Rev Left Radio - The Ministry for the Future: Climate Change, Sci Fi, and our Near Future

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

We are joined by Kim Stanley Robinson, the renowned science fiction author, to discuss his NYT bestselling book "The Ministry for the Future". We discuss climate change, geoengineering, Frederic Jameson, anti-dystopian fiction, political terrorism, Capitalist Realism, democratic socialism, the boomer/millennial divide, and so much more!  Outro Music: "505" by Arctic Monkeys ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I have a really wonderful conversation for you. It's with the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, focused primarily around his newest book, The Ministry for the Future. It's a novel, it's a science fiction novel that depicts the near future in the coming decades as humanity struggles with increasing climate change. It talks about the social effects, the geopolitical effects, the economic effects, scientific effects, and it really covers the entire gamut of humanity going through a really rough patch in human history,

perhaps the roughest, and in some ways dividing further, in some ways coming together, ultimately presenting a fairly optimistic view of the future, but not one without plenty of lumps on the way. And the reason why this is fascinating, aside from all the content on its face, is that this is the rest of our lives. If you're listening to this, you're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, maybe even older than that, the several decades that will make up the rest of our existence on this planet will be revolved around climate change and the social political struggles revolving around it, which is part and parcel with the struggle against capitalism, against imperialism, against

hypernationalism, et cetera. So this is a fascinating conversation. we cover so much ground. If you love this conversation, which I know most of you will, definitely check out the book. Plenty of people are still in quarantine. You have time to kill. It's a really engaging novel that really takes you through the most likely, I think, scenario for how climate change is likely going to play out while presenting an overall optimistic picture of humanity's ability to come together to solve our problems. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

on his wonderful climate science fiction book, The Ministry for the Future. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Kim Stanley Robinson. I go by Stan. I am an American science fiction writer, lifelong Californian, lifelong, well, adult lifelong, American leftist, and patriot of science fiction, you might say. Good to be here. Yeah, absolutely. We're honored to have you on.

I'm a big fan of your work. This latest book, which will be the focus of this episode, is called The Ministry for the Future. And it's been a book that I've been an evangelical supporter of telling more and more people to listen to it in my personal life and on the show. I've even read some chapters of it on another podcast I do to try to get people to read it for reasons that will become obvious throughout this interview. So thank you so much for coming on. To start off this interview and sort of orient you to elements of my audience that might not be aware of who you are, Can you just talk a bit about your political development, your current political outlook, as well as your relationship to Frederick Jameson, who is, you know, somebody that we've studied on this show as well? Sure, because he's important to my story and comes in very naturally.

I was brought up in Orange County, California, which is between L.A. and San Diego back in the 50s and 1960s. And Orange County was a very white, very right-wing space in my childhood. It was the physical home for the John Birch Society. And in general, a kind of a development of the post-war period of Americans of all kinds moving out to the aerospace and defense industries in Southern California that had developed during World War II, a lot of Midwesterners, a lot of people that had, you know, saw, palm trees and went to the beach on Christmas Day during the war and decided to move there. And that was my context growing up, although, of course, I wasn't aware of it at the time. It was agriculture. It was orange groves.

And it got ripped out and turned into the space that it is now, a kind of an urban slash suburban space whilst I was a youth. And that was a kind of a slow motion or after the fact, radicalizing experience to see a natural landscape. or, let's say, a monocultural, agricultural, agricultural landscape getting ripped out and turned into city so fast. Turned me into a science fiction writer, I think. But the thing is that in high school, I was living in a bubble so that I say, I might as well be in high school in the early 50s in terms of the way things were going. The world we would get by way of Life magazine and TV news, but my family wasn't really a TV news family. So Life magazine, we knew the world was changing that the 60s. were happening. I mean, I was in high school in 1966 to 1970, but it was as if on campus

and in our minds, it was like it was the early 50s. So one day in 1970, I went down to UC San Diego to go to college. And so in an hour and a half drive, I went from 1955 to 1970 and just dropped right into it. And it was like time travel, an incredible shock, a future shock, a political shock. I got my draft number and so did all of my friends so that we were in theory draftable. I mean, in a way, the student deferments were working for us. But the Vietnam War was happening. Young guys our age were dying in Vietnam. And this was the immediate pressure on our brains to rethink the politics that we've been taught as kids. And then by coincidence in a French class. My French teacher was this guy who spoke French to us only in a bit of a New Jersey accent, very slow, very clear, very thoughtful. It's super interesting. But because it was in French, I had a hard time taking it on board. And it took me a few years to realize that that was Fred Jameson and began to read his work. So we had also on campus, Marcoza and Angela Davis for a while. I saw Markle.

Kuzza speak. I never saw Angela Davis. She moved to UCLA about the same time I got to UCSD. But it wasn't just these individuals, okay? It was my moment. So I am a California hippie, anti-Vietnam War youth. And that set a lot of my values right there. Jameson is a Marxist literary critic, and he certainly educated me in the tradition of Marxist literary criticism, which is to say he made us read all the texts, he made us think about them, recontextualize them to the present, see how they could be put to use. And that's kind of my political autobiography up to that point. Wonderful. Fascinating that you were on the campus at the time with people like Mercuzza, Angela Davis, and Jameson. That's a real pressure cooker situation for

intellectual development, as well as the broader historical context that was developing at the time. And for those that might not be familiar or maybe new listeners, I'll link to our episode on Frederick Jameson in the show notes so you can go check that out. It's focused on his work postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. But going on to the next question and diving into the book itself, you know, this book represents, I think for me, at least as far as I've come across, one of the most realistic sort of trajectories of how climate change is going to play out over the next several decades. I was just wondering, what made you want to write this book and what did you ultimately sort of want to accomplish? with it? Well, I'm a science fiction writer, so I set my stories in the future, and I'm interested in that zone of the future that is relatively near to us. So you have to realize, and I think everybody does, that science fiction, if you define it as stories set in the future, if you set them

five million years in the future, then they become a kind of a fantasy space, because anything could happen in those five million years. If you set them five years in the future, you've got a very different kind of feel to the stories that you're writing that are more like a realism for our time, just slightly offset into the future to create a kind of surrealistic effect or point out trends that are happening that if they continue, will lead to the space of the story. So I tend to focus on the newer future. And I should add that I'm very interested in that in-between zone of the time that is not just like our time and being five years in the future, but more like 100 years to, say, 300 years in the future, that's a very different space

than space opera of millions of years in the future out in the galaxy. And it's also a different space than near-future science fiction and a day after tomorrow type stuff. And I'm interested in that. But whether you're interested in the near future or the middle future of future history, you might call it, that 100 to 300 year zone, climate change is an overtetermining a thing that's going to be happening. So if you want to write about, use science action to write about reality itself from that angle of the future, then climate change has to be taken into account. And I've been doing that for a long time. Ever since my, in a way, my Mars trilogy was about climate change, but it was on Mars. Then I came back in Antarctica

to this planet. And ever since, my, in a way, my Mars trilogy was about climate change, but it was on Mars. And ever since then, with some notable exceptions, I've been writing about climate change time after time. But with Ministry for the Future, I decided to really put all my cards on the table and go directly at the problem and try to describe, from studying from right now, about three decades out approximately, and then show a kind of a best-case scenario. In other words, a good outcome that you could still believe in while you were reading it, you know, given the willing suspension of disbelief that we give to fiction while you're reading it, your bullshit detector would not go off too alarmingly. You would grant that the story could happen that way, and at the

end of it, you could contemplate it and say what you like about it, but you would have gone through the experience of the fictional or virtual experience of a best case scenario of future starting from right now. And you definitely achieve that. I think one thing about art and specifically science fiction, specifically your science fiction, is that it can really be used to expand the political imagination and deconstruct what we call capitalist realism. I see a lot of science fiction that would be set, you know, hundreds of years into the future. In fact, I'm watching the sci-fi show, The Expans, right now. And it's sort of a reflection of this where it's set, you know, many centuries into the future,

but it still takes for granted that capitalism and the hierarchies that it fosters more or less exist. sort of inherently dreary in that it doesn't even seem to question that economic system, and it just projects that into the far future, which is always dystopian, whether the people really writing it, you know, understand that assumption and that indication of, implication of it going forward. But just speaking of all of this stuff, you know, what positive social function can science fiction play in a society? And I've heard you mention that your book's been described as anti-dispopian as opposed to utopian. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that as well. Yeah, thanks. That brings in a bundle of things I'm really interested in.

Capitalist realism and really American science fiction of the so-called golden age, the 1940s or 50s, it's striking when you read those texts now. They're still very interesting, but they also show that one has a tendency to project forward into time the reality that you're in now, and not see things that your culture makes it hard to see. And so when you read older science fiction, you get a good glimpse into what that culture's moment thought the future might bring. And that's a big part of any cultural imaginary. That's what science fiction does.

So I've been saying for a while that what science fiction does aesthetically and politically, and the two together kind of, is that one it's like a 3D glasses at the movies for the old 3D movies that one they the two lenses of of the effect show you slightly different things one of them really is trying to talk about a future that might be possible it's like prophecy the other one is a metaphor for the way things feel right now like oh I feel like a robot at work or time seems to be speeding up the metaphorical applications are usually pretty obvious. And I would say that you don't have to,

that something like the expanse, I've done this very same thing myself in New York 2140, the extension of capitalist realism out into a time beyond which it can really survive in geophysical terms is not a mistake, but an emphasis of the metaphorical lens over the prophecy lens. And when you bring those two lenses together, when you manage to pop a false 3D that,

that false third dimension is history itself. So this is the use value of science fiction. You read a science fiction text, you're sophisticated enough reader, and science fiction readers are very sophisticated in decoding science fiction. They can make the two lenses coalesce into a single 3D that they quite enjoy because they're co-creating it as they read or watch. But especially reading, you know, the act of co-creation on the part of the reader is incredibly creative and generous, one hopes. So what's interesting then is to sometimes talk about capitalist realism, but then also, obviously, the political interest of science fiction would be to postulate that in the future,

things will be different. Well, how will they be different? You've got hopes and fears. If things continue to devolve and go wrong, you've got dystopias, and that expresses our fears. And then we have a lot of fears for good reason. And then hope, if you hope that things will get better, well, what would that look like? How would we get to it? And the second question I've been very, very interested in.

Because how, you know, you can postulate that things would be better. It's relatively straightforward. Oh, well, justice, sustainability, unpack those, go to work. That's the definition. Things would be better then. But how do we get from here to there? And that's where a science fiction story that gets a little historical and tries to tell the story of that better society coming into being in ways that you can still believe right now,

that would be both anti-utopian and also kind of a low bar for utopia, but I think that's appropriate. It would also be utopian. So the two have different functions. I mean, there's a discussion we can go into. If you posit utopia, then you can either say that that will never happen and then you're being dystopian or you could say that by trying to create utopia you will make things worse that's anti-utopian and the classic examples are 1984 is just a dystopia that government wants its boot on your neck wants you to suffer a little and make you fearful brave new world is the classic anti-utopia they tried to make things great for people but instead they turned them all into drugged out zombies so that's a statement on huxley's part and it's not his

final statement that utopia doesn't work because trying to make a better society will always boomerang back and make things worse instead of better. So, I mean, this is Jameson again. He's always using the gray mouse rectangle. And so you've got the knot and the anti. So you start with utopia. You've got the not utopia is dystopia. The anti-utopia. Then there's a fourth term that is anti-ante. So it's important, Jameson, says, to be anti-utopian, to leave a mental space for the idea things can get better. And it was Bill McKibbon who simplified this fourth term in a way that I quite like and just said that Ministry for the Future is anti-dispopian. And that's an interesting difference. And there aren't quite the same thing. But in any case, that's how I would

unpack that that particular set of issues. Yeah. Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I find those nuances incredibly fascinating and interesting to play around with. And I like how it just destroys the simplified dichotomy of it's either dystopian or it's utopian. I like that a lot. But let's go a little deeper into the book. And one thing that I am interested in and that you depict in the book is the concept of geoengineering as a sort of, you know, kind of like a last resort that we are pushing ourselves towards due to our general inaction on the climate front for so many years up until now. It seems like while there is no silver bullet, geoengineering will definitely play a role in our response going forward. Can you talk about the kinds of geoengineering

that you explicitly explore in the book and what, if any, you didn't include? Yeah, sure. I'll preface that by saying that it's very important. I take it that it probably make sense that most of our audience here will be leftists. And I want to say that there's a leftist knee-jerk response against geoengineering as an idea that I see in the culture very clearly that has to do with rejection of some kind of silver bullet response that would allow us to keep on limping along in the capitalist system. And it's like all the technological interventions has created a horrible problem. So then you have another even bigger technological intervention. And who's to say that wouldn't create an even bigger problem, the kind of so-called

snowpiercer scenario. And so in general, geoengineering has been equated in a very simple definition as bad things done by capitalist to try to get away with capitalism. So naturally it's bad. And people just, when they hear the word, they begin to think, you know, well, in my case, Robinson must have lost his mind or been suborn somehow. I want to push back against that and say that we are in an all-hands-deck situation. We are slipping into a mass extinction event. We have to decarbonize our technological infrastructure way faster than capitalism will allow. And because capitalism is fixated on the single index of profit and decarbonizing our infrastructure is not, the highest rate of return and not even profitable, we will never do it. Therefore, we are doomed. So the first act of geoengineering would be to change capitalism to a better system, the better index.

But also, all the other geoengineering ideas need to be put on the table and discussed as emergency operations that we might need to keep mass death from happening. And that's why ministry starts with the scene of math death and is followed by some after the barn door is open kind of geoengineering attempts. So with that kind of preface, I naturally, I went to the first one that is most on everybody's minds, which is sometimes called solar radiation management, that you toss some dust into the atmosphere and imitate a volcanic explosion and you reduce global average temperatures by a degree or two for two to five years. It depends on how much dust you put up there, et cetera.

deflect away some sunlight. Well, this is hubris. This is crazy, but it might nevertheless be helpful, if not necessary. If global average temperatures get too hot, the temperatures combined with humidities might rise to a point where people just die in them unless they're in air conditioning. And, of course, power grids fail. So I describe a kind of an undiscussed act of solar radiation management by the Indian government because the first big heat death happens in India. And then that becomes normalized in the next 30 years as to being something that's on the table to do because it does not lead to dreadful results. And now that is a guess on my part, although based on the scientific evidence, people do worry that,

When you have a big worldwide affecting global volcanic explosion that does lower temperatures in the way that we're modeling here, that sometimes that slows down the monsoon and then people will be dying for a different reason. And there are other effects that people worry quite a bit about. But I'm going to say that it doesn't matter what well-meaning and well-informed leftist intellectuals in the West. It doesn't matter what we think. if people start dying on mass because the global average temperature has been driven too high by our developed countries' actions, the developing world may go ahead and do some of these things, and we have no moral basis to object to that. And also, it doesn't matter on a practical

basis whether we object or not, because any nation state has a fleet of planes to be able to get up into the stratosphere and throw out some... I just learned yesterday that the best dust was probably calcium carbonate, which is simply ground up limestone, almost like chalk. That's already in the lower atmosphere. It doesn't seem to be doing any harm, and you throw it up there. It's way better than sulfur dioxide, which is what volcanoes toss up there, because sulfur dioxide tends to degrade the ozone layer. So you'd be killing yourself a different way by imitating a pinotubo precisely with

sulfur dioxide particles. Better just to use chalk, bounce some sunlight away from us, lower temperatures, the chalk falls to the ground. That's not unproblematic. It might have effects that are bad in the Arctic. So this is another problem, but it would only last for two to five years, and then we could evaluate what happened and think it over again. I think this is coming. The other geoengineering that I talked about in the book, the major one, aside from things like justice, things like women's rights, things like new religion, these are all geoengineering too but the other one that is in the in the realm of

manipulating the biosphere geosphere system to help us here is the attempt to suck water out from under the big glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland to have them bottom back out on the rock so that they'll slow back down to the speed that they were before because the reason sea level is rising is because these glaciers are sliding into the sea faster it's not that they're melting in place they do that a tiny bit, the water runs down to the bottom, they get lifted and floated and then they're sliding on a water slide of sorts and they run down into the ocean about 10 times faster than they used to be. So this is the situation that some glaciologists suggested this method

to me. And I thought it was super interesting and I asked all my other glaciologist friends if they thought it would work. And the other ones, you know, it's an idea in that community. they said, well, it completely depends on the configuration of the bottom rock. If it's a canyon might work. If it's a gigantic sloping plane might not work, certainly worth investigating. And for me, that was good enough to stick it into my novel. So I would add that I didn't, and I absolutely think it would be a bad idea to, for instance, throw iron dust into the ocean, hoping to create a plankton bloom that will then die and drop to the ocean floor. The ocean is already so messed up. I feel like amongst all the geoengineering methodologies that have been

discussed, that one is, to me, the creepiest, the ones with the one with the most possibility for collateral damage that we didn't expect. But again, to finish, it's all hands on deck. Everything has to be discussed with an open mind and given a scientific evaluation and a political evaluation to see if we might need to use it if we overheat. Yeah. I really love that opening point you made about and, you know, the over sort of fear-mongering about these things. And, you know, it's based in some sense in reality, but also, like, this is going to

have to be part of the puzzle. The glaciers was a fascinating thing. I had never thought about it or heard that. And just the paper I read the other day, new studies are showing that sea levels are rising faster than even previously thought on par with some of the more pessimistic projections. So stuff like that glacier geoengineering might become more and more front and center in our minds. Oceans, I also completely agree.

I mean, we don't really understand the oceans on the level that we need to to be able to mess with it on that level. You know, it's more unexplored than our moon, as is often said, and already with climate change, it's 30% more acidic the oceans in general are. So I agree that you're playing. with fire when you start trying to tinker with that. And then also, I really loved how you depicted the unilateral sort of action from hard-hit countries, often in the global South, who definitely don't bear the same responsibility as countries in the

developed North, but will and already are being hit harder by it, forcing themselves to do increasingly desperate things without getting the rest of the world on board. And I think that is going to be more likely than some come to Jesus. moment where the whole world comes together, holds hands, and advances forward. We already see the rising far-right, rabid nationalism in the face of globalization rising in our own time right now, and that's only going to, I think, intensify along with elements of progressive thought that are pushing for more internationalist cooperation. Both those sides, I think, are going to be inflamed in the coming decades. And so one country being particularly devastated by a particular

event taking unilateral action, I think is very likely. And the political fallout from that that you explore is another fascinating element of your book. Yeah, well, I can only agree. I think that there won't be, well, let's not put it that way. It would be hard for the international community to agree to do something global that will have different effects in different parts of the world Because even though we are faced with a global biospheric problem, we're in the nation-state system. And that's generally regarded as a zero-sum game where if one nation wins, the other nations lose, et cetera. Certainly many political leaders and many citizens think of it that way. So that'll be a hard one.

That said, my ministry for the future is predicated on the continuing adherence to the Paris Agreement and the idea of the Paris Agreement. the international treaty space in which we try to do things all together. And one very cool thing about the Paris Agreement, given what you were just saying, is that common but differentiated obligations is written in from the start that climate equity, climate justice was written into the Paris Agreement by the people who framed it. And this was a huge battle in 2015 when they were writing it that essentially the climate justice crowd won. It stated multiple times in the agreement. and they even have a schedule of essentially developed nations or rich nations

and developing nations or poor nations with a little bit of a disagreement at the margin as to some countries which category do they belong in but the categories exist and the rich nations promised to do more to help the poor nations both to get their populations completely out of poverty and up to adequacy whilst also combating climate change at the same time I mean, this is a show that's about capitalism, and so everybody listening is aware that capital exists in every system, resources, capital, the useful residue of human labor, sometimes we've called capital, sometimes you can just say money, but in any case, capitalism is a system of power where the few control of a capital that is created by everybody, and what we would want is a more just system where the horizontalization of power and resources is accomplished. But in any case, that capital is going to need to be invested in decarbonization rapidly. And that means that developing nations need help. And this is not a matter of charity. This is a matter of the historical past of the many of the global

South being colonized and ripped off and now getting a bit of help getting back into the the flow of all of the benefits of modern civilizations such as they are. So the point I'm trying to make here is that the Paris Agreement has a potential for good in it that is quite extraordinary. Yeah. You know, it's fairly toothless at the moment, but it provides a framework that can be made more robust going forward, and some of that language will become increasingly important as that robusting process occurs, hopefully. And I definitely also agree the importance of understanding our interdependence on one another. And, you know, with the pandemic and with climate change, it's almost as if nature is putting pressure on the contradictions of nationalism and

forcing us to evolve or perish. It's like you either evolve to a something like a global civilization or you stay these little warring nation states looking out for only themselves and you perish, as Martin Luther King would say, together as fools. So it's kind of interesting to think of nature putting that sort of filtering pressure on us and, you know, the civilizations that rise to the challenge, they make it past this stage, the ones that don't, you know, they fall away or at least are knocked back into the past. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I want to add that Paris Agreement is toothless because all international treaty organizations are toothless. The UN is toothless. The League of Nations was so toothless that it died and was useless

assume we got World War II. So it's, as you say, we either put some teeth into the Paris Agreement by everybody agreeing that it's so important that we all have to adhere to it in a kind of mutual aid situation because there will never be a sheriff. We won't be authorizing an army to go around and punish the transgressors. The voluntary basis of the Paris Agreement is just inherent in the nation-state system because there's, the international courts are relatively toothless, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a mutual age situation.

And it's, as you say, unless we recognize that and do the right things, there will be a citizen, there'll be a mass extinction event. And that will cause a civilizational crash. And then we are knocked back. I mean, I'm not saying humanity will go extinct. I don't think we will. But if civilization is knocked back hard enough, you can imagine a stupendous crash. crash as quite possible.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's also how these, our reaction to combating the nationalist forces that we see with Trump, with Bolsonaro, with Modi, et cetera, is linked to this broader fight against climate change. And so none of these struggles are, are separated from one another. That's true. Yes. And many of those nationalist forces are also petro states, and they're sitting on fossil fuels that they own as a nation. So Russia, Brazil, United States, States, Canada, Australia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, if the authoritarian nationalists decide that they need to sell and burn their carbon, whilst it is still possible to do so and not just a stranded asset, then there's a race to destruction as everybody tries to burn as much as they can

before that becomes impossible one way or another. So, yes, a very fraught and dangerous moment right now. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, moving forward, you know, perhaps my favorite in a morbidly curious kind of way, and I've heard you describe this part of your book as one of the more frightening aspects of the book itself was the aspect that covered the rise of the children of Kali. They came out of the ruins of a catastrophic Indian heat wave that you opened the book with. And in a similar way to geoengineering, they represent a sort of desperation, if not a last resort, sort of activity. Can you talk about who the children of Kali are in the book, what they do, and how likely it is that some analog to them

will probably exist in the coming decades? Well, I can try. I find this stuff really scary, and it makes me queasy and uncertain to talk about it. And, I mean, you write a novel that portrays a best-case scenario for the next 30 years, and there is a strand of political violence in it, it can be easily read as advocating that violence as a necessary part of the solution. And I want to say that for me, it was more a fearful feeling that if we don't cope properly with climate change starting right now and really fast, that the alternative to that is people around the world suffering so much from the bad effects of climate change that they're going

to be stupendously angry and there's going to be a violent response, probably more spasmodic and inchoate than what I described in my novel, which is relatively targeted and pointed to get useful results. It's probably, if it were really to happen, it would be wilder and more useless and fact counterproductive than what I portrayed. So then, I mean, I'm thinking about sabotage, ecotage it got called, and when I was first interested in it, it had to do with deforestation in the Pacific Northwest and just wrecking machinery that belonged to capitalists who were destroying the biosphere for profit. And so it was a matter of appropriation, exploitation, and wreckage that was vandalistic and depriving the people of the future of the biosphere that they are going to depend on. And so sabotage looked to me and to many others to be morally allowable and even in some cases a kind of moral imperative if you were going to do anything. When you come to hurting people, and this was a very interesting case when it came to trying to stop the logging in the Pacific.

northwest. So you could pour sugar into the gas tanks of bulldozers. And it was kind of no harm to people. The harm was all to capitalism to profit margins. And their profit margins were so thin as always that it might stop them. But then there were people spiking trees so that if a logger used a chainsaw and ran into a spike in a tree, it could hurt that logger even to the point of maybe killing them. So there was a methodology to these different sabotage methods that crossed over a line between hurting or destroying machinery and hurting other people. And there was a point where the debate was clarified to where you could say, yeah, it's okay to destroy property. It's not okay to hurt people. A lot of people said that then. And I think that's a good thing to hold,

especially from my own subject position. Privileged white male, suburban American, one of the most privileged people in human history, I have to say, in terms of the luck of the draw. I mean, I didn't get to choose it, but I was born into it and I see now what it is given me. For someone in my subject position to advocate political violence is really a bad faith gesture, because I wouldn't do it myself. And the people who will do it will get hammered for it. They'll get killed or jail. for 40 years for attempting it. And the state monopoly and violence is very tightly held. And so physical resistance of that kind, first of all, you're hurting other people, never a good thing. Secondly, its political effectiveness is highly questionable because the response against it, the rallying against it, like, oh, these people are so bad, these people are terrorists. You can often, your efforts can rebound against your own political desires. And there's a very interesting book by Erica Chenoweth, why civil resistance works, or maybe it's called why nonviolent civil resistance works. In any case, she makes the case as a sociologist that nonviolent resistant movements have very often achieved much more of their political goals than violent resistant movements. And she tries to explain why that is. And it starts a very interesting debate. But if you're interested in not advocating something you wouldn't do yourself, So trying to stay coherent, and you are opposed to violence against other humans, and yet we're in a system where the slow violence is radical in killing humans and the future generations, well, what do you do?

At that point, in this all hands-on-deck moment, you've got to think through all of these various options and your own subject position. So in that sense, I wrote this novel, you know, the children of Khalid, but they come from everywhere. They start in India and name themselves after an Indian goddess, God goddess, a deity involved with destruction for the sake of the greater good, but they could come from all over the world, and I imply in my novel that they do, exercising the right to resist the slow violence of neoliberal capitalism by really going after it hard. Well, in a way, I was just doing the job of a science fiction novelist, it seemed likely that this kind of thing would happen. I therefore needed to describe it as happening. I'm not comfortable with that. One of the things I think you'll notice

if you read the book or when you've read the book is that the book doesn't go into details about how much the Ministry for the Future is involved with political violence itself. The reader is cast into the position of a detective. What really happened? What did the ministry join in doing? And then the reader is also not just the detective, but then the judge. You have to imagine what happened and then judge it yourself. Would I agree with that act? Would I not agree with that act? Would I countenance that act, et cetera? So this is how I managed to frame the novel as a discussion of these questions from my own personal position as a American suburban leftist writer. Yeah, I completely sympathize and agree with your, you know, your

suspicion of the use of violence and the recognition of its downstream effects, not least of which include political instability. If you come to power through brutally slaughtering your enemies, you create in a dialectic sort of fashion the very reaction to that movement. And that leads to more political instability, more violence. And it, as we've seen throughout history, becomes a very death spiral sort of situation. Yes. And I always am in you know, pushing back against any fetishization or romanticization of violence on the political left, I do believe that self-defense and the defense of the innocent can come into play, but I also completely agree that it is never justified to hurt innocent people whatsoever.

And there is a big current on the left, I think, that is suspicious of and rejects adventurous, terroristic sort of behavior. But what you display is not an advocation of that stuff, but just saying, hey, this is how the dominoes fall, you know, with this inaction, with this nation state squabbling, in the wake of some catastrophe that hits one region particularly hard and other regions are spared, you have to think through the implications of that, and this is likely one of them. Now, in your book, you depict it as pretty much a, I mean, a revolutionary force for progress, right, targeted assassinations of particularly evil people, shooting down of private jets,

etc. But in the real world, that could also and will, and we already see, take the form of what is increasingly being called eco-fascism, where, you know, fascists gleefully, we even see it with some of the boogaloo boys and elements of white nationalism and white supremacism. Their goal is to create chaos so that they can then take advantage of the chaos. So in a climate change situation where more and more chaos sort of holds, it's not just people with well-intentioned hearts that want to strike back against the evildoers, that violence will just as easily, and in some cases more easily, come from the far right. And I think we're already sort of seeing, see that bubble up with, you know, far right factions like the base or Adam Woffen, but they're increasingly

consciously embracing climate chaos as a mechanism of their sort of doorway into political recruiting, violence, instability, etc. So, you know, the moment you play that violence card on the left, that violence card on the right is just going to be upped and that anti continues to be upped throughout. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I'm glad to hear you saying that, actually. This is reassuring to me trying to find my own way forward

in terms of thinking strategy. Strategies of the left, what works? So there's the discursive battle that we're in, the battle of words, the battle of ideas. And that's really intense and wicked. But as Shakespeare has this phrase, paper bullets of the brain, it's just ideas. It's just words. Now, when I say just, they're incredibly powerful because they direct actions. They point the guns and they point the armies. So the discursive battle is where you want to fight like a demon to, but then fight. You're trying to persuade also. So what's persuasive? And then you get into rhetoric. And I mean the ancient Greek art of persuading your listeners to your point of view. Because people are not generally persuadable. In your college years, you're kind of.

open to new ideas. Your ideology is somewhat of a blank slate or you're seeking something better than what you were taught when you're a kid. It certainly happened to me. And so that crowd, you want to persuade. And then the point becomes, what is most persuasive to people? How can you win the discursive battle? And then what one hopes is that in this world, with the state monopoly on violence being what it is, that if you win the discursive battle, the armies and police will be pointing the guns in the right direction and we will get good social change backed by the state. So changing the state, changing the laws, you get shifted back to the level of the discursive battle and to the level of politics, which, well, incredibly depressing

because politics is so tedious and stupid and ugly. and yet way better than violence in the streets, getting knifed in the dark or pulled out of your house and shot. So as bad as it is, it's better than the alternatives. And you have to think really hard about what is persuasive to the persuadable amongst the people who aren't already on your side. And, you know, that's been a lifelong quest for me as a leftist novelist, using the novel as a political tool, but it's gotten more acute, of course, in these last

20 years. The 21st century from the 2000 election to 9-11 on has been like kind of a bad alternative history. Many things have gone wrong and led us to a state where in 2021, in some ways, we're worse off than we were in 2000, which is a little shocking because everybody knows more and yet we haven't managed to leverage that better knowledge, even more powerful science. We haven't managed to leverage that into a better outcome for the world. So certainly we've got to have our thinking caps on. And I am actually very interested in ancient Greek rhetoric where they've done a taxonomy where all of the ways in which a speaker persuades his audience or his friends are anatomized

into a gigantic taxonomy of some, you know, they're Greek terms, but they've often been translated into English and, or we use those Greek terms. And it's worth studying such a highly intelligent kind of early experiment in the technology of language and justice, you might say, which is involved in rhetoric and persuasion. Because we got to change the laws and change really fast to get the right things done. We have to create post-capitalism out of capitalism. And we've got to quickly shift from, maybe we can talk about this later. I'm drifting into another thing that I do want to talk about with you, which is the attempt

to diminish battles amongst the leftists over best tactics, best strategy, best philosophy to suggest that it's a united front and everybody's allies in this cause, and we ought to save our arguments for the undecided or for opponents, but also to put it on a timeline, because this is a recent thought of mine. It's a science fiction thought that, especially as a novelist, I'm always trying to imagine different kinds of leftists and different plots being told as to how effective they are or not. If it's the very near future, like, well, let's say like right now, then you want anti-austerity, you want climate laws, you want the Biden administration, do as well as it possibly can.

Do you want to have the Democratic Party in the United States win the 2022 midterm elections? So this is all near-term stuff. And, okay, there's going to be left saying, Stan, why do you even concentrate on that ephemera? Because the picture is so much bigger than that, and we need a complete overthrow. And this is just liberal fiddling. And so then suddenly you're castigated as a mere liberal, which is to say a capitalist who would like to ameliorate the system so it keeps working. But it's stepwise, okay?

So for 2022 or even 2021, you do what you can with the situation that's at hand and try to turn the wheel. 10 years down the line, what you hope for is full on, or even five, Keynesianism, just a balance between government and business. So you're past neoliberalism and back to an improved Keynesianism. Maybe that's modern monetary theory. Then further down the line, I won't put years on it. You get to then, you get social democracies like in Scandinavia. And these are all still can be categorized as versions of capitalism.

So you obviously haven't gotten far enough because there are inherent contradictions and disastrous underpinnings in the axioms of capitalism. But you're cranking the wheel, okay? And then after that, you get to democratic socialism. So social democracy, the next turn, Democratic socialism. If that were to be instituted worldwide, that would be one name for us getting healthier politically and biospherically. Then maybe after that you get to something more like full socialism or well, not in democratic socialism. It's already full socialism. Maybe

then you go to communism. The best parts of the communist program are eternal and devoutly to be wished for. And then maybe the anarchists are talking about something even further out where there's a withering away of the state because there's been a total horizontalization of power and capital. And so then, however many decades or centuries, that's out, that's a horizon goal. Although in a technologically diverse world of eight billion people, I'm dubious about how long we'll take to reach that goal. But I hope what I've made clear here is that all these people are allies with each other whose political imaginaries are focused at a different part of the future and that you can only crank the wheel that you've got, which is, of course,

something that Mark said, you have to deal with the situation that you're in and not just immediately leap to some utopian imaginary of things would be better if they were X. Well, yes, that's no doubt true because we're in such a bad spot. But to get to X, you've got to crank the wheel from where you are. And so I'm now thinking that all these, I mean, it's notorious, right? Left us stab each other in the back because their knives don't reach the right wing who never listen to them. And so therefore we go down. This was Spain. This is the Spanish Civil War. And this story is repeated ever. In every chat room, in every discussion space, this is the story. The left eat each other alive and cannibalize each other. And the right just sits there and laughs at

us for not getting our shit together. And I'm thinking, let's think of it as a timeline problem that actually we're all allies and our cultural imaginaries, us all being science fiction writers, have cast ourselves out to different points along the good history and advocated for that point in the good history. It's not an endpoint and it's not the only solution. And so if you think of your fellow leftists as being allies in a larger cause that has a long timeline, then you can maybe pull in to the fold of your affections liberals and anarchists. You can't do it with libertarians from my read of their situation because they're simply

imagining capitalism has freed them off into a space of their own individual bourgeois autonomy. I mean, I think libertarianism is just off the table of this discussion and is not even a leftism, not even close. But for the rest, for all the things that could be regarded as center-left all the way out to fully radical anarchist, I think they're all on a spectrum that could be put on a timeline. Yeah, I think you're incredibly insightful and thoughtful on these fronts. And you do take the Marxist idea seriously of building the new world out of what you actually have right now in the old one. It's a it is a process. And I think a lot of the hypersectarianism, particularly that we see online and on social media, is a sort of manifestation of the left's impotence and the hyper individualism embedded in our culture, which the left can take on board just as easily as anybody else, which says me and my ideas and my preferences are more important than standing back, thinking socially, thinking historically.

And it also is a great way to build an online brand and to express yourself and, you know, sort of playing into the cult of individualism that we see. And certainly we share the goal of diminishing sectarianism on the left it's something RevLeft does and tries to do very much to have these conversations across a different sex of the left so that we can at least understand each other and to use persuasion to reach people not only intellectually but also emotionally and in their hearts which i think people respond to much more than simply you know abstract intellectualizing and the entire time that this process is taking place however you think the process will develop there's the role for the left to be

organizing on the ground to be building autonomous democratic democratic movements, a dual power, mutual aid, community defense, taking care of each other and building up democracy in a sort of cultural bottom-up way as we fight on all fronts, including the electoral front. You're not going to, and any time soon, wage some magical revolution that's over is going to topple capitalism and take over the state or build anarchism out of nothing. It's going to be a messy, dirty process that you have to come to terms with if you want to make progress at all. I think one of the critiques of social democracy that I think is the most legitimate and that, you know, people that advocate for democratic socialism

should, I think, take seriously is the connection between imperialism and capitalism and that so much of the wealth that goes to fund social democratic building in the global north is often siphoned and extracted from the global south. So, you know, for me, a robust social democracy would be part and parcel with an ending of imperialism if you want the social democratic project to be taken sort of seriously and to be disconnected from capitalism in the way that imperialism is just an outgrowth of capitalism on the international stage. Do you have any thoughts on that? I agree with all that. That strikes me as a great description of the situation that we're in. And I like the emphasis on mutual aid and on bringing together different

discourses and also how there's an eco-Marxism as well as eco-fascism. And Jason Moore, with his idea of the four cheaps and then with Patel making it the seven cheaps, the way imperialist capitalism has gone out into the world and extracted value out of the global south and anywhere else that can be conquered, including the whole precariet now of the north, because the falling rate of profit generally has caused the ordinary cranking of the capitalist engine to find better and better ways to exploit everybody. So it's not just in the post-colonial countries. It's not just in the global south. In even the most developed countries on Earth, and let's just say the United States, the precariet includes people who used to think of themselves as the happy

middle class, and now they're not because they're precarious. And that that cranking of the engine to keep profit going in a world where the four cheaps no longer exist will intensify precisely against human beings because that's the last and most exploitable resource. So resisting that is indeed part of the process of getting to post-capitalism. And I very often use this term post-capitalism to leave it as a kind of an open marker as to what will come next as the name of an order to kind of leave some flex there for, things that we might not yet have theorized that will be useful. And also a way of suggesting that capitalism itself, you can use the tools that already exist to start the process in

extremely useful ways. Say it is a world of the few powerful, the 1%, although I think it's very useful and valid to talk about the 10%, the top 1%, the top 10%, whichever, to pressure that population. And here you don't have to resort to a physical violence, which is morally bankrupt anyway, but simply speak about bankruptcy itself. Tax structures, a big haircut, a really big haircut, such that you've got a horizontalization of wealth. And, of course, that has to happen at more than just the individual level. It has to happen at the level of corporations and of nation states. the idea of the haircut by way of taxes, by way of laws being passed, that it's financial

violence. And so it's discursive violence. It takes place in the realm of numbers. This is a move towards post-capitalism that I'm very interested in because it can be done by the political method. Now, I know that very well that many in the leftist community will scoff at this as being naive, that power never gives up power, et cetera, and you can't legislate your way out of the inherent power dynamic that we're in. I would challenge that. This is part of democratic socialism to say that the armies and the police will point their guns where the laws tell them to point their guns. That rule of law is not particularly powerful, but is more powerful than anything else that we have available to us. And if you count on the state system holding, that the rich

can't buy it out because they're such a tiny minority, if you could win the discursive battle, if you can create working political majorities to pass laws, to create socialism and also biosphere health, socialism as a way to get to biosphere health, maybe the only way, that you need to do that by winning the discursive battle. in changing the laws in a long when wicked political fight that we're in that we've been losing for quite some time. And for my, you have to take it from my perspective. The 70s were wild. Anything could have happened. History was in flux. The post-colonial moment was not even over yet. And it was crazy and anything could happen. And that was the feeling I had as a young person.

And then 1980, Reagan and Thatcher and the neoliberal counter-revolution. It was like a door slamming in our face. It was a complete surprise. It took years to even come to grips with what it happened or even to understand what was happening. And it took a while to analyze and figure out what was happening. And then the die was cast. The discursive battle had been lost, I would say. And that's 40 years now, 40 years of neoliberal capitalism

in which really, in terms of the dominant activities of humanity, bad things have happened in those 40 years. more injustice, for sure, more inequality. This is all measurable and more biosphere destruction. And so turning back in a good direction is proved way more difficult than I would have thought when I was young. And this is one of the many reasons why I love to see young persons like yourself and like the whole, the bulk of your audience and young people in general, they're well educated in America. And I think worldwide, everybody now is kind of well educated and saying, look, we're being screwed here. And we need to turn back the valence of political change.

So I really welcome that because 40 years is a long time to be on the defensive. Yeah, absolutely. And there's this sort of shallow intergenerational hatred like, like, you know, fuck the boomers, etc. But we have to understand that not all the boomers are hardcore reactionaries. they advanced the ball on some serious ways. I mean, Angela Davis is a boomer. Fred Hampton is a boomer. You know, like Malcolm X would be, if he was still alive, would be a boomer.

You know, there was this segment of people really advancing the ball and that they didn't do it all the way. How could they? But they advanced it to such a degree and they taught us so much that it's our turn and I'll grab that torch and carry it forward. Oh, yes. Well, let me make a defense of the boomers being one myself. You can only do what you can do.

We lost pretty bad. Capitalism is a gerontocracy. So you young people, when you're old, there will be people 40 years younger saying that you were sellouts, you didn't get it done, you're rich, you've climbed the ladder and then pulled the ladder up behind you. and you're going to be saying, wait, it wasn't me, we did the best we could. It's just that as we got old, and, you know, it's absolutely the case that most boomers are flat broke. So this whole intergenerational battle is yet another splitting that the right can laugh at. And it is the automatic motion of capitalism to coalesce more money as if by gravity into the hands of fewer and fewer people. and just by the nature of time, they tend to be older.

It takes a while to grab that, not always, but often. And then in terms of defense of the baby boomers, well, a lot of it was a bit naive compared to now, but we did manage to make a lot of progress on certain fronts, maybe identity politics, maybe historicization, for sure, the anti-war movement. And that's where I think it gets interesting. We fought like demons to stop the, Vietnam War because our lives were on the line. We could have got sent over there and killed ourselves. It's the same with this pandemic. People that responded to the pandemic because it

could kill you. And now with climate change, all young people, it may be that you will have more momentum than the baby murmurs had. Because when the Vietnam War stopped, there was this illusory feeling from, say, 75 to 80 that, oh, we won. And then the weirdness of the Carter years, the sense that, but wait, what did we win and did we really win? And then, oops, no, we didn't. Because although there were huge strides made in terms of social justice and civil rights, they weren't the end of the story by any means. It was, so we had some illusions that were busted as life went on. And that's going to, that's sort of the story of aging. You're young, you have, you have some idealistic beliefs, then life happens.

And at the end, you go, oh, my God, you know, what went wrong? Well, there are people that weren't convinced. There is a system that we live in that is like an algorithm that crunches up lives in biosphere in an algorithmic way. And the people that benefit from it are saying, I like this algorithm. Why should we change it? And everybody else suffers. Yeah, absolutely.

I'll say a couple points and we can move on. The whole idea of generations and fetishizing that, separation, you're 100% correct. It splits people up and it's an idealist obscurantism of real material politics, so don't fall into it, you know, and I know a lot of people just do it as a meme and I get it, but you always be suspicious of those sorts of dividing up of people because it has no relevance to actual material reality. The second thing is I really love how you emphasize this open-ended experimental aspect inherent in Marxism. Marxism is anti-dogmatic. Dialectics is an emphasis on the continual process of change. And as the left bolsters its forces, as the left makes

advances, capitalism adjusts, the reactionary right adjusts. And so everything is sort of evolving in the face of the other thing. And, you know, you have to understand it as this outflowing process and not as these static sort of categories or these checklists of things that you can do. And then it's socialism. And so I think that's another thing that you emphasize that I appreciate. And lastly, you know, if you disagree with anything that's being discussed here, the whole point is for you to understand that position and to understand why you disagree. And so, you know, I think there's like this thing on the left that falls out of sectarianism and purity politics where it's like we don't even want to hear ideas that aren't exactly

what we're already committed to. And I think that feeds into dogmatism. It makes you more impotent. It cuts you off from the actual realities of regular people that aren't in these siloed hyper ideological sort of, you know, subsex, and I think it's ultimately damaging to our movement. So I really appreciate, you know, you laying out this thoughtful analysis and, you know, people can engage with it on those terms and not straw man and have some hyper simplified idea, which only, you know, is to the detriment of their own understanding of the world. But I do want to ask this question that sort of falls out of this discussion, and then we can move into two closing questions. And that's something, and, you know, taking everything we've said so

far, you know, for granted, you know, just looking at the right, you know, the political right in this country, in government and outside of it, it's really set the stage for a minoritarian rule for years to come. I mean, the electoral college, a right-wing Supreme Court, voter suppression and gerrymandering, a hyperfunded by billionaires, right-wing corporate news media that's getting further and further into the conspiratorial fever dreams of the far right with OAN and Newsmax, etc. Even with a clear majority of people, that the polling shows want real systematic change on a number of fronts. Our reactionary institutions are seemingly simply not going to allow that change to happen.

So, you know, all of the talk of democracy and using the political state for our own advantages, you know, taken for granted and on the table, what are your thoughts on this attempt by the right to instantiate minoritarian rule? And maybe it's not even fair to say instantiate because the system in so many ways was set up to be minoritarian rule of white landowning property males, and that tradition is just sort of manifesting in the current era as the Mitch McConnell's, you know, the hyper right wing media, etc. But what are your thoughts on sort of overcoming that? Because I don't think persuasion in and of itself is going to be enough on that particular front. Well, it is a wicked problem. And everything that you describe is

happening and self, it's evidence. And I would agree with your description of the situation 100%. And what it means is you have to gain a working majority, which is very often far more than 51%. And what you can point to is, okay, the Constitution is set and there will never see another amendment of the Constitution passed in our lifetimes because of this intense partisan divide. And the bar is set too high for amendments. The bar is set too high for quite a few things. And yet, If rule of law holds, what this suggests is we've still got the numbers and the demographic surge amongst young people means that old reactionary whites are going to die. And we're in a multicultural United States in a multicultural world, multi-ethnic. And the numbers are on our side. And therefore, you have to look at the already existing political system and basically do like Stacey Abrams in Georgia and say there's no reason. Georgia can't be a blue state. We just need everybody to come out and vote who has their, for their own self-interest. And so what I would say also to young leftists, and I did this myself when I was young

and even middle age, is you actually have to get off the internet, which didn't exist when I was young, that made it easier, get off the internet and go down to your local school board meeting, your local town council meeting in your local area. And this is bottom up stuff. And that's where you can fight the gerrymandering where you can get your town to sign on to good climate goals, where you can actually make a difference and not just comment on it on the internet, but actually get out there and be an active citizen beyond just voting every two years or whatever. Now, I'm going to say that's tedious. There's something intensely boring about the slowness and the stupidity of local town council meetings. And I know this from putting in my about three to four years,

not on the town council, but going to the meetings every week and giving commentary and joining citizen groups where you don't have to win an election, but just join and start putting your shoulder to the wheel. And that's really what the right did in the neoliberal era to fight against liberal reforms that were happening was go to the school boards and go to the local town councils and put in the boring hours of actual political work in America. So, I mean, People can calculate how much time they spend on their social media per week. For all of us, it's likely to be kind of shockingly high. You could maybe, and a lot of it's crap in terms of you're getting repetitive,

self-reinforcing, non-important new information. All this stuff is already known to us. So it's a little bit of a useless stroking to cut that time in half and spend half of that time doing local work, landscape work, political work. and then try to push this Stacey Abrams thing in the national scene. It's just as you described. On the other hand, we got the numbers and 51% not being enough, very often because of the electoral college, because of the Senate,

because of the way the Constitution set up, minority rule, as you pointed out, what's hilarious is that if equal representation under the law and one person, one vote, are fundamental values of, let's say, American law, if not human rights, that the Constitution is illegal. Well, we use the Constitution as the benchmark of what's legal and what's not, and so we have a standing contradiction, which is not at all uncommon in the capitalist system, but this one's political, a standing contradiction between the principle that one person gets one vote in. We are all equal people and a political system that grotesquely warps.

that to the point where if you're in Wyoming, you've got like twice as many votes as a person from New York because of the Senate, electoral college, et cetera. This is all known to all of us. So I won't reiterate the details of it, except that the defense is in numbers and in going and doing the local and the regional and the state and the national work altogether as a united front and all fronts count. And you've got to put in the hours. And really young people are better suited being more idealistic and energetic and having more time and being less beat down by years of stupid local work. It's a wave, it's a wave in history where each wave puts in five years of really hard volunteer work and then maybe relaxes in hopes the next generation

can take it up because you're just kind of beaten down. And that's just my own personal response to many years of fighting various fights in Davis, California. Yeah. Yeah, no, I like that a lot. And on the local level, there's, you know, PTA meetings, there's local politics. Yes. There's local electoral politics. There's also local organizing. There's feeding people. You know, there's building up mutual aid organizations.

You know, community defense against neo-Nazis and fascist intrusions, etc. It runs the gamut. And I've always said, spending an hour shoveling your neighbor's driveway with snow is more useful than spending 14 hours arguing online about your specific ideas about the world. It's actually more materially relevant to the people that you're most connected to to turn around and help your neighbor than it is to scream online in your little silo for the profit, mind you, of huge tech monopolies. The whole time you're on there, they're extracting your data and making money

so you can get as mad and as angry as you want. You're playing their game on their field. And I think that should be a huge thing that we take away from the whole social media discourse as well. Yes, mutual aid. And also, Gary Snyder, the great California Buddhist hippie poet, whom I love so much, a teacher and friend of mine once said to me, you've got to make a distinguishment between your network and your community. And your community is your neighbors, your local, you're in physical contact with them. You talk to them every day, and it's your physical space.

And that's your community. And then your network is international and it's done virtually over the Internet, et cetera, et cetera. And although occasionally you get to meet. Now, you cannot turn your network into your community without huge damage of isolation, depression, a feeling of futility. You have to have a community. And then your network is also enriched because certainly it's great to have a global network. I mean, I love mine. I was just before I was talking to you, I was talking to people I had scarcely met in Pakistan and it was exhilarating.

But my community, I'll go out, I'll be gardening with my fellow gardeners. Well, you need these people badly, especially now in the pandemic, where it's all, you know, a little bit cautious and trying to make sure we don't infect each other. But nevertheless, because there is this overmastering fascination of the screen that you all, your age, have lived with your whole lives in, but it's an unnatural intrusion such that I see it as, oh my God, it's as if TV is taken over, as if we've all become couch potatoes, or Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451 has an incredibly pressing image of that. In writing in 1950, he predicts the internet. And the way it can eat up your lives and you have nothing but network and you think that that's your community, but it just doesn't work. It's very important to keep ties to your community and do work in your community. And that's what you've been talking about, mutual aid. One thing I'll say, though, is when you go out and you do, as a volunteer, help to feed people and help the homeless, which my wife has led me into doing.

And God bless her for that. Because what it does, though, is make you... incredibly angry that this has to be done by volunteer labor because our state, our nation that we are supposedly part of and our government, in essence, isn't doing it as a natural part of government work, but it has to be done on the side as a charity thing. Well, that's deeply wrong. And that's one of the reasons that socialism is the solution is that food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education and electricity are human rights that need to be provided by the mutual aid of the state itself. And when government goes neoliberal and turns it into a doggy dog word, well, the losers just

die in misery. Well, this is wrong. Absolutely. And that moral argument is becoming more and more relatable to more and more people as we see this state just fail us on every front during a pandemic. And one of the things when the pandemic started that I really wanted to take seriously was and you echoed this and your difference between physical community and networks is I wanted to sort of get to know my neighbors and to get past that initial sort of like awkwardness of saying hi to a neighbor that you've never talked to before. And so it started with shoveling driveways or mowing my neighbor's lawn or helping my neighbor jumpstart their car, exchanging tax numbers. If you ever need anything during this pandemic, you know, let us know. taking in my, across the street, my neighbor's elderly, helping her carry her groceries into her house. And one day I held, we put up a red flag on our porch for May Day. You know, not thinking that anybody in our neighborhood, we live in Nebraska, it's a red state, not thinking anybody would

even know what it meant to hang a red flag out on May Day. We have Labor Day. We don't have May Day in the United States for very clear historical reasons. My neighbor, diagonal to me, actually knew what it was. That started a dialogue. And turns out he's a, you know, very far to the left, almost a Marxist socialist type, and he was flabbergasted to see the red flag out on May Day. And so it opens up this whole new world of the people that, you know, when push comes to shove are the people that are most impactful on your day-to-day life, the people that dramatically and immediately surround you in physical space. And so I would urge anybody listening to at least take that idea incredibly seriously.

Get to know your neighbors, help them, serve people in whatever ways big and small that you can. And not only are you advancing our goals, our ideas, and our values, you actually find that you're happier when you serve other people and think about others as opposed to obsessing over yourself, your online identity, who's dragging you today, et cetera. That is a machine of misery and to step away from it and to serve other people in a myriad of ways, I think is so much the path not only to personal happiness, but to collective and political liberation down the line. Yeah. And I would say good things about Nebraska. And also, as a side note, it's too bad that the New York Times listed red states and blue states backwards in terms of color valances because red used to be the sign of the left. And I kind of liked it as such. But Nebraska, you know, Lincoln and Omaha, this typical for many, many places in America, kind of blue islands and red seas. Why are rural areas not understanding their co-op past? Why would these people be voting red? This is something to understand and trying to change by direct discourse and refiguring the argument and understanding that we're all mongrel in our brains.

And really, you've said this a couple of times, and I want to reinforce it, a rejection of purity, of political correctness, of self-righteousness, a friend of mine, a writer named Jeff Ford, he was locked in by snow and is older and has some physical problems. And there were young people shoveling out his driveway in a helpful way to him. And they were the local Trump voters amongst his neighbors. So particularly in America, I mean, one of the reasons that I think Obama was fooled when he went to Washington and and thought he could convince people to work in a bipartisan way was he came from Illinois, very much a state like Nebraska, where he would go out to state fairs and talk to local Republican

citizens and feel like if they're willing to accept me, then they are tolerant enough that we're all going to be okay. And then when he got to Washington, D.C., the hyper-partisanship that is cranked up by, as you pointed out, Capitol's interest in splitting us meant that he was too inexperienced and young that he was deceived and that in part his presidency went down because of his belief that there's a bipartisanship that doesn't actually exist in Washington, but it exists out in the in the field in the in the small towns where um it's only in the small towns face to face where I have Republican friends whereas politically I would say that's impossible you know how could they be I mean I can't relate to somebody who's

that fearful and greedy, let's say. But on the other hand, when you start talking to individuals, then you realize, well, maybe this is an internet function, maybe this is virtue signaling or self-righteousness on my part, the urge to righteousness, the othering of the other, like really we're just two baseball teams that are going to fight each other no matter what, and it doesn't have anything to do with the principles involved.

All that needs to be thrown into the hopper and mixed up and thought over again so that we can communicate better. And again, it's part of trying to win the discursive battle. Yeah, absolutely. I could not agree more with that. Last year, there was a young teenage girl. She just got her driver's license, probably 16 or 17. She drove off into a ditch.

And it was me, you know, this lefty Marxist with left-wing bumper stickers and stuff and this obvious sort of right-wing, you know, I don't know Trump supporter, but conservative almost certainly guy. and, you know, that never came up. We jumped out of our trucks and we worked together to pull her out of the ditch. And it's just a small little fleeting moment, but it shows that, you know, when push comes to shove, we have more in common, living close to each other and being human beings than so much of corporate media would lead us to believe. And that's not always true. There are some people who are consciously racist and white supremacist and fascist and you can't work with them.

You must combat them. But for the most part, your average wandering around your supermarket conservative isn't an evil person. And it behooves the ruling class to make us fist fight in the streets while they sit back, smoke their cigars, and rake it in. So just keep that in mind. Yeah. And I want to say that because of being a science fiction writer and making many visits down to Silicon Valley in California, meeting billionaires, well, there are always men. And that is very suspicious in and of itself. Anything that is one gender in this world is worrisome in one way or another, except for maybe.

maybe mom support groups, but even there, you would want more dads involved. And I was a Mr. Mom and saw how even that can go wrong. But certainly when you got a bunch of men. But the thing is, they're not evil, and they're not smoking their cigars, and they're not plotting to undo the hopes of the rest of the world. What they are is successful people in an algorithm that has been set up over time that is an improvisation or a cludge. And certainly they don't want to give them.

up their power because they don't trust the collective to exert power right. But it's a, it's a category error to think of them as Snidly Whiplash, twirling their moustaches as they devise evil plans. It's the algorithm. And what's interesting about that is that if the algorithm were to change, if the Congress passed and the Supreme Court didn't overthrow it, and the president signed it, a bill saying that everybody over who's making over $400,000 a year pays the overage of that, 91% in taxes to the federal government. That got signed, well, that's Eisenhower. That happened in 1953 with a Republican Congress and a Republican president is worth discussing. But if it was to happen now, and you would also do Thomas Piccatee

type taxes and say corporations themselves pay, I don't know, 20% of their assets every year, but it would be progressive, let's say. So the bigger the corporation, the bigger the hit. immediately the lawyers would be talking to them about how they need to downsize, how they need to become a co-op, because the co-ops hardly pay any taxes at all, how they need to become owned by their employees to play less taxes. Suddenly, the wielding of tax law, like a leftist club, comes into play, and the algorithm changes, well, the rich people, let's say the 1% that we're demonizing in our heads typically, they're not going to, they'll say, well, if I can't stop that, I'll take my $10 million, my cap, and I'll run with it, and I'm not going to get thrown

in jail for opposing it. In other words, they'll obey the law, and they'll take what they can get out of the legal system that exists. That's what they've done now. Nobody broke the law to become these Silicon Valley billionaires. They obeyed the law, and the law happened to advantage them in being the first one to have an online store or the first one to have an online payment system. So it behooves us all to focus on the system and on changing the laws. And then even the so-called bad guys will hopefully come around in the end. What will happen is they'll regard it as normal and regarded it as being the legal thing to do. And then the structure of feeling around that will change. That's why Eisenhower and a Republican Congress were

able to pass that stuff in 1953 they weren't virtuous they just felt like it was the right thing to do given what had happened in world war two yeah so now's the time i really appreciate how you complicated that that that was a sort of uh sort of lazy sort of thing on my on my part to depict them as as that because they are just like all of us in this system with different levels of advantages playing out the incentive game that is handed to them and it's not necessarily a good versus evil thing. It's much more of a, yeah, change the entire field and the context of the rules and you change people's behavior. And I think that's a much more Marxist way to look at it. And you depict that well in your book, I think, which is really interesting without, I mean, with

complete nuance and showing how some people resist, some people, you know, go into it and how it becomes normal over time. And the whole idea of the, of a new structure of feeling is another fascinating thing that I took out of your book. So I appreciate all of that. Let me end with one question kind of combining the last two and take it in any direction you want. You know, your book is wonderful in that it's simultaneously sort of pessimistic in some ways while maintaining an overall optimism that humans can ultimately come together and solve this problem, though it won't be a necessarily pretty or non-bumpy journey. So I'm compelled to ask, like, what is your most pessimistic, realistic prediction? What's your most optimistic? Maybe the book itself is your most

optimistic. And then ultimately, what do you hope readers take away from your book? Sure. But let's not say prediction, but just scenario, a modeling exercise, because nobody can predict the future. And prediction is not the right word for what science fiction does even. And people who say they can predict the future are always scamming you one way or another. So, but there's, you can certainly run trajectories. If we don't get a grip, if we don't win the 2020s politically. then you can easily imagine a mass extinction event where there will end up being food shortages, mass death. And then the first really serious food shortage will cause hoarding like we saw in the pandemic. And then that will cause real tribalism as people try to get through that by hoarding or stealing. And a breakdown into a war of all against all and a mass extinction event that will be marked in the record of the geology of the earth for, ever afterwards and a biosphere that will only recover to a full spread of species in about maybe 20 million years later, which may or may not have humans involved. So that's the

worst case scenario. And the scary thing is that's entirely possible. And many times I see young people assuming that that's an inevitability. And so, of course, you get anxiety, depression, frustration and doomism and also the mask of the red death system like okay since we're doomed I'm just going to party right now because there's nothing to be done but let's run the dial to the completely opposite side of the scenario modeling twist the factors say that we win the little battles here the present battles that were right face planted into of can we help the Biden administration succeed enough to win the 2022 election in the United States? Can we get the Paris agreement countries and all the governments to agree to do carbon quantitative easing as happens in

my book? Well, if good results happen there and the science that continues to grind on in its own separate world of finessing the money problems and trying to do good science, technology, etc., If we were to get all that and get clean energy and universal health care, you can begin to imagine a future where we've made room for the wild animals. And essentially, as in my book, we've dodged the mass extinction event. So that 30 years out, we're not facing a mass extinction event, but are in a clean energy space where the wild animals are thriving, or at least not suffering.

And then that's a scaffolding to more improvements after that, that there will be outstanding problems. There will never be an in-state to this process. It's a dynamic process where you have to struggle forever. But the thing is, especially for you younger people than me, you're actually going to live this. Your lifetimes will encompass these decades of radical change. And given the stakes involved, it does make sense to really throw yourself into the cause and do everything from the local to the national to the international to try to make the good scenario come to pass as close to it as you can get. And it's a little unfortunate. It's like saying that you're involved in a kind of a worldwide.

civil war or a struggle against entrenched powerful forces that don't agree with you and don't see it the way that I've just outlined or the way that you see it. And that's going to be lifelong. That struggle will never go away. There's no, there's no happy, happy ending where you could say, oh, if you were just to struggle for 20 years and to win, then you could go into retirement in a good world. It probably won't be that good. It probably will be a struggle for your entire lifetime. It's turned out that way for me, but then again, when I was young, I didn't have the slightest idea that the neoliberal capitalist 40 years that we've gone through was even a possibility. So that was a smack on the nose. And hopefully the result of the badness of

these last 40 years will be a swing back in the other direction towards the left, towards the good future that's possible if we get our act together. Yeah. Absolutely. And it's, Is that the ultimate lesson, I think, that you want readers to take away from your book? Yeah, the ministry for the future. Here's a cool thing that I've been realizing. People wanted this story of the ministry for the future. They want positive stories about the future going well rather than poorly because they don't want to despair and go into that doom state. So there's an urge towards stories like these and more need to be told.

Because, you know, my novel is what it is, but it isn't the, word on these issues. And so I've been seeing that, that people want this. And with that story out there, it allows people to begin to imagine, well, maybe it could be all right. Maybe we don't have to fall into a kind of social media-assisted despair that we are already doomed in advance, because that flatly is not true. We have the scientific and technological basis to make a a just and sustainable society. So it takes the political fight of our lives to get to that. And yeah, the book was about that. And some people say, oh, this book's so optimistic. It's so unrealistically optimistic. I can't even believe it. And other people are saying, Stan, why are you so pessimistic?

We're already doing this good stuff right now. Why do you depict it as happening in the 2040s when we're doing these good things right now? So I realized then that the book is also like a mirror. You see yourself in it and your pre-existing experiences, you might say, and your imagination. So I guess I should end with thanks to you and thanks to the readers of my book who are generously giving time and imagination, but also especially to your listeners for, I mean, they're listening because they're interested in this stuff or else they wouldn't listen. And they come from an already existing ideological position and that imaginary relationship to the real situation is very important. So I want to say thanks to your listeners too. And the old lefties are still waving the flag and cheering you on. And so I stand for a whole wing of baby boomerdom pleasure

at your existence. Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, thank you, Stan, so much for coming on. If we can take anything away from this, it's that, you know, nature is resilient. If given a chance, it does bounce back. Change is the only constant. And we are nature defending. itself. We are not separate from the natural world. We are the natural world become conscious and then fighting for its own health and longevity. The book is The Ministry for the Future. I cannot recommend it enough. I will link to that and other things to find Stan online. If you're interested, thank you again. And let's do this again. I absolutely love talking with you. It would be my pleasure. I am so happy to have you and people like you to talk to about this. It's been a long time coming.

could not be happier to witness these developments. Stop and wait a sec When you look at me like that my darling what did you expect I'd probably still adore you with your hands around my neck All I did last time I checked shy of a spark The knife twists at the thought that I should fall short of the mark Frightened by the by-low, it's no harsher than the bark

The middle of adventure is such a fake place to start I'm going back to 505 If it's a seven-hour flight or a 45-minute drive In my imagination you're waiting lying on your side With your hands between your side But I crumble completely when you cry, it seems like once again, you're that too, that you're free. with goodbye I'm always just about to go

unspoiless surprise take my hands off of your eyes too soon I'm going parts of 505 if it's a saddle down a flight to 45 minute drive

In my imagination you're waiting lying on your side with your arms between your thighs and a smile You know, yeah, Thank you.