Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Indigenous Economics with Tyson Yunkaporta

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

It often feels like contemporary life diverges from everything that actually matters. Our global economic system could not be less in touch with patterns of creation, natural systems, and the real wealth of healthy soil, clear water, and bonded communities. Of course, it hasn’t always been this way — and it doesn’t have to continue to be. In this conversation, or yarn, we speak with Tyson Yunkaporta of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland, Australia, about the connections between Indigenous economics, complexity theory, and systems thinking. We also discuss caring for the commons, explore how to hold each other accountable, and hear the story of the world’s first corporation. Tyson carves traditional tools and weapons, works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, and recently authored the book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. 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.

Before we get started, please head to Apple Podcasts to rate, subscribe, and leave us a review. It really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to spread the word and help grow our audience. And as always, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. Your donation helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so if you can, please donate. Thank you. The caste system is needed. Without a caste system, you can't have economic growth.

So that's why this idea of changing the culture and fighting for equality and tweaking the system, that everybody thinks that we can still have prosperity and equality at the same time you can't in a growth-based economic system at all for that you need oligarchs at the top and you need serfs dying at the bottom you need that and look the mechanics of that are quite simple. You cannot price anything in this economic system that we have now. You can't price anything unless it's limitable and excludable. That's how you calculate that price. It's limitability and excludability. So you have to be able to limit the amount of that thing.

And you need to be able to exclude people from access to that and make it difficult for them to access that you can only do it with a caste system so the people at the top half have access the people at the bottom half don't you're listening to upstream upstream upstream upstream a podcast of documentaries and conversations that invite you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation, we hear from Tyson Yunkaporta of the Appalachian clan in far north Queensland, Australia. Tyson is an academic, researcher, and author who carves traditional tools and weapons,

works as a senior lecturer in indigenous knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, and recently wrote Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. So welcome, welcome to Upstream. Really good to be with you. I'm wondering if you could start by introducing yourself. How might you introduce yourself for those listening? Yeah, it's really good to be talking to you all. Yeah, I'm Tyson. My real name, my bush bush name i guess some people call it is um car whopper now that's the sound that a brolga makes when it's

flying over really high brolga is like a i think in europe and asia they call it a crane you know that bird the crane yes i do yeah yeah so the country, the land that I'm on here is the Boon Wurrung Mob. That's the country here where I'm staying in Melbourne. Melbourne was called Narm before, and most of us still refer to it as Narm. Yeah. I've been here about three years, four years maybe. Here for another couple of years, and then I'm heading back up home. And so, Tyson, the show is about economics. And I'm curious when you when you got the invitation,

what what you're like, oh, economics, or maybe this is a regular topic for you. But just curious, you know, when you hear the word economy or economics, what comes to mind for you? What's your your felt relation to the concept or the system of economics in general? Yeah, it's flows of value that track relationships is what an economy is. And that still operates and actually scales massively when it's operating in a system of fractured and fragmented relationships and bad relations and asymmetrical relations. In fact, the more asymmetrical the relationships are, the more that economic system can grow. But we can get into that. I do have a lot of thoughts about that. See, I'm at Deakin and we've spent the year setting up the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab.

So, you know, we work with, we don't look inwards at directing our research towards our communities and things like that, but we use our customary logics and methods of inquiry, the traditional Indigenous knowledge sort of systems, complexity sort of lens focus. And we direct that outwards towards the world to big complex problems with that really strong complexity lens. So yes, economics is one of our areas. Yeah, and maybe if you could also just introduce, you mentioned that you're doing this work on Indigenous thinking and the economy.

And you mentioned complexity, theory, systems thinking. So what would be some of the offerings from Indigenous thinking in light of economic systems and the economy? What would be just some of the tenants that we might dive into? Yeah, well, basically, it's about relationality. And there's a protocol in our trading system, which still survives today. You know, even in the most colonized communities. It survives in the form of what a lot of people call demand sharing. You know, so demand sharing means like no person can accumulate anything. So I haven't been able to keep any of the royalties from my book, for example, because that's, you know, that's a surplus that's coming

into one member of the extended family. And that must be distributed. So, you know, if I have $10,000, you know, and somebody asks me for five, I have to give it to them. There's no like, oh, no, I'm saving that for my kids college or anything like that. There's kind of no accumulation of things. There's that understanding that when my kids go to college and they need money for books or tuition, then I ask around the family. So that means that there's a principle of a really high velocity of any unit of exchange. So every dollar in an extended family family but then in a community made up of extended families every dollar changes hands and is exchanged like a thousand times yeah the dollar has very high

velocity in our economic systems even today with you know our internal economies in our communities are sort of a pale shadow of what was. So that kind of demand sharing economy from before, I mean, that starts at the individual level of you acquire or accumulate something. And then it goes into that relational pair that you might have with, let's say, your nephew. So he puts his hand out and you pass that on. Later, he might do something for you as well. But I mean, that just happens all the time. You're always doing things for each other. So it's that pair.

But then there's you and your grandmother and their grandmother, grandson sort of pair. And you're in all these different pairs. So it's a network of pairs that make up your extended family. So, you know, there's a kind of internal economy in there. And then that scales up to clan and then to, you know, your tribe, but then your regional group. And these are all networked. And so there's a principle of, it's important to note that there aren't permanent hierarchies in these. Hierarchies emerge temporarily for different purposes like it's ceremony trade or managing different parts of the land that you know are cared for by different people

so as you're moving through that country then that leadership will shift it's not really leadership it's like a cultural authority it's not power because power is distributed in the same way that goods services value is distributed always distributed um throughout and it's always moving so like we always say no boss for me so you have no boss that's like against the law you can't boss anybody ever even if you have really high status and high authority you know all you do is um you share that knowledge because that's what you've accumulated and that's your value, your store of value as a person who is a knowledge keeper. But you share

that knowledge and make sure, and that person has such authority that everybody respects that and does what, and usually will follow that, follow that knowledge, but there's no bossing so you know you have that complete autonomy so if you can imagine that as it keeps scaling up so each family has complete autonomy but is bound in obligations and relationships in the clan each clan has complete autonomy however it's bound in obligations to the rest of the tribe and then that keeps scaling up and then that goes to the next region you know each regional group language group is is completely autonomous and their territory cannot be annexed you know under that continental common law that's not really separate from the landscape because

that's patterned on the landscape that's patterned on the ecosystem and the complex systems and patterns of land and creation and the spirit that drives that you know and then so that that governance model it has the same topography there are no layers of abstraction of ideologies and culture wars and things like that we don't have cultural wars it just sits like yeah another layer in the landscape that's not separate from the landscape. And your economy sits on top of that as well. So there's all these layers, kind of like a stack, but without separation between the layers, if that makes any sense. So if you think about, you know, all the layers in sort of, you know, internet systems or something like that,

and you need protocols, you know, in between each layer so that each layer can talk to the other. And those protocols in computer language, that's like, these are layers of abstraction there. And it's the same way with Western economy, not Western economies, but, you know, the global economic system that's here now and covering the entire planet that has all these layers of abstraction and some of it's like weird mystical wizardry kind of stuff as you know you know a lot of that the magical equations you know um you know of um you know equilibrium and all that sort of thing is weird and magical thinking you know i don't, all the rising tide that lifts all boats, the trickle-down stuff, the horse droppings on the road and the birds and all that sort of thing. It's a really weird mythology behind this global economic system that doesn't make much sense to us.

You know, because we have that fractalized kind of thing that scales fractally, and sort of bound within those sort of natural laws, and that law of the land that is inalienable and ineffable, and you just can't change it. So you have to go with those flows. Anything that you acquire, it's not yours. You know what I mean? You're not extracting it because you are in the landscape and that landscape is something that you're in relation with and so therefore that plant that

tree that place that river it's giving up these things for you it's giving you these allowances that in that season the river can share these fish with you but not next season you know next season you're putting something back into the river. You're doing things to care for that place. So there's that reciprocal relation going on. There's always that exchange. So basically, an economy is a way of tracking value within relationships. Well, I guess that's more of a... No, tracking value, that's more of a currency, isn't it? That's a better description of a currency. An economy would be the system within that series of flows of currencies.

I'm so glad that you mentioned horse and sparrow theory, because I actually just learned about it myself recently. For those who may not know, horse and sparrow theory is really the 19th century version of trickle-down economics. And it's the idea that if you feed a horse the oats that a horse needs to eat, that those oats will pass through the horse's body, its digestive tract, and then the horse will excrete on the road. And from that excretion, the sparrows will go and be able to eat out of the poop, that which it needs to survive. So yeah, again, a very interesting way to reframe or rethink trickle-down economics. But yeah, I'm hearing

a couple things that I want to pull out. So the first thing in the layers that you spoke about is seeing that we have nested systems, that we are a part of and embedded in nested systems. So for example, I view the bacteria on my skin as a system, and then that system is on, you know, me and my body, and then I am embedded in ecosystems, and then those ecosystems are embedded in the planetary system, earth system, sometimes referred to as Gaia. And so we can see that these systems scale, right? And that they're nested. And then I love what you're also adding about the permeability, the permeability and the influence of one system to the other, that they're not closed systems, that there's influence and interaction between them, and that they're not separate and we are not separate from them. And then I also love, on the other hand, you're also talking about the exchange and debt and gift. And I love that what you're reminding me is how, you know, if I give someone something and they give me money back or something in exchange, then that relationship is done. It kind of cuts and severs those ties. However, there's a real mutual indebtedness that comes

from mutual gift giving that really can strengthen a relationship. The debt in terms of community is not a bad thing. That mutual indebtedness is what kind of strengthens bonds. So it's kind of like what you were saying with yourself and a nephew. So just, yeah, appreciating that and appreciating how mutual indebtedness in an ongoing way really builds connection. Yeah. And reciprocity doesn't quite cover it because in sort of reciprocity, there's that option to gain that system, right? And here's where the problem comes in of multipolar traps, et cetera, when you have a commons sort of way of looking at things like that, that that can always be corrupted. And it only takes one person to do the wrong thing in there

to gain an unfair competitive advantage. And then everybody has to do it, and then it's a race to the bottom. And the concept of reciprocity, that can be gained. There's that temptation of one person to shortchange the other. So it's not quite that. When I say it's patterned on the landscape, it's not necessarily mutual and reciprocal. It's more of this idea of a closed loop. Because if you have that proper closed loop, then you avoid that inevitable entropy that occurs in systems that become shut off from other systems. So that closed loop is like when a tree dies, falls down in the forest,

but everything's recycled through. That doesn't just sit there rotting and poisoning that place that goes down and that feeds many things and that's carried through the roots of the other trees which then share those things out with all the other trees and then all the plants do that and this animals that use it as habitat and then there's you know different animals that eat that and is in a million things. So it's in this kind of closed loop within that system. The system itself though, that's not a closed system, that little forest. If it was, like in a national park for example, it would be doomed within a couple of centuries.

Once you take the semi-permeable membrane around a system and you make it less permeable, you try and make it into an enclosure as we do with real estate now on every inch of land on the planet that's capital for people right and we'll get to that later too these things are fenced and enclosed so that those flows are disrupted the flows that you get and the flows i'm talking about are the closed loops between systems. So that forest must exchange entropy. Every system creates entropy and it has to dump that entropy elsewhere. But that has to be in a closed loop in terms of your system's entropy has to be another system's lunch. The waste that your body produces, for example. You know, that's um sent to a sewage treatment plant then that's no good

that's an open loop and there's entropy but if that's like uh goes into your garden and that's a closed loop you know what i mean because then you're compost toilet you're eating those beans later you know um so it's that kind of thing it's like the sahara like um the big entropic event events happen in the sahara like the the big dust storms you know but that entropy is then outsourced and becomes another systems lunch so without the dust storms in the sahara the amazon rainforest couldn't exist because it's those dust storms and what's carried on the winds there that actually fertilize the Amazon rainforest. So if you disrupt that closed loop by, say, covering 20% of the Sahara with solar panels,

then you're changing the reflective part of the sunlight on that system and that part of the system is intervened with. And then you're making changes in microclimate, which makes changes in the climate across the Sahara, which then increases rainfall, and then that would disrupt the dust storms, and that would kill the Amazon. The entire Amazon would be finished within a century or two.

There's all these things to consider always. Our current economic system regards every element of those outside systems as externalities. It takes closed loops of creation and opens them. So there's a mouth at one end and an ass at the other. So it's extracting at one end and then producing entropy at the other. It's also producing surpluses of capital, etc., that's distributed asymmetrically, is a kind way of putting it. But it also produces excesses of entropy, which are outsourced to other spaces.

And that also creates that inequity, that same inequity. equity all the entropy like the toxins produced etc that's always uh dumped on the the lands of the people who are furthest from the center from the you know elite um minority so you know this um system is is in place to reinforce permanent hierarchies that are um anathema to every human being this isn't just Aboriginal culture. This is everybody's patterning as an organism. Primates freaking hate hierarchies. Most mammals hate hierarchies, and we will disrupt them and challenge them wherever possible.

Yeah, this is something we do not like. It's part of our patterning. Absolutely. And if we were to take the problems of the growth-based economic system and the problems that you see today, and you were to go upstream from those, so this is that question about the root causes. When you think about imperialism, colonization, growth industrial society, and you go upstream from that, what is it that is causing these downstream problems that we see and experience my clan if i go back 500 years my clan upledge clan on a place called cape kiwi up the top of australia there we started that 500 years ago the d Dutch came there and tried to establish trade.

And they were trying to get us interested in rice and soap, for example, tobacco, things like this. But it wasn't as good as the tobacco that we had, so nobody liked it. And the rice was sort of yucky because we hadn't cooked it and we were just trying to eat it dried. And that wasn't very nice. And the soap, it was like clearly that was made from fat, so we tried to eat that and then we were blowing bubbles. And so it was a pretty crappy sort of a deal. And a lot of the Dutch then decided,

because in Europe at that time women were chattel, and that was a concept that was just completely alien to us here, and particularly alien to our women who did not take kindly to the idea of these Dutchmen suddenly seizing them and trying to carry them off as payment for rice and soap that we didn't even like and so the women took exception to that and and sort of fought back as you do and it wasn't long before most of those dutchmen on that ship were speared to death and so there was basically a handful of them managed to sail their ship back to holland and of course they had lost their cargo lost their crew and the whole

thing was a disaster and they owed a lot of money on that voyage and were bringing back no profits and they didn't want to go to debtors prison or whatever so so they had to figure out a way to get around that and to um outsource the accountability for that entropic mission they had to try and outsource that somewhere else so they kind of created a third party like uh that would take the blame for that and take it off their shoulders you know and so that was the world's first corporation was invented which has personhood so they created the world's first corporation the dutch east india company started up and then of course the british followed suit with the british east india company this was incorporated into the big push to go to the new

world and try and settle all their debts from the wars they've been fighting for centuries the big banks that they owed money to and money lenders and all that kind of thing and so yeah off it all went and it was all our fault here in western cape york in australia if we hadn't speared those dutchmen you know and if we'd been more amenable to the idea of women as chattel like to be treated like dogs or horses to be traded or whatever, then, you know, maybe we wouldn't have ended up with the world's first corporation and the Dutch wouldn't have invented finance. They also invented art speculation, by the way. So those two things, they invented both of them. And therefore, I blame the Dutch for NFTs. They're responsible.

Yeah. But our women didn't like them. They thought they just smelled vaguely of feces and pancake mix and pipe tobacco. So, you know, nobody really wanted to go with them, unfortunately. And that kind of ruined the world. So that's our fault. And we should apologize for that. Probably shouldn't have speared those Dutchmen there.

Yeah. Now, yeah. Now, so that's when I look upstream. Now, what came out of that then was these corporations were taking lands, and they had to figure out how they would be able to, because the only way to escape the debt then was to leverage capital for more debt. But there wasn't enough capital, you know, in the world. So what could we use for capital? They were thinking. And so they went with land. Before that, land was inalienable. Like,

if you had land, that could not be seized. Or, I mean, you know, someone could kill you and live on the land instead. You could do that. But you could never, never you know see somebody's land for failure to pay off a debt so you couldn't secure a debt with land but so they invented this sort of financial instrument whereby debts could be secured you know that mortgage on the land so you had land became capital to secure debt and then they as technologies improved, they employed surveying technologies to survey every single bit of land in the world and divide it up into these sort of blocks. So each unit of land had a certain value. And, you know, the closer that was to the desirable places to live where the most wealthy places lived, the more value it had. And so that created this sort

of real estate market. Every inch of land became capital. All these blocks of land were enclosed. So then interfered with the flows within the landscape, just as it was interfering with the flows of value, currency, exchange, trade. And so, you know, it's not free trade if the flows of trade and value and relation are blocked. You know, it's not free trade if, you know, monopolies are created and there's just horrendous antitrust stuff going on, which kind of came all out of that backdrop. So if I look upstream, I look upstream 500 years and I see that developing. And you can go 500 years before that as well and look at things coming out of the Middle Ages of Europe. And you can start to see, you know, with things the church was doing to break up

intense kin networks and to change the culture of extended families and break it down to more nuclear families and make sure that individuals could own capital so that then therefore when they died the church could inherit that to guarantee that person went to heaven etc so you know you can keep going back and back and start to see this sort of perfect storm of generator functions that built up and built up into this massive system of perverse incentives that became so complex that it became a self-organizing system. So, I mean, a lot of people are looking for conspiracies and rooms full of little men who are conspiring to design these systems, but this system wasn't designed. It was like machine learning. It was like a learning algorithm and kept building itself. Once it become complex enough to become self-organizing, then it basically just took care of its original operating protocol, its prime

directive of when it was originally created by these Dutch, and that was to grow. That's all it has to do. That's its prime directive. And it's very creative, it's self-organizing, and it makes sure that everything it does just goes towards that singular objective of growth, growing itself. And kind of that's what we're in. So, you know, off it goes. That's when I look upstream, that there's a lot of historical things that feed into that. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta. We'll be right back. guitar solo You can't be what you were

So you passed out being Just what you are You can't be what you were The time of now is running out It's running out, it's running, running, running out You can't be what you were So you passed out living the life running out You can't be what you were Say you're best at living the life

that you're talking about You can't be what you were The no movement The no movement The no movement It betrays a bad mind The no movement The no movement The No Movement If a treasure bed mine The normal man

The normal man The normal man If a treasure bed mine You're always talking, talking, talking, talking, talking shit now But you will talk yourself down You don't want to That was Bad Mouth by Fugazi. Now back to our conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta,

author of Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. You mentioned women as chattel, so I'm seeing like male supremacy over women. You mentioned white supremacy in the last example. And then you mentioned also supremacy over women. You mentioned white supremacy in the last example. And then you mentioned also supremacy over nature. And if we go upstream from supremacy, one of the things is this view that you share in the book about better than, you know, better than thinking. And the emu, for me, that part of the book was one of the most upstream perspectives of it's like that separation and then the better than thinking that then leads to all these historical events that you spoke about. If we think about it in economic terms, a growth-based economic system demands inequality

and demands a caste system and that there must be people at the top of that. And we'll get back to the mechanics of that in a minute. But I guess here's where the emu story comes in and that's at that moment of creation when all of those kind of spirits became real so in my world view like as a brolga boy the emu is is the entity that stole all our eggs and stole all of our children to enhance her status. And so the broga only lays one or two eggs now, because there's that idea of that theft to make yourself bigger. And so that's a cautionary tale. And you'll find that in different forms all around Australia. And that's in that law. And that's a warning, you know, against that. So I described the structures, our governance structures and economic structures, and how that the individualism that we celebrate, that autonomy,

that self-determination that we celebrate, at the same time that there's a check and balance with that, with your reciprocal obligations and networks of obligations. And so there's that law that holds you in check. And there are a lot of mechanisms, laws and rules and protocols and punishments that are there to stamp out that narcissism when it rises up and starts to take over. So that's our mechanism for avoiding the multipolar trap and that tragedy of the commons. When that emu starts to steer legs from the commons to you know increase their status we stop that there so that punishment that went to the emu but then also the brolga having to stop and be satisfied with one or two eggs now and us coming back into some kind of understanding and relation

there rather than everybody having to jump in and compete now with the egg theft game that's how we avoid that. That emu becomes a cautionary tale. And the emu actually becomes a respected figure then that is keeping that law. You know, yes, they got to keep their eggs, but they lost their wings. So they couldn't fly anymore, you know. And so they become a respected entity that carries that law and maintains that law as well now, you know. So that's how all that works. Now, so that you're talking about women as chattel and then, you know,

land as a thing to extract from and all that kind of thing, and animals being beneath humans and then different regional groups of humans being beneath each other. That great chain of being was established as this kind of meta hierarchy and as a model for economic growth is how I see it. Because basically you need to have a caste system. This is what education does. When you go through high school, they're ranking you and they're placing you. It's like the sorting hat in Harry Potter, except it's not Gryffindor, Slytherin.

It's like doctor, lawyer, jail, like that. And it calls out where you go. You get ranked and then your school gets ranked, you know, so that, you know, your neighborhood, where you are, that matters because you've been zoned into that neighborhood, depending on what kind of person you are and where your people are in that caste system. Caste system is needed. Without a caste system, you can't have economic growth. So that's why this idea of changing the culture and fighting for equality and tweaking

the system, that everybody thinks that we can still have prosperity and equality at the same time. You can't in a growth-based economic system at all. For that, you need oligarchs at the top and you need serfs dying at the bottom. You need that. So you must constantly have that. And look, the mechanics of that are quite simple. Comes back to the start of our talk, talking about value and price and all that sort of thing. But you cannot price anything in this economic system that we have now. You can't price anything unless it's limitable and excludable. That's how you calculate that price. It's limitability and excludability. So you have to be able to limit the amount of that thing. And you need to be able to exclude

people from access to that and make it difficult for them to access that. You can only do it with a caste system. So the people at the top half have access, the people at the bottom half don't. Otherwise, nothing can be priced. And then there's also the economic problem, you know, that magical thinking around equilibrium and all that kind of thing. But, you know, basically in a growth-based economic system, demand must exceed supply. Demand must exceed supply for growth to happen.

If it doesn't, then you get recession, you get depression. So therefore, there needs to be more people needing things than there are things to go around. And how do you determine who's going to miss out? Well, you have to have a caste system. You have to zone people into different neighborhoods. You have to then take over those neighborhoods again and gentrify them and move them on. That's why I really don't believe this idea of changing people's attitudes,

of people having to somehow have an ideological makeover and become anti-racist and anti-sexist and all this kind of thing. That's not how you address systemic problems. If you're living in a growth-based economy, you have to have those things. So really the only way to address inequality, racism, bigotry, prejudice, all these things, is to get rid of a growth-based economic system. You also can't have land as capital. Land as capital is the thing that's at the source of the river. That's at the source of the Nile, if you're looking upstream. Land as capital is anathema, and it's killing us

all. If land was not capital, whatever system would emerge from that would not need a caste system, and it would not need infinite growth. The problem with that though is, and I've talked to a lot of people about that, you know, I've talked to, you know, indigenous impact investing firms and all these sorts of things. And the universal consensus from the people I've talked to around the world about that is that there would be no way to remove the mechanism of land as capital from the world right now without massive, horrendous bloodshed and large-scale death and just cataclysm, absolute cataclysm. That's the problem. In order to transition to a new system, it would require a price, and I don't think that's a price that we can pay. The problem with that, though, when you have these systems that inevitably share a topography

with the landscape, the environment itself is going to bring that cataclysm about. I mean, the land is the source of the law, and mother will slap. And so there needs to be... of the law and mother will slap. And so there needs to be, it's the biggest problem ever is figuring out how to transition to a non-growth based regenerative global economic system in which the autonomy and self-determination of every individual and every group is respected, but then also offset with those checks and balances of relationality and mutual obligation and those networks of interdependence to transition to that is just um nobody knows how to do that lots of people are trying to tinker solutions you know capitalism 2.0 like stakeholder capitalism and capitalism with fields you know exactly the same system but with more posters of women of color on the wall and things like this.

You know, so they're trying to airbrush it and call it a reboot or a reset. There's that great reset idea. But they're trying to reset in a way that will outsource the entropy to most of Africa and also punish Asia and put Asia back in its place. And these great resets are all about outsourcing a bunch of entropy and accumulating a bunch of value temporarily for the privileged, weird minority of this planet that, you know, is not even planning it and doing that. That's just the thing is this is something it's so complex and it's been set in motion and it's not about an aggregate of people's bad attitudes. People don't have a choice as to whether they'll participate in this system or not.

Even the most poor and marginalized people, they don't choose their behavior in that system and most will murder and kill if given the opportunity to rise. Squid games. Most will exploit inequalities in order to rise. Most will do bigotries. Most will do antisemitism, will do patriarchy, will do misogyny, will do racism if they can to rise. And that's a matter of survival. It's not a matter of some evil sin in people's hearts that needs to be purged. Our analysis needs to be economic, I believe. So that's why my lab's interested in economics. Because if we're using indigenous logics and complexity to try and resolve this meta-crisis that's going to kill us all in a

few decades if we're not careful, then we need to have an economic theory of what the hell's going on and figure out ways to foster the emergence of a new sort of self-organizing system. That's just the thing. You can't design it. It must be emergent. And emergence, I believe, is the only way to have any kind of soft landing out of this thing because everybody's going to try and save their own and then you've got that multipolar trap issue again and a mad scramble and lots and lots of bloodshed revolutions are not nice things it will be really good to avoid that but if we keep avoiding it and kicking the can down the road then the world the earth itself will have its own revolution. And that will be just as bloody.

Arguably a tsunami dropping on your head is just as bad as a guillotine dropping on your head, you know? One thing that I wonder is like our perception of self. You're talking about everyone will fend for themselves. And that kind of small self view would lead to scarcity of like my physical body and my home and my family, you know, all that kind of stuff. But if we, if we have a possibly like an eco spiritual shift in consciousness and see like a wider sense of self, like you're saying these widening spheres of clan and community, but also widening sense of self in terms of nature, like seeing us as part of the web of life. Like, I'm just trying to think out loud as to what shift might be

supportive of like, then it's a win-win for us to become instead of owners, stewards of land, or for us to create like land trusts, or for us to preserve commons collectively. Like, you know, it's like everyone's winning when there's a flourishing ecosystem that we are embedded in. There's a spiritual shift and an inner shift that needs to take place. However, unfortunately, the only models that people have through breathwork, meditation, crystal healing, tarot, et cetera, you name your poison, mindfulness. All these things are repackaged into individualized things. So if you're doing mindfulness, that's coming out of a culture in India that has very intense kin networks. It sits within a network of people where you're not an individual that's gazing inwards

to find your fabulosity. You are part of a networked group of people, and there's a very fluid self-other boundary between you and the others around you. Your thinking is not contained within your mind and even your body. It's out in your web of relations with community and with place and with the land and the seeds that women are caring for and collecting and keeping and, you know, the groundwater and the wells and the cows and the sacred cows and the goats and the jungle and everything else and those systems. That's where that's coming from. Anyway, so something like mindfulness training that you get sent in a PDF document when you happen to mention to your manager that you're thinking of killing yourself. And so they set you up with human

resources and human resources takes care of your mental health by sending you a PDF on mindfulness and maybe sending you to a training. That's the way it goes. Most of the models that we have for spiritual awakening are products that have been extracted, more networked and place-based cultures. So it's a horrendous system. And yes, an awakening is needed, but the tools for that are not residing where most people think they are. I don't know. So as a member of the indigenous community,

I know that when we interface with the calm, we try to help people understand and try to give people tools to come back into that relational way of being that people want to extract things they want to take the shiny things people keep talking about wisdom in my book and there's no wisdom there to be taken people are quoting bits of it as if that bit is going to mean something or is going to spark an awakening in you or something like that. It's not. There's nothing like that in there. It's a sort of just a big gradual paradigm shift. You know, we try to pass these tools on, but, you know, instead people will take part of it and hang it on their wall or make a necklace out of it.

Or they want to take that snippet. They want to be able to sing a lullaby in an Aboriginal language to their kids, or something like this. Or they're like, you know, I want an Aboriginal name for my dog, or something like this. They want to take the bits, and then they feel like they're becoming self-actualized and natural and indigenized but no and where you'll find our helpful knowledge you know might be in um our economic analysis of of the current global system that there's there's useful stuff in there to help yourself actualize and move into you know a cultural desire for reconnection with place and reconnection with kin and a re-establishment of um you know collaborative

collective ways of being it's just sitting in that constant tension and balance between the individual and the group which you need need. You need that. Currently, you know, the culture wars are being fought essentially over, you know. It's basically this idea you have to choose between collectivism and individualism. If you boil it down to it and you go upstream, it's that. But these are one thing. In our way, there's a kind of two-ness, you know, opposites sit together very comfortably and they don't contradict each other you don't have to choose between them because it's that tension and balance between those opposites that is the engine room basically of creation you know there's

magic and energy that's created there that offsets the entropy that you get in physics and kind of that's your zero zero point energy kind of uh you know function of spirit and that's where you need to be you know at the interface between those two things so how do you hold both or how do you live with both how do you hold that dichotomy it has to be in groups and it has to be organic. Like you can't do it yourself. You know, basically, you know, every now and then you're going to go, Hey, I'm the best. Me, me, me, you know, look what I did. I can run faster than all you bastards. Look how smart I am. Hey, look, I did a book. I wrote a book. How clever am I? And then, you know, the people around you will slap you down, I guess, in a very loving way.

They'll bring you back into that group relatedness, you know, when you start to run away. And that's not, I don't know, that's not something you have to learn. That's something that's patterned in us in every cell in our body as human beings. As an organism, we do that. That's a behavioral trait of our species is to slap that emu and it gets out of control, starts running around crazy and stealing everyone's eggs. That's how we protect the commons. We do that collectively. And then we don't hate that person after there's no like they're not cancelled they're not like permanent criminal record or anything there they performed a vital function of reminding us all and uplifting the whole group so they're respected for that and everybody learns from it together and the shame of that person is

shared with with your whole clan the whole clan feels that shame together and moves on from it and learns. You know, and that's the way to go. It's, I don't know, it's pretty simple. You take a whale that's been bred in captivity and you dump him in the ocean. What does he do? He knows where to go. He knows what time he needs to migrate to the poles and hunt the seals under the ice. You know, he knows how to break the ice and

come up and breathe. He knows exactly what to do, even though he's never been there, you know, because it's patented in him. Birds, you can keep a bird in a cage, grow him up from an egg, and he'll take off and you'll know what time he's going to fly off. He'll go, he'll migrate to where he needs to migrate, you know, And he's not just following the other birds. He's got that magnetized in his being. And we have that magnetized in our beings, that way of being together and of maintaining the tension and balance between autonomy and relatedness, between collectivism and individualism.

Man, woman, male, female, same. We've got that and everything in between. That's kind of the function of everyone in between. Those polar opposites too. They're that creative, amazing space, that brackish water in between, fresh water and salt water. They're the people that stir up creation and hold that law. It's all good.

It's all good. Just let it be. stop arguing about it anyway and i guess that you you sent me a question in the email what's the thing that breaks your heart and it's that binarization of these dyads these two-nesses that need to sit together because you know know, everything's held between those dualisms. And, you know, they're supposed to be one thing, like that base kinship pair that I started talking about at the start. You know, it's like that, you know, two sides of the same coin. And it breaks my heart to see that sort of tearing the world apart and defining everybody's relationships and just that dogged

denial of reality of every person who must be in that and can't listen to anyone else and can't you know find that tension and balance can't assert their own autonomous identity and ideology without insisting that that narrative comes out on top and defeats all other narratives. It's awful. It's infected every relationship. You know, it used to be groups of people and, you know, our parties of people against each other, but now it's individually.

It's in all of our relationships. It's in our marriages. It's in our relationships with our children. It's just, you know dogs fighting now and it does break my heart to see that because we're fragmented down to individuals and it can only go one way you know until we can figure out how to come together i don't know yeah and i'm wondering can we close with the story of the knife fight? I really was touched by that story. Yeah, that's from southeast Queensland in Australia,

this stone knife fight. The purpose of ritualized combat is to ensure the dignity of the person who's been wronged. Do you know what I mean? It's to make sure that there's no victim and perpetrator walking away from that act of justice. And it's not like the Vikings, you know, who'd fight and like, even if they are unevenly matched, it'd be like, well, if you're right, then the gods will intervene and you will beat me. But that never happened. The bigger guy with the bigger axe is the one who

wins. So, I mean, we have these rule-governed, ritualized combats that are there to ensure that it brings the aggrieved person and then the perpetrator into relation with each other and the entire community, because they get fractured throughout their relationships too. Brings them into relation so you don't end up with these vendettas and feuds coming out of it. So you've got two combatants, the wronger and the wronged. They come together with stone knives. There are elders standing either side with spears so that if either one of them breaks the rules, they get speared immediately. So it's a hell of a big incentive not to break the rules. And the rules are you can't cut on

the front of the body anywhere, on the face or groin or legs or torso. You're only allowed to cut on the shoulders and upper arms and the back. Like you have to try and score points on the back. And I don't, try this with a friend, get marker pens. I've done this a lot with young fellas, young sort of trouble at risk men. And it really, it's really transformative you do with marker pens shirts off and just try to like score a point on somebody's back it's very very hard anyway so it kind of limits the amount no it's very difficult to maim somebody or kill somebody in that way so anyway at the end of the fight though the elders line the two of them up and turn them around facing away, and they look at their backs. And the winner is the one with the least cuts on them.

Now, victim or perpetrator, whoever is the one with the least cuts, they get cut up exactly the same as the other person. So you're both walking away with the same cuts. So throughout that fight, you know, you know that when you're cutting the other person, you're cutting yourself. It forces you into being able to inhabit the other person's position, to walk in their skin, and to understand their point of view. So there are no apologies necessary. There's no word for I'm sorry in our language. There's no apology necessary.

It's just coming to an understanding and coming back into relation and balance. And I guess that's what equilibrium really is, coming back into that state of asserting your autonomy and dignity as an individual, but having that in balance with the collective and the needs of the group. And that's what our law does. And it's pretty cool. I'm just thinking about a knife fight with the earth and what that would look and feel like. Yeah, man. Yeah, that's looking like all kinds of things. You wouldn't be having a knife fight

with your mother. Mom slaps you, you don't slap her back because she's got that ultimate authority. She's the center. That's the other thing. Any community, any economy that doesn't hold the mother at the center of all things, that doesn't hold the mother, and that doesn't mean the top of a pyramid of a hierarchy as a matriarchy, but that mother at the center. All value, all relationships are feeding in and out from that central figure, but particularly that central kinship pair of the mother and child. That's the most sacred thing. Every human community, every primate community, most mammals, it centers around that mother-child. That's just how we're patterned. And particularly as homo sapiens, we're patterned in that way. When you violate that, you violate the most essential law

that's encoded into your bones, into your being. You violate that, then you separate yourself and make yourself into some kind of golem kind of creature, because you separate from the mother in that way, and then you separate from the big mother of the earth, and then the earth becomes something that you can extract from and abuse and kill. So I guess that's another element. But the thing is, everybody, people want this

indigenous wisdom, but these are things that everybody knows. If you're a human being, that's your ancestral wisdom. Respect your ancestors. They weren't brutish, primitive, simple, bloody oogaboogers running around murdering each other. That's not what they are. Show them some respect. You know, what you have now isn't progress. You're not evolving beyond what your ancestors were. You are them. And your descendants are them. And your descendants are you. You belong in that continuum. That's your people. You know, respect them. You're not going to transhumanize and grow beyond that. We're certainly not doing that now.

We're not advanced beyond that. Look in yourself, not just your own self, but your people, you know, your ancestors, your descendants, and you'll find that pattern there. You don't need to look for indigenous wisdom in a book or drum circle or something like that. That's not where you'll find it. You'll find it in your own patterning as an organism. And more importantly, as a species, like collectively as a species. And there's that perfect, you know, individual versus collective again. You are an organism,

but you are also a species. And there are patterns of being that are encoded in everything that is you. Biologically, there's an informatics going on within you, but then also within your species, but then also within your habitat, between you and every other entity within that land space. It's all there. It's pretty easy, man. It's easier than this. author of the recent Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Upstream is a labor of love.

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