Transcription
Trump's imperialist attitude with regard to other nations is gangster imperialism. It's very transactional. Like, I'm going to threaten you. I'm going to put up these tariffs and then we negotiate. We make a deal. It's pure force. Like, I come in with pure force because America is the biggest consumer of the world. It's the wealthiest nation in the world. And he's like, "No, we need to throw our weight around. We've gotten bad deals. We're going to need better deals."
The liberal form of imperialism is the NGO industry, the non-governmental organization insertion into places of conflict in order to create spheres of American influence within crisis areas with the goal of having American corporation corporate interests being protected or move in afterwards. Right? In the 90s it was human rights and human rights was the new cover for the end of the Cold War and also genocide. Like they were just using genocide all the time to say that this was going to be a place where intervention was going to be needed.
[Music] Hello and welcome to Global Majority for Peace podcast. I'm Alana Chan. Every week on this podcast, we discuss with special guests from across the world our mission of building a global movement to challenge the US-led war drive against China, Russia, and countries in the global south. So, please subscribe, comment, share. You know the drill. We are also going to be putting the first part of this interview on YouTube and then the full episode on Patreon and it's also available as an audio podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music on Saturday.
Today I'm very happy to introduce our amazing guest to Global Majority for Peace, Katherine Leo. Katherine is a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine. She's the author of Virtue Hoarders, the case against the managerial class and an upcoming book with Verso tentatively titled Traumatized, which I'm very excited to read. It's got a subtitle now. Oh, good. Colon, the gentrification of suffering and the end of liberalism. Okay. I am very excited about that book and we're going to be getting into some of the themes of it later today.
But we do like to start interviews with a little bit more of a personal question. You know, the origin of your politicization. Was there a particular incident that has led you to where you are now?
There are a couple of things that are positive and negative instigators. And I would say one of the positive instigators was that I went to elementary school and partially high school and middle school and high school at a time when public schools were very, very functional and my teachers were very inspired and call and they were well paid relative to that time and it was a respected profession. And so I came of age at the tail end of all of the New Deal things that had been provided for the public sphere in America and very quickly all of that disappeared when Reagan was elected president.
But there was one specific incident that I talked about on Midwestern Marx because Bridget there also asked me like how did you become politicized? And I think that the question for me of ideology and um Western imperialist ideology really became so clear through this one incident. My father was involved with a lot of like left-leaning Chinese people in New York already and we went to China very often. I was little because he was at the UN and they paid for us to go on home leave every other year. So there was already a lot of talk about Marx about Mao in my father's social circle. He wasn't very committed to it in the end. I was like a little sponge absorbing everything.
But in like 10th grade or was it ninth ninth or 10th grade in the United States you do a course called World History and it was very Cold War very mechanistic. I just said like I had really great teachers. Well, this was one of my worst teachers, but she taught the course according to the textbook and it was of course very American and Cold War serving. And I remember reading on the China module that the Chinese are like little blue ants filing in and out of factories. It's sort of the propaganda about North Korea today, you know, just illustrating this like faceless anonymous totalitarian society like a scene from Metropolis. expert slangs like science fiction silent film and it was in a textbook. It was in the history textbook describing China and I was someone who had been to China a number of times through the 70s and so this was like maybe 79 or something and I raised my hand and I just said to my teacher like this is not true. This is not true. This is not how China is. And it made me doubt like everything that was in the textbook, right? And she came back at me and said, "Miss Lou, you open your mouth again. I'll put my size eight shoe in it."
I was like very vocal because I was like, "This is just not right. There's a lot more life in China. It's not just workers. If you see them as ants and you think of them as disposable, this is not accurate." And so I walked out of the classroom and I said, "I'm not coming back in here until you apologize to me. I don't know how I had that kind of like self-assurance, but it was just such a glaring like authoritarian act. And we, you know, met the counselor and my mom came in and my mom was like, "Yeah, doesn't Kathy have such a big mouth?" Because my mom just thought I was very anti-intellectual and just thought I was a troublemaker. But my teacher felt like maybe she was going to be in trouble. So the counselor was there and she was like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I just say things like that." And then after that I was like, "Wow, I can't believe everything I say." And yet the liberal propaganda is so powerful and my parents' fear of getting into political trouble because they had grown up in authoritarian regimes that I felt that I had to keep my skepticism hidden.
And as I became more and more committed to leftism on my own, I was reading the Frankfurt School on my own. I took one or two courses on Marx as an undergraduate and it was so against the grain of what was happening in the 80s and 90s. I always felt like I was like the underground woman. You know, there were things I really cared about then I had to like have produce this different kind of a effect for the public and for my academic career. So I really learned about alienation and part of that I think is also about being Chinese American. There's a face for the outside, there's a face for the inside. And there was a face that I couldn't share with anyone, which was my pursuit of ideology critique, which in the 80s and 90s was totally unpopular because everyone was going through to cultural studies. Thank you, Great Britain. And we were all going to celebrate popular culture and it was Tony Blair's third way. And so the left was in disarray at that time. And my feeling at the time was that, well, maybe communism has failed. Maybe socialism really has failed. I still think this is the best political and economic theory for understanding ideology, but I kind of have to keep it to myself. And you know, everyone's like indul, you know, or just straight on intellectual history. And you know, I was a very up kid. Like maybe I should have just gone and studied with David Harvey. I didn't love Fred Jameson stuff, but I could have found like a mentor. The person I really admired is Mike Davis, and he wasn't taking students. He was just like a real brogue guy. Totally respect him for that. But there were very few like real Marxist mentors. Nancy Frasier and the sort of philosophical leftist feminists that I don't do philosophy. I'm not a philosopher. I don't think Marx should be read as philosophy. And so I was just like deep in culture. My adviserss were all second-wave feminists. And so Marx and Freud were just patriarchs. And um I kind of had to keep it hidden. But that's called alienation. That's the cost of growing up under an ideological regime that the liberals don't want to admit is actually quite authoritarian, especially during the Cold War.
I think that's a really good way to describe it, alienation. And I think that's why I really gravitated towards your interviews and and your work because the psychological use of the word gaslighting, you know, the very popularized use of the word gaslighting. But certainly, I think we feel that we feel gas lit when we're like this is not the truth and you're making us feel like we're the problems. But anyway, that is why I'm so happy to have you on this podcast. Of course, we are a geopolitical, anti-imperialist, anti-war podcast, and we like to link and highlight how, well, for us in the UK, we're based in the UK, Britain's foreign policy is often subordinate to the US and how Britain is really can be seen as a complicit junior partner of the US Empire and how that is often or is perhaps our primary obstacle to achieving social and economic progress and wealth redistrib. distribution. I mean obviously that can be quite controversial statement but I felt like your book Virtue Hoarders the case against the professional managerial class observes American class dynamics which similarly do exist here in the UK and it gives us a really useful framework for how the manufacturing of consent for the imperialist neoliberal agenda is achieved despite that being contrary to the general public's interest. Can you start by explaining what you mean by the professional managerial class because I think a lot of people might not know what that is and how they function to uphold ruling class interests.
Well, it is a class of white collar workers who I think it might have been Mills who said this see right Mills but they are the workers who work in air conditioning. If you want to think about this in like a subtropical colonial neoc colonial thing, it's like there are a group of workers who work in climate control. I mean that's kind of a joke, but this class has credentials. It doesn't work with its body. It usually has to obey certain rules of professional organizations like in the American context. American Academy of University Professors regulate certain actions and conditions of the professorate. The American Bar Association and the American Medical Association regulate the behavior and the actions of lawyers and doctors respectively. And they really come up in power throughout the 20th century. And I would actually say that there was a moment when this class was very, very small. Like there are some statistics from the labor analysis that says in 1900 maybe white collar workers only made up 3% of the American workforce and American agricultural workers made up 25% the rest was industrial workers and then other kinds of service itinerant workers. And today that number has been reversed. you know, there are 25, 27 sometimes people say 35% of the American workforce has a professional managerial job but I think we can refine this by saying that there are certain professionals who manage other people and there are certain professionals who do their jobs like nurses and teachers they're professionals they don't manage other people they teach so they can provide a service job in the factories and in the 19th century classical Marxist merkantile firm. This class has roots as foremen, as clerks, as accountants. And Marx said that these kinds of people who were delegated by the capitalists to regulate discipline and control the flow of money and labor were in the premodern period more like family servants. So they were working alongside or often in the offices in the homes of the mercantile capitalists. As the functions of the corporation become more and more complex, as logistics lines become more and more dense, especially with the British Empire, you have a whole level of lawyers, insurers, everyone who is not lifting things but managing the flow of those things. And in 1977, John and Barbara Erin Reich wrote The Tracks Professional Managerial Class about how they had noticed that in left and liberal political spaces, increasingly the working class was marginalized for professional managerial class interests, college educated people who were presenting a new cultural vanguard. And there was a split in the liberal left between the old school old left, you know, labor-based progressives and this kind of like liberal progressivism that was taking place. I would say like the values of the American professional managerial class have to do with meritocracy. And I don't mean that in a good way. I mean that as a kind of social sorting. That was a term of insult that was actually invented by Michael Young who was a British labor politician of the 1950s who said that if capitalism is becoming more and more of a meritocracy not an aristocracy and the meritocracy is rewarding ruling class elites by saying you're just smarter than everyone else. So rather than using nepotism to get into Oxford or Cambridge, you have to test into it and you arrive at the sort of top of British society because of your smarts, not because of your feudal connections. And so it's a new configuration of sorting for ruling elites. There's a lot of reasons why this meritocratic form is very American and it was exported after World War II. It was supposed to be rewarding the cream of the crop of people creating a kind of equality within capitalism that's had to do with competition, rewarding the smartest. And a lot of the diversity initiatives and the anti-racism initiatives that presided by this class is about selecting the smartest people from all genders, all sexualities, all races, all ethnic backgrounds so that they can occupy this stratum of capital society where you can ascend from any kind of background and test into the elite in this way. So the history of meritocracy is deeply connected to the history of this class because they think that they've overturned inherited privilege and wealth but increasingly in America at least and I think in Britain as well college educated people with cultural capital pass it on to their children.
Oh yeah, I mean definitely I think in the UK. So the professional managerial class you were saying was the cultural vanguards, the virtue hoarders. They set the standards for which we are supposed to aspire to. For virtue signaling, it's purposefully devoid of social and historical and political context. And this serves to obscure the real transgressions being made. Obviously, we're in a time when it's like the cultural wars are happening. So you have the right engaging with this by opposing the liberal left within this narrow superficial scope of debate. But when we kind of use this framework and we focus outward and we look at it on a geopolitical scale, we can look at something like USAID as a pretty accurate encapsulation of this dynamic which I think is you know it's interesting because USAID for many people they still do believe it's masquerading as a virtuous endeavor but it's actually a tool of American imperialism but a lot of people aren't aware of that. So when Trump gives the reasons for cutting the agency as like oh you know DEI it's he's anti-woke and all that stuff the reaction to this in the global south is actually really different from the official narrative that comes out of the liberal left. So many people view Trump's action as like mask off type of moments for US empire. But can you help us unpack where the the American people are maybe on that the general public and your view on it?
You mean about US aid or just general like dismantling of the state and DEI and things like that?
Yeah. I mean, because the thing with it is that I think Trump is on one hand doing some very, very obvious imperialist moves and then on the other hand the USID thing this is like their cover right like this is their virtue signaling. Trump's imperialist attitude with regard to other nations is gangster imperialism. It's very transactional like I'm going to threaten you. I'm going to put up these tariffs and then we negotiate. we make a deal. It's pure force. Like I come in with pure force because America is the biggest consumer of the world. It's the wealthiest nation in the world. And he's like, "No, we need to throw our weight around. We've gotten bad deals. We're going to need better deals."
The liberal form of imperialism is the NGO industry, the non-governmental organization insertion into places of conflict in order to create spheres of American influence within crisis areas with the goal of having American corporation corporate interests being protected or move in afterwards. Right? In the 90s it was human rights and human rights was the new cover for the end of the Cold War and also genocide like they were just using genocide all the time to say that this was going to be a place where intervention was going to be needed right it select very, very selectively depending upon what the industrial military industrial complex had to gain from the intervention or American industry had to gain from it. So what you have is this kind of like gangster imperialism mask off as you say or replacing a kind of faux philanthropic attitude towards the world. So all of the reporting about US aid was that millions of people are going to die if the Americans withdraw. So you have this sense of megalomania like we are actually saving millions of people every day by being in Africa by offering HIV medicine by doing this and they personalize it. It's like face after face of people who are suffering. This is a very liberal technique in the news without looking at any of the context of where US aid is of what US aid does to undermine sovereignty of what US aid does as a sort of precursor for other forms of American imperialism and I don't have the research right at my fingertips but we've known for years that US aid is a cutout for the CIA. You know, people know that that it was just general knowledge, right, on the left. And if you listen to a lot of people from places that have where US aid was a strong presence, a lot of the left leaders are saying, "Yeah, get them out of here."
But the American philanthropic, you know, USA foreign policy does something that I try to describe in Virtue Hoarders, which is it hypoasticizes the weak as the recipient of help. And that person, that victim, that survivor, that citizen of the global south is in need. And the actor, the sovereign, the agent, the provider of help is the American, is the aidgiver. It's another form of Victorian charity. And what Victorian charity was meant to do was to quell worker unrest. It was just very, very clear was the moralization of inequality. The only person who could correct it was the church, the lady, the giver, the royal society. and it merely cements and reinforces power relations and inequality and you remain in this state of serving the worthy poor and leaving behind the unworthy poor. So there's this kind of like triage going on. I can't speak for the conscience of every US aid worker. They are probably thinking they're doing good. They probably go into it thinking they went to elite schools. they have medical degrees or social science degrees and they think we're going to Africa, we're going to do these things, but it's always about decontextualizing a situation of need and having America be the provider of all that is good. And so you have this stripping away of US aid from the right. And it was very, very clear that wherever there are forces of corruption and inequity, if the left didn't get in there and work on it, all of these things would eventually come the bill and all these things would come paid. And it was the right and the far right who are dismantling this because the liberals don't want to hear any criticism of US aid from the left. I mean, if you think about this, there could have been a realignment of American foreign policy through left intervention, but the Democratic Party will not let its left flank, and the left flank is just completely up anyway, have any kind of power. But the Republican Party allowed itself to be taken over by its far right flank. And so, this is what we're seeing today.
I can't emphasize this enough. One of the reasons why I was so committed to the Frankfurt School and was very, very unfashionable to be thinking about them, especially in the '90s and early 2000s, was something that they were writing about constantly, which was the fact that the logical end of liberal capitalism is fascism. And the only way to take that apart is to have a robust ideological critique and political program from the left. And we're just seeing that happen now. I mean, I don't want to be like, I told you so, but you know, they told us so. I mean, it is just very, very frustrating because now it's almost impossible to untangle. I mean, one of the things that I think you've mentioned before is with Gloria Steinem being funded by the CIA or, you know, being part of a CIA project to, I suppose, decontextualize, as you've talked about, feminism when it's a very real issue. you know, we definitely need feminism, but now it's been sort of destroyed in in many aspects and used as a pretext for intervention.
If you look at the evolution of American feminism, it was always funded and promoted by wealthy women. So, the suffragettes who achieved female suffrage in 1920 for American women were generally very, very wealthy women. And there was there were one or two really wealthy women who sponsored the legislation and lobbied. And so it always had a class basis, but its class formation in the 1970s became all the more stark because second-wave feminism was a professional managerial class feminism. And throughout the 30s and 40s, there were socialist feminists who were marginalized during the McCarthy era, during the anti-communist era. And these were women who are really focused on work issues, leave issues, maternity care, child care issues. But you see in the 70s and was totally directed by upper middle class professional class women, there's a complete focus on a kind of libertarian attitude towards sexuality, sexual freedom, and then abortion rights becomes their singular focus. Singular. It's also part of this NGOization of the social movements that happened in the 70s. It's really chilling to look at how a lot of these movements that grew out of the social movements became just like fundraising organizations and lobbyists and I think you call them charities in the UK.
Yeah, I think that's it's interesting to hear the origin of feminism because I think from an American perspective just because personally I was introduced to it by my parents. It was the whole thing about women hold up half of the sky. you know the communist I have not researched whether or not there was any other but to me it comes across as like something quite different from well, you know, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party really did want to break the back of the Confucian family in China and since Deng Xiaoping were formed people have walked that back and there so there's a lot of re-Confucianization but one of the things that about modernity and modernization from the Republican revolution onward in 1911 was modernizing China and modernizing China meant changing the position of women in Chinese society. So chattel slavery, arranged marriages were outlawed by the first Republican government and then with the communists you had this idea that outside of the Confucian hierarchy we want to endow women and men with the right to marry people they love. that was like considered that was revolutionary after 1949 and also because of the lack of you know a cadre of educated people we needed to educate women to fill positions of teaching in the party everything else and Mao came up with that slogan women held up half the sky and one of the things that can be construed now as like cruelty and child abuse was that in the communes in the collectives there were 24-hour nurseries like you could send your kid to a nursery to school because you were building the revolution and it was about breaking this kind of like Chinese family clan idea. We've gone back to it. The clan had to be substituted for the party and that was also about trying to break this kind of pre-modern mobster was also very mobsterlike like I have to acrew all the power to my clan. I have a completely different relationship to my clan when I look at the people from the other competitors. I kill them. You know, at the highest level, it becomes warlordism and gangsterism. So, the communists were trying to create a civic society, secularizing the Chinese family. And a lot of that has to do with changing the way that women were seen. It was the same thing in the Soviet Union. But once communism collapsed, women became sex workers again. you know, the the whole transactional thing about young women and the trans mercantile capitalism just brought back all of these economic disparities and one of the things that the communists were really proud of was actually destroying the networks of prostitution in Shanghai, which was one of the biggest, you know, sort of sex work, drug networks in Asia. And all of that has kind of come back. The CCP doesn't want it to come back. It's just very hard to control. who's going to um head into territory that they've not really equipped to head into in terms of like comparing that to like South Korea or you know I mean there's definitely confident women legacies or whatever um there but yes a digression sorry.
But in your upcoming book tentatively titled Traumatized and now we have a semicolon which I did not remember the gentrification of suffering and the death of liberalism. Very cool. You talk about trauma being decontextualized. Now granted, I have not read this. rather I've listened to an address that you gave in Georgetown which we can link below because I think it's really fascinating address but you cite the example of Judith Herman's book Trauma and Recovery where she talks about the trauma experienced by Chilean political prisoners under Pinochet without acknowledging the US-led anti-communist campaign that instigated it. Can you expand on the implications of this further because I found that really fascinating?
So Herman was talking about this technique to help people recover from trauma called flooding where you relive the trauma with a therapist where you write down what you've experienced or sometimes you reenact even like scenes of childhood abuse and everything because you're in a safe environment and you repeat the experience. you can overcome it. And it was pioneered in the Veterans Administration for soldiers suffering from PTSD. And then Herman very casually says that a lot of this technique was first used by these Chilean psychiatrists and psychoanalysts for people who had survived Pinochet's torture cells and who were leftist who had been persecuted by him. And so I went and actually read through the accounts of the clinical account written by Ana Julioen Fueos and Christina Minelli. And the amazing thing about what they did was Pinochet had not been brought to power. You know, he he had fallen from power. And in the aftermath of this, they thought or actually Pinochet was still in power. They were doing this in the underground for a while. And then they made it more official. They treated victims in such a way that they could take down their testimony and sort of put the Pinochet regime on trial in a clinical setting like this happened to you because you were working with Salvador Allende. You opposed American imperialism. Pinochet grabs you from the street and tortures you, imprisons you and it was to create a political social context for people who were completely broken but not broken just individually and physically. The psychoanalysts and psychiatrists were emphasizing that these young people lost hope for the future. And so they taped their testimonies and they would stage these mock trials of the torturers of the victimizers hoping to restore a sense of agency and heal these victims of Pinochet's regime. Sin Vos and Minelli were very modest about what they thought could happen, but they said this is a really important documentation of the testimony of the victims of Chile's military dictatorship. Right? None of this is in the Herman book. And in the last chapter, she's actually very supportive of NATO and US bombing of Yugoslavia and the break up of Yugoslavia because there's all these human rights violations. So it was really like striking to me that you have people who are a victim of US imperial polic foreign policy. Absolutely no clear victimization and the US medical establishment and the feminists are extracting this technique and this wisdom from a nation. I mean, you we can use global south. I like to use the third world, but they victimize you and then they extract your technique of healing the your therapies that you've actually pioneered in order to restore political agency to the victims of your foreign policy. You're decontextualizing it and bringing it back to saying this can heal American victims of trauma in the rape clinics where she was seeing a lot treating a lot many people who women who were also in their own context. I mean, I don't think I can unseal any of this records, but it's very clear that many of them came from blue collar working class Irish families near Harvard, Cambridge, from this town of Somerville, where she was treating a lot of these women. So you have all these kinds of depoliticizing movements, these really politically naive apprehensions of both the therapeutic technique and the narratives of recovery. Like she doesn't ever say like, well, why were these people being tortured or what role did America have to play in this? America had to play a huge role in this. So, it just seemed to me like this kind of political naive about trauma and recovery was extracting something once again from the global south. And the whole thing about America's fear of communism drove it to support the most murderous regimes. I mean, we're not even talking about Indonesia. I mean, I don't think you know that that whole thing the trauma of Indonesia should be front and center in any discourse about foreign policy and trauma but if you look at the literature and trauma communists victims of American imperialism never figure as important agents of any of these trauma narratives. So I just think that it fits in well with the Cold War attitude about American superiority because one of the other moral superiority because the other aspect of the trauma narrative in the 80s and '90s was that as the Berlin Wall was falling as Eastern Europe was being integrated into the global capitalist network a lot of the rhetoric around NGOs and around the reintegration of these former communist countries was that they did not deal with the Holocaust. We did. They didn't reckon with the European past. So, we have better psychological tools to deal with trauma. They are in denial. And to be integrated into Western Europe and the global capitalist flows, they have to acknowledge that they are behind in terms of dealing with this horrific thing that happened in Europe in World War II. And that gives the sort of professional managerial class executors of the terms of the end of the Cold War a kind of moral superiority as well.
Yeah, that's so interesting too because I think it's so much of a part of Western culture now to use psychological terms somewhat inaccurately but it's just so widespread and to have this idea of not only inaccurately but to take our culture of therapy and just impose it upon other cultures other places there are certain universal principles about the psyche I'm deeply invested in psychoanalysis that I think are absolutely necessary to look at but one of the things about trauma from any point of view is that it is embedded in a culture and each culture deals with suffering in its own way. But one of the things that the United States and Britain follows along with is imposing a narrative of recovery from that. So I call that the trauma script. And you impose the trauma script as a healer or an imperialist, a professional. And that is just not very good therapy either. But it is definitely American foreign policy like you guys suffered. This is how you're going to recover. And we have the best techniques. We have the best drugs in Ethan Waters crazy like us. He said that a lot of the US aid packages that go into post crisis places like Indonesia, Thailand during the post tsunami earthquake world was feminine hygiene. you get a package of feminine hygiene and anti-depressants and psychodoba drugs. I mean definitely two things here. one is that I think this is one of the maybe the most effective soft power or this idea of America being superior in some way especially with you know I hear this across the board as sort of an accepted fact oh you know Asian societies or these countries are not good with therapy they're not sort of evolved enough yet you know these are new concepts they're going to learn from us they're going to learn from us yeah we we know in the Georgetown address he mentioned the phrase trauma for export, which is I think what you're talking about where it's like another example of imperialism as an extension of capitalism but basically paving the way for the pharmaceutical industry in this way that you're saying. Can you expand a little bit more on that? Cuz that's really a really good point. Here in the West we're all about these types of psychotropics. Is that what you called them? But it's it's somewhat new in many many different I mean so it's like there's a lot of untapped markets basically.
There are there are a lot of untapped markets and it's a complicated story but with neoliberalization with austerity with the withdrawal of funds from NHS and the privatization of all forms of health care mental health care making it more for-profit-based what you have is a demand for efficiency and scientific bases for cures right and psychopharmmcological companies were finding that there were drugs like lithium that really did help treat schizophrenics and paranoia who were you know in full-blown crisis right the drug innovations became more and more suited towards the diagnostic statistic manual that's like the bible for psychiatric diagnosis in the United States these psychiatrists and pharmarmacological companies sort of danced together since 1980 to produce diagnosis and and molecules that would address and take over those diagnoses. So you have a proliferation of anti-anxiety, anti-depressant drugs from Prozac to Xanax to, you know, more there are more and more of them that are what some people have called chemical straight jackets. What it also allowed for was lower level psychiatric psychoanalytic contact. Like if I give you the drug, I don't need to see you every week or three times a week. I just check in with you to see how your dosage is doing and I'm just modifying your dosage all the time. And so it's less labor because I am just prescribing a drug for you. And this kind of management of mental illness has everything to do with the dissolution of communities through late capitalism, the destruction of the middle class, the destruction of the working class, the destruction of the social safety net. You know, the E.P. Thompson, the old Marxist called like life world, you know, the pub, the factory, the family, all of those things, you know, are sites of toxic masculinity or just pre-modern people go there. And so you have this introduction of all these new consumerous ways of interfacing competing for increasingly smaller pieces of the pie and no real sociality that's given by you know kind of infrastructural modes of being together and so people are more and more isolated. You have incredible growth of anxiety among young people. Is it self-diagnosis? Is it just this sort of an social media epidemic? I don't know. But if you go and you present with anxiety to a psychiatrist, you're going to get anti-anxiety drugs. Like in my utopic world, you would get good psychotherapy or you would be integrated into different social worlds that gave your life meaning. Maybe your family is abusive, but you can find meaning in work or meaning in school. more and more of our institutions are filled with empty language and meaningless activities and there's just no way of finding anything that is truly therapeutic in social life. So therapy becomes a way of just mitigating the effects of isolation and there's really no infrastructural solution to any of this. It's not about reinvesting in anything. It's just about treating symptoms of things. So trauma for export then says, "Oh yes, the rest of the world is suffering from this too and we just need to treat them in a way that they don't know they even need to be treated."
the question of like the narrative of the self, the story of our lives and how it fits into wider historical struggles for freedom, for dignity, for autonomy, for agency, for understanding. The connection between our individual struggle and a social collective struggle is more and more tenuous. And it's often configured in this way by liberal discourse where you know you enter into a social situation you're immediately like oh I'm the victim of bias or this makes me uncomfortable that triggers me. You become like a sight of just like different sensitivities and you're rewarded in liberal culture with this kind of like pseudo recognition like oh I'm sorry I really see you. I'm going to make space for your suffering. It's all this phony language that actually makes it harder for people, especially young people, to relate to each other because there's so much fear of transgression, of getting kicked out of the in-group, especially in the left. It's like they're a bunch of like in-group cool kids and you have to know the latest language or you're not part of the in-group anymore. I mean, what kind of left is that? That's not a left. That's like a club.
Yeah. or a cult of mean people mean girls. I'm like also curious as you're speaking about that about like what happens with the you know there's a push right now for AI therapy and like AI doctors so it's going to be even more alienating and formulaic and why can't we have real doctors why can't because we don't want to pay people we actually don't want to pay people anything. Capitalism would love it if we could just get wages down to zero. I don't know how they imagine like consumption might happen. Oh yeah, very very rich people consume. That's where all the profits are taken and everyone else just like makes bare minimum wage and maybe zero too. And also the capitalists they hate to think that there is professional knowledge that they can't leverage and make into AI like and that's why I think that there is some hope in the disillusioned professional that they can see themselves as part of a working class because you can fight so hard to become a doctor. You work in a hospital and you realize that hospital is being managed for profit. It hasn't happened in the UK yet, but it certainly happens in the US. So, it's a lot better to have 50 AI therapists that you pay nothing to have five really good professionals who might not like your management style and who get tired and who have trouble and who have children, who need leave, maternity leave. You don't have that problem with AI. AI is all is just a question of labor from the point of view of the capitalist. you know you're part of the UC Irvine.
So interestingly I did just learn that the current author Ross director of center of US China relations at Asia Society Orville Shell was the dean at UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism for 10 years and he also worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia from 1964 to 1966 which of course you know you've mentioned this the US-led anti-communist campaign and it's on his biography so he's quite proud of this but basically you know I do think that Maybe one possible solution for social progress is context and understanding. And when our educational institutions are so thoroughly compromised, how do we deal with the contradictions like this? It's always been the the American higher education system has been the envy of the world and the right is taking that apart. The much touted ideas of academic freedom were defended even in the UC even during the most virulent moments of the anti-communist campaigns where the president of the University of California Clark Kerr refused to make his faculty take a loyalty oath to the United States. That was maybe a happy moment, a happier moment. I see most university professors sort of accept leaders accepting the fact that we are entering a phase where academic freedom is not going to be a value that we can protect any longer especially because of the Palestine Israel situation where any criticism of Israel can be construed by the administration granting organizations as anti-semitism and then your city is going to be um compromised by this. The other thing that the liberals did to us was by imposing a whole apparatus and bureaucracy of diversity, equity, and inclusion that was meant to sustain the status quo, not look at any serious economic redistribution, but work towards what I was saying was curating a more diverse professional class. And that has been extremely unpopular. Professors still are invested in liberal professors at least. and the Trump administration is going after that. So I feel like the American universities may not recover from this situation. I feel like the endeavor of autonomous and independent research is so important. But if the PMC just works on being gatekeepers to keeping that knowledge behind a very expensive door that you most people can't pass through, then it will be destroyed from within and without. Now, how do we create universities that protect research from the forces of ideology? It's always been a struggle and the American university has been ideologically captured always by American foreign policy and American imperialism. But there were sort of pockets of independent work, autonomous work that has been fantastic. All of the books behind me are probably written and published by university presses and we've built this reservoir of knowledge. Can we make it serve the people rather than serve the imperial project? I don't know at this point. I really don't know because I feel that the um the university itself has eaten itself from within even before Trump came to power and now it's threatened by the forces of the right but it needed like deep deep reform from the forces of the left and that never happened. the university became so corporatized like there's so much thought conformity already and so is this a time for us to think about what we are really defending I feel like we're belleaguered on so many sides with regard to the forces that really want to destroy real thinking real dissent real coming together for common cause and you know maybe it's just we have to find ways of creating networks of knowledge and research church outside of the institutions in order to rebuild the institutions. I still believe in the institutions and I believe that they are bull works in liberal society against the forces of the market. But if we go into full-blown fascism, for example, the universities are fragile and they will collapse. We've already seen though that the educational system in the United States has produced functional illiteracy for even college students. So how can we have a democracy when we devalue education to such a deep degree? And this happened before Trump. This has happened before Trump. So the roots of this degeneration are deeper than just Trump. But it is quite disastrous right now. I don't personally feel like I want to go out and go on PMC marches against Trump. I feel like their horizon is just bringing the Democratic Party back into power. So, I think it's okay not to go out on a protest. There are big protests today. It's April 5th and I'm just giving everyone who's listening to this in America like a pass like you didn't have to go out to protest today because what is their horizon of change?
Yeah, exactly. What are their tangible demands? Indeed. So, thank you so much for coming on Global Majority for Peace. Thanks for these great questions, Lyanna. I loved your questions. you know, you have such a wealth of knowledge. I obviously could have easily talked to you for hours. And thank you everyone for watching. Thanks everyone.
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