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Indirect Action and the Politics of Helping · Mechonomist Podcast

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: it looks like the Trump administration is set to take a chainsaw to the federal government,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: which is interesting because much of our economy is reliant on the functioning of
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: the federal bureaucracy in order to work.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we may be, in fact, as Elon Musk said, in for some lean years.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sort of on the fence about it.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't...
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a dumb idea,
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: but at the same time,
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think the federal government is extremely unwieldy and bloated.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't think you need to take a chainsaw to it.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think you need to take a scalpel to it.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: But you got a bunch of inexperienced people who are essentially novices when it
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: comes to understanding how the government works who are going to go in there and
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: try and chop it to pieces.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: But what I think is that it will create significant opportunities for mutual aid
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: institutions to show what we can do.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we will have to step up in order to fill the gaps left by a destroyed federal government.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm going to call mutual aid is not direct action, but is indirect action.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: You think of it, direct action is like protest or military action or
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: some of the sort of direct confrontation,
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: whereas indirect action like mutual aid or cooperatives or something like that is
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: about filling the gaps left by a crumbling empire.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this sort of destruction of the federal bureaucracy may in fact be the death
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: nail in that crumbling empire.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it may be imperative on us as
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: mutual aid institutions to respond by providing the things that the federal government does not provide.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: But what I really wanna talk about is the politics of helping, just helping out.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've done a lot of activist community organizing work in my life.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've done a lot of ideologically driven stuff.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I find that that turns a lot of people off and it doesn't really build the type
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: of institutional power that we wanna do.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a it's like a quasi religious type activism or organizing in the sense
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: that you're trying to convert people to a specific ideology or way of thinking.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the politics of helping builds trust and it weaves the bonds of community
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: because people look to you to serve them and to be a trusted member of the
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: community or a trusted institution within the community.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that trust goes a long way to building relationships.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really what we need and what we're going to need in order for us to
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: survive and thrive in the coming years.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's relationships.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's interesting because a lot of people are sort of in the prepper
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: mode now,
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm kind of consider myself similar to that.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: But preppers, you know, they get guns and food and
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: supplies and they stockpile all this stuff and that's going to be fine,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: but that's only going to sustain you for a limited amount of time.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And what we really need going forward into the future is people.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: We need strong relationships based on trust,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: based on mutual aid,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: based on contributing to the community,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: based on skill sharing and,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And based on building a society that all of us can be proud of, that's not really ideologically based.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's more based on what we do for one another.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess that is a type of ideology.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it's an ideology that's more based in service than in a quasi-religious type of approach.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: So the prepping should be basically make friends.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Go out and make friends.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things in our society,
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: and I think this has been purposeful,
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: is that people in our society don't have friends.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: They have work acquaintances, they have church acquaintances, but they don't really have friends.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was looking at statistics and like 38% of the population have four or fewer friends.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Most people have over half have five or fewer friends.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Really, every person in any community anywhere should have
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: approaching 100 friends,
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: because that's about the number of relationships that a human being can maintain
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: over time is about 100 different types of friendships.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So really, we shouldn't have five or six friends.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: We should all have 100 friends.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a big, big difference.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: If we have these friendships and these people that we can rely on to come to our
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: aid and we come to their aid when the time calls for it,
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: then we can build a society in the ashes of a crumbling empire and in what may very
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: well be the death knell of that empire with the chainsaw approach to cutting the
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: bloat of the federal government that the Trump administration is going to take.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: It may be our opportunity to build that new society,
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: and that starts with just going out and making strong friendships together
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not based on ideology, but based on mutual trust.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the politics of helping.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: You help somebody, you build trust with them, they help you, they build trust with you.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's power.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And everything that gets accomplished gets accomplished collectively.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing is done individually.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if we are to survive for the future,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to have to take this approach,
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: which is that we need a shit ton of friends.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: We need a lot of friends.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: People that we can trust and we can count on.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's always been that way.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's never not been that way.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: So as much as things are changing and as much as things are scary,
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: things are kind of the same as they've ever been.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see y'all next time.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, y'all.