 If it took Britain the exploitation of half the world to become what it is, how many worlds will India need? His idea was that this is not a way in which other large countries like India and China can basically grow. So what you're doing then is then you're basically saying that the most important task that these people are doing which is really regenerating your society is not valuable. And that's a horrible lesson, a horrible message to give. And it perpetuates then this kind of cycle of exploitation and feeling that the only way, the only good path that you're successful when you're most successful in exploiting others and exploiting nature, that that's what makes you successful. And that's a terrible message to give in terms of sustaining the planet and so forth. So I feel that we are at a situation where many kids today have this green consciousness. They're aware that the world is in danger and they're needing this movement really to change the way we do things but there's a huge gap between their consciousness and the consciousness of the people who are political and economic leaders. So that to me as an anthropologist is going to be one of the most interesting conflicts and struggles that we are going to see in the next decade or two. Basically you've created a situation where you've solved globalization as a good thing to people but they're not seeing any of the benefits. And this is where there was a failure of governance but there was also a failure of the ideology of the economic system which in a sense, you know, if you leave capitalism to capitalists they'll destroy it. That's why Mark said you need government because the government prevents the capitalists from destroying their own. The goose, you know, it's like the golden egg. And the idea is that governments force entrepreneurs and businesses from usurping all the wealth and they distribute some of it so that everybody feels they're invested in the system. But this is what did not happen and that is why we have, I feel, we have this enchantment with the political system that we see all over Europe and North America. The question really is, okay, I lost my job as an auto worker because the companies moved abroad. What did I gain in exchange? And the answer is not much, you know. For most people they didn't really gain anything. Their goods became cheaper, that's true. But if you don't have an income, it doesn't matter if your goods are cheaper, you can't afford to buy them anyway. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two... What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We're onsite at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is our second annual partnership with them. We are now going to be speaking to the incoming president of the American Anthropological Association from 2019 to 2021. We have Dr. Akil Gupta joining us on the show. Hi Akil. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the program. It's a pleasure. I'm so excited to talk to you. Akil, I want to start things off actually by talking to you about, you know, you have a very vast understanding of sociocultural anthropology. Things like transnational capitalism, infrastructure corruption, studying agriculture, contemporary capitalism, post-coloniality globalization. I mean, you take a very macro level perspective about the trajectory of our entire existence over time. So I want to know your thoughts on specifically, is the most upstream issue that we face that's causing all of the symptoms, all of the issues? Is it that we have feelings of separation and disconnectedness from what is actually the true interconnectedness of all things? Well, you could put it like that. I mean, I think that one of the biggest challenges facing us as anthropologists today is to think about the major issues that are threatening life on the planet. So climate change is a big issue. Global capitalism and the way it's going, those two are related to each other are big issues. And a lot of the other issues that have to do with inequality, with social relations, with our connectedness to each other are really tied to those issues. Because part of the reason why we have growing inequality in the world and less connectedness and less of a feeling of empathy, for example, for others, is because we are feeling more separated by the fact that there are growing chasm. There's a chasm between us and other people, even within the US, between the poor and the rich, between the urban and the rural, and certainly worldwide there's a growing chasm so that even people in India or China who are really wealthy live in bubbles. They live disconnected from the rest of society around them and sometimes they cannot escape like the environment. So they can't escape the pollution that's rising to incredible levels, but a lot of other things they can escape. So that's, I feel, part of the problem. Anthropology as a discipline, we have to basically come to terms with this. We have to say, where is this leading us as a culturally and civilizationally? And we have to say, what can we do about it? And how can anthropology as a discipline contribute to making things better? We also face the extinction of species, the warming of the ocean. There's all kinds of connected things that make non-human life on the planet precarious. And the precarity of non-human life is connected to the precarity of human life. Absolutely. So if we go all the way upstream to how when we're first birthed into the world, rather than being taught about how the breaths of air are from what the phytoplankton and trees breathe out and how the bite of the apple is actually powered by the sun and how that level of interconnectedness. We're now in the metropolises and there's light pollution. We exchange a sheet of paper for the piece of food. And the level of just spiritual cohesion and interconnectedness between us, now given the exponential technologies and these devices that are capturing our attention, is so much more disconnected rather than interconnected, which is this kind of first principle that if we felt that the symptom issues that you described, inequality, the divide between the rich and the poor, the pollution of the environment that we live in, all of these other, that I feel are downstream issues may be solved by this kind of first principle. Do you feel like that first principle can, we can implement strategies that can help that most upstream? And what do you think those strategies are? Yeah, so I mean, I think here the interesting question you raise is what is cause and what is effect, right? And are we disconnected from our world because of the way in which we live in the capitalist world, in which there is a commodification of nature and a separation of nature from humans? Or are we disconnected because we are learning the wrong ideologies or the wrong attitudes in our early life? And it's really hard to say that that's really the cause because much of what we learn, even about our connectedness to other beings and about connectedness to nature, we learn through the ideologies of the system in which we live, right? So in capitalism, we learn that nature is a resource. We can use it for our own benefit. We don't have to care about the earth, right? That's all part of what that teaches us. So people then internalize those attitudes and then they go out and then do things that further despoil nature. They don't care about other kinds of non-human life forms, et cetera, right? So it's a very tight interconnection and you can't really separate the two because this is the world in which we live and the world in which we are born. So it's not that we can somehow change our attitudes to something else when in fact we are learning those attitudes in our everyday practices, right? So I feel that those are caring for other beings, caring for non-human beings, caring for the earth, goes hand in hand with changing the ways in which we actually interact with each other in the economy and in society and so forth. And we can't have one without the other and one won't drive the other but they obviously support each other. So positive change in one supports positive change in the other. It does seem like the positive change on the most upstream one feels like we'll catalyze the greatest change on all of the downstream ones. And then also by doing things like rebuilding the actual environments from a more indigenous first principled understanding of our interconnectedness, we'll make it so that it's not like you can even be born into these boxes that are stacked up on top of each other in the metropolises where even if you have to leave the metropolis to feel like you're actually interconnected with trees and plants and animals and the beaches and the air and all that type of stuff, the stars. So I have another question because your study in this is very deeply unprecedented and so we need to ask you this question. The way that we've been globalizing over time, we've been moving to these metropolises. We've been creating the wealth. The wealth is, you know, the cities create wealth. People move to cities for more wealth and it takes people out of poverty and it's the story that is being sold to people to leave their rural areas and go to metropolises. And yes, there are things that are there like the most cutting edge western style health care is there. And the professorship of the institutions and these types of things. So how do we figure out what to do about the incredible benefits of these concentrations of the spirits of the brilliance that is there that is going on there yet also realize where globalization and where capitalism 2.0, the next iteration, is human-centered nature center interconnected style of capitalism. How do we figure that equation out? No, so far all the development models we've had have been models that take the experience of the west as the basis for development. So the idea is that in the UK, in America, people moved from rural areas to cities. They changed from doing agriculture to, you know, doing kind of factory work and urban and then service work and so forth. And so that's supposed to be the trajectory that everyone else should follow. Everyone else in the world should follow if they are to become rich and so forth. But of course it was built on the fossil fuel economy, right? So the whole industrial revolution and the entire basis of civilization as we know it today and globalization in the world today is built on fossil fuels. And we know that we cannot, that's not sustainable. It would probably destroy the planet before the human civilizations run out, right? There's a real chance that in a couple of generations we could be wiped out as a civilization. So we have to start thinking about doing drastically, things drastically differently. And whether that involves urbanization or not, I think it's an open question because you can in fact think about forms of urban life in which you would use less energy, you would be able to, you know, live in a more sustainable way, etc. But it's, I think that's to me less of an issue. Cities have a very old history in, you know, like the first cities came up 6,000, 7,000 years ago. But I think it's more about the idea of living sustainably and living on renewable resources and thinking about not basically digging stuff up from the ground and burning it, which is what we've been doing to have, you know, to have what is now called development, right? So the question really becomes like what alternative forms there might be of development? So one answer that was given, for example, by somebody like Gandhi who as early as 1908 wrote something saying the British form of civilization is not sustainable, right? So he could see it coming and he felt that this was not the way in which the rest of the world could live. And his reasoning, he has a famous quote which says that, if it took Britain the exploitation of half the world to become what it is, how many worlds will India need, right? His idea was that, look, this is not a way in which other large countries like India and China can basically grow. And so his solution was, okay, you build self-sustaining village communities, a decentralized form of life and that's the way you build resilient and sustainable life on the planet. But there have been other people who have said, no, you know, if you have urban centers, then you can actually provide people with a higher quality of life and you can make it sustainable, etc. So there are, I think there are in fact creative solutions and there are multiple creative solutions. It might be a mix of different things, but the bottom line has to be how can we live sustainably? And I don't think that there's enough of a sense of urgency about that question. And that might actually be something that destroys, you know, human life on this planet. It might not destroy the planet, it will destroy human life. You know, Akili, you know what this reminds me of? Immediate return hunter-gatherers. That's what this reminds me of, where you are so in deep interconnection with the natural environment around you that you go to the patch for the energy, the food, the nutrition, the value that you need from it just like if we were to do something like figure out what the next, what the free energy systems are that we want to be able to use. And then to let that patch that we took that nutrition from regrow plentifully and bountifully. And then we move on as these nomadic hunter-gatherer foragers did. And then now it seems as though this idea of wanting, you know, we want to, we have this great vision of trying to have 100 billion humans across celestial bodies and exploring their own unique endeavors into consciousness where they can bring their creative gifts forward into the world and maximize meaning and love and creativity and all these grand visions. But like you said, this key is sustainably, doing it sustainably. And frankly, a lot of the so-called solutions about colonizing other planets, et cetera, it's carrying on that same colonial extractive model. And that's not going to get us anywhere. It can have, it can have a more of a, the directional arrow that we go there with can be more about exploration and fun. And it can be not so as much about colonialization or fear of asteroids, but rather about fun and exploration and settlement, maybe. And also being able to have the future in that sense. But I also appreciated your point about that. You gave like a myriad of solutions towards sustainability. And I really appreciate how one of these that I think is most central we talked about was that idea of understanding the deep interconnectedness of how like immediate return hunter-gatherers live. But also regarding like what capitalism 2.0 looks like or when it is actually centered around humans and the environment and the next generations, the seventh generation principle of the indigenous, these types of things, that it looks like something like an inclusive stakeholder system where it's not just that the employees of a company and the investors of that company are the only shareholders but that also at least other stakeholders are like the gig economy workers and like the customers of that product and also the community that that company is actually headquartered in. And everyone owns that is part of that flourishing. And then you see the fruits actually being shared of the next technologies that are emerging. And even you know the question of which technologies emerge. So right now for example, if you're a really smart undergraduate and you're at a school like Stanford or MIT or whatever, the chances are that you will, your intelligence and your abilities will be channeled to profit making technologies. Not necessarily the ones that benefit humans the most but the ones that make the most money. And you know I've seen this. I've seen this as a faculty member where students are channeled from areas where they might be doing say fundamental research and doing you know like breakthroughs in fundamental physics or chemistry or biology that would change the way in which we treat disease or do other things and their intelligence is channeled from there into startups. Startups that basically are there to make money but they're not really doing things that will fundamentally change the way in which we understand the world or work on the world. So you see that happening already with universities are you know becoming increasingly corporatized in that way and they become profit making centers rather than centers for the production of knowledge that is for the benefit of all. And that's I think where a lot of the innovations and a lot of the energy of this generation is basically being squandered in this way and that's really unfortunate to see. Like the economic machinery of civilization is creating some sort of a pressure cooker at people's throats that instead of being able to do things like where Lorenzo de' Medici during the Italian Renaissance patron to Michelangelo Botticelli da Vinci to be able to express themselves artistically and create the Renaissance now we have like imagine Michelangelo also trying to like grow his art on social media trying to write grants for money and like it couldn't happen that way. And so it really it's not everybody can be seen as a circle stamp trying to be fit through the square hole of the economic machine. There have to be different vehicles for the for knowledge which now we see lots of children exploring project based learning around the sustainable development goals or emotional and social intelligences and all these other myriad of ways of learning. But then we also have other ways of being able to to produce the next world. So it's not just about fitting this circle through the square but it's also about things like understanding that every new person has their unique gift their unique shape. It's a snowflake for the human to bring their gift forth in the world. So how do we design a social fabric that has new funding vehicles some of the old ones like just patroning artists right that actually make it so that the the fluidity of the social fabric is conducive towards people actualizing and bringing their gifts for us. Yes. Now that's a huge challenge. I think for the educational system for the whole manner in which we really get people from a very young age to a productive life. And a lot of it is also about you know what counts as being useful work. So a lot of the work that people do today is not recognized caring for elders caring you know like school teachers are poorly paid in most first world countries except perhaps Finland or a couple of exceptions and they're not they don't have high social status you know and so forth. And then so what you're doing then is then you're basically saying that the most important task that these people are doing which is really regenerating your society is not valuable and that's a horrible lesson a horrible message to give and it perpetuates then this kind of cycle of exploitation and feeling that the only way the only good path that you're successful when you're most successful in exploiting others and exploiting nature that that's what makes you successful and that's a terrible message to give in terms of sustaining the planet and so forth. So I feel that we are at a situation where many kids today have this green consciousness. They're aware that the world is in danger like you know Greta, the world and they're leading this movement really to change the way we do things but there's a huge gap between their consciousness and the consciousness of the people who are political and economic leaders and that so that to me as an anthropologist is going to be one of the most interesting conflicts and struggles that we are going to see in the next decade or two the struggle between and it's sometimes portrayed as a generational struggle but it's really not so much a generational struggle as a struggle between different kinds of consciousness. I love the way you're putting that because it's as though then somehow we have this like archaic consciousness which is let's continue doing what has been working for us in the past which is actually not sustainable it's not able to support the next world that we want to build and then we have this new fresh consciousness of the youth that see a path towards that next world that is sustainable that is driven towards building a social fabric that maximizes prosperity for all and I agree that it's then in these next couple of decades that we see this pull between how the archaic consciousness loosens its grip and the new fresh next generation of consciousness comes with the next architectures and it's not going to happen without friction obviously but you know as Mark said a new civilization doesn't come into being without destroying the world I mean there's going to be conflict and I see this as being a source of you know we will see in the next two decades increasing conflict and struggle around this issue and it's going to divide societies you know across the world. So in terms of globalization one of the things that you know I feel has happened with globalization is that people often talk about globalization as something that just started in the 1990s you know and it's such a you know U.S. center not the American centered view of what's happening in the world. I was just saying over at Byron's house last night who's a South African and he was telling me since 1650 what's been you know happening. And even the whole you know story of European exploration in 1490s Vasco de Gama, Columbus going it's itself a shallow history of globalization because there's been a much longer history of globalization that you know has been there for a much longer period of time. So the way I look at it is I say that there are different phases in globalization and the 1990s marked a different phase of globalization one in which which was neoliberal which was spreading a certain kind of philosophy of you know pulling back government and allowing incredible concentrations of wealth to happen. And the failure of that even for a country like the U.S. or Canada Europe most countries in Europe was precisely that in fact free trade as most economists will tell you free trade is a plus-plus for everyone like everybody gains by free trade. And free trade in fact created a huge new source of wealth. So there was a lot of new wealth that was created by the agreements that launched globalization. But the problem was that it was all usurped by the one percent. So what you have is a situation where countries are getting wealthier but people are not. This I believe is 50% of all new wealth generated goes to the one percent. It's higher than that. It's even higher than that. And median male income in like places like the United States since 1970 are just flat aligning. It's flat. So basically you've created a situation where you've sold globalization as a good thing to people but they're not seeing any of the benefits. And this is where there was a failure of governance but there was also a failure of the ideology of the economic system which in a sense you know if you leave capitalism to capitalists they'll destroy it. That's why Marx said you need you need government because the government prevents the capitalists from destroying their own. The goose you know it's like the golden egg. And the idea is that governments force entrepreneurs and businesses from usurping all the wealth and they distribute some of it so that everybody feels they're invested in the system. But this is what did not happen and that is why we have I feel we have the disenchantment with the political system that we see in basically all over northern Europe all over Europe and North America. The same principle that applies in ecosystems of trees where the carbon that is being sequestered by the ones that are very high that can then distribute that carbon to the smaller trees is not happening in our own social fabric as humans. Exactly. And if you don't do that then people are going to get this. So the question really is okay I lost my job as an auto worker because the companies moved abroad. What did I gain in exchange? And the answer is not much. You know for most people they didn't really gain anything. Their goods became cheaper. That's true. But if you don't have an income it doesn't matter if your goods are cheaper you can't afford to buy them anyway. And nothing else came into its place as. While rent a skyrocket insurance skyrockets all these other things go quadruple in price. Right. And then we're stuck with a flat lined income. Income is. Yeah. And so there's been a real loss of jobs and a redistribution of jobs. So a lot of white men in America at the level of middle management and lower have either lost their jobs or downgraded their jobs. And there hasn't been so all in the name of globalization. So they're supposed to be benefiting by this thing but they're not really. Many many are and many are not. And then this is kind of one of the big if you're trained as an engineer. Oh you are getting some great benefits of globalization. If you are trained in the service industry you are in dire need to be retrained as A.I. and automation come and take over of the area at what humans can do better than A.I. and robotics is becoming smaller and smaller over time. And so who was going to own the robotics and the A.I. and the substrates of the virtual worlds and the neuro technologies and biotechnologies that we augment ourselves with because those owners are going to be the ones that then have this potential to do some sort of a bifurcation a speciation away from the 8 billion other ones that are deemed as this what do we need useless class for. And spiritually speaking indigeneity would say you're out of your mind to think that way. This is all deeply interconnected. No exactly. So the problem is it's a continuation of this trend. So if you have one percent of the population getting all the wealth and now you have robotics and A.I. taking over the jobs that other people did and you have nothing to replace it with no meaningful work, no redistribution of income. What are they going to do? And so it will create even more conflict. So I see that there are potentially sources of conflict that come from issues of climate change and so forth but also that come from economic inequality and the two in some ways converge because the people who are saying let's have a more sustainable life are also saying let's have a more equal mode of living. So we are not because having a sustainable life is only possible if you have incomes that will allow you to live in a decent way. And so now what we have is the function that governments did before about for redistributing income etc. is being taken up increasingly by private individuals who are running their own forms of government. So the large foundations like the Gates Foundation etc. they run a parallel government system because they basically spend billions and billions of dollars on things that they want to do whether it's about malaria in Africa or whatever. But it's not in any way coordinated or answerable to other agencies that have been doing this for a long time or the governments of those countries or even the people who are being treated etc. It's not answerable to anyone. And so it's not clear to me that that's actually a better way to do things because there are no checks on it. There are no balances. There's no embeddedness within a larger vision of the social good. And you're giving an example of what is the best case scenario of one of the 1500 billionaires there's the purchasing of the fifth yacht or the fifth home or the fifth car, the fifth watch etc. that is also happening. It really is if you are sequestering the most amount of wealth from the civilization there is a moral burden to also build the next world where it enables that social fabric of a gift economy of deep levels of interconnectedness of bringing unique gifts forth. We have much more to explore. I'm so excited that congratulations on being the president of the American Anthropological Association starting now to 2021. We're really excited to continue doing partnerships and dives into conversations like these into actually architecting all of the solutions that we were talking about to ensure that prosperous future. Thank you. I look forward to it. Thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below on all these great things that Akil was teaching us, everyone. Check out the links in the bio below to Akil's work also to the American Anthropological Association and support them, please. Also support our show simulation so we can continue doing cool things like coming on site for these partnership interviews. You can find all the links in the bio below and go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace. That's a wrap. Okay. Thank you so much, Akil. Oh, nice. I really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you.