Guest: Kim, a mod at the Collapse Support subreddit and Discord server, longtime doomer, collapsenik, ex-lawyer, ex-clergy, and “non-breeding housewife”
New Thought meets collapse. Doing good on behalf of hypothetical futures. The origin of water. We’re all extraterrestrials. Dystopian shopping malls. Helping the normies. The Coronavirus and predictions of doom. Living in captivity. XR Australia is fighting an extremely uphill battle. Zoomers are smart. The metaphysics of humor. Good Grief Network. The fires (and waters) of Australia.
Music this episode by Martin H Emes and “Soft Rain” by Glass Boy (CC BY-ND 3.0).
Transcript
Opening
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 5: Secret Agents For the Future
This episode I’m very excited to be talking to Kim, a mod at the Collapse Support subreddit as well as the Collapse Support Discord. We’re gonna talk about all sorts of fun stuff. Let’s just jump into it. I think you’re really gonna dig it.
The Main Bit
Jeremy: I’m here with Kim, longtime doomer and collapsenik and ex-lawyer and non-breeding housewife. How much of it did I get of your preferred introduction?
Kim: You got everything except I’m also an ex-clergyperson.
Jeremy: Ex-clergy! How could I forget that? Can you tell me about that?
Kim: Sure. I basically out-thought my understanding of Christianity as a child, and so spent a couple of decades without any kind of spiritual home. Then I discovered the New Thought movement in the middle of the nineties and studied it quite a bit.
I joke that it’s like the Church of Oprah, because if you ever saw the spiritual types Oprah would have, it was the kind of people that were in my former church.
But anyways, I went through doing what it takes to become a clergy person. And then after I discovered collapse and our vulnerabilities I realized that my religious movement was failing to address reality. So I left that church.
Jeremy: That’s really fascinating. The whole New Thought thing, that we can think our way… or that there’s some sort of mental technology we can apply in order to get what we want out of life…? I mean, I’m trying to paint it in broad strokes ’cause there’s a lot to it and there’s a lot of nuance, but I don’t want to do a disservice to it.
Kim: No, I think you actually said it properly. It is a perspective that the thoughts of one human being could somehow marshal the atoms and forces of the cosmos to create a physical reality for that person. And I have no trouble saying today that that is flat out false.
Jeremy: Is it because of the collapse thing that you’re comfortable calling it false?
Kim: Collapse and what I’ve learned from collapse. Number one, because we are part of a unified whole, if you call it the cosmos, if you call it planet Earth, if you call it human beings, we are a part of everything else. So just the notion that my little prayer for my little red Corvette could come into existence without considering 8 billion other prayers, to me, that was enough to prove it as a false teaching.
But through collapse, what I’ve come to see is that the subtle large-scale commonalities do make a difference, but nobody seems to be talking about the collective consciousness. And that would be where my spiritual interest would go.
Jeremy: Interesting. So it’s like resisting the atomizing individualistic tendencies of New Thought as such, and more embracing that we’re all connected, interdependent kind of thing.
Kim: Right. Ultimately, one of the things that I have done is come back to my place of my personal cosmology or my personal metaphysics. And I’ve had to make a personal cosmology, so that I can cope with what I see happening every day.
I do believe that there are invisible forces, whether they’re laws of physics, laws of metaphysics, but things that we don’t understand very well, and we can’t really observe with our senses that somehow impact our world. And I call it the Mystery. And I feel my connection with that mystery. I feel that I’m participating.
My consciousness, my ability to communicate, my heart and soul as it understands what is in my consciousness, all of that I have tried to devote to paying attention on behalf of the good of all life everywhere. And I know that sounds very amorphous. But that’s where I am with it today.
Jeremy: I dig that. Paying attention on behalf of all life everywhere.
Kim: I joke that I am a cub reporter for the Akashic record. Things from the 90s are like ancient history now, but there’s an old guy named Ervin Lazlo who wrote a lot of books, and one of them is called The Akashic Experience, and he basically just posits that there is a record somewhere in the cosmos of everything that’s ever happened, every thought that’s been thought, every word that’s been uttered.
Jeremy: I mean, it’s a nice idea. Even if you just think about time as like a fourth dimension, like Einstein, then everything that ever happened still exists.
Kim: It makes sense for me because I then have to think of what is the good that could come from me simply paying attention. And how I conceive of that is that it’s going to be like the stone that’s rolling down the hill. And so the shape of the stone, what that stone is made of, will affect how it rolls. And so the sum total of everything behind us or around us is moving us forward and to my perception, it’s moving us to the possible extinction of our species and many other existing species here in this biosphere on this planet. So I try to imagine that what is learned here could somehow do good perhaps billions of years into the future somewhere else. Because my perception has been so dour about our biosphere, I couldn’t just think about doing good for homo sapiens and mammals and other carbon based life forms because I can get way too pessimistic that they’ll even be around very much longer.
Jeremy: I see. Pulling back the scale until it’s… Yeah, because in the short term or medium term, it definitely is not looking good. Trying to think of leaving behind something good or useful or positive or enriching in the immediate future is a depressing thing to think about.
On the last episode we recorded, Sarah, a geologist, was talking about how long history was giving her a more comforting or comfortable perception of the crisis that we’re facing right now as a species. Like, yeah, and maybe it’s all over for human beings, but if you look at rocks, they’ve been around for a long time. So it’s just like a blip in the history of rocks. But you’re talking even further than that, but still bringing it back to conscious life, or some level of consciousness, which I like. That resonates with me. I mean, I like rocks, but I find it easier to have empathy for even imaginary future consciousnesses. So then it seems like a useful kind of image.
Kim: Yeah. One of the things that I think set me to this orientation was that almost 10 years ago now, I gave a talk at the Sydney Evolver Spore, which was website founded by Daniel Pinchbeck and some others to try to say, “Hey, we need to get our species to evolve.” So they formed Evolver. And I gave the program one month, and it was the evolution of water. And so I had to study how water came to exist on planet earth, and then try to teach that to 50 other hippies in a warehouse. And when I looked at how long it took before we even had, I believe it was hydrogen came first, then oxygen on planet earth, and then some other miracle happened for them to come together and make water.
But when I realized that that could only have come from other matter in the cosmos, it seemed silly to just only think about what happens here on this planet.
Jeremy: Yeah, I mean an extinction of the species threat and end-of-the-world kind of thing definitely seems like the biggest possible scale, but you’re right, there’s plenty of space around it. There’s plenty more context to include in that way of conceiving of it. The evolution of water definitely puts things in perspective because we’re water pretty much, you know, we’re messy water.
Kim: It was just a really profound thing for me. Now when I hear all these, like the mass media joke of aliens and all the alien DNA and is there alien DNA in a virus or whatever? Well, I’m an alien you’re an alien. Everything we’re made of did not start out on planet earth because planet earth didn’t start out here.
Jeremy: That’s a good way to connect cosmology and this kind of mystical vision of interconnectedness. I mean, I really think science is a really useful route to the idea of interconnectedness. At almost every scale, if you look hard enough, you see that everything is connected in some way, on some level.
I have just a bunch of stuff I want to ask you about, including living in Australia. But could you talk about the formation of, or at least your participation in Collapse Support as a community and maybe what you’ve noticed about it as it’s evolved and grown?
Kim: Absolutely. I’ll preface it a little bit with my journey of how I got to Reddit because I think that the forces of censorship are influencing quite a bit how our communities come into and out of existence. I had to leave Facebook because the Australian federal government made it very clear that anything you posted on Facebook would be used to try to deny you a visa. So I had to scrub my entire Facebook social media presence, and I was very involved with a lot of, we called ourselves doomers at that point in time in 2015. So after I scrubbed it, I discovered Reddit and this was like 2016, 2017 and I discovered the Collapse Discord, which was often a really dark place with a lot of Ted Kaczynski type people.
And then the Collapse Support Discord was founded around that time by a young man who wanted a place for conversation around meeting his emotional needs and, and the needs of other people who were quite obviously suffering.
So this guy started it and it started filling up with people. And he did his personal work in being aware of collapse, and he concluded that he wanted to go apprentice as a WOOFer working at a farm. And so he then put out the call and said, would anybody be willing to moderate?
And at that point in time, the thing that I was most clear about was that being collapse aware was so difficult on one’s mental wellbeing, one’s soul wellbeing. And so I said, yes. And I think we’ve gone from under 2000 subscribers in those last two, three years to now about 6,700 subscribers on Collapse Support, which is just incredible, I think, considering that it is a really weird subreddit; we rarely have very active back and forth threads. They’re mostly like just a very simple two way. Somebody makes a post and they say, I’m experiencing a need or a crisis or a sense of aloneness, and then people respond offering that person, truly, support. And the support may be, “Oh, chin up, you’re not going to die for a long time” or “chin up we’re all equally screwed.” Or some incredibly insightful Jungian analysis.
The types of responses just warm my heart. So right now, I think we’ve got a pretty decent little subreddit.
Jeremy: Yeah, for sure. My collapse journey was fairly recent actually. I mean, I remember being in high school and talking about global warming and maybe that’s a thing that should be a pressing concern for us. I didn’t find a lot of purchase with people. It was kinda like, “yeah, we know, but what are you going to do about it?” kind of thing. But it wasn’t until last year or the past 18 months, I had a little space in my life where I could look and try to see, okay, how screwed are we really? Like, for me to get my existential bearings. What are we dealing with? And so the Collapse subreddit was instrumental in that, at least pointing out a lot of links, a lot of sources to independently verify, a lot of authors to read up on, or climate scientists and what they were really saying. So the Collapse subreddit was really useful for that, for getting doom woke. I love that expression.
But after that, it’s like, okay, now, what? What do I do with this information? This information hurts to carry and I don’t know what to do with it, and I don’t know where to put it, and I don’t know what to do with my energy now and my attention now and where to direct my effort. So that was definitely when, Oh, there’s a Collapse Support. This is seemed, this seems like the next step. I don’t know why anyone would want to just stay on the collapse. I mean, it’s still useful for getting information and watching how things unfold. But, for me, I just feel like, you know, angry and depressed and bitter and resentful and hopeless and everything, and that’s a very difficult emotional space to stay in. It’s like Alan Watts said, when you get the message, hang up the phone or something like that. So after feeling like I got the message of Collapse, finding Collapse Support felt more like this is where I can stay. This is something I can connect with. This is something wholesome now. This is something that isn’t just repeating the same anger and despair loop, that isn’t just feeding that. You know, it wasn’t false positivity. You know, it’s not chin up, we can create our own realities and stop being such a bummer. It’s like the reality sucks now let’s band together around it or find a way to emotionally process it.
I feel like there’s some real heroes involved in the community such as yourself, who are really keeping their hearts open, even as painful as that can be and as much emotional labor that entails sometimes, you’re adding to this collective capacity to actually process this information.
I think it’s a really beautiful thing. It’s a really great community and I feel really grateful to you for what you’ve put of yourself in it and keeping it going and growing it.
Kim: Thank you. That’s… My heart is really, really full to hear that. And, I could easily cry right now with how much you’ve made me feel good. But I’d like to respond with a little story of one of my weeks at Goofy Sufi Camp, which I used to do in Hamus Springs, New Mexico. And this was a week where we would just study a different spiritual tradition for a week. One year it was Sufism. Another year it was Harry Potter books. And during one of those years, a person committed suicide that was well known to many of the participants at this retreat.
And so, you know, we were gathering for morning meditation and the announcement was made about this person, that they had committed suicide. The way that the bad news was conveyed, it started from a place of accepting that it is hard to bear living this life. And if somebody can’t bear it any longer, they’re not a villain and they deserve our love and blessings and support.
To me that’s like this knife’s edge that I walk, being aware of collapse. Because yes, it is terrible and yes, for some of us it is too much to bear, but let’s try to band together so that it’s not too much to bear because there’s just so much more that we can have if we allow our senses to gather the information that’s all around us and we allow ourselves to bear witness and take care of ourselves so that we don’t go the edge. Because it is undeniable that questions of the possible meaninglessness of life, or people’s own mental health crises, are usually what people to make posts in there. And we don’t just say, Oh, call the 1-800 number. We actually say, we can understand how you’re feeling that way and we want to help you find ways so that you don’t feel that’s your only choice.
Jeremy: Yeah. And that’s a lot to take on, and it’s a lot of responsibility almost, but it feels much more wholesome. I mean, I have a lot of respect for those crisis lines. They do really hard work. But it feels like a consumer style solution to a holistic problem. And at least being able to respond to something like that as a community in a connective way, something about that feels more healing. It’s not just how can a stranger talk you down, but how can we come out of this with a greater connection to each other if we can come out of this together?
Kim: Yeah. One of the things I just didn’t realize at the time, cause it’s now pushing 30 years ago that this happened in my life, but I helped somebody to commit suicide in the early nineties and they wanted to leave planet earth before they became a blind quadriplegic. So that experience helps me to be with somebody who is having an emotional dark night of the soul. You could say one is medically body driven and the other is purely mental driven. But I see now the continuum as being just one continuum. And I didn’t realize that helping someone to take their life on their own terms would be something that I would feel so very proud of so many years later.
I am really happy to say that of the many people who have come through the collapse support community, very, very few, if not zero of those people have ultimately viewed themselves in as dire of straights as my dear friend Katie was in when she was looking at becoming a blind quadriplegic.
Jeremy: And that’s… I’ve never looked at the possible future of being a blind quadriplegic, but I think anyone who’s responding in a healthy way on Collapse Support I don’t want to say everyone, but I suspect there’s a large portion who have confronted this kind of question before of, given the circumstances, whatever they may be, does it make sense to keep going? And then whether whether you find a reason to or you just do, you know, irrationally maybe …
Kim: We are, in essence, with our collapse awareness, much more like my friend Katie in that she could say, okay, so here’s the things in my life that bring me pleasure and here’s what doesn’t and so what are the maths of my future? And we now have even more information about what is the carbon footprint of the food that we eat? What is the burden of another person in our community on the infrastructure or whatever?
If you just look at the smallest number of variables that you’re comfortable with, it’s very easy to say from that false analysis, the planet would be better off without me. And so that’s why I, myself, have gone back to my own personal cosmology because I needed something besides that kind of a numerical analysis to justify my existence, my carbon footprint, if you will.
I really try to encourage people to apply their own values to what’s available in their life so that they can get to the point where they say, oh yeah, it’s totally worth my carbon footprint for me to be here because I’m a secret agent for the future, or I am, you know, willing to go first to respond, or whatever it might be that gives them personal meaning.
Jeremy: Mm. I like that. Secret agent for the future. It feels like a good episode title.
Kim: Please use it at will. It came from this thing where… Shopping malls are fundamentally different in Australia from America. And so you have to go to a shopping mall to buy groceries I at one point in time was like at risk of having panic attacks in the shopping malls because of how collapse of where I am. It was just so much stimulation of, negative information. So finally I was like, okay, Kim, just pretend you’re a secret agent for the future. You know you’re going into hostile terrain, keep your shit together and get the groceries bought and get home.
Jeremy: I like that. It actually reminds me of something I heard on an episode of Dunkin Trussell’s podcast, the Duncan Trussell Family Hour. I can’t even remember who he was talking to, but he was like pitching this thought exercise of just living your day as if you are a sleeper agent for goodness, and at any moment you can be activated and you don’t even necessarily know what your mission is or what it’s going to be, or you may be on your mission without even knowing what that entails. And the people you encounter around you may also be secret agents for goodness. You can’t necessarily tell each other that you’re a secret agents for goodness, but anyone you encounter could be one of these.
And you know, I’ve tried that, in my Robert Anton Wilson- programmed receptiveness to doing thought experiments to just see what I can do with my reality tunnel. I’ve gone through days of just like, okay, this person may be a secret agent for goodness. I’m a secret agent for goodness, and it’s… You know, it feels meaningful even if, on one level, it’s fictitious … And really like, why not? Like, why wouldn’t we regard ourselves as secret agents for goodness if we’re, if we’re setting the intention of trying to do good one way or another, or increase joy directly or indirectly for other people, even if we don’t know how we’re doing it. That’s our intention. Then on some level, we are working toward that aim. Maybe it’s secret to ourselves in our like ego consciousness, but at an unconscious level, if that truly is our intention, then we are secret agents for goodness, I suppose.
Kim: Right? And there could be metaphysics at work that we don’t understand. I would argue that the principle of emergence, or in the New Thought word, “divine right action,” or “best possible outcome” in the words of an MBA, that the way that we will activate those metaphysics are through just doing that. We know harmony has principles that dissonance doesn’t have. And so that’s where I will go and say, hey, I suspend my disbelief. I claim any good metaphysical mojo that we can possibly have when we all put on our secret-agent-for-good hats.
Jeremy: That makes me think of the chaos magic approach of just having a utilitarian approach to metaphysics. Like, I’ll take any metaphysics, I’ll believe based on the utility of believing a thing.
Kim: Yup.
Jeremy: I’m a little stuck on… You said you had to get groceries from a shopping mall, and to me that already sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
Kim: It is.
There are a lot of similarities in terms of the capture of society between America and Australia, but they’re off by a few little decades. So I think shopping malls were delayed just long enough that. It became clear that the best way to anchor a shopping mall was through a grocery store here in Australia rather than a department store like Sears or Macy’s in America.
And so when we had no car, where did the bus routes go? Well, the bus routes go to the shopping malls. And the train stations are next to the shopping malls. So for the first couple of years, that was the only grocery stores I could go to. You know, the shopping malls are like, you know, big, fancy San Francisco type shopping malls, multiple stories.
It took me about a year, but I remapped all my vendors and I and I now purchase very, very differently than I did back then.
Jeremy: The idea of anchoring a shopping mall with a grocery store, it’s such a perfectly capitalism-calculated… Like you’re just linking it to a more basic necessity that you can’t not go — I mean, you can, but it’s extremely hard for the average person to not use grocery stores to get their frigging groceries. It’s just like we just make it so you can’t avoid the shopping mall. You literally have to go there to survive. I’m just like recoiling a little bit at that notion.
Shopping malls make me so uncomfortable as a highly sensitive introvert. Feeling like you’re in such a constructed environment and the environment is so constructed entirely by the dictates of capitalism, by trying to coerce you or influence you one way or another to make purchases that you don’t need. Like, I feel that intention behind all of the store displays and the basic layout of a shopping mall as like an aggressive, parasitic attack. And so I’m trying to imagine having to go there to get my groceries and…
Kim: Well. Yeah, and it’s everything you’ve imagined is actually correct because the corporation that owns so many of the shopping malls here is called Westfield corporation in the United States of America. Westfield corporation owns one shopping mall. It is the huge shopping mall in San Francisco on Market Street, I believe. Everything else owned by Westfield Corporation in the United States is a gambling And so all of the malls here are built on gambling casino principles. You cannot see the door. You have to go into a flagship store to actually leave the mall. There’s no clocks. It’s very much like a gambling casino here in Australia.
Jeremy: That’s so on-the-nose.
Kim: And it was funny because I had actually, Then in the Westfield shopping mall of San Francisco in like 2009 and I had a panic attack because I could not find how leave . And it was like the old manager of the men’s watch department or something runs over to me and I was like in Nordstrom’s, and he’s like, “miss, can I help you?” And I’m like, “I just need to get the hell outta here and right now and I can’t find a door!”
And then, two months later, here I am in. Australia, and it’s like, oh my God, I have to go buy my groceries at the same company mall as where I had that panic attack in San Francisco.
Jeremy: Oh, yikes.
I hear a story like that and I run it through the script of how I was raised , like the values of American culture. And some might say, Oh, if you’re having a panic attack in the shopping mall, then there’s something wrong or some deficiency in yourself that you need to correct or something like that, and that is a hundred percent bullshit in my opinion. I’m hearing that and I’m thinking like having a panic attack because you can’t figure out how to leave a place that is like aggressively trying to coerce you so it can take stuff from you? That feels like an extremely healthy response.
And when I think about like the rise of depression, anxiety, and suicide, in more and more industrialized countries, it just seems like, yeah, this is just how human beings react if we haven’t numbed ourselves, or if we’re not particularly insensitive, or if we haven’t just dulled the impulse or shut off our feelings completely. Like, yeah, this is an extremely triggering environment to live in.
Kim: Yup. And the whole notion of who’s neuro-typical and neuro-atypical in the collapse-o-sphere… It has been really helpful for me to realize how many neuro-atypical people we are with this community , to accept that we will have lots of helpful gifts to offer the normies as things get worse, because they’re going to need the coping techniques that we have been using now for years to just get through each day with the load of cognitive dissonance that we’re aware of.
Jeremy: Word. Ah, let’s help the normies. Let’s be secret agents of good and set our intention in making little gifts of usefulness for whoever’s to come on, whatever timescale you want to look at.
Kim, you brought up the Coronavirus stuff also.
Kim: Yes. I have for many years followed a blogger on collapse-related issues. And this person has followed the coronavirus from the very beginning. They also have sources on both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. And one of this this blogger’s sources is a guy called Hal Turner and he is a white supremacist. I feel that I can say that firsthand because I have listened to his radio show deep enough that I hear the white supremacist stuff, and that is deeply offensive to me and wrong. However, the guy is an ex CIA spook, apparently, or worked in areas of the government where he got to know CIA spooks. And so he also shares his intelligence. And he has shared that one of the models used by the government to look at a viral outbreak would have had China collapsing by today, February 16th. And I note that that has not come to pass, that while we could say without a doubt that China is in the midst of a massive crisis, we could not say that the Chinese government, as of today, has collapsed.
So, positive and negative outcomes compared to predictions, I keep track of. And so Hal Turner is in the negative column today because this prediction has not come to pass.
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s useful. A lot of doomers make bad predictions and it’s good to know which voices tend to be more accurate than others.
Kim: Right, and as an ex-lawyer who just came to realize that evidence isn’t necessarily what we thought it was, I look for a narrative that I can construct that makes sense that holds over time based on my personal assessments of veracity and reliableness of information.
Other information that I got from this blogger had to do with, the burning of bodies, instant mass, cremation of the victims of the virus. And that has apparently also been born out as accurate reporting. And so had me pretty concerned with what this could mean because I’m so close to the travel of humans from Southeast Asia also because, I don’t have a narrative. I don’t see information being honest and reliable that comes from any government or any ostensible health organization. That just really sucks for us as collapsniks because we are pre-primed to be aware of these potential huge negative outcomes. And if we don’t have trustworthy information, it’s very mentally, potentially toxic to just exist without information to tell us what’s really happening.
What’s been pretty fascinating for me, following this, I would say that I was on top of it January 23rd day that the last plane from Wuhan flew into Sydney, so from January 23rd to February 16th. That’s a long time. Originally we just weren’t leaving the house. Well, that doesn’t fly. My husband couldn’t work from home forever. Now we’re basically at the point of, in order to keep living our lives, we are consciously accepting the risk of infection.
But as 57, I’m already in the death demographic. So here I live in a city that has no measures. They’re saying there’s nobody really to worry about, no risk and so you need to go out and do your normal things, even if you’re a 57 year old person who, in theory, would be at a high risk of death if you got the disease.
All of those social forces saying, “sorry, Kim, you still got to go out and do the shopping,” they’re basically saying,” the risk of your death, ah, no biggie.”
It reminds me a lot of my personal assessment with regard to the risks of nuclear energy and atomic bomb development or anything involving nuclear material, my personal assessment is, even if the risk is very small if the negative outcome is holy shit terrible, then I make decisions not so much by the risk, but as the magnitude of what would be at stake if I did get a negative outcome. I think that our society is not presuming that people would do that kind of a risk analysis any longer.
Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, the society benefits from you not questioning too much how they’re getting their energy to continue powering civilization in this current form.
It’s so frustrating when I hear politicians, even politicians, that I tend to root for, just taking the basic assumption that we want to keep living our way of life the way it is now. It’s like, well, we can’t do that, mother fucker! Like … No matter what kind of crazy magic power source we come up with, we can’t keep growing infinitely. We’re breaking down on so many levels right now. Even if nuclear was risk-free, even if we could just hook up enough windmills, there’s so many other ways that system would break down.
It’s hard when you reject the premise that everyone’s supposed to start with that we should keep doing basically what we’re doing right now — we might have to make a few concessions, we might have to figure out how to make recycling work again, or we might have to figure out how to do away with single use plastics… But we pretty much licked it, like, we pretty much got a handle on this whole thing, once we figured out one or two little things, like how do we build enough windmills? So it was like, no, we can’t do that. That’s an invalid starting premise. That’s bullshit. But, of course you don’t want too many people to see through that or else you get to like mass panic or people actually doing something to affect the status quo.
It’s extremely frustrating to have to just keep going along with this narrative that you know ends in destruction.
Kim: Right. And I don’t get pushback, but I also don’t get a lot of traction from people, but the phrase that I use is our entire lives occur in captivity and the sooner that we admit that, the better off we’ll be with our mental health. I just don’t know how to analyze my place in the world unless I accept I’m entirely captive to the culture and society in which I live in Australia, in America, on Planet Earth, you’re captured.
Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of options if you want to try to run away from it. The number of groups and pocket communities that have managed to evade fitting into a supply chain, or having the coils of supply chain formed around them, is just vanishingly small.
If you think about just how much of your time and energy is spent on things that are compelled, things that you have to do or else you risk violence being done to you one way or another. How could you not feel like a captive? How could you not feel like you’re not being given much of a choice for how you want to live your life in this very real and tangible way.
Kim: Right. And try moving to a country without human rights, when you don’t have the right to remain silent, when you don’t have the right not to answer your door to the person wearing a uniform.
Jeremy: Wait, are you talking about Australia? Do you not have that right in Australia or are you talking more broadly?
Kim: No, I’m speaking specifically of Australia. Australia doesn’t have codified human rights. In fact, the reason that Australia has never had, to date, successful environmental litigation is because there is not a right to Clean air and water and food.
The legal name for the concept is called “standing.” So you have to have the right to have something to go to court to Sue over it. But there is no standing for humans to have environmental litigation in Australia, cause we have no human right to air or water.
Jeremy: I imagine that Extinction Rebellion Australia is probably focused on that as a useful lever to try to budge. I’m not sure how international their demands are, but does that factor in? Are you connected with, are very aware of XR Australia?
Kim: I’m kinda lurking on their Facebook stuff. As a non-citizen, I can’t run the risk of being arrested because that would be grounds for them to cancel my permanent visa and deport me.
Pretty much, they’ve had to fight battles of improper bail conditions. In Australia, if you go to a protest for XR and you get arrested, then they were trying to get you to sign a document called “bail conditions” and in the bail conditions, you could not speak to or communicate with any other members of Extinction Rebellion, or you couldn’t even go to the city limits of Sydney your bail conditions.
Jeremy: God damn
Kim: Yeah .
Jeremy: To me, that says that the Australian government definitely sees XR as a credible threat…
Kim: Yup.
Jeremy: …If they want to pull some shenanigans like that. I mean, not only does it diminish the ability of people who make it out of jail to keep going with the movement, but I mean, that’s a credible threat to resistors who might otherwise be interested in getting arrested for making a statement, and you’re like, well, if you get arrested, then I’m severed from the group, essentially, and is it worth it? That’s pretty conniving. That’s some bullshit.
Kim: Yeah. they’ve been trying to felonize protest in Australia as well. Because obviously if you can charge somebody and convict them of a felony, then you can incarcerate them for a long time and make the whole rest of their life suck. So XR has been having to deal with those kind of threshold issues here.
Jeremy: I feel like I remember you saying something about moving to Australia having something to do with collapse. Am I remembering that correctly?
Kim: Yes. I became collapse aware in May of 2007. I was in rel ationship with my now husband and he had been collapse aware since 1988. So after I got doomwoke, eventually we had some conversations of, well, do you want to be in America when it goes down? No. Neither one of us wanted to be in America when it went down. So we just started opening ourselves up to opportunities elsewhere and a job in Australia came up within a matter of days.
It wasn’t really a notion of being able to survive longer through collapse. it was, the notion of not being in your home culture when it collapses. For whatever reason, that feels easier for me to bear to watch someone else’s culture collapse than my own.
And that is part of our journey. just having to look at our lives the day after we get doomwoke can be so terribly painful. I do want to encourage us to talk about that pain and to share ways that help us to cope with it. Because one of the most recurring tragic archetypes of the doom awakening journey, for particularly people under 30, is the pain that people have when they imagine that their parents will suffer through collapse. And then the even worse pain when they go to talk to their parents about it and their parents treat them like they’re insane.
Jeremy: Being completely shut down in response to that, and how painful that is, it seems like a very common source of pain, of grief to have to experience in the doomwoke community.
Kim: Right. And it’s got to be, also, the source of our magic, because, my goodness, look how much experience we’re getting dealing with it and living in that. Even somebody who’s 17 years old and six months ago had this conversation with their parents — just think how much more adept they must be now.
I’m so impressed by the people that I meet in these communities. it’s not uncommon for me to interact with somebody and feel, wow, this person has so much to offer. Look, they know about all these things. And then somebody says, how old are you? And it turns out they’re 16. That just makes me smile.
Jeremy: Yeah, zoomers, they figured a lot of shit out really early. I’m very impressed. I see a lot of zoomer Twitter, I’m like, how are you, at a point, even just politically that took me like 30 years to get to, and you’re like 15 years old and you know more about that than I do. Goddamn. Kudos.
Kudos, zoomers. I guess that’s a good, like #givesmehope kind of moment. But I also kind of resist that because, you know, my parents always told me, it’s gonna be up to your generation to figure out how we can all not die. And now, you know, I’m 32 and I’m like, I, no. Like this isn’t up to me. This ball has been rolling for so long. I can’t make us not die. So I definitely resist this narrative that I’m hearing repeat itself. Oh, it’ll be up to the zoomers to save us when it’s even harder and we’re even more screwed. But
Kim: Right. That is so bullshit. Because I would say to you, I knew the answer 30 years ago and lobbied my ass off and failed incredibly. And so if somebody said that to me, I’d be like, fuck you. I did my bit. I’ve been there. I didn’t make the system crooked.
Jeremy: Right. And what you were up against was all of the resources. All of the resources that have been plundered from the commons. All of the things that have been drained from the earth and then sold and the system built around that. The idea that you can just believe hard enough and try hard enough and it’s up to you to change all that and you can do it if you really try is like… I call shenanigans shenanigans on that. Fuck that.
Kim: Totally, totally. And I remember really very clearly when I understood this while I was in graduate school in the mid eighties in St. Louis. It was like, Oh my God. Well, of course the government now is going to be completely taken over by business interest. We’ve made it legal to do so. And once that happens, very bad things will happen for the public good. And, you know, I would regularly get booed and hissed during my lecture classes when I was in MBA school in the 80s and I would talk about this stuff.
Jeremy: Yeah, I can imagine. The 80s was like prime time of like, yay capitalism, greed is good, cocaine-powered business. That’s going to be like the hardest time to try to get people to curb those impulses.
Kim: Yup. That is very much the case and I am very glad that I was in law school and business school at the same time because
Jeremy: So let me ask you, just in the short amount of time we have left to record, maybe the hardest question to ask, which is, if we have any ability to influence the outcome for the species, or the people we love, at least, and if that involves building some kind of popular movement, what action do you think might be most conducive to doing that work?
Kim: I think that it’s going to a appear as paradox. The words that I would put to that paradox are words like, accepting how hopeless it is and how close to death any one of us are, and yet still taking action in flagrant defiance of the hopelessness and the risks. What’s the nicest thing I can do? I’ll just go do it, and if I live to tomorrow or I don’t, that’s not as central to my thought as “what is the nicest thing I can do for anybody today?”
Jeremy: I dig that. That’s good stuff. In passing comments we’ve made to each other on the Discord awhile back you said something about basically leaning into the absurdity of it.
Kim: Yes.
Jeremy: Might as well be an absurdist in an absurd situation.
Kim: Absolutely. Someday I hope to fully understand the metaphysics of humor. But I am certain that humor has its own metaphysics.
Jeremy: That reminds me of something dumb that I tried to tell a friend back in college. There was like an episode of a cartoon I was watching and one of the characters was like a normal person. Like the cartoon had its own cartoon logic, and the cartoon characters all kind of understood that they were in a cartoon or behaved as if they were in a cartoon other than this one character that’s acting just like a regular person. He’s reacting to all this cartoon stuff that’s going on in the way that a normal person would react to cartoon stuff going on and it just stressing him out and, and he’s having like the worst time about it because he doesn’t realize that he’s in a cartoon.
And there was something sort of Zen about that for me, where it’s like, oh, in some way where in a cartoon, I mean, not literally. I think. But there’s something fundamentally absurd about our situation and if we realize that maybe you won’t change anything dramatically, but we’ll at least have a better time being in the cartoon than if we’re just flailing and digging our heels in, and trying to stop the crazy train.
Kim: Yup. that is my point of view on it too. That’s part of the hat metaphor for me. Sometimes I get to to live in the cartoon.
Jeremy: I read that Allister Crowley had different rings he would wear depending on which kind of persona he wanted to embody. So now I’m picturing like literally different hats you could wear depending on what kind of persona you want or how you want to respond to what’s going on and having a crazy hat.
Kim: Yeah, no, I do that stuff. I enjoy totems. So yeah, I had to get rid of my, my fancy dress hats would be what they would, we called in Australia. But yeah, I actually did have a collection for awhile.
Jeremy: How’s the fire situation? I have to ask. That was like all over the news here for awhile.
Kim: Oh, it was insane. Completely insane. And they are now all out and much of Australia now is that risk of catastrophic flooding. I shit you not.
Jeremy: God .
Kim: The fire thing though is, people just do not understand how horrible the fire risk was because all of us live within burning ember’s reach of bush. And so it doesn’t matter that I live on a residential street. If a burning ember could get to my house from the hiking trail park five kilometers away, well then my house can burn down from a bushfire. And that’s something that,
Jeremy: Do you think that the fire situation has brought more Australians to doomwokeness or is the denial extending into that into that as well?
Kim: I think it’s kind of the, The morphing of denial into the, well, yeah, we know it’s real and it’s bad, but it was this bad already. So even though we weren’t admitting it, we were living it, so now we can admit it and not have to do anything different because we already were living it.
Jeremy: Great.
Kim: That’s some convoluted logic, but I do think that is the logic that most of the boomers are using.
Jeremy: Yeah, even about climate change in general here, I’m noticing the denial is dropping away and it’s just being replaced by a, yeah, but this is normal, we’re in a warming period, and what are you going to do about it, really? So let’s just keep extracting oil. It seems more cynical to me, think it’s happening. It’s like, yeah, it’s happening, but meh.
Another thing that you’ve brought up is Good Grief Network.
Oh, yes! Kim: Yes. I absolutely want to make a plug for Good Grief Network. Goodgriefnetwork.org. It is a 10 week online course based loosely on the 12 step principles of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And it was brought into existence by a couple of fabulous human beings who came out of the 12 step world and were struggling mightily with their eco grief.
They’ve now been doing their courses dozens of times and they’re getting alumni all over Planet Earth, and it’s a thing where you for 10 weeks in a row, come together for 90 minutes on Zoom and you talk about different aspects of eco grief, like acknowledging the problem, acknowledging your role in the problem, acknowledging your need to take rest, acknowledging that things will change and you have to kind of keep scaling up, or in two different directions, your point of view.
And so I cannot recommend this enough to anybody of any age if they are feeling like this is just a bigger subject than they can cope with. And financially, there are lots and lots of options. If the hundred dollar price tag is not affordable to somebody, like it wasn’t affordable to me when I signed up They were wonderful at working something out.
Plus, Oh my God, the people I met, the people in my class, it was like I just developed twelve Internet crushes. It was really cool.
And just how people would become emboldened hearing somebody else, they would never have talked about that thing that really makes them suffer, except they heard somebody else in the group talk about it. And then it was like, Oh, it’s okay, I can talk about that.
Jeremy: Yes, yes, yes. That’s something that came up on the last episode with Sarah, just how cathartic it can be to have someone else say. What you feel, especially if you’re told, if the messaging is repeatedly, it’s not okay for you to feel that, but to hear someone else say, either eloquently or boldly, or even if it’s just the first time you’ve heard someone else sayit, something that you feel and how powerful that is. It’s like anti gaslighting almost. It’s a way of more honest with yourself, I guess.
Kim: Right, and if there is any truth to metaphysics and our ability to use them for the good of the cosmos, it’s got to come from a place of truth. The more that we can hone in on what is true for us, the better our magic our magic ability will grow.
Jeremy: Kim, thank you so so much for coming on the program.
Kim: Oh, you are very welcome. This has been a lot of fun… Ironically.
Jeremy: Yeah, doomers can have fun together. It’s great. We can smile.
Closing
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Oh yeah. So, I got curious and looked it up. The Westfield Group split in 2014 into Scentre Group, which owns and operates the Australia and New Zealand shopping centers, and Westfield Corporation, which, after a big 2018 merger, is now Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, the largest commercial real estate company in Europe. (And actually they own like 33 malls in the United States now.)
I couldn’t find anything to back up Kim’s claim about Westfield owning casinos — it looks like they were mainly in the shopping center business — but Starwood Capital Group did acquire a number of their properties in 2012, and they are in the casino game. Maybe someone else can find something. Let me know.
I did find that Westfield’s founder and longtime chairman and “mall-igarch” is Frank P. Lowy, one of the richest men in the world, owning about $6.5 billion US dollars. He founded the Lowy Institute, an Australian right-leaning foreign affairs think tank. He’s also served as Director of the Reserve Bank of Australia a number of times.
But anyway. Giant shopping malls… Barf.
Music this episode by Martin H Emes and “Soft Rain” by Glass Boy (CC BY-ND 3.0).
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