Political Revolution in the 21st Century: How Not Why.

revolution is not an end in itself revolution is not a perpetual state being a revolutionary is not a profession and certainly nobody should get involved with a revolutionary cause a revolutionary war or what could be charitably called acts of revolution just for the sake of being a revolutionary some of you will know exactly what i'm talking about some of you have known people young or old who have been seduced by the notion of being a revolutionary or we've been seduced by the specific notion of being a part of a revolution and for them it's become and then in itself an end in itself the objectives of revolution define disambiguate and clarify what we mean by revolution the purpose of a revolution any revolution is what i call the total revision of society the total revision of the laws the revision of the constitution if you like and i say this disambiguates what revolution means because if we accept that as our first tenet here then we can look at for example the american civil war as a revolutionary war the american civil war concluded with amendments to the constitution with the revision of the constitution and the legal political and social reality of everything in that society that would not have happened and could not have happened without the civil war so i'm actually expanding the concept of revolution not narrowing it with this definition right but if hypothetically you could write a new constitution for the united states of america without a revolutionary war without any war without any a single person being hurt or killed right that would be preferable that would be superior now i could say this about the american civil war in relation to slavery racism so on and so forth we could also say it about the first american revolution the american revolution that wrote the constitution of the united states of america if if it were possible to make the transition directly from the old constitution to the new constitution without a war without a civil war without this really a kind of world war because don't forget spain and france all these international empires uh participated and there were terrible consequences for the indigenous people there were genocidal elements to the wars a lot more if it if it were possible it would be preferable because as i've opened this video by clarifying right revolution is not and then in itself the purpose of revolution is not to have a revolution or to live in a state of perpetual revolution nor is it to be a revolutionary it is to instead accomplish this kind of revision in this video i'm going to really contrast just two allegories for how people think about the pursuit of revolutionary social change in the 21st century and some of you some of you been watching my youtube content for years some of you been reading my books for years reading my writing whether it was in book or article form some of you your your imaginations will leap ahead uh to what i'm getting at in certain specific applications for specific but i think this can be said also about haiti about jamaica about china today uh i mean communist revolutionary revolutions against communism not the revolutions that established communism this has all kinds of applications undreamt of shall we say applications far beyond the remit of what's usually discussed on my youtube channel suppose you have a friend who has made up his mind that he's going to cheat on his wife and you're sitting down and talking to this friend and there's different types of counselling and different types of advice you can give him and perhaps as the conversation goes perhaps it begins with you counseling him one way and then realizing he's not going to take that advice and then trying to to counsel him in another for the purpose of this video i'd say there are two ways of cheating on your wife and both properly understood really entail that this man should be seeking out the company of a woman he really trusts he really respects i think it's actually interesting to ask the question with the clarifications you're about to hear with all the footnotes in the argument about to be revealed maybe he needs to trust he needs to respect his girlfriend more than he trusts and respects his wife not less we live in a cultural context where obviously the presumption is that he has a much higher level of trust and respect with the woman he's married to as opposed to the woman he's cheating on her with or or what have you and and let's be honest even in the context of an open relationship polyamory whatever you want to say i think these are deep-seated assumptions that we have that i'm here challenging the two ways he can go about cheating on his wife one is to pursue a woman that he trusts to really work with him to be on his side to be his companion and collaborator in deceiving his wife where he has a girlfriend and in effect he's saying this girlfriend you and i have to get along you and i have to be in this together i'm not going to deceive you because you and me together like if my wife picks up on the phone or in the middle of a conversation if my wife walks in on something if my wife catches me uh ordering food that's being delivered to your place you are going to come up with an explanation like i'm not you know i'm not going to be here on my own i'm going to dry you're also going to make up some explanation for why uh the man sent flowers to your house so the man ordered food said to your house that you know where the mistress the girlfriend is herself a conscious intentional close collaborator with a very high level of mutual trust and mutual respect between just two of the three people involved in this love triangle that's one way to cheat your wife you know what another way is where this man is seeking out a girlfriend he's seeking out a mistress and where he says to her openly look you have to make an effort to get along with my wife where the man says he's not going to lie to his wife he's not going to deceive his wife he's going to be open and honest with his wife and he wants this other woman to really work with him and also work with her where all three parties are going to get along think about what an incredibly high level of mutual trust mutual respect you're talking about there now a lot of you your minds will be reeling in what way is this like a revolutionary cause a lot of people work from the false assumption that the type of cooperation that can change the world the type of cooperation that makes political movements successful that makes religious movements successful makes social movements successful civil society organizations successful they work from an unexamined assumption that the model of cooperation is military military cooperation is based on hierarchy and blind obedience in the absence of mutual trust in the absence of mutual respect so i've mentioned this in relation to some current and ongoing wars i've said to people if you join the army you may have to work with collaborate with someone who is a neo-nazi and you're you have no choice you're assigned to the same artillery unit you say oh yeah yeah that guy that guy brett you know he's a bit of a nazi he's a bit crazy but i'll tell you something you know when we're out in the battlefield you know he's a good man he backed me up and it's it's hard i'm ethnically jewish for me to be assigned to a military unit where i have to cooperate with a nazi is going to be hard for him to cooperate with me it's going to be hard and he might go home and tell his his friends in the neo-nazis hey you know there's this jewish guy and we were in the artillery unit together you know what he's all right he's okay you know i tell him all the time you know he's one of the good ones this is this is not a rare phenomenon like the type of racism that exists within military units there are southern rednecks who hate black people and end up becoming friends with black people because they're in the the army together and there were probably black people who hate southern rednecks and they end up getting to know each other this kind of thing if you are an army recruiter or an army commander you're in a position to say yeah you end up recruiting some people who are neo-nazis and you recruit some people who are communists and some people who are black and white and jewish and christian and what have you and on what principle are they made to cooperate collaborate in the pursuit of any kind of military objective whether that's a revolutionary war a counter-revolutionary war whether it's filling up sandbags and building a barrier to prevent a flood the army does that kind of thing too it's not always war that these people are are collaborating cooperating and doing well it's nothing like cheating on your wife is it right you don't have to respect these guys you don't have to trust these guys and the commanders i'm using this sentence broadly the people who are giving orders at whatever level whatever the whether it's a general a commander or otherwise people giving orders they don't have to take someone immoral and transform him into being a better man they don't have to take a neo-nazi and raise his level of political and ethical education such that he sheds his skin and is reborn as a better man right all they have to do is enforce discipline whereby they say look i don't give a [ __ ] if you read mind conf every night before you go to bed i don't give a [ __ ] if someone else is reading the bible and someone else is reading the quran when i tell you to stand on this dotted line you stand when i tell you to draw your gun you draw your gun and when i tell you to pull the trigger you pull the trigger and that's it you're here to follow orders there's no scope for independent thought creativity initiative there doesn't need to be any trust between us and if you've met and spoken anyone in the military or you've read the autobiographies of anybody in the military there are plenty of guys who who hated their commanding officer or command they may have hated everybody going up the chain of command but they followed those orders and you will meet guys sometimes instead their experiences they really respected their commanding officer but they hated the other guys who were their equals who were in the same unit with them at the same pay grade who they had to cooperate with that might also be your experience right this form of cooperation is nothing like you and i working together to make a documentary film it's nothing like you and i working together to make an illustrated children's story book and again then getting an adaptation of that storybook to be a cartoon on netflix all right documentary films change the world a documentary film is never going to be a revolution unto itself it's not it's not uh obviously throughout history before we had cinema before we had the internet of course books changed the world writing a book publishing a book changing people working together to publish a book can change the world right any of these forms of creativity can change the law how are you going to do that you know the simplest steps leading up to revolutionary change they require relationships with a profound level of mutual respect a profound level of mutual trust and not just trust in planned situations that's why i'm talking about this scenario like cheating in life what if someone interrupts the phone call what if something embarrassing and unexpected can you trust that person they're gonna do the right thing they're gonna do the right thing for me they're gonna do the right thing for us they're not going to sell me out they're not going to stab me in the back they're not going to let me down it's a really really interesting kind of trust no i'm going to add a significant addendum to this in using these creative examples like making a documentary film together right you might think that i'm only open to the possibility of intellectuals who have read aristotle working together intellectuals who have read cicero and thucydides that i am only interested in collaborating with someone else on a documentary film collaborating with someone else in publishing an illustrated book who i regard as my equal you might be implicitly assuming as so many people do in our generation that equality is the prerequisite to the pursuit of political change or even that the objective of all political change is equality right like whether you've thought about that as a contribution as the outcome of revolutionary struggle or has the input at the beginning you know that it's the first presupposition is that we work together as equals no not at all okay a man and his wife are very unlikely to be equal they're most marriages most good marriages there are dynamic inequalities there are some things the wife is good at and some things the husband is good at and they're not the same things they have different strengths and different weaknesses and they learn to lean on each other they learn to benefit from each other's help and support and they also learn the ways in which they're equal but of course there are some marriages where the inequality is absolute where you know one person is just a completely useless idiot and the other person's an intelligent highly effective person i would not want to be trapped in that kind of relationship myself no no the relationship between man and wife is unequal the relationship between this man and his mistress whom he's cheating on his wife with is unequal and the relationship between the wife and the mistress is unequal there's no possibility of deluding yourself into equality and guys if any of you are in a polyamorous relationship relationship i'll tell you right now the worst thing you can say to your wife is i love the both of you equally if you get caught cheating or you're not even caught you're open about it then someone else you reverse the genders the worst the worst thing my girlfriend could possibly say was oh i regard you two guys it's the same i work hard what [Laughter] the best thing you can say is you two guys are totally different i appreciate you in different ways you bring different things into my life right that melissa is laughing her ass off camera by the way you know that's what you should say you shouldn't emphasize the equality you should emphasize the asymmetry the inequality and the argument you have to make is that this can be a complementary inequalities that we can work together this can be this can be great right this can be good this can be tolerable you know whatever the whatever the the case may be so i gave melissa an example this morning that came up spontaneously i made a video this morning talking about antidepressant medication psychiatric medication the health effects the brain damage and specifically and especially brain damage for fetuses unborn infants children so these are drugs that have very serious negative side effects most people are uncomfortable talking with them women take these drugs during pregnancy and then they have serious consequences for the babies you can watch that video if you don't believe me i cite a whole bunch of scientific sources and studies but even if you don't believe me let's just continue this as think of it as a hypothetical example but you may be horrified to find it is much more actual than it is hypothetical okay so what i said to melissa was what's depressing to me about making a video like that is knowing that i'm not going to get even one email from someone wanting to work with me wanting to collaborate with me wanting to want to help me you know and there are all kinds of different ways you can help i mean one way you can help is donating money to me i have an ongoing fundraiser right now you can just stuff money in my pockets you know if it were enough money okay right and we're leaving this aside and and maybe we should talk a bit more maybe that'll be a question from the audience maybe questions about fundraising and how it fits into the model i'm setting out here of revolution how not why um i pointed out to melissa look i could be working with someone i could be collaborating with someone who is not my equal intellectually who is not my equal in terms of book learning but someone who was just passionate about this and you had a kind of sociable gregarious character this is an example i came up with the top of my head someone who could stand on the street and do interviews with people and say hey i'm gonna name four of the most commonly used drugs in the united states of america and i want you to guess which one causes brain damage to babies if the mother takes during pregnancy you know and so you can kind of imagine it's kind of a game show format okay doesn't take a genius all right you guys can imagine the kind of you know it might be someone with a background in acting might be someone with a background in comedy right someone with a skill set we're not equal we're unequal but they're really good at that you know it's and by the way their motivations their ethics may also not be equal they may be motivated by wanting to become a successful comedian about wanting to become famous for wanting to make money they may have other motivations involved when you bring people together to work on a project a documentary film or a youtube video right it's gonna be unequal different people are going to contribute different kinds of talents and my kind of talent isn't the only one that matters now an even easier example if i want to publish a children's story book and if you guys aren't guessing this is for propagandistic reasons it is for political reasons it is for revolutionary reasons it really is the illustrator i work with the person who's going to draw the pictures they don't need to have read aristotle they don't need they don't need to be on my level intellectually or ethically or anything else like in theory you could work with someone where their only redeeming quality is they're an incredibly talented illustrator they know how to hold a paintbrush you know they can and that's all they've got going for them gonna reduce the scale of revolutionary change i'm gonna increase the intensity because i think this is something all of you guys can relate to uh emotionally intellectually and and otherwise um what if we want to change the education system how are you going to improve education in your country in your city in the united states of america daycare primary school secondary school high school university i'm telling you something right now and i've made so many videos discussing this that i'm not going to digress to do anything there the way to reform education right i think you all have a sense of what i mean by reform we're talking about a change that is as profound and startling as what happened at the end of the american civil war it's something like an amendment to the constitution or ripping up your constitution and writing a whole new constitution right if you want that kind of change that kind of revision in your society it will never be accomplished by standing by the side of the road holding a cardboard sign and chanting you can do that today tomorrow next year you can spend the rest of your life organizing groups of people who hold cardboard signs and chanting and you will not move one inch closer towards having a better education system in your country in your city i'm using the united states of america as an example here because it has a certain kind of democracy right that is effective nowhere and obviously it's not effective within congress china now what do you want to do in the pursuit of and i'm not talking about trivial change here i'm not talking about getting a five percent raise for the teachers salaries talk about real revolutionary change we have really new fundamentally different ideas of education one thing you could do is to make a documentary movie right that's not the final step but it could be a first step you make a documentary movie with everything everything that's wrong about the education system right now okay that's pretty interesting someone might watch your documentary film and say hey you know what the problem with your documentary is you don't have a positive example of your philosophy your theory of education working really well in contrast to what you're criticizing good point now you're gonna do a fundraiser and you're gonna raise millions of dollars and you're gonna have a team of people work together and you're gonna own and operate a private school that demonstrates the way you think education should be done now you can make another documentary movie i'd say the first one was successful and now you have the contrast okay how are you going to accomplish this on the level of human organization this video is about how not why even in just making the first documentary film in the sequence of three steps i've outlined here right again the revolution isn't over yet you you realize there's maybe there's a whole century of struggle maybe a decade right but okay now we're talking about the beginnings what could really be a powerful movement with real transformational power right this is a good start it's going to start with something really really positive for the future of the world think about the type of cooperation you need to have in making the first documentary movie and then in creating and managing that school all right obviously several other people will have to be teachers in this school right my relationships with them will be unequal they don't know everything i know and quite likely they're people who saw my movie they saw the documentary and think i'm really honest like maybe you make documentary maybe you publish a short book or manifesto or something that goes so people who really like the film can buy the book and read more of what your proposal is for how to improve education okay you're gonna have to select people who will work with you in running this school whom you can trust if there is just one bad person on your staff the reputation of your school is ruined you could have one person who's a pedophile you could have one person who's a drug addict you could have one person who has a violent temper and loses control and beats the students like think about all the different ways this could go wrong you could have one person who is okay in the job interview but can't cope with the stress and they're just not that intelligent and they make a mockery of your whole philosophy of education and guess what somebody else can make a documentary film about how terrible your school is you know how you're you know because you had one bad one bad teacher you're worth so without getting into all the questions of what redeeming qualities these teachers would need to have and the way in which by the way they again they may have redeeming qualities i don't have like i might be the guy who can make a hard-hitting documentary film saying the university is broken here's what's wrong with universities the high school system is broken here's what's wrong with high schools we go all the way down i mean it'd be a lot of work day care centers kindergartens we could really do hard-hitting critique of these institutions someone might say well you know you even though you had what it took to make this film you don't have all the call you can't be a one-man movement you can't you you probably can't even be the school principal someone with a certain kind of background in management and actuarial science there's a lot of paperwork and a lot of you know logistics involved there are all these other roles here you can't play so who's gonna play them probably other people who who lack some of my redeeming qualities and who have different redeeming qualities of their own the level of trust the level of mutual respect it's nothing like the army and it's natural people think revolution they think revolutionary war they think civil war they think of this in a militaristic way and they think of it as encompassing and including people with totally different political values totally different uh presumptions about life you know as as war does i mean both today and in ancient times you know this isn't new you know they think one of the terms left-wingers like uses big intent big tent political organization we have a big tent uh in england they say a broad church a church that includes many different uh beliefs and this kind of thing as opposed to having a narrow church and i'm aware one of the criticisms directed against vegans this is the first time i've used the word vegan in this video but many people say about vegans oh you're engaging in a purity test you only want people who are pure enough who agree with your with your your beliefs your conceits this sort of thing you know okay right what i'm saying is there's a profound and almost invisible mistake in thinking that these are hierarchical relationships based on giving orders and blind obedience based on leaders and followers as opposed to thinking about it being much more like cheating on your wife now again one model i suggested you is that you're cheating on your wife and your wife knows about it this is more like an open relationship for like polyamory but that's also work i mean making your mistress feel good about your relationship with your wife you know neither party is jealous or the other or hating on the other making your wife feel good about your mistress nobody feels like they're being cheated or deceived or deprived of something they're entitled to right like which which model is is more work and my point is this this can never operate on the basis of one man giving orders that just the two other people follow one person there's a whole range of spontaneous and sincere activity that can't be micromanaged all right what does it take to make a film like the artistic and creative elements of the collaborative elements you can't you can't give orders for these things you need people who are spontaneously sincerely positively motivated to contribute to your film what does it take to run a school a school a daycare center a university even we can think of this at any level of education right you can't command from people the type of partly improvised you know the what are you gonna do sit there in the room with the professor while they're doing q a with the students are you gonna you know breathe down their neck and observe everything they're doing and try to ring from them exactly the type of you know performance you command it's it's just not the case that this is like having men in uniform standing in a firing squad uh pulling the trigger when you when you give the orders you're actually talking about a kind of trusting collaboration where a lot of the time it's like look i'm not going to be in the room when you get that phone call you're going to get a phone call from my wife who's angry at you or something and you've got to handle it you've got to improvise or make up your own story i'm not going to be in the room telling you what to do i'm not going to manage it for you when you deal with infinite known and unknown you know situations right those are the relationships that make revolutionary change possible that is the question of you know how not why so from the very first videos on this channel i've discussed the extent to which the history of the world has been made by the salon all right holbach and helvetius in their salon um you know yes the french revolution involved armies it involved decapitations and bloodshed it also involved elections and a parliament and a new constitution a lot of people want to kind of discuss the french revolution purely in terms of mob violence and leave out the democratic aspect the procedural aspect and the way in which they really did have a working parliamentary system also right but i don't think it's controversial to say that without the intellectual groundwork created by people like voltaire people like hobach and helvetias in their salons many of whom never dreamt of the revolution that would come and many of whom died before they saw the revolution uh sir but another one the baron de condor say right we were talking about conor say just just the other day you know it is not controversial to say without them the revolution would have been no revolution at all now again when i talk about the american revolution i'm normally um trying to de-glamorize it rather than glamorize it the american revolution is so storied and so mythified that you know my role very often is to kind of debunk misconceptions about the american revolution but there can be no doubt again that in a period of at least 15 years before the american revolution right there were these intellectuals including benjamin franklin another interesting contrast including benjamin rush i just mentioned we could go through the whole intellectual pre-history of the american revolution there there were salons benjamin franklin very clearly and explicitly organized salons so on some of them to do with science some more to do with uh politics some more to do with religion you know but that intellectual life is what i'm going to emphasize okay many of the people who were leaders in this sense of the revolution did not think of themselves as leaders many of the people who set the groundwork for evolutionary change did not think of themselves as being in any way involved in a revolution or setting the basis or something that would later become a revolution for many of them it didn't occur to them right many of the people who were heroes never thought of what they were doing as heroic and this is another very strange asymmetry that creeps in when we include the intellectual component in the assessment of how revolution works how not why we can pursue fundamental revisions to our society fundamental political change if you guys have a moment hit the thumbs up button now's the time to do it i will read your questions and comments if they're not on my level i'm not going to reply to them but if you have anything intelligent to say i warned uh the first people who showed up here that this would be a short broadcast so think of your questions in advance and you know if you have left this video really with a lot of questions to ask i would remind everyone i have invited people to send me questions about my current book veganism the future of an illusion that books is one dollar digitally it's four dollars on paper so you can own it is it convenient babe yeah do you wanna just pass me so it's a good looking book a lot of a lot of entertainment for four dollars so you get it on paper for four dollars oh look at that i haven't aged a day honestly uh yeah suitable for framing too and you can see it doesn't take that long to read but i haven't had an open call for questions on the internet now for at least a month i've said look i'm happy to do a video answering questions but um part of what this book is addressed to and the next book to be published hopefully within the next two weeks i've really got to finish it and publish it the next book to be published called no more manifestos part of what it is answering is how do we live our lives without the hope of a revolution what does it mean to be a dissident intellectual to really pursue fundamental political and social change in the absence of an actual revolution or in the absence of any hope or dream of participating in privilege and you know another way to put that is what does it mean to be an intellectual pursuit of political change when you don't have the delusion that somebody else is going to do the hard work for you because for most people that's what the dream of revolution is isn't it it's just oh don't worry wait till the revolution comes somebody else is going to do the thinking for you someone else is going to do the planning for you someone else is going to do all the hard work for you and my message is no uh uh you know wherever you you live if the education system if you think it's a disaster in michigan if you think it's a disaster in ontario if you think the education system is bad in the british isles i don't know lancashire lancashire you know what you know who you don't you know who nothing is going to change we're waiting for you to show the initiative you know what i mean and there was a time when it wasn't obvious that the whole world was waiting for voltaire but they were voltaire had to show that initiative a whole bunch of weirdos holbach and helvetias any of these guys you know before the revolution came it wasn't clear what the significance would be uh all right so no revolutionary change in the education sector you can't wait for someone else change is waiting for you no one else is going to do it for you so in that sense don't passively expect the revolution to happen you have to be the revolution you have to start living the revolution you have to start acting on your own initiative and your own authority uh right now and look i've chosen education as my example here again you can read my whole book written about this in no more manifestos the major uh example i use again and again is the reform of policing the reform of the justice system police brutality and so on although i have to say there are quite a few pages about reforming the university system it will manifest those two both examples are in there but you know so we just lived through several years of radical demands for change under that heading right so where is change gonna come from all right it's you and i all right and obviously in relation to veganism i've made so many videos about this the change is not gonna come from standing on the sidewalk holding a sign if you wanna reform psychiatric care or antidepressants medical science any of these things i hope you think of it this kind of change it's not going to come from anyone but people doing exactly what voltaire did as strange as that may seem it's going to come from dissident intellectuals providing leadership it's going to come in a sense from distant intellectuals doing what socrates tried to do but failed and i think it's very easy to imagine with these these examples i've set out someone could make a documentary film that really lets people know on a scale of millions of people women are taking antidepressants during pregnancy and giving birth to children with brain damage giving birth to children with mental abnormalities even if it's not your son or your daughter your son or daughter is going to be sitting in a classroom with people who are affected by this fad pseudoscience of antidepressants this is a huge impact one documentary film could ring the alarm bell and it could be the beginning of a profound kind of social and cultural change all right and under any of these headings any of these examples i am not saying a documentary film is a revolution unto itself it's not but i think it's clear for you how uh the role of the creative arts and the way in which the minority of us who are dissident intellectuals acting in the public interest we have to make use of the arts to reach out to to wake up to guide um our fellow men and then create the basis for a better political regime and future fundamentally for the revision of the constitution both in the literal sense of a written document and the more abstract sense of what it is that defines our society our culture are the political status quo i just pointed to melissa melissa this is your chance [Music] all right looking at the written questions uh now hmm so i i'm gonna reply to a few different questions under just one heading so i'm seeing these questions from oliver [Music] so oliver i'm gonna i'm going to answer all your questions under one heading part of the title of this video is that we're talking about revolution in the 21st century no one has asked this question but i'll state as a question how is revolution in the 21st century different from every other century that came and went before and a very simple answer i think in this century now more than ever we have to have these close trusting collaborations based on mutual respect even mutual admiration that's more like cheating on your wife and not these militaristic hierarchical relationships i think in the 21st century we don't have a choice some of you might not know this example and some of you might immediately remember this there were quite a few scandals showing that there were insane communists revolutionary left-wing extremist communists who were part of bernie sanders organizations back when bernie sanders was making his bid to become president of the united states now these people just volunteered these people they probably just went and filled out a form to say they wanted to volunteer to somehow have a position inside bernie sanders organization and whatever i mean you know some of these people answer phones some of them hand out pamphlets this kind of political organization maybe a few of them were at higher levels of of command i honestly don't remember that in that kind of detail now today in the 21st century that's put on youtube that's put on twitter the whole world sees it and it's deeply embarrassing and it discredits bernie sanders movement an example that might be harder for you guys to sympathize with but it's it's just human uh patrice cullers the leader of black lives matter you see the way she's had these weird cronyistic relationships with people friends and lovers and what have you and who she's sharing this money with in her position of authority having collected many tens of millions of dollars in donations and so on in her in her position of power and everyone looks at this and says well this has no legitimacy this is terrible so on and so forth and you can think though what if you weren't her position would you want to make the mistake bernie sanders made and just let anyone fill out a form and say they want to be a revolutionary say they want to join your revolution and you start giving them millions of dollars or you know are you only going to work with people you can trust and and who can you trust maybe it's your ex-boyfriend maybe it's your ex-girlfriend maybe it's your your baby daddy maybe it's you know this other activist you've been friends with yours where instead it starts to look like like cronyism but my point is this today all of this is visible it's visible to all the participants within an organization it's visible to the donors it's visible to the the general public um so i mean the level of transparency you need to operate a civil society organization to operate a charity to collect donations for some civil political cause uh the level of transparency and accountability that every organization big and small must have right i think that destroys the prospect of more dehumanizing mechanistic militaristic relations of of giving commands now it's the sort of thing i joke about in different ways um [Music] you know what if every student in every classroom had a a camera on their hat let's say that although in their lapel had a camera and a microphone recording the behavior of the teacher at all times this might not be far off in the future i saw a lawsuit that was launched by a group of concerned parents when they put a microphone in their kids backpack for just one day and it was a mentally disabled child and they recorded all the misbehavior of the teachers for just one day it was really saddening and a glimpse into into human nature now something i've said to my own daughter someone said to my colleagues and so on um you have to live your life as if the camera is on all the time you know and you any of these positive examples so the recent past how would the black panthers have been different if they had to deal with today's levels of transparency and accountability how would the ira have been different i do not sympathize whether to support the ira it's a terrorist nevertheless you know any historical example you want how would the uh feminists uh the original suffragettes you know how would they have coped with this level of surveillance frankly um and accountability okay well i'm i'm giving you my answer i think this is the way in which the pursuit of political change in the 21st century is different from any other century that that came before and you can no longer have the attitude that there are people in your organization people who collaborate with people you work with even say the illustrator for my book um my colleagues in making a documentary film uh i can't make excuses i can't sweep it under the rug these have to be people i really trust i really respect and it's in that way that i think there's the potential for that that older model it's obviously associated with the 17th century 18th century 19th century the model of the salon to once again become um the most important building block in the pursuit of political and social change