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ACFM Trip 61: Resilience
01:38:28
A weird-left look at the magical properties of resilience, from the colonial legacy of the stiff upper lip to contemporary narratives of trauma and victimhood. Nadia, Keir and Jem wonder whether humans and animals can flourish in the ruins of capitalism, and what a left politics of resilience could look like in an era of constant economic and climate shocks. No tunes in this show, but plenty of ideas from Catherine Liu, Sheryl Sandberg, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and more. Find the books mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support
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- [00:03]
A
This is af.
- [00:20]
B
Hello and welcome to acfm, the home of the weird left. My name's Kia Milburn and I'm joined, as usual, by my very dear friend, Nadia Idle.
- [00:30]
A
Hello.
- [00:31]
B
And my other very dear friend, Jeremy Gilbert.
- [00:35]
C
Hello.
- [00:36]
B
And today we're talking about resilience. So, Jem, why are we talking about resilience?
- [00:43]
C
Because we're launching an NGO and we're trying to get funding from you men approved bodies and the Soros Foundation. So no, we're not really. But resilience has become a kind of buzzword which circulates within the corporate sector. It's part of management discourse, but also large sections of the voluntary and public sector. Resilience is understood to be a thing that schools are now supposed to teach to school children, for example, or a quality that it's supposed to cultivate. And this question of, well, what does. What does that mean? And is it. Is it all bad because it's coming from sources that we usually mistrust and what do we think about? It is interesting thing for us to think about, I think.
- [01:26]
A
Yeah, definitely. So I think for all of those reasons, and I really like this kind of encapsulation of it as a quality. So I'm interested in resilience as a quality and then as a discourse and where it sits in late capitalism. As always, this is an area of interest for acfm, but again, how it interfaces between the individual level and thinking about our psychology and how people talk about personal resilience both in the workplace and in groups and in progressive spaces as well, and how that functions, but also how that interacts or relates to big structural issues like the economy and the environment. And I think more and more we're hearing this term resilience. So it's a really good ACFM topic to kind of unpack, you know, what does this actually mean? And importantly, how does it function?
- [02:19]
B
Yeah, in my head, this is almost a sort of a continuation of conversation from the last episode we did, which is about shock. And we start got into this idea that we wanted to talk about shock because we thought there were some, like, economic shocks, oil shocks, food shocks coming down the line because of the war on Iran, and then, you know, increasing extreme weather shocks which will impact all sorts of economic and ecological systems we depend on, are coming down the line. And a lot of the ways we would normally manage those risks, such as the insurance industry, etcetera, may not be reliable for that when the shocks that coming down the line get. Get large enough, basically. And so, like, resilience is one of the terms we could use to continue that conversation, I think there was lots more to explore. And it is a good one because it does go from like, the personal to like the economic to ecological and to the political. And when JEM introduced it, extremely funny way about what a buzzword it is in, like the NGO sector. You know, we have to think about the role it plays, their resilience in NGO world. But like, you know, what role could it play in other forms of left politics? The forms of left politics we might be a little bit more interested in, like mass democratic left politics, perhaps. So all of that basically just means it's an absolute classic ACFM topic. And we'll get into that in a moment. Let's just do the parish notices. We always do this. So there's the newsletter, of course. We'd be writing very interesting things about shock and resilience in the newsletter. You know, it comes out once a month. Sign up for it. Navara Media Forward slash ACFM newsletter. On the other hand, we've got the, the ever expanding ACFM playlist of all the music that we've played on acfm. Just search for that on Spotify. We want your reviews, of course, your five star reviews. It will help our podcast become more resilient against the ever changing algorithms. And of course, why not make our host, Navarro Media, a little bit more resilient by donating some money towards them and that way you can support us. To do that, go to Novara Media. Support.
- [04:34]
A
Do you guys think there is a difference, you know, between talking about resilience and endurance and tolerance? Because I was thinking about those three kind of terms and it seems like resilience is the buzzword of the time. And I wonder whether you thought there was a qualitative difference between what we're talking about.
- [04:54]
B
Well, yeah, endurance seems like something which sits alongside resilience, like the ability to endure stuff, basically keep going while enduring hardship or something like that, or even just keep going for a long, long period. Endurance, running, these sorts of things. Explain the tolerance thing, Nadia. I'm not quite sure how that relates to resilience.
- [05:16]
A
You know, if I'm thinking about how, and we're going to talk about this in a minute, you know, on a kind of personal level, like my resilience and my ability to, you know, we're going to talk about whether it's something that you can work on, that you can increase, or whether it's something you're born with, if it's a psychological disposition. But I'm thinking about myself. In relation to the effects of late capitalism and all the shit things that are happening around us. I would like to be building my resilience and some days I feel like I don't have very much resilience to be able to endure some of the effects of late capitalism that I see in my everyday life. So that's the relationship, I think, between resilience and endurance I could think about. But then I also thought about tolerance. Is it also about building tolerance? So is to be resilient about building a tolerance to a thing being to be able to tolerate. So I was thinking about it specifically in terms of the effects of late capitalism in this sense. So I just wondered if, you know, we don't want to spend too much time on this, but whether there's a qualitative difference there and we need to define terms before we start talking about some of the political issues around this.
- [06:24]
C
Resilience implies something slightly less passive than tolerance, doesn't it? Like resilience implies that you're able to kind of weather adversity without simply necessarily accepting that adversity is inevitable or unchangeable. So seems potentially better like from a
- [06:42]
A
radical perspective, there's more agency in the term. Yeah, no, I think you're right, actually. That's good. We can work with that. Kia, do you have any comments?
- [06:49]
B
Pairing tolerance with. With resilience is sort of revealing because it reveals the side of resilience I think I'm more suspicious of. I like perhaps is resilience, you know, that, oh, we can just bounce back no matter what's the. What happens, etc, is that just. Is it a spur to tolerate conditions as they exist rather than to try to change conditions, etc, that sort of idea, endurance in, in some sort of way seems like a good thing, partly because so much of contemporary life is so sort of fleeting, etc. So if you think in terms of political endurance, that's exactly what's missing from politics now. Basically the ability to endure over the long term, have political commitments over the long term, have organizational structures over the long term. Seems like something we'd want to address.
- [07:34]
C
Yeah, that's related to an idea of durability, isn't it? The durability of institutions being a desirable thing to try to achieve. I mean, resilience is really closely related as a concept in organizational theory to adaptation. So it very often is like for a concept which goes alongside the assumption that your institution or your individual can't change their circumstances and it's not their job to try. So therefore you just have to adapt. You have to be adaptable to circumstances. So I think it is, it does, it carries a little bit more of that kind of sense, as I said, of like being able to, you know, being able to endure things. But that, that is definitely the way it's been used. It's been used in the context of a broad understanding amongst various kind of managerial and organizational networks that you. That there are all kinds of chaotic outcomes likely in the future because of climate change and because of the basically the perpetual economic instability since 2008. And those are things which organizations and individuals are going to have to adapt themselves to if, if they're going to endure at all. So in that sense, like this, the idea is that the durability of the individual or the person is dependent upon that is dependent on their adaptability rather than dependent upon their capacity to actually impact on the wider circumstances, which is generally assumed they can't change. And I guess like in the case, in a lot of cases that's probably. It's like it's, it's not wrong that like a primary school might prefer to be training all its children to be like, you know, really competent, like democratic citizens in a sort of social democratic society. But we're actually not living in that kind of society at the moment. So it's understandable that schools also think, well, we have to kind of cultivate an ability just to survive in a really hostile labor market in students.
- [09:41]
B
In terms of like, the use of resilience in like management circles, I, for my sins, have had to sit through some management conferences. I've even presented papers at management conferences. Not many. I managed to get out on most of them. There's one, there's a paper that came to mind I had to sit through where somebody was presenting some findings about how older workers were less resilient, they were more resistant to organizational change, basically. So how do we deal with these older workers, their lack of resilience and their lack of adaptability? My question was like what, you're just assuming that like that organizational change is a good thing, right? And in my experience, most organizational change is like to the, to the detriment of the workers involved. It'll involve like low, lower wages and worse conditions. Basically. Point, point to me, point me out. An organizational change in a company that hasn't worked in that way be very far, few and far between. Shouldn't we be celebrating the lack of that, the resistance to organizational change and the lack of resilience of older workers? Basically, perhaps they've came up in A time when conditions were better than the younger workers. And, you know, I mean. Sorry, just a little anecdote there.
- [10:52]
A
Oh, no, I think it's a good one because also you're bringing up. You're bringing up the point of, you know, change. And I've said this a lot before and this is, you know, very live, we're recording on election day in the uk, where we have council elections. And, you know, it's really interesting, the use of the terminology around change and how people interpret change, whether it's a good or a bad thing. And my argument is that a lot of the time people experience change as things becoming worse. And so I don't think it actually works as a campaign messaging for a lot of, you know, I don't think it even works for Corbyn. And that has a direct relationship to what you were saying. Kia of course, not just in the workplace, but also in people's lived environments, like people experience things getting worse. And it's really interesting to kind of situations where this paper that you're talking about, where the kind of politics and structures and power relations are completely removed from discussions around resilience. And I think that's something that interests us. Is that what happens when you put the power back, whether we're talking about people or whether we're talking about structures?
- [11:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's the danger of this conception, conception of resilience, isn't it? It's like the direction of change that is outside of your control. So you just have to adapt to it. Are you good at adapting to it? Are you bad at adapting to it? But can you bounce back? Can you man up and take it? Or are you a weak individual who can't adapt to the constant deterioration of life?
- [12:17]
A
Yeah. Which is a flip of actually an argument. So it's a very clever kind of late capitalist managerial speak, basically, effectively, is saying that we want you to be less of an agent. Right. We want you to be somebody who is unable to struggle for their own rights in a basic way. And so it's interesting, I think this is why this is a great topic for us, because in a way, I think there are spaces that we're going to talk about or, you know, frames or situations where we might think that building resilience is a good thing. Right. But we also want to talk about the discourses where that's been used as a cover effectively for exploitation.
- [12:57]
C
Well, yeah, I think it's really important that the notion that flexibility and adaptability are like desirable qualities for anyone in the Contemporary labor market that's now been around for decades. Like it. That wasn't like a ubiquitous. I mean not ubiquitous. That wasn't like an. A historical thing. I mean if you literally look at like management theory textbooks from the mid 20th century up to the early 70s, which I have done actually, then every level of the corporation, the key thing that is desired in employees is dependability and efficiency. You know, turn up on time and follow the rules is like the thing. It's like, it's like being in the army and, and like the most maverick parts of the corporate institutions, like the sales people regarded like with. With mistrust. And then from the kind of 70s onwards you get the proliferation of this sort of entrepreneurial discourse. Actually like this salespeople are the most important part of every organization. Everybody should be flexible and, and creative in the. In invent in finding new ways to market everything. And then in the 90s you get the development of this real sort of basically normalization of precarity. I mean, something we've talked about a lot on the show is the kind of corporate deployment of kind of ideas taken from, say from Asian contemplative traditions. And this is really years before the corporate mindfulness thing in the late 90s there was this fad for actually borrowing language from the Chinese, from the Taoist tradition, because Daoism has all this language non attachment and flexibility and like being like water. I've mentioned this before. I keep talking about this on the show recently. I know because I keep. I've been thinking about it a lot, about how all that stuff, that stuff doesn't just begin with the 2010s mindfulness boom. It was all. It was a big thing in the late 90s. And Zizek, like when Zizek was like going on about what he called Western Buddhism as a kind of. As a form of capitalist ideology. I mean, you know, I mean he, he wasn't wrong that some of the people he was criticizing would refer to Buddhist ideas. But it was really this, it was kind of Daoist stuff that was really trendy in the late 90s. I remember like being in like California at some point people would have like the, the Chinese characters which mean. Don't cling was a really popular tattoo. And they say don't cling to anything. And that's supposed to be sort of radical. And there was this, there was this real like convergence between like, you know, graduate school, post structuralism, like people into deconstruction, Derrida and kind of anti essentialism, like no One's got a fixed identity and this kind of emergent, like Silicon Valley discourse. And it was really obviously a kind of, you know, way of normalizing, a normalizing precarity. I remember my friend Paul Bowman, actually, he's a academic at Cardiff University. He wrote an essay on a website I was editing like years and years ago about. He wrote about this. There was this management theory book that was basically like a little sort of. It was written just like a kid storybook, I think it was called who Stole My Cheese? And it's like a little parable about basically about a mouse who can't cope with the fact that his cheese has been moved or, and like, and can't adapt to the fact he's got to go somewhere else to find the cheese. Like, you shouldn't be like that mouse. And it was really like, say, it's really kind of wild. But I just think it's important, it's important to underscore for people in 2026. We're like, we're sort of 40 years into this stuff really now, this stuff, this idea that you ought to adapt, you ought to be adaptable, and if you're not, you're a sort of a failure, a boring old failure. And that. And therefore that's why it's your fault that you're not actually doing well in the world of capitalism like that. It's been going on for 40 years and they started, they really started trying it like in, in the, at the end of the 60s. So it's been around for a really long time now.
- [16:50]
B
When we started this podcast five, five or more years ago, we had a real focus on dairy and cheese. It's really dropped off over these years. We should start every episode with where's my Cheese? Celebrate the. The cheese mice. Lack of resilience amongst mice. Sorry, a little side note. Sorry, Nadia, you were coming in.
- [17:14]
A
I think what's interesting is, you know, there were, there were discourses and there were times over history where, you know, even like in things like population, you know, even in that kind of crass language of talking about population resilience or like community resilience and stuff like that. And some of those discussions are interesting, right? And some of that thinking is interesting. But I think specifically, even when we come to talk about the economics and climate, I think we have to understand the strength of this discourse around resilience being pushed down to the individual, around this idea of kind of self management and responsibilization. Right. And the kind of necessity to, like you said, Endure worse conditions. Because, you know, we talk about this on the show quite a lot. On one hand we're saying like, the struggle has to continue, but on the other hand, like, we need better tools and we want to be able to, you know, work on creating and supporting each other to have those tools to effectively be able to endure, survive lately capitalism. And we want to do that without normalizing the precarity and the overwork and the exhaustion and the affects in the way that, you know, you were just talking about. And I think that's really important as we go through the various different categories that we want to talk about is to understand where it is a cover up for structural dysfunction, whether that is dysfunction in a workplace, like I said, where you remove kind of power and interests from the conversation or even when we talk about, you know, ecology and economics and kind of the function that talking about resilience has in being able to kind of move the conversation of power and interests away or hide it as in a sense like become a smokescreen for that. So I think that's, that's important.
- [19:09]
C
Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Because the part, I mean, the flip side of what I was saying before is that, well, it's not wrong, actually. It's not wrong that if you, if you're really invested in some for this idea of having a job for life, then you're probably going to be miserable. That's not wrong. It's not wrong that you're going to really struggle if you can't adapt yourself to the labor market in some way. So the stuff is really complicated.
- [19:33]
B
I want to pick up on that link to that neoliberal responsibilization. So that's the idea that we're responsible for the outcomes in our own lives. That's got a surface plausibility to it, of course, but of course, basically that obscures all sorts of structural causes that constrain our lives in various ways and the inequality in access to resources, the sort of resources that you might need to be resilient. Both psychological but also material. I think in preparation for this, this episode, I read a very interesting book by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant called Option B, Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy. Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook's chief operating officer. Of course, I didn't read that book. To be honest, I doubt anybody's read that book. I doubt Sheryl Sandberg read that book. I read an AI precis of an article summarizing its main points. And even that was too much, I'll have to tell you. In this book, she's sort of like recounting how resilient she was in the face of her husband's death. She managed to bounce back, you know, into work, et cetera. And that's a sort of interesting thing because that's a sort of the resilience in terms of like, the kinds of adversity that all human beings face. It sort of gives this illusion that we're all humans now. We are all humans, aren't we? Maybe. Cheryl Sandbaggers Elizabeth, I'm open to that sort of argument moment, but basically it's that idea that we all face the same sorts of adversities, or not all ourselves say same sort of adversity, but there's some adversities that all humans sort of can face, basically, such as the death of a loved one, etc, and she's sort of like using this to aggrandize her own leadership style and to justify why she's in a position that she is. But of course, like, her resources, even just her material resources to be able to cope with the effects of that, of that of her husband are just like, just not available to most people. The level of resilience somebody has is not something built into their character. Let's talk about character a bit later. The conception of character, whether it can be built or whether it's. But you're born with it, or it's genetic or something like that, you know, your, your resilience. But even if you accept there is an element of that, like just having the resources for it not to be, not to have to think about, you know, the material consequences of a death of a spouse or something like that, not even like, the consequences on your caring responsibilities, because all of that will be taken care of. Just to give you some context, Sheryl Sandberg is also the author of that Lean in, you know, the neoliberal feminism book.
- [21:59]
A
I think there's something else that's related there, which, I mean, regardless of the individual case that you're talking about, and this is why I think it's interesting to keep this idea of collective resilience kind of in our minds when we're talking about people, which is support structures, because when, you know, when someone, a loved one dies, which to your point, is something that happens to a lot of people, there are people who are supported and there are people who are not supported going through those kind of crises, right? And so on a psychological level, like, you know, if your lack of support can have like, A really long term detrimental effect.
- [22:40]
C
This idea of building resilience. I mean firstly, I think as we'll keep saying like it is, it is complicated because I do think, I think there is a sort of widespread spread social and cultural anxiety. The like young people are not somehow being prevented from developing certain kinds of resilience through their dependence on you know, social media, depends on technology through being quite infantilized. You know, there's all, there are various studies just in suggesting that people basically learn to like make their own dinner and kind of bake and look after themselves and discipline themselves, do schoolwork etc like older than they used to. Like. It's not universal. These things are never ubiquitous or completely generalizable. But it's a real, I mean it's a complete cliche for people teaching universities across the English speaking world that students just don't seem as sort of, that they don't seem as adult as they did like 20 years ago or 30 years ago. There's this sense that there are all these kind of infantilizing processes. But this is, and this is happening in, despite the content, the macro context of the labor market and housing market becoming really, really hostile and partly those are self reinforcing because that, because the most common way of experiencing all that for people is that they're not, they're not able to become economically independent but they're nonetheless, they're in sort of family networks which are more or less able to look after them. So that produces this sort of dependency I guess, which it's different from what it was like if you, if you were not able to get a job in the 1930s and you really had to like figure out a way to just keep yourself alive. But so that, so I think there is a kind of understandable, very widespread anxiety that what's happening is people being, being put in this position where they're sort of deprived of any sense of agency. But then they're not really, they're not really equipped or enabled like personally or collectively to engage in sort of political struggle against it in a comprehensive way. That's the real worry. If I think about the kind of history of thinking about these questions of the, the question of well, what, what is it that we want to cultivate in young people or in ourselves as adults? Like what are the qualities? And you think about this idea of resilience. One of the really obvious things to think about is the fact that well there's this very long tradition certainly in, again certainly, certainly in British and American educational traditions. This idea that what is it you should be cultivating in people? You should be cultivating character. What used to, it's, it's a really archaic term now but the idea of character was this idea that it was a set of qualities that involved being honest, like having a strong sense of duty, a strong sense of responsibility to your role in a family, an institution in a society, etc, strong sense of duty to others and the kind of resilience, like a kind of an ability to withstand physical hardship and an ability to defer gratification is a really important part of it. You know, an ability, an ability to, to withstand boredom and discomfort, quite high levels for quite sustained periods of time for the sake of achieving some long term personal or collective objective. And that really became associated in, in British culture and British elite culture I think in the, the early 20th century became associated with this idea of a certain kind of emotionlessness that was supposed to be associated with British men, what the French call sang frois. It's kind of summed up in the, the English language slogan. The idea of the stiff upper lip, meaning, you know, your upper lip never quivers with emotion because you never show emotion. Like exactly where that notion of stiff upper lip comes from I think is sort of debated by historians. I think I remember mentioning this on the show before, so casually. People often associate it with the Victorians but I know that some social historians, people like Ross McKibben have said actually, you know, Victorians are quite sentimental. It's the stiff upper lip thing is really kind of early 20th centuries. He associates it with the period between the wars when like in Britain the, the historic divisions between the Conservatives and Liberals are kind of changing because of the threat of socialism and the working class and the whole middle class, the who middle class had to sort of unite and the kind of ruling class had. They all have to unite inside the Conservative Party and they develop this culture that revolves around sort of golf clubs and sort of very superficial chumminess in order to maintain, really to maintain a sort of front actually against the threat of socialism and that. That becomes associated with this idea of the stiff upper lip. But then I mean other people have associated it with the function of the public schools going back to the early 19th century in terms of basically hardening people's emot responses to equip them for carrying out the brutal tasks of colonialism and, and also discouraging them from any notion that they might embrace the frankly more interesting and attractive cultures of the convey, populate parts of Asia that they're being sent over to colonize and rule. So exactly where it all comes from is sort of, is not totally clear. But. But that idea of character, you know, it's not, it's not something that's historically only associated with right wing and repressive institutions. Like there's a really strong tradition in the labor movement and there's a strong tradition in institutions like the communist parties of the idea that, well, like a communist must display character, as communists must like to show to their neighbor, friend and neighbors that they are a person of good character, they're honest, they're reliable, they're hard working, they're stoical. It's interesting to think about because there's a whole set of qualities there which, you know, they're not all bad. You know, they're not all. And they, they are quite useful if. For people in struggle, I guess.
- [28:33]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really useful encapsulation, Jeremy. And I would say that. I would agree that there are certain qualities within that kind of framework of thinking or within that history that I would say it would be good if people had more of. And that's including myself. I would say that I struggle with. With resilience on a psychological and experiential level, like every day. I think it's a big thing. But before we go on to maybe some specifics around that, I think it's important to also put women in history and also a feminist spin specifically on the stiff upper lip and capitalization. The stiff upper lip stuff does exist in kind of feminist and emotional labor theory and stuff and class analysis, as we've said. But I think the kind of, of the image that usually is conjured is one of kind of British masculinity, as you said, Jeremy. But I would say that. I think what's interesting there is that regardless of that fact, that kind of, what would we want to call it, like an ethic or a way of being or, you know, a set of qualities have also probably deeply shaped women, but in a different way. And I was trying to think about this as we were preparing for the show. And I think the kind of phrase that I found that I think is most useful, understanding how it's affected women, is this idea of like, women as emotional shock absorbers, you know, and we can, you know, we can talk about this now, we can talk about this later because there's obviously a big feminist piece that is on resilience specifically. But, but this, this idea of women as, you know, the family shock absorbers. And this also of Course, the idea that women were supposed to, like, part of being a woman is enduring pain, whether it's the pain of childbirth or whether it's the pain of, you know, the corset or whatever. Right. So the idea that physical is normalized for women and then it's kind of, you've got this idea coming back to endurance, of endurance as empowerment. So there's lots of stuff that can be said around this, but specifically with a stiff upper lip, you know, I think it does, it, it does apply to women, but in, in a different, you know, way women were expected to also, you know, delay gratification, whatever, and put up with a lot of stuff. But perhaps the social consequences of behavior that wasn't seen as in line with that kind of character would have different consequen consequences for women.
- [31:01]
B
Yeah, if you think, if you think about what would be the inheritor of like the stiff upper lip tradition in contemporary Britain or contemporary society, it would be around conceptions of masculinity, wouldn't it? So one way in which you could talk about resilience is, one way people talk about it is I'll just man up, basically be a man. Which means, you know, just take it sort of thing, do you know what I mean? And in a way that just take it in is don't have emotions basically. And of course that is all through history that's not been, that's been a fallacy, do you know? I mean, it's been a front that you put, you put into the public and at home the women are supposed to do the emotional labor basically of sorting out their men's up psychologies, do you know what I mean? Which does lead us to like, I don't know if we talk about it now or a bit later, but trying to think through resilience and care alongside each other. How do you collectivize the concept of resilience? It would have to be something like. Care would be the mediating term basically to collectivizing it. You know, people caring for each other to create collectivized forms of resilience, something like that.
- [32:07]
C
Yes, I think that's right. Because when we've talked about care on the show before, we've talked about it in relation to the Marxist feminist idea of social reproduction. But also there's a broader Marxist category just of reproduction which people like altizair use, which, which just means like the processes by which sets of social relations and institutions keep, Keep getting renewed, keep. Keep being made to endure. It's not only the sort of reproduction of labor in the family. It's also the reproduction of the corporation and its internal institutions reaches reproduction generally. And that term resilience, when it gets used across a lot of the context we've been talking about, whether it's the context of, you know, schools making children resilient or companies making themselves resilient, it is really a way of talking about that broad notion of reproduction. It's about the reproducibility of institutions or people or groups in the face of all the things that threaten to disrupt them. And again, the question of care has really come up in many ways in different political contexts over the past few years for that reason. And care is understood to be necessary to many, many processes of reproduction, including all the processes of what we normally call social reproduction, but also to some extent processes of reproduction generally and just, just the, the ability of humans to persist. And partly, I think partly, I mean obviously that's why in, there's been so much interest in the concept of care in the past few years and in a lot of radical circles of course, is because it's, I mean care is one name for a set of activities that a kind of naked capitalism just can't do and like won't do. Like has no interest in doing. It sort of names the point of tension between capitalism as a specific set of social practices and relations and the broader problem of the social formation. I mean this is, I mean, I think, you know, the particular strands of like Marxian analysis that we're all are probably most interested in and committed to have often made the point that there's a tent. You know, capitalism isn't just this completely perfect self enclosed system that reproduces itself. Capitalism is a particular way of, of gen. Of organizing production and distribution which has all kinds of permanently deleterious and disastrous effects. And it's a permanent problem for capitalists themselves. Well, how do you keep doing that without just destroying the world around you to the point where even the conditions which make it possible you to keep doing it just get totally undermined. And that's the basic problem for capitalism. And that, and that is why we have concepts like the regime of accumulation. Because basically the regime of accumulation changes when enough capitalists start saying actually we're going to use this new set of technologies and this new way of organizing companies and institutions to now to be able to hold all this shit together for a few decades. Like because the, because the other one's not working anymore or it's accidentally empowered workers too much. All the workers have figured out how to organize themselves within the context of
- [35:12]
A
it, there is so much interesting stuff in what you were just saying. But I think what was also interesting in terms of listening to what Kia was saying before, that is I actually think that the stiff upper lip is more analogous to Keep Calm and Carry on. Like in a way that's become like a popular and a populist slogan that I think became kind of really big during the pandemic in the UK to kind of encapsulate some kind of Britishness of being able to I think in a way like follow the rules but also be resilient to kind of strange times that I think kind of cuts across class in a way that perhaps the stiff upper lip doesn't so much. I would actually say that man up is more complex and says other things, things about masculinity than it does about like the character of, of a nation. But you know, I want us to keep continuing to talk about resilience, so maybe we should do a whole episode on that another time.
- [36:09]
B
I do think man up is a form of resilience though, or a term that hovers around resilience. I think that the Keep Calm and Carry on is really interesting. It was in the, in the sort of like post 2008 crisis thing that it first sort of came up.
- [36:23]
C
It was specifically in the context of austerity, of Cameron Austerity. It was, it was absolutely circulated by Cameronite apologists for austerity. And the whole discourse was it's coming, we have to do it, we have to just suck it up. Hahaha. Keep calm and Carry on.
- [36:40]
B
And interestingly, it was a direct reference to a poster that was released in the. During World War II.
- [36:45]
C
No, it wasn't released. It wasn't released. I never tire of explaining this to people. Keep Calm and Carry on was designed in very, quite early on during the war, designed by British like civil servants on the assumption that a Nazi invasion was probably going to be successful. And it was designed, it was designed to be a poster that would be put up like once the Nazis had invaded to encourage people to keep Carry on as if that was what they should do. And this was all predicated on the assumption that the reason the Nazi invasion would, would be successful is because the British population would cave after a couple of weeks of aerial bombardment. And that is what they thought. So it is really important in terms of political, cultural history. I mean the, the actual history of World War II is always really worth studying from a left perspective because basically about nine months into the war, like in sort of late sometime in 1940 there's this real crisis and Churchill doesn't become Prime Minister till then. Churchill becomes Prime Minister with the support of the Labour Party and it's the outgoing, it's the Baldwinite like Liberal, Tory, like Treasury orthodoxy, establishment who all basically have to leave, they have to leave government and they do have to recruit loads of new people to the civil service because basically there's all these people, all the, the British political class who'd been governing during the 30s had a view of the British population, especially the British working class class which was, they were basically weak willed and like would, would collapse in the face of Nazi invasion. And you know, I'm always making this analogy because I just think that's, it's a perfect analogy to what's the British, the problem of the British, of the British political class. Right now. Right now the British political class know perfectly well what people want. We want that water re nationalized. They also know if we try and do it then like capital and, and the Americans are going to come for us and try and fight us and fight them them. And they think well we'll just cave. They think we won't fight back. They can't imagine us fighting back. So it's exactly the same people, it's the same kind of people who like produced that poster who like did, who did do the austerity regime and are still basically defending it. They're people who, their conception of what we're like as a people, especially working class people is we won't fight, therefore we must be encouraged to just keep coming, carry on. And also, so it's all, it's a really vague question. I'm not sure anyone's totally sure in the history like what is it that they were trying to stop people doing keep keep calm and carry on as opposed to what? And I think, I think the assumption was the people who are producing that poster was well if people didn't come keep calm and carry on like they might, they might form like getting, go into guerrilla resistance or something. And they didn't want people doing that because they, they basically imagined themselves as a sort of Vichy regime in ways meeting. And that's why they wanted people to keep calm and carry on as well. So you know, it's really kind of, it's sort, it's sort of shocking, it's shocking that that became this little twee thing everyone's into. This was like these like reactionary civil servants like the agents of the pre Keynesian treasury orthodoxy who were assuming that the Nazis were going to win because the British working class wouldn't stand up to them. And they were assuming that under those circumstances their role would be to be this sort of, of like, you know, quizzling regime supporting governing Britain on behalf of their new fascist overlords. And that's why they wanted this poster telling people to keep calm and carry on like we should. I remember it really, it became a real, became a sort of in joke with Marco Mark Fisher, like he would send me like pictures of like any, any examples of Keep Calm and Carry on merchandise you could find like for about a year. Because, because we hated it so much.
- [40:27]
B
Much.
- [40:27]
A
It's almost like the Che Guevara T shirt, right? But I tell you what, I think it's where white's slightly different. I mean, I just to clarify here, I do, I do agree that it has to do a lot with resilience, Right. So it's not that I'm saying it hasn't got to do with, with resilience, but I think the interesting thing about Keep Calm and Carry on is I actually think it has a collective sense to it. Right. In a way that I'm not sure other encapsulations of resilience do. Right. Because when we come to talk about things like the various ways in which we are being sold, how we need to have resilience either in a psychological level or on a workplace, etc. There isn't kind of a culture around it in a way all those annoying Keep calm and eat cake or keep calm and whatever. I mean, it's become a meme effectively, in a way that's saying that this is who we should be as a nation, which I think is, is quite different to like, you know, we get to the other extreme, which is a sense of wellness, which is all about actually not caring about anybody else and only caring for myself, because that's a form of resilience which you actually need to have that is framed in a totally different and very individualist and kind of selfish space. Right. So I think all of these things do have to do with resilience. And I, and I'm happy that we talked about the Keep Calm and Carry on for a bit because it's, it's a really interesting one. It's a really, really interesting one.
- [41:52]
C
The key home carrying thing was also it's a way. I mean, the reason it had this resonance with people is because as Keir said, people have this vague sense it had something to do with the war. And actually our collective folk memory of the war is about this massive act of actual resilience. London can take it surviving the Blitz. You know, the reason that keep carrying common, carry on thing is so sort of insidious and so telling is because it wasn't about that people. It wasn't advocating for. For that at all. And if you look at the actual posters that were produced like Dior and propaganda piece during the Blitz, they are more like, you know, they are more into. They are more designed as they did to encouraging people a sense of sort of, you know, military hostility to fascism. So. But it was about resilience as well. I mean, this is. And this is the ultimate example of resilience is, you know, Britain doing the Blitz.
- [42:41]
B
Let me just comment on that fantastic rant of yours, Jen. That's why I like ACFM recording ac. You never actually know which way it's gonna go. The conversation. No matter how much planning we do, we never actually know what we're gonna say. But I think, you know, they probably were right. I mean, it reminded me of like the Home Guard was the initial Home Guard was set up by veterans from the Spanish Civil War basically, and they were preparing for a foreign Nazi invasion and they were gonna. They were gonna refight the Spanish Civil War on British soil. Do you know what I mean? So the whole Dodd's army thing was when. Which is a TV show in the 19. Well, it's always on British TV now. From the 1970s it was filmed. You know, that was all when the. The British state sort of took over. And so I said we better, we better rationalize this and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, I was going to say because that other, the other bit, the Blitz spirit thing, that in. In that. That plays all sorts of roles basically, that idea. So the Blitz spirit, every. Everybody down in the. The tunnel and you know, we can take it, etc, that forms or leads into all sorts of political directions because one of the other ways it leads into is like, you know, that Blitz spirit which, you know, brought the country together as a precondition for the 1945 government at the government, etc. Etc. I remember that documentary Spirit of 45. Massively nostalgic film, I think, by Ken Loach, I think it was. But from a very similar time actually from that time of that keep calm and carry on. So glad you mentioned it, my dear. Where are we now? I'm not sure.
- [44:11]
C
We're developing character. We're keeping our upper lips stiff. We're. We're showing the Blitz spirit. Okay, but of course, like as we talked about, when we talked about on the shock episode, one of the sources of p. Of. Of thinking and concern about the question of like how resilient humans can be collectively or individually. Julie, is that experience of war. I mean, it's the point I think Keys made on the show before. You know, it's a really important point that the thing that was learned during World War II by militaries around the world is that the previously held theory that civilian populations would cave in the face of aerial bombardment stand out to be totally wrong, turned out to be wrong again and again and again. We're seeing it proved wrong in the Middle east, like right now. I mean bombing, bombing the out of people's homes just pisses them off and makes them angrier.
- [45:01]
B
You.
- [45:02]
C
It doesn't make them surrender at all. In World War II, as even more than in World War I, there was obviously a really big concerted effort by governments to work out like, well, what are the kind of limits of. Of endurance, like both personal and psychological and a lot, a lot of, A lot of post war sort of psychology, including some deployments of. Of psychoanalytic theory. They come out of that wartime effort to figure out or how do you. How much trauma. Basically, as we were saying, how much trauma can soldiers endure or civilians into your during war and how can you treat it and should you treat it and how do you make people able to endure more? So there's a. Obviously there's a really close relationship between like psychology and psychiatry and, and notions of resilience. Isn't there there?
- [45:54]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean this is a whole. We could do, you know, five or six episodes on this, but I think in terms of, you know, relating specifically to late capitalism, which in a way, you know, and we, I'm sure we've talked about this in several ways before is it is a kind of war, but it's kind of insidious class war. It's not, it's not as of. Yeah, well, it's not just class war. There's also, you know, a war on so many other fronts. Right. In terms of people's daily experience and, and, and that's why it's interesting to think about. Well, you know, if you're thinking about how to create people who are resilient to, you know, bombing, should the use of, you know, hormonal treatments or pharmaceuticals or whatever be used as a good or a bad thing for, for people to think about effectively self medicating or accepting the medicalization of their symptoms, like under late capitalism. Right. I Mean, there are, there are arguments in favor and against. I mean, especially with, you know, for thinking about women. There are the women who were saying, you know, because of medical misogyny or whatever, there's been a long history of women's suffering, physical suffering, not being taken seriously and a lack of research, et cetera. So, you know, a lot of, you know, this is something that I struggle with myself with PMDD and, you know, the perimenopause and the access to some of these, these, these hormones or these drugs is kind of like helping people. But on one hand, if you have a political head on, like myself, sometimes I'm thinking, is this just capitalism? Like, am I, am I not, do I not have enough resilience because of the effects of capitalism rather than something that's, you know, physiologically happening, happening in my brain or my body? And it's something that, you know, I really struggle with. But, you know, it's very clear that the medicalization of what can be called like, social distress, like, is a problem. On the other hand, some of these, you know, pharmaceutical drugs or hormones or whatever help people cope and make it, make them more resilient in a sense. And. But then I think the question we have to ask ourselves is, are people taking these things for their own resilience or like, how does this relate to, like, the market and being productive? And also how does it relate to, I guess, definitions of being normal and what it is to be normal? And I'm using that terminology. I think I find it more progressive and useful for the kind of discussion that we're having rather than neurodiversity. I'm not really very o fait with arguments around diversity, although obviously those things do exist. I think, I think it's more that I'm interested in how capitalism constrains people in various different eras or different times and needs them to be certain things. So in one way, you know, we have to deal with precarity and that is become understood as normal. Well, you know, if that's what is needed by like, capitalism, then I don't want to be normal.
- [48:44]
B
Right.
- [48:44]
A
And those are kind of political questions. And also, of course, you can think about it as, you know, pharmaceutical management or whatever as part of, of disciplining the body because there is no space for effectively not being a stiff upper lip or there isn't a space to not keep calm and carry on. And if people want to be hysterical and scream in the face of late capitalism, where is the space in which they're able to do that? And not be punished or disciplined by the system, both in the workplace, but also in terms of structures of care, etc.
- [49:17]
B
Etc.
- [49:18]
A
Right. So I think it's really interesting to think about resilience and whether, and because we can see both sides of it when it comes to, you know, pharmaceuticals and hormonal, quote unquote, you know, management, which have helped a lot of people, but also we need to look at it politically. But I think that the main reason, and I'm interested to see how you guys have interacted with this phrase, the phrase that I've come across recently that I think, wow, this has really become a discourse because it's become part of, you know, common parlance. I think very quickly, I would say even in the last six months is this talk about nervous system, you know, and you know, being over triggered in your nervous system, et cetera, and people trying to defend their nervous system through, you know, based tools and, and sharing information online. And I think that in itself is really interesting to kind of relate the body in a way to how we're talking about resilience.
- [50:11]
B
I think to add to your like pharmacological sort of management of just like normal psych. But what would, what would once have been thought of as just normal psychological, normal levels of mental distress? We'd probably put it, perhaps we'd put it that way. You'd have to add stuff like cbt, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy and those sorts of, those sorts of therapies which are specifically designed to try to increase your resilience or to try to be able to help you cope with things rather than to talking therapies, psychoanalysis, etc, where you'd get to the originary traumas, etc. And you'd be able to, in some way you'd be able to manage the process of change, basically have some sort of control of the process of change through therapy rather than just, you know, try to adapt to what's going on. I suppose something like that. I can see that as a more general trend.
- [51:00]
C
Well, I think, yeah, I have noticed people talking about nervous systems because obviously that's not a new term. I mean the term nervous system has been around since the 19th century and it's, you know, people start using that term when they start to be aware of the, the fact that there's this kind of electrochemical dimension to brain activity and sensory inputs. I think it's partly related to the, the real increase in talk about hormonal effects on mood. So there's lots and lots of kind of popular medical and quasi medical discourse now about dopamine and oxytocin and the way which the different hormones affect the body and affect the mood. And I think it is really interesting, actually, because. I think it's really interesting because, like, as somebody who's interested in, like, effect theory from a materialist perspective, I've wanted for years to write a book about what I would call endocrinal culture. Like the idea that the endocrine system, the system which circulates hormones like the ones I've mentioned, and endorphins and the sexual hormones, like, through the body, is like a really important thing to understand and that hormone fluctuations do really affect our moods and affect people's behavior and perceptions of the world. And they are themselves subject to all kinds of inputs and effects, like, you know, like the amount of exercise they get, but the kind of, the amount of screen stimulation they get, etc. So I think there's something quite positive, I think, in. In it because broadly speaking, it's a, you know, it's a sort of vernacular way, way for people to develop a sort of materialist conception of psychology. And I think it is coming out of a kind of very diffuse or popular critique of platform, platform capitalism and, and social media culture. That's my scent. My sense is that there's a. There's a degree of literacy, like, emerging among quite large populations about the way their moods are being manipulated and their perceptions are being manipulated at material and psychological level by technologies, like by machines. Which, you know, from, from a materialist, philosophical perspective, I think is actually good. I think that's a good thing. So I'm quite sympathetic to it. I mean, obviously it's one of those things that. It's one of those areas of discourse where like so many other things you've got to say it's people being really conscious, in a good way, of an important set of political and social and cultural problems. And then the question is, well, is anyone supplying them with the analytical tools with which to actually turn that into a kind of raised consciousness? Or, or are they actually being given a lot of pretty stupid answers or simplistic ways of thinking about it? They're just going to make the problems worse. And I think obviously both of those things are true. So I think. I think it's good people are talking about nervous systems, but what people should be doing next is, you know, know, attending online seminars about Spinoza's Marxism. But they're. They're mostly not doing that. Mostly what they're doing in instead is, look Is looking for magical solutions.
- [53:53]
A
Yeah, no, I think you're completely right. But I think what I'm talking about is, I think maybe I should add a term on the end of that. Is that this idea of like nervous system regulation or disreg, you know, deregulation or whatever people are calling it as a. And I think it's falling into kind of discourses of retreat in the sense, is it a new form of this wellness discourse? Right. Because on one hand, like I totally agree with you, Jeremy. I mean it would not only be good to write a book, but a whole like institute talking about this endocrine, you know, endocrinine or whatever you call it, like, like use of hormone, hormones and kind of political discourse around it like that. That would be great. But in a way, kind of what I'm seeing from my, my minimal interactions on social media is that talking about like I need to regulate, stimulate my nervous system, like that kind of chat, as a way of saying I can't deal. I think what I'm reading from that is I can't deal with people anymore. Like I'm tired, I'm overstimulated. There is a problem with my nervous system on one hand. I think that's great in terms of awareness, but to your point, like the solution for that is communality and consciousness raising. Right. In some form.
- [55:01]
B
Right.
- [55:01]
A
That people are overburdened by stimulation, but what they're not able to do is minimize the stimulation because the overstimulation from screen time, et cetera and those kind of addictions is like one of the number one ways in which people's nervous systems are being deregulated. Right. So the solution is usually people, but the only way that people can deal with it is retreat. Right. And that does have a kind of link back to the whole wellness agenda that we talked about before.
- [55:30]
B
Yeah. I do think that, you know, the idea of retreat is not particularly useful when I think, but like I am sort of attracted to the idea that like perhaps we should be creating spaces which run under a different logic. Perhaps even hand your phone in. I know it's me saying this and you'd be surprised not here, but like a lot discussion around sort of consciousness raising groups and these sorts of things. Like I really do think we should do an ACFM retreat as sort of like enclave from platform capitalism in which rules are different. Yeah, yeah. It's just governed under a different logic basically. Do you know what I mean? And so we try to slow everything down, etc. So we can like do the analytical work and that sort of stuff. I think what you're pointing to is this idea that. What, you know, I'm going to. I basically that sort of discourse used as a spur to sort of like solipsism or something like that. I'm gonna. I'm not gonna engage with other people sort of idea, which I think is probably wrong. Or, you know, it's fine if people want to go and have a sit down in a quiet room. Why not? You know, I mean, there are different ways in which you can sort of like think about how that discourse is used. And I think the. The other thing, the other, the other thing to. Which might be useful to get. To get in our heads is that we. We're used to sort of like trying to oppose. Sort of like either we think about the body, the individual body, and it's sort of like capacities, or we think about social systems, etc. In fact, we should. You know, we mentioned when we did the ecology episode, Felix Guattari's book about the three ecologies, you know, like mental ecology, you know, economic ecology, these sorts of things, you know, that, you know, we have to sort of do a model which incorporates all of those things, do you know what I mean? Because they interact with each other and structure each other, but they're not the same thing. That is just a restatement of like basic Spinoza, Marxist principles. But I think it could be used. Useful.
- [57:24]
C
It is really useful to think about. Well, actually, what. What is the sort of mode of subjectivity that like women's liberation consciousness, raving raising or Chinese Communist revolutionary. Communist raising was supposed to cultivate in. In the. The unique subject, you know, the people. I'm going to avoid using the word individual because it's supposed to cultivate a. Say. Well, it is supposed to cultivate a sense of connectivity and a sense of shared interest and shared grievance. But it is also in. It's supposed to, on the one hand, it's supposed to encourage a sense of. Kind of emotional literacy and a kind of confessional ability to talk about your problems and to talk about your most intense feelings, which is quite contrary. Contrary to any nation of the stiff upper lip. But it's also supposed to cultivate resilience like it is. It's supposed to cultivate an ability to go out into the world of patriarchy or into the world of the revolutionary struggle, the Chinese Civil War, and to. In and to engage in struggle and to endure hardship. So resilience is part of what it's supposed to Cultivate, but it's supposed to cultivate resilience without that kind of sense of a sort of emotional, you know, inability to express oneself. And in some ways, like it's supposed to. That is both similar to like contemporary ideals, like the ideal in contemporary culture. Because, I mean, I think the kind of normative ideal in kind of liberal advanced platform capitalist culture, the normative ideal is you're supposed to actually talk about stuff quite a lot. Like the ideal is for people to have a high level of emotional literacy, to talk quite a lot about. About. About their feelings, to be unafraid of doing so. And there's a. And I think there is also, there is a risk at times, especially in the world of social media, especially for young people, and I think especially for young women sometimes, that there's a risk then of a sort of what Foucault called an incitement to discourse. There's a risk of being encouraged actually to, To. To occupy a subject position whereby the only thing you can really talk about is yourself and your feelings. And, and to also to end up taking like, your personal feelings, your immediate responses to things as some kind of, you know, inviolable truth, which is actually completely the opposite. It's completely the opposite of the Buddhist tradition. Like, mindfulness is supposed to teach you that your feelings are not necessarily telling you the truth about the world precisely because they are actually some. They are just a sort of physical response to stimuli which might mislead you if you don't get some kind of control over them. And so what's supposed to be being cultivated in that kind of tradition, and I think in sort of revolutionary traditions and I think to some extent in those women's liberation circles as well, was also a kind of stoicism. Like, it was also something we might call stoicism in terms of an ability to withstand hardship and also a kind of sensitivities like when isn't. When is and is not the right time to start sharing. Like, you don't stoic women's. The ideal women's liberation sort of activist, like, wasn't just sort of sitting on the bus, like, talking to strangers about, about all their problems. You know, it wasn't. Wasn't just kind of screaming their rage at men in context where that was just going to get them sectioned. You know, they were kind of cultivating a sensibility about how to use those feelings of kind of rage and, and injustice in a way that was actually positive, like channeling them into something positive and that does exist, demand A certain degree of self regulation, a kind of deferral of gratification. I think the idea of stoicism is really interesting and it's something we've come back to you before, but we're going to do a whole microdose after this one. That talks a bit more about that notion of stoicism. I don't think we're going to sort of dwell on it here, are we? But I think it's related. I think what I was. The phenomena I was just talking about, like, it is also. It's related to some of the other things you wanted to talk about, Nadia.
- [61:17]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's really. That's really helpful, Jeremy. And we are going to go into this a little bit more on another episode. But I think, you know, this pressure that a lot of young people seem to feel like you're saying that somehow there's something around agency and there's something around authenticity, which requires a kind of dumping of the self in public, is very, very important to think about in terms of resilience because it often does have. Have consequence on one hand, in a way, you can see that it's good for people to be able to share their grief or share their feelings with others and not bottle them up in a kind of stiff upper lip or keep calm and carry on kind of way. But at the same time, that kind of, I don't know, deluge of personal experience as agency, I think, is an interesting space to look at politically. And one theorist that takes quite a strong position on this who has been critiqued is Catherine Liu. She's a Marxist. I've recently come across her work. It kind of is useful for us, especially because part of her critique is about this professional managerial class. So she's got this thing about the managerial class as well, which is useful for us. But I'm particularly interested in what she calls, you know, trauma culture. Now, she's talking about trauma specifically, and of course we're not just talking about trauma. And you know, my reading is I don't think she's saying like that people don't have trauma. And I mean, I think part of what we're saying here is that, you know, capitalism is traumatic, right? And people have their own experience of trauma in their own lives and their families. But I think it's useful for us to understand some of her work in relation to resilience specifically because she's talking about how that suffering gets individualized, right? And psychologized. And this links to what I was saying before about you know, the self medication and whether that's useful in a way. And so she's saying by doing that is kind of taking us away from the structural conditions of, you know, whether it's class exploitation or precarity or whatever. And as I understand it, the big part of her critique is effectively saying that institutions like university, you know, media, definitely NGOs, and definitely social media are in a way rewarding this performance. Right. Of vulnerability where people are being very vulnerable and using this kind of therapeutic language. But what I find super interesting about what she's saying is it becomes tied to identity. Right. And in a way, moral legitimacy. Right. And I think it's interesting specifically because she's saying this can weaken solidarity because collective political kind of struggles become replaced by the thing that we're always criticizing, a highly individualized narrative of both the harm and the healing. And effectively it becomes the only language in which you can get attention or the only language in which you can get agency. And this is institutionalized in a lot of quote, unquote, supposedly progressive organizations that are liberal. Right. And I mean, I would think I would agree with her in a sense. Like there is, of course, a critique of her work which is basically saying that she's minimizing, you know, people's suffering and downplaying genuine trauma. I don't think so. I think she's actually just taken quite a strong Marxian line on it. But I think it's really interesting to think about that. She's got a book coming out called the New Politics of Public Suffering. Right. And she's saying that trauma has moved away from clinical and historical context to becoming kind of the space of self presentation. So I think it's interesting to think about an example. Example of her kind of work when we think about resilience and what does this say about. Does it help people become more resilient to be able to speak like this online? And I would probably say no in the long term because of what the exposure of one's personal feelings or status actually does to people. Sure, one positive end is you get a community of care, but what does it do to your self identification, but also your understanding of structure. Right. And oppression?
- [65:43]
B
I mean, I've got to say I haven't got a lot of time for. For Catherine Lews, her general sort of like political project. I haven't read that. That particular stuff on trauma, but there's loads of very interesting work on trauma because it makes me think of that book by Jennifer Silver called Coming Up Short, basically, which was and she did like, she did like load of ethnographic work with, with young adults in the US etc. Etc. And her conclusion was during this period of like really diminishing life experiences, etc. A sort of like traumatic narrative was the way in which they made sense of the world. The meaning to be given to the world was I, I've managed to overcome this difficult, this difficulty to have a normal life. And the problem with that is that like it makes economic precarity. You know, you internalize it as like, you know, either a personal failure because you fail to be resilient and overcome your trauma, etc. And also like it's all of the other stuff, you know, individualizes and depoliticises these social problems, etc. These sorts of things. The reason I'm not particularly into Kathleen Liu's sort of project is it a lot of her work just seems to be like complaints about her students at elite universities in the US Basically I
- [66:54]
A
think that's a bit of a simplification. I think there's a bit of a simplification.
- [66:58]
B
It is a simplification that she's.
- [67:00]
C
Her colleagues as well. Her colleagues.
- [67:02]
B
Oh yeah, colleagues as well. But like I'm quite skeptical a lot of like the PMC's discourse, it seems to be people who are PMC you attacking other people who are PMC under their own self categorizations basically.
- [67:13]
C
I mean we're not going to do the PMC here. So it's always been a flawed analytical category. It was at the time when it was first coined. I don't think Catherine Liu can be dismissed as altogether because I mean my problem is a lot of it. And she ends up coming across as kind of engaging in just a version of the moralism moralizing that she herself criticized, criticizes to me like that's the trouble. It's like she's like she's basically wagging her finger at everybody for being sort of PMC crybabies. But it's not necessarily wrong. Also what she actually says, she's one of those people like I, I agree with completely until I don't. Until the point where she goes too far. She seems like she's gone too far and she's not helping to build anything political. But I do think, I think she's worth reading. I do think she's worth reading. Catherine L. It's Lou Spelled Liu. We've talked about psychological resilience. Like what about a completely different or not completely different actually discursively closely related but seemingly Quite different way of talking about it, which is talking about, in terms of economics because as we said at the start of the show, this notion of resilience partly comes into public discourse from the corporate sector and from companies. Companies and management's saying they want their, their profit making machines to be resilient, to have economic shocks. Say what, what do we make? You know more about that than I do.
- [68:35]
B
Well, one of the ways to think about this is, is that like, you know, that, that whole idea of the, of the sort of neoliberalized individual, responsibilized, resilient individual in some sort of ways that is, you know, it's a way in which people, people can adapt to these sort of straightened circumstances, etc. Etc. But it sort of comes out of the dominant sort of modes of, of economic organization and those modes are changing, I think partly in response to like economic shocks. So like look, this is a, this, this is a, an obvious way to do it. You know, one of the, one of the ways in which economic systems became more resilient in doing economic than neoliberal period was this move towards what they call just in time, production basically. So that, this is something which is, it's a form of production which was pioneered in Toyota. What you're trying to do is eliminate all stocks and reserve stocks, these sorts of things basically. So you just bring together, you have as minimum stock and you bring together that stock just in time for its use in the production system. And so that production system is then formed into a network. Do you know what I mean? So that network is international network and that sort of stuff. So that can be resilient to some degree. Because if say a factory goes on strike while the network can route around it, basically they can route around it and find new suppliers and these sorts of things, right? So there's a level of resilience. But now the move is away from that because you know, in terms of like the big economic and ecological shocks that we've been experiencing in increasing regularity over the last sort of like 15, 20 years that all of a sudden seems like a really fragile form of production, do you know what I mean? Because there's no stocks, so any disruption in supply means that production comes to a halt. So like these oil shocks that are coming up in there, which are in the pipeline, the oil shocks and the food price shocks that are coming down the line because of the war in Iran, etc. These sorts of things have led to a change in sort of macroeconomic policy. So the trend and Also in light how corporations sort of like are trying to think about production moving away from just in time production to like developing big like strategic reserves of essential goods and these sorts of things basically. And like that, that's this, that's, that's. There's a similar thing going on in macroeconomic policy where there's this, this move to like reshoring production. So moving production to, you know, reshore into the US is the primary thing that they sort of got, they sort of doing. One of the ways to think about that is to try to build a more resilient economy so it can deal with the shocks that are coming down the line, basically these sorts of things. So there's a move towards the building up of stocks of essential goods, etc. All of that, right, all of that was something which was forbidden during the structural adjustment conditions to loans from like the IMF and the World bank through the 1980s, 90s and into the 2000s. Like the World economy was like, like all of that sort of like that stuff, Third world debt, all of that sort of stuff was used to construct an economy which is really quite unresilient in the face of like the level of shocks that we face these days.
- [71:46]
A
There is a way to link it to psychological resilience of course, which is, which is how it's being sold to us. Like talking about all of, you know, what's coming down the line and you know, people needing to expect it to be adaptable to these new realities and the fact that we've got the cost of living crisis, crisis times over and over and over again and prices are going, going up and up and up and nobody is proposing a structural solution for people to be able to live their lives without this kind of hardship. Right. So it's how this economic situation is being sold to us, I think that's really relevant.
- [72:23]
C
But I think there's also, there's a kind of shift in register from that sort of late post for this early big surge in you know.com corporate culture. That moment of don't cling like corporate Daoism, which, which just shades directly into move fast and break things and be a disruptor, like be an agent of change. There's that discourse which is still there, but, but I think it's, it's less widely distributed and it's lost a lot, a lot of its efficacy over the same period. Over the past or 15 years. This notion of resilience has kind of risen and risen, risen and to some extent in, in a lot of contexts has displaced it. And that's quite, and it's quite different, I would say, that move fast and break things, be a disruptor, be an agent of change. Like be always on the move, like that's good. It's like basically be capital, be a commodity yourself. That is a kind of hegemonic discourse and a hegemonic set of practices at a moment when people are being incited to kind of participate in, to actively accelerate these processes of disruption, these processes of what shun particulars, creative destruction. And, and the thing about resilience is it's more about this notion that while there isn't really any agent at all which is responsible for all this stuff, that to some extent the, the machinery of disruption has been put in, put in motion globally on such a scale that it doesn't really require disruptors anymore. It's just going to keep happening and everybody now has to kind of weather it. Everybody just has to accept it as a thing that they have to go along with. So there's less, less of a. There's less of an incitement to participate as an active agent and there's more of an incitement, more of an incitement to recognize these as entirely implacable forces which like no one is responsible for. Like no one can really intervene in, in any meaningful way. So I think it's about, it's partly about where we are in the kind of cycle of, you know, in particular Silicon Valley, like seeing it is itself as this immersion, emergent force and then being seen as this thing which is like completely hegemonic over capitalism generally. But it's also like I started off at the start of the show talking about it being a thing that people talk about in schools. It's also partly because resilience is such a vague notion and it is so sort of adaptable to different ideological inflections that I think in a lot of contexts it is understood by individuals and organizations as being less obviously just aggressively pro character capitalist than talk about like entrepreneurialism. And I think that's important to think about as well that you know, in the kind of, in sort of discourses of education when they're talking about making students resilient. Well, like in some context this is replacing a kind of late 90s, early 2000s emphasis, explicit emphasis on entrepreneurialism. And so there is a sort of the. In. In that sense there's a kind of move away from a kind of aggressively progress, pro capitalist discourse. And it partly. That does resonate with the just the general fact that the kind of moral legitimacy of the sort of professional political class and the people they work for has like massively declined since 2010, you know, that that's the defining fact, you know, Alex Williams and I argue in our book of Germany now that's really, that's the defining fact of the moment we're living in historically is that those forces which did, they did succeed like in the, in the 90s and the beginning of the 21st century, they did manage to establish a situation where like most of the population were with varying degrees of reluctance was all participating in the systems and processes that they'd set up and were deferring to their norms even if they didn't really like them. Like now, since the crisis of 2010 and especially since the 2015 moment when it's become apparent they, they can't really restabilize things and especially since the 2023 surge in interest rates basically made clear they didn't, they couldn't really even even keep sort of middle class homeowners on board as part of this project. See under those circumstances, you know, there's a general weakening of, of people's consent to those, those kind of explicitly neoliberal norms of things like entrepreneurialism. And resilience is a bit of a sort of Brazilians is also, it's a really weak sort of counter discourse. Like it's quite a shitty one. Like it's one which is not as good as saying actually we need to build revolutionary class consciousness instead of building resistance. But also it is a little shift away from that sort of discourse of entrepreneur, of explicit entrepreneurialism in a way. I think it's sort of interesting.
- [76:58]
B
Yeah because like entrepreneurialism, you know, you need to have the idea that you're going to get a return on that entrepreneurial activity.
- [77:05]
C
Basically.
- [77:05]
B
Basically a little bit like, you know, higher education was re reformed around high, around fees and investment in education etc. You know, that you would be an entrepreneur of yourself. You know, you'd invest in your human capital. That only really makes sense if you're going to have a return on that investment and that return on investment has really dropped off a cliff, etc. Etc. And I agree that I do think resilience provides openings for a left politics. One of the people who sort of perhaps pushing or thinking through a left politics of economic resilience is Isabella Weber. She's got this anti fascist economics project and, and now book and her, her sort of opening sort of gambit is that like, you know, the, the continuing shocks that we see, you know, those are exacerbating material inequality. She did some analysis recently of like of the 2002 oil shock shocks or you know, the increase in energy prices that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Her analysis was in the US that 50% of all of the increased profits that were attained from that for fossil fuel companies, 50% of those accrued to the top 1% of individuals and like the top 0.1%. So 131,000 families received 26 times more of those profits than the bottom half. So it's like each one of these shocks, you know, that, that research was released by saying we haven't, we're not actually experiencing the full effects of the 2026 oil crisis, but we know what the results will be unless we change macroeconomic policy. Basically the results will be even further increase in material inequality, all of the costs falling on ordinary people, etc. And so her analysis from that is, you know, that sort of fit, that level of material material inequality and uncertainty can lead people to fascist politics if they're just led left to suffer the vagaries of the market. That that's what happens basically. It's stuff I've sort of talked about before, but she's advocating the managing of prices for, for essential goods basically so for like food, energy, sort of like housing as well actually these sorts of things to try to prevent price shocks. And so that is like governments building up strategies, strategic reserves of essential goods, etc, these sorts of, these sorts of things and you know, setting prices, etc. Energy caps. You remember one of the responses to 2022 energy increases was, you know, the whole don't pay campaign etc and then the trust government guaranteeing energy prices, these sorts of things here. Antivirus economics is something around that and like you know, trying to increase Social Security, etc. What goes along with that, that increase in inequality etc is just this like rollback of democracy. We've seen it this week in the uk, the incredible rollbacks of democracy. The head of the Metropolitan Police being the primary political actor in the local elections over the last week, basically despite that being illegally these sorts of things. There's a trial this week of Palestine action, second trial that they've been subject to and their lawyer is now being taken to court for mentioning the right of a jury to acquit according to their conscience, which is a right, you know, guaranteed right, etc. But the judge had said that you can't mention that he mentioned it and he's now probably going to get sent to jail for contempt of court. Unprecedented like rollbacks on like just basic economic rights, etc. It links to this like affordability stuff basically, you know, the idea that contemporary left economics has to start with affordability, but the analysis of affordability of essential goods has to point to like corporate profiteering, basically rent extraction, these huge, these companies extracting huge, huge rents from, from essential services and then increasing those profits every time there's a shock, an oil shock or a food shock. That's an attempt to try to make governments act, to make economies more resilient, to help ordinary people become more resilient in the face of like the shocks. We're going to see an increasing sort of level. So that is a left politics of resilience to some degree. One of the most important organizations around this idea of ecological resilience is the Stockholm center for Resilience, who've done really, really famous work trying to map out the sort of planetary boundaries. So like the safe operating space for humanity is the, the way that they put it. So you map out the sort of like nine Earth system processes, etc, try to work out where the tipping point, where you tip over from a stable to a chaotic state are, add a precautionary element to that and say, let's not cross these sorts of boundaries. So in some ways that can be seen as like resilience, as in some sort of form of like adaption to, to climate change, which of course we need to do, etc. And you know, we, we went through the whole, we thought in a whole episode on ecosystems and whether that, whether there can be a sort of conservative element to that. I actually think the safe operating space for humanity though is quite a nice way to do it because it sort of says you can have any form of social and economic organization as long as it stays within that, that safe operating space, as long as it doesn't breach any of these tipping points. This idea of resilience and ecological resilience, the idea that natural systems can bounce back up to a certain point, plays quite a big role in promoting the idea of resilience.
- [82:28]
A
I think one of the theorists that I'm reading at the moment, it isn't a new book, I think it's been around for about 10 years, is Anna Tsing's the Mushroom at the End of the World, which I am really enjoying. And it's kind of opening my eyes to a whole kind of set of theoretical thinking which I think started when I did the book launch at Hausman's earlier This year with Hazel Sheffield. I should get her on acfm, actually. And her book Frontierlands, which is called Britain's Survival in the Making, that's the subtitle. And it got me thinking about various different texts and theories and studies that are out there that are kind of thinking about ecology, studying ecology, using ecology as a metaphor, like all of those things, at the same time, to understand how. How nature and we include humans within that are able to exist in this stage of capitalism. And I think Anna Tsing's work is really interesting because it's not thinking about resilience in the sense of nature recovers, I suppose. And so this is also, it's specifically, I think, interesting to think about her work in terms of how we would map what she's saying onto humans. And in a way, I'm almost done with the book. In a way that's almost what she's saying saying, but rather this idea. She uses the matsutake mushroom to talk about how survival occurs within systems that are already damaged. So this is what I find really interesting about her argument is in a way, she's talking about precarious coexistence in nature. She's talking about adaptation from within, ruin, as she's got all these really kind of complex and kind of kind of quite wonderful ideas about collaborative survival or what she's calling like the emergence of unexpected life within damaged conditions. So she goes on this whole kind of sprawling ethnography that's talking not just about the relationship between mycelium and trees, but also like humans and animals living in a way on the edge of capitalism. And they're both operating from within capitalism and within the reality of capitalist destruction, but also on the edge of capitalism. So there's something about these economies and ecologies and sets of relationships that are kind of testing capitalism's limits at every point. So I think she's partly bringing forward this kind of thesis of noticing by saying life in a sense continues, but actually it's in unpredictable ways. And there are things that flourish in disturbed ecologies, both in terms of human behavior, but also in terms of non human nature. So I think it's a really interesting thesis and it's really getting me thinking about resilience on the edges of existence in a sense, or like resilience in such an extreme reality that a lot of us find ourselves, themselves in late capitalism. And thinking about human beings from within those ecologies rather than separate to nature, I think is really valuable intervention.
- [85:43]
B
Yeah, I can see how that relates to Hazel Sheffield's book. That idea of life within the ruins, etc always reminds me of this famous quote from the Spanish anarchist from the Spanish Civil War, Buenavera Duruti, who was interviewed, in a sense said, you know, what about all this destruction that's taking place in the world? He says, like, we're not afraid of ruins. Working class built the cities, we can rebuild them after. You know, if the ruling class wants to smash the cities because we're taking them over, we'll just rebuild them and all that sort of stuff. And it always makes me think, Darutti, I think you underestimated capitalism's ability to absolutely ruin the planet. And this absolute death drive towards like, you know, basically just absolutely destroying everything. Basically, like a lot of this discussion around survival in the ruins etc and like the way we sort of like try to think about resilience these days is to do with this idea that basically we're in the middle of some sort of collapse. We're going to have to build something from within these ruins as they exist. Now if we think about the way that ecological problems and climate change has like disappeared as a political issue over the last five years, it had a real high point of political, political valence perhaps, you know, at the end of, of the last decade, the first sort of year of the, or two of the 2000 and twenties, etc, you know, all of that Fridays for future Greta Thunberg. All of these sorts of things, even extinction, rebellion, all these sorts of things. It's almost like, you know, capitalism was faced with this thing. Do you adapt to this, but you lose control or do you just say everything basically? And if you think about what, what, what's been invested in since then, like these huge data centers, despite the fact that they, they require huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of water, etc. It is almost like capitalist accelerationism. It's like, well, fuck it, we don't care. The whole fucking world can burn. Is basically where we are now with some idea, you know, a little bit of like a fig leaf, that AI will solve climate change. Nobody believes that. Or we will set up a new civilization on Mars. Nobody actually believes that. Which does leave us with this thing of like, well, what do we do about all this stuff? Which does mean that like a left politics of resilience has to, to. It has to form a part of like our strategic thinking, the anticipation of like, this continual amounts of like, shocks and emergencies, etc. And how we deal with those in a way that isn't just about adapting to increasingly worse circumstances, but in fact Builds like our collective power in order to try to deal with the causes of these things, you know, that has to be like a key part of left politics. I'll just talk about this book, Lifehouses, by a guy called Adam Greenfield. When did it come out? A couple of years ago, I think. Gale Bradbrook, who was involved in setting up extinction rebellion after taking acid one time. I do apologize.
- [88:31]
A
Yes, there's a big difference.
- [88:34]
B
There is a big difference.
- [88:35]
A
We're supposed to be the experts on this.
- [88:38]
B
I know I can't be loose on my psychedelics on this podcast.
- [88:44]
C
Exile is definitely an IOSCA project. It was never an LSD project.
- [88:48]
B
No, it's. It's not as an environmentalism, it's DMT environmentalism. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is like that Gail Bradbrook and an organization that she's formed around that are quite interested in these life houses. The general idea is this, is that like, like the way Adam Greenville puts it is that a Lifehouse should be. Be like in, in every neighborhood, basically. It should be a house which has got like all of the things that you'll need to be able to cope with a disaster. So like some sort of energy generation which isn't linked to the grid, some sort of water production which isn't linked to the water system, basically. So if those go down, then you can survive. It also contains sort of like tools that it doesn't make sense for one individual family to have tools that you could go and borrow these sorts of things and it'd be a place where you deliberate on these sorts of stuff. Perhaps it'll organize childcare. I'm not quite, quite sure. In some ways this is sort of an attractive idea. I don't know how those come about. It's sort of like sort of left prepper sort of ideology. The experiences he's drawing on for those are things such as Occupy Sandy, if you remember that just after the Occupy Wall street stuff, there was a hurricane disaster, wasn't it? I think in New York. And so a lot of the people from Occupy Wall street went and did disaster relief, etc. You know, you can see that in New Orleans when the, when the storm surge came and New Orleans flooded, etc. And people basically people had to just come, you know, respond to that. I suppose it's the mutual aid sort of groups that sprang up around Covid as well. It's like, how do you prepare those in advance and then politicize them and use those as a form of political organizing at the same time time the Frame in which he puts it in though is there's a collapse is coming. There's nothing we can do about it. So we have to prepare. So it's like who will build the ark? Basically we have to build the ark and we have to build the ark in every neighborhood sort of thing.
- [90:36]
C
I really like the idea of these things, lifehouses. It's a great idea. It's an idea which a. It's not very novel. I mean the idea of having localized resource centers that would form some kind of a disaggregated network is like a. Basically a key key. It's basically a key idea. It's an ideal of anarchists, like organizations. It's the 19th century and it's never happened anywhere. Nothing even remotely close to it has ever happened anywhere under any circumstances. And like, maybe there's a reason for that. I mean, I like the idea of it. It'll be great. It's the kind of idea. Would it be great to have this incorporated into a sort of, you know, a sort of acid Corbinist program of kind of municipal socialism drawing on these radical traditions. Traditions. But it really, it's kind of exemplifies a sort of, you know, it's what Alex Williams and Nick Sirnicheck called folk politics. I mean that is. And that is also, you know, I'm sorry, that is also Brad Brooks total thing. She's a kind of incarnation of folk politics. It's this idea that folk politics is what happens when you, you have a kind of general set of principles that like self, self organization and bottom up democracy and horizontalism are good and you have a set of political problems you can see going on around you and you try and bring those things together. But you do all this without a, without any real knowledge of actual political history of the past 300 years and without any real understanding or conception of, of, of, of the state and you know, what the state actually, what state institutions are like, what they can do. Because basically the only way lifehouses are happening is if like local authorities create them. There's no, there's no universe in which those happen. Just because people read this book and think that's a good idea, that's a great idea, let's do that. And of course the sub. I think the subtext is also, well, how's this gonna. Maybe this is going to happen because like philanthropists are going to do it. Maybe you're going to persuade like some Bill Gates like fund life houses. That's how XR got funded. XR was all paid for by some hedge fund guy.
- [92:29]
B
I mean you're talking about serious resources as well. If you're talking about a house and every neighborhood, neighborhood that's billions and billions of pounds or dollars.
- [92:37]
C
You know, it's a good idea to think about, well how do we get, how do we get resources for like radical purposes and how do we make some use of the great classic idea of, of social centers? I think, you know, you've done your book Radical Abundance which is making similar arguments. I was, I was looking at for reasons, for reasons I don't need to go into. I ended up digging out some article I wrote in 2000, 2007 saying oh, we need to bring together the idea of the commons and the public and some of us have been pushing this line for years and years now that you're only going to get this sort of stuff if you have some really creative ideas about how to interface between a sort of grassroots non state politics and, and state politics. Like the only. Because the only way you're getting it without some kind of attempt to occupy state institutions is if it's paid for by billionaires. But you basically that's the only other way you're getting it. So I think it's a really good idea. But I think we really. I'll take public commons partnerships over lighthouses as a, as a concept that's going
- [93:33]
B
on the back of my next book
- [93:35]
C
and I will also. But why, I'm saying that why this is all important is because like we've been around these, this block enough times now to know the like utopian folk politics ends up absorbing loads of energy from people who get burnt out by it. It just as much as they get burnt out from being in Trotsky Sex or sometimes. So I'm really, really wary, I'm really wary of this stuff because I've seen so many like people, they get radicalized around some idea like this, they get all excited about it, they devote two years of their life to trying to do it and it turns out well, it's just not doable and they get kind of burnt out, they kind of walk away from politics or they get disillusioned. I've seen that happen like hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of times like over the course of my life. So I think, I think, you know, I think this kind of utopian kind of policy prescription is really important like as an ideal to have in our heads as a kind of idea like life houses would be a great thing to have but we have to be really, really clear eyed about we're not getting them without getting like a, a, a left wing government in Britain, in somewhere like Britain. Like you're not, there's no other, there's no other other way you get getting them. They're useful as a way of thinking about demands, but they're not useful as a way of thinking about routes to achieving those demands.
- [94:53]
A
I mean, there's a problem with defending space. Right. I think that's also like a major factor here is that in late capitalism you might be able to set up even with public canteens, which we know is my obsession. It's like how do you actually find the space to be able to do that? Like physical space for people to be able to congregate. You might be able to do it for a short period of time, but for how long? Because the state on either a local level or a national level is going to take it away from you.
- [95:20]
B
The other problem with this is it's framed around like a conception of collapse, that the collapse is going on and we have to survive it sort of thing that's been sort of taken up. An old friend of mine, Tadshu Muller, used to do a magazine together back in, called Turbulence back in the 2000s. Yeah, he's recently been organizing collapse camps which are, which are sort of like, you know, the collapse is coming, what we're going to do about it, how do we survive sort of thing.
- [95:46]
C
Now I think Tadio's drawn all the wrong conclusions, I think from the defeat of a certain kind of environmentalism. But. Sorry, I interrupted you.
- [95:54]
B
No, well, I know I, I do agree with you and I, but I, I partly, I think it's because like if the horizon is collapsed then that put the politics come out of it are not universalist or it's quite a leap to make them universal, worstless politics, basically. If the horizon is like transition, as in, look, we need to change the world, basically we need to address these problems. In order to do it, you're gonna have to change huge amounts of stuff and you're going to need to, you know, it's going to take a whole ecology of, of different actors to do it. And that includes, you know, taking control of the state at various levels. It involves building out these sorts of infrastructures so that we can do, we can change, change political composition the way that the neoliberals change the way people thought about the world, all of these sorts of things. Do you know what I mean? But the horizon has to be transition. How do we get from here to there? Basically, if it's collapse. If it's like, how do we survive the collapse that we can't change the direction of? You know, that that is a version of resilience that I'm not so interested in. I'm much more skeptical about. And I also think that relates to sort of like individual resilience. When I think about my own individual political resilience, why do I keep going all the time, etc. These sorts of things. Why do you persevere with projects for years and years and years? And these sorts of things also just like psychological resilience, I think really important to that is an idea of, we've said this a million times, but an idea of that. Like I see myself positioned within an ongoing movement of millions and millions of people stretching back into history, but also stretches into the the future about what is to be done, basically. And you know, as soon as you're. You're in that sort of like mind frame, then you move from like a politics, you know, of like moralism to a politics of strategy about what should we do? Do you know what I mean? And I think that is the sort of resilience, that idea that like, it is possible to address the crises of the world and move the world in a better direction. That is the sort of mentality that people did have. And when they, when they could create enduring institutions and do things such as self sacrifice and giving your life meaning because you're involved in a project bigger than yourself, basically, that is a form of resilience, I think, which leads itself towards a universalist politics.
- [98:04]
C
This is.