Transcript:
Violence serves the interests of people in power. If we can reduce and minimize the kinds of motivations that channel people towards violent activities and violent actions, and if we stop sanctioning violence in our international and domestic relations, things will get better. It’s inevitable. That’s how it works. It’s not impossible or somehow precluded as a possible future. It could happen. We have to change some rules. That’s what humanity has done throughout evolution. We learn something, we change the rules. We learn something else, we change the rules.
Now, people have been changing the rules in a particular kind of way for several hundred years, since the industrial revolution and the advent of technology that gave us more control of people’s time, and increasing technology that allowed all of these transactions to occur without barriers, money, transactions, but that’s rules. The rules have been designed to allow money to move more easily than people, and it set up a contest between human beings who want to live in relationship with each other and the natural planet, the systems of the planet, and an artificial, constructed kind of hallucination, really, that endless accumulation, and the notion of continuous progress are somehow preordained as the only way to determine value.
Like, that’s just ridiculous, but we’re so enculturated, it’s so deeply embedded in us to worry about the monetary value of our time, especially those whose use of time has been bankrolled by a system that funnels other people, mostly brown people, plenty of other less-than-perfect white Americans, the image of what it means to be an American, the old image of what it means to be an American. Like, we’re just so steeped in a political economy that gives straight white men all the power, which they have used, in every field, to create a web of interlocking policies, laws, gendered cultural practices, and raced cultural practices, to keep themselves in power.
And those of us who don’t fit that, but are still benefiting from whiteness, like we have to understand that we are just as guilty. Like, there’s a way in which, at this point in time, at this historical epoch, our inaction, our coasting along on the existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and the stock market, and the way they game futures in this or that, our embeddedness in the healthcare insurance industry, all of the insurances. Like, all of those things are ways to extend white privilege, right? The people who get the most of those benefits and advantages are the people who fit into the industrialized corporate structure of big business, or small businesses that are playing by those rules and have a good enough product to be competitive, et cetera, et cetera.
Competition, I think, is still really important, but we can compete on different terms, or on terms that are defined, categorically, at a level that’s beyond a basic quality of life that our technology most definitely enables us to provide for everyone, if we chose to do it. And there’s really no reason not to do it. Our circumstances might shift in terms of… Like, I just think of it as a lateral shift. We’re bringing people up in collective ways, and there should still be a lot of variation. Culture matters tremendously, and we need to make sure that we create systems that enable bridges, and conduits, and spans of interpretation and transition from a setting or a context into another setting or context.
It’s just not undoable. We could really do it. We just need enough people in enough different industries, the various pillars of society, government included and essentially in government, and businesses, especially bigger corporate businesses, to own it, and say, “It’s our turn. It’s our time to be a great generation.” And not just one generation, like only a certain subset of the ages of the generations that are currently alive, but intersectional, across, intergenerationally. Let’s be the people that do this thing.
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