Episode #193 ...The chief export of the western world is trash. - Anarchism pt. 2 (Bookchin, Social Ecology)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. Philosophizethis.org is the website. For an ad free experience of the show, go to patreon.com/philosophizethis. Hope you love the show today. So last episode was a bit of a challenge to be able to write. There was a lot of stuff that needed to get talked about, lot of core ideas from anarchist thought that needed to be explained, to be respectful to the people who came to the episode not knowing anything about anarchism yet. But it was a challenge because we had to talk about all these core ideas without saying too much about anarchism in general. Because, look, it's a fact of the universe. You say anything about anarchism, a beacon goes up into the sky, anarchists start crawling out of the trees all over the world. And And no matter what it is, there's gonna be some anarchists somewhere in the world that doesn't agree with what's being said because it doesn't correspond with their version of anarchism, of which there are many. Now lucky for me, I can start talking about individual thinkers today. Also kinda lucky for me, I guess, is that the philosopher we're talking about today didn't get too caught up in labels like anarchism. Seemed a bit silly to him to be doing that. What he cared about is whether the substance of the ideas were there. But as though I learned nothing in my life, as though I really am, you know, top five dumbest people on planet Earth, I'm gonna try it again today, at least here at the beginning of the episode. Because to anybody coming to this podcast today in good faith, you know, you're trying to learn more about anarchism. You're trying to place it in the greater historical context of what you already know. I personally think that if you're trying to do that, that taking a step back and looking at anarchism from more of a panoramic view is helpful because I think it sets us up for the rest of this episode where we're gonna be seeing exactly how an anarchist perspective can start to look when it's directly applied to what many consider to be one of the biggest issues facing the human species today. What I mean is, you know, it's been said that if the world we live in today ceases to exist somehow, like if you could get in a time machine, go into the future five hundred years, you arrive in that world, you look around you, and it's obvious that civilization has collapsed at some point between now and then. If you found yourself in that spot, there are a few things that are going on in 2024 that could have been responsible for that collapse. Nuclear proliferation, our toxic relationship with the natural world, various forms of social unrest. We got fascism, mental illness, addiction, socioeconomic turmoil, religious fighting of any type, not the least of which …