Legal Shamen & Economic Witches

Yuval Noah Harari & Russell Brand on nations vs. villages

While I’m banned from YT, here is another video I did on Yuval, now up on Rumble also. The description reads:

In Russell Brand's interview, Yuval looks at nations as spells cast by legal shaman. I answer that we need economic witches to take back the commons. I look at how nations prevent people from feeding themselves in India and profit from climate change at the COPs. Yuval states that nations make us care about the stranger but I find Israel negates that point. I imagine California breaking into 4 Swedens or 100 Icelands to be a manageable size for matrix government. Nuclear disaster, climate change, and runaway technology can all have small solutions more effective than the patriarchal pyramid of power.

In this, I talk about four areas where I agree with Yuval and four areas of departure. Here are the agreements:

1. What creates nations and corporations is a form of legal shamanism. They are legal spells that have been cast that then dictate ownership or the ‘assumption’ of ownership.

2. If you don’t have power, you exaggerate it. If you do have power, you hide it.

3. Neither the right nor the left have a vision for the future. I talk about how we need to be developing a pragmatic, realistic, feet-on-the-ground vision for what we want to see.

4. If you don’t understand economics, you don’t understand real power. And then he asks, “And who among us understands economics?” Although alone in the kitchen, I had to raise my hand since my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, looks at the history of the world through an economic lens.

What are the ways in which I differ?

a feminine economy

Both Russell Brand and I support a feminine form of economics that promotes small scale sovereignty or local self-governance, as he call it. In this conversation, Russell talks about the 10,000 villages that Gandhi wants to break India into. Yuval says that’s not a model for the 21st century because 1.3B people are too many to feed to experiment.

I protest that Modi isn’t feeding anyone—according to Vandana Shiva, he’s preventing people from feeding themselves by Bill Gates’ Green Revolution that’s resulted in thousand of farmer suicides by drinking Round-Up. In Patriarchal Pyramid or Matriarchal Matrix? (linked at the end) I talk about military actions like Operation Green Hunt that’s stated objective is to move 85% of people out of rural areas and into congested cities.

I believe that feeding people is too important to leave to any form of centralized government and I’d go further in dividing Gandhi’s 10,000 commonwealths into 100 neighborhoods of around 130 people each. That’s the range where you really have inclusion.

the stranger within

Yuval says that nationalism is a good thing because it makes us care about the stranger. I’m a little shocked that Yuval can say that living in Israel where there is no example more blatant of a nation that doesn’t care about the intimate stranger, the stranger within.

Israel has two different classes with different laws for Palestinians including the age of adulthood, so that Palestinian children can be convicted as adults, torn from their families and no one can accuse them of torturing children. That’s a sleight of hand that’s disguising the reality.

When Yuval says this, he’s talking about things like nationalized healthcare and paying taxes. But that’s really like paying for health insurance: you contribute to it so that it will cover you. Taking care of your own isn’t really caring about the stranger.

His example of a nation that has a high quality of life is Sweden. Sweden has 10M people but California has almost 40M. If California could be four nations with the power to take care of ourselves, I think it would feel much more inclusive and give more ability to care for the people and the territory within it.

Iceland is 350,000 people. California would make 100 Icelands, which would really give us the ability to care for the people within our borders. Iceland is able to crowdsource its Constitution, determine its trade policies, and kick out the vulture banks. A county in California at the same size can decide what color to paint their park benches. And all because of legal shamanism.

free will for individuals or communities?

Yuval says that people are manipulated through fear, greed and hatred. I think that people are manipulated through a belief in their own superiority, which Yuval is demonstrating in this statement. He doesn’t think that he’s fearful, greedy or hateful, only other people. So he sees his own ability to make rational decisions for the good of others but not for people to decide for themselves. So if everyone was like Yuval, he implies, self-governance would work, but they’re not.

Another thing Yuval has said is that people have very limited free will, our free will is determined by family and genetics. I ask, “Is the lack of free will equal for an Israeli and for a Palestinian?” I don’t think that’s because of genetics. I think that’s because of legal shamanism that says, “Israelis own this land. No real people lived here.”

If we were to take away that legal shamanism and give communities back the economic ability to determine their own priorities, we don’t know what they’d do. Before we can decide that people wouldn’t choose to care for each other, we need to enable that. I think that people would choose what Yuval would, given the option.

the three biggest disasters

Yuval says the three biggest disasters humanity faces are nuclear armaggedon, climate change and runaway technology. He says that only nations are big enough to deal with these. I don’t believe in dictating solutions to other communities. My book provides a mechanism by which communities can develop solutions for themselves.

I present ways in which commonwealths of <200K people could deal with these big issues of weapons of bioterrorism, nuclear terrorism or chemical terrorism. First, you ‘depotentate’ them by defunding and taking their power away to create these weapons. Then you refuse to trade with anyone who does, along with your trade alliances.

The COP conferences have shown that nations are an impediment to dealing with climate change. Through regenerative agriculture, commonwealths can protect their local food sovereignty, reverse climate change, and obliterate an issue that Yuval, Russell and I all care deeply about: factory farming. If we have ownership of our lives, our properties, our economies and our land, we could make this happen.

Now let’s look at technology capture. When Wikileaks was censored, little Iceland was able to provide a free internet where the information was stored. So one example of truth-telling can give the lie to the rest.

All of these are symptoms of centralized power, empire, patriarchal pyramid power. If we’re going to reverse those spells of the legal shaman, we need to cast our own as economic witches!

---

Here is Patriarchal Pyramid or Matriarchal Matrix?

Responding to Russell Brand's interview called On Fearlessness and Fighting Power, I nominate Vandana as Spirit Mother Earth Goddess and suggest Ganesh as her consort. I predict that we're at the end of 100 generations of patriarchy and should enter the matrix—the womb or place of origin—to imagine what comes next. I look at fear as the opposite of love, and the social distancing that says fear IS love. I cite another fearless Indian woman, Arundhati Roy, on the fighting power of the Maoists or Naxalites. I propose India's 1.3B people as 4000 self-governing commonwealths and end with a dream of Red King Kong and the Winged Green Dragon in which they have tea and solve climate change.

and just for fun:

You can only change what you love. Following in the footsteps of Tessa Lena and Charles Eisenstein, I talk about love, God, meaning and truth as synonyms. I tell the story of how Tessa became qualified to talk about love with no kumbaya, through haunting personal experience. I relate this to Charles on The Bloodroot & the Raven. And I share the confidence of both that riding on the current of current events is going to bring us to the place I call The Great Rest, where we can be who we were born to be.