Sarah and Jeremy talk anti-civiliation, Derrick Jensen’s A Language Older Than Words, peak oil, Tar Sands, ocean floor mining, alien belly slugs, rock bottom Hell, the utility of shaming in civilization, mirror universe synchronization, the “Millennial Spectrum of Millenniosity,” and more than a little bit of Star Trek. End on another bitchin’ track by Glass Boy, sip a nice cold beverage, call it a day — you’re in bed by 10:00.
Intro music by Martin H Emes plus “Power Glove” by C. Scott (CC BY 3.0). Closing track is “UnMartin” by Glass Boy (CC BY-ND 3.0).
Transcript
Opening
Distorted Voices: Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern … all future generations are at stake in this battle … failure of crops … rivers and streams serve as sewers and dumping grounds … the impacts of global climate change are already being felt …
Jeremy: This isn’t the way it has to be. It doesn’t have to be the end. There’s still time. It’s Now or Never. Let’s try again.
Season 2, Episode 4: Oilent Green with Sarah.
We’re talking anti civiliation, peak oil, alien belly slugs, the utility of shaming in civilization, mirror universe synchronization, and more than a little bit of Star Trek.
Join us on Twitch for live episode recordings, Sundays at 6:30 Eastern Time, 3:30 Pacific. Call in during the show or leave a message anytime at our toll free number: 844-9161-NOW. (That’s 844-916-1669.)
An iceberg the size of Malta just broke off the Pine Island Glacier. Probably not entirely unrelated, temperatures of over 20 degrees celsius were recently recorded in the Antarctic for the first time.
Anyway.
Episode Content
Jeremy: I’m here with Sarah. Sarah actually turned me on to Derrick Jensen and, recommended A Language Older Than Words, which fucked me up, so thank you for that.
Sarah: That’s so funny because that was my favorite book for a really long time, and I definitely recommended it to several people.
Jeremy: You’re like, “you should read this. It’ll fuck you up.” I don’t think you said that, but it was implied.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, he is amazing, and he does mess people up, so…
Jeremy: How has that generally gone over, your Derrick Jensen recommendations?
Sarah: I don’t know that anyone else has actually taken me up on that. Maybe just like one or two friends. A Language Older Than Words I read in probably like 2000-2002 or so, right after it came out, so whichever year that was. That’s a book I bought three or four times and given copies of to people. And I still don’t think that many people have actually read it. Like I know one of my high school friends read like half of it and she was like, “this is too depressing.”
Jeremy: Anti civ thought, in general, is maybe one of the more fucking-uppy kind of things you can get into. It’s not just like, this is how you can think critically about the religion you’re a part of or the organization you’re a part of, it’s like this is how you can begin to critically examine and potentially feel emotionally pitted against the very foundation of the world that you inhabit.
Sarah: Yeah it’s bigger than a lot of other things.
Jeremy: Yeah. And it’s hard to undo once that knot in your brain has formed or loosened, I’m not quite sure which metaphor is appropriate. You’re just kind of like always thinking in those terms. Like agriculture made these roads. Agriculture made that building.
Sarah: Yeah. It may have prepared me to be a geology major. Because it’s like, yeah, it’s big, but it doesn’t really feel that big, ’cause I’m always like, oh, it’s only been like 12, 15,000 years or so. Not a big deal.
Jeremy: That’s cool. How long history gives you perspective that makes it easier to deal with.
Sarah: I mean, in geology undergrad, they try to beat that into you. They want you to have, you know, different timeframes memorized, like when the Cretaceous ended and when the Permian started and all that . Time is kind of basic to geology. And that’s really what geology gives to the other sciences is time. You know, it’s very important to how we think about the world.
I think about like human behavior quite a bit where we evolved and we were, you know, in one set of circumstances for millions and millions of years and like with agriculture and everything that’s happened since then, we haven’t had like evolutionary time to catch up with it. So to me it makes sense that we’re all like struggling. Every thing’s hard for us cause we didn’t evolve for this. We just haven’t had the time to really adapt to it. We’ve adapted to some things, but it’s just so minor compared to the amount of change has happened.
Jeremy: I feel like there’s a question in here around what it would look like to adapt to agriculture, which is sort of a strange line of thinking because agriculture may be part of this general trend that’s just going to destroy us…
Sarah: Yeah.
Jeremy: Or at least make it difficult for us to continue in this form. I’ve noticed you read a lot of science fiction . Is there an imagined future that you’re familiar with that looks at what human beings evolving to the environment they’ve created for themselves actually, it looks like?
Sarah: I would say not that I’ve read yet, but I have not read every single thing . Yeah, I’ve kind of, I’ve looked for that. I’ve been kind of disappointed that I haven’t really found it. There’s definitely science fiction out there that’s about humanity changing. But most of it, I’m kind of underwhelmed by so far, just, I haven’t found like that perfect book.
I think books that I have really liked, that have longer timeframes… I really like, Kim Stanley Robinson and some of his books have longer future histories. One of his central theses is that humans aren’t going to change that much and that we need to be aware of what we are and not try to change too much too quickly, which I might just be attracted to his writing cause I agree with him
Jeremy: So you think there’s some kind of like innate human quality that we should preserve, like we should resist self-transformation, the transhumanism kind of thing?
Sarah: Yeah. Transhumanism bothers me. That’s an interesting question because I think we shouldn’t make too much change until we understand ourselves better, and I think it’s dangerous to be making tiny changes. If you have a poor understanding of what you are. I don’t really have like a deep philosophical reasoning for that. That’s just kind of my observation.
Jeremy: Well, I mean, it makes sense to be sort of conservative about making changes to things you don’t understand that can easily result in things breaking in terrible ways.
I mean, transhumanism is sort of scary to me. The more able we are to mess around with biology and genetics, just the more opportunity there is for things to go wrong. Things are more likely to go wrong than they are to accidentally go right. I’m not like the world’s biggest anti GMO person, but when we’re talking about changing ourselves genetically, especially if we’re still living in the kind of economy that we’re living in right now… Like if capitalism is dictating how we change ourselves, are we just going to become more productive worker bees? That’s terrifying.
Sarah: Yeah, and it’s like, why would we even want that? Like it just, it sounds so awful.
Yeah. I’m not super anti GMOs but I’m very anti GMOs owned by corporations. That is super disturbing to me and really upsetting. Like I feel like, well. Genetically modifying food is something that we’ve already been doing for thousands of years, like breeding is just a slow, inefficient, and kind of dumb way of making corn better corn to eat. So like modifying corn or, you know, whichever food crops in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just why does one corporation, or a very small handful of corporations, get to own and that knowledge? Like shouldn’t it be knowledge for everybody? That to me is really disturbing and it’s really weird that, there’s a lot of people were super anti GMO, but that’s barely part of the conversation.
To me it’s not necessarily that it’s good or bad altered genes because that is something that humans do. We breed animals. We breed plants for our liking. I think it’s bad for a very small number of people, very small number of corporations, to own so much of that genetic knowledge. You know? And it’s just, it’s such a huge change too. And like, there’s still a little discussion of it. This isn’t something that was possible even like 20 or 30 years ago. It’s so recent and so huge and everyone’s just totally fine with it. It’s really weird to me.
Jeremy: Yeah. It is kind of staggering how quickly things become normal. Like just in my lifetime, in the past 30 years, that’s become normal. Or I mean, in the past four years, the things politically that have been happening have become normal. Like what kind of fucked up trajectory are we on right now?
Sarah: No, totally. Well, I mean, when we were in college, the human genome wasn’t sequenced, and now not only is that sequenced, but several other animals are, and like several different individuals. Like it took, what, 10 years for the first one to be sequence? Now it can happen in less than a week. that might even be super old data too. Know that might be five years old knowledge.
Jeremy: But it sounds normal to me. And like genes are being patented, right? there’s intellectual property genes, which is insane that information that exists out there that has been produced by evolution is being claimed as intellectual property by corporations because they can, because we’re not stopping them. It’s fucking nuts.
Sarah: It’s crazy. Well, because a very small number of people understand what’s happening and more people who understand what’s happening are being paid to keep the knowledge secluded and profitable. I don’t think there’s many people who actually understand what’s going on who aren’t somehow financially involved. It’s very dystopian.
Jeremy: The knowledge is sort of protected against, and, not even getting into conspiracy thinking, it’s hard to learn intellectually. It’s hard to process emotionally. It’s hard to be in a place in your life where you want to perceive things that are really fucked up, that are really disturbing, that are really dystopian. It’s much easier to just be like, look, I’ve got to put food on the table. I’ve got to take care of my kids, or my dogs or cats if you’re further on the millennial spectrum of millenniocity … or plants. I don’t know where you’re at. But to be like, no, I got to think about this really complex fucked up stuff that’s happening around me that I don’t have any direct way of dealing with. The only options I really have are like revolution or a degree of civil disobedience that we just don’t currently have in this country or something like that. Like the options are all extremely daunting. So of course people aren’t going to want to learn this stuff. It’s going to be kind of selected against.
Sarah: Yeah. I would say what me and most of my friends who talk about this stuff do is just get more and more depressed. We don’t show up to protests and stuff. We’re just like, yeah, it’s horrible.
Jeremy: Well. Yeah, I mean, which also seems like a healthy response because if you look at the kind of protests that are happening… Kristine and I went to that DC march with all the pink hats and shit. Trump’s still in office. He committed impeachable offenses and he’s still fucking in office. We know he paid a porn star to fuck him and misappropriated campaign finances. We know he’s a rapist. He’s still in office. Everybody marched and it was a huge spectacle and it didn’t do shit. So that’s depressing.
Sarah: It is so crazy. Yeah. It was completely unthinkable just like three years ago. It’s really hard to talk about current politics without just getting so angry and so flustered and just like…
Jeremy: I mean, it is like, it’s pretty obscene. Every time I see a tweet from him that just surfaces, like I don’t follow him on Twitter, but I find out about tweets that he’s twoted, that he’s twittered, and I’m just like, God damn it. I just don’t want to know this. Like I can learn about anti civ thought, I can learn about what agriculture is doing and I can learn about the dangers of capitalism stuff. But for Christ’s sakes, don’t show me another one of these Trump tweets. I have my limits.
Sarah: Yeah. I don’t follow him either, and I still see stuff, you know, people retweet or like, or whatever. Yeah. I guess the anti civ Twitter is not nearly as active.
Jeremy: I don’t know if a ton of them are on Twitter. There’s that comic that’s, like making fun of that “or are you tweeting like anarchist stuff from your iPhone” kind of thing that, “and yet you live in a society” kind of thing. So there’s like, there’s nothing contradictory about tweeting from your iPhone if you are an anti save advocate or something like that because this is the world we live in. And yet it seems like once you get into that, maybe you’re just less emotionally motivated to want to tweet.
I mean, when you like get into Marxist thought or anticapitalist thought in general, you’re like, “yeah, let’s dismantle capitalism.” Let’s like, you know, let’s do a proletarian revolution or something like that. But once you start questioning the foundations of civilization itself, it’s like, what the fuck are you going to do? You’re not going to form an anti civ party like it’s just so, it just seems more impotent to just like screech about it on Twitter, you know?
Sarah: Yeah. Well, I probably don’t have the energy to make any kind of political party, but I guess part part of it for me of being like anti civ — I don’t know if I would refer to myself as anti civ — but like of like reading that kind of stuff and thinking about that kind of stuff, is to learn more about what humans should be or like how we should live. ‘Cause if we evolved in a certain way, then we’re going to be the happiest if we keep that in mind. Because like everybody I know is super unhappy and super stressed out all the time and it doesn’t really make sense.
Why do we have this whole system, this whole way of doing things that’s just destroying the planet, making everybody unhappy, stressing everybody out… What’s the point?
I mean, we’re here because we made a series of decisions, you know, obviously it’s a huge project, like learn the entire history of the entire human race and like, no human can actually do that. But like, you can learn the broad outlines of it. You can roughly know which decisions were made and when. Or if it was an accident too. ‘Cause, I guess, with civilization, why did we start agriculture? Was that a decision or was that an accident? There’s a huge debate there between whether it was environmentally forced or if humans made that decision. And I guess I haven’t really made a decision on that one or that’s what I’ve kind of gone back and forth on depending what I read most recently.
Jeremy: Something you said about being hesitant to call yourself anti civ… I’m kind of in that same zone because I think you get a lot of use out of the anti civ critiques, and yet I feel like it’s entirely too regressive to just say well, let’s just smash civilization and go back to living in huts and being a hunter-gatherer nomads or something like that. Because inevitably the process is just going to start again. One environmental catastrophe and people are going to think, well, when the times are tough, we have to do something about it. Let’s form a state, let’s start the patriarchy again. That worked out last time for building civilization. Let’s agriculture.
The genie’s out of the bottle. It’s always going to be an option now. I don’t think we’re going to get to a point unless we just completely, like, even if we like bomb ourselves back to the stone age, we’re going to be like, we were wizards a couple of generations ago, like we figured out like magic boxes and there’s a way to do that and I think it has something to do with killing other people and taking their land and growing plants on it. You know what I mean? We can’t like erase that from our memory. So I’m more curious about how do we synthesize that knowledge? Like how do we take the thesis of civilization and technology and the antithesis of how we’ve been fucked by technology and Ted Kaczynski and anti civ thought and then, you know, synthesize that into something new, some new way forward that takes both of those points of view, I guess. Do something constructive.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah. You’re right. The genius definitely out of the bottle on that one, but… I think one of our big projects like as a people is to figure out, is it possible for humans to be sane within the context of civilization? And so far, it seems like no, it seems like we’re not going to be totes sane if we’re very civilized.
However, now there’s like 8 billion of us, you know, when we were pre agriculture, there was like half a million of us at any time. Population was so much lower. So then the most humane thing to do now is to try to go forward, to try to take the good from each thing if possible. And obviously that’s a huge project and not even that many people are thinking about it, but I just think like the world’s gonna change so much in the next couple of decades that we should take for granted that the world’s going to change and try to change it in a good way if possible, and not just assume it’s going to always get worse, even though, I don’t know, maybe I’m just being very utopian, but I am very utopian pretty often. It seems like everything’s gotten worse within our lifetimes, but, I dunno, I just don’t see how you can really go on and just assume that things are just going to continue to get worse.
I guess that’s why, if you had kind of asked why I read so much science fiction, that’s part of it is like all of these questions are science fictional questions, right? Like, like David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson have addressed more futures than the number of futures we’re actually going to see.
Jeremy: I mean. It’s almost like every possible future in a way plays out on some scale. Like I remember… Like early internet, there were arguments about whether it was going to be like, “are we headed for a Brave New World or a 1984 kind of thing?” And there were like early memes that were like, “it’s Brave New World, motherfuckers! It turns out it’s Brave New World.” But in a way it’s kind of both like the truths, the possibilities that 1984 and Brave New World were pointing out were there and developed. You can look at what’s happening now and see a fruition of what 1984 warned against and what Brave New World warned against.
And even techno optimistic futures. I don’t know about Star Trek. It’s really hard to, well, okay, no, I got to commit to this. Like we have a gay man running for president right now, and he’s polling reasonably well and I don’t want him to be president and I disagree with him, obviously not because he’s gay, but we’ve accepted that on a wide enough scale that that can happen. And that was pretty Star Trek, like, even within… Like when I was a kid everyone was calling everything bad “gay.” I mean, not outing, like not everyone obviously, but it was so wide scale to just be like, “that’s gay,” “you’re gay.” You know what I mean? It was like unfathomable for there to be an open and out mayor running for president unapologetically. So that like “brotherhood of man” slash sisterhood slash non-binary hood of human beings thing… That’s kind of happening.
I mean, we don’t have like warp drive and deflector shields and teleporters and shit like that, but we have some cool stuff.
So all of this science fiction looking at the possibilities of what could happen is pretty practical when you’re thinking about how all of that may or may not come to fruition in one way or another. And it makes sense to put your energy and to put your juices into the tendencies or the potentialities is that you want to nourish, that you want to see more of. In the garden of the future, you’re kind of picking what plants you want to water with your attention and energy. That totally makes sense. That’s like the beauty of science fiction.
Sarah: That’s a really nice way to put it, which plants you fertilize, which plants you put where they need to actually go.
Well, in the Star Trek future, do you remember the episodes of Deep Space Nine where they traveled back to 2020 or 2030 and there’s riots in LA?
Jeremy: I remember the Voyager back to 1996 episode. I don’t remember the DS9 back to 2020 riots.
Sarah: Yeah. There’s a DS9 episode, it’s in the 2020s or 2030s, and it’s like Sisko and maybe Chief O’Brian, accidentally step into history and accidentally take the place of like a famous dude who started a riot in like a slum in LA. but He showed up and he’s like, “Oh no, there’s supposed to be a big riot.” And the slums were just really horrible. And it was like a 1990s five commentary on homelessness, which was still relevant like last year when I watched it. But like, in the Star Trek future, a lot of bad stuff is supposed to happen now or soon. Like, they reference this century as being horrible. So like in a way it’s like, I mean, I know Star Trek is fiction, but like in a way I’m like, it’s fine. There’s going to be riots in LA. The homeless riots will start any day now. It’s right on schedule, whatever.
Jeremy: I mean, doesn’t it culminate in a nuclear Holocaust like before we get warp drive? I mean, there was supposed to be a Eugenics War in 1996 . That happen… That we know of. I don’t know. I don’t want that. I don’t want them to be right about everything. The lack of Eugenics War gives me hope that they may not have been correct about the nuclear Holocaust timeline.
Was there, there must’ve been a lot of time travel in DS9. Didn’t Quark and Nog accidentally go back in time and…
Sarah: That was like one of the best episodes. Yeah. They accidentally went to like 1940 , and it was at an American airbase.
Jeremy: Oh, Area 51?
Sarah: Area 51! Yeah. Okay. So it’s like Quark and his brother Nog accidentally get time traveled back to like 1940 Area 51 and then the humans assume that they’re Martians and then hilarity ensues.
Yeah. It’s amazing.
Jeremy: They also went back to original Star Trek Trouble with Tribbles episode. That’s three separate time travel plots. Are there more?
Sarah: I would say that’s all that I remember right now. There’s also some dream episodes, which I remember you talked about dream episodes on one of your previous episodes of this show, but the dream episode where Sisko wakes up in the 1940s? They do that twice. But it turns out it’s an alien messing with him.
Jeremy: I’m remembering it as you’re saying it. I remember everyone was like, “what is this shit?” But Jadzia, or her 1940s counterpart was just like, “I’m into it. I got a slug man, living in my belly? Sign me up. That’s cool.”
Sarah: Yeah! That was so amazing.
Jeremy: The symbiont… The Dax thing, was a belly slug or am I combining that with Stargate?
Sarah: That was a belly slug.
Jeremy: They’re both belly slugs.
Sarah: Yes, but that alien species was introduced in The Next Generation where this alien falls in love with Crusher and then the host dies and then they put the symbionte in another creature. It was a really cool alien and I’m really glad that they fleshed it out for Deep Space Nine.
Also with the new Picard show, I’m super excited, that would be one of the characters that theoretically would still be alive in Picard world. She hasn’t shown up yet, but it’s possible, right?
Jeremy: Yeah, that’d be rad . We can just spend like another half hour talking about characters that we want to show up in Picard.
Sarah: Oh my gosh, yes.
Jeremy: Oh, someone told me that Guinan is supposed to come back in season two.
Sarah: Nice.
Jeremy: Yeah. I’m into that.
Sarah: Yeah. Well and her character’s supposed to be super old, so…
Jeremy: Yeah, it didn’t she chill with Mark Twain or some shit? She’s hella old.
We just started watching the original series from the beginning. It’s pretty charming, but some of it is just really bad. There was an episode where they spent 10 minutes being towed by another starship and it was just like a drama about them trying to stop being towed. They were trying to break out of the tractor beam tow. It did last for quite some time.
Sarah: Yeah. The pacing has really changed in media. Have you seen the first Star Trek movie where it’s just like them leaving space dock for like an hour?
Jeremy: I remember being extremely bored by it as a kid so I’m not really looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to Voyage Home, where they go back in time to save the whales, but like Star Trek: The Motion Picture…
Sarah: Star Trek IV is the best Star Trek. And it’s also the best one to introduce people to Star Trek ’cause it has all been good elements of Star Trek and some of the weird elements of Star Trek.
Jeremy: But it’s like more grounded cause it’s happening in, well, what was contemporary…
Sarah: Yeah. Scotty like yelled at a computer, like “Computer?”
Jeremy: Someone hands him a mouse and he’s like, “Hello computer?” He typed fast and that’s very impressive. “Whoa. In the future, they type so fast.” Why would he type that fast? He talks to a computer. I don’t get it.
Sarah: It’s so true. Yeah. Their computers don’t even have keys anymore. Data types really fast. No one else even types in Star Trek ever.
Jeremy: Right. You only see people type when it’s Data, so they can show off how fast he types, but then I guess that’s normal in the future…?
Sarah: It’s super cheap special effects where like we filmed Data typing, and then we sped it up, played it at 1.5 speed.
Jeremy: That’s true. Budget friendly.
Oh yeah. Lost Connections. I saw that you had read Lost Connections, which I just finished.
Sarah: Yeah. I liked that book. He spent a lot of time talking about how the drug companies, they have a vested interest in making people think that the drugs were when there’s not really good evidence for it.
If depression was vanishingly rare 500 years ago, and essentially ubiquitous now … our body chemistry hasn’t changed that much in the last couple of hundred years. So why would we think it’s just a brain chemistry thing?
I liked that book a lot. And his prescriptions for being healthier and being saner is like, get more in touch with nature or be part of a group. I don’t know if he puts it this way, but I’ve seen it elsewhere where, peak oil people will say to save the world, join a choir. Join a group that meets regularly for something fun so you’ll continue to show up. It might not be choir for us, but whatever.
I really liked the section that’s about the people with the bad apartment situation in Berlin and how by banding together, they were able to make their housing more stable and they were all just very atomized before they all realized they have a common problem and then that story was successful. Those guys were able to improve their housing situation.
I heard that guy, Johann Hari, I heard him on a different podcast that he was interviewed for This is Hell a couple of months ago. I really liked that interview and definitely liked that book, but maybe again, because I agree with his thesis.
Jeremy: It’s amazing how cathartic or empowering it is, though, to just encounter some writer who’s saying eloquently something that you feel . Almost like it’s giving you permission to feel that way. Even when it’s something like, man, work sure is shitty. It sure does feel shitty to be at work. But all the messaging around you is like, “well, you have to do it and you’re a good person if you can stomach more of it and put more effort and time into it,” and then just to encounter thinkers who were like “Nah, it’s shitty. It’s shitty and you’re getting screwed over and it’s designed to be shitty in certain ways and it sucks and it shouldn’t exist in this form.” It’s really empowering.
Sarah: Yeah. It really is. That’s interesting ’cause that is, a lot, for me, what reading is, is finding people that say what I’m thinking in a more researched way or, I mean part of it is more eloquently, but part of it’s just more thorough because… I used to get super frustrated with people for not caring more about ecocide and the species extinction and everything. And I think people are much more aware of those topics and they want to let on. I think it’s just too depressing for most people to articulate it. Even with the changing baselines thing, I think people know that shit’s a lot worse now than it used to be. ‘Cause it’s not just the economics. I have that economics discussion all the time. It just comes up so organically ’cause so many people our age want houses and can’t get houses. Everybody is in that situation of working really hard, but not really making any money. That’s so common. But I think people understand that there’s problems on other levels as well.
Jeremy: Yeah. No, I think you’re right. I think people generally are aware, unless you’re in deep, deep denial, people I think generally are aware that things aren’t really going great, that maybe we’re doing some pretty janky shit that’s affecting the environment and extinction is kind of normalized.
I don’t know if everyone generally understands the extent of it, all the way to this societal collapse threat situation, but I think that’s just because they haven’t wanted to explore that too much. I don’t think it would surprise anyone really, I mean, generally speaking, that things are as dire as they are. It’s just, it’s incentivized not to explore that. So I think there’s something powerful about just talking about that. As hard as it is, somehow bringing it up into consciousness and then somehow sweetening it enough, “spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” kind of situation.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jeremy: It’s kind of, I don’t know, forcing you to look at it a little bit, but in a little package where it’s not too scary or too depression-spiral inducing.
I’m definitely of the opinion we all need to be thinking about this a lot more because we have to do some shit about it. Like instead of just feeling like, ” Well, we’ll just be depressed about it so what’s the point of that?” It’s like, no, I’m sure we can come up with something. We’re probably going to be headed for a kind of shitty future, but we can maybe still avoid the shittiest possible future. The spectrum runs to extremely fucking shitty and we could still impact where we fall in that.
Sarah: That is very true. That’s a very long spectrum long continuum.
You have a cat right?
Jeremy: I have two cats. Cats are cool. I can’t afford a dog… Or a child.
Sarah: We’re in the same situation. We love our cat, but I wish I could have more pets. I think one of the weird ironies my life is, I had no idea how spoiled I was as a teenager where like my dad lived in the suburbs and didn’t pay attention to what we did at all and had a whole bunch of pets. Like he had a golden retriever and I had a bunch of cats and my sister had ferrets and rabbits and stuff, and just like, it was like a total zoo. But it was so fun. I just assumed like, Oh yeah, you get a job, you can get a house in the suburbs and get a bunch of pets and it’ll be a total zoo. And like now it’s like 20 years later and I’m like, I have one pet because that’s what we can afford. You know? And it’s just, I miss it. I mean, granted, my house smell bad when I was like 14 so there is a limit that sane people don’t cross. Yeah. I wish I could have more pets
Jeremy: But I mean like when you were 14 I think you’re ashamed of less. Were you ashamed of your house smelling like animals when you brought people over?
Sarah: No. Yeah, this is fine. This is how it is. Yeah. We were oblivious.
Jeremy: I feel like a lot of behavior of my parents that I didn’t understand as a child, like looking back, it was like, Oh, that’s shame. I didn’t get it at the time. But like, that explains so much. Now I’m 30 there’s so much to be ashamed of.
I was thinking about shame as some like fundamental force of civilization. I don’t know if there’s much of an intersection between psychoanalytic traditions and anti civ, but I think that might be like a fertile ground to explore. So I’m thinking about like, there’s the Adam and Eve myth of basically discovering shame is how I read it. You’re like finding self reflection and then you’re realizing that, “Oh no, there’s something about me I should hide that I’m now aware of. Like now I have this ego, I have this symbol of myself. I have this image of who I am, and now I have to cover this part up.” So now you have something that you’re like, in Buddhist terms, you have like, you’re attached to this part, you want to show this part, you’re repulsed by this part or aversed to this part, so you want to cover it up and that seems to be very fundamental, like the more civilized, like the more urban environments, the more people, the more shame there is, the more you have to be super conscious of like, don’t do this, don’t do that, like speak in this kind of code with these groups of people, watch where you’re stepping, you know, follow this line or that line… I don’t think you can get a city unless you have ramping up shame in a population, and you don’t get that unless you have people enforcing social mores through shaming.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t say this is something I’ve thought about a lot, but it’s definitely like, people who are ashamed are easier to control, and you have to control the population to get them to stay in the cities. And so, yeah, I mean, that’s kind of a big function of the way we’re taught religion and kind of like the bigger mainstream religions, how they their people. ‘Cause like people who are not easily shamed, they have an easier time just doing whatever, you know, not being coerced as much.
I don’t know, how far down the peak oil narrative rabbit hole have you gone?
Jeremy: I don’t know how to measure that. How far is there? I saw that Michael Ruppert documentary movie on Netflix.
Sarah: Okay, that’s pretty far down.
Jeremy: A few years ago, I thought peak oil was going to be the thing. And I definitely still think it’s part of it considering our whole system of agriculture is also based on fossil fuels. But like… that far I, guess.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. For a couple of years I really thought that we were like really close to a Seneca cliff and that life was going to change, like simplify in a horrible way relatively quickly. And I guess I’d been kind of surprised that it kind of hasn’t happened as much yet or so far as I would expect. Partially that’s the huge amount of capital that got poured into shale over the past decade.
I think peak oil’s not wrong. I think it’s just kind of had the wrong timeframe. Oil is still very important to how we run our economy and our civilization. They’re still not like more oil out there. We just have more willingness as a civilization to go for shale oil and the tar sands oil than like anyone would have predicted 20 years ago. I mean, the tar sands especially, they’re so ecologically devastating that it’s unbelievable that we would choose to do that when we know the cost is so high.
I read a really good book several years ago by a guy named Andrew Nikiforuk. I think it’s just called Tar Sands. But it was like a Canadian journalist explored the tar sands. And like it’s a huge amount of energy, but it’s also just a huge amount of pollution and like carbon dioxide pollution, climate change causing pollution. it’s a really high cost for what it is and like we’re going for it. Like Canada is like, yeah. Like dig it up, sell it all.
Jeremy: Yeah. And it’s become normal to us.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah. The thing is, is like geologists knew about those deposits for like 80 years at least it’s not like the stuff was just discovered. It was just, it became economically viable recently. And the same thing with like the shale natural gas, like the Marcellus Formation in Pennsylvania and Ohio and West Virginia… The Marcellus was known about since the 1800s, but it was just not economically viable until like 2010 or whatever. So… Yeah. As an economy, we’re willing to like take much bigger risks than like anybody would have thought.
Jeremy: Is there an even scarier, more terrifying and destructive potential source of like the last bits of oil that we could suck out of the planet that we’re not at yet? Is there like a little bit of oil that only exists in baby monkeys? So we have to start farming those, grinding them down into baby monkey oil or something like that? Like what, what’s maybe on the horizon in terms of possible futures that could come to fruition?
Sarah: Uh, yes. Soylent Green.
Jeremy: Oilent Green.
Sarah: I don’t know. I mean, like methane clathrates, like the frozen methane on the ocean. There’s been discussion about that, of like harvesting that, and there are companies that are like, “Oh yeah, let’s go get it. Let’s burn it all up.”
Jeremy: Oh shit.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like, if those guys get investors… Well, I mean like 20 years ago nobody thought that most of those, you know, like Anadarko and whoever else, the big companies that are in the Marcellus 20 years ago, nobody thought that they would get the kind of funding they got. Or that we’d be in the Permian again. Like, right, like we’ve been in the Permian this whole time, but like the current boom there is like, it’s a natural gas boom on top of the oil boom that was already always happening .
It’s just crazy. Just like the scale of it.
Hmm. I’m going to think about that question of what’s the next energy boom, that’s going to destroy everything. I feel like the tar sands should really be the worst, but I think ocean floor mining is also pretty bad, and that’s starting to happen now.
Jeremy: Oh, great. There we go. Ocean floor mining. That sounds awesome.
What was that line from Milton? Lucifer is like monologuing and he’s like, I myself am hell… Basically no matter which rock bottom hell I find myself in, a fresh new hell opens to swallow… I don’t remember the line perfectly, but the sentiment really stuck with me.
That’s that’s where we’re at. Tar sands, that’s the end. Oh no. Ocean floor mining.
Sarah: This is one of those things where it’s just like we understand so little about the ocean, it just seems like a really bad idea to be like, Oh yeah, let’s go dredge the shit out of it and then sieve out the metals. And then the actual smelting process will be exactly the same as it is on shore. Yeah, it’s better than it was a couple hundred years ago, but you’re still talking make giant piles of metal and run acids through it to break the metal off the slag. It can be very destructive. I really wish we had somebody in our society with the authority to say no, who also had the sense to say no. You know, like, we just, we keep doing stuff just ’cause like, Oh, it’s economically feasible now.
We are in the worst possible timeline. The darkest timeline.
Jeremy: The darkest timeline. I’ve been working on my goatee. I think this is as good as it’s gonna get.
Sarah: It looks good.
Jeremy: Thank you. I’m ready.
Sarah: You are Evil Jeremy.
Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, it’s easier to shave it off than it is to grow it, you know what I mean? So I have options. I at least want to be able to pass for Jeremy, like just in case shit goes down.
Sarah: Yeah. If you’re transported into the Mirrorverse, you want to be able to do like a quick makeup change and like, elbow your extra off screen off screen.
Oh man. We should talk about the Mirrorverse in Star Trek. That’s another thing Deep Space Nine really overdid, but it was so wonderful that it’s okay.
Jeremy: Well, I’ve heard fan theories that we are actually the mirror universe like that, that our timeline that we’re living in becomes the space fascism of mirror universe. And that kind of makes sense. If we do ever cross paths with non-mirror universe… I mean, when you’re the mirror universe, the other universe is just called the mirror universe, right? I don’t know how to differentiate them, but the good timeline, I would definitely get rid of good Jeremy and take his spot and just chill out there without even questioning it. Just like, no, this is mine now.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And the mirror universe is such an interesting construct too because you essentially end up having the same relationships play out generation after generation, but they only make sense in one universe and they don’t make any sense in the other universe. We see it decades apart in Star Trek where the same people have been born and died. Like everybody exists in both.
Jeremy: Yeah. There’s amazing coincidences between the universes
Sarah: Everything that can impact the future is the same and everything that doesn’t impact the future is different. It just cracked me up where it’s like, there’s gotta be situations where you just meet somebody and have a kid with them and then you’re like, wait, who was that ? I don’t know. They just appeared!
Jeremy: Yeah. There’s some like cosmic force that’s just trying to keep them synchronized.
Closing
Thank you so much for listening. Big thanks to our guest, Sarah.
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Intro music by Martin H Emes plus “Power Glove” by C. Scott (CC BY 3.0). Closing track is “UnMartin” by Glass Boy (CC BY-ND 3.0). Links to everything, as well as a full episode transcript, available on the website, itsnoworneverpodcast.com.
Until next time, get fucked up on gnarly books, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, take care of your cats and plants, type fast and take chances… Try not to go back in time too much. Maybe let’s try not to melt literally everything, you know?