it's not an animal. anti-sex work show, by any means, it just shows the nuances of how sex work manifests in different economic contexts. Would you agree that capitalism is still very much at play in the show?

Yes, and I think this is not accidental. I think that when I say the alliance, and this is somewhat conjecture, but it's not my conjecture, but the show isn't explicit on this as far as I know, But the alliance refers to the idea that in the future, the United States and China form an alliance, and that grows into this group that tries to run the known universe. And so the idea behind the show is that these jointly, very strongly stateist perspectives of the United States and China have joined together as we've gone on to other planets and their outlook is now influencing the world. So I think the idea is we're looking into a future that's far away in science fiction, but it's not far away from history. It's still got this United States perspective. And in the show, all the characters speak English, but they will often speak in Chinese, usually for slang or when they're saying like square words. And so you get this dominant United States perspective with tinges of Chinese perspective.

And so I think the idea of the show is if the United States keeps going on this trajectory, maybe with a little help from another powerful country, what will the universe look like? Right, right. And so in that sense, we would get a capitalist universe. We would get a universe that kind of looked in the mold of a United States now running the universe as opposed to just the world. And so that capitalist idea is in the show. It is purposeful.

And I think it's kind of a projection of this could be where we're headed. and the show's kind of realistic in kind of a sad way that way. Yeah, and it's dystopian. It's so sad to think of the future being dominated by such an ugly economic paradigm still, and that ugliness pops up all throughout the show. Before we move on to, because I want to discuss the genres of sci-fi and westerns,

before we do that and move away from the show itself, do you want to maybe quickly sum up your basic overall argument for an anarchist interpretation over a libertarian one for Firefly I think so I've been kind of saying it back and forth in the various things we've been saying I feel like there's

certain episodes we talked a little bit about Janstown and Heart of Gold there's certain episodes that make more sense if you look at them from anarchist perspectives just like I think the vast majority of the characters make more sense if you look at them from anarchist perspective then if you stick with that libertarian perspective that you first see when you first hear the theme song and meet Mao.

And so, like, an example that I'm going to throw out real quickly is in a very early show, the train job, they are, they make a deal with a man named Niska. And the deal that Mal makes with Niska is that he's going to steal something for Niska. And Niska does not want Mal to know what they're stealing. But Mao agrees. He doesn't need to know. So it's a consensual agreement where the information requirement is waived. It turns out, Mao finds out somewhere in the middle of the episode, they're stealing medicine from a town where everyone's going to die. And so, Mao gives back the medicine.

And there's actually a libertarian writer, I can't think of his name right now, but there's a libertarian writer who wrote about the episode and thought it was a good example of libertarian. And I'm thinking, based on what moral principles, Mal consented to steal the medicine. We're not, let's push aside that they're stealing. He's a thief. It's what he does. Mal consented to steal the medicine. He's now giving him to a positive duty. He's choosing to give the medicine to the people who desperately need it as opposed to

to keeping his consent. And it's a moment where Mao, when he's told, you know, it must have been a hard choice. I'm not quoting exactly, but it must have been a hard choice. He responds, there was no choice. And so, Mao in that episode, I think it's a very telling episode where Mao's a libertarian, he believes in consent, he believes in keeping his deal, but he gives it all up because there's people who need medicine, which goes back to your point of saying, health care is a really good example of this, because on the one hand, yes, in order for us to have

a good universal health care system, people are going to have to pay taxes. on the other hand we're talking about people dying right the health care is life and death if you're not willing to pay taxes knowing that you just have to pay a little bit of your salaries so that people don't die I don't see how that could not be a moral issue that if you really get in touch with it it should drive you as a moral person absolutely that's a really good key issue to kind of think of what would you do if you knew that this exact moment your taxes were key to saving people's lives. And I think it's harder when you stop being abstract about it to say, well, my money is more important than saving people's lives. Because that's kind of a crazy view to have. Absolutely. Yeah, and so my opinion, to sum up what your paper more or less says

is that on the surface of the show, it's a libertarian show. And it certainly starts off with heavy libertarian messaging. As the show progresses, it becomes clear that it's a critique of libertarianism. and Mao's moral progress is progress away from libertarianism and towards a more egalitarian anarchism. He doesn't make it all the way. He has lots of moral failures all the way throughout that go unresolved. He's not a perfect person.

But too bad the show had to end after one season because a lot of these questions might have been fleshed out more, but we're only left with one season. And so that's all we get to analyze. That was a great way to put it. I really like how you put that. All right, well, we're getting closer to the end of the series. show here so I do just want to touch on some genre questions this really

fascinates me I love to think about what genres do for for thinking and for philosophy and for popular culture so this show combines sci-fi aesthetics with classic western aesthetics it has themes and tropes from both genres what are these themes broadly and how does this combination of genres deepen the show in your opinion I think it's an interesting question one not I haven't really thought a lot about, but I think in a certain way, both westerns and sci-fis, I think of zombie shows in a similar category, they ask the question, what would society be like if we took away the civilization and looked at society from a different

perspective? Or how would society grow if we took out the civilization? So, you know, I'm the show that pops in my mind, two shows that pop in my mind. One, Westworld, which was recently started on HBO, has a similar sci-fi and Western feel. I also think of, though, Deadwood is a HBO show from about, I'd say, 10 years ago. And it was explicitly on this question of, what if we had this Western town, but the law had officially not arrived, because it had just settled from being Native American territory. White people had taken it over. But, but, you know, but the United States have yet to officially incorporate it. So what would that western town be look like?

I think all these types of shows, what's interesting about them, is that it kind of gets us to think more about the place where we basically started, which is how are we going to think about the next society? And there's two questions there. One, what will the next society look like? And two, what should the next society look like?

As a philosopher, I'm more interested, in what should the next society look like, but you can't answer that without trying to figure out what will the next society look like. I think one of the limitations of scholarly work in both philosophy, but also in the more social sciences where they try to study these things, is we just can't really know until we get to the next society. I think that's where fiction plays a very important role,

because people who are doing these westerns, people are doing these sci-fi, they're creating a society, and then they're trying to be reasonable and real, and if they do a good show, they're giving us a glimpse of what a society might look like in different parameters than ours, but maybe parameters that stretch away from ours, so that in a Western, there was a civilized society somewhere down the road, but these people don't live in it. in sci-fi maybe it was in the past but these people don't live in it same with zombies there was a civilized society then people started eating brains and turned out to be a bad thing so in each one they're kind of imagining a new way of looking at society and I think when it's well done it gives us important glimpses of what we should theorize about and what we should take from how will things work and how should things work yeah um I love sci-fi it's it's It's my favorite genre of movie because I think it's inherently philosophical, because as you were saying, it attempts to make you think about the human condition in different contexts. And by analyzing our economic system or our human condition or whatever it may be in our consciousness and our morality, in the context of a totally new futuristic situation, it forces us to analyze ourselves in real time.

and then it forces us to think about where we're going, which too often people can get through life without having to think about. Sci-fi challenges you to think about. It's kind of a controversial opinion, but I think that Star Wars isn't sci-fi, because Star Wars doesn't do that sort of intellectual sort of thought experiment. It's just an action-adventure movie in space. I don't want to get hate mail for that.

That's just kind of my opinion. But I think with this show, when it combines sci-fi and the classic sort of Western aesthetics and tropes, it's this tension between past and the future. And what the writer and creator of the show is asking us to do is, as you were saying earlier, extrapolate from our past and our present position into the future, but also think about how we can grow beyond the limitations imposed on us by the arbitrary historical events that led to us existing. And in that tension, I think it adds a layer of what sci-fi does

is to make you examine the world around you, past, present, and future. And I want to say, so first, I love Star Wars. But one thing I think is important is that in a certain way, I think part of the problem, and there's lots of problems with the prequels, but part of the problem with the prequels is that it might be that George Lucas was trying too hard to do it, right? The prequels are trying to say

how do we go from a democratic system to a tyranny and he was trying to keep it so realistic and manipulate it so carefully that just, it wasn't interesting and maybe it wasn't realistic.

I think he just went, he studied Mussolini, he studied Hitler, and he said, I'm basically going to do the same thing, but I'll just put the emperor in their place. and it kind of felt fake and in a certain sense it's kind of like it's weird that it feels fake

when he's trying to keep it so real but in another sense I think the systems are so different and the people are so different the characters are so different from real people that you can't keep it too close to the way history has been

or the way politics currently is without losing something because I think what's interesting thing the interesting thing about Firefly is It has that distant pass of this is somehow connected to America and China. We're not telling you how. It's kind of just hinted out through language and flags. But the connections aren't so precise because lots of time has passed, lots of things that happen in their universe.

It won't be exactly like our world. But that makes you think harder about it. Because I think George Lucas, one of George Lucas's mistakes in the prequels is that he didn't let us think hard enough about it. he tried to be too spot on. I think that's spot on. And I like to think about, like, I'm a big fan of Star Trek. And I really like the way Star Trek portrays the future. And a lot of, you know, socialist, communist, anarchist friends of mine online, like, we have these similar interests.

And, you know, Star Trek is an embodiment of kind of what a future left-wing communal society could look like. I mean, it explicitly disavows wealth and it's an egalitarian society. society. But the one thing that stuck out to me about that show is there's still a very strict hierarchy when it comes to the ship. Captain Picard is the leader or the old show, whatever, whatever Star Trek you want to talk about. But there's a very strong hierarchy. So part of me thinks, is that necessary when you're traveling space and you're confronting enemies? Is a hierarchy in a military context absolutely essential? Or was this just a lack of imagination on the part of the show and what would a truly egalitarian ship in a star trek universe look like i mean

do you have anything to say on those topics i know it's not a good question but i think that's a really good question because there is this this sense of even when we leave certain hierarchies behind other ones creep in and in a certain way i'm trying off the top of my head to think of a good tv show that doesn't have that kind of hierarchy but it does tend to be true that when they're traveling to space, they tend to develop this kind of rigid military hierarchy, even where it's not clear what role it's playing in their society, so it's not clear why they would have it as they're traveling to space. And it's also kind of weird because it doesn't seem at all, it seems much less necessary because there's such a small community, they're stuck

together, it feels like they could arrange themselves in a much more egalitarian fashion and be quick about making decisions and make better decisions because they're a small community and they're all experienced in their own ways. They all bring something different to the table. And so especially, you know, thinking of all these Star Trek characters who all have their uniqueness and who some of them are clearly, you know, data in certain ways and are Spock in certain ways. They can bring things that others clearly can't. So I think it's an interesting question.

Why do they cling to that hierarchy? And part of it might be just, would it be recognizable if it didn't have that hierarchy? And one of the interesting things about Star Trek is it lacks economic hierarchy, but it doesn't tell you that, right? It's something that you just realized one day when you've been watching for 20 years,

least this is what happened to me you just one day you go wait they don't have money right and suddenly you're like that's weird what have I not realized about this show it's not like they have an episode that's like here's the communist episode of Star Trek it's just something that's in the background

that you don't think about and I wonder if it would be harder to put the military hierarchy out of the play because it would have to be more explicit right I think that's a really good question I'm going to think a lot more about yeah I don't I think

it was really progressive for its time, but I think when you think about the context in which sci-fi movies are made, you are still restrained by the situation you're living in now. And to question hierarchy really deeply, as you just alluded to a difficult task, to think about how these things would be run on egalitarian lines, is very difficult. Trying to conceptualize a society ran completely horizontally and totally democratic is difficult because it's so far removed from anything humans have ever experienced. And so when you can't expect people that write for Star Trek to be

3,000 years ahead of their time. So another show that comes to my mind is, and this is not sci-fi, obviously, but Sons of Anarchy. And Sons of Anarchy is clearly anarchists, but it's also not, and like it's called Sons of Anarchy.

Right? And they have this decision-making table where they all make decisions jointly and it's unanimous but they also have a leader and the leader is in charge but that's not accidental that's because they're they're giving up their anarchist roots and so sometimes i think one of the most difficult things about analyzing tv shows philosophically is that you never know is the show too subtle for me to for for me or for any of the other viewers to get the messages it wants me to get or is so when I see something wrong is it that I'm seeing it wrong and they actually meant it to be wrong because they're making a more

you know a more subtle point so it's are sometimes you're giving them credit and no credit to do exactly and so that that makes it more challenging to kind of analyze TV shows and that's why I say in my work I'm usually not trying to give the the perspective that they meant as much as the perspective i read right so i see the perspective there i don't know if they meant it or not and there's a conception of art as as a whole where the meaning is always um in this communication between the artist and the viewer and different meanings arise depending on who's engaging with that art and so i think i think that's a fair way to look at stuff like this too yeah but at the same time go ahead like people who make it they have thoughts right and sometimes they express them and sometimes they refuse to express

Right. Yeah, very, very interesting stuff. Well, I know we're running short on time where we're about to wrap up here. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope in the future, because you write a lot more papers than this. It's not just Firefly. And there's a lot more shows. So maybe, you know, once every few months or something, if you'd be willing to come back on the show, discuss a new topic. I think this is a really fun way for people to engage with these ideas. You do it in your work, and I would like to kind of embrace some of that in my podcast. So thank you so much for coming on. I really do appreciate that. thank you very much for having me i had a really good time talking to you about all this yeah before we before we wrap up though um i usually do this at the end of every show do you have any recommendations for anybody who would want to learn more about any of the stuff that we discussed in today's show or maybe just linked to your work or how to find your papers uh so that that's a hard question um i mean there's so much out there on anarchism and and it's it's like there's so much it's hard to know where to start yeah i think um

Pitzer used to host a website called Anarchy Archives where I don't know if they still do, but that's a good source to kind of just find out what some historical anarchists have written. I really recommend, I like starting with Emma Goldman. I think Emma Goldman is a clear writer. She makes points that are shared across a lot of anarchists, and she's just historically important and fascinating. and she's also combining anarchism with feminism probably for the first time, at least for the first time, you know, yeah, for the first, maybe for the first time.

Yeah. So I like starting with Emma Goldman. The history book that's really thick but it's worth reading is Peter Marshall's demanding the impossible, a history of anarchism. I really like that book and really shows you how wide a breath anarchism has. and I write a lot in open court books and philosophy and so sometimes if there's a TV show that you're interested in those are good places to read more philosophy about them

all right awesome well thank you I guess my recommendations before we end I'll throw my two cents in I did do an episode a few back with Dr. Mark Bray a visiting lecture at Dartmouth and we had a whole show on anarchism where we kind of lay out the history and the philosophy of anarchism so if you haven't heard that it's one of our highest ranking shows so far So I'd really encourage listeners to go check that out. But then more on the sci-fi front, some shows that always come up to my mind when we're talking about sci-fi is Battlestar Galactica.

It's a really good show talking about extending the human conditioning in the future and all this stuff that sci-fi does great. Her with Joaquin Phoenix is interesting. Ex Machina came out recently. That's interesting. And you mentioned Westworld. All of these really present us with moral conundrums and make you think about self-hood.

and the future and where we're going as a species. So all of that is helpful. Combining anarchist literature with sci-fi and thinking how that could play out in the future, all that is so fun. Thank you again for coming on. I really appreciate it, and I hope to have another episode with you sometime down the road. Sounds great. Thank you very much. You've got hands that were born to wield the bow.

Stealing hard their head to bend your will. And I've got scars from every job I've ever had. And they're labored hands that ain't when they're still. Well, I may not see all the fruits of my labor in the condition of my class Most of us don't have the luxury of treating a hand like the main of glass you may be an artist

but you never been starved you never been dead friends I've been without a home no once you plow down from your heart or after me in my faded out of me And I'll show you what it means to me alone You never care. You never cared for re-telling stories.

So we roll around tragedy But I am jazzed me Singer folk songs I thrive on second-hand melody What's up And it's a black thing And it's occurred Seeing both sides of the tale

But when you're living made on regret by gone you're dealing with the devil in detail well you may be ignored but you never have starved you never been arrested from head leveled or just you climb down from your high ground

I'll show you what I'll see you what it means to say about You never care for my way cleaning and hoarding again You never care for all the lives I was living You've never understood that winch before our last last You've never got me to your friend You may be an audit But you never been starving

You never been restless I've been out of your mind What I'm plugged out from your high ground Look at me in my seat, I'll show you what it means me in my eyes. Jesus, that's a longer than I thought it be. Yeah. Make you get rid of the right time.

Here I say Jesus and that might be.