The Box We Opened — Myth, Politics and Staying with the Trouble (Feral Wisdoms Collection—A Conversation) with Alex Andreou

What happens when the box is already open? Anna Grear and Alex Andreou begin with Pandora — and find themselves moving through myth, politics, and the stories and frames shaping our world, now and in the past. Wide-ranging and exploratory, this conversation weaves between the archaic and the contemporary: the double-edged potential of the narratives we inherit, the political turbulence of our moment, the role of community and embodied connection in times of fracture, and what it might mean to stay with the trouble together, in all its messy complexities. Nothing is neatly resolved — and that's precisely the point.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

My name is Gray, and I welcome you to exploration podcast. Combination of conversation, meditation, hypnotic techniques, intellectual inquiries, sound, music, language, explore healing, spirituality, and imaginative reality in the 21st century field. An incredible man. He's got an amazing podcast called Podicy, which visits Greek myths and looks at their contemporary relevance. But Alex, I know you have another podcast that I didn't know about called Quiet Riot, which sounds amazing. And Alex, would you like to introduce yourself? That would be fantastic. And it would save me embarrassing myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

I was born in Greece, but came over to the UK around the age of 18. I read law here, did economics here, worked for the government, worked for a regulator basically for about a decade. And then I quite literally escaped and joined the circus. So I went to drama school, retrained as an actor, and now I make my crust with broadcasting and uh voice work and uh uh a little bit of acting when it's available and things like that. And um I I seem to have found a good home in podcasting. Um, so I I do I used to do a podcast uh called Remaniacs during the Brexit years that I did for us uh for many, many years. And I now have a politics podcast called Quiet Riot with uh Naomi Smith, who runs the think tank Best for Britain, uh, or rather the campaigning organization. They're not really a think tank, they're a civil um uh society organization. And I also recently started a podcast called Podicy that sort of brings together a lot of my otherwise useless skills, a lot of the things that didn't seem to have any reason for existing in my life up until now, they seem to come together in this format that looks at an ancient Greek myth. And the idea is to try and trace its influences and its tentacles and the way it has evolved over time, um, and and see what that does for the original myth, because sometimes it changes its meaning quite significantly, and also see what it means about how it's changed, because that can be very revealing about the now. Um, so it's not really a history podcast, and it's not, you know, some bits of it, I guess, are funny, and some bits of it are straight up the myth itself, but a lot of it is, you know, why is this myth always portrayed in paintings in a particular way? Or um, you know, how many films exist today that basically recycle that same story over and over again, but in a way that we don't notice? Um, and and so I like it. It's uh it's a lot of work because uh because it involves a hell of a lot of research, and uh basically there is no way to synthesize it other than me just absorbing all this stuff and somehow trying to put it in a sort of order that makes sense and and see if I find any patterns to it.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

I mean, but but I love that.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

I think I love it, and also um for anyone who is curious about this, I thoroughly recommend you go and listen to this podcast. Uh Alex weaves in music and incredible songs. He does it in a really lyric, poetic, profound way. It's a kind of like experience of tentacular wisdom, you know, fingerprinting his way through the through the little wisps of meaning and the the more profound robs of meaning that come through the myth and how they get yeah, refracted through contemporary questions. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to speak to him is because I was so lit. I think it's the only word lit by the Pandora's box episode, um, which I thought you brought such refreshing angles on. And you know, I haven't realized so much of what you revealed there about Pandora's box and that the fact that it wasn't even a box in the first place, that it was this jar, and that Pandora had a completely different meaning from what it's been interpreted to mean now. And the elision as well with the Eve myth, I thought was particularly interesting. So, given that we're at this incredible inflection point, I think, in human history at the moment where we're really struggling between what I think of as forces of contraction and forces of expansion or invitations into expansion, the invitation to embrace complexity and inclusion, more radical forms of equality, opening up to even the more than human, and then this kind of really backlashy type anxiety about the loss of traditional privilege, um, centuries of oppressive, oppressive kind of closures and and also in the West, you know, they those link quite strongly with colonialism. Um, so I would love it, Alex, if first we could sort of trace the Pandora myth along the lines in which you did, that you could kind of open that out to the audience, and then maybe we can kind of interrogate it at key inflection points for squeeze it for what it means now.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, so the Pandora myth is slightly unusual among the topics that I've looked at so far, in that it it has one source, um, all of it. Usually you find different sources that say slightly different things, and you have to synthesize them in a way to get a story. Usually you get a lot of people from not contemporaries to the myth, but much sooner after than we are, that have written it out and they've written it out in different ways. And so the hope and the expectation, I guess, is that they are much closer to the oral tradition via which this myth is transmitted, and so they they have a more authentic version than is accessible to you. But Pandora is unusual in that it has one source and it's Hisiod. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Um was there no pre-existing oral tradition around Pandora?

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Well, there must have been, because there is some artwork that predates Hesiod that we think shows a Pandora-like figure. And and that's one of the very interesting things. There is no ancient depiction. There is no depiction really until the the I would say second century uh AD that connects her in any way to a vessel that contains stuff. Um, every depiction up until then is about Pandora as the first woman created by the gods to be a companion to man, if that makes sense. Yes. And given every gift by them, and she's usually emerging from the earth, as if she's coming out of the clay from which the god Hephaestus is meant to have fashioned her. And even her name, there is a reasonable school of thought that it's a it contains a spin, because Pandora comes from basically two relatively common words, pan, which means everything. Um, and if you think of pandemic or pandemonium, you know, it's it's an all-encome encompassing sense, and thora, which is gift. And so Hesiod tells his audience that the name means the woman with all the gifts, but a lot of scholars think a more natural uh explanation of the name is all giving rather than all gifted, and they do think that this has to do with her emerging from the earth. There are usually a lot of symbols that are connected to fertility, and you know, there are wreaths and and sort of uh uh uh plant uh scepters and things like that, which are usually connected to fertility. And so they think that Pandora essentially emerged as a myth of the woman going from maidenhood to uh consort, if that makes sense. It is that stage of life that changes from um not being married to being married. Now, there's a lot we can say about marriage customs in Greece, and you know, people ought to understand that women were not well treated in Greece. Um they weren't particularly more badly treated than you know, 16th century or 17th century Britain particularly, but they weren't well tr treated, they they were they didn't have uh rights, although we have to draw a distinction, I think, with royal women, um, because again, there's a very strong school of thought that the royal lineage passed through women rather than men. And and I'll give you a very the smallest example to illustrate that. If um you know all of Greece did not unite and go fight a war in Troy for 10 years because they'd abducted a pretty girl, they went because they had taken away Sparta's royal lineage by abducting the queen of Sparta. Um and in the same sort of epic, look at it from the flip side, if you look at the Odyssey, there's no reason for the very suitors uh that want to marry Penelope to not just take the throne if they are the strongest and have a military power. You know, the king has been absent for 20 years. Why do they need Penelope? Because the royal lineage rests with Penelope, because royal authority is with the queen.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

And so Alex, is it that's is it that straightforward or is there here enfolded into this somehow the idea of containing linear purity through the purity and sexual kind of domestication of the woman? Like there's a control of female sexuality, arguably embedded in that approach, because you're looking at you know sexual purity, which you can't guarantee with fathering, right? We know that's the case, but with the mother, you always know who the mother is. And so is there embedded in this royal lineage coming through the queen a kind of double-edgedness? Um, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Look, I mean, we could look at of course it contains it, no doubt about it. Whether that is part of what moves it or whether it's one of its effects, I can't tell you definitively. Because you look, for example, at you know, Jewish heritage, that also comes down through the woman. And that isn't a question of purity of lineage, because you know, if you were after purity of lineage, you would demand that both parents are Jewish and that only the union of two Jewish parents, you know, produces a child that is also Jewish. So there is something to the mother, you know, bringing, and maybe it goes back a long, long way to a time when uh effectively the children were deliberately not attached to a particular father. Um, something that you still see in cultures like the Sami people in the north of Norway in the Arctic Circle, you see that there is a deliberate attempt to not form family units that consist of a father and a mother, because then there is a collective responsibility for raising the children of a village or a tribe or whatever. And because, you know, life for men who are primarily hunter-gotherers is a dangerous thing. And so you would end up with loads of widows basically with no means of supporting themselves. So it's it's also partly a practical thing to say the child is attached to the mother, and we are all collectively responsible for looking after the mothers, as it were, of the of the thing. But and the other thing you have to take into account is that I mean it's still to a certain extent a dangerous and traumatic business having children, but it was much more so back then. So, by some estimates, uh sort of between uh archaic, classical, and even into the Roman age, a a child had a 50% chance of making it to 10 years old. You know, a lot of children died. And so women had to produce a lot of children. Um, and then also the childbearing years was really the most dangerous period for a woman. Um, one in three women died, you know, during that period. And it it's interesting, I was speaking to an anthropologist who was saying that if you look at the average uh you know, ages, uh expected living ages of ancient people, you assume that it just goes up as medicine gets better, and part of that is true, of course. But there's also another thing that if you made it to a particular age, then you probably made it to 70, you know. So it's not the median is not the same as the average, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

So, you know, if women made it to 45, they probably made it to 75. Um, but so many women died young, and so many children died young that if you just look at the average, it looks as if there weren't any old people in antiquity. And that's just not true. There were.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Well, interestingly, in biblical accounts, you've got people living into their you know, 120, 150 kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Probably also a matter of paternity, by the way. Yes, because how can they produce all this progeny, you know, without if if effectively you come from just one couple, and and that's something that I've had to explain on the podcast a few times, because people find the idea of incest probably quite rightly, you know, they revolt against it, but it's there with every creation myth. Wherever you start with one pair of people, there is no way to get to a larger number unless you have a lot of incest going on. Now we could beautify it um in the way the Bible does. So the Bible mentions um Abel's wife in only one sentence. It says, Abel knew his wife, and they bore X number of children together. And it's like, well, yeah, yeah, he knew his wife. They were brother and sister, because before them there's only two people, and so you get a lot of that going on, you get a lot of that turn in creation myths in general, and a a huge uh willingness to, I guess, relax social moris so that they don't impinge on the actual survival of the species.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

You know, from from the point onwards where you're securing your numbers and you know you have a reasonable population that can cross-pollinate, if that makes sense, yes, you can go, you can go and say, we have seen from birth defects and things like that that very close unions are problematic. Therefore, we will make them uh an ethical taboo and maybe even unlawful. But if you're just a tribe of 20 people, your options are much more limited. It's either inter-marry or die. Um, and and so you get that sense with Pandora because she is immortal and she becomes mortal at the point where she marries Epimetheus. Um and there is a sense that at the point of marriage, woman back then entered a dangerous period of her life, a painful, traumatic, unsettling period of her life where she was effectively, you know, her life's mission for that period was to breed. It was to produce children.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

And it's very creaturely, isn't it? It's very creaturely. I mean, I'm struck here by the resonance between the emergence of her from the planetary ground itself from the earth, with its kind of quasi-adamic echo of you know, the man of clay, the human clay, earthlings, inescapably embodied creaturely, and as she enters motherhood, that's a thoroughly embodied period. You know, you are very much thrown into your physiology in a way that you might you can't escape it, but you might have a different relationship with it when you're not pregnant, when you're premarital. Absolutely. So there is something there in that convergence. But I'm intrigued by you mentioning that Hesiod is the only written source, at least. The only written source. Yeah. And what's the implication of that, Alex?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

The result of it is that we get a very misogynistic telling of the tale, is the first one to come out, and it's the one that influences all future ones, really. Because Hesiod hates women. I mean, this is not even a controversial statement. It's it's there throughout everything he writes. Um you can you can almost see him having an awful relationship with his wife and then going away to his study and kind of you know getting it all out on paper. Um and so he introduces this idea, which is then pinched by Christianity, and it's not there in the original myth of Adam and Eve. We can talk about that in a minute.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

Oh, I'd love to, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

So he produces this idea that man was happy and blissful until this first woman came along and she made everything rubbish, basically. She's responsible for every ill to befall humanity. And like I said, this is something that influences uh early Christian thinking in interpreting the um the sort of Old Testament books. And and that was, I think, the first thing that when I was researching this story really made me sit up and listen. Because I do often think of Christian morality influencing the tales as they go through time and changing them into something else. I've seen it with many, many, many of the myths. But we don't often think about ancient Greek culture. Influencing the way Christianity thinks at that early stage. And it's very much a two-way street. So at that early stage, it was Christian thinking that thought, ooh, we quite like this, the idea that woman is responsible for everything wrong. Pinch it, and then you start getting versions and translations of the book of Genesis, which completely remove Adam from the whole thing with the snake and the apple and the tree. In the original, he's present. Yeah, it's not it's a three-hander scene, as it were, as we say in the theater, it's not a two-hander. He doesn't participate, he doesn't object or um, you know, encourage her in any way. Um and we see that pattern repeated again and again, that sometimes what um what is interpreted after the event as a mistake is simply decisiveness. You know, you have a binary choice here, knowledge and you know, the loss of innocence that goes with knowledge, or not knowledge and you know, blissful naivety. And it's not uh, you know, it's not a choice that's again particularly controversial or that has gone away. You know, we we see it all the time. I don't know anyone that is, I guess, book smart, that doesn't occasionally think, God, I wish I I were less, you know, curious about the world. I I wish I had married my childhood sweetheart and worked in a shop because there's a kind of comfort and um contentment to that. Uh but I mean that's projection, of course. You know, you just imagine that their life is.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

But we see it, we see it all the time now, Alex, with people saying, I don't want to know. Like literally chosen ignorance because looking at reality is too complex. You hear the same from people who've had spiritual awakenings experiences, they'll say, Man, I wish I could, I wish I could go back to before I before I lived in this more expanded reality, which is kind of demands more of me ethically in terms of my presence and my attunement and all the rest of it. So I think that's a deeply, deeply human impulse. Another thing that really interests me about the Adam and Eve account is the order of creation um arguments there. You know, was it was it really the case that a male was made and a female was pulled out from a rib? Or was it more the case that in the original Hebraic languages, the original human is something more like uh undifferentiated, yeah, undifferentiated contains both contains and is genderless but full of gender. Yeah, and in fact, I think it's Virginia Ramey Mollencott who argues that it was actually kind of an omni-gender being with all sorts of potentialities, and then you know, you then you separate or you you need you differentiate between male and female, and then you've got the other order of creation discussion where people say, Well, man was made last, so he's superior, and you can pop in and go, Well, actually, technically, it might have been if you presuppose a male-female separation, which we might not want to um in the beginning, i.e., male pre pre-existing, if we don't want to assume that, but if we do, then surely female was made last. And actually, it's really interesting. The Hebraic word for help meet, which is the word that God uses to Adam, I'll make a help meet suitable for you, um, is used more times in the old testament of God than anyone else. So, so it's very interesting to me how the Hesiod and Genesis accounts kind of both draw are drawn towards each other with this mute mutation. Um, and as you said, this kind of mutual interest, actually.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Yes, by mutual interest, and that I think is the key. Yes, because what you have going on in the background is also a real struggle with older religions, with cathic religions that tend to worship the all-encompassing mother earth goddess, Ga or Gaia. Um, and the the era of the Dodekathion, the sort of mythology, the heroic mythology as we understand it today, we are very much in a mode where they are actively trying to separate the woman into her component parts, and to an extent the man in his component parts. Um, because if you have one deity that is the goddess of fertility and um the earth and nature and the home, then you have an all-powerful woman. And so you get they get separated into Demetra for fertility and agriculture, and Persephone, her daughter, many believe is simply a facet of the same goddess that is the goddess of the underworld. Um, and the myth of Persephone is really interesting in the way it has mutated, because a lot of people believe that it represents effectively the life cycle of a seed that sits under the ground for the cold months and then bursts forward with life. Um and so you get it everywhere, you find that everywhere. The the most potent symbol of Catholic religions is the snake, the the either a dragon or a draco or some kind of you know, big serpent. And you find that symbolism everywhere around Greece, uh, you know, in the early Bronze Age, and then suddenly it disappears. And with it you have all these tales of all these male gods and male heroes that go somewhere and kill a serpent, you know, starting with Apollo going to Delphi, the most powerful oracle in Greece, controlled by women, incidentally, and killing the snake and making that oracle his own. And you know, it it's it's very evident if you begin to see the patterns, that what we have in the background is a really deliberate attempt to say we men are the you know, we are meant to be for power and for ruling, and you women are meant to be for nurturing and um you know uh to represent effectively the embrace of the home, if that makes sense, which is not necessarily even a lesser role, but it is a different role and it is a limiting role, and it leaves open the more powerful role for the men. You know, one of the episodes I'm researching at the moment that is coming down the line is about Amazons and this, you know, this obsession with this probably historical uh race where women just had a quality. Like any any ancient source you look at, if they're if they're depicting an Amazon, it's basically just a woman on the horse with a bow. So all you have is that somewhere in Asia Minor, probably, there was a tribe in which the women now were warriors just like the men were. And this you know, mutates into a different thing. And and again, this is where I think the the kind of journey that I take is useful. Well, it's useful to me anyway, because most of this stuff I find out with you. I it's not, you know, I don't start knowing the answer and take you by the hand and and lead you there. I start not knowing the answer and we find out about it together. And so there is so much of that that is to diminish women's physicality, which I think is of interest to you and your podcast. Yeah, very much so. A lot of it is to say women are limited physically, limited in terms of you know, the home, in terms of where they can be uh location-wise, limited in terms of geography, in that you can't come and pinch a queen, we'll come and do a war with you, and also limited within themselves. You know, the it's not it's not a coincidence that at the same time when uh the Amazons become a symbol of, I guess, sexual freedom, freedom and occasionally lesbianism, that you get uh, you know, a society that's trying to tell women not to ride horses and not to do sports, because oh my god, you might break your hymen and then no man will have you.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

I was told that at school by nuns. I mean, what some something that interests me here, though, is the the history of the emergence of hierarchy itself, because you know, there are arguments out there. Um I'm just thinking um Murray Bookchin's work, which says in these kind of before the agricultural settlement, before communities settled in kind of to to start tending crops and being more place-based, rather than roving in these kind of more nomadic peripatetic ways, that that was the point at which there was a kind of inflection in gender relationships that became really obvious, that that was the point at which matriarchal structures, which were more ancient, allegedly, um, became replaced by a more patriarchal structure. And you know, it becomes possible then to confine women to the home if you're basically in a static location. And we see it play out as later in terms of the division between public-civic capacity, the political action of men, and the domestication of women there being locked into the private sphere. And you know, we're seeing now a recidivist motion that in particular arising in Project 2025 in America, where you're starting to see a pushback to try and confine, reconfine women again to these roles of kind of maternal support for a man who's out there in the world and the wife is at home servicing his full expression as a human being while she is, you know, to express her fulfillment through these very constrained roles around you know, notions of her gender. Um, and I find this that this very, very interesting because one of the things you brought up in the podcast that really I thought was phenomenally tied to what's happening now, which was the witching crases. Um, I think you link you linked it to the misogyny of Hesiod, you you linked it to the emergence of male power, and it's implicitly linked to male anxiety about you know female potency. Um, and there you have it, you know, the the witching crazes. So maybe we could kind of get into that because it does refract quite well with what we're seeing now.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Yeah, again, to my surprise, because I guess it's easy to fool oneself with the idea that progress is slow, non-linear, frustrating, it consists of small, you know, banked victories and on with march. But it was a surprise to me to find out that there had been periods where there were significant moves forward that had been beaten back for centuries in terms of you know equality between men and women. Um you know, there were women teaching law at the University of Bologna in the 1200s, and there were women teaching medicine at the University of Salamanca in the 1300s, and there were orders like the Begins, which were semi-formal religious orders, whose focus really was giving girls an education and doing charity work out there in community. And so they were immensely popular and very well respected, and the male leaders of the church went after them in a really specific way. Like if this was happening right now, we would call it a sort of attempted cleansing, because that's what was going on. You know, if you're if you're smart and educated and have a public voice and have a public persona, then we will uh brand you witch and try to eradicate you. Um and and that did scare me because it did make me, because I I do tend to, I'm you know, I'm an optimist at heart, and I do tend to look at uh Trump as a blip. I do tend to think, you know, it's a it's a sort of last spasm of that world that is resisting a newer way of being that will just go away and it will be violent and unpleasant, but it will eventually be defeated. But then I look at stories like that and I think but you know that going back might be a new a new dark ages that lasts, you know, 800 years, or it might be a new witch trial that that lasts two centuries. Um and so I I think that arguments about the arc of history can make us quite lazy in in the sense that we feel we don't have to put our shoulder to the wheel. Um, you know, things will eventually resolve themselves towards progress, but they don't. Not unless you fight for it and push for it, they don't necessarily. They sometimes resolve themselves towards regression, sometimes radically so. And you look at the situation in America and you think, hmm, maybe Margaret Atwood wasn't writing science fiction, maybe she was writing a sort of you know insightful documentary about what's about to happen. Um, and I find that I find that quite frightening.

unknown 37:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

I find that quite frightening because it goes hand in hand with a lot of other things that we've seen before: a dislike of anyone with different sexuality, a dislike of anyone that's outside the gender normative roles, a dislike for intellectuals, a dislike for education, a dislike for art. You know, you you see it, and the seed of it is already there. And I think the seed of it is very present in the UK. The the saving grace of the UK is the is a lack of religiosity, really. Um Protestantism, effectively, which is a much less uh um uh evangelical and you know sure of itself uh uh kind of Christianity is its saving grace. But the anti-intellectualism and the misogyny is really there in large quantities and we and the racism, and we look away, but it's still there, you know. And the difference I think with the UK, as someone who has come from a different country, and yes, I've become anglicized, I guess. But I still there's still a part of me that stands a little bit apart and looks down uh at what is going on with a level of detachment. And what I haven't seen in many other European countries is the working class policing itself in that way, the working class telling itself that this kind of music or this kind of education or this kind of literature is not for the likes of me. Um I see what I see on the continent on the whole is a kind of petit bourgeois reaching for something better. You know, and maybe people might get it wrong, maybe they can be comical in their misreading of something, but they are reaching for a better understanding. And what I see here is people slapping each other down, policing each other on the same stratum, which I think is really, really dangerous. So if you're a builder and your builder buddy goes to the opera, then you take the Mickey out of him for the next month and possibly make um you know imply things about I don't know, his sexuality or whatever, to kind of knock out of him that aspiration to try something new.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Yeah, I think.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

Because it's not for the likes of you.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

Yeah, I think there's a lot of I think there's a lot of truth in that, a kind of internalized class structure. But on the other hand, what I'm seeing now is that the working class are being addressed in really creative ways, particularly by the Green Party, by Gary's economics, and there are some, you know, people like Grace Blakely have got incredible um analytical facilities and a really, I think, a really astute political analysis of the dead ends of neoliberal capitalism. Um, and what I'm starting to see, particularly with the election of Hannah Spencer, is a very different conception of working class consciousness where people are starting to say, look, the material conditions under which we live are not sustainable. We have to get involved, we have to be represented, we have to be included. And I'm genuinely moved by her. Lots of people dismiss it as a kind of naivety. I see, see all the memes and the and the pushback and the ridiculous levels of misogyny aimed at her and the homophobia aimed at Zach Polansky and all that. But pushing that to one side, they're really cutting through because they're going after material conditions and they're they're pointing to the real division, which is between uh an extremely unaccountable billionaire, multi-millionaire class, which to my read was always inevitable in neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, by taking the ceiling off inequality, set fascism, proto-fascist inclinations in an almost inevitable arc.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

And and so when coming back to the thing It was certainly one of the possible paths.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

I think it was likely it was one, yeah, it was probably the likely path. Well, I read I don't think it was I don't think it was inevitable, and I don't think it is inevitable because No, I think it's inevitable within the neoliberalism, but not inevitable within market relations and you know ambitions for a rule-based order and and that. Um but I do I do think that the the risks say with Trump, you know, what what's um difficult to control, and this is where we get back to a kind of Pandora's box myth twist, um, is he's opened a box, right? And I know that that that the myth was about letting out all the bad shit, and then at the bottom there was hope left, which is this double-edged is hope helpful or unhelpful? Is it just a is it just a form of suffering to hope? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

Um, but what I mean the psychoanalyst that I interview on the on the podcast thinks it's both. Yes, and I would agree. You know, it can be unhelpful, but it's also completely necessary to sort of stop you from just being in existential despair.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

Absolutely, because you have to have a forward-facing iteration of who you are to guide your next choices ethically, morally, politically, um, even in terms of you know the development of your own happiness or your own health. We have to have this forward-facing choosing this. But what interests me about Trump is yeah, he's a wild card, but he's he's sort of like the necessary agent of chaos for a much, much more organized campaign. And while we could think of him as a blip, and I think if he goes down, he's taking a lot of people down with him. Behind him is a much more structural gravity that has been moving for decades. And coming back to Margaret Atwood, I would not be at all surprised if she'd looked at the Heritage Foundation and you know all those ties between Reagan and the white Christian nationalist movement in the States. Yeah. Yeah, and when they made abortion a key issue because Reagan saw that as a way to power, you know, the whole culture wars moral majority twist that takes you away from looking at material inequalities and the actual conditions in which people live. Kind of we've ended up here. And it just seems that that's all a kind of mythic. You could you could refract that through the mythic lens of Pandora's box because you know, look at look at the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

So you could do it through yeah, you could do it through several ones. The the Pandora's box in in some ways is a you know, you can divide myths and stories in several ways, and lots of people have attempted to classify them. And the closest I would say is that Pandora's myth is a psychological one. It's also a creation one, it's an ideological one, it's all those things, but it's also a psychological one. It's you know, it's basically it at it's a it's a form of theodicy. It's a form of trying to address the really central question of if someone has created all this, why have they created it with so much negative stuff in it? It doesn't, you know, it only makes sense if you assume that the creator is a malevolent being, or at the very least, an indifferent one. Um, it doesn't make sense if they are a benevolent being. The only way to make sense of it is that we have free will and we did this to ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 45:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:55

And and you know, in that kind of frame, a patty comes in to take the blame for all of it. And because at that moment there are forces fighting to marginalize women, to lock them in the home, to do all of that, then of course the patty is going to be the whole of womanhood, basically expressed in the first woman. That makes sense, it's convenient, it's practical. But refracting ancient myth myths on Trump, I would say that yes, there is Trump himself, yes, there is a system around him that supports him and is pushing for the same objectives, but there is something else going on as well at a much broader societal level. And the myth that you see that in is Midas, which was one of the very first episodes I did, because Midas in Greek mythology is a figure of fun. This is not a tragic myth. This is an idiot who keeps making the wrong decisions, and having the Midas touch is very much a negative thing, because as soon as he gets his wish, he finds that he can't drink, he can't eat, he kills his own, you know, the only person he loves in the world, his daughter, and then begs to lose this gift. And yet at some point that began being seen as a good thing. The Midas touch began to be seen as a desirable quality.

SPEAKER_01 47:39

Everything turns to gold.

SPEAKER_00 47:41

Yeah, and King Midas as a tragic figure rather than a comic one. Um, and as a matter of fact, uh I mean, this could it could not have been more perfect if I'd invented it. When I started looking at this, I found out that Trump, with his gold um, you know, uh penthouse and his ridiculous toilet and you know blinging up the the White House has actually written a book called The Midas Touch. That's all about how to succeed in business. Wow. And and so I I think all of what you say is true, and I think Hannah Spencer, by the way, is a milestone because she challenges perceptions in so many ways, not just in what is possible, not just in the sort of the framework of a green party or a more progressive politics, but also just by being her, just by saying, hi, I'm you know, I'm young, I'm smart, I'm a plumber, and you know, I'm now an elected politician. So there is, you know, and that's why she attracts all the memes and all the derision, because she's a dangerously subversive figure in many, many ways, not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of class and in terms of profession, and it's you know, in all kinds of ways. But and so while I agree that yes, there are these systems in place, I think there is also a part of us that tries to point out with in order to avoid the uh introspection that's also required. When did we collectively began to see you know having lots of gold stuff and material possessions as a great thing? You know, it I mean it used to be a source of shame to have ostentation. You know, it it used to be something that you did not flaunt because it was offensive. Um and then at some point we became a society that lusts after material things, and so we look at someone who has created material possessions that are shiny, not as someone who you know leaves has left a wake of bodies in his progress to that, not as someone of poor taste and poor judgment, not as a f a comic figure, which Trump is, but as a symbol of success. And I think that's where his power is, to be honest. I think his power is that, and I'm not absenting myself from responsibility for this, I think his power is that for the longest time one can look at Trump and think he's so ludicrous, he can't possibly be dangerous. And there is a huge power in that. And then the other part of it is that I think the the far right, the alt-right, the hard right, whatever you the populist right, whatever you want to call it, they are much better at telling stories. And again, we can't absent ourselves from this. You know, the you see it everywhere. When I did when I did the uh I did like a three episodes on Aesop, who who is really constructing a new way of telling stories, of stripping them down to three sentences. Some of his stories are three sentences long, you know. Um, and also he's a constructed person. He we don't think he actually existed. So you have this constructed person who Trump is, incidentally, um, he is very much a put-together TV persona, um telling people stories. And I think as opponents of that kind of politics, we take the bait all the time, and instead of addressing the moral the story is trying to impart, we try to address the facts and the figures. And we fall over all the time. I agree. When the Brexit bus went out and said 350 million to the EU, everyone on the remain side uh became occupied with whether that figure was right, because we get a rebate. You know, that's accounting, that's not storytelling, you know. People are not interested in it.

SPEAKER_01 52:41

I agree, but it's also a kind of good faith attempt to engage with the content instead of understanding that what actually is happening is a ploy. Quite, you know, and and one of the things that strikes me about Trump is he uses hypnotic language construction all the time. The guy is an arch manipulator, he's really good at it, he's less good at it now that he's you know cognitively challenged. He's starting to betray himself and making all sorts of Freudian slips, and people are starting to see that. But you know, the if if there's a ploy that's put out, it's a mistake to engage with the content because then you buy into the frame that's been given to you, and it's actually much more skillful to actually see the frame and exploit the frame from a much more ethical position, yeah, and actually meet the ploy with its own tactics, which I think the Green Party now that watching their social media campaigns, they are starting to actually break through in terms of very, very clear, very simple, very funny storytelling, and it is cutting through to a generation that relies on stories more than they rely on analysis.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's absolutely true. Um, you know, the sleepy Joe Biden, um, crooked Hillary Clinton. You know, the there is a note to attaching these things, and they become memorable and they become short and they become ciphers for something else. And and we keep not seeing the ciphers. Yeah. You know, when the whole Obama birther thing was going on, it wasn't about showing his birth certificate and proving where he was actually born. It was about the fact that he he's black. Yeah, you know, and and unless you're willing to say, you know, that's racism, that's all that is. If you start producing documents to get to try and justify where he was born, then you're only going into that, like you said, you're only accepting the validating the frame. You're validating the frame. And and we see it all the time, and it happens all the time, and we keep failing to pick it up. They're eating the pets, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, everyone went crazy and started producing statistics from the police authority of that area and animal charities to show that there is no reported, you know, animal abuse or animals being eaten or whatever. But that wasn't the story. That wasn't what Trump was saying. What Trump was saying was that there are dangerous people living in your street that do not share your customs and you ought to be quite afraid of them because they can take something that's dear to you. It was plainly a cipher about about children being snatched. You know, it wasn't about the dogs and the cats. It was a sort of blood libel, it was a modern blood libel. And and we have to get better at it. We just have to get better at it, and we have to do it in a way that's better than they do it.

SPEAKER_02 56:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:03

Because my concern with the Green Party is that yes, they see the method, they adopt it, they weaponize it really effectively. But what I need to know as a progressive is that there is a depth of analysis behind it that means if they get into power, they don't have a back of a fag packet plan.

SPEAKER_01 56:26

I see, I think they do have a serious analysis of the state. I hope so. I absolutely think they do, and I think that shows in a very simple way in the conversations on bold politics podcasts, the kind of conversations that they're having. And, you know, for a very long time, I personally have thought the Greens are often the grown-ups in the room when I actually look at the policy position that they've got.

SPEAKER_02 56:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:51

Um, I think a key though is going, you know, to come back to this some of the themes we've been talking about, to think about the kind of earth-emergent wisdom of the first woman, um, the kind of original Pandoran idea. I think what matters is can this become collective action on the ground? Can it become distributed intelligence? You know, we're, I think we're moving into a time where complexity is such that we have to move beyond an obsession with leaders and leadership and actually start recognizing that we as collectives, as communities, as friends, as neighbors, um, need to actually create the solutions on the ground where we are and build, build local trust and community. Because that's again another thing that I noticed, and I've I've thought that for a long time because I'm very interested in commoning and commons-based approaches and a kind of much more earthy way of engaging. But but again, I was struck by the cut-through on that with Hannah Spencer's campaign is against Matt Goodwin's campaign. Hannah was a kind of local emergent character in that neighborhood. She's a Mancunian, she lived there all her life, and I noticed how often she spoke about her local community, how she framed her local community in particular ways that invoked hope, that invoked loyalty, that invited a sense in the community of being seen.

SPEAKER_00 58:12

Solidarity.

SPEAKER_01 58:14

Sorry?

SPEAKER_00 58:14

Solidarity.

SPEAKER_01 58:16

Yeah, solidarity and being seen in a certain light. You know, that's what we do for each other, that's who we are. We show up, we've got each other's backs. I thought that was really because really good, not only because it's true of most communities. I mean, I maybe my social experience is limited, but I don't think so. But I go around Britain and I don't see a broken country. I see a country under pressure, I see a lack of um investment, I see the ravages of austerity, but I don't see a broken country in the sense that most Britons strike me as compassionate, kind people. If you ask them for help, they'll help you. They're friendly, they're warm, they're caring, obviously not everybody, but I just cannot buy the stereotypes of the British people being sold to us by people like Reform who claim to be patriotic, but are actually really just nationalistic. And there's a there's a world of difference between those two things.

SPEAKER_00 59:14

Yeah. Um, and there's something about a big world of difference between those two.

SPEAKER_01 59:18

Um there's some something about encounter, isn't there? Something about neighborliness, rubbing up againstness that that where a lot of those myths break down. Like, what's it like in real life? I mean, in some places it's not going to break down because they're desperate pockets of you know, predation and oppression and long-standing. What do you do if you're the fourth generation in a housing estate of people who've never had a job and have not had the opportunity to have a job? Like, what do you do in that situation? That's a very different situation from the average British or even average English to get really, you know, yeah, kind of located in this particular country experience. And I think it's very interesting talking about myths and thinking about contemporary mythic constructions. And I think one mythos that is being run at the moment is this idea that this country is irredeemably broken, that we've got nothing to offer, that that that we're a hopeless basket case, that we're one inch away from civil war, that we've been taken over by radical Islam. I mean, all these things are deeply unhelpful, and they do remind me, Alex, and they're lovely the way in which the in which the Pandoran myth was distorted over time to produce lensings that actually reflected agendas that came out of psychologies, yeah, were threatened by change.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:44

Yeah, but okay. So I'll play devil's advocates. Please do not not to um to to stimulate something because I don't disagree fundamentally with what you say, but I also think that there are first of all that there is also a section of the population that are agents of chaos that do for sure, um, you know, that are negative forces, and I and I think I would agree. Yeah, and I think if we they alone cannot bring chaos because there's not enough of them, but there are people uh whose aims differ, and I think sometimes in the progressive vernacular, this idea that if you just give people a chance, everyone, you know, no one is a racist, really. No, I don't buy that. People are kind and compassionate, you know. There are people.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:42

Yeah, I'm I'm with you. I'm with you. I wouldn't buy that either.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:45

And so we need to find a way, and this is where I think we fail again and again. We need to find a way to peel off the people from that side of politics who are peel-offable without alienating them, and isolate the people who are genuine negative forces in this country or in our community or in the world. Um, and sometimes I find that the you know the attempt to embrace a sort of left-wing populism, because by definition, it needs to be succinct and catchy and all of those things, it can create binaries that alienate people. It can it can look at something and say, you know, it can it can act as a kind of negative vetting of saying, you did this one thing that's a deal breaker for me, therefore you are now the equivalent to Nigel Farage. And making everything samey is not something that I think serves as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:57

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:58

I see it all the time in reaction to something I will say. I would say, you know, that I'm disappointed by X person because he used to be one of the more moderatories. And people will go, there's no such thing as a moderatory, they're all, you know, and and actually that's not true.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:15

No, it's not true. I agree, but don't you think this reflects psychological maturity? Because, you know, I think at a certain stage of my development when I was much younger, I'm sure I'd have been much more black and white about you know projective judgments and maybe oversimplifications. And I think it's really important to be nuanced and and to come back to I think a theme we touched on earlier, with this idea of being comfortable with complexity, you know, and and having the humility to suspend judgment, I think is sometimes really important.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:49

And we need a very different kind of way. I think we need a very different kind of way of thinking about the political, whereby I I love Donna Haraway's conception of staying with the trouble. You know, can we stay with the trouble well? Can we recognize that rubs and conflicts are actually an intrinsic part of growth? That we yeah, that we don't grow without some rub, you know, some stretch.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:13

Yeah, we don't, and and that's part of the Pandora myth. It is, of course, because the there is also a way to look at what comes out of that jar, of that pythos that became a box, as what shapes us, you know. It is difficulty, it is adversity, it is the you know, the the limits of mortality, it is the need for raising the next generation to be better than our own that define us as people. It's not the gold penthouses. And so there is a humanity to that myth. It's saying that it's not easy, you know, it's hard to make things better, but it is worth making things better. And I think the the problem, the difficulty we're having right now, I think there are two things actually. The first difficulty is that we're in an environment that encourages this kind of you know, uh binary uh black and white thinking, social media especially, yeah, but also the media environment in general just encourages you. If you have a position, you know, you might as well paint it in technicolor and make it unassailable and never back down from it and die on that hill. And I think that's a deeply unhealthy way to be, and very, very bad for our politics. And again, I think there is a difference between there's a difference between uh left and right, broadly speaking. I mean, I know left and right are quite plastic terms, but there is a difference in that I think the right are much better. At putting aside differences and saying, well, this is one important thing on which to agree. So let's work together towards that and then we'll see what happens. And that's why they tend to hold power, to gain power more easily and hold it longer, because they are better at that sort of compromise that power entails. And so that's one aspect of it, I think we have to get better at. But a second, I think, more deeper trend that kind of worries me is that with environmental decay, we are going to see mass migration. And it is the first time we will see mass migration in an age of nation states and borders because they're a very, very new invention. And so I think part of what moves the people who might be reform curious is that they understand this in their bones. At some very deep level, they know there's a difficulty coming. And so there is an element of denial, a little bit, that we're seeing in politics at the moment. Like, unless you're saying, and this is what I would like to see more from the Green Party, in a strange way, Caroline Lucas, you know, such a magnificent communicator, by being a small party that was primarily about environmental issues, she sort of brought a focus to it. By trying to become a broader church party that, you know, is getting ready for power and needs a much broader range of measures, I think the Green Party has slightly lost focus on the environmental issue, or at least can be perceived to have lost focus.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:00

I think it's a perception more than a reality, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:03

But and and the point is actually that unless we talk about the environment in a way that identifies the massive costs and difficulties that are coming, we can't talk honestly about the economy and about you know what the next transport uh policy might be, because there's a massive elephant in the room that we're not even tackling. We're not even we're not even acknowledging.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:34

Yeah, and it's all it's all entangled. There's no way, there's no ultimate way to separate, you know, what you're pointing to is is the material entanglement between, you know, the inescapable entanglement between the climate crisis or the new normal crisis in relation to climate and environmental and ecological pressures and breakdowns, and the economy and social organization and perceptions of reality. And, you know, I keep coming back to the need to like have, I feel that at the root of a lot of our problems is the fact that we don't have a sufficiently open, complexity-sensitive view of what reality actually is. If we could actually take a wider lens and look at the complexity of all this, um, and actually have some humility and and have a kind of tentacular way of knowing where we explore distributively and we and we have the inner capacity, the the psychological political maturity to go, okay, so that's not quite working, we need to adjust, without seeing that as some sort of policy failure, but actually building that in that there's a kind of epistemic humil humility at the heart of the way we do our politics. Unless we do that, we're going to be so rigid in the and so oversimplified and reductive in relation to these complexities that we spasm back into very simple us and them binary measures um and knee-jerk reactions, which is kind of what we're seeing.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:01

Yeah. And yeah, and so we we need to do both of that. We need to both be nuanced and much more broad in our view of the world and our interconnectedness, and also in a weird way narrower, in that we need to also have agency and understand that change is not about ticking a box once every four years, it just isn't.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:34

No, and that comes back to the point about community.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:37

And unless we change internally, the way we refuse to share, the way we like new things, the way we shop, the way we uh consume, the way we throw food away. You know, unless we do that work, then everything else becomes a sermon.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:01

I agree. And I think that comes back to this theme of community in a broad sense of being aware that you're part of an earth community, that having a kind of communitarianism, um, not reducing everything to the collective, because the individual's also important, but situatedness, the idea of you know being related, situated with neighborhoods and ecologies, and even at the level of our embodied life, our gut microbiome is affected by local, you know, biota and all that. So there's again, it's this sense of coming back to this earthy, you know, our critterly, creaturely continuity with Earth as a planet, ourselves as earthlings, not in some romanticized, eco-romantic kind of way, but as an actual empirical actuality that this is how it, this is how it is. It's generative, it's complex, it's real. Um, and how do we as human beings get with the program and grow up? Yeah, as you're implying, grow grow these sensibilities that enable us to live a good life together as human beings entangled with a more than human world.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:15

And yeah, I think we, you know, if there's one pattern that comes across in every single myth I've looked at so far, it's this notion of balance. And I think we're off balance right now as a species. I think we have lost our contact with the natural world, I think we have lost our contact with each other, I think we have lost our contact with our own body, we tend to elevate everything from the neck up because it's easy, you know, because it's a rich space in which to live. Um and the space in which we are in complete control of. And so technology is helping that along. It's helping us, you know, helping this notion that we can exist really without our physical bodies and without the physical world. And I think that is doing quite a lot of damage. I was chatting to a very new newly elected uh Labour MP in one of the episodes of Quiet Riot, and he was saying that going back to this idea of community spaces and you know shared stuff, and he was saying that the fact that our community spaces are disappearing is not um you know unrelated to the fact that we disagree more and we're becoming much more binary and much more intolerant of people who hold different views. Because, you know, if you're in Greece outside a cafe every day arguing about politics, or if you're down the pub arguing about politics, you become much more inured to the idea that you know you're going to disagree sometimes vehemently with people, but that doesn't mean you can't exist in the same pub and maybe play a game of pool and support the same football team, you know, or whatever. Um, but removing ourselves from our physical environment and removing really ourselves from our body and just inhabiting this and the virtual, it does divorce you from other people. And and so I think I I know that sounds overly simplistic, but it's also very hard. Um, and and I think the solution lies somewhere there in sort of becoming more physical beings again, yeah. In sort of stopping to deny the fact that we exist inside a sack of skin and bones and muscle that actually really likes and loves and needs contact with other people. And we saw that during the pandemic. You know, the online spaces were invaluable during the pandemic, but we also found that we need touch and we need to walk, and we need, you know, to see the outside world, and we need to breathe clean air. And it made it very, very clear to me that this path we're on that we might live inside a pod and only engage with people in our head and online, is not sufficient.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:51

It's not I would agree entirely. I mean, you're you're singing from my hymn sheet now, Alex.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:56

It's half a life, you know, it's not even half a life.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:59

Well, the it's it's it's not what we evolved to be. You know, it it it's uh you know, we we're more than human, like we've got multiplicities of cellular intelligences that evolved long before there was ever a human form. And those mitochondria in the cells, thousands of them, need light and dark, they need the movement of the planet, they need the outside light, they need so much more. And and you know, when you said we're not just in a bag of, I would say we are a cascade of intelligences that is naturally other-reaching. We the body naturally all the time reaches for relations beyond itself. That's just how bodies are, and they don't just reach for other human bodies, they reach for animal bodies, plants, as you said, you know, fresh air, you know, there's a whole circulatory commons of which we are a vibrant living node. And coming back to all of that and the fundamental wisdom embedded in that, I think, is a really important move to come back to our earthlingness, our belongingness in in our spaces, places, and and world. Um, and to recognize, yeah, there is complexity, there are rubs, there are conflicts, but these are part of what worldly life is, and it's not a source of fear. Um, that that you know, for example, you and I could find something about which we would disagree, I'm sure. And then there's hundreds of things, you know, and we could still be really good friends. It's it's it's not uh it's not a fatal blow. Um, but we're not separated by algorithmic bubbles, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:43

And and so I do wonder whether this you know how I don't know, sometimes people have the propensity to kind of argue and conflict uh if they know they're going to be separated, you know, like if you know I don't know your yeah, or if you know your or if you know your sister, you know, let's take people who do love each other. If you know your sister is going away to and you're not gonna see her for a year, that's often a time when siblings really argue because there's an attempt to say, I'm not gonna miss you when you're gone because I don't like you that much. And and I see that a little bit on social media, I think. That is part of what's going on. This notion of um sort of being negatively vetting everyone all the time and blocking people all the time and saying if oh, if we disagree on this one thing, then you're dead to me. I think it might be a psychological attempt to say, I'm okay in my solitude. Only we're not. You know, it's it's just coping. But so so what is the solution? I mean, I don't I don't know. It's not a problem that can be solved, but I do sometimes think like if there is so much around that is out of our control, and so little that is within our control, that if we start with what is within our control, like if we started with a genuine um concerted move, not to you know, not about politics or broadly society, but if we started with a concerted move to be kinder, or to go outside and plant some bulbs, or you do but do you know what I mean? Like if everyone did that, or if a significant portion of people did that, and and then you begin to raise that and say, what if a significant uh number of people took more of an interest in being on the board of their local school or running for the council or just uh donating a bit of time to a local charity or whatever. You know, that is kind of how it happens, it seems to me. And when it happens like that, it's unstoppable because it's not brittle, it's not some slogan. It is something that enough people have internalized that you can't stop it. Uh, and and and that is the part of things that makes me hopeful about where we are now, because yes, I do worry about what we're seeing in the United States, especially with trying to unwind women's rights and gay rights and and all of that, but I also see kind of a muscle memory in people that remember how to fight back from previous generations and previous times. So I see, so there is, for instance, a huge emergence of reclaiming like witchery by women, you know, and sort of forming into covens. And and and you see it in literature and film that kind of witches are cool again, you know, Agatha and Wondervision or whatever. There is a sense, and I wonder if that's just you know, a whole planet feeling that uh oh, I've seen this thing before, and they always go after us as witches. So let's preempt it, let's own it and make it powerful. And and sometimes I know this is intangible and difficult to point to, but it feels like there is a muscle memory there, fairly near the surface, about fighting back against the far right and fascism and misogyny and racism and homophobia that is quite recent, and it feels like it springs up easier than it does in a population that's never done it before. So that's what makes me optimistic about things that we we just need to flick a switch, but we know what to do, we know what happens and we know what needs to be done. We just need to bloody do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:31

So this is coming back to the Pandora myth because we've gone all over the place. Yes, is um again the double-edged nature of hope. And you know, it's I think it's good to end on a hopeful note because I I share your hope. I have a basic trust in our humanity, and I have a basic trust in the kind of parody resistance, um, that's springing up the kind of, I mean, even that reclaiming the witch as cool is subversive parody and it and it's and it's brilliant for whatever else it is. It's it's quite um tongue-in-cheek, but deadly serious.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:11

Um, and I love that. I love the idea of the kind of joker-like playful seriousness and the joyful resistance that you see, as well as the hard-nosed willingness in some cases to go and stand against guys in militarized uniforms and put yourselves on the front line. And I'm really inspired by ordinary people getting out on the streets in their hundreds of thousands to actually stand up and say, No, not in my name. I'm really, really inspired. And I think that's to me, that's one of the massive differences between what's happening now and what happened historically, for example, in Germany. Um, and I I agree, it's good. I think it's good to end on a note of hope because I think we are an evolutive species. We have enormous resources internally. And and part of the key, I think, is introducing people who've lost hope in their own capacities as influence in their own life to actually restore that, to restore agency to communities, to restore space and place to communities. As you said before, if there are no community meeting spaces, it's not surprising that people struggle. Well, it's not difficult to create ways in which people can come together and discover each other.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:24

So much so weirdly, yeah, and also weirdly, if you accept that interconnectedness, it kind of lowers the stakes because so if we end up obliterating ourselves, I mean, for the planet and the ecosystem as a whole, it would have been a blip that's the equivalent of 30 seconds, you know. Maybe cockroach archaeologists of the future will be watching this podcast that we're doing and laughing. But but you know, we have to also accept that side of things that we are a very small cog in a you know in a very big planetary machine and maybe a universal um even construct. And that kind of releases you to stop taking things back so seriously and resist in a way that's positive and playful and incredibly dangerous to the the men, and it is always men that take themselves very seriously and want to regress us to something else. Um you know, and to involve one other myth. Medusa, when I did Medusa, there was you know, there was a sense that in all the early depictions, Medusa is laughing. Is there anything more dangerous to those men in power than not taking them seriously? Would there be anything more dangerous to Trump than him regressing to the comic figure, the idiot that King Midas is, rather than you know, elevating him to uh another potential Hitler or whatever? You know, that is the most dangerous thing for people like that, to not take them seriously, to look at them and go, fine, you do your thing. Um, you know, but no thanks. It is his talent is in many ways to involve us in his cycle of news, in his cycle of madness. And actually, I don't know if I don't know if everyone switched off the news for 24 hours and went and did a bit of gardening. I don't know if that wouldn't be the best thing for the world and the worst possible thing for Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:06

Well, it would so it would certainly, yeah, it would certainly irritate.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:08

For a day no one was watching, no one cares.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:13

It would certainly irritate his narcissistic wound.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:16

Yeah, we're we're doing pruning today. You do what you want.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:22

Alex, it's been delightful to talk to you. I'm gonna stop the recording and come and say goodbye to you properly, but I want to thank you on behalf of the audience. We've gone everywhere, and I'm I suspect we're gonna have another conversation at some point to pick up some of those threads.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:39

Yeah, yeah, but they're the best kind of conversations.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:42

Anyway, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:44

You're welcome.