Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 57 | Astra Taylor on the Promise and Challenge of Democracy

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

"Democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone" — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor's new book. We all know how democracy falls short, in practice, of its lofty ideals; but we can also appreciate how democratic values are crucial in the fight for a more just society. In this conversation, we dig into the nature of democracy, from its origins to the present day. We talk about who gets to participate, how economic inequality affects political inequality, and how democratic ideals manifest themselves in any number of real-world situations. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, author, and activist. Her documentary films include Zizek!, The Examined Life, and most recently What Is Democracy? Her books include The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital age and the new Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. She has taught sociology at the university level, and written for publications from n+1 to The London Review of Books. She was active in the Occupy movement, and is a co-founder of the Debt Collective. Wikipedia IMDB profile Amazon author page Trailer for What Is Democracy? Debt Collective Twitter

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Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And several years ago, I watched a documentary about philosophers called Examined Life. There aren't that many documentaries about philosophers. And it was just a very enjoyable, thought-provoking kind of experience. You had these philosophers out there in the world. They weren't just behind their desks in their offices or lecturing in a hallway.

They were out there in cars on the streets, doing things, and then talking about the relationship between philosophy and practice and the real world. So I was interested to find out that the documentarian who made this film, Astra Taylor, has recently been working on the idea of democracy. She has both another documentary that just came out called What Is Democracy? And she has a new book that has just come out called Democracy May Not Exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone. I think that's almost exactly right.

You know, as soon as you say, well, democracy, blah, blah, blah. so many people say, we don't live in a democracy. Either, you know, we live in a republic, or they try to say, well, we don't really have the voice that we should to truly make it a democracy and so forth. And so Astro is saying, yes, that's right, but there's still good things about democracy that we should think about, try to make them better rather than just despairing that it can't be done. So she goes all the way back to ancient Greece, you know, Plato and Aristotle, our founding philosophers were notoriously against democracy. They didn't really like the idea. But Athens was definitely the touch. The touch. for the flowering of democracy subsequently in the Western world, at least. And Rome, as those of you who have listened to Mindscape know from my conversation with Ed Watts, Rome was more of a republic than a democracy, and it's interesting to compare those. And it's interesting to move forward to the present day, where we have technology and we live in these huge societies where the relationship between individual voters and what their governments do grows increasingly tenuous. So democracy is on the one hand very, very

important to us. On the other hand, it's taken for granted a little bit, and we should promote democracy, I think, but also we need to keep it on its toes. We need to make sure that it is really doing what it is there to do. There's good questions to ask about whether democracy is the right thing to do. From a philosophical, intellectual viewpoint, we should always be probing whether we're on the right track. So I think that democracy is a fantastically important part of our world, yet something we don't actually devote enough brain cells to really thinking about in a deep way. And I think this conversation helps us do that in a way that is also very entertaining. Reminders, of course, this is a podcast.

So you're welcome to go onto iTunes and elsewhere and leave reviews of it. We also have a Patreon account where you can support Minescape. We have ads coming up, but the Patreon supporters will certainly still get benefits. For example, you get ad-free versions of the podcast. if you support on Patreon. And also we get monthly Ask Me Anythings where you can ask me any question and I will try to answer it

in a special podcast just for Patreon supporters. So there's still some motivation to go there. With that, I think this is a wonderful conversation that is both philosophically provocative and very, very relevant to how we live in the world today. So let's go. Astrid Taylor, thanks so much for coming on the Mindscape podcast. Well, thanks for having me.

So I am familiar with some of your films back in the day. Zijek and The Examined Life. And these were about philosophical topics, pretty straightforwardly, right? And here you are with a new bookout and also a new documentary about democracy. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey from slightly more abstract ivory tower philosophizing to a little bit more down in the political mess kind of thinking and activism. Yeah, it is, you know, it seems like they might be. unrelated, but to me they really are. I have always been someone who wanted to marry theory and practice. So, you know, I could never quite become a full-time philosopher myself and only be a

scholar because I always wanted to experiment with my ideas, you know, and especially if they relate to ethics and politics and the question, that old Socratic question of how should we live? Well, you can't decide that on your own. You can't really figure that out definitively on your own. And so then the question for me has been, okay, well, how do I build this kind of life where I get to engage with questions, philosophical questions, theoretical questions, have a kind of life of the mind. And also, you know, the life of a person trying to embody those principles in some ways. So I do that through organizing and I do that through writing and I do that through filmmaking. So those films, you know, Jezeck came out in 2005, so I was 25. Examined Life came out in 2008.

And those were, the tagline of Example Life was philosophy is in the streets. So what I wanted to do with that was to show the way these abstract ideas are actually all around us. They're built into our environment. They're in the space we inhabit. And to treat ideas with a bit of irreverence and playfulness. So I have all these philosophers sort of traveling through different. in places and even, you know, rowing a boat or walking through a garbage dump and trying to also, you know, in a way, express my own enthusiasm for philosophy and to share it with people,

you know, and to share it in a way that didn't intimidate them. I hope, you know, I wanted to make it fun and engaging. But then I sort of felt after Examine and I came out like, you know, well, this isn't, I didn't dream of being a filmmaker. You know, I, I, again, it's, you know, I want to bring these ideas. I wanted to. kind of go the next step, which for me was actually trying to get more involved in politics and organizing. So that's so when you look at it that way, then what is democracy, which is the name of the documentary film and the companion book, Democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone. It's kind of, it's actually a very clear kind of next step. And I will say this about it.

You know, democracy in my mind, as I understand it, and I say this in the preface, demand, philosophy. Democracy is intellectually hard. That's a quote from Daniel Allen, a classicist, and who I interviewed. And it's hard because at the center of democracy is an abstraction, the people, right? The people doesn't just exist like a fact out there in the world that we can point to. And so already you have this abstraction. And how do you have an abstraction deciding things and making ethical decisions and governing itself? So, you know, philosophy is sort of part and parcel of democratic life. And we hinted this in our media when we talk about deliberation or debate or even this whole conversation happening now about facts and truth. But I think it's,

I think it's like, you know, so democracy is theory and practice always. It's like we have to reflect and act and reflect and act. And so the film is an attempt and the book are both attempts to just sort of bring that philosophical dimension into focus. And I, my feeling is it can help us at this moment of a political crisis, but other people might not agree. But that's democracy. I do think, yeah, exactly. I think that because we're so, most of us in this country, you know, grew up in a democracy, we tend to forget or at least underestimate how philosophically radical this idea is. And the idea that just everybody has a voice or supposedly has a voice in how the society is run certainly comes along with a whole bunch of

presuppositions about, you know, who deserves to have power and things like that. So philosophy should be part of that. It makes sense to me. Yeah. And, you know, but what's interesting, so the, you know, both of the projects go back to the founding text of the Western philosophical tradition, Plato's Republic. Yeah. And it's, it's a founding text of Western philosophy, and it's interesting because it's anti-democracy. It was written at this moment when Athenian democracy is in decline, and Plato is saying, you know, he's issuing a very, um, powerful critique of democracy. In a nutshell, he basically says, you know, democracy marginalizes the wise. You know, his definition of a philosopher was someone who loves wisdom

and the virtuous. And he had reason to think that because the democracy had put his mentor, Socrates to death, right? They said, hey, you know, you can either be exiled or you can drink the hemlock. And he was too proud and he drank that hemlock. So, you know, there's always been this concern. It's a concern that's ancient that, well, the people aren't philosophical. they aren't wise. And so I think you see this in my work again and again where I'm saying, well, we have to create a philosophical public. You know, this is also, you know, the, it's also about democratizing not just access to knowledge or information or facts, but, you know, confidence that one can participate in a certain kind of conversation and precisely because that abstract

reflection is demanded by the political system that we say we have, we say we aspire to. So we better do it. Like there's no other way. There's no way around. You can't have democracy and not aspire to have a philosophical public because democracy has no, there is no barrier to entry, right? It shouldn't be based on the color of your skin, how much money is in your bank account or what school you went to.

It's like, sorry we can all be part of it. Right. Well, you know, you're preaching to the converted here at Minescape Central. This is part of what I'm trying to do with the podcast, right, is. talk to people about big ideas in a way that is made possible by this new medium. So just before, I really do want to get mostly in the democracy, but I have to ask sort of a strategic question about writing books versus making documentaries, right? You know, what, how do you visualize those two very, uh, separate, but related activities?

Most people would do one or the other, but you try to get both going. Yeah. And then I want to ask you a question because that's what I always, I always like to do. So, I mean, to me, to me, I think I'm medium agnostic and medium curious. You know, we have all these different, we have all these different mediums. And, you know, I'm not a Marshall McLuhanite. Like, the medium is the message. And so each medium is, but there is some truth to that.

Like different mediums have different affordances, different capacities. They, they conjure different affects. Well, in different audiences, right? In different audiences, right? Right. So for me, it depends. You know, I see organizing as a medium. So when you are building an institution, that's a medium through which human beings interact and perceive the world. And so it just sort of depends on what has captured my attention.

A film, you know, is more akin to a podcast in the sense that it's, you know, it's direct. It has an emotional quality. So, you know, because my films are mostly made up of interviews with people. And so there's the words that they're literally speaking, but then there's all of their expressive aspects, you know, and whether you empathize with them, whether you like them, whether they're charismatic or not. I get a lot of comments on the podcast about the fact that it's audio only. And I'm sympathetic to this because it really does matter to see people talk. But, you know, so far I don't have the technological capabilities of that, but maybe sometime in the future that will happen. Well, it's funny because I often think, God, podcasts are great because you don't have to see someone.

So it's like, what if the background's ugly or what if, you know, it's raining outside? Or, you know, brushing their nose in an awkward way. I mean, you know, then it's all that matters is what's said. But, you know, even a film, my film was an hour and 45 minutes or so. And, you know, but if you transcribed it, it wouldn't make rational sense because there are these leaps that film allows. And also, it wouldn't be very long. It would be like an academic book chapter or something like that. So the film allows for me to give space to other people, to honor them, to be interested in them,

to kind of actually express to the audience my own curiosity about other people, which I think is important, which is kind of what you're doing on this podcast. You're saying, hey, you know, I might be this amazing physicist, but I'm so curious about people. I still want to ask questions. And I think asking questions and having that curiosity, I'm almost as like interested in having that be part of my propaganda. Like, we should be curious about others as the more kind of traditional political takeaways of the film. And then a book, you know, you get to write at length. You get to have footnotes, all of these things, all of these details that would just weigh a movie down.

You know, you can't stop and say, hey, check this page of this obscure text, Machiavelli or, you know, Madison or Marx or whoever. So that's where I get to be more didactic. I also get to say more, I get to kind of express my point of view more. more. So, you know, the mediums have different. They're, they're different depending on what it is I'm trying to communicate. I, when I go speak at colleges and young people come up to me and say, you know, I really want to be a filmmaker. I'm always slightly befuddled because to me it's like, well, that's just a shell or a vessel. What is it you want to communicate? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a great point. Right. You know, because it's like there's lots of terrible books in the world.

There's lots of terrible movies. It's like to me, it's the message, the story. the thing that you want to share with other humans. Yeah, because I think that at heart, your essence is not a filmmaker. You're an intellectual slash activist, right? Yes. I remember when, because I'm a science consultant sometimes for movies, and so I got to meet Ridley Scott, who was thinking of making a movie of the Forever War. And I don't think it has happened.

Maybe it will never happen. But so it's based on a novel already, so there's some plot, but there was no screenplay at the time when we met with him. But he clearly in his mind had certain scenes. already perfectly mapped out visually. And it was very clear from talking to him that that's what he was about, right? Making these wonderful visual moments.

And then the plot, whatever. Okay, we'll figure that out. You know, what happens in the movie comes second. I think that's perfectly okay, but it's a very different thing than someone who is just about the message or the substance and then finds different media in which to express it.

Yeah, I think it's really different. I mean, you know, there are, and I'm very charmed and interested in people who are visual first, you know, or say, I had this image of a girl walking through a field of sunflowers. I mean, a filmmaker friend literally said that and was like, wow, and that was enough. But, you know, it's beautiful. And it's a beautiful thing to make other, other, to have other art forms. But again, it's just, it's not me. I was interested in you, you know, because I think, you know, I write about this a little bit in the chapter on education in the book, but, you know, there are kinds of expertise that, you know, you're, you know, you're almost the

cliche of a person with knowledge, right, being this theoretical, physicist, right? Credential and so forth, yes. Right. And yet, and so what, but yet you're still open to this idea of democracy as this, as this, as an intellectual pursuit that needs to include everybody. I mean, I'm just curious if that, that just something that is almost like an instinctual sense of trust of other people or? Well, yeah, no, I mean, this is definitely something that I want to talk about. So let's talk about it. Democracy, one of the radical parts of it is the idea that everyone not only has a, voice, but is in some sense ideally equal, right? One person, one vote. Of course, there are distortions to that from power and money and so forth, but that's the ideal. And it is, there's clearly a worry that some people don't really deserve as much of a voice. If you're sort of, these days we would call it technocratic, right? If you think there's a right answer to what government should do at all times, isn't it the case that the smart people are more likely to find the right answer? But I always thought it was never very hard to me,

because I just thought that was the wrong way of thinking about how a government works and the purpose of democracy. The purpose is to make sure everyone's interests are represented, right? I feel bad because I'm very middle of the road about these things. I like the idea of a representative democracy in which people vote and they express their interest by doing that. And then the representatives gain expertise in various ways and implement the policies the best way possible.

It seems very bourgeois and so forth. I think that when that system works very well, it's the right thing to do. And so I think that the right place for expertise is at the level where we've already recommended, sorry, we've already elected our representatives, and those people ideally will go to the experts to find out what's going on. Yeah. I mean, I'm not unsympathetic. I think I say something in the book that's like, I don't want to be involved in every decision, right? I mean, you know, and that, you know, expertise is an essential.

component. I think when that becomes abstracted to the level of like, okay, well, let's just let technocrats govern or the experts govern, it's not, then it becomes more of a problem. Right? Oh no, absolutely. They become a self-serving, you know, a self-serving group and

maybe there's no accountability. So, you know, the you know, it's funny, I wouldn't describe myself as middle of the road, but I'm always trying to find the complexities or find the balance in things or, you know, where, where, you know, so, and I think expertise is a really interesting one because, you know, it's, and there's something undemocratic about it because absolutely, yeah. And not everybody can be an expert at everything. And yet we desperately need it in a society as

complicated as well. I think it's a huge worry. I think that one of the sets of people who rejects democracy implicitly or explicitly are people or the masters of the universe who think that they know what's best, right, and think that basically they should have the voice. And in some sense, you know, I had a podcast interview with Yasha Monk about liberal democracy and, how it's failing. And his point was, you know, the word liberal is not just there to make it a longer phrase. It really means something. It means a certain set of protections for people. And populist movements can be very democratic, right, as long as they define democratic in the right way. And his theory is that a lot of the attraction to populist movements is that democracy is seen to not be working in

places like Europe where the European Union has put so much power into technocratic elite. right, so that the person on the street thinks nothing that I do has any impact on what the government does. And I think that, you know, I'm not an expert. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do agree it would be bad if that were the right case. Well, I mean, there's, you know, to bring it back to the United States, there does seem to code a bit of evidence that regular people don't actually have any say over the policies. So there was the famous study that became known as the oligarchy study, but, you know, they, they. What is that? I'm not familiar with the oligarchy study.

So the political scientists were Jillens and Page. I think this was maybe 2014. I feel like time is speeding up. I can't remember when things came up. I can explain that using physics. They crunched the numbers and they said, you know, regular citizens have virtually no impact over policy. You know, it's big donors. I mean, and again, these are things people know in their guts, even if they haven't read the social science research.

And, you know, I think that that's part of the frustration. You know, Yasha Munk is an interesting example because I read his book and I was very surprised to see my name mentioned as a populist. What? And I had written, yeah, I'd written a book. I mean, sorry, I'd written an article where I said, well, hey, part of the problem in it, it was for the New Republic, which is a bastion of liberalism, actually. But I said the point of it was basically that they're in the wake of the election in Donald Trump, there's a big anti-democratic urge coming from elites actually, right? the sense that the people had made a terrible mistake. There was actually this resurgence of interest in Plato's Republic.

You know, maybe democracy does always devolve into journey. And I understand why that was happening. But my sense was, you know, my point was that, you know, the problem is, in my view, that we haven't democratized enough, right? That there's still there's still work to be done. Let's not name democracy as the problem. Let's fight over what we mean by democracy and democratization. let's look at the concentration of wealth and power. Let's try to look at the sources of people's frustrations and address those.

And so I think I come at it from a different angle because I still, I'm where some people are very worried right now about what, about a sort of populist threat and a sort of, you know, the question almost of like the tyranny of the majority, right? the people and their unruly passions. So again, the Plato thing. I'm more concerned about the points of minority veto power in our political system right now in the way that progressive desires are actually being thwarted.

Because if you look, for example, there is rising xenophobia. I mean, there's horrible things happening right now at the border. And there are very scary trends not just in the U.S. but in Europe and beyond. And yet, polls show that actually Americans have more positive use of immigration they've had since 1965. Americans want gun control. Americans want all sorts of progressive, forward-looking things, and they're blocked because of these, again, these veto points, structures of minority power. The Supreme Court's going to be worse on this moving forward. The Senate is also a minotarian sort of institution, right, in the sense that,

less populist states have disproportionate power. The electoral college, obviously, is what really gave us Donald Trump as the president. So that's where I'm always trying to temper this condemnation of the people and say, well, hold on. What are the structures that are actually blocking the more progressive will? Well, it's interesting. So I think that what I got from talking to Yasha was the idea that populism, sort of its self-conception is very democratic, but it's always at the cost of shrinking the circle of the people who actually count as the ones who get to vote, right?

So like excluding foreigners and so forth or minorities. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. You know, this is, you know, all, all definitions are unsettled, you know. And so for me, I also see, again, to go back to the question of democracy. So what, you know, we can, I always joke because people bring up issues of populism and liberalism in the Q&As for my film, especially. And I'm always like, okay, yes, I can. My next even more unmarketable film will be what is populism.

But, you know, to begin with the teacher. question in my film, you know, what is democracy? And it's, I'd like the, I like to go back to the ancient Greek roots of the word. And I think it's very important to be clear that the Greeks didn't give us the practice of democracy or of people engaging in trying to have power over their own lives, but they give us this word. And I think it's a really great word. And it's the demos, the people have Kratos, power or rule, hold power, grasp power, meant to sort of hold, hold, on to something. And so this question of who the people are is constitutive of democracy itself. It's not a populist aberration to be fighting over how we define this. It's something that we have

to kind of face head on. It's a question that is bagged by the idea of democracy, right? Who are the people who have this will? It's just part of our struggle. And so it is true that there's this, you know, you can call it a small peopopulous tendency to say, you know, to do a kind of us or them and exclude immigrants and foreigners. But then, you know, but as I said, it's also just a problem of democracy itself. How do we define the demos? How do we define the we? How do we define the we and make that we accountable?

So I think there's, you know, this is a problem that we have to face. And it gets really, it's a really thorny, a thorny, not just philosophical issue because people's lives are at stake. But we've shown that demos can radically expand and it can radically contract. And we have to figure, I think the point is to recognize actually how things are today are not set in stone. And that's what we have to always remember to have to keep an imaginative flame alive. Yeah. I mean, you can't do democracy without, well, this question of who counts, right?

Who is in the demos? Who's the person? You can't just say everybody, right? because there's no democracy ever that has given people the right to vote the moment they're born, for example. We exclude children. Historically, we've excluded women and various groups. I had an interesting podcast interview with Ed Watts, a historian about the decline of the Roman Republic. It was eventually replaced by an empire, but it succeeded very well for 500 years. And part of its success was whenever Rome would conquer another country, they would very quickly give them the right to vote in Roman elections. And that seems a little weird to us today, but it worked really well for them at the time.

It just is a reminder. There's no clearly right and wrong way to draw these lines. Well, it's interesting because the empires have often done that, right? The method, the Roman Empire's a great example, was just like, okay, fine, now you're a citizen. Yeah, assimilated, essentially, by us. And democracies do have an unappealing tendency towards the opposite, which is to exclude. And so, you know, to contrast Rome with Greece, Greece was Athens was extremely exclusive because you had to have two citizen parents at a certain point.

They said, oh, actually, you know, no, you only have to have the one citizen parent. Then I was from when they made it that the mother also had to be a citizen. And so made that bloodline even more constrained. And if you look at, you know, I talk about this in the book in the chapter on inclusion and exclusion that, for example, Canada, so I'm Canadian, but I grew up in the American South. But when Canada was part of the British Empire, you know, or that constellation, it was more open to immigrants. And then when it separated itself and had control of it, citizenship laws, it started to become more exclusive. So there's some really troubling. More Canadianness.

And then they were like, well, hold on, what is Canadianness? I mean, and so in this process of even inventing what it meant to be Canadian, they started to close the door to people from other parts of the world. So this is, it's, it's definitely one of democracy's least appealing features. My point, I think what makes it really hard is that right now it's difficult, just given the state of the world, to imagine forms of constructing a demos or people that aren't really negative because we're living in a moment where the exclusions are founded on really troubling histories. So histories of racism, histories of colonization, you know, immigration law is designed to explore. labor forces, right? So then, you know, we're not really in a position where we can ask, well, hold on, when is, when is, when is setting the boundary of a community actually ethical, you know, when do people need to be involved in a decision or, you mean, because when we, I mean, on the one hand, we have to do that, on the other hand, it's hard to separate the fact that we've been really nasty about these things. Yeah. Yeah, like right now, exclusions are predicated on terrible things, like erase, just arbitrary fact of where you were born. And, and, and, or they were based on gender and sexuality. You know, exclusion does not have a pretty history.

You remind us that Switzerland only gave women the vote in like 1971 or something like that. Yeah, right. I mean, this is, and this is all really, really recent. So I think the thing is, you know, under what, and yet, you know, I agree, we can't imagine democracy, including eight, nine, ten billion people because that would be incoherent. So, you know, I think we, but there has to. we have to wrestle with this fact that at a certain point, yeah, you do, you do have to have, you do have to have boundaries. And, and I think for me, the solution is that we have to create a more

equal world where, you know, in a world that is so terribly unequal, where the thing that determines the quality of your life, your life expectancy is not what a hard worker you are or how smart you are, but just basically where you were born. Where you're born, yep. Right? And your passport, right? And, you know, and so we, in a world like that, exclusion is a matter of life or death in a more equal world, it would be a very, very different calculus. And the fact that in a more equal world, a lot less people would want to move from where they are and abandon their community. So one of the issues I wanted to ask about was the relationship of democracy, which we, let's put aside the idea that democracy is not a good idea. Okay, there are people who think that. But let's agree

that democracy is good. But there's lots of things that are good, right? Equality and liberty and justice and economic freedom, health care, whatever. How do we, do you include all those good things in a definition of democracy? Or do we try to slice it so that we can consider all these virtues separately? I don't have a hard and fast answer to that. I think that that's something that, you know, every generation will have to reassess because we have, you know, I think we have shifting expectations and shifting baselines.

So, you know, I think democracy does demand, by its definition, by its minimal definition of the people ruling, a baseline of equality, right? Of political equality. Political equality, right? Yeah, and I think that you cannot have political equality under conditions of intense economic inequality. Yeah.

I think that's a reasonable claim, but it's one that you have, it's work to establish it and really convince people. Yes. And, you know, it's so controversial to a lot of very powerful people and maybe some less powerful people who aspire to having that kind of, yeah. Yeah, I think what is the phrase that's like, you know, every, you know, we all, we all think we're going to be millionaires one day. So we, we hold political ideals for those incredibly, fabulously wealthy future selves. So I think, you know, I think there is this, I think there, there are some minimum requirements. You know, should we separate out these other values from, from democracy? I mean, you know, I think. think we have to we have to decide as we have to decide well what are what are the values that we are we are oriented towards as a as a people so yeah maybe they're separate but then they become

part of the democratic project right like you know um it becomes sort of implicit that well democracy well you know in the phrase of the constitution right is the pursuit of happiness i'd rather have it be just like well-being or something like that but flourishing yeah yeah our collective flourishing or something like this sort of it's very hard to have to just separate the the ends from the from the means from the the the goal from the process and yet I do think that that um again they always those values always have to be assessed and reassessed yeah this is something we might aspire to things we aspire to things obviously that you know 100 years ago people would have just been like well yeah what are you what the hell are you people who are you people who are you people

A lot of you people are not supposed to be in the people. And 100 years from now, what will that discussion look like about us? Well, that's exactly the kind of thing I like to think. And you spend your life in science, physics, universe time. But, you know, sometimes I want to say, you know, even in our more mundane conception of time, but, you know, hopefully 100 years from now, there will be new assumptions and new aspirations that make us look backwards. I hope so. We like to think of progress, right. Yeah, and that's part of why I like the word democracy in its vagueness, because who the people are is open for debate and how they rule is also open to contestation and transformation.

So I like this concept that we have this word we can hold on to, but we can also really radically reinvent it. Yeah, this was impressed on me actually, believe it or not, when I took a class in grad school with John Rawls, the political philosopher. And he... Oh, wow. I've never... I mean, that's, you know, that's... He was a titan. He was, yeah. He was an amazing guy.

And actually, I always find it funny because he loved cosmology and physics. So I really never got to talk to him about philosophy because he always wanted to talk about cosmology whenever we chat it. But he had this, he also, you know, his motto was justice as fairness and ordering a society on the basis of fairness to everyone. And happily, because this isn't always true for great thinkers, but he lived. lived by what he preached, and he was the fairest guy I've ever met. And one of his things was he had an ongoing, you know, a challenge. If you can find a logical flaw in his principles

of justice, then, you know, he gives you $100 or something like that. And no one ever did, right? He, you know, he listened if you had a proposal. But one of the things was, of course, these principles having to do with, you know, don't allow inequality unless it benefits even the least off in society, you would come up with something, well, what if there was an epidemic and everyone was dying and you had to do something like that? But he was very clear that he meant his principles to apply to a well-ordered functioning healthy society. And that was all precondition for making any of this happen. And I think that even if you're not a Rolzian, there's an underappreciated aspect of democracy that if not requires, then at least suggests that everyone

should have some minimal, both economic and political resources. I think, I mean, I think it does because you can't be, again, if democracy is people engaging in ruling themselves, if you are, well, you know, if you don't have the minimum subsistence. Yeah. Not just to survive, but also so that you can't be sort of terribly coerced, right? then you can't engage in those in the in the processes democracy requires. And, you know, but this is also this, you know, we take this as common sense, but different at different moments in history, people looked at this in different ways. So for the ancient Greeks, you know, there was a contempt of labor.

They associated leisure with democracy, with that freedom, that space to govern. In fact, they just learned that the roots of the word school was actually also had to do with sort of free time, right? So it needed that time to engage in the learning, to engage in the sort of more elevated modes of life, which included being able to go to the assembly and stuff like that. So, you know, and so there was a whole enslaved laboring class. And the United States was also is a democracy that was founded on freedom on slavery. And there was also a sense that, you know, working people just, you know, were subject to coercion. You're not necessarily sort of like freehold farmers who had their own land.

That's why the yeoman farmer was this ideal, but, you know, people in the factories or slaves. So there's this sense that labor, you know, labor, laboring people didn't have what it, didn't have what it takes to cover themselves. And so, yeah. You had this wonderful scene in the film where you're interviewing these. school kids in Miami, I think it was. And you ask them, you bring up the possibility or the prospect that they could have a voice in how the school was run. And they point out that when they try to ask for things, their privileges can be taken away, right? Their vending machines can be taken away. And this actually happens. And part of that, of course, there's a surface of saying, like,

this is why kids don't get to participate in democracy. But then you think about it and go, like, oh, wait a minute, maybe I'm the kid. in this parable, right? Like maybe all of us are subject to having our privileges taken away in some way. I really like that. And I'm happy that's how you interpret it because that's how I see it too. I mean, I think the scene, and it's interesting because the film and the book are companions, but they're not, it's not like the book is a transcript of the film.

And yet the kids live in both mediums. They got to be in the movie and the book. And they're important because when we're thinking about the problem facing our society right now, you know, one solution we tend to hold on to and we tend to vote is education. Okay, like, okay, democracy needs education. And it's true, it does. But then the question is, well, education to what end? What are people, what are the lessons people are being taught about democracy?

And so by going to this public school in inner city, Miami, and so I spoke with kids who are, you know, they're like middle school age. So maybe they're 11 through 13 or 14. And what you see is that they are being taught. lessons about democracy, but they're very dispiriting ones. They're essentially, there's a kind of hidden curriculum, right? That's not hidden to them, I guess, because they're, they're, they're gleaning its messages, but basically they're being taught to grin and bear it. Their place in the world, yeah. They're being taught their place in the world. So, you know, what I, the thing about the vending machine comes up because I asked them what they would change about their school. And they say, well, what they'd really

like is for their food to be hot. Like it doesn't taste good, but at least it could be warmed up. And then the administrators come down on them. Just asking for so much. It's just unbelievable. They would be so greedy. I mean, it's just such a reasonable demand that they have, right? They just want their lunch to be hot.

And then the vending machine thing comes up because this one girl, you know, and at first you think, oh, God, right, should kids be eating junk food at their school? But then what you realize is she's saying it, she's saying the kids don't have breakfast at home. That's their only chance to eat. And so these kids are very astute. They're so young. They're very astute.

And what I was struck by is that they don't blame their teachers for their problems. They have an analysis of the power structure. So they understand the teachers are controlled by administrators who are controlled by the state. You know, who also, so they see the adults is powerless. So this idea that we are the children in the parable, it's because the children are saying, we know the adults are powerless too. And so I wanted that scene to be in the film so that we would have to. to ask, okay, well, right, what kind of education? And in the book, I'm able to go more deeply

into the battle for universal public education where that idea even emerged. So, you know, breaking with the ancient Greeks, breaking with the founding fathers and saying, well, no, we can't just have, you know, workers who don't get time, who don't get time to feed their minds and to and be full people. And in the book, I show that, you know, working class movements have always been at the cutting edge for the demand for for for not just skills training but for for education to be you know a whole thinking participant in public life and sort of giving the the people who don't usually get credit the credit I think they deserve looking back historically and there's this wonderful other powerful scene in the film where you're interviewing the barber

who is an ex-con who explains I forget what was Is his name? Do you remember? His name's Ellie Brett. Ellie Brett. And he explains when he was in prison, he's still a very young guy. The punishment for them misbehaving was that their library was taken away. And the prisoners actually went on strike to get their library privileges.

And it was even maybe overly on the nose example of the power structures trying to keep the people from learning things. And I mean, yeah, preaching to converted once again, I certainly think that even though I would love, I don't have a lot of data about this. I would love to see some more social science research, but I have this feeling that the more educated we make people the better off the world is in some large-scale way. Yeah, I mean, you know, when Ellie told me that story, my jaw literally dropped because there was actually, so it was actually 2016, in the end of 2015 when I interviewed him. And, you know, I thought I knew a lot about criminal justice in one.

what people go through. But just the fact that he had to be part of a struggle for something so basic as the right to read, right? Yeah. And then it was very interesting because when the film was released, it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and there was a wave of prison strikes happening around North America, and there was actually a strike in Nova Scotia, Canada. And the demands of the prisoners there was we want the library.

They've taken the library away. And this only makes sense. I mean, if you look back on history, happened, you know, he says, you know, it used to be illegal for people like me, black people to read, you know, and it was a crime to teach a slave how to read. I was just reading a history of, um, uh, of the labor movement in the U.S. books and reading materials magazines used to be banned from factories, you know, and it wasn't, it was, it was, it was, it was not because they didn't want people to take, it was that they didn't want people

reading, engaging in a life of the mind. So I think the thing is that, you know, there is something very threatening about an educated public. And I think that that feeds into the attacks on public education and higher education today in this country. And so, you know, we're still, you know, history's not behind us. We're still part of this struggle. And so the film aims to sort of give that sense of urgency of just how unjust things are, right, when kids and even adults are having to fight just for basic, basic access to materials. to dignity and to having what they need to learn. But then also saying, actually, what does that say about the broader, the broader structure?

And what does it say about those of us for whom the education system has basically kind of worked out? Right. Yeah. Well, something I've railed about for a long time to no end whatsoever is just this weird idea we have in the U.S. that we fund a public education through local property taxes, right? So it's sort of the most obvious way that the rich can get richer and the poor can get poorer, right? I see no justification on the surface for thinking that if you were born into a wealthy family, your public schools could be better.

I mean, not only could you afford to go to private schools, but if you just happen to be born into a really poor neighborhood, then you're going to get less resources from the start. I feel like this definitely fails. John Rawlsian test. Oh, yes. Right? Like, this totally fails a Rawlsian kind of like how, what kind of, if you didn't know

what zip code you were going to be born into, would you accept this as a principal for funding K through 12 education? Right. No way. In the original position, you would never accept this, right. It's a, right, right, from the original position, you would never make, right, this makes, it makes a farce out of the idea of education. But, you know, as I point out of the book, you know, education is not a right.

It's not in the Bill of Rights. I mean, it's something, you know. when we think about what our democracy is and these values that might be attached to it, I think education is a good one. Just like we said, political equality feels required, a baseline of economic equality, well, also a baseline of education. So, you know, I think that that's, that in theory should be a right, but it's not a right on paper in this world.

Yeah. I mean, maybe it's, I think it's in human rights a lot, but not nationally. And that's something we almost forget because it feels like a shibboleth. or something like that. Well, yeah. But equalizing funding for K through 12 education, I think, would be such a rational first step of education reform. Yeah.

All right. Well, but when they elect us to be the dictators of the world. The benevolent dictators, let us make it clear. Yeah. I mean, I have a more, you know, but I have a very odd educational background because I was unschooled, so I didn't go to school as a kid. And I think that that, that, you know, to me, I feel like we have to, the horizon, the democratic horizon in terms of education and in creating this philosophical public

that I believe could be, you know, is, I think involves, you know, working with the system as it is and imagining how to expand it and fulfill its promise, you know. But then I also think about what could go beyond that, right? So, you know, I, I, when I was a kid, I didn't go to school, the idea, it was a very sort of Rousseauian romantic idea. My parents thought human beings were naturally curious. And so instead of giving carrots and sticks and grades and tests and stuff, just let your kids do what to follow their curiosity. And so I don't think that scales.

And I really do, obviously, as we've discussed, believe in public education. But there's something, for me, the next level would be expanding more of that trust, the trust of, okay, letting people get in touch with what their interests are. And I think that, because I think that trust is actually really essential to democracy, because it's, again, it's this idea that we're going to rule ourselves. So, you know, that makes no sense if you actually don't have some trust in other people. So I like, you know, it's like what would come next? If we could just, you know, make sure every kid had access to a decent school and a hot lunch.

and the supplies they need, what would come after that? Yeah, no, I think, well, there's a really deep question here that I don't think that we ever, that I don't hear much discussion about. On the one hand, I think that, you know, among the choices one as a responsible grown-up adult should be allowed to make is I don't want to learn anything more, right? I think some of us are just naturally going to do it all the time, right? And that's fun as part of who we are. I don't want to force it on anybody, right?

if that that's, I'm a big believer that we intellectuals need to do a better job of appreciating the simple pleasures of people who are not interested in the kinds of things we're interested. That's okay. But when you're a kid, I would almost be on the flip side of that. I mean, it worked out great for you. Previous Mindscape guest, Malcolm McIver, also was a Canadian and self-schooled? I don't know, maybe there's some connection there. Yeah.

And he turned out really, really well, professor at Northwestern, et cetera. but I can imagine plenty of kids for whom that would not work. So I do believe that there should be some minimal requirements out there where, you know, when you're when you're below a certain age, you've got to go to school, you've got to teach you some stuff. I mean, I remember my love for philosophy only came about because it was required courses when I was an undergraduate, right? I had no idea that I would be interested in that. And I was forced into it and I fell in love. No. And I mean, I've had that experience too where I had to take something and then I was like, you know,

my mind was blown by it and it's not something I would have found before. So I think, again, it's this thing of like, how do you find that balance of sort of giving? I write this in the book, but I think one thing that the unschooling experience gave me, and again, it's sort of this thing like, how do you institutionalize it, was I came to really respect other people's intellectual authority because they knew things I wanted to learn, right? And so I didn't engage because I didn't have a teacher, right? I wasn't sort of afraid of teachers. I wasn't afraid of being punished or afraid of detention and or afraid of doing badly

or getting in trouble somehow. So I think there is somehow a way to square the circle and to cultivate a space where people, we're learning just a more positive experience too. And where the person introducing you to an academic discipline for the first time isn't also like really there. also just like this figure who's disciplining you. Yeah. So what you see with these kids in the scene in the film is that,

you know, they've got these like harried teachers who are, you know, probably have a classroom of 40 students, don't have the resources they need. And so there's not, there isn't the space. There just isn't the capacity to have that sort of, you know, that experience of really learning and having that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that introduction to a topic that really compels them, you know.

And I don't know. But who I am and how I approach the world is so shaped by my very eccentric upbringing, and there's no denying it. Have you seen, did you watch The Wire, the TV show? No, I haven't seen it. Season 4 of The Wire is enough to convince you to despair of any possibility of public education as it is currently constituted, but we would like to do better. Yeah, you know, and I think that a big part of, I mean, science,

in particular what you just said resonates extremely strongly the idea that the way that we do teach science is here are some facts you should learn them and then tell them back to us on the test. The way that we do science is a constant series of failures, right, of making proposals, hypotheses, testing them, they were wrong, go back and forth. And that simple paradigm is very helpful even if you're not doing science. It's a way of looking at the world that doesn't come across in education. And that's partly because the teachers are not really science. They're not taught that way, partly because they're harried and they don't have enough resources and they have too many kids.

And certainly for a lot of, I've met substitute teachers who worked in really bad school districts and literally more than one person independently volunteered. The goal is to have no one die when they're there, right? It's not about the life of the mind. It's about just the physical integrity of the students in their class and themselves. And just like in the richest country in the world, we can do better. Yeah, you would like to think that. Okay, to switch gears a little bit, because you said something very important, very provocative and that I've written down here, and we haven't gotten a chance to get back to, but the

existence of structures within the democratic process within government that are anti-democratic, or at least contra-democratic, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, all of these things that prevent the democracy from being the unfiltered will of the people. And I'm a big believer in not having the unfiltered will of the people do everything. As someone who lives in California and is subject to these weird ballot initiatives that I think are a terrible idea. But there's tradeoffs, right? You know, in some sense, the minority that is being protected by the Senate and the Supreme Court right now are not the minorities that deserve protection the most. So do you have either feelings about that or something more programmatic about what we should do about that to be more healthy democracy?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think you just said something that's quite key, right? Which minorities are being protected by these institutions? And so we, when we talk about minority rights, we often think, at least, you know, I'm speaking as a liberal person here, protections of women, even though we're not really a minority. We're just a minority in positions of power and influence. But traditionally discriminated against groups, right? Traditionally discriminated against groups, right? The disabled sexual minorities, you know. And but we have to remember is that the minorities that the founders of our political system had in mind, it was different. I mean, they were thinking about religiously oppressed groups in some cases, but they were also thinking about the opulent, the rich, right? I mean, and they were very direct about this. And so another minimal definition of democracy that I think is great is from Aristotle, who also was not a,

Democrat. But he said, so classically in political philosophy, you know, their different systems are organized. They say, okay, well, there's the rule of the one, right, which is the monarchy, or the rule of the many is oligarchy, and the rule of the many is democracy. And Plato, I mean, sorry, and Aristotle takes that he sort of says, well, yes, so democracy's rule of the many, but even more significantly than that, it's rule of the poor, because the poor always numerically outnumber the rich. And so the people who created our political system were very aware of, of that. They had studied their ancient, their ancient Greece, and they understood that they wanted to protect minorities. And, you know, as someone who, so in my own personal organizing, I organized

something called the Debt Collective, which is a union for debtors. So we focus a lot around issues of student debt and fighting student debt. So, you know, James Madison was very clear that you need to protect the minority against the wicked projects of the majority. and one of the wicked projects would be debt abolition. So I'm like his worst nightmare. So, I mean, I think we have to, you know, in the book, so each chapter in the book is a tension that I think we have to hold. So this tension of inclusion or exclusion,

the tension between expertise and mass opinion, and then there's the tension between one chapter is spontaneity and structure. And so this question of, you know, how do we structure our democracy? And, you know, these, these, these structures, even if you look at the 200-year history of the U.S., I mean, these institutions, they were designed to protect an affluent minority, and yet they've played different roles depending on the historical juncture. So, you know, there were periods when the Supreme Court

was very reactionary. I mean, look at decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson when it was standing in the way of racial progress. But then there was the same. sort of, you know, heyday of the, of the 1960s when we, you know, and we, we still, you know, hold up decisions like Brown versus B-O-E. And now we're, I think we're moving into a very different political alignment with the Supreme Court. So, you know, I think this is where your abstract philosophical models just can't be too absolute. Yeah. Because politics is messy. It depends on the power dynamics in the, in the here and now. I think we do, we need to see these structures, at least this is me putting less my philosopher hat or more my organizer

hat, but we need to see these structures as malleable. They might be really, really hard to change, but they are changeable. They have changed really recently. I mean, if you, things that we take for granted, like direct election of senators, I mean, that was a constitutional amendment. If we can see examples of, I mean, there have been, I mean, the Voting Rights Act was 19, You know, it's like the mid-60s. This is like not long ago. We were alive, some of us. We have barely, we have barely even tried this democracy thing by our current minimal definition, you know.

And so I think, so I think we need to to see these things as changeable. So there's a phrase you said, actually, that I want to go back to. So you said, well, democracy is one person, one vote. Right? That is something to get said, yes. Right? That sounds, that sounds true. very new principle.

That principle is also from Supreme Court, I mean, it made its way into Supreme Court jurisprudence in, I think, 1963. So it was said by John Lewis during the famous March on Washington, right? It said by John Lewis, and he said, you know, one person, one vote. And he actually said one person, one vote. He said it because, A, America was not doing it because of segregation and Jim Crow. constraints that were basically totally suppressing the vote of black people in the South. But he said, one person in one vote is the African cry.

And it should be our cry too. Why did he say that? He said it because it was actually a phrase that was being promoted by the ANC in South Africa and Nelson Mandela. So, you know, at that point, they were these South African Marxists, right? Yeah. And now here we are, this beautiful phrase, this beautiful ideal, comes from South Africa through the civil rights movement. Now we take it for granted like, oh, yeah, one person, one vote.

That just makes sense. Well, no, it's really new. And the question I think we have to ask ourselves now is, is it even democratic? So, A, we don't have it because people are disenfranchised. Felons are disenfranchised and not given the right to vote. But, okay, so you can have one vote. You can access the ballot. But what if your vote's not weighted equally, right?

Which it's not in our society. In the Senate, for example, or because of the electoral College, you mean? Because of the electoral college or because of the way districts are portioned, even at the state level. So, you know, you can have within the state, your vote for a member of Congress can be way more or less than someone a few counties away. So the Senate, right, if every state gets the same number of senators, but you have a state that has, you know, a couple million people versus California where you are. Like your Senate vote weighs almost nothing. So I've, would say, why don't we expand the idea of one person one vote to say one equally weighted vote? And then I, but then I would say that doesn't even go far enough. We could actually push for one person three votes or four votes through something like rank choice voting, right, where you would no longer have to worry about splitting your vote, let's say, you know, and ending up with a split ticket where you're actually, you cast a ballot, but it actually helps elect the person you like

the least. So there's, ranked choice voting is now happening in Maine. It's happening. It's happening in a little community in Michigan. I think Massachusetts is adopting it, right? So people actually have three votes, and they get to rank first preference, second, preference, third preference. In the book, I also point out, well, what about the principle of one person no vote? Because what if we abandoned elections entirely and use sortition? So I think I'm just going through these as a way of saying.

Sorry, what is that? Sortition is lottery. Oh, okay. Yes, I got, I remember that. Yeah. So to go back to Athens again, you know, they, they thought elections were aristocratic because the rich and the well-born would win.

Crazy idea. Who would know? Right. Or today we might say the reality TV stars. But, you know, that actually it was a contest that just reinforced privilege. So they had very elaborate systems of randomly selecting citizens and engaging the public in the running of the city's affairs. And so, you know, again, to quote Aristotle, he said, you know, elections are aristocratic and selection is democratic.

And I think it's quite, it's quite an interesting, you know, it's a thought experiment effectively in the United States today. But to say, okay, well, our elections, especially as they're, they currently run, are they really democratic? And so, yeah, maybe one person, one vote is holding us back. Maybe one person, no vote. And now you have me thinking about doing it using. quantum measurements so that there are different branches of the wave function with completely different rulers in every branch. That would be amazing. Okay, so that is the next level galaxy brain, but to bring it back to Earth brain, I'm sure you saw the news that Ireland, by referendum,

actually decided they would amend their constitution and open the way to allow abortion, right? Yeah. So this seems like a very intractable, like just one of those political issues. I mean, We're talking about this Catholic country. How would that ever get resolved? Why the vote went the way it did and had so much democratic legitimacy was in part because the country was at this breaking point. So they used certition. They used lottery.

So what they did was they created the citizen assembly and selected 99 citizens at random who sort of were representative in quotes of the nation. And they deliberated for five months. I did not know that. Wow. Yeah. And then they came up with recommendations. And they said, hey, we've really thought about this.

And we've talked to all these experts. And we really think actually the Constitution is antiquated and should be reassessed. And that gave the sense of democratic legitimacy that would have been missing. And otherwise, it would have just been this very destructive vote, kind of like these other referendums we've seen. But instead, they use lottery in a way that kind of allowed there to be a sense that the people of Ireland had sought together and been heard. And the Citizens Assembly didn't have power. They didn't then make a determination.

They made a recommendation that was listened to. I think, yeah. I just think, you know, the point is we have to remember that these are malleable, these are malleable structures human beings made them and they can be changed. And, you know, history shows that they can often only be changed with real struggle. Sure. So that's a tactical issue. That's a strategic issue.

But, you know, we shouldn't, we should not buy into the myth that what we have is democracy and this is the bill and Indal. No, not at all. And I think that, you know, the lottery idea would probably be left out of court in a lot of parts of the United States. But I get it. I get the sense that it's much more democratic because there's not all of these layers of filters of political advertising and, you know, you need to be a millionaire to run for office. and stuff like that. You know, I'd be 10, I just had this thought over the course of this conversation, but I'm completely on board with having a third chamber of Congress,

which is just randomly selected people from the United States. Exactly. I think that, so I, I, I think you've honed in on exactly how one has to approach it. It's, you know, how do you put it into the mix with other methods and other approaches of doing democracy? You know, I'm, it's not, this isn't about finding the new religion and being like, I'm for lottery to solve all of our problems all the time. But, you know, actually, given the problems with the system that we have right now,

which is, you know, who has the capacity to run for office? What are the incentives and how much money do they have to raise? And then, well, what are they thinking about when they're serving? When they're serving as public officials, they're thinking about re-election, right? So, you know, if there was another house that was, the people's house that was where citizens were called up, you know, at random, you know, they'd have, they'd have a whole different set of concerns. And all sorts of political scientists have done research about how to reduce corruption of this hypothetical body and how one would educate

these citizen leaders about issues. So there's actually all sorts of really interesting work. And again, we can point to the example of Ireland. But, you know, I think it's, you know, one one trick isn't going to save us. No, no, sure. But it does. I like it because it makes us think in a different way. It is an outside-the-box thing. And there are issues with the current system.

And thinking outside the box is a good thing. Ooh, there's so many things I want to talk about. But one that is major and we need to get to is the idea that a democracy, on the one hand, it's the people's will is legitimizing the government. On the other hand, there is this agreement on the part of the people to abide by what happens, right? Whether you want to call it norms or a commitment to pluralism or value diversity or whatever. Number one is this good? And number two, is it tenable?

Like, are we seeing that people these days are less willing to put up with what other people are deciding for them? The coercion part of your chapter of your book. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think, you know, I was talking to this woman who is a civil rights lawyer in North Carolina, and she said something that really resonated with me. And she said, you know, I don't know why it is that it's so hard to build things. It's so hard to create constructive institutions and fair rules. And yet it's so easy to destroy. It's so easy for things to fall apart. It's the second law of thermodynamics. We know why that's true. It's entropy. It's entropy. Yeah. It increases. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. So I was thinking about that as I read your great book on time.

And I was like entropy. There needs to be a political theory of entropy because. And so I think because of this, and let's just say it's a lot of the universe because that gives us authority. Because of this, we have to, we have to try to value the norms. We have to, we have to fight for them and we have to fight to make norms more just. And so, you know, as a woman, you know, but. But I think as a citizen, we should all be able to say, hey, norms have actually been really terrible. Norms can be, right?

They can be really regressive. They can be dehumanizing. All sorts of terrible things have been legal and are legal. Slavery was legal. You know, and right now they're fighting, you know, we're living in a world where they're fighting to make, you know, destroying the environment and poisoning the population legal. So we don't want to fetishize rules for their own sake. I do think we want to be attuned to the fact that, yeah, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to build things, and entropy will get us.

And I think you do see, I mean, I don't think we're at a point where the American people are just like total nihilists. No, no, not at all. But maybe that's the, I don't think we're there. Maybe that's the momentum. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, but I think, okay, so this is, again, I'm going to put on my organizer hat. Yeah. When the rules of the game are so corrupt.

people are frustrated. And I think cynicism is really toxic for, for democracy. I mean, I think this is, you know, the legacy of even like the Watergate era, right?

It was not good for, for the project of, of people coming together and, and wanting to build a better government, actually. It helped lay this groundwork of people just being really cynical about, about the power structures. But that cynicism is merited.

And so for me, when I try to engage people, my instinct isn't, you know, you can't, you can't tell people like, oh, no, it's actually really great. We're the greatest country on earth and everything works. You know, I think you have to say, yeah, you know, this, right now we do have a system where, you know, the members of Congress are mostly millionaires. And, you know, indeed, there is a system of legalized bribery that we call campaign donations and lobbying at work. But, you know, we have to speak to people's, we have to speak to people's cynicism in the despair and try to build a cold. that and give them credible alternatives and and build a social block that will push for for real change.

So I think, you know, when we when we see this volatility, it's tempting to kind of be afraid of it or, you know, and I don't know. I guess for me, I'm like, well, no, we have to, we have to kind of throw ourselves into it and speak to it and create solidarity and create strategies that can be a path, a path forward. And that's the hard work of organizing. That's not really the work of philosophizing. And you have to speak to people's, this is the cliche of community organizing 101, but you have to speak to people's real direct needs and try to find a sort of win-win solution out of the mess. Right. And it's a balancing act, right?

We don't want to overthrow everything every 20 years, as Jefferson somewhat playfully suggested. but the norms do matter because there's a protective aspect to them, but there's also an anti-progress aspect to them. I do think, by the way, parenthetically, that there probably is a very good analogy to be drawn between the body politic and real biological bodies when it comes to entropy and organization and homeostasis.

You know, our bodies would left to their own devices just decay, and we would die, but instead we take in fuel and we use that to upkeep and maintain ourselves. And there is some work that is necessary to make that happen. And I'm sure the same thing is true for society or government. What's interesting, I was talking to a political theorist the other day about this metaphor of the social body because it comes into my film. So the film begins with, I'm sitting with Sylvia Federici in a museum and we're looking at a painting and we talk about this image in front of us. It's an image of a vice, but of a, it's enviance.

She's sighing. And we talk about how the social body is being sought apart right now. And social body is this metaphor that is constant in political philosophy and body politic. And it has, it can often have almost fascist undertones or even overtones, right? Because people start to go like, okay, they start to have this kind of ethno-nationalist body, right? to keep the foreigners obey. And so our point in our conversation was like, well, hold on, but let's actually be more biological about it.

Like no body is an island in isolation. All bodies are permeable. We have our microbiomes and we have to eat, as you just said. And so, you know, where is this myth of this body that is autonomous and independent and cut off from the world? Or the gender doesn't generate other bodies and other, you know, human beings. So it's like, let's actually embrace that permeability. Yeah, we're the quintessential open systems and we can eat well or eat badly.

We can exercise or sit around and I think the analogy is actually pretty good. And there's physics underlying all of it, as you will not be surprised to learn. This is science. We're now science. And one of the aspects there is that with bodies either literal or political, the environment that we're embedded in is changing, right? Darwinian evolution never stops working, but the pressures that push us one way or the other are different. different depending on our environments. When it comes to politics, you know, we're technology is changing things very rapidly, right? We have different media that teach us things. Is that something, again, I'll just ask this open-ended question. Are you given social media and cable news and talk

radio and whatever? How do you balance whether this is good or bad? And how can we use it as a force for better? Yeah. Well, on the social media question, I would say everyone should just read my book, the People's Platform, which came out in 2014. And the People's Platform is my analysis of social media. It came out at a time where people were a bit more techno-utopian than they are today. But I think my basic argument sale holds, which is we can't separate the technology from the business models underlying it. And specifically from the business model of advertising and data collection. And so the internet, not intrinsically, but just because this is sort of, I think, just the way our media landscape worked. I mean, it was just, it was television also ran on

ads, right? Sure. So did newspapers. And now, now the sort of gloves are off for data collection and personalized, you know, behavioral targeting and all of this stuff. And so my blog will, my podcast will be taking ads, but they're not targeted in, and, Anyway, it's just like which companies I'm happiest shilling for, basically. Like I get to veto places that I'm not interested. I've already gotten, well, I can't go any details, but people ask me to advertise on the podcast, and I looked at what they're selling, and I'm like, no, I can't do that. Well, I mean, and the things we're we're all embroiled in the system.

And part of the point I'm trying to make, too, is that this isn't sort of, you know, I mean, if I had a podcast and I would also veto ads and, you know, maybe consider taking others. But the point is that we're all in an advertising economy, whether we want to or not, because we're being offered, you know, ostensibly free services, but actually we're paying with our personal data. So I think they have to be attuned to the way that this business model is creating the kind of clickbait economy, right, that we are seeing. And that is very detrimental for deliberation and debate, because ultimately, if what the platform is more interested in serving you a bunch of. headlines that you're just going to like look at and to get to the next one as opposed to being incentivized to give you a long read and the fact we even have the word long read now is a sort sign of the times but you know it they'd rather have me click a lot than have me read something that

takes an hour and so that's you know you know it's interesting because we kind of say like oh it's so hard to read something long online well is it necessarily or is it because actually all of the research has been geared towards pushing us in the opposite direction. I mean, there's a quote in my, in the people's platform, it's like, the greatest minds of my generation are all just figuring out how to make people click on ads. So, so I, I, you know, so on the one hand, obviously there's a human temperament to be distracted and to believe falsehoods. This is why in the Republic, Plato is basically talking about the fake news of his day, right? Again, democracy, you know, doesn't elevate the wise. People, people believe, believe lies. They gossip. They're

guided. But unfortunately, we have this whole technological apparatus that because its priorities are accumulating profits through data collection are really antithetical to our needs as citizens and human beings. And, you know, it is basically the, you know, it's a continuation of the television model. I mean, there's a reason that the former head of CBS said, you know, yeah, Trump's not good for America, but he sure is good for business, right? So, I mean, the implication seems to be that we have to be vigilant and take active steps to make sure that this doesn't trample us underfoot in some sense. Yeah, I think though, you know, this is where, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the economy stupid. It's like, you know, we, we have to,

I think it's, it's a really daunting task, but like what, what are the, how do we transform the, the underlying incentives that are shaking, that are shaping our media sphere, right? I mean, this is, you know, we see, so I work the education space. And I see the difference between, you know, people who go to a traditional four-year public college or people who go to a predatory for-profit college, right? There's a difference. And right now, there's almost no public media in the United States of America. It's just not something that existed. And, you know, and there is no sort of intrinsic reason why we can't experiment with other modes of subsidy online. I mean, in fact, the internet was a non-commercial was a non-commercial academic invention.

I mean, big business didn't give us the internet or the World Wide Web. So, you know, and this is why, you know, there are lots of people who are kind of nostalgic for the early, the early days of the internet before it was fully commercialized. But I think, you know, so I think we have to, it's very heartening to me that people are finally having conversations about sort of breaking up big tech. But I think we need to go a step further and go, okay, well, what? other ways could we fund things that aren't just the sort of advertising or Patreon, you know, donation models.

Yeah. But, you know, I'm a Canadian. They're still public media. And in fact, what is democracy was funded by the National Film Board of Canada. And so, you know, this is an anecdote I often give. But in 2014, I went to my New York City literary agent, you know, and I have a very good literary agent and a fancy agency. And I said, I want to write a book on democracy.

And she said, no way that is. is a career suicide, it will never sell. Then I went to the National Film Board of Canada and I said, I want to make a movie about democracy, which I think it should be harder. That sounds like a harder sell. Yeah. Greenlight for, right?

And they were like, that's great. That's, you know, exactly what we're here for to spur public debate about interesting things. And so, you know, I couldn't get a democracy project off the ground until after Donald Trump was elected. And then everybody was like, well, maybe we should think about this work. But I think it says something about why we're in the mess we're in and also about funding structures that can hold different kinds of work and different kinds of thinking. So the final question, you're suggesting an answer to it already, but what makes you optimistic? What are the things we can do to?

I take it that we're both on the side that democracy is a good thing, but it can be a flawed thing. And it is like the body, it's an open system that needs constant care and maintenance. and improvement. So where do you see that coming from? I see hope in the attitudes of young people right now. And I'm someone who's so against fetishizing young people. Yeah. You know, this sort of, you know, because I think we need a, we need public engagement from people of all ages and backgrounds. And so, you know, in fact, when I was in my 20s, I used to joke that in opposition to the baby, boomers. I was like, it's not don't trust anyone. It's not, it's not that you shouldn't trust

people over, under, sorry, the baby boomers are basically like, don't trust anyone over 30, right? You know, like, only the youth get it. Hope I die before you get old. Yeah. My attitude was like, no, you shouldn't trust people until they're over 30. Like, so they show they actually are committed to this, these ideas. But I think you see, I mean, we see people, this is a generation that has every reason on someone to just be totally disgusted, totally cynical, right? I mean, look at the person who occupies the White House. Look at what's happening with climate change.

I mean, people have known about climate change. Scientists have known about climate change. The leaders of the most powerful corporations on Earth, leaders in government have known since long before these kids were born. And they chose to suppress it and deny it and actively subsidize these industries. And yet, so they should have every reason to just be completely disgusted. And yet here they are, you know, striking for the climate going out week after week. They are, you know, pushing for gun control.

We see this wave of really idealistic people in their late 20s and early 30s running for office, you know. And this is a market shift because, you know, I was, you know, part of Occupy Wall Street. That was only 2011. And the attitude there was no way, no engaging with the system on that level. We refused to even make demands of this corrupt government, right? And we can debate the pros and cons of that. And we can debate the purpose Occupy served because I think it was, it was, I think it was important even if it was ineffectual in many ways. But I'm happy to see people going beyond that and saying, no, we're willing to get our hands dirty and step into the fray because, you know, we have 11 years and who's going to, who's, and if we don't do it, nobody will.

So that, I, I never have trouble finding hope. I almost find hopelessness to be kind of trite because I think if you have a historical gaze, it's impossible to deny the fact that people have had it so much harder than us. Yeah. You know, so then it's like, well, you know, here we are talking on Skype, you know. Technically not Skype, by the way, but yes. Oh, no, not squadcast, sorry. I mean, you know, and, you know, yeah, just have some perspective, you know, it's, it's been worse.

It's been worse. And, you know, in the books, I'm like, you know, let's try to be good ancestors. Let's try to be the people we would respect if we were looking back. You know, it doesn't mean that we have to win, but we have to try. Yeah, I mean, clickbaity, media landscape notwithstanding, I get some optimism from the fact that a remarkable number of people are interested in listening to hour-long conversations about the nature of democracy. I hope so. They're going to be like, I think they are.

No easy answers. But I think, you know, this, you know, the book ends with this image of, you know, let's not aspire to be founding fathers, but perennial midwives. Like, this is something we just have to do over and over and over again. And what it means to get involved in, you know, enlarging democracy, deepening democracy. It really does depend on where you are in your community and what the people around you care about. You know, there is, sure, we can say easy things like go vote or something like that, but that should take, you know, an hour of your time. Yeah.

The other questions, you know, have, they have a lot of specificity and we have to, and they're not questions we can answer by ourselves. And that's sort of the right way to think of this Jeffersonian impulse, not to throw, overthrow the government every 20 years, but to continually renew it by actually engaging with it. I think that there is, I agree with you, the historical view gives us actually, believe it or not, some source of optimism. Oh, yeah. No. There's, you know, things have been bad. Things are bad. Things are bad, but they were worse and they could be better, but only if we do it. They don't, it doesn't have it automatically, right? Yeah, and things could be better. So I think this is, you know, it's always, I always recommend studying social movements and, and thinking about all the, all the work that has done to get us where we are today. So let's keep going.

All right, let's keep going. Esther Taylor, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. It was really fun. Moving yourself sounds simple. Until it isn't. The packing, the truck rental, the lifting, the mess. Now imagine moving with United van lines. United's pros know how to transport your things safely and seamlessly. No guesswork, no borrow dollies, no hassles. A full service move by United means your move is handled by experts. Your time stays yours and your stress level dramatically lower. Full service moving from America's number one Mover, United. It's a better way to move. Get a free quote at United VanLines.com.