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- [00:01]
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- [01:22]
Sean Elley
If someone asked you about the state of the world right now, what would you say? Odds are it would be negative. That is the vibe of the moment, and you don't have to look too far to find confirmation. Political breakdown, ecological breakdown, AI hysteria, Another war in the Mideast? A lot of things really do seem to be unraveling. But humans are wired to see all the threats, and because of that, we miss a lot of the good things happening around us. If you pull back from the immediate spectacle of politics and look over a longer straight of time, you can see something else too. You can see real shifts in values, in norms, in what counts as justice, in who counts. There is, in other words, progress. Lots of progress actually. But most of the political stories about this moment don't reflect that. I'm Sean Elley, and this is the gray area. Today's guest is the writer and longtime activist Rebecca Solnit, who has a new book out called the Beginning Comes after the End. Solnit's argument is that we are terrible at seeing slow transformation while it's happening. We notice reversals and catastrophes, but we miss the quieter, more lasting revolutions that happen over decades. And she thinks that beneath all the noise of the present, there really has been a significant change away from hierarchy and separation and domination and toward interconnection and reciprocity in a much broader sense of equality. Solnit is a progressive, and she's speaking mostly to other progressives who are worried about seeing their political gains challenged and often undone by the political right. Her message isn't so much that progressives are wrong about the backlash. That's a real thing. Her point is that there are also many reasons to be hopeful if you're on the left. It's a cheerful argument, maybe even a necessary one. So I wanted to have Rebecca on the show to talk about her view of history and her theory of change and why the fragility of political victories is never a reason to despair. Rebecca Solnit, welcome to the show.
- [04:19]
Rebecca Solnit
My pleasure. Hello. Hello.
- [04:21]
Sean Elley
I like the way you write. Can I just say that right at the top?
- [04:25]
Rebecca Solnit
Hell, yeah. I do not object to that kind of remark.
- [04:30]
Sean Elley
As you might expect, this book reads to me like it was written with urgency. I mean, it kind of felt like you felt like you needed to write it right now. Is that right?
- [04:44]
Rebecca Solnit
I see a lot of my writing dealing with politics in the very specific sense of the current US Crises in the broader sense as equipment. And I wanted people to have this equipment as soon as possible. The book is rough in places. There's a few repetitions and things. And there was this moment where I was like, well, I could bring it out in the fall of 2026 and take some more time to revise, but I wanted it out now. And I actually think we're on this. The upswing. In a lot of ways, everything Trump is kind of imploding, collapsing, decaying, starting with the guy himself, who just looks like he's rotting in every possible way, mentally and physically. But, you know, I wanted to hand people this other picture, this longer perspective on where we are, how we got here, how much the right is engaged in backlash against everything we've done over the last 70 or so years to equip people for what we need to do.
- [05:48]
Sean Elley
This is a book about change. We'll get into the meat of that. But something you. You talk about throughout is that we're actually pretty bad at recognizing change, or at least pretty bad at recognizing positive change while we're living through it. Why do you think that is? Are we just wired for pessimism?
- [06:12]
Rebecca Solnit
There's a bunch of different pieces that come together to create that condition. One I would diagnose is amnesia. If you. To perceive change, you have to see time in increments as big as the changes. Something I run into all the time, for example, is people saying, either that feminism failed, as though you should undo millennia of patriarchy in one lifet, or you're not doing anything. Feminism is dead. So if you don't have the memory of what the status of women was before second wave feminism in the 60s, you can't see that change. That's one piece of it. And there's a way that we have to lock onto the short term in this moment. What happened today, what's gonna happen tomorrow, that doesn't help us see what happened over the last 10 and 20 and 50 years. And then there's a third thing. I think there's something in English speaking world that's kind of puritanical and Protestant and wimpy, that is kind of doomer, defeatist, grumpy, negative, pessimistic, full of premature surrender. I thought Timothy Snyder's 20 rules for surviving Authoritarianism, he wrote right after Trump got elected the first time, was so important that do not surrender in advance, which is essentially deciding the regime has all the power and you have none. Obeying when you don't need to obey, giving up the power you have. And people do that a lot. They decide they have the gift of prophecy. Oh, they're going to hold all the power, they're going to do this, they're going to do that. There's nothing we can do about it. And I see people all the time give up the real power we have to make the future in the present because the future does not exist. It's a result of how we show up.
- [08:05]
Sean Elley
Well, staying with this, this the theme of change, I think a fairly popular view of the last 50, 60, 70 years of American history, at least, is that it's mostly a story of disruption and cultural decline. Lots of backlash, lots of anger and discontentment. You know, this narrative, the book, is largely a response to it, just right out of the gate. Do you think it's true, that story?
- [08:36]
Rebecca Solnit
I think it's. There's a lot of truth in it, but it's tracking a specific number of things. You know, often the left is so busy watching the right, it doesn't watch itself. Something I've found over and over as I participate in movements is that our enemies take us seriously even when we don't take ourselves seriously. Occupy Wall street, for example, which I often hear people say, didn't achieve anything, achieved so many things, but at the time that it was erupting not just in lower Manhattan, but all over the US and beyond, there was an Occupy Auckland in New Zealand. It was really scaring the captains of industry, the people at the top of capitalism. They saw us as very powerful. Even when there was a lot of grumpiness about you know, not doing anything, not having any power. The aphorism at the heart of this book is the famous one by Gramsci, that an old world is dying, a new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters. There's lots of attention to the old world dying, and I believe a lot of the kind of misogynist, white supremacist, hyper capitalism, environmental destruction, climate denial of the Trump administration and authoritarianism generally is a kind of supernova and a kind of backlash against what we've achieved. You know, so the monsters get lots of attention, the old world dying gets lots of attention. I felt like people weren't really seeing the new world being born. We have changed the world so profoundly through the anti racism, the civil rights movements, the feminist movement, queer rights, disability rights. Underlying them all, a kind of human rights agenda that insists on universal human rights, on equality, on breaking down a lot of the apartheid and segregation and separation that was so normalized in the world I was born into, which was a world in which a lot of Africa was colonial. Apartheid had been instituted in South Africa. Jim Crow still existed and was dominant in the American South. Women were such marginalized, disempowered, degraded creatures. In this society, to be queer was to be considered mentally criminal, mentally ill, or criminal or degenerate, or all of the above, and treated as such, which is why queer people mostly had to live in hiding, you know, that there was no language to talk about the environment, no awareness of the systemicness, which means that everything you do has these ongoing consequences. The poisons, the radioactive fallout, the environmental degradation. And so, you know, the new world being born is all those movements that have actually been incredibly successful and powerful and have made the right very angry and frightened, because if you listen to them, they are angry and they are frightened and they think they're losing, which is really telling, you know, and it's put us in a really different position than the one we're used to. And the language of progressive and left activism is we are fighting to try to get something. It's a little confusing when we've become the status quo of voting rights, reproductive rights, marriage equality, environmental protection. We're worth the brand new status quo and we have to fight to defend it.
- [12:16]
Sean Elley
You're touching on something I wanted to ask you about, which is like, what do you think fundamentally the backlash is about in this moment? Because there's clearly a backlash. And you know, I mean, disconnection, isolation, you know, these are big themes for you. And if America has an ideology, it is hyper Individualism, that is very much our thing. Do you think maybe at bottom what's happening is there is just a deep seated revolt against interdependence itself, against this idea that we are all connected and therefore we owe one another something?
- [13:01]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah. And it's been so interesting seeing Christianity, which in American politics long felt like it was the territory of the right, really becomes something very progressive and left. And of course there are always Quakers and Unitarians and Methodists and all the rest who were progressive. But we're seeing a lot of Protestants, including these white Christian progressive candidates like James Tallarico show up. We're seeing a super cool pope. We're seeing love thy neighbor being laid down again and again. We're seeing an interdenominational religious showing up against ICE that includes Muslims and Buddhists and everybody else, you know, progressive Jews against the genocide in Palestine, etc. But yeah, and in a way you have to have a backlash when your status quo is challenged. There's a lot of ways that the United States was about rugged individualism, about isolationism of various kinds built on white male supremacy, because that's who was supposed to be the great self made man, pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Forget that a woman gave birth to him. Forget that other human beings fed and clothed and educated him. Forget that a whole city system made it possible for him to be a successful businessman. Forget all the people who worked in his factories or built his roads, saw that his water was drinkable, and he was never really separate, but it was an ideology. Something I find fascinating is that for the American right, the very science of climate change is offensive to them because they're deeply committed to what I call the ideology of isolation, which is ultimately a kind of nihilism. Nothing is connected to anything else, because if things are connected, then there are consequences to our actions. If there are consequences to our actions, we have to take those into account when we act, whether we're building a dam or cutting down a forest or dumping toxic chemicals or burning fossil fuel. And they see in the ideology of isolation an individualism where the individual's rights are absolutely unlimited. And of course, these rights don't apply to everybody. They really, you know, for example, they want to take away reproductive rights, which you would see as part of rugged individualism. I have the right to control my own body, but women are just another thing that men have the right to control. Women are just part of nature that men get to, you know, dominate, control, et cetera. And so it's this very ugly version of, you know, individualism that leads also to emotional, spiritual, moral isolation that I think breeds a lot of loneliness. One of the striking things about the contemporary right, from the Silicon Valley oligarchs through the manosphere to the Trump administration, is that they all seem angry and miserable and there's something so deeply joyless about them, so disconnected. But Silicon Valley is hyper white patriarchy is hyper individualism, and it's created so much more loneliness, so much more isolation, helped people abandon the old ways we used to connect in person, feel much more in person and local sense of belonging and membership, which I think people are now really trying to recover. And of course, AI is only the next step of it. AI saying like, oh, since you no longer have access to human contact, you need a substitute lover, a substitute therapist, a substitute counselor, a substitute teacher. And capitalism also runs on scarcity, the idea that there's not enough to go around and we need to compete for it. And Silicon Valley is very excited about the idea that there is somehow a scarcity of human beings on this planet of 8 billion people. But as is almost always true of capitalism, there is no real scarcity. There's just a distribution problem, and there is no shortage of human beings. We just have a distribution problem Silicon Valley created and is very uninterested in solving, except by offering us human substitutes that are part of their kind of ugly new world. Yeah, that is a world that sees itself very threatened by the idea of anti capitalism, by feminism, by anti racism, by climate action and environmentalism, because they benefit from the opposite of all things. They benefit from the ideology of isolation that wants to return to that world of separation. So I see it very much not just as a philosophy, one that was actually very easy to belong to. You didn't have to defend it because it was the dominant ideology in, say, 1955. Now it's a backlash because they're trying to return to the world before we change things so much. And they're angry and frightened because it is no longer a given that we will have this radical inequality. We'll have this unfettered individualism. We will have this deregulated world in which you can destroy the environment by burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, mining and polluting.
- [18:49]
Sean Elley
Well, I mean, that has always been the problem with libertarianism in general. Like, from my point of view, that it gives us a language of rights, a very clear language of rights. What I'm entitled to, what you cannot do to me, but it has no language of obligations and responsibilities to other people and to the environment. And I think we're just, we're just continually colliding with the consequences of that kind of thinking. And, you know, I just, that is, that is why I've always been uncomfortable. I just don't think libertarianism really scales in a world that's actually interdependent, which it is. But just to step back a little bit, because I think a sympathetic skeptic who digs what you're saying, who wants to believe that the, the gains and the progress is real, and kind of does believe that it's real, probably still looks around and sees all the problems you're talking about, the alienation, the corruption, the ecological breakdown, the authoritarian resurgence, all of it. And they just don't find a lot of solace in the victories. You're highlighting me to that person, and admittedly I am kind of that person. You say what?
- [20:08]
Rebecca Solnit
Oh my gosh. Well, I am familiar with the species and a lot of what I find is people don't actually know and pay attention to the victories and they tend, you know, they don't see the change. And a lot of people don't know, for example, that the great majority of people on earth support climate action, take climate change seriously. There's been a number of studies that show that the people, when you take a survey, people are like, yeah, I support climate action, but it's a minority view. We don't really know who we are because mainstream and right wing media has worked really hard here in the US to convince us that the minority is the majority. That this angry minority that's anti vax, anti immigration, anti reproductive rights, anti trans and queer rights, anti environmental and climate action is really the majority. And it makes people feel powerless and isolated and alienated, when in fact we are the majority. So changing the story is not changing everything, but it's the beginning of changing that. And, you know, there's a piece of It's a Wonderful Life. I've always loved the part where the angel Clarence shows Jimmy Stewart's character what his town would be like if he'd never been born, if he'd never run his progressive savings and loan to help these working class people get an economic foothold to build a life. And we never see what the world would be like if there had been no queer rights, no feminism, no environmental protection. And a lot of times our victories look like nothing. You know, the coal burning plant that didn't open, that didn't give the kids asthma, the forest that wasn't cut down, the people who didn't die of cancer the woman who didn't die of back alley abortions, things like that. So, you know. But it's also. There is a habit of this progressive left, whatever we're going to call it, of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So these are habits of mind. And it's also really hard to get people to see that, yes, the bad things exist and also the good things exist, to see that the world is actually multicolored, not even shades of gray, pardon the reference, let alone simple black and white, that we have not lost everything because we have not won everything. There's this wonderful passage by Vaclav Havel. People quote all the time saying that hope is not a prognosis, it's an attitude of the spirit. But what people don't remember is he said that some years before he helped topple the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia, when, for all he knew, he would spend the rest of his life under totalitarianism, in a regime that had imprisoned him repeatedly and would continue to imprison him. So that radical uncertainty of the future is also the realm of possibility. That is also something that saddles with a kind of responsibility to make the future with all the power that we have. And I see not the most oppressed people, but the least oppressed, often as the ones who want to surrender that power. That is responsibility, because it really gets them off the hook and because they see grumpiness as a form of solidarity.
- [23:47]
Sean Elley
I think part of it is just a fear about the fragility of the gains. I mean, you're definitely right in that the backlash proves the gains were real. I mean, that just has to be true on some level, right? And then the question is, all right, well, will it hold? But I mean, it is kind of just an eternal political reality that no victory is final. You know, you win ground, and then that ground has to be continually defended and redefended. That's just democracy, right? So, like, that precarity is just baked into the cake. But I think there is a. There's an impulse that people have where they're. The fear that it's. That the backlash isn't just a backlash, that it's a reversal, I think taps into that. That fear of losing the ground. But that's not a reason to despair. It's just a reminder that that doesn't hold itself. You have to keep defending it.
- [24:41]
Rebecca Solnit
I've always hated the save the whales language because it sounds like we will permanently put whales either in a piggy bank or a heaven where they are somehow beyond reach, rather than that the process of protecting the oceans and stopping whaling will be an ongoing process. You know, and it's interesting, but it is about how you tell the story. And Roe vs Wade was overturned, you know, and that's a reminder that those reproductive rights were gained in 1973 and lasted for 49 years. And there's a lot of ways you can tell the story. I often hear it as though. And yet another. And people love to write obituaries for feminism. Even when I was in Europe on book tour last year, people were like, well, doesn't the overturning of Roe vs Wade mean that feminism failed? And it's like, you're in Europe. Roe vs. Wade is not relevant. You know, and there's so many different ways to tell that story. You know, women gained reproductive rights first with a victory. People don't remember Griswold versus Connecticut that gave married couples a right to birth control. People don't even remember, unlike Roe vs. Wade, that there was no right to birth control, and that was only for married couples. There was a second Supreme Court decision that gave independent women a right to birth control. And then came Roe versus Wade. When it was overturned, it went back to the states. But also at the same time that the right, in its long effort to dismantle abortion rights was happening. Four Catholic countries, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and Ireland all granted women reproductive rights. So there's lots of different ways you tell the story. There's a way in which this one thing is everything, and it's all over. A bunch of blue states have fought to expand reproductive rights. But then the biggest thing of all, I think, is people do not willingly surrender their rights. You can take away the legal right. You can't take away the belief to that right as easily. In fact, I think abortions have actually increased partly because medication abortions are available, including by mail, in a lot of those states. So we're in the middle of the story. The end of Roe versus Wade is not the end of everything, you know, and that's a way in which you can't go back. You can take away rights, but you can't take away the belief in those rights so easily.
- [27:15]
Sean Elley
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- [31:49]
Rebecca Solnit
Well, I think it's, you know, I think it's really important to recognize that stories do not do the work by themselves, but they changed the foundation on which decisions are made. Early in the 2000s, the Supreme Court had this kind of weird ruling, in retrospect, decriminalizing anal sex, which was used to criminalize homosexuality. And their attitude towards queerness was radically different than in 2015 when they legalized marriage equality. And so why did the Supreme Court see it this way in 2015 in a way they could not possibly have seen it, say, in 2003. And because the story of what is normal and who we are had changed radically. And that story had been changed not by legislative action, but by countless queer people coming out of the closet by ending that world where people thought they didn't know anyone who was gay. But, yeah, you know, which was also the word used for, you know, lesbians and the whole LGBTQ spectrum. And so there's a short term version where, you know, the nine gods of the Supreme Court handed down a decision from above. There's a long term way in which what constituted normal and reasonable and who deserves rights had been changed radically, not through the law, not through legislation, but through changing the story by changing who we are, by all those queer people with incredible bravery, particularly early on in the 60s and 70s, showing up as who they really were and getting the straight world, the heteronormative world, used to that. And you can See that young people are just a lot more fluid around gender and sexual orientation. It is a genuinely different world that I do not think will change back to. There are two genders, they each belong in their airtight little boxes, and the only legitimate sexual orientation is narrowly heterosexual. You know, the right is trying very hard to make that a reality, but I don't believe it will work.
- [34:15]
Sean Elley
You know what's interesting about that, Rebecca, and you sort of alluded to it earlier. You talk about this in the book, and I think it's true. The right seems to grasp much better the depth of all these changes than the left. Even though the left has been on the winning side of a lot of these changes. Why do you think that is?
- [34:37]
Rebecca Solnit
And it goes back to what I said at the beginning. The there's a lot of kind of mournful, defeatist, gloomy attitude that's really just kind of a cultural attitude. I don't know if it's like being heirs to the Puritans or what in kind of the white, English speaking left that I think is different in other parts of the world. But also something I said at the beginning of this conversation. Our enemies take us seriously even when we don't take ourselves seriously. And one of the core arguments of this book is that, that if you listen very carefully, the right is telling us five things. The last two are familiar, but they're built on the three. I don't hear people articulate very often. What the right is telling us is you all are very powerful. You have changed the world profoundly. All that stuff you do is actually all one project, one agenda. The thing everybody does here is we fucking hate it. We want to change it back. But why would they hate it? Why would they be so upset about it? Why would they be so angry if it didn't matter? And so we sell ourselves short and our enemies estimate us truly. And that's a lot of what this book tries to do, is to look at this sheer power and scope of all these changes to create a world that is so profoundly different. You could say that it is a different society. You could almost say it's a different civilization, because so many assumptions are so radically different than they were in that world. And it's weird because even people my age and older often don't remember the changes. I feel sometimes like the Ancient Mariner or some character, you know, in a horror movie who sees the thing other people don't see and wants to testify and get people to see it. But I don't see the zombie apocalypse I see the long arc of change. And to see it is to see our own power, which I think really reinforces the confidence that we do have power and the commitment to protect the changes that we've made and to continue making those changes, because it is by no means a finished project and there's so much we need to do.
- [36:59]
Sean Elley
Let me. I actually want to hold on what you were saying for a minute, because I think of you at least, as both a theorist and a practitioner of political activism. And I have always looked at politics as a political theorist. I mean, that's my background, as basically a struggle to navigate this tension between order and progress. If societies change too much or too fast, if there's too much disruption or too much backlash, whatever progress they've made tends to unravel. And also if they don't evolve fast enough, if they don't adapt fast enough, they get stuck. And society also unravels for different reasons. And so the challenge for me is always living in that tension without careening too far, too quickly in either direction. And I say all that to basically ask you as an activist, I mean, have you thought much about the pace of change and what's sustainable and what is it? How do you think about living in that tension?
- [38:06]
Rebecca Solnit
I don't know, because we've actually seen profound changes in this country and other countries and societies continued. But we abolished slavery in this country and of course, undoing reconstruction, building Jim Crow, the KKK were a backlash, but they did not restore the country to. And Black people to pre1865 conditions. Women got the vote in 1920, and somehow the country did not fall apart. And a lot of things have changed really profoundly. People are actually quite adaptable. And you see revolutions overturning monarchy, other forms of radical inequality, and sometimes you get the French Revolution and then you get the terror, which is something I hear about all the time. But I read this piece when I was writing A Paradise Built in Hell. I wish I could find again a beautiful academic journal article that pointed out France never went back to absolutist monarchy and the idea of the rights of man, from which the idea of the rights of women arose by a Mary Wollstonecraft, and et cetera was unloosed on the world influenced lots of other people, and frankly, and continue to kind of work like a yeast in the dough of France to feed further revolutions, further movements towards democracy and equality. And so things can regress, but they never go back to as though this never happened. You know, you can change regimes for more democratic and equal for more authoritarian and unequal. But you never really forget the new idea that's out in the world. I don't think women will ever go back. They've been forced back in places like Afghanistan, but will never go back to the old equality now that so broadly and so deeply women have had the vote, women have had other kinds of equality and public participation. The idea that women are somehow fundamentally so far flawed, so inferior, so mentally deficient that they cannot participate in governance, in intellectual spheres. We live in a world that was inconceivable and unimaginable to the people of 1955 or to the world that I was born into. If time travel was a real thing, if you brought someone forward, you could not explain all this stuff to them. And that's, you know, the kind of subtle, invisible, incremental change that both proves that we're actually quite adaptable and that actually this stuff has been really powerful in changing things.
- [41:09]
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- [42:39]
Commercial Narrator 3
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- [43:23]
Sean Elley
You've been writing about home for a long time and not like in a glib, quixotic way, more in like a lucid, philosophical way. But do you ever waver in that? You ever wake up some days and go, shit, we lost.
- [43:39]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah.
- [43:40]
Sean Elley
Asking for a friend,
- [43:43]
Rebecca Solnit
I. I have to say that I wrote the book A Paradise Built in Hell about the extraordinarily beautiful and joyful way people often respond to disaster because in those moments of emergency, they feel a sense of solidarity with, you know, everybody around them. That book is a very positive view of human nature. The way it's been complicated since 2016 is by seeing how driven people are by in group behavior, by doing what it takes to belong to an in group, which often requires punishing the out group. And that is very true of the left as well as of the right and every other part of the spectrum. And, you know, and just seeing that, that a lot of times the political views people embrace feel like they're less about the actual ideology than I am in this group. And, you know, I get my identity from belonging to this group. And I prove that I'm in this group by punishing anybody who is not totally, 100%, squarely in this group. And I think this is part of how the left eats itself. I think a lot of young people start out saying like, oh, these are the positions, the values I want to embrace. And then they're like, how do I act on those values? And they somehow get tutored by example. Oh, we just punish all the people who aren't as pure and perfect in their embrace of these values as us. My friend Yotam Maram wrote this beautiful essay years ago saying at some level, the left doesn't believe it can win. And if you can't win, all you can do is be perfect. And one of the ways that perfection exercises itself is by punishing the people who are imperfect. And that includes the people who have come more recently to embrace Palestinian rights or queer rights. And in this moment where a lot of people are leaving Maga and the Ray, there is this big question, do we welcome them or do we punish them for having the wrong views? Do you want to build a big tent or do you want to have a perfect little tent with only perfect people who have always been perfect?
- [46:00]
Sean Elley
I think perfect is one word for it, simplistic or neat is another. I think a lot of it comes down to just comfort with uncertainty. You write about this, I mean, you're very attuned to the power of political stories, and people just want all or nothing stories. And anything that disrupts that binary just doesn't compute. And I think it produces a lot of political pathologies that get in the way of something that's.
- [46:30]
Rebecca Solnit
Yeah, something that's been so interesting to me recently is Adorno's work on the authoritarian personality and just seeing that some people need to have a really orderly, pigeonholed, categorized world. And there's a lot of people, they're not the majority, but there's a number of people who are supposed to be on the left, but who ultimately like authoritarianism, like punishment, like these very neat categories. There's other people on what's supposed to be the left who just need a very simple, categorizable world and who tend towards these very simplistic stories in which, yeah, they're often very binary. There's the, you know, the very. The category in which everyone in it is good and the other category in which everyone is bad. And, you know, and I make an equation in this book that came to me recently and in writing about hope, I've written about what the Buddhist teacher Pemat Chaudhren calls comfortable with uncertainty. A lot of people are uncomfortable with uncertainty and therefore seize on false certainty about the future. They create a more predictable, categorizable, containable world in terms of the timeline. They also, with category, create another, more predictable, categorizable, containable world. And I like to say categories are where thoughts go to die. Once you've decided that this person belongs to this group and, you know, all people of this religion or ethnicity are this way, all people of this sexual orientation are that way, all people of this nationality or political party are this way, you can stop thinking about them. You can stop observing the contradiction and the complexities of the reality that all categories are leaky. So that comfort with uncertainty and that comfort with a reality that will always overflow and break through categories, I think is in some ways a personality trait, but is also about how you've been trained to think, just as that reliance on category and predictability is also often how people have been trained to think. And I'm so much in all this work trying to give people equipment to think more complexly, to see that the categories are leaky, to see that the future is uncertain, and that another word for uncertainty is possibility.
- [49:07]
Sean Elley
I've always found you to be such a valuable read and I always feel like there's a cocktail in your work of both pragmatism and also like fearless, revolutionary kind of spirit that exists I think in in a in a healthy, unique way. And it's always major work, dynamic and interesting to me. So all the which is to say, it's so good to talk to you. I'm glad I finally got you on the podcast and I love that there are people like you doing the work as long as you have been, like in a very, I think, honest, consistent way. Once again, the the book is called the Beginning Comes after the End. Rebecca Solnit, a pleasure. Thank you.
- [49:56]
Rebecca Solnit
Likewise. Thank you.
- [50:01]
Sean Elley
All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I love Rebecca. I'm glad she exists. But as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please also rate Review subscribe to the podcast. You Know the Drill. This episode was produced by Thor Neuerider and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Sarah Schweppe and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Our Executive Creative Producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
- [51:21]
Commercial Narrator 3
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