Parasitism with Andrew

Summary

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Episode Summary: Parasitism with Andrew

Podcast: It Could Happen Here (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Date: May 13, 2026
Hosts: Andrew Sage (andrewism), Mia Wong
Episode Theme:
A sweeping analysis of the historical development of "parasitism" in human societies, drawing on frameworks from Samuel Miller McDonald's book Progress. The hosts explore how systems of domination—rooted in religion, politics, economics, and ecology—evolve across history, leading to the parasitic structures dominating the present. They invite listeners to rethink modes of relationship with each other and with nature, discussing the possibility of mutualistic futures beyond extraction.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Framework: Parasitism in Civilization (02:29–07:19)

• Andrew Sage opens by clarifying:

  “Humanity is not a parasite. But the systems we collectively uphold today are certainly parasitic. They maintain their hold on us due to our interdependence as we rely on each other to survive… through ideology... and to some extent... through violence.” (02:29)

• Andrew introduces Samuel Miller McDonald’s three-phase framework from Progress, emphasizing that history is not strictly linear, but such models help clarify broad trends.
• Recognizes flaws and limitations in “grand narratives” yet finds value in critical engagement.

2. Phase One: The ‘Heaven’ Era—Religion, State, and Administration (07:19–12:55)

• Mia Wong highlights the development of temple complexes in early states, using Graeber’s Debt and other works:

  “A bunch of the administrative systems that would become like credit are developed in order to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes… the building blocks of economics and exploitation… are developed in order to… fuel these… hierarchical massive complexes.” (07:19)

• Andrew: Draws parallels between ancient temples and modern megachurches.

  “What is the megachurch but like the temple complex as farce?” – Mia (08:23)

• The era’s notion of "progress" meant aligning society with a perceived divine cosmic order, enforced through religious law, monumental architecture, and interpreted through disasters as signs from the gods.
• Andrew: Points out “even the earlier ideas of progress have not entirely gone away… just taken on subtler forms and sometimes not as subtle.” (09:38)
• Mia introduces the idea of "exaptation" (from biology): old social forms repurposed in new systems.

3. Material Realities and Technological Limits (10:35–12:55)

• Religion in this era was inseparable from reality—there was no cultural concept of “secular.”
• Parasitism at this stage involved continuous resource extraction by city-states and empires, limited by pre-modern technology, communication, and transportation.

4. Phase Two: The ‘Nation’ Era—Human Order & Global Extraction (15:12–22:55)

• Transition (1400–1900): From cosmic/divine to secular/human authority.
• Expansion of scientific thinking, Enlightenment values, and the birth of efficiency/knowledge as benchmarks for progress.
• Colonization and global trade networks increase the scale and reach of resource extraction—“parasitism” becomes more dispersed and global (sugar, cotton, metal, labor).
• Nation-states and corporations emerge as new powerful agents of extraction.
• Mia: Cautions about oversimplifying history—multiple, diverse cultural forms always coexisted:

  “The entire world in like 2000 BC is not just like mirror images of the Shang dynasty everywhere… there’s an unbelievable sort of diversity of cultural forms.” (17:07)

• Andrew: National identities are often recent constructions, enforced through violence and assimilation.

  “Nation-states… were not always a thing… the idea of a group of people with a shared identity… had to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation.” (18:30)

• Mia: Offers the example of historical “China”:

  “We have a bunch of records… people in China… being like, ‘what the fuck is China?’” (19:22)

• This phase’s contradictions: rise of liberalism and socialism alongside mass industrial and colonial exploitation; scientific advances paired with pseudoscientific justification for inequalities.

5. Phase Three: The ‘System’ Era—Networked Parasitism (22:55–29:59)

• Since 1900: Global systems of extraction (multinational corporations, industrial & digital supply chains, financialization, mass media). No longer one king or an identifiable evil—systemic, web-like processes.
• Andrew:

  “The system… is this vast interconnected set of systems that organize how we live, produce, consume and even think. … It’s really a web of processes and incentives and networks and complex bureaucracies…” (21:20)

• Progress shifts almost entirely to metrics of output, productivity, and profit, removing focus from meeting people’s needs.
• Mia:

  “Trump has threatened to wipe out a civilization. What does this mean for investors?” (23:28; noting a haunting news clip about market focus in the face of atrocity)

• Parasitism at this stage is “networked… it flows through global supply chains… powered by fossil fuels… A whole world has been built around these fossil fuels.” (25:53)

6. Contemporary Fragility and Agency (29:59–39:42)

• The system phase is all-encompassing, extracting not only material resources but also attention and data.
• The scale of extraction is unsustainable—borrowing from the future and disrupting million-year-old ecosystems.

  “Our system has put us in the position of essentially being mosquitoes on planet Earth… literally sucking more blood than the system can sustain.” (37:52)

• Nation-states and corporations are increasingly unaccountable, sometimes with transnational corporations wielding more power than entire countries.
• Andrew:

  “The system sees you… it sees you as part of its functioning.” (31:59)

• Individuals can choose:

  “Whether you are an agent of history that serves as a cog in the machine, or… as a wedge in the machine, that’s really up to you.” (32:24)

• The present system, while apparently robust, is often managed by people with little understanding and can be fragile—described as a “paper tiger.”

  “Never have people who understand the system so poorly been in charge…” – Mia (33:42)

• Examples: U.S. soft power (USAID dismantling), inability to secure global sea lanes (Strait of Hormuz), and the catastrophic consequences of misusing military and economic dominance.

7. Outlook: What Comes Next? (37:24–39:42)

• McDonald’s framework suggests that current global “system phase” will not last forever, but its totalizing scope is unprecedented—there is no “outside” anymore.
• Possible futures: fragmentation, devolution, calcification, or social revolution.
• Andrew: Advocates for moving toward commensalistic or mutualistic forms of relationship (borrowing concepts from ecology):

  “In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other… In parasitic relationships... one organism… has captured the energy of another, or of multiple others, to those others’ detriment. … We have to shake things up. We have to embolden, I think, new forms of relations and what those relations look like are up to you. All power to all the people. Peace.” (39:10–39:42)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Humanity is not a parasite. But the systems we collectively uphold today are certainly parasitic.” – Andrew Sage (02:29)
• “What is the megachurch but like the temple complex as farce?” – Mia Wong (08:23)
• “Nation-states… were not always a thing… they had to be constructed… and enforced through violence and assimilation… The whole world has suffered as a result.” – Andrew Sage (18:30)
• “Trump has threatened to wipe out a civilization. What does this mean for investors?” (referencing CNBC) – Mia Wong (23:28)
• “Our system has put us in the position of essentially being mosquitoes on planet Earth… literally sucking more blood than the system can sustain.” – Andrew Sage (37:52)
• “Never have people who understand the system so poorly been in charge of it…. they are already kind of tearing it apart because they don’t understand it at all.” – Mia Wong (33:42)
• “Whether you are an agent of history that serves as a cog in the machine, or you are an agent of history that serves as a wedge in the machine, that’s really up to you.” – Andrew Sage (32:24)
• “All power to all the people. Peace.” – Andrew Sage (39:41)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:29 – Introduction of the theme, what parasitism means in modern systems.
• 03:31–07:19 – Framing history through “Progress” and McDonald’s three phases.
• 07:19–12:55 – The ‘Heaven’ phase: administrative and religious roots of extraction.
• 15:12–22:55 – Shift to human-centered state power, global extraction, birth of nation-states.
• 22:55–29:59 – Emergence of the “system” phase: capitalism, fossil fuels, mass media, and data.
• 32:24 – Call for agency: being a wedge or a cog in the historical machine.
• 33:26–36:17 – System fragility, U.S. power, and the collapse of paradigms.
• 37:24–39:42 – Prospects for the next era and the possibility of post-parasitic futures.

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Closing Thoughts

The episode provides a dynamic, critical narrative of how societies have transitioned from religiously justified extraction to secular, globalized, and now digital forms of parasitism, arguing that dominant systems are not immutable. The hosts challenge listeners to reimagine their roles in shaping future relationships—moving from relationships of extraction to those of mutual benefit, with a pressing call to action as the current system frays.

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Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Mia Wong]

Cool Zone Media

[Andrew Sage]

Humanity is not a parasite. But the systems we collectively uphold today are certainly parasitic. They maintain their hold on us due to our interdependence as we rely on each other to survive. And these systems, as destructive as they are, are how we know how to cooperate. And they also maintain their hold, of course, through ideology, the sets of ideas about the world carried through religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture, etc. And to some extent they maintain their hold through violence. And so we can, and I believe we must break free from this parasitism. I believe there are other ways of relating with each other, with nature, and I'll talk about those ways at the end. By the way. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew sage andrewism on YouTube and

[Mia Wong]

I'm joined today by Mia Wong, also here. Yeah, we're doing great intros.

[Andrew Sage]

Yippee. So I want to talk about parasitism, the development of parasitism over time as discussed in Samuel Miller McDonald's book Progress, which I highly recommend. Quite an enjoyable read. So I actually really first heard about that book years ago, before it was even out. And I had reached out and was like, oh, I would love to, you know, get a copy as soon as it's available and talk about it and stuff. And you know, I was at that point in my life I was really voraciously consuming these kind of grand narratives of history. And of course we know the flaws with these grand narratives. They have limited explanatory power. But I still found use in these narratives in understanding aspects and angles of our history, at least when you take a critical approach to them. Because I mean, history is, as the name implies, a story. There are many interpretations and frameworks that can be used to explain or better understand different aspects of history. And so progress offers one framework through its three eras of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different forms can coexist, forms can come and go. It isn't this sequential development as is sometimes posed, but there are trends that we can observe. And so these three phases that MacDonald discusses identifies particular ideas of progress, forms of parasitism and agents of history. And I think it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics and ecology that intertwine to make up history. Obviously not perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist adjacent approaches to tracing the development of the state in history. You know, Peter Galileos had worship in power, James E. Scott has against the green and in progress, although I don't think he is anarchist or anarchist adjacent in progress. McDonald's starts with the beginning of recorded civilization in 3000 BCE and looks at the way that many early states developed from a blend of religion, politics and daily Life. So I mean, humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years before recorded history. Right. They spread across the globe. They experimented with all kinds of different social, political and economic organizations that are now lost to time. And the dawn of Everything by David Grieber and David Wengru kind of wrestles with some of this. In the early years of recorded history, there were many manners of approach to state development. From roughly 3000 BCE to 1400 CE. This is the first phase of McDonald's timeline. Human societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica and medieval Europe saw a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. MacDonald calls this phase heaven in the book, not to co sign it as an ideal, but to illustrate the prominence of religious power in this time period. And me, I know you've been posting recently about the impact of religion and the seeming hesitance people have nowadays about actually engaging with what it means materially for the experience of domination in our day to day lives.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, and this is something you can look at sort of in that period is the emergence of states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes as the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems. Graeber talks about this, I think in Debt actually, where a bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become like credit are these things that are developed in order to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes. And so you have this situation where you know, the things that are going to become the building blocks of economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history are developed in order to, in order to fuel these sort of hierarchical massive complexes where like just staggering amounts of resources are like fueled into, into these sort of temple complexes. And that's a, you know, that's a thing that continues to current, present day.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed, you know, indeed we have, we have temple complexes.

[Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Like what, what is, we have temple complexes in the sense of mega churches nowadays.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. It's like what is, what is the megachurch? But like the temple complex is farce.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. That's the thing, right. Like we are seeing an echo of this historical time period even in the present. Because the idea of progress in this time and in these places was about progressing toward a higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods, you know, ensuring that different groups of people were in their proper place in that order. And so you had the development of religious laws and theologies and monumental architecture which established this particular kind of order. And when disaster struck, whether it be floods or droughts or invasions, this was a Sign, a sign of the times perhaps that the order was breaking down. And so it's really funny to me that, you know, in this progressive account of the idea of progress that McDonnell's talking about, you know, even the earlier ideas of progress have not entirely gone away. You know, they haven't been replaced by the next era. They have just taken on subtler forms and sometimes not as subtle forms.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, there's. There's a concept that the journal Zhuang uses where, I mean, they're specifically talking about, like, the ways that elements of, like the Chinese, I guess you call it, the socialist regime are sort of taken and then used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing from biology called excipation, where something like evolutionarily that was used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a new thing. So it's like, you know, you've like. Finn becomes hand like that. I'm not a great biologist, but this is this kind of thing where like, you have this situation where like. Yeah, elements of, like the old notion of what progress was of like this sort of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are like, excavated by the next thing that's going to happen and then that's taken by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing. And we still have our sort of like, versions of it that have been taken through, like countless numbers of world systems.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah, I definitely see that. Of course, there were differences in how they would have, I think, approached religion and thought of religion compared to how we do.

[Mia Wong]

Yep.

[Andrew Sage]

Psychologically in a time like that, they didn't really have this more prominent and culturally accepted secular mindset that we have today, where religion could even be seen as something separate from everything else. You know, for them, religion was how reality worked. The seasons, the harvest, illness, victory in war, all of this was interpreted through a sacred lens. People knew what place they had in the cosmos, or at least thought about it in that lens, and they understood what role they had in the divine hierarchy on a material basis, though, because, I mean, we do have to think materially and not solely ideologically. These societies engaged in what MacDonald called continuous and regional parasitism to extract resources like food, labour and land. And the agents of this parasitism are city states, kingdoms and empires. On the city state level, you had them dominating their immediate hinterlands, and on an empire level, their conquering neighbours done for either integration and taxation or tribute or slavery. But due to the limits of the technology of the time, you know, they didn't have the instant communication and fast transportation that we do today. There were limits to how far an empire could spread. Even the largest empires had their limits and would often devolve power or fracture. Tensions would begin to build as growing empires struggled to uphold central authority. Belief systems came into conflict and contact and intellectual traditions developed over time. Governance would get more bureaucratic, religions would face reform due to challenges from within. And by the time that we approach the late medieval period, around the 1300s and 1400s, at least from Europe focused account or Old World focused account, the world is indeed changing. Transition has begun from this heaven phase to the next phase in McDonald's framework.

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[Andrew Sage]

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[Mia Wong]

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[Andrew Sage]

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[Andrew Sage]

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[Mia Wong]

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[Andrew Sage]

As in the nation phase from 1400 to 1900, where we move away from a world of cosmic order to a world more distinctly human, a world of human order. Religion persists, of course, but authority has begun to move from the heavens down to earth. An earth that could be observed, could be measured, navigated and controlled by human beings. And we see this in this time with the emergence of the sciences and the emergence of, you know, newly minted political theories. And the idea of progress in this time was redefined as expanding knowledge, increasing efficiency, mastering the environment. Hence the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, advances in navigation and so on, and consequently parasitism. As a process becomes more dispersed, extraction would stretch across continents and would be carried by maritime trade routes taking resources from different parts of the world, including sugar, cotton, spices, metals and labour, all flowing through increasingly complex global systems and increasingly industrial supply chains. As wealth starts accumulating in certain regions thanks to the extraction of others, you know, the rich is being built up in one place because of the poverty being developed in another place. As the agents of this time are the kingdoms and empires, but also newly minted corporate charters and nation states. And to be clear, I'm not trying to say that these are the sole agents of history in any of these particular periods, but just that they were significant. I don't want to deny the role of, you know, the politics from below, the rabble, as Graeber sometimes refers to them, would have also shaped the development of history.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too, and this is something you were talking about from the top, but as with all of these sort of like really, really broad sweep looks at history, this is capturing trends in a few places in the world as they moved. There are obviously many, many, many other things that are also coexisting with all of these systems at the same time. The entire world in like 2000 BC is not just like mirror images of like the Shang dynasty everywhere. Right. Like there's a whole plethora of different systems that are interacting with each other from. I mean, I can't even. There's, there's just an unbelievable sort of diversity of like cultural forms, some of which are states, some of which are not. But yeah, when you're doing a macro history like this, you are looking at certain sets of them and matching patterns with thems. But that also is not. We're also not saying here that that's literally everything that is happening on Earth, because it's not. Yeah, but, yeah, just, just, just want to get that in for the people who are going to get very mad about this. We are aware of the presence of other narratives. We have, we have, we have, we have done our postmodernism training. We have done our historical archeological stuff. I just put in this note, of course, of course.

[Andrew Sage]

And like I was saying there, they had these other agents, but for this particular narrative, we're focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters and the nation states. And, you know, nation states, we take them for granted now, but they really were not always a thing. You know, the idea of a group of people with a shared identity, language, culture and history being artificially, I would say, unified under a state that had to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know, you didn't have this concept of France until France was built and the whole world has suffered as a result. You know, we didn't have this concept of Italy. You didn't have this concept of, of, of Nigeria. You didn't have this concept. These nation states had to be constructed.

[Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Even China, which is seen as like the sort of archetypical example of this. Like, we have a bunch of records of people in the 1500s, and I think even through the 1600s, like going and talking to people in China and being like, yeah, you're in China and the people are talking to her. Like, what the fuck is China? What are you talking about? Like, we're like, under this ruler who's under this ruler, who's under this ruler

[Andrew Sage]

who's like, yeah, exactly.

[Mia Wong]

You know, so, yeah, these things have to be constructed, and they were constructed a lot more recently than people think.

[Andrew Sage]

And then to actually get people to identify with them also has to be constructed over generations in some cases.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And usually by, you know, a process in which, I mean, the only way to cause people to have a positive identification with like, a specific new bounded national territorial identity is to have it be posed against an other. So, yeah, one of these, One of these. Also, like the question of the national, like the 20th century national liberation movements is when you get like, for example, like pan Arabism. It's like, okay, like, whose national liberation is this? Because it sure as fuck is not like the herds of Yazidis. It's. Yeah, you know. Yeah, this is, this is all of which is to say what you were saying, which is, this is a violent and bloody Process that is a lot more recent than people understand.

[Andrew Sage]

Absolutely. This time also saw a lot of revolutions, bloody indeed, you know, the rise and fall of old powers and new powers. And this is also a phase, I think, that could be marked by its contradictions. You know, you had this rise in tide of ideas like liberty and rights and you know, liberalism was developed in this period as was socialism. But you also had obviously this vast industrial exploitation of peoples and ecologies. We saw the development of the sciences and scientific classifications. But you also saw how that gave way to pseudoscientific justifications for inequality. You know, the great chain of being, the idea of the whites being on top of everyone else. Yeah, we saw self determination for some and self determination not so much for others as by the time we reached the 1800s, the pace of change was exceedingly dramatic and volatile. Industrialization, urbanization, communication and transportation converged to compress time and space. We see the birth of new ideas and reformed relations. And by the time we reach the early 20th century, a new phase is taking shape. We are now in what McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning from 1900 to the present day. The system, the machine, whatever you want to call it, is this vast interconnected set of systems that organize how we live, produce, consume and even think. The system does not have, you know, a single king or figurehead that you can point to as the Big Bad, despite, I think, people's efforts to try and find a big Bad. It's really a web of processes and incentives and networks and complex bureaucracies and global markets and industrial and post industrial economies and mass communication and the underground economy and all these different things chugging along almost like it's beastly. Bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive the alliteration. I like to throw in a little poetry every once in a while.

[Mia Wong]

It rocks.

[Andrew Sage]

So the idea of progress becomes very economistic in this period. It's focused on growth, output, productivity, efficiency. Our entire economy is basically organized around these metrics. That's the thing that people are worrying about when they're on Fox Business or whatever, the Financial Times, whatever spaces of dialogue about the economy. The focus is not on actually, oh, are people's needs being met? It's what's, what's growth looking like this quarter? How efficient are we exploiting the planet?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that clip on CNBC that we played in an ed a few weeks ago. Whenever this is coming out, where the CNBC is anchor goes, Trump has threatened to wipe out a civilization. What does this mean for investors?

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, I saw that, I saw that. It's horrifying.

[Mia Wong]

Haunting. Haunting shit.

[Andrew Sage]

The way that our economy has been built around these metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea of progress in this time tends toward the economistic, you know, the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism and so on. Parasitism in this system phase is, as the name implies, systemic. To quote directly from the book, contiguous parasitism had captured energy from indigenous societies and native, wild and domestic species. This is the parasitism of the first phase. Disparate parasitism, meanwhile, had captured energy from indigenous societies, imperial subjects, and both exotic, wild and intensively domesticated species abroad. And that's the second phase. And so the new form, networked parasitism captured energy from all these as well, but with the addition of ancient species of plant and animal in the form of fossils, this enabled concrete energy capture through increasing electrification and then the digitisation of extraction and production and abstract energy capture from extremely large, dense populations of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this system were built in the 19th century, it was only in the 20th century that it came to dominate. End quote. So this parasitism is networked on another level. You know, it flows through global supply chains. It extracts fossil fuels, you know, coal, oil, gas, power, maintains the entire economy, maintains transportation, industry, agriculture, digital infrastructure, all of it. A whole world, as we've seen, has been built around these fossil fuels. And something as simple as blocking a fairly small strait can have a dire impact on the entire world. Much of which is yet to be felt, even as the strait has now been reopened.

[Mia Wong]

Well, it's not been reopened.

[Andrew Sage]

About, about to be seemingly a, I mean, Israel did violate the ceasefire though, right? So it probably will not be opened again.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I mean, even before that it hadn't been reopened. I, I don't know, I, I, I have no idea when this episode is going to come out. So I, I, I am standing for the record here.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, it's very hard to comment.

[Mia Wong]

It, it's impossible. It's like not impossible. It's extremely difficult to figure out whether the straight is open on a hour to hour basis.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, like that's fair.

[Mia Wong]

I don't know what the fuck the straight's gonna like. I, I don't know, like, maybe so maybe someone will have like filled the straight in by the time this episode comes out. Like, who knows?

[Andrew Sage]

Who knows?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, sorry, I just, I've been so straight pilled.

[Andrew Sage]

That's a fair point. That's Fair point. I guess the point I'm trying to make is, even in the hypothetical scenario where the straight is fully opened, we're still gonna feel the impact of that brief period of closure.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, for years.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

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Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter or singer in the group the Worst? Yeah, me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge

[Mia Wong]

donation to the group the Yardbirds, Right?

[Andrew Sage]

That's the name.

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The Harvard Yard. But they're open.

[Andrew Sage]

Do you have a name suggestion?

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We're open since you guys are middle aged one erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[Mia Wong]

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

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If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.

[Andrew Sage]

Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a

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[Andrew Sage]

Drew Pinky has financial issues. I like the bougie style of Housewives show.

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[Andrew Sage]

The system phase, by the way, is not just on the whole extraction of resources, of land, of labor. You also notice that it extracts our attention as well, through the collection of data, through the increasingly efficient ways that it seeks to draw out eyeballs for the sake of advertising, for the sake of profit. And this unprecedented scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's merely borrowing from the future and from million year old ecosystems. Eventually that debt is going to catch up on us. In fact, it already has begun to catch up on us. We're not in the. When climate change happens in the future, it is happening right now, and the nation states are carrying on business as usual and business is booming. The agents of this parasitic phase do not care. This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these massive transnational entities. And what you'll notice about this period is that they are the agents of this time, even sometimes more than countries. Some of them, some of these corporations have more power than entire countries. And so with the advent of mass communication and globalization, we also saw ideological coalitions which could be seen as another agent in this phase. You know, the governments, institutions, media, tech giants and movements that share a particular worldview and shape the narratives that determine what people, be it workers, consumers, users or citizens, believe is normal, necessary and inevitable. As a person living in this time, it is very difficult to see it. You know, you get used to a certain system and it's, you know, it's like water to a fish. Yeah, you can feel abstract, intangible, like what are you talking about? This, there's nothing. Besides, this can be the reaction you get sometimes. And it is not on any one individual to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system. The biggest picture, nobody, I think, sees all the machinations of the entire system. But nevertheless, the system sees you, you know, it sees you as part of its functioning and to kind of bring it to a close. What I want people to take away from this is that, you know, you can be and you are an agent in history.

[Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Now whether you are an agent of history that serves as a cog in the machine, or you are an agent of history that serves as A wedge in the machine. That's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth, deep inequality, technological advancement, military might, environmental strain, atomization. The 2000 and twenties have been a whirlwind of a decade already, and it's not even over yet.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, God, still four more years.

[Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This decade sucks. I want a new one.

[Andrew Sage]

It really does. But this system is not unassailable. Yes, it can, and it does adapt to our ruptures, but it is a lot more fragile than it. It puts forward. You know, to borrow from, I can't remember who said it, the concept of paper tiger, it comes from Chinese mythology or Chinese military philosophy, right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Like, I know Mao talks about it a lot. I don't actually know where it's from,

[Andrew Sage]

but yeah, yeah, I say that to say that it's a paper tiger. You know, a particularly sturdy paper tiger, but a paper tiger nonetheless.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And never have the people who are attempting to ride the paper tiger have, like, never in the entire, like, history of modern capitalism has it been ridden by people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing. Nick. Never have people who understand the system so poorly been in charge of it. And they are, you know, they are already kind of tearing it apart because they don't understand it at all.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, I think one of the. One of the signs of that was just the idea that you can kneecap your country's soft power mechanisms entirely and bully every other country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen. I mean, honestly, the US has not faced the consequences that it should for the things that it has done in this year alone, let alone in its decades of history. But, I mean, when you saw the deconstruction of USAID, which was one of the US's primary mechanisms of having sway in other countries, building up goodwill in other countries, and also intervening in the internal, the domestic politics of other countries to break that down like a bull in a China shop, when that was really like one of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal world order afloat. It really, I think, is an indication of the incompetence we're dealing with.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And then even on top of that, I think on. Even on an even larger scale. Right. The entire premise for, I mean, like the entire premise of the Pax Americana. Right. The entire premise of the post World War II American order was that the US Navy would keep the world's oceans open for supply chains. Yeah, that was the whole thing. And it worked exactly as long as the US never actually had to fight a war over, like, the sea lanes that it couldn't militarily control. And then we fought the one war which would prove that we cannot, in fact, secure the sea lanes for global capital. Epochal transformations are happening in, like, the very structure of global capital because these people think that, like, the idea of not using your military power and then reaping the. Reaping the world spanning, like, trillion. Trillion dollar rewards of this. Like, they thought that shit was, like, girl shit.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I mean, the whole. The whole point of what? I think part of the point of invest in all this military might is so that you don't have to use it.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

It's this to try and scare people into just bowing down. Just station your troops outside their territory, and you're like, yeah, are you gonna really try and challenge us?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And then you went and stomped all over somebody, and obviously they had to stand up and defend themselves. And now everybody's seeing what it is, you know.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And it's a situation, too, where, like. Yeah, like, Iran has always technically had the military power to, like, control the Strait of Hormuz, but they never did because the consequence of that would be the US bombing their cities. So the only way you could possibly lose control of the Strait of Hombus is if you bombed the cities first. So all you had to do was not do that, and it would be fine.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, but, I mean, the little girls in the school were Hamas now, so. Oh, God.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it's just.

[Andrew Sage]

Just a tragedy.

[Mia Wong]

God, it's really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves in the balls because they just, like, wanted to go kill a bunch of brown kids. You know, this is an unfathomable horror. And also, they so clearly have no idea what the fuck they're doing. That it makes a lot of things possible.

[Andrew Sage]

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is, you know, what comes next? We're seeing, like, as you said, epochal transformations just in this year alone. This phase that we are in currently, as defined by McDonald, is not going to last forever. You know, unlike previous phases, however, this phase has been imposed truly globally. There's no longer a hint to land that one can escape to.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And so what comes next can be fragmentation. It can be some kind of devolution or calcification, or it can be a social revolution. And the moment, and the cogs and wedges in this moment are actively deciding that. But I think we can do without this parasitism. As McDonnell notes, there are other ways of relating with each other and with nature. He borrows from the ecological language of commensalistic and mutualistic relationships. In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other. For example, we provide hives and protection, while bees pollinate crops and produce honey. In commensalistic relationships, one organism captures energy from another while doing neither harm nor good to the other, as lots of animals and plants would make their home among trees, while neither harming nor helping the tree itself, although some of them do end up helping the tree in more indirect ways. But finally, in parasitic relationships, which is the kind that has proved disastrous for our world, one organism that being us, has captured the energy of another, or of multiple others. To those others detriment. Our system has put us in the position of essentially being mosquitoes on planet Earth, and not in the role that mosquitoes play in the overall health of the ecosystem, but literally sucking more blood than the system can sustain. And so we have to. We have to shake things up. We have to embolden, I think new forms of relations and what those relations look like are up to you, as usual. All power to all the people. Peace.

[Mia Wong]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Podcast Host]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Andrew Sage]

Guaranteed Human.