Tyson Yunkaporta: A different kind of growth (ep321)
If material, economic growth is merely an illusion within a closed-loop system, what does it mean to re-orient towards the growth of intimacy, complexity, and diversity? What are the common threads at the heart of Indigenous thinking across cultures?
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta, an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Dr. Yunkaporta is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Karma by Sarah Kinsley
“Life itself is so powerful—the amount of energy that’s produced constantly just by the biomass on the planet. There’s no better energy return on investment than life, than biology within an amazing, complex, dynamic system, that is constantly increasing in its complexity.”
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Transcript
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as invitations to dive deeper into the topics and resources mentioned. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Kamea Chayne: Your book, Sand Talk has been described as "reverse anthropology", where instead of using the Western lens to study and understand non-Western cultures, you're using your Aboriginal lens to look at Western civilization and its crises. I'm curious to hear a little about your background that inspired your interest in this focus, and as you traced back into history what you pinpointed as the beginnings of our erosion of relationships, desires to dominate, and the unraveling of creation.
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: I've never been particularly a good scholar. I'm not publishing in massively high-impact journals. I got my doctorate about 12 years ago, and I'm still only at about lecturer level in the university system, I'm not a professor. So my background is always just on the edges of things and somebody who's doing interesting things, but not because he's particularly interesting. It's probably more of just a peculiar mix of pathologies that happens to throw up interesting things in some contexts and some subject matters.
I never really had words for what it was until I discovered complexity theory. As soon as I saw complexity theory and systems thinking, I was like, "oh, that's that thing". But it was also quite familiar to me, from my life and from being with the elders in my home culture, within groups of people as you move across the landscape… It's knowledge that's employed and that you're just inhabiting all the time, which we don't really have a meta-language for. We don't have a word for things like psychology, and all that sort of stuff. All of this isn't really anything you actually talk about, it's just something that you do.
And I just found myself in a unique position of being liminal enough in my life to be able to find ways to talk about these things, that we never talked about before. To be able to do this strange alchemy in the in-between of things, being able to throw things together and see what comes out from there, name it, and talk through it.
Kamea Chayne: And through this lens that you've acquired, through experiencing a lot of different ways of knowing and various Indigenous cultures, what do you see as the thing that tipped the imbalance, that then gave way to other forms of injustices, be it patriarchy or white supremacy, later on? What do you see as the first thing that sort of went off-balance, that then rippled off to everything else?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: The first thing that caused me to notice it or for it to happen in the world?
Kamea Chayne: In the world.
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: In the world? It's been there from the start. It's been there from the Big Bang, there is that little seed that's actually not a bad thing, it's just part of creation and it's there for a reason—to make sure that the patterns of creation aren't just replicated the same way every time. If it does replicate the same way repeatedly, that thing is going to stagnate. What you get, because of entropy, is that that thing falls apart and just dies. So you have this, I guess, almost what people call evil, this narcissistic desire to be greater than someone or something else, a seed of that is in every single one of us. And it's there for a reason—so that every now and then, somebody will mess up and act on that thought or feeling and create disproportionate conflict, or make something terrible happen, something that will disrupt the system so much that it will change the pattern so that as the patterns replicate, it's replicated differently.
Strangely enough, it's all those disruptions that end up making the pattern beautiful. The problem is when it all takes over and you end up with the disruptive becoming the pattern.
People who find themselves in troubling times always feel like they have no horizon in sight, like it's the end of the world and the apocalypse. But I think most of us feel like we're looking out at the world and we're seeing that most of the patterns of creation that we're inhabiting are the pattern breakers. Narcissist, no good... Choose your poison for metaphors. Is it satanic, demonic, Marxist, fascism? I guess everybody's seeing that all around them. What do you think? Do you think that's we're overreacting? Is it a real thing or are we just panicking a bit?
Kamea Chayne: I'm very much in my thought process where I'm trying to make sense of it all, so I don't think I have a conclusion. But I'm trying to think about whether these injustices that we're facing are sort of inevitable, as just part of how this all works, and if there is even a way to disrupt this pattern, or if it's just going to keep replicating in other forms.
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: I feel the same way about it, but then I'm not sure if that's just part of my indoctrination. Is that part of the narrative of liberalism? You know, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs… that progress is like a whole heap of terrible things, but it gets a little bit better each time, and it's getting us somewhere... There's kind of that feeling to it. I don't know if that's the right story.
I don't tend to go with the progress narrative and it's only because I can't trust it. It's just so obviously not true.
Kamea Chayne: And that just puts into question what betterment and progress even mean. A major theme of this show is questioning the idea of progress as it is defined by Western ideologies—this idea that we're more advanced than we've ever been, that we're wealthier than ever, the idea that that's a sign that we're on the right path, and so we just have to keep powering forward.
So I wonder how you contextualize this with an understanding of closed-loop and linear systems and how Western civilization might be holding on to a false sense of advancement as if it's outsmarted the laws of the land.
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: We live in open systems. At the same time, there are closed loops. A closed-loop means every bit of waste produced within that system is recycled back through either in that system or beyond that system (so that the entropy of this system becomes another system's lunch).
So "open system good, but closed loops bad" is how we start to think about it, because you've got these positive feedback loops, which sound like good things because of the word "positive", but then you've got negative feedback loops—which are actually good.
So a positive feedback loop is just like, let's say you're a leader of the free world and you don't have very many filters and you go on Twitter, and the responses you get every time you tweet rewards you with money and attention, which bolsters you, and some of your really bad ideas get reinforced by how many people like or respond to that tweet... That's a positive feedback loop. And that can only end in one way, which is probably North Korea and a half dozen other places getting bombed. A positive feedback loop is like cancer, which is doing great things, for cancer by metastasizing, but it's not doing great things for you.
So what has to happen is balance. You need negative feedback loops that are counteracting and regulating to make sure [the bad] doesn't keep spreading and growing.
A completely open system is probably not a good thing because that's just something that goes out of control: there has to be limits. About that balance—everything has a purpose. Even the stuff you regard as evil, it's got a place, too.
What we've always had is ways of enacting that ritually: In ritual combat and in ceremonies, that bad penny comes out, in a rule-governed way, to limit the amount of damage that it can do in the community. So you always have to make sure that you've balances and checks in place to stop [things from] getting out of control.
The best way to do that is to make sure that you have enough people who are living in small units, where everybody within that unit is not able to be anonymous. You've got to be able to see and know what everybody else is doing. It's when it's human, distributed, with natural eyeballs on it and doing that out of love, that that works. When it becomes digital surveillance and this panopticon, it's a completely different thing. But I guess if we want it to scale, then you probably need to have a bit of a panopticon...
Kamea Chayne: There's always a cost to scale and growth. So when we're talking about this endless economic growth that capitalism is predicated on, in opposition to this, there's been a degrowth movement.
And I feel aligned with many of degrowth's intentions, but my only question with it was why we continue to center this reductive form of understanding wealth as the basis of the economy, and why we don't, instead, center the growth of what is beautiful, of what matters to us, like meaning relationships, aliveness, biodiversity, etc.
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: I think the wealthy understand what actual wealth means, and they understand that there needs to be closed loops within communities, like economies, and that every dollar needs to be spent a hundred times, kept within that community, flowing around.
[Wealthy people] understand how a good, healthy community economy works, but they create that for themselves and exclude everybody else from it.
So within their own sort of business interests, within their own portfolio, they'll develop that diverse, beautiful free-market economy, in which they own everything along supply chains and everything around it, even the lobby groups that make sure they keep getting subsidized, in the weaker parts of those supply chains. It's working well: it's really working for them. It's working for them so much that you can shut down the entire planet for the best part of a year and their wealth will double. That's pretty huge.
Kamea Chayne: And I guess the only thing is that they're not separated from the rest of the world... So that's the one problem. But as I was thinking more about this idea of growth, it made me wonder if growth in terms of material and energy is even possible inside of this closed system… or maybe it's just about transformations that can either grow in complexity and diversity and intimacy or otherwise trend towards simplicity and separation.
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: It's about having a worldview and a set of assumptions, and not politicized or ideological ones. What I'm talking about are the assumptions you have before you even start measuring or theorizing or figuring out gravity. There are assumptions that are behind what you need that for, and where you go from there, and then what you project onto that. Because it's a mess when you really start to look at growth and increase.
What is the difference between growth and increase? From my cultural point of view, an increase in our relationship would be about increasing the knowledge and the experience that we have between us, so in our connection, the relational space in-between, an increase would be about growing the complexity and the beauty of that relationship. Nothing physical is being created there.
But from other people's point of view, it would be about reaching goals and milestones… whether we end up going on a first date, getting engaged or married, having kids, a joint bank account... It's like all these deliverables and markers in relationships.
I know it seems to be getting off the topic, but it's just the absolute impossible physics of growth... When basic building blocks of existence, like energy and matter and resources and power, are being named, used, measured, valued, with value being created out of them... there are all these weird illusions, illusory value propositions that just go against reality and the basic physics of what is.
Life itself is so powerful—the amount of energy that's being produced constantly just by the biomass on the planet.
There's no better energy return on investment than life, than biology within an amazing, complex, dynamic system, that is constantly increasing in its complexity.
The idea of mapping an idea of growth on top of that, like, "Let's open those closed loops, and let's take from here in a way that kills that place and we dump the toxic outputs from that to kill that other place"… constantly having to rob Peter to pay Paul… [the truth is] it can't be paid back. And each time you have to take a little bit more and a little bit more under the illusion that we can go on forever, like there's an exponential function in the universe, when they just really can't. The illusions were created before people understood the exponential function too. I guess they thought they could just rob Peter to pay Paul forever.
You run out of people to pay your bills for you, places to outsource the debt. There's this bad physics within this global curse, the illusion of infinite growth.
It's more than just proposing a degrowth economic model. It's more than just making externalities in accounting, more than just giving rivers human rights. These are just more illusions.
They think just because they can do number tricks and word tricks to get around having to pay the piper on this and that, that it's real. Like, if they can get out of paying the fine for the pollution, or if they can get out of anybody seeing all the cancer or they can say all of the cancer from what we dumped was actually caused by something else, that's real then.
The illusion becomes the truth. It's not just the rich: everybody's doing it now. We just name things something else and [assume] the damage isn't being done anymore.
In Australia, there's a practice of stealing Aboriginal children from their families, in massive numbers, the government putting them in state care or with non-Aboriginal families, with the openly-stated goal, right from the start, of assimilating, [which was basically] ethnociding the entire Aboriginal culture. That became apparent to everybody, and it became apparent that it was wrong. So they named it the Stolen Generations.
And they did this truth-telling thing about it. The government actually delivered an apology for it. And it was like, "OK, we apologize for that thing that was happening in the past. Now we can all move on collectively as a nation and as a people." So they had that lovely symbolic thing, that illusion there, but the fact was and still remains right now, that there are more Aboriginal children being taken right now—even when the apology was being delivered—than at any other point in Australia's history.
But by naming it as a historical thing, saying that the evil people, who have been dead for one hundred years, did this a long time ago, you've outsourced the accountability, the requirement to address the problem. You've done this by actually laying it at the feet of people who are dead a long time ago and saying:
"I'm sorry for the actions of my ancestors, who I actually inherited all the wealth from—the wealth that was built on that theft of land and people and children and everything else—but I'm going to keep that. But I'm terribly sorry about that thing that happened in the past. But I'm going to keep doing it now, because we need to be able to keep doing that, because you can't have a growth-based economy without a caste system, without a permanent underclass, and without designing them to the other side of the tracks, so that the land on this side of the tracks can continue to grow in value. We need to keep everything awful, we're going to need to keep arresting and locking up men mostly from your culture over here (unless they're doing drug stuff, [in which case] it's just catch-and-release, because it's actually helpful to the system and the growth-based economic model). We need to keep digging up those minerals that are under you because that's the only thing that's keeping Australia afloat. Unfortunately, your land and communities are sitting right on top of that ore. We're going to need to ramp things up and we're going to need to kill lots of you..."
I'm just basically barking around the edges of a very complex system here to give you an idea of just how intractably complicated it is, and how horrifying it is to everybody on the ground to whom all this entropy's being outsourced.
There are privileged people in the world who are feeling their world shrinking because those safe spaces [they've inhabited] are becoming harder and harder to maintain because it's becoming harder and harder to outsource all of the entropy and the externalities—some of those externalities are even becoming internal because there's no external to outsource it to anymore.
Those people you're displacing, they're coming down the street in larger numbers, and more frequently, and more than the private security company that polices your streets, more than the gated community can handle. And every now and then someone will get through and take a crap in your rose bushes, and you're trying to figure out how you make sense of that. And that guy might then walk across the driveway and punch your neighbor right in your face, right in their face. And your neighbor, she's 60 years old and has never been punched in the face before. That's the kind of unspeakable privilege we're talking about—there's a whole heap of people who have been living in such a bubble that nobody's ever hit them before. And for most of the people in the world, in the global community that I belong to, that bubble of privilege is almost unthinkable. I can't imagine what my life would be without frequent violence being done to my face throughout most of my life. [So these privileged] people are starting to panic a little bit: it's like when you're emptying the water out of a fish tank and as the level gets lower and lower, starting to see the fish that are swimming more and more visibly, but it's still fine...
Economic growth has been exponential. There's never been more money, more wealth on the planet than there is right now. The last year has just exploded the amount of wealth there is in the world. And we're talking about also that massive wealth transfer. [Altogether, there had to have been] a hell of a lot more extraction just to make that work. We're talking about the burning of so many resources to make that happen—wholesale destruction of lands, places, peoples and communities. Nobody knows yet about the full extent of the horrors that have been committed on the world over the last year and a half.
Economic growth—the economy of this Anglosphere, of this liberal system—has never been healthier. That doesn't translate to anybody being able to survive, but the economy is doing very well.
Kamea Chayne: As you say, also, it's not just the people in power that are playing into the perception of change. A lot of people want to be heard. We want our hot takes to be shared. We want other people to agree with us. We police other people's language to reflect our worldviews.
And all of this, in the grand scheme of things, is more so about changing people's views, while little actually is being changed. So I wonder if this is all reflective of what's called "conquer and divide" as a strategy deployed by those in power, where they might fuel these surface-level fights for everyday people over diversity, to prevent us from finding common ground or leveraging our diversity on the real changes that need to be made.
And also, you speak to the importance of diversity of thought, but is a level of agreement necessary to be able to create tangible changes so we're not stuck in gridlock?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: They've got people thinking that whatever percentage of whatever opinions you can think of matter at all, and that these opinions remotely affect the outcome of anything in this world. Tell me who you can vote for for a degrowth economy.
Kamea Chayne: Nobody.
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: You can vote for plenty of people who are like, "I am passionate about climate change", who say that we will be taking measures for climate change. Then you have the other people over here who are like "climate change isn't real". [And they start infighting and thinking that they have to be defeating each other.] Meanwhile, we've lost the message.
Degrowth? You can't vote for that. There's nothing you can vote for that actually would change anything.
Liberalism co-opts every single term—even to the point where they've taken the term "structural inequality" and got everybody thinking structural inequality means the aggregate of opinions, or lack of awareness or bigotry, of the people in the institutions.
And so the only solution can be to change people's minds. That's all we get to do: fight for the awareness and the opinions of each other. We fight each other in the belief that it's the aggregate of the majority of the opinions that forms the decisions for how the world is going to be managed and run. But that's not what decides those things at all.
So we're stuck with this false idea of what structural inequality is and what structural power is, without an idea of how those relations work. And all we're allowed to really talk about changing or affect changing is just little bits and pieces of cultural change. Even the critique of the critique is co-opted, and it's all twisted around and like really disingenuously feeding back all power to the center and spraying out entropy all over the place.
Kamea Chayne: How do we navigate the fact that language is often being weaponized or co-opted, but that at the same time it is a powerful tool of communication to help people better make sense of the world? With this sort of culture war that is going on, it's really hard to properly communicate with people with nuance...
So, for example, I often say things that go against dominant narratives, like I critique science's limitations, and like you, so-called "green" energy, and some people will respond by saying that I'm using fossil fuel industry talking points. Or, I've also critiqued racial frameworks as a limiting way to understand Asians, and had people tell me, “What you're saying sounds like when racist people say I don't see race"—without actually addressing my critiques.
All of this plays into culture wars, where it's often so simplified into just binaries of people in this faction against that one. And I know you also raised the point that Black and white is an insufficient paradigm to understanding the Indigenous experience. You say "it's difficult to name the ripples and patterns of global power systems, when we're limited by 19th-century language around race and colonialism".
So how do we at the same time recognize that language is important, so we can, for example, share that it's much more nuanced today than Black and white, alongside resisting those statements being co-opted and watered down?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: This system of liberalism... and by that I mean global liberalism: the system that's replicated all over that makes the Anglosphere work, that the Rhodes Foundation has spent a century or so putting in place, the system that's turning every place in the world into one that loses its capacity to be a people or a place, turning all of these places into places that have things like a hospital, post office, local council, city countil, court, school, all these institutions...
Within the net of liberalism, anything you do or say, the minute you give it a name, it's finished. If you have a critique, and you call that critique something, it's finished. The minute you give it a brand, it's finished. It's co-opted. I believe in trying not to name things, trying not to brand them.
Kamea Chayne: And you said this about emergence, right?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah. I don't know, I try to avoid naming anything. And I try to avoid making too much sense, and I try to say things a bit differently every time and to mix it up. And I'll make points that you can't put together. I do that quite deliberately because I don't want the things I'm thinking or working on to become an ideology or a brand, or something that people can use as a name. I have seen that happen before with a few things I've done: People have grabbed it, and then it's become their thing. You've got to avoid that packaging and repackaging of ideas and let these things be free-range.
Kamea Chayne: So you say in guiding our path forward, "Westernization wants to find one story, the scientific method, the one economic system. All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence"—and I know you think that word also has been probably co-opted, but you go on to say—"and allow it to emerge, and just behave with integrity. The minute you have an idea and you think this is an important idea, that everyone should be doing this... As soon as you do that, you've made an ideology and you're stuffed."
So given that I know a lot of what you talk about, in terms of Indigenous thinking, is really relationships with place and the land, I wonder if the political and economic systems we take on everywhere also should be tied to their landscapes, as in, there shouldn't be one political ideology that works everywhere. And social systems of people living in, for example, a rainforest, should look different than people living in a desert or the Arctic or grasslands because the law of the land and the elements is different everywhere.
What your thoughts are on social organizing in a way that is most in alignment with the law of the land, and what do you think that would look like?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta:
If you want something to be antifragile, it has to be diverse, and truly diverse.
For example, we've been wanting to get married here for years and now we've got enough money to do it. But for the last year and a half, we haven't been able to do it because of COVID, so we rethought our idea of what a wedding should be. Every time you plan something, you're tossing a coin that there won't be a lockdown your town, and in other towns where all your guests are coming from, with any date you choose. In fact, it's probably worse odds than that because you've got all of your chances in one basket.
So we thought how do we change that? We decided to do a progressive dinner model, with like the first course at one house and then the next course at someone else's house. So instead of trying to get all the guests to come to a central location, we'll just combine the whole wedding thing with the honeymoon thing, and we'll just travel around and visit everybody and just celebrate our marriage with our loved ones all over in whatever way is appropriate in that local context.
The chances are that up to two or three of those locations will end up being inaccessible because of COVID, or a one in ten chance that we won't be able to travel on that date. But because we've distributed the event across a lot of different places, we've decreased the odds of the entire event itself being canceled. So that's how we've applied our Indigenous logic to make an Indigenous wedding.
People would say, “What's an Indigenous wedding? What do you got, like an emu feather veil, a bush tucker wedding cake, is the father of the bride going to give her away and then throw a boomerang? What's Indigenous about it?” And it's none of those things. It's in understanding the way systems and relationships work, and understanding the way you have to build the structures of anything that you want to be sustainable over deep time.
Kamea Chayne: I've been playing in my mind these different scenarios of what revolutionary change from where we are today could look like because we do have centralized power in control right now, so even as we acknowledge our need for diversity in thought and ideology and approaches and how we organize ourselves, do you think that it will still take centralized people's movements to be able to dismantle the congregated global powers of today, to then create space for decentralized organizing to take place? Or would any sort of unified effort to topple power end up just replicating the pattern again?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: It's funny because it seems to me there are two BLMs—there's the one that has organizational status and accepts donations. And a lot of the grassroots community people would say they're not getting a lot done. And there were or are, at least particularly in the beginning and it's hard to tell now because they don't get reported on much now, actual grassroots Black community movements getting a lot done with no funding, no particular leadership nor no big figurehead.
I don't know about the complete anarchy side of things, but all I do know is that the only actual protest or movement I think that ever actually really worked was Occupy, because there were no leaders. People are still producing things today out of what they learned out from Occupy: There were genuine, dialogical, distributed models of governance coming up, ways of doing parliament that were genuinely productive, generative, and distributed coming up, and all quite organically within that movement.
People will say they failed because they had no unified objectives and goals, that they couldn't even tell you what they were protesting about, that there wasn't a representative that we can speak to. They'll say these things because you're "supposed to" have a prepackaged solution and a leader because that's the liberal model.
The liberal model will tell you that if you want to have a movement, it must be organized around a mission statement, a set of KPIs, and a boss, that you have to have a leadership structure in place, and that you need deliverables, and a clear cut solution.
But then at the same time, like more white, disorganized parts of the Black Lives Matter movement, if I can say that... it can't be that either.
Everybody keeps thinking that it's a choice between authoritarianism at one end, and complete chaos and bloodshed on the other, and that you've got to choose some point on the continuum. But we've been thinking stuff through and living in groups for a long time. And I'm sure there's more than just one straight line between fascism and death and destruction and blood in the streets.
Is there somewhere between absolute imposed top-down order and bottom-up, everybody murdering each other, anarchy? I know there's more than that.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, so as we're closing off our conversation before we go into our lightning rounds, I want to bring up something that you shared before. You said how you and various Indigenous scholars have agreed that if we can't bring non-Indigenous peoples back in relation with the land, we're probably all going to die.
This clarified, for me, when you say that "Indigenous thinking can save the world", it's not one monolithic way of thinking—that it's just really in relationships to place. So on this note, what final thoughts would you like to share? And in light of this very honest conclusion, what are your calls to action for our listeners?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: It's hard because the most damaged people on the planet are going to have to set aside their IOUs, set aside any kind of justice, or hope for justice or karma, or anything else, and carry the load for another thousand years to keep everything alive. And it's going to be hard just to forgive and then hand over all this wealth of knowledge and relationship and everything else to the people who are still holding the capital from the last great heist and are not going to give it up or share it anyway.
The only way that's going to save the entire planet is to bring everybody back under the law of the land, and be very generous with our social systems, open them up and bring everybody back in.
That's going to be really hard, because at the same time, people are going to be trying to extract from that, corrupt that and everything else. I think if anyone's capable of navigating through that, it's us, as Indigenous peoples and marginalized peoples and impoverished peoples—the people who still have a demotic culture that's evolving from something real, a real-life of cause and effect, that know what it is to be punched in the face, that are still responding to actual physics and an actual lived reality.
The only way it'll work is going to be if we have diversity. Each bioregion is responding to the unique spirit and entities of place there to build a patterning of relation and an economy, a governance structure, there…
and then syndicating that with all the other bioregions around and syndicating out. You have to have that syndicated diversity and that balance, and that constant tension and balance between autonomy and collectivity, which it's a tricky one to do, but it's doable and scalable.
The only way for it to be scalable is to be syndicated. But it's not scalable if it's monolithic, which I think is what most people mean when they say scale now. But for me, when I say "scale", the first thing I think of it is the thing that comes off a fish, but that's just me.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: Anything by Vandana Shiva is worth looking at.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: I try not to get too motivated or inspired, and I tell myself that depression is very effective. Depression is a superpower. Look at all the people who have achieved the greatest things in history... they were all depressed. From whatever brand of politics, you'll find out that they all had severe depression. It's a superpower and helps you get stuff done.
Kamea Chayne: And I don't know if hope is the right word for you, but what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment that we might have a chance of breaking this destructive pattern we're in?
Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta: Just that... It's all fine anyway. And the planet will be fine. I have that basic irrational idea and belief that "I'd like things to be good for my children," that for some reason they have a right because they're children to some kind of future.
That's kind of irrational because I don't have that same feeling for myself, that I deserve any kind of future. I don't think most grown people do. They want that for their children.
I don't really find any particular hope about the future or think that we particularly deserve to be doing this or that. I know that we have a role as a custodial species and that's our ecological niche and that we've got a while to try and get back into that niche and sort things out. I guess if we don't do that, then everything that is now will die, and then there will be something else after that.
