Upstream - How to Be a Good Ancestor w/ Roman Krznaric

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

It's been said that “the shortest path to the future is always one through the deepening of the past.” But how do we balance the past, present, and future, when all three weigh so heavily on our consciousness and our social existence? Perhaps one way to find a balance—or at least to distill these various webbed threads of temporality—might be to pose them as questions: what can we learn from the past to help us in the present? And how can I be a good ancestor for the people of tomorrow? These are the questions that inform and guide the recent work of our guest on today's episode. Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and the author of several books including most recently, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity and The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. In this episode, we explore lessons from the past and what it means to be a good ancestor today. We look at how our conceptions of time can expand or limit the way that we answer these questions. We explore what it means to be on the radical fringes of a society, how to build and strengthen solidarity, and how to find meaning and community in a world that has grown increasingly isolating and alienating.  This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse-responsive co-learning network that hosts free online Weekly EcoGatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some Upstream episodes to life—this is one of those episodes. We hope you can join the gathering on TK to discuss the topics covered in this episode. Find out more at www.ecogather.ing. Further Resources The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World Radical climate protests linked to increases in public support for moderate organizations, Nature Sustainability The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, by Ibn Khaldûn The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…Essays, David Graeber Related Episodes: Be More Pirate w/ Sam Conniff Doughnut Economics with Kate Raworth Cover art: Nina Montenegro Intermission music:  “Seed of a Seed” by Haley Heynderickx Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse responsive co-learning network that hosts free, online, weekly eco-gatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some upstream episodes to life. This is one of those episodes. Find out more, including the date and time for this EcoGathering, in the show notes, or by going to www.eco-gather.ing. Our obsession with the present moment has been developing for more than 500 years in the Western world.

You know, it goes back to the invention of the mechanical clock in the 14th, 15th century when time started being sliced up into hours, then by 1700 most clocks had minute hands, by 1800 they had second hands. You know, the clock became the key machine of the industrial revolution, speeding everything up, diminishing the future, forcing people into the present moment. And not in a sort of a expansive Buddhist sense of interbeing or anything like that, but a sense of like, right here, right now, I'm going to, you're going to work faster, I'm going to sell you more, you have to consume, you know, we have to produce all of that kind of obsessiveness with the seconds, with the nanosecond speed algorithms of the share markets as well.

You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. It's been said that the shortest path to the future is always one through the deepening of the past. But how do we balance the past, present, and future when all three weigh so heavily on our consciousness and our social existence?

Perhaps one way to find a balance, or at least to distill these various webbed threads of temporality, might be to pose them as questions. What can we learn from the past to help us in the present? And how can I be a good ancestor for the people of tomorrow? These are the questions that inform and guide the recent work of our guest on today's episode. Roman Kriznaric is a social philosopher, a research fellow at the Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and the author of several books including, most recently, History for Tomorrow, Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity, and The Good Ancestor, How to Think Long-Term in a short-term world.

In this episode, we explore lessons from the past and what it means to be a good ancestor today. We look at how our conceptions of time can expand or limit the way that we answer these questions. We explore what it means to be on the radical fringes of a society, how to build and strengthen solidarity, and how to find meaning and community in a world that has grown increasingly isolating and alienating. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded.

We could not keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one-time donation on our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to find. So thank you in advance for the

crucial support. And now here's Delia in conversation with Roman Kriznar. All right, welcome. We love to start by having our guests introduce themselves. So would you mind introducing yourself, our listeners? Sure. My name is Roman Kruznarek. I'm a social philosopher. I write books about how ideas can change society, about their extraordinary power to reshape and transform. And I am a research fellow at Oxford University in a place called the Center for Eudaimonia

and Human Flourishing. And what else matters? I founded a museum called the Empathy Museum on the art of stepping into other people's shoes. And I've recently written a new book as well called History for Tomorrow, inspirationiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. LS. Yes, thank you. And yes indeed, you are doing many different things and you are a prolific author. And I'm curious what threads, themes, or inquiries tie your books together? And a few just to uplift. So you mentioned History for Tomorrow, your most recent book. You also have The Good Ancestor, Carpe Diem Reimagined, and a book called Empathy. So what weaves your work together? What are the common threads or inquiries? And also, what inquiry is most alive for you

right now? Gideon Larkin So if you take my last three books, they are part of a loose trilogy on humanity's relationship with time. I think we've got a problem with time. And the way I think about it is that back in the 1990s, the psychologist Daniel Goleman spoke about the need for emotional intelligence. He wrote a book of that title, a sort of big bestselling book. And while I think emotional intelligence is important, it's something that I've explored in a book of mine called Empathy, I think now what we really need to cultivate particularly

is temporal intelligence. In other words, the capacity to think on multiple time horizons, forward and backwards, long-term, short-term, linear, cyclical. And so my last three books have been a kind of exploration of temporal intelligence. So the book called Carpe Diem is about humanity's relationship with the present moment. And then my previous book, The Good Ancestor, is about long-term thinking. It's about our relationship with the future. And the new book, History for Tomorrow, is about our relationship with the past. And so through those three books, I've been trying to unravel in a way the kind of inheritance of time we have from the past, a kind of inheritance that binds us to the tyranny of the present moment in many ways.

And so that I think is a thread which runs through some of my work. In terms of what's most alive for me right now, that is such a difficult topic. When I finish writing a book, sometimes people say to me, so what are you gonna write next? Well, actually I feel I have nothing more to say, to be really honest. I spend sort of three or four years

working on each book normally, and I feel kind of spent in that sense. I don't feel hugely alive to new ideas. What I do feel, I think, particularly because we're talking here in the context of a recent US election, is the sense of turbulence in the world. In physics, they talk about the idea of turbulence as the last great question of classical physics. The way that the smoke from a candle will go up in a straight line, then suddenly it will become chaotic. Or water flows down a stream and it hits a rock and

becomes turbulent. Or an airplane suddenly hits an eddy, a pocket of air and boom, it drops. And I kind of feel that's where we are now politically, socially, ecologically. We've got the turbulence of the rise of far-right populism across Europe and the US, the destabilizing aspects of that. We've got an ecological crisis which is here now, but is only set to get worse with its slow violence. Often it's fast violence, looking at the floods in Valencia and Spain just a week ago.

Risks from AI and bio weapons, rising food and energy prices. I mean, people often talk about this, of course, in terms of some kind of poly crisis or meta crisis, depending on your terminology. But that concept of turbulence really seems to come to my mind. And in fact, that's kind of where I'm situated now.

How about you? What's alive for you now? Where are you feeling and thinking now? Yeah, well, certainly that turbulence that you're mentioning is very alive. And yeah, I really also hear this interest or this focus on time. And you're reminding me of two conversations we've had on time, one with Jenny O'Dell on saving time, her book on saving time, as well as Oliver Berkman, 4,000 weeks. So

I really do find this reflection on time and how we view time and how we can invite other ways of seeing time to be helpful for this moment. I do appreciate this focus on both lessons from the past for tomorrow, but also how to be a good ancestor and cultivating this sense of long-term thinking. So yeah, thank you for those. And in History for Tomorrow, one way that I love you describe that book is that it is applied history, or it's an invitation for looking at applied history. And there's so many insights from that book. Like, each chapter is really a different insight for us to weave until tomorrow.

But one of the ones that stood out to me was this idea of the radical flank. And I think maybe that's alive because I feel that many of us view ourselves as being part of a radical flank, particularly in light of the US election. And so, you know, what have been some of the radical flanks in the past?

What are their uses or their importance throughout history? And what could be their role in the future going forth, particularly in light of systems change that is so needed? Yeah, so that idea of applied history, I think, is so important today when our politicians and policymakers seem so trapped in the tyranny of the present moment, or they cross their fingers and hope that new technologies will come to our civilizational rescue. And I think you wouldn't drive a car without looking in the rear view mirror. There's something important about learning from history. But typically when we think about learning lessons from history, we think about the warnings from the past captured in that famous aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And while I think it's important to learn from

the cautionary tales of history, the colonialism, the interwar fascism, the totalitarianism of the 20th century, I think it's just as important to look at what's gone right as well as what's gone wrong, moments where we have managed to act collectively, to rise up, to overcome crises and tackle injustices. And one of the patterns you can see in history, and by the way, I don't think there are any iron laws of history in a kind of a Marxist sense. I don't think there are any universal principles which hold across space and time,

but there are certain kinds of patterns which hold for certain periods of time or across certain geographies. One of them is the idea that you mentioned there of the radical flank or radical flank theory, which was something that first emerged in the 1980s really amongst social movement analysts when they started noticing a certain kind of pattern where often some of the most successful social movements really had two parts to them. They had a moderate mainstream movement and then a radical movement alongside it, whose

role was really to help make function, to make the moderate movement look more acceptable or palatable to those in power, pushing forward change. And so the classic example was often given was from the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960s where you had a kind of mainstream movement around Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP, the sit-ins and things like that. And then you had the Black Power movement, the radical flank, the Malcolm X's, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, whose role really ended up as if you could have doing a historical analysis, one of the key roles they played was to make that moderate movement more acceptable to those in power.

And Martin Luther King Jr. very much recognized that himself. And again, because that's not an isolated example, you can go back to other moments in history, which I do in my new book. In fact, the first chapter, I go straight in there with the idea of the radical flank and I look particularly, I think a really important historical episode, which has to do with a uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1831 on British owned sugar plantations. Now at that time, or say in the 1820s, over 700,000 enslaved people were working on British-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean. During that period, many plantation owners and financiers made remarkably similar arguments to

today's fossil fuel executives to defend their actions. They admitted that slavery, like oil and gas production, was morally questionable, but they claimed that ending it too rapidly could lead to economic collapse. So they typically argued that slavery should be phased out gradually over many decades, which of course is precisely the same kind of argument we hear today from the fossil energy industry. And at that time, the British abolition movement was organized in something called the Society for Mitigating and Gradually Abolishing the State of Slavery. I mean, and the name said it's all, its gradualist nature was all about lobbying politicians and publishing pamphlets. And it was making a little headway, but the turning point came in 1831 in an act of disruption which sent shockwaves through Britain,

which was the Jamaica Slave Revolt. When over 20,000 enslaved workers rose up in rebellion in Jamaica, they set fire to more than 200 plantations. Now, the revolt was brutally crushed, but it sent a wave of panic through the British establishment, who concluded that if they didn't grant emancipation, then the whole colony might be lost. And there are many, many studies which show how the revolt tipped the scales in favor of abolition leading to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which was by no means perfect. It included huge reparations for the plantation owners, for example, or a system of apprenticeship, which meant that enslaved people still had to keep working basically for free for many years.

But it was a significant shift and that revolt really tipped the scales. Without that radical flank movement, it could have taken decades longer for abolition to enter the statute books. And I think that kind of disruptive radical flank movement can help us think today about, for example, the global ecological movements, the movements like Extinction Rebellion, the Just Stop Oil, the Direct Action Radical Movements, which are often, of course, people are very, very quick to criticize them. But historically, they are part of long traditions of successful disruptive movements going back to the Jamaica rebels, to the suffragettes, to Indian Independence Movement, to the US

civil rights activists whose actions have helped amplify existing crises and catapulted them onto the political agenda. And of course, the tragedy is that while disruptive figures from the past like Emmeline Pankhurst, the great British suffragette and others are celebrated often in our children's school history textbooks, including the textbooks of my school kids who are just turned 16. You know, their modern equivalents in today's, you know, radical flank movements are demonized by the press and criminalized by the police. In fact, I just sent a copy of my new book history for tomorrow to a guy called Roger Hallam, who is one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion

who's in prison for five years for being on a zoom call for organizing planning to organize a just stop oil road protest or road blockage. And so I think, you know, coming to where we are today, one might still say, oh, those radical flank movements, I hear people saying this all the time, those radical flank movements, you know, they get a lot of press, but they're they're putting off more people than they're turning on to climate action. But in fact, if you look at the evidence, and in fact, there's a recent paper that came out a couple of weeks ago in a journal called Nature Sustainability, very kind of mainstream academic journal, which showed how during a just-stop oil series of direct action protests, although most people in the British population was a British

study, most people were opposed to their actions of road blockages and things. Actually it converted over a million people to put the environment higher up their agenda and to support mainstream organizations like Friends of the Earth. So it didn't convert people to becoming radical street protesters necessarily, but it shifted the discussion and people's priorities. And that's what the radical flank theory is all about. It seems to be working. LS. Yes. You're reminding me, we interviewed Sam Conniff on how to be pirate and how to be more pirate. He also spoke to the statues. The statues in, just like you said about the people in history books, are typically those of the radical flank,

and just like you said about the people in history books are typically those of the radical flank, right? Those who are celebrated later on. And as well as when I was reading your book, it was like, one of those moments where synchronicity, reading your book and then somewhere else, I first heard of the Overton window. Like I had never heard of it and then saw it twice within the span of a week.

And so what that told me was not just is it that the radical flank kind of makes the more mainstream side of the movement more acceptable, but it can also shift the political window even. And of course, after the US election, it's like that is so needed for us to really shift. And I do also think about discourse on Palestine and radical flank, you know, articulation there too. And again, what that's doing hopefully for the Overton window. So yeah, thank you for sharing about radical flank theory. And another piece, another question that you wove in the new book around applied history was you ask, how is it that some nations have survived collapse and change? And you alluded to this in you were sharing about your books, but I think that's such an

important question right now, particularly as you mentioned, we are in a time of turbulence. So what is it that you learned looking back in history about how is it that some nations survived other turbulent moments? That's the big question. That's why I put it at the end of the book. Um, you know, to me, when I think about that question, I think of a kind of phrasing that is raised by a systems analyst called Nate Hagans. He, he asked the question of what's going to make us bend rather than break as a civilization, because I think the problems we face are so acute,

the turbulence is so great that the real question is how are we going to make our way through this century at least? How are we going to bend, ideally transform, but avoid the breakdown, the climate breakdown, the other societal breakdowns more generally? breakdown, the climate breakdown, the other societal breakdowns more generally. Standing back and looking at the historical picture, it seems to me that there are three fundamental elements required for a society or a civilization to survive and maybe even thrive in the long term. One of them concerns a concept called Asabiyah. Now, Asabiyah is an Arabic term which I first came across in the great 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun's writings. He wrote a book called the Muqaddimah, which was one of the first great treatises of history.

He wrote it in a crumbling castle in today's West Algeria in the 1370s. In that book, the word Asabsabeer appears over 500 times. Its meaning in Arabic is collective solidarity or group feeling. He believed that what makes civilizations develop and thrive is strong as-sabeer, a kind of social trust, a social glue. Societies tend to decline when that as-sabeia is eroded, for example, by wealth inequalities, which might create conflicts or schisms within a society. Asabia is very fundamental. You can see its importance. For example, pick up a book like Rebecca Solnit's brilliant book called A Paradise Built in Hell. What happens in societies when things get bad, when a hurricane hits or a San Francisco earthquake comes? Well, often it's people

organizing on the streets themselves that asabia in practice when they set up a soup kitchen on the streets of San Francisco in 1906. That kind of idea. So I think that's one of the key elements So I think that's one of the key elements for a society that survives and thrives, building that asebia. And that is a major task in an era of huge social and political polarizations, which of course have been, you know, get exacerbated by digital culture and the algorithms which split people into those camps of pro-immigrant, anti-immigrant, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, climate change denier, climate change activists, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, and so on. So that's one area that we need to think about,

as a beer, it's a kind of pillar of civilizational survival. The second one is what I think of as biophilia, which is a term from the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, which is about, you know, literally means, you know, the love of nature, but, you know, I think in a more profound sense, it's about our deep interconnection with the living world. The fact that as I speak to you now outside the window over the top of my screen, there are two big ash trees. I know those

ash trees provide enough oxygen for eight human beings. In other words, they are my external lungs. My body, in some profound sense, myself does not end with my outer skin and my bones. It's kind of out there, but it's very hard to grasp that. Of course, it's something that's grasped very much in many indigenous cultures, the idea that the earth is not a resource but a relative or captured in concepts like seventh generation decision-making and things like that found around the world in indigenous communities. So clearly, that kind of interdependence with the living world is fundamental, which someone like Ibn Khaldun was not thinking about. He was much more focused on the social. He was more focused on, let's say,

intraspecies solidarity than interspecies solidarity. So those are two pillars. And then the third thing a society needs, I think, is a capacity to respond effectively to a crisis. In other words, you need that social glue. You need that connection with the living world. But when shit happens, you know, when the hurricanes come, when the waters rise, when the, you know, any kind of disruption happens, we need to be able to respond to financial collapse. And in my book, I talk about kind of a model of how change happens, which I call the disruption nexus, which is a triangular model of change.

And just to say something very briefly about it, basically, governments tend not to undertake rapid and transformative change, unless there's something very extreme happens, like a war or a pandemic, where they then might stop the planes flying or something like that, or the Second World War in the US,

they stopped the production of private cars and had fuel rationing. But outside those times, what would it take to get governments to actually take the action we need on the ecological crisis? Well, the disruption nexus offers a clue to that. You need three things to happen. One, you need some kind of crisis like a melting ice sheet or a financial collapse, but that normally isn't by itself enough.

The second thing you need are the disruptive movements, which we've spoken about a bit, about those movements which break the rules, sometimes break the law to catapult the issues onto the political agenda to shift the Overton window. And the third thing you need are the new ideas or visionary ideas to replace the old system. I don't quote Milton Friedman very often,

but he did rather usefully once say that a crisis creates opportunities for change and that the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. So one might think of the 2008 financial crash and say, right, they had one corner of the disruption axis triangle, the crash itself. You have the second corner, the movements, the Occupy movement. But what was maybe missing were the models, the new economic models prevalent enough in society. So what we ended up getting was a bailing out the old system. You know, none of the bankers ended up in jail.

You know, we've still got that financial system at that time. We, I don't think we had things like doughnut economics or degrowth or modern monetary theory, or some of the more alternative models models which are becoming increasingly talked about ready at hand. So that would be my quick sketch for civilizational survival. And let me add one other thing. I think the prepping mentality is not going to get us there. Human beings are social animals. Buckling up and hungering down and pulling up the drawbridge and having your gun by your side is not going to ensure, you know, multi-generational survival. That's not how humans have operated and survived through history. We are interdependent cooperators.

LS And yet, as I'm thinking, that's the theme of so many movies, right? The kind of lone person out in the wasteland kind of fending for themselves. So yeah, I definitely hear you. And I love these points that you're making around how we survive civilizational turbulence. And for the first one, I do think of this idea that we are not homo economicus, right?

As mainstream economics would have us believe. We do have the capacity to be rational, self interested beings and often are socialized that way, including by mainstream economic thinking. But we also have the capacity to be kind, interconnected, solidaristic, cooperative. And yeah, beautiful example of how there are times in history where there is disaster capitalism, but there's also that disaster collectivism. and it's very much present.

That's a great way of putting it actually, a kind of disaster collectivism. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, and then the biophilia piece, I really hear that too, like just speaks to, yeah, being in relationship with the more than human world, that care, that sense of moving from the egoic, isolated, rugged individual self to more of an ecological self really speaks to that point. And then I do love also this idea of the capacity to bend and not break and really speaks to the need for our prefigurative politics now, our mutual aid, our getting to know our neighbors for that time of collapse that we are more resilient and more resource when it does happen.

And I also love that idea of the power of visioning and use of the moral imagination, which I think for many authors and folks, it has become more alive more recently to do this visioning and to cultivate these alternative worldviews and visions of systems that could be more equitable, sustainable, and just. So thank you so much for weaving all of that in. And, you know, one of the other ways that you speak about time when you move into the future is in your TED talk you shared, the future has been colonized. The future is treated like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological damage and

technological risk without any care or concern to the great silent majority to that of future generations. So tell us more about this idea of the colonization of the future and what does it mean or what would it look like to decolonize the future? Yeah, so I thought a long time about that metaphor, that idea of colonizing the future. Because of course, you know, the way we think about colonizing and decolonizing is very much connected with history. And, you know, partly maybe because I come from,

I grew up in Australia, you know, and Australia, you know, when it was colonized by Britain in the 18th, 19th century, the British invaders had a legal doctrine now known as terra nullius, which is the idea that there was nobody there in Australia when they arrived, or the continent now known as Australia. But of course, there was the indigenous population. And the struggles of Australia's, Indigenous Australians goes on, Australia's First Nations people, the land struggles for example. But as well as the continent having been seen as a terra nullius, I think we are now also in an era of tempus nullius, where the future is a kind of an empty time, this sense that there's nobody there, yet there are the

millions, the billions of people who will inhabit the future. And the way I think about this is that humankind, particularly the wealthy countries of the global north, have a kind of colonial attitude to the future in the sense that this is where we dump much of our ecological degradation and our technological risks. I think the colonial metaphor works reasonably well as well because the impacts of what we do disproportionately affect the global south, marginalized communities, who gets hit first by the ecological crisis, but those who don't have access to water, who are being hit by, don't have the infrastructure to support themselves through the turbulence. So that then raises the question,

if we've colonized the future, what does it mean to decolonize the future? Partly, I think that's a kind of a mental shift. It's about recognizing that our moral responsibility extends not just across space but through time. And that the lives of future people and the world they live in are intimately connected with our own. Of course, as we already mentioned, many indigenous cultures do have deep philosophies connecting the present to the future, like certain ideas of

ecological stewardship or seventh generation decision making, which I mentioned before. When it comes to cultures of the global north, how do we make that leap or that shift towards decolonizing? I think there are ways to do it institutionally. Across the US, for example, there are legal struggles to give rights to future people. The organization Our Children's Trust, a public interest law firm, has brought a series of cases at the state and federal level on behalf of young people who are campaigning for the right to a clean environment, a healthy environment, safe climate for both current and future generations. I think that's one way. That's the legal way. Another legal way, of course, is giving rights to the

living world itself. The Wanganui River in Aotearoa, New Zealand has been given the same rights as a person, just like corporations were given rights in the US in the late 19th century. There are those kind of routes. I think there are the kind of on the ground, on the street kind of roots as well, like the radical flank movements, the ecological direct action organizations. It's another way to decolonize the future. I think a third fundamental thing is,

something that you've worked on is challenging the economic paradigm at the deepest level, the kind of hyper short-termism of neoliberal capitalism. How do we move to post-growth, post-capitalist economies? How do we spread things like the idea of a doughnut economy, which is about balance rather than growth, about staying within a safe and just space for humanity, about not going outside the ecological ceiling while bringing people above a basic foundation of social justice and economic justice. So I think there are many roles with many different kinds of people, I think, in a decolonization of the future.

But it's so deep in us in a way because our obsession with the present moment has been developing for more than 500 years in the Western world. It goes back to the invention of the mechanical clock in the 14th, 15th century when time started being sliced up into hours. Then by 1700, most clocks had minute hands. By 1800, they had second hands. The clock became the key machine of the Industrial Revolution, speeding everything up, diminishing the future, forcing people into the present moment. Not in a expansive Buddhist sense of interbeing or anything like that, but a sense of like, right here, right now, you're going to work faster, I'm going to sell you more, you have to consume, we have to produce all of that kind of you more, you have to consume, we have to produce all of that kind of obsessiveness with the seconds, with the nanosecond speed algorithms of the share markets as well.

LS. Yeah, and let's dive deeper into that hyper-short-termism and what you described as what's taken place over the last 500 years. And you've also described as the tyranny of the now and also marshmallow thinking. So I'm wondering if you can share, what is the problem with short-termism and what are some examples for us to invite in so that maybe we can start to notice when we are engaged with hyper short-termism

and also to see it in maybe our politicians or leaders? How do we recognize it? Yeah, so I mean, that idea of the tyranny of the now, I think we all kind of get it, right? We know that our politicians can barely see beyond the next election or the latest tweet or opinion poll that businesses can't see past the quarterly report,

that nations sit around international conference tables focused on their near-term interests while the planet burns and species disappear. And of course, as individuals, we're looking at our phone and clicking the buy now button. And we're caught in so many short-term systems, not just that inheritance of the clock, but the way our representative democracy works,

the kind of cycles that it works on, the way our 24 seven media works, the way digital culture works, I mean, and the way markets work. You know, there's so many drivers bringing us towards the here and now. It's not just our phones, I think is the main point I would make. And this also relates to the way the human brain functions, I think of us as having a both a marshmallow brain and an acorn brain. So the marshmallow brain is the part of our neuroanatomy which focuses on immediate rewards and instant gratification. And it's named after that famous marshmallow test from the 1960s when kids were had a, you know, in the psychology test when kids had a marshmallow put in front of

them and if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes, they were rewarded with a second marshmallow and lo and behold, the majority of kids couldn't resist and snatch the snack. But that's not the whole story of who we are. As you were saying earlier about the challenges, the idea of rational economic man or self-interest or our short-termism. We are so much more. We are also acorn brain thinkers in our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, you know, at the front of our brains, we've got a neural capacity for long-term thinking and planning and strategizing. So you know, many creatures, other animals do think ahead a little bit. So a chimpanzee might get a stick, strip off the leaves and turn it into a stick to put

into a termite hole, but they'll never make a dozen of those tools and put them aside for next week. But that's what human beings do. We're actually pretty good at that. There's always a struggle between the marshmallow and the acorn. Do we party today or save for our pensions for tomorrow? Do we upgrade to the latest iPhone or plant a seed in the ground for posterity? Do we plant that acorn so future generations can bask in the shade? But actually, if you look through human history, there are so many examples of a capacity for long-term thinking and planning.

I mean, one idea is the concept of cathedral thinking, which obviously links to those medieval cathedral builders who would maybe be laying the foundation stones knowing that building wouldn't be finished within their lifetimes. I don't think we need any more cathedrals really, but we need to build the ecological cathedrals. We need those long-term projects. There's all sorts out there. Think of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault collecting millions of seeds in an

indestructible rock bunker that's designed to last for a thousand years, a kind of botanical Noah's Ark. That's part of the kind of long-term thinking that we need. You can see it in all sorts of other things as well, which don't necessarily look long-term to start with, but actually have a long-term aspect to them. Think of the rise of the Citizens' Assembly movement, particularly across Europe, but in other parts of the world. There's been a revival of an ancient idea of a form of direct democracy where people are randomly chosen by lot like we do for jury service to discuss political issues. A famous one happened in Ireland in 2017, a citizens assembly where a hundred citizens were chosen by random,

but controlling for geography and age and ethnic background and so on to discuss the issue of abortion. After meeting for over several months and on weekends and things, they famously recommended that there should be a referendum to change the constitution to allow abortion, which passed. Since 2017, there have been hundreds of citizens' assemblies across Europe, particularly on climate and many other issues. And one of the really interesting things about them is that they tend to take a longer view than your regular politicians. They are kind of decolonizing force.

I think the rise of the citizen assembly movement is one of the most exciting shifts in the history of democracy since the extension of the franchise to women a hundred years ago. They're not perfect by any means, but they're extension of the franchise to women a hundred years ago. They're not perfect by any means, but they're one of the political mechanisms we need. Because I think, you know, often, I guess with a lot of the people I hang out with, you know, a lot of whom are in the kind of ecological justice world and the social

justice world, I often feel that there's a lack of focus on the kind of political mechanisms or redesigns that we need. And maybe that's because my background, I used to be a political scientist. So I used to teach in universities, democratic theory and history and practice and stuff like this. And so I always get a little bit frustrated when people are talking about the, I don't know, carbon emission target reductions and things like that without thinking about, well, bloody hell, you need to sort out your political system as well. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Roman Kriznaric. We'll be right back. If we don't know better

If we don't know better Well, then my parents know better Know what they tried They tried Cause we all need Sun sunflowers on the rise like I need A silent mind in a consumer flood and if i'm lucky Maybe a glass of wine And if I'm lucky Maybe a hand next to mine

Oh, freedom Better know what we tried If I get lucky, maybe a simple life If I get lucky, maybe some free time No, if we don't know better If we don't know better Well then my parents perished, no better, better That was Seed of a Seed by Hayley Hendrix. Now back to our conversation with Roman Kriznaric. You know, I wanna go back to, you mentioned marshmallow thinking and acorn thinking,

but I'm wondering if there's a third, which is that more enlightened, you called it expansive, you know, Buddhist sense of being in the present moment. And I say this because I, when I was reading that part in your book, I thought of Ram Dass's book, Be Here Now. I thought of this Buddhist phrase, when one eye is on the goal, there is only one eye left to follow the path, which I reflect on a lot as someone who can be actually very future oriented. And so I lose sight

of the enjoyment and the kind of savoring the present moment. And then I also thought of Satish Kumar, founder of Schumacher College, who said, we should be 80% in the present, 15% in the future, and 5% in the past. So I'm just curious if there's any maybe third invitation of this present that is more expansive and a be here now sense? Or how do you negotiate or balance that with marshmallow thinking and acorn thinking?

Richard Lundquist Yeah, so I'm very much interested in, for example, Buddhist concepts of the now. I spent a week with my family, my teenage kids, at a Buddhist meditation retreat a few months ago, a place called Plum Village in the south of France. I was talking to one of the monks there about the concept of the present moment. One of the things I was saying was a kind of frustration I often feel with a lot of, not a lot, let's say some people who talk about the importance of being in the present moment, where there's a kind of dismissal of the future and the past. This sort of sense, actually particularly in the writings of Eckhart Tolle, for example, in his book The Power of Now, a kind of almost a hatred of the future and the past.

The future is all creating anxiety and the past is just full of all our terrible inheritances and more anxieties back there. So we have to be in the present moment. And that's the only thing that matters. I kind of like Satish Kumar, who I've met. I like that idea of, let's be a bit more open about this. Let's be a bit in the future, but in the past. Or actually, when I was talking to this particular

Buddhist monk, he was saying, well, in the past or actually when I was talking to this particular Buddhist monk he was saying well you know in or at least as he was explaining a certain concept of time out of the the thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh the Vietnamese Zen monk who they kind of follow at Plum Village you know being in the present moment and having a kind of an infinite sense of present that kind of breaks down past and future doesn't mean you don't care about the past or future. The Buddhist tradition itself or the people at Plum Village themselves are thinking about how they respond to the way the world is changing and might change in the future. It's not like they're not thinking about the future. It's not like they're not thinking about the past, about the mistakes they may have made or their inheritances that they need to honor.

mistakes they may have made or their inheritances that they need to honor. I think it's about having a kind of equanimity, a kind of capacity to step back from it a little bit and almost take the view from the mountain and to see the present, past and future kind of flowing below you in some way. I think maybe that's the third eye view or another way of doing it. So I don't think that in a sense, a deep sense of being in the present isn't of course about clicking the buy now button or swiping on your phone. It's about recognizing that on some deep level that the whole past is contained in the present moment. And this moment will shape so many possible futures. Yeah, thank you. And another maybe we could call it shadow cider or question that came up as I was reading was this tension between long-term planning but organizing for the here and now at the same time. And just this idea of there are a lot of people who are suffering currently,

and how do we not abandon them to then move towards future thinking and future planning? So how do we balance the desire to think long term while also developing kind of the concrete analysis and the forms of organization and support and solidarity for those who are really suffering under concrete material conditions today. So I don't know, what are the ways that you've found in your writing and your research that people have negotiated this balance? Yeah, I certainly am well aware and care about the suffering of people in the present moment, whether those who are subject to a genocide or moment, whether those who are subject to a genocide or in civil wars or facing droughts or imprisoned, tortured by

authoritarian regimes, all of these things are the there's the fierce urgency of the now, of course, as Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about it. I don't necessarily think there's a tension or contradiction necessarily with recognizing that and thinking about the future. In fact, actually when I was writing my book, The Good Ancestor, I sent a copy of it, a draft to a friend of mine who at the time

was the chief executive of a very big development organization called Save the Children, which works around the world. And at first he said, oh, I don't like your book, Roman, because there is 150 million children dying of malnutrition right now and you're talking about the future. And we had a kind of interesting conversation about that. But later, Save the Children ended up writing a report all about being a good ancestor. And the general thrust of it was that if we care about the lives of those children, actually,

one of the things we need to do is not just have the emergency response, but do deep investment in education and healthcare, lots of long-term thinking and planning to build the resilience for young people to survive in difficult times. I think another way of thinking about this is that there are so many confluences between doing things for the present and the future. So in Wales, for example, there is a public position called the Future Generations Commissioner,

whose job is to look at the impact of public policy up to 30 years ahead. I think it'd be quite good if many countries had Future Generations Commissions or commissioners. And speaking to the commissioner, they've said to me, well, the first thing we try and do I think it'd be quite good if many countries had future generations, commissions or commissioners. And speaking to the commissioner, you know, they've, you know, said to me, well, the first thing we try and do is do things which help both the present and the future. So things like obvious things like green energy shifts, cheap, renewable public transport helps

people today, helps people tomorrow. So we need to be thinking about those things. And I think one of the insights I had on this issue, and of course, let me just also say, there are always gonna be tensions between, do you deal with an emergency now if you have a limited budget and do long-term investment in a tidal power scheme

or something like that. Of course, that's just what politics is. To me, what's important is to bring the voice of the future into our current debates so they are not ignored and sidelined because never in history have our actions had such potentially damaging impacts on future people and the world they live in. But one of the things that gave me real insight was the writings of the great biomimicry thinker and forestry expert, Janine Benyars. And I remember talking to her and listening fact, listening to one of her talks,

I asked her in fact, I talked about exactly this, I asked her this exact question, the one that you've just asked me. And she said, well, if you're thinking about how she's very interested in what can we learn from nature's 3.8 billion years of research and development to help us today. And she said, well, if you think about most other creatures, how do they survive for the long term, 10,000 generations from now, especially when they're not gonna be around 10,000 generations from now, what do they do?

Well, what they do is they take care of the place, which will take care of their offspring. In other words, they don't foul the nest, which is the opposite of what human beings have been doing, at least for the last century with a great acceleration. We are experts at fouling the nest. So in some level, particularly around the ecological issues, to think long term is to be here now, to fall in love with rivers and mountains and ice sheets and savannas. So I think there's a necessary presentism. And let me just say one other thing. One of the things I think is really

interesting and important is that many of those people who are facing deprivation right now of the most acute kinds are also thinking about the future as well. So think about, this is something actually my father pointed out to me, who was a refugee from Poland to Australia after the second world war. He said, you know, think about people who are in the lifeboats crossing from the Mediterranean, from North Africa, you know, to Southern Europe. What are they doing?

They are risking their lives right now for their children, basically, a lot of them, for their futures. They are, of course, immersed in extreme deprivations and violence at the present moment, but they are also thinking about a longer-term survival. And so we all, I think, have to be thinking about the present and the future and their relationship with each other.

But as I said, I think ultimately it's about bringing the voice of the future into the room. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, no, I do love that idea of not spoiling the nest. And it reminds me of this quote, and I don't remember who said it, but something like, live as if you're going to live in a place for your whole life. Like, I've really taken that on where even if I'm somewhere short term, like, you know, there for a little bit or, you know, school, whatever, if you just invite that thinking of what if I was going to be here the rest of my life, then you do plant the trees, you actually

do get to know your neighbors, you start to get involved in the local cultural activities. So I do love that sense of that idea that being here now, like you said, is connected to the past and the present. The being here now, the tyranny of now or the marshmallow thinking, when I feel into that, it's very cut off from the body. It's very impulsive, right? And maybe hedonic, whereas eudaemonic would bring in that deeper sense of the now. And that relates to this word you use, deep time. And I love that idea of what is deep time, right? And it makes time not as linear, but deep, right? And expansive. So, you know, the now can be expansive to include the past and the future.

And, you know, you brought up a few ways that we can bring in the other, the voices of the future. And I wanna move to those examples now because there's some beautiful experiences of deep time that we can cultivate. One of them that I actually facilitate and have participated in is from Joanna Macy, eco-justice, Buddhist, philosopher and activist

who invites a deep time ritual called the seventh generation inspired by indigenous seven generation thinking, as you mentioned, where you invite two people sitting across from one another, one person to use their moral imagination to imagine themselves as a present being and the other to imagine themselves as a being of the seventh generation from now. And then you meet in a point beyond space and time where the two can have this conversation with one another. And there's a series of questions that you explore together and at the

end, the seventh generation being gives the present day being kind of their their marching orders or their words of encouragement as they're about to go back into 2024. And every time I lead every time I participate in is such a powerful experience. And another experience of deep time, Stephen Harding, Dr. Stephen Harding, who just passed away, deep time. Stephen Harding, Dr. Stephen Harding, who just passed away, he created or developed the Deep Time Walk. So this idea of our deep time throughout history, the history of our whole planet, but also where humans fit into that. And it's this beautiful experience. And now it's actually an app that you can listen to even though he's passed away. But that's another experience of deep time that we can cultivate.

And another example that you offered in the book was from Japan, where folks are part of political decision making, embodying that voice of the future being. So please tell us that example, because I found that really insightful and particularly what those future being people recommended politically. Yeah. So, I mean, like you, I've, you know, I've been on some Joanna Macy workshops and, and, and that seventh generation imagining that journey. And it is very powerful. And I've also done the deep time walk and the app,

and I do like you recommend it. I mean, there's so many ways, I think of trying to connect with deep time. I actually think it's extremely difficult to do so in general to get that sense, especially of that great, that sense of the 13.8 billion years of life of the age of the universe. In fact, I once did a workshop, which was this was also very powerful where we were invited to go to the top of a hill, a group of about 20 of us, and there was a spiral rope laid out. And each of us was given a little envelope and inside of it was a word. My word was the Big Bang, somebody else had Birth of the Dinosaur, someone else had the first cell. And we were all moments in the long history of the universe. And we had to go

and stand in our particular point in that spiral. So I was right in the middle as the big bang, and then everybody else was spread around at different points. Most people were bunched up in the last couple of hundred million years with the rise of human beings and things like that. And then we had to do a piece of kind of automatic writing, just for a few minutes of to do a piece of automatic writing just for a few minutes of how we felt as being the Big Bang or being the first cell. And we read them out in order. And some people were really serious, some people were very funny, but it was very, very profound. And I think it's something about the embodiment of these kind of ideas, which is so important. I can look at geological graphic of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous and all these kind of things. I feel

pretty much nothing. Maybe that's an inadequacy on my part, but there's something about just being told about the lengths of time, which doesn't really do it for me and I think for most people, though I do know geologists who really feel that, you know, not just seven generations, but seven million generations or cosmologists who sort of have a sense of what might happen over the next billion years or five billion years, I don't, I don't feel it. I think it's important for most people to try and embody our investigations of deep time on a kind of human level within a sort of something which is within a few generations span,

like seven generations, even seven generations, I think people find hard to really think exactly seven generations. It's not about that. It's about sort of something that you might feel connected to in the past or future. So that's why I'm kind of interested in a mechanism that they have in Japan, a movement called Future Design, which is a kind of local government or local community decision making methodology influenced by the idea of seventh generation decision-making from Native American peoples. And what they do is they invite local people to discuss and draw up plans of a town or city where they live, and they typically divide

them into two groups. Half are told they are representatives from the present day, and the other half are given these kind of ceremonial kimono-like robes to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from 2060. So only a generation or two away. But even that imaginative leap, it turns out that those who imagine themselves being in the shoes of people from 2060 systematically advocate far more transformative plans for their towns and cities, whether they're talking about climate or AI or dealing with the issues around an aging population.

They've advocated for paying higher taxes, higher water bills, so that they invest in the water infrastructure that their children and grandchildren might enjoy. And in a sense here, yeah, you don't need to think a thousand years from now to do something like that. One of the ways I think about it, if you think about any one person or think about yourself, if you knew your grandparents, you know, think about the date your grandmother was maybe born. And if you have children or might have children or grandchildren, think about the date that your grandchild might die. Well, there's a span of a couple of hundred years already in which we are kind of anthropologically connected at a deep level.

Even if we were operating on that level, the world would be very different than it is today. Hostie So one of the parts of your book I found really fascinating was the argument for an enlightened despot or benign dictatorship, or also called eco-authoritarianism. And you phrased it because of this problem with the tyranny of the now and marshmallow thinking, which I really do attribute to politics today, really can see how a politician would want to appease voters now so that they get reelected and would not want to do things like raise taxes or fund projects that

would be long term in the future because it could mean their political career. So I see that challenge. And so this idea of an enlightened despot or benign dictatorship to kind of address the fact that so much of politics and also so much of our ways of thinking can be very hyper short-termism was really interesting. So I'm curious, tell us about this, this idea, the argument for it. And then of course, what you found and your analysis of it. Yeah. I remember a few years ago being really struck by the number of people from

across the political spectrum who kept saying to me, or hearing it in public meetings or on the radio or something, or even my own father saying, you know, look, the only way we can deal with our problems now, like the climate crisis, is by having some benign dictators. We need to be more like China or like Singapore, give up some civil liberties, hand the power over to a good dictator and they can sort out our problems for us. And I thought, well, that's interesting, an interesting thought. And maybe because I used to be a nerdy political scientist, I thought, I'm going to investigate this. Is it actually true that authoritarian regimes perform better when democratic governments, let's say? So I worked

with a brilliant statistician called Jamie McQuilkin who developed a index called the Intergenerational Solidarity Index, which ranks countries on their long-term public policy. And so we plotted those countries on one axis on their intergenerational solidarity score, 122 countries against their scores on how democratic they were, a very sort of standard measure of democracy, called the VDEM, Liberal Democracy Measure, comes out of the University of Göttenberg in Sweden. And lo and behold, what did we find? Did we find that the authoritarian regimes performed brilliantly? No, actually quite the opposite. Of the 25 highest scoring countries on the Intergenerational Solidarity Index. 21 of them were democratic governments of one form or another, and of the 25 lowest form scoring countries, in other words, very bad long-term public policy,

environment or healthcare, etc. One of the 25 lowest scoring ones were authoritarian regimes of various kinds. They were military dictatorships or monarchies, et cetera. Now there were some outliers like Singapore, but the general message is if you want to try and deal, for example, with your long-term ecological crisis, don't bring in a dictator and hope that they're gonna sort out your problems for you. It's very high risk because dictatorships tend to be very fragile. This is not to say that the current state of

democracy is being very effective at dealing with the ecological emergency, far from it. I think that's probably the system that we need to work with, but we need to go far beyond the machinations of the representative system of just putting an X on a ballot sheet every few years. We need radical decentralization of power. We need citizens' assemblies. We need local assembly-style government of the kind that they've got in Rojava, in Kurdish controlled Syria at the moment. We need those kinds of radical Murray Bookchin-esque styles of local democracy, I think, if we're going to have any hope of bending, not breaking.

Yeah. And I do hear the both and, the deep democracy piece that you talked about, which can take more time. You mentioned this group in Ireland meeting over several months. So the deep democracy and hearing from each other and allowing people to receive the experts, the presentations, and then also to reflect and then to share can take more time. But that ultimate conclusion is more holistic and also can bring in that future perspective more clearly. And then there's also, I'm reminded of the piece you mentioned around what ideas are lying around in crisis or what can get elevated.

And so it is also important to uplift the leadership, the people who are doing the thinking on this, right? Donut economics, degrowth, et cetera. So maybe a little bit of the both and, but I did find that section just really fascinating. But I think it's also, you know, yes, important, the leadership of ideas is important. But you know, you mentioned earlier the word prefigurative. And I think the prefigurative politics of

mutual aid and community action is really also vital here for creating these models of change. And as you were talking, I was just thinking about Britain's National Health Service, which emerged after the Second World War as a kind of a state institution, a very long-term state institution. But what did it grow out of? Well, one of its founders, Anurhan Bevan, the health minister at the time, always used to say that actually he was modeling the National Health Service on something called the Tredegar Medical Health Society, which Tredegar is a small Welsh mining village where the workers themselves in the 1920s and 30s had formed their own mutual aid association to provide health care for each other through regular voluntary contributions.

Through that, they funded an ambulance service and hospitals and all sorts of insurance for health and funerals and things like that. Bevan used to say, I'm just scaling up that in effect prefigurative Kropotkinesk mutual aid model. And so in times of crisis, we were going to need those kinds of models and those kinds of learnings to draw on. So I'm all in favor of that. And I think, in fact, just a couple of days ago, a new book by David Graeber was just published, a collection of his old essays. I can't quite remember the name of it, but also worth mentioning to people listening to this is it's the 100th anniversary this year

of the birth of the great British anarchist writer, Colin Ward, who wrote about anarchy is a form of social organization, the way that we cooperate in local communities, in community gardens, in children's playgrounds, tenant run housing cooperatives, all these different kinds of areas are fundamental for the bending, not breaking. Yeah, thank you for that. And our last episode, one of our last episodes was on prefigured

of politics, and we will we will be doing more on anarchy as well. So speaking of models, we have to speak about donor economics. We've mentioned it a couple of times. And obviously, I saw Dona Economics throughout your books, the holding a transcendent goal, the practice holistic forecasting, even the story of circular economics in Japan's history. So of course, I thought of Kate in Dona Economics. So Kate is your partner and obviously the, you know, the, the founder of donor economics. So I'd love to hear how, how do you two share inspiration and intellectual influences with one another? How, how does your work influence each other?

Yeah, well over the years, it's actually got closer and closer, you know, together, because she's always reading every draft manuscript I have and I read hers as well. I think I've learned a huge amount from her own journey, Kate's journey from being a development economist originally to shifting towards ecological economics in many ways. It was through her that I discovered thinkers and writers like Herman Daly, who taught her and I think taught me that when you're thinking about an economy or a political system, the first thing to do is draw a big circle around it. It's called the biosphere, right? Everything

happens within that non-negotiable space of the one planet we know that sustains life. And to be honest, it's taken me many years to really get that at a kind of deep level and to get the idea of systems thinking, the work of Donella Meadows, which has come through Kate to me as well. So I'm incredibly grateful to her for opening my mind because I studied economics like she did, you know, 30 years ago. And I was also taught what she was taught, which was a demand and supply diagram on a white background with no circle of the biosphere around it. So I try and make sure that everything that I do

is kind of consistent with the doughnut goal. I still, of course I would say this, I do think it probably is the most coherent and effective vision for a different kind of economy that we have. But I think what I try and say bring to it myself is partly the political piece, which is what kind of governance systems are most likely to bring us into that donut-shaped space. And if the stuff that I write about politics has that in mind all the time. That's why I'm interested in things like citizens' assemblies and direct democracy, decentralization. I think these are

parts of the roots to doughnut economics. And then I'm also thinking about the historical piece, which is what have we learned from the past to help us to get into that doughnut-shaped space? So hence in my new book, History for Tomorrow, I write about 18th century Japan, the fact that they had what we would today call a circular economy where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposed, or recycled. And I hope that that contributes to discussions about what it means to create a regenerative economy today, to bring in some of those other angles. And who knows where Kate's work and my work might go in the future.

But I think that, yeah, in a way I sort of feel grateful that it's helped take me on a kind of intellectual journey of my own and to always be open or to always be thinking about what does it mean to create a regenerative culture in the broadest sense possible. Yeah. And for the folks listening who maybe are unfamiliar, the main premise of Done Economics is to move from gross domestic product and our typical metrics of success and progress and development and instead to say, what if the goal of the economy was to meet human needs and to stay within the needs of our ecosystems

or the planet. And so it really is a very holistic and ecological alternative goal and aspiration and a very much a like all of us are a part of that. All of us are a part of the meeting of the human needs and staying within the ecological boundaries. And I love what you said about your work being kind of looking at the actual donut, the safe and just space for humanity. How have we gotten into that space in the past or in cultures or places of the past? And also, how can this be a model for the future and for thinking about the future generations and also the inheritance or the gift to the future generations to leave them a livable world. One of your earlier books is titled How to Find Fulfilling Work.

And I love that because I'm also a right livelihood coach. So I wonder as we kind of wind down our conversation, you know, if there's anyone listening who might think, how can what you're sharing and your work and your books influence our livelihoods? What would you offer as how our work can align with this future thinking, but also being good ancestors as we practice our livelihoods? What do I think about that? What pops into my head is a quote attributed to Aristotle,

but which I've never found in Aristotle, which is this, where the needs of the world and your talents meet, there lies your vocation. That kind of sense of when we're trying to think about what path should we be pursuing as individuals to somehow find the meeting point of those things that to look at the world we live in, to keep asking yourself what does the world need but not have? But then also, you know, what is my role in this in terms of my talents, my passions, my skills? I mean, it's easy enough to say. But I also think for many years I taught courses and workshops on finding purposeful work. I was a co-founder of an organization called the School of Life, which provides sort of teaching and stuff around

the big questions in life that college doesn't teach you, like how to find fulfilling work or how to make relationships work or how to deal with death. And one of the things I really discovered from all that work and thinking and running workshops and talking to people is that most people don't find vocations, they grow them. They grow them through experiment. They grow them through conversations with others that you find your path not by just walking around in circles and trying to work out what the hell should I do with my life or what should I be doing next or how do I deal with the turbulence of the world or living in a land ruled by Donald Trump or living in a world where the planetary boundaries are being overshot. We find a way through that. We find our path in communion with others, in conversation with others. In fact, that's what I

do. When I've finished writing a book, when I'm in that state, which I mentioned earlier, I feel like I've got nothing more to say. I do a lot of talking to people, talking to strangers, talking to friends, seeing the lie of the land, looking at the state of the world, feeling what my path might be through it, and realizing that it's always, all life is an experiment and you may tumble, but up again, you know, keep on going, keep on struggling.

And I think, you know, in my book, The History for Tomorrow, there's a historian who I mentioned quite often, the American historian Howard Zinn. And he wrote a beautiful essay in the 1960s called Historian as Citizen. And in that essay, he talks about two very powerful words, a powerful phrase, as if. And what he meant by that is we always have to act as if change is possible. That those who struggled against colonialism in India, against all sorts of subjugation probably thought they were never going to succeed, but one always has to act as if change can happen. Because I think if you look through history, it sometimes does, not always, but sometimes. And that gives me hope, not hopium, hope without action, but a kind of

vigorous sense of hope, which I think even when the odds are against you, we can create change. And that I think is something that can give us that deep sense of purpose which goes beyond the hamster wheel of pursuing wealth and social status and all that kind of stuff. LS Yeah, the Aristotle, possibly Aristotle quote that you said reminds me of a Frederick Buechner quote that we are called to the place where the world's deepest hunger meets our deepest gladness. CB That's even better than apparently Aristotle. LS. So we're going to close now with our final invitations for our listeners. So a few that

I'll uplift and then I'll ask you for yours. One, in your book you invite us to join the Time Rebellion. I love that. And to become Time Rebels and to follow the path of being a good ancestor. And I'll just say this idea of what would it feel like, what would it be like to be a good ancestor, just to invite that question in regularly is powerful. Such a powerful prompt. For us to develop intergenerational solidarity and empathy and practice that deep time perspective, but also that moral imagination, imagining that, you know, how would my actions, efforts, even policy decisions, all of that, how would that influence maybe the seventh generation from now or even the next generation from now? And also the empathy for those beings, that silent majority.

from now and also the empathy for those beings, that silent majority. And then to each of us do our part to decolonize the future, to engage in biophilia, right? That love of place and of our, you know, our wider body, we could say, our Gaia. And then also to participate in mutual aid and solidarity today, right? To support those who are maybe struggling or suffering today and to get to know our neighbors and do that prefigurative politics for that time when there are crises because they will come so that we bend instead of break. So those are some that I heard. But I'd love for you to close with your final invitations, particularly if there's anything around the six ways to think long or anything else we haven't shared.

Just what would be your invitations for the listeners as they go forth? I'd say one thing just to draw on what you're saying in a way is, you know, I remember listening to this Steve Jobs talk that he gave at some college and he talked, it was a kind of a seize the day message about, he used to say that, you know, if I, when I look in the mirror each morning, I'd ask myself if this was the last day of my life, you know, would I do what I'm about to do today?

Now I don't advocate that. What I would advocate is to say, look yourself in the mirror every morning and ask yourself, you know, what am I gonna do today to be a good ancestor? Or at the end of the day, ask yourself, what have I done today to be a good ancestor? And there are many answers to that question, but I think these are about existential habits of mind, which just get us to see the world in a slightly different way, to interpret what we're doing in a slightly different way. So just that question to carry it with you in your mental back pocket.

What could I do today to be a good ancestor? And I think the second thing, you know, you mentioned that getting to know your neighbors, I think there's something very fundamental about that. You know, I would say to people have a conversation with a stranger once a week, you know, joining a local sports team with players from diverse backgrounds, you know, on some level, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as it is helping to create that asabia, that social glue, that collective solidarity, that group feeling, which is then a basis for doing the kinds of things we

need to do to bend rather than break, whether in the ecological field or in the social justice field or in other areas in the more directly political field as well. So I would say that power of conversation and to become a great empathic listener as part of that, which of course Joanna Macy was so good at advocating that too. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Roman Prisnarek, a social philosopher and research fellow at the Center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and the author of several books including History for Tomorrow, Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity, and The Good Ancestor, How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World.

Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Hayley Hendrix for the intermission music and to Nina Montenegro for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse responsive co-learning network that hosts free online weekly EcoGatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action,

and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some Upstream episodes to life. This is one of those episodes. Find out more, including the date and time for this EcoGathering, in the show notes or by going to www.eco-gather.ing. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We could not keep this project going without your support.

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