In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I am Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we are exploring the possibility of reorienting our entire culture around the power of love rather than the love of power. And to understand this, we have to really pick apart what love and power mean in our culture, because some of those meanings are essential to the ways we move forward. And some of them are so toxic they turn the entire concept into a poisoned cue. This week’s guest is someone with whom I can genuinely go deep on these fundamental questions. Jamie Bristow is a friend of the podcast. We spoke to him back in episode number 274, recorded near the start of this year. And there we were, considering what it was to be a spiritual warrior in our times, a concept to which Jamie has given the past 16 years of his life. And so he has explored in detail the nature of power with as opposed to power over. And how love infuses the first and how the latter tries to destroy it.

Manda: There are many ways these conversations go on this podcast. Often I’m exploring a particular body of work, and I’m asking questions to which broadly I have a sense of the answer. So tell me about this thing that is squarely in your field, that I have read about or listened to you speak about, and I want you to expand on it for the listeners. Sometimes, though, I’m talking with somebody I know well enough, and where we share enough of a common grounding that I can ask questions to which I don’t actually know the answer at all. Where we can explore the places where our theories of change meet, but perhaps don’t overlap. And then we can dive into the fertile, liminal places of uncertainty where those two edges come together. And Jamie is one of these people and this was one of those conversations. Where we explored the nature of love and power and game theory, and how we get from where we are through a nexus of power that is firmly arrayed around the dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy and sadism.

Manda: And I know this is slightly different to the way the dark triad is expressed by other people who would put in raw cunning instead of sadism. But I think the cunning is in there with the psychopathy and the sadism is, as we are seeing, living out around the world at the moment. An essential part of the performative power over that the wounded egos of the dark triad need, if they’re going to spin themselves stories of safety and confidence and respect, and all the other things that everybody needs that we don’t get by crushing other people. And we know this. And so how do we spread that knowing so that a critical mass of people within the world understand that we give love and then love flows, that we give compassion and then compassion flows, that we share power and then we don’t need power over any more. And crucially, because Jamie is one of these people who stands at the intersection between spirituality and policy, and he talks to the policy makers and some of the billionaires who are slightly more adjacent to this position. How do we talk the language that makes sense to them while we are going to places that they perhaps don’t yet understand that we need to go? What are the steps to get there? This is the work of raw thrutopian tactics. And the language that we need to make sense with the people who do have the power to make the change that we need. Who are the gatekeepers? What is the leverage? How do we bring it into play? So that’s where we’re going.

Manda: And I have a new puppy. So there are moments where you will hear puppy noises in the background. She did manage to find an entire toilet roll and destroy it. She also had occasions when she needed to tell me that this is what she was going to do, and I carefully ignored her. So I apologise in advance for the little squeaks and scrabbles that you will hear. This is the nature of puppiness, and it’s glorious and I love it. But I’ve never had a new puppy and a podcast at the same time before, and we’re still working out how it works. So with that in mind, as Jamie and I delve into what it is to be human, how we strive for emergence into a new Kincentric and flourishing system at this moment of total transformation, people of the podcast please do welcome deep, thoughtful, heart centred thinker Jamie Bristow.

Manda: Jamie Bristow, friend of the podcast. Welcome back to Accidental Gods. How are you and where are you this bright, sharp, almost winter morning?

Jamie: So lovely to see you again Manda and I am speaking today from my office, which is the front room of a neighbour, 30s or so from my from my front door. And it’s a beautiful, completely clear blue sky day here.

Manda: So does your neighbour go away for the day? Because I’m thinking if you’re in the neighbour’s front room, which I had not realised, what happens if they, I don’t know, need to make a cup of coffee or something?

Jamie: No, I mean, she has a big house. It’s like one of the big rooms on the ground floor, basically.

Manda: Wow. Okay. This is almost communal living, which we are working towards the shamanic monastery.

Jamie: Yeah. I mean, it works for her, she’s sort of in her 70s and on her own, so she likes having someone around.

Manda: Right. Okay.

Jamie: Yeah.

Manda: So you and I talked at the beginning of the year, and we were exploring the nature of what it is to be a spiritual warrior, which still feels to me as if it’s key to where we’re going. I’m still in a place where we need total systemic change, and that we’re not going to get the outer change unless we get the inner change at scale. And I think both of us have probably evolved quite a lot. Last January we decided we wanted to talk again, and there was a point when you were going to be at COP around now, and you’re not. So just before we go anywhere else, COP seemed like a bad idea? I think COP is a performative waste of time now, but I may be wrong, so just give me a moment or two on COP before we go anywhere else.

Jamie: Sure. Yes. In a way, a performative waste of time if what you’re there for is trying to influence the negotiations, and you expect those negotiations to deliver something pivotal.

Manda: Other than being a performative waste of time.

Jamie: Yeah, right. But there’s a whole ecosystem around it.

Manda: Okay.

Jamie: And I met lots of people at the last COP who you might say were kind of at the margins, working away at trying to bring the spiritual or the inner aspects into this policy making ecosystem, which obviously has global reach, has tendrils to every country almost on the planet. And my sense was that being there and being part of the conversation and holding a perspective that integrated inner and outer dimensions of human systems was an important thing to do. And we were hoping to to be there and to once again be the guests of the UNFCCC, but our main sponsor in this work retired in May and with him unfortunately went most of the things that we were working on. And the inner development goals that I was working with at the time, this time last year, has a formal partnership still with the UNFCCC, but without that champion it’s tricky to maintain momentum, to find that exposure, that platform. And it might arise again, but this has often been the case over the last 10 to 15 years of work, where you have one person who gets it, you know, has their own inner journey, their own language and logos, you know, understanding of why this is important. And they can mobilise colleagues to do something on the subject and make the case for it. But when they go, the others who are left, if it isn’t a real, you know, embodied, felt, personal, passion project, then it falls foul of normal prioritisation of the external material structural stuff and gets sidelined again.

Jamie: So this has been happening across the parliaments I’ve worked in, across the workplaces, you know, corporates, UN agencies or whatever. You have to go with the energy when it’s there and and hope that it will kind of recycle and re-emerge again when it’s not. And this is one of those one of those times. Masamba Choi moved on and we had to roll with that. So yeah, we have lots of other things going on, and I’m not too sad not to be there. It would have been a great act of service, I think, to go back into that madness again. I was willing to do that, but I’m not disappointed personally, if you see what I mean.

Manda: And staying with this for a moment, because this seems to me to be at the crux of a lot of where we’re at. I think it’s undeniable that the death cult of predatory capitalism has become more of a death cult, even in the time since you and I spoke, and certainly since the time since the last COP. And absolutely since the COP that was in Glasgow just after Covid, When there seemed, possibly because it was in a country that I live in, broadly. I’m not in Scotland, but it was in the UK, and there felt as if even the Tories can get behind this, there must be something good. And we heard that the First Minister of Scotland, who was Nicola Sturgeon at that point, the first thing she did was take off her shoes and join a circle of indigenous elders, and she really seemed to get it. And yet there were more fossil fuel lobbyists at that COP than there had been at any previous COP. And pretty much straight after fossil fuel prices started to rise, and within months, a major petrochemical nation, Russia, had invaded another major petrochemical nation, Ukraine, and had given cover for a rise that was already happening. And it seemed to me that that COP was the point where the fossil fuel executives got together and went, you know, we don’t want this, and really decided how they were going to accelerate their profit taking.

Manda: And someone else we talked to, who was at Davos this year, said, this is the year where the masks had come off. That previously they would invite Greta and everybody would sit there looking deeply mournful and meaningful, while Greta told them that change is coming and they’d all nod. And at least again, there was some kind of performative willingness to pretend that change was happening and possible. And this year, no, actually. We’re all (expletive deleted) going down the pan. And we’ve probably got about seven years, and we’re just going to make as much money as we can in that time; let’s all party. And he said the relief at not having to pretend anymore was palpable and deeply, deeply distressing.

Manda: And I’m thinking all the way back to Andrew Harvey, who wrote in his book on spiritual activism that he’d been at, I think, the Paris COP way back and had been talking to people and demonstrating and all the rest of it. And eventually he got an invitation to lunch with someone whose Rolex cost more than he was ever going to make in his entire lifetime, and went to a restaurant that he could never have afforded to go through the door. And this person said, do you think we don’t know about the deaths that our business causes or the widespread ecological damage? I would not deserve to have my job if I didn’t know this. And I have made a structural decision that it doesn’t matter. And you telling me about all the deaths is not going to change that. You are totally wasting your time.

Manda: And that landed quite deeply with me, because it seems to me that the only possible answer to that is an energetic shift such that that person, or the people who hold that space now, feel the shift inside. And that we’re not going to do that by lobbying them. I’m sure it’s lovely holding a poll and it changes the nature of the Overton window a little bit. But Tommy Robinson tweeted this morning, (I’m not on Twitter/X, but somebody posted it to one of the feeds that I am on) that the Overton window has gone now, and he was very happy about that. Because basically the Labour government is now saying what Tommy Robinson would like them to say. So we can stretch the Overton window all we like; the people in power, do seem to be actually doubling down. So given that and given, I think, the answer is inner and energetic; but you’re actually talking to the people who can make a difference and I’m just sitting here theorising; where are you seeing the opportunities to shift the narrative or shift the Overton window, or open the cracks through which the light gets in, whatever metaphor works?

Jamie: Yeah. First of all, I think it’s really important to recognise the change that’s happened in the world. And I think we’re still recognising or we’re still absorbing what this really means. When the leader of the free world doesn’t want the world to be free, you know, and how the game that we were all playing before with the US hegemony, which maintained certain values and structures in our discourse, in the relations between countries and other interest groups; it requires that the sponsorship, as it were, the leadership of the United States and of the white House, to maintain those relations. You know, the old world order. And I’ve been coming to terms with it since we last spoke. It’s been 10, 11 months now. It was pretty fresh, the inauguration had just happened last time we spoke.

Manda: Yes. It had just. And we still, I think, had hopes that he might turn out to be sane. I don’t know why we hoped that, but we still thought somebody might rein him.

Jamie: Sane, or rather that he might not be as effective as he has been.

Manda: That project 2025 might not roll out.

Jamie: Because the writing was on the wall in his first term, his values, his worldview, the way he wanted to see things develop. But he was ineffective at actually bringing the world with him, or even his own country with him. But this time, as you say, things are things are very different. And it’s the effectiveness and the depth of change he’s managed to create within the United States and within the sense of ourselves globally. And the rules of engagement between nations has moved back to a major power rationale, you know, action logic.

Manda: Which is extremely infantile. It seems to me we’re looking at wounded egos, hurling at other wounded egos. It’s going backwards in terms of kind of personal evolutionary space. Yes.

Jamie: Yeah. For sure. We have gone backwards in complexity. But it has also exposed the fact that these big power games were kind of always there, but it was the US hegemony enforcing a different sort of game, which sublimated some gross ambition or naked desire for power or control of resources, etc. behind another sort of game, which was about soft power and influence and law.

Manda: And still was horrible. It was still pretty vicious.

Jamie: Yeah, exactly. And there are ways in which we could, of course, evolve to have better games in the future. You know, we want to evolve more and more sophisticated, more complex games where we have positive sum games, where more parties, more countries, can have better and more equitable outcomes. And a international rule based order, with law and criminal courts that work internationally, etc., are all part of the apparatus of that kind of different way of relating to each other. But we’re starting to see that all of that, all of the post-war progress since 1945, was dependent to some extent on the supreme power of the United States and their skin in the game and their sponsorship of that whole apparatus. And if they unilaterally take that away, then France or the United Kingdom or whoever else can keep trying to play the previous game.

Manda: It’s not going to work, though.

Jamie: But it’s not going to work if Russia and China and the United States are playing a completely different game, which is more about naked self-interest. I mean, there are ways that even within that game, what Trump is doing is self-defeating. You know, China complains a lot about how they are sort of isolated and the United States has a lot of sort of soft power and relational influence. And Trump’s just burning that up through his trade wars and his rhetoric etc.. So it’s not like soft power doesn’t matter anymore. And there’s a simplicity and a vulgarity of what he’s doing, which is self-defeating. But yeah, we still have to, as spiritual warriors or actors in the world, I think, pay a lot more attention to geopolitics than we did. Particularly before the end of history to, you know, to reference Fukuyama, etc.. And I grew up in the nice decade where the progress narrative was strongest. One of the few newsletters that I pay most attention to, that I actually pay for, is the Geopolitics Insider. Because it’s a world that’s so complex, it’s so important, and it’s so far from where I’ve spent my time that I’ve just been trying to get my head around it. It’s really key.

Manda: I have a number of questions, but before I get to them, I think we need to explain positive sum or negative sum or zero sum games, because quite a lot of people will not be familiar with game theory. So can you just go through game theory? And then I will ask why it’s relevant. I think we both think differently about this. So let’s go.

Jamie: Yeah. Thanks, Manda. I find the game Theory lens super helpful. I’m a player of tabletop games myself. I spend my free time going around to neighbours houses with board games and so I love being a gamesmaster or getting my head around new sorts of games with new sorts of interactions and rules. And there’s a big community of such gamers in Sheffield, where I live. And games there have certain rules, elicit certain behaviour and certain strategies essentially. So game theorists go really far down the rabbit hole on this stuff, and it becomes very mathematical and sort of like using logic and stuff to work out what the absolute optimum strategy would be, depending on different conditions and knowledge of different players and that kind of thing. And it’s applied in very serious ways to the world, in financial markets but also in politics and international relations and that kind of thing. But in the simplest terms, it’s what makes sense for me to do, given my desire to have positive outcomes in a given game or interaction. And we use this word game to apply to anything from finding a spouse to how economies work and how I spend my money. Tic tac toe is a game and it’s quite simple, quite straightforward, and you can pretty much predict what I’m going to do. There’s probably only 1 or 2 good moves at any given time, and so it’s the kind of probability assessment or working out what the good move is, depending on what the current conditions are and what the next step would be. And so games that have a zero sum essentially mean that there is no win win scenario where we’re both better off. That one of us is going to win, the other one’s going to lose, that’s generally speaking the case.

Jamie: And so in pre-state societies, there are lots and lots of zero sum games. As in, I knock you over the head and steal your stuff. I take all of the stuff and you have none. You fear that I’m going to do that, so you knock me over the head first and take all my stuff. And that’s the kind of strategies that kind of evolve that makes war quite likely, because it’s always better to strike first if there’s any doubt about whether someone’s going to strike you. And then we learn different ways to relate to each other. And particularly one of the biggest ones, of course, is trade. Because to be friendly with you and to swap stuff that we have in abundance and pool our talents in that way, actually leads to a positive sum game. Which means that to trade rather than hit each other over the head means that we’re both better off. So some philosophers suggest that the arrow of progress, like civilisation societies over time, become in some way better because we move from largely having zero sum games, where might is right, to having more and more positive sum games. Where a lot of our more base desires get sublimated into these more complex rules of engagement, where different sort of strategies are possible. And those different ways of relating to each other depend on certain causes and conditions in the world. And so that’s what I was referring to.

Manda: So I talked to Bill Plotkin a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve read all his stuff. And I also have internalised Francis Weller. (And I apologise for the singing puppy in the background. She’ll soon settle). So everything that you said seems to me to be embedded in trauma culture thinking. And Bill Plotkin is pretty clear that the trauma culture, which is our culture as opposed to the initiation culture, and that’s Frances Weller’s concepts. We are locked in early adolescence and unless or until we find our way through to adulthood and elderhood, we are basically not going to make it through. And game theory arises out of adolescent thinking. And by the time we get to adulthood and elderhood, which means we are an integral part of the web of life and know ourselves to be that, then games are no longer an issue, because I’m not in that space of having to prove anything, or even trying to mitigate the need to prove anything. I am acting as a co-creator with a wider network, some of whose nodes are human, and quite a lot of whose nodes are not. And I don’t see a way through that doesn’t get us to that. And it seems, therefore, that worrying about whether the game theory is zero sum or positive sum still locks us in trauma culture, of that belief in separability. And yet at some level, there must be a place where spiritually we can reconnect with the web of life or whatever is the equivalent for people for whom that way of speaking, that ontology doesn’t work. How does that land with you, and where does it take us?

Jamie: Um. Well, let me ask you some questions first? In this future, are there still monogamous relationships?

Manda: I doubt it. I have no idea. I personally think monogamy is…there used to be a a guy who wrote for the New York Times, and he wrote about fetishes, and somebody asked him once what was the weirdest fetish he’d ever come across, and he thought for quite a long time, and he said, monogamy. It’s not how humanity evolved. I think it’s extremely unlikely. There are very few indigenous peoples where that sense of couples bonding for life is a thing. It just isn’t. Because you don’t need to. And why would you? Because you’re part of a community. And the interflow of human interactivity does not require that sense that one other person is going to fulfil so many roles that they are required to fulfil in our culture. I think it’s massively unlikely.

Jamie: It’s a little bit more complicated an example to talk about polyamory, but it is still possible and relevant. So a person who you are attracted to can only have a certain number of relationships. They haven’t got infinite capacity to love and care for.

Manda: Why?

Jamie: Just because of time. Just because it’s complicated.

Manda: But you’re in a culture where the whole culture loves and cares for.

Jamie: But there are limits to the number of people we can know and be friends with. So if there’s a particular person who is attractive to you, there is a game that has to go on, to interest that person in you and negotiate their attention and their affection. And those are the kind of games of life we will struggle, it is impossible to get completely beyond. There’s always going to be scarce resource. So there is a game, for instance, to get on your podcast, you know. And it requires getting your attention.

Manda: That’s true.

Jamie: And I’m sure there are many hundreds of people who would like to be spending this time with you this morning and having this conversation. And I’m a winner of that game. So I have done things which convinced you sufficiently that I was worthy of your time and your audience’s time. And so even in societies that decouple significantly from material goods and that ‘game A’ approach of winning in terms of, as you say, who dies with the most stuff wins. There are still other, more subtle games that go on. We still have needs and desires and they tend to go towards things like validation, the meaning of having your work seen and applauded. We’ll always want things that are not so abundant that everyone can have as much as they want, and therefore there will always be some competition, unavoidably, between people to get whatever that scarce thing is. Whether it’s the sea front property or it’s the ideal partner or it’s time on the most influential podcast or space in the academic journal. We have to recognise that there will be healthy conflict, perhaps. We need to remember that much of nature and the beauty that we see, you know, the birdsong and the plumage, is a fruit of competition and Evolution. So to say that we’ll ever be able to totally get beyond games and some zero sum games, I think is what philosophers sometimes talk about as game denial.

Jamie: And this is to allow the ‘ought’, the world we really want to see where everyone is totally nurtured and happy and gets exactly what they want and has all the meaning and validation and attention that they really want, overcomes the ‘is’ of right now. And that’s not to say that we won’t really want to try and change the games as much as we possibly can, and try and make as many possible zero sum games positive sum games, and everyone to get the nurturing and the happiness that is possible, at scale. But to deny the games that are currently not transformed, is to not learn how to play those games and to do a disservice to us who would have power in order to enact game change. Because those who are on the other side, which is often more common on the right, is game acceptance. Which is to say life’s a jungle, you know, it’s nature red in tooth and claw. There are wolves and there are weenies is the language which David Brooks used in the New York Times recently in relation to Trump’s psychology.

Manda: Oh, God. Yes. Alpha males need to win. Yes.

Jamie: And the wolves know how to play the game, right? And if us who would want to change the game don’t recognise the games as they’re currently played, then we will get completely trounced. And so let’s learn how to play the game. And in the words of Jonathan Rosen, he says:  ‘in an important way love is the answer. But if that’s the case, then power is the question. And those that would be angels can still learn from the Mafia’. And that’s kind of the journey I’ve been on really in the last ten months, since we spoke. Which is I’ve been talking a lot about love and the politics of love. And I’ve started to realise that what Martin Luther King said about power and love is deeply true. And there are those, like Adam Kahan who have written about this. He said ‘power without love is reckless and abusive, but love without power is sentimental and anaemic’. And that actually, if we don’t learn how to play the game, then we really discredit living from love as a change agent. And we get trounced in the games that we refuse to even recognise. And so, in a subtle sense, according to another writer I really like, Hanzi Freinacht, game denial is a crime against the truth. And we let the ‘ought’ get in the way of the ‘is’ and that weakens systemically those who would change things.

Manda: Gosh, this raises so many questions. I think this framing of game acceptance or denial is deeply, deeply trauma culture and I don’t think we get through if we stay with it. But let’s let that one go for a moment. So one of the substacks that I pay for is Heather Cox Richardson. And she wrote: ‘On Tuesday, November 4th, Elizabeth Dwoskin of The Washington Post described the ideology behind the Trump world and the whole Epstein abuse of young women and everything that it supported. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organisation funded by tech leaders, to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump. She wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing JD Vance, one of the network’s members, into the vice presidency. She explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says, (and this is the key bit) “A select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward.” Such an aristocracy, as he described, this vision drives innovation. It would be, and I quote again, “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers”. When he’s not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Dwoskin, pushing “unrestrained capitalism into American life”. And she goes on to say we’ve heard this ideology before, and the bottom line of her very long post is in Lincoln’s day and in the Gilded Age, and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the US. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today’s America, where the rich and powerful are increasingly operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability. But where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth. Which I guess we’d all agree with.

Manda: So I don’t know how long you think we’ve got, but I think we’ve got a very, very short time span before biophysical reality hits us square between the eyes and all of the games become moot. And Steve Bannon said a long time ago, when Michael Moore asked him, why does the Right always win? He said, because we know exactly what we want and there is nothing we will not do to get it. And what they want is a white supremacist, patriarchal theocracy. Originally, they wanted it run along the lines of the Inquisition, but Elon Musk seems to think that the Iliad is currently their model. Either way, they’re going backwards to a point that they can easily imagine, because the white men with a lot of money were in control. And they have the means to get that now, and there is nothing they will not do. They are showing that at the moment; there is nothing they will not do. Whereas in our games, you and I do have pretty hard stops of things that we will not do to get to where we want to go. How can we possibly enter into that game? It seems to me there is no way of changing that game. They know what they want. There’s nothing they will not do to get it. They have the power and the money. And I don’t see how you get people like that to listen to a change of game, when why would they? What’s the possible incentive to get them to listen?

Jamie: Yeah, I completely agree that we’re not going to get them to listen and convince them to change a game. So we have to win the current game as it is.

Manda: How? Don’t we just change the game? I don’t see how we win this game. For me, you have to change the nature of the game.

Jamie: So. Okay. First of all, there is something extremely troubling and dark happening. And also what’s changed over the last ten months is a lot of these figures have come out of the shadows, and it’s clear that those like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are trying to enact not just project 2025, which is scary enough as a program of change, but have something else in mind closer to monarchy, essentially.

Manda: They’re going full Curtis Yarvin as far as I can tell.

Jamie: Exactly. And the work of Bronze Age pervert and then Bronze Age mindset. And what’s interesting is that there’s quite a similar structure in their thinking to some of those that we follow. They say that there’s deep cultural malaise, where we have a kind of meta crisis. That the problem is partly in virtues and that we’ve lost a sense of developing inner qualities that underpin successful society. And that we need to have deep cultural change that includes that shift towards the inner life. But their vision of society is so different from ours. They want to have a male dominated, white dominated, fascist, monarchic, hierarchical society. And the kind of virtues that they’re suggesting, they say that empathy is bad.

Manda: Is a sin, yes.

Jamie: And that you need some kind of male virility to come back.

Manda: Theil wants to have empathy labelled as the eighth deadly sin.

Jamie: No! I hadn’t heard that. Yeah. And it doesn’t surprise me. These guys are far gone. I mean, we’re not going to be negotiating with them to have a more sophisticated.

Manda: But they also control the weaponry.

Jamie: They absolutely do. But we need to understand how the weaponry works, how the systems work, how public opinion and methods of influencing it do. And that’s what I mean by power. Like we need to understand how the the platforms have been grabbed and owned. And CNN and others are going to fall as well into their sway. And the fact that it feels dark and bleak and hopeless right now should not be an excuse to deny the fact that we still have to play by, not the rules of their game or their strategies, but to recognise that we are in an existential struggle. And to use the language of power and to be clear eyed and realistic about the mechanisms and flows of power and influence in society. And there are other channels and strategies available to us that we need to develop. Simply absenting ourselves, not suggesting this is what you were saying, but one mechanism is to say, okay, well love is the answer. We need to look at the third horizon. We need to make the new system that makes the old system obsolete, etc. And to disengage from all of that.

Manda: And this is spiritual bypassing basically.

Jamie: That’s what I would say is spiritual bypassing or game denial. Yeah, exactly that’s what I’m saying. So it’s not like okay, yeah, we need to join the same forum with them and use the same language. No, we need to speak differently. We need to find different rules of engagement. We have a very, very different strategy. But the rules are set by the realities of the world as it currently is. You change the game by winning the game as it currently is, and then setting different parameters so that in future new strategies are possible and new ways of interacting are possible.

Manda: All right. So with that in mind, recently Andrea Leiter introduced me to the Economics Space Agency, and I have been reading their protocols for Post-capitalist expansion. Which are lighting up a lot of sparks in my head. And they’re basically, I’m not all the way through, but the fundamentals as I understand it, is redefining value, redefining tokens, cryptocurrency tokens, and creating flows of value that are in no way linked to current fiat currencies. And I do not see a different way of getting through fast enough that doesn’t remove the dollar as a hegemonic currency. At the point when the dollar is worth nothing and we will have to then zero Bitcoin, basically where the markets no longer have any value, then the people who currently have the power have no more power. Because their power is based solely on their appropriation of value and the nature of compound interest. Basically, they are making money simply by having money. This is back to Polanyi and the commodification of land, labour and capital. And the commodification of capital means once you’ve got capital, you get more capital, and we cannot live in a world where that happens. So to what extent are the people that you’re talking to, looking at removing the dollar as a fiat currency? And are you seeing a different way through? Because I don’t think we’ve got beyond the end of the decade. Just looking at basic science, there was a report out this morning saying we’re going to hit 2.6, and if we hit 2.6 we’re done. Because 2.6 takes us beyond so many tipping points that all of these conversations are basically pointless.

Manda: They are all predicated on us all having food, water, air and shelter. And the one that I look at a lot is oxygen. 50 to 85% of our oxygen comes from phytoplankton. We are currently killing the oceans faster than we’re killing the land, and we’re killing the land fairly fast. The GOES report reckons we’ve got till 2045. So that’s my deadline. And I don’t think we have time to spend a lot of time trying to change the narrative nature of the game, much as I am trying to change it, I think that’s an essential thing. But I think we also have to be working structurally, and my structure would be when the dollar is worth nothing Elon Musk is no longer the most powerful man in the world. Or Peter Thiel or any of them. What structures are you aiming at with your change in narrative? Or do you think that we can change the concept?

Jamie: Yeah. Interesting.

Manda: Of power. Faster.

Jamie: Yeah. So this speaks a little bit to what I am now doing. So I’m co-founding a project as yet unnamed. It was called the Reweaving project. It might still be called that, so you can use that as a placeholder.

Manda: I like it.

Jamie: So I’m founding it with Professor Rebecca Henderson, who is about as high up the academic tree as you can climb. And her background was in engineering and then economics, and she’s still one of the top 100 referenced economists. But really, she spent the last couple of decades working primarily in business and she wrote the book Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, which has a big following behind it. And we have a particular rapport and shared language, because she has, over the last 4 or 5 years, started meditating a lot. So she spent about six months on meditation retreat, cumulatively. Spent a good deal of her sabbatical in the last few years, basically doing the inner work and starting to see the deeper shifts that are required. I mean, I think many people found her book Reimagining Capitalism very provocative and, you know, heart and mind changing. And she feels that it hasn’t gone anywhere deep enough and sort of regrets to some extent, pulling her punches and saying what she thought could be heard rather than what needed to be said. And now she she sees things differently. And so she’s been teaching a course at Harvard called Reweaving Ourselves and the World.

Jamie: And that’s where the Reweaving project sort of placeholder comes from. And this is a post-grad course for anyone at Harvard to join and discuss the fact that there’s a polycrisis. Waking up to the challenges that you just highlighted. Making that move to meta crisis; that there are deep reasons why all of these things are happening and why they’re cascading across. Risk is cascading across different domains. That those deep reasons go down to our psychology and our culture. And that inner is really important as a result, and because we’ve neglected it, the inner is the site of work. And that we haven’t got to start from scratch, there are decades now of great stuff that people can get behind and learn from, etc. So that’s the broad shape of the journey that some in the elite are interested in going in. She’s had both post-grads, but also people at the end of their careers, they’re back at Harvard to spend a year doing whatever they want. Many of them chose her course because they like the sound of it, and have been evangelistic in their enthusiasm for what they learn and the journey that they went on over the 14 weeks of this program.

Jamie: And so Rebecca really understands economics. We’ve talked about alternative economic systems with many of the people that we speak to. And yes, that would really change the game if we had different currencies. And, you know, that is one way of game change. Is working out the rules with which we can exchange value and collaborate with each other, avoiding mainstream currencies. Totally. And what’s our work to do is to help people go on this journey, recognising the inner and the deep cultural transformation that’s possible. And these kind of changes take generations normally. But rapid change in perspective worldview is possible in much shorter time scales in response to crisis. And what we’ve seen this year is a very different playing field. You know, we started off the year talking about how a politics of love felt kind of radical and needed advocates. We needed to start having that language. Just in the last week or two someone forwarded me a video of Zack Polanski going on stage and saying, well, first of all, a kind of socialist populist platform. He was on stage with, um…

Manda: One of the big comedians, I think, wasn’t it? It was somebody really famous. Or a rapper.

Jamie: Yeah, actually, it was a hip hop act. Yeah. And said, like, you know, what are we against? We’re against fascism. And what are we for? And the first thing he said was like, love. And everyone was like, yay! You know. And that’s really interesting.

Manda: Yeah. And Zohran Mamdani saing much the same in the US.

Jamie: Totally. Yes, exactly. And yeah, finding that the L word is suddenly a lot more common.

Manda: I think the Romans had seven different words for the word that we use love for.

Jamie: Yeah.

Manda: And it stretches from, you know, I love gooseberry pie, to I love the weather today, to I feel a lot of projection and lust for this person, to I feel heart blazingly in love with the process of being alive in connection to the web of life. And that’s a very wide spectrum of what we cover by love. And you and I were on a call this time last week with someone who spent quite a long time apologising for having used the word love, in a call with people who should have been totally on board with it.

Jamie: Yes.

Manda: So I wonder if, just in terms of ontology, is that the best word to be using? And what’s the difference between love and let’s say fierce, wild, raw compassion? How would you frame the differences between those?

Jamie: Yeah. Great question. More people are using the word love and we need to tether it to or pair it with demonstration that we understand systems and the workings of power. Going back to this conversation around games.

Manda: That’s a lot to weight on one four letter word.

Jamie: Yeah it is. But this is what Martin Luther King is pointing to as well. And I’ll come back to what you’re saying there about is it the right word, for sure. Let me first give you kind of an anecdote about the work that we did with mindfulness, because to some extent we were a legitimising project. When I say we, I mean the Mindfulness Initiative. So we clerked an all party parliamentary group on mindfulness. We worked with politicians who wanted to look at mindfulness and compassion training in different walks of public life and make it a serious matter of public policy.

Manda: Look how well it’s happened in the UK? Compassion seems to have died in the UK Parliament, but I’m sure there are people within there still trying really hard.

Jamie: Yeah, I think there are people who really get it and who are very compassionate and we can come back to that as well and talk about some of those people in particular. So we had an audience of policymakers and politicians, and we had a certain language and a policy report, you know, reference after every line, trying to make it as credible and as legitimate as possible. And for that, we had to to frame mindfulness in a particular way, and make it not just a wellbeing, nice to have, you know, not just about dwelling in the present moment. But actually this seriously underpins our ability to enact change in the world. It’s about our agency, it’s about ability to connect and be open to and receptive to new sorts of information with which we can have a wiser and more compassionate response in the world. And so we had this particular frame that we felt we really needed to get across, to broaden the sense of what was going on here. And there are lots of advocates of mindfulness who really wanted the same thing, wanted people to get the memo, as it were. And without realising it, we’re really undermining its acceptance in society by giving certain messages of like, oh, it’s just about well-being, or it’s just about being being present.

Jamie: And that was an easy story to tell and understandable why people were doing that, as it was just coming into society. So we had a secondary audience. We had the audience not just of policymakers, but also we had a leadership role within the mindfulness world, where we produced lots of materials, lots of conference talks, did lots of webinars, helping to nuance the ways in which mindfulness teachers were talking about it. So as not to undermine it, so that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, or at least not talking about it in limited ways. And then I worked to legitimise the whole gamut of inner outer capacities with the inner development goals. And to some extent now I feel to some extent I’m legitimising love. And I’m really up for the debate about whether that is the right thing to legitimise or whatever, but I deeply think we have to go there. That it’s the only thing that’s deep and broad and powerful enough to to to stand toe to toe with the fear and the hatred, which are also being exaggerated.

Manda: So can we define love then? What is the embodied sense of love that you want us all to be able to feel?

Jamie: So the reason for telling that story is that I think it’s one part of the picture for Zack Polanski, you know, the leader of the Green Party, to go on stage and say, we are for love. And we talked in the last podcast about how the mayor of Istanbul had a platform of radical love to overcome the right wing populists of Erdogan in the Istanbul elections. You know, hard power came home to roost more recently, and he’s now in jail, even though he won a second term.

Manda: Oh is he?

Jamie: Yes. But I think to be a really successful electoral force, I think that’s a different strategy. I think that’s a strategy we need to play. We need to talk about love. We need to really go there. And we need to show that we also understand that we need boundaries. That we need, as we say in mindfulness training, we need to be like strong in back and soft in front. You know, we need the rigour and the discipline, the boundariedness, and we need the differentiation. I know we could probably have some creative tension if we talked about immigration as an example of where this often shows up. That we need to talk about love, we need to talk about compassion, we need to talk about values, we need to talk about leadership, we need to talk about what kind of world we want to see. We need to talk about those individuals who are fleeing persecution and deserve sanctuary. And I’m proud to live in a city of sanctuary in Sheffield.

Manda: Oh is it? Yay!

Jamie: And also, we need to recognise that immigration, the tensions and the costs of that are not shared equally in society, based on class and income. That actually, with refugees also comes trauma that we need to help process and heal. And we can’t just invite people in. And that takes resources. And that’s the kind of understanding the workings of power in systems and having a deep sense of what this really means, rather than everybody’s welcome here. Because that would be the love approach. We step first of all into the unification, we see the oneness, we see that we want to be led and acting from that place. And if we don’t also see the long term implications of that, and the political game of narrative, and of understanding the needs and wants of everyone in society, then we lose the game to the far right in the long term. If we just focus on the everyone’s welcome, we need to throw open our our borders. And I worry that Zack Polanski, who says love, also has a straightforward message rather than a kind of more nuanced message about immigration and refugees that seriously limits, there will be an upper limit to where the Green Party can go in the United Kingdom as a result. And so, yeah, I haven’t answered your question, but I’ve gone off on a rant.

Manda: No. But this is going to take us into really interesting places. Because our current concept of the economy is wholly flawed and is based on an absolute either misunderstanding or deliberate confabulation of the nature of money and how it arises. So we keep telling ourselves, and even Zack Polanski, and I know he knows this is wrong, because I’ve heard him talk to Richard Murphy, so he understands how money is created. But he’s also very cleverly, I think, still talking within the ‘we need a tax take in order to spend’, which we do not. But he’s saying we’re going to fund this by taxing the multimillionaires and billionaires and here we have the money. And the problem is not the people coming in, the problem is that we have been starved of resources since Thatcher decided that there is no alternative and wanted to shrink, basically wanted to really accelerate the funnelling of resource to the few from the many. And I don’t see, because he’s being super bright about this, as far as I can tell, he’s not saying let everybody in. He’s saying the immigrants are not the problem. Which strikes me as a really useful shift in narrative.

Jamie: I completely agree.

Manda: The reason your NHS is not functioning is not the people coming in, it’s the fact that money is being sucked out and given to American healthcare companies in order to turn us into a really bad version of the 51st state. I think let’s not stay on Green Party politics for long, much as I think it would be really interesting. I listen to Zach’s podcast; he’s extremely well informed and he’s got a really good strategy. He is doing what I think we need to do, which is playing within the rules of the game. He’s not challenging the fact that the rhetoric is that we need a tax take in order to spend, which we do not. He is saying that we’re going to tax the people who have way, way too much money, and we’re then going to pour it out and at that point you will realise that your problem was never the fact that a Ukrainian family moved in next door, the problem was that a whole selection of governments with exactly the same suit and slightly different coloured ties decided it was fun to extract money from all of us and funnel it to the top. So this strikes me as a really useful shift in narrative. And we’re seeing it with Zohran Mamdani and somebody who was just elected, another really interesting democratic socialist woman was elected in another of the states this last week. So there is a shift that way.

Manda: I am expecting quite soon a very hard counter shift. It would not surprise me if they didn’t arrest Mamdani. Given what you said just happened in Turkey; hard power is hard power. So I really like the idea that we are beginning to Land. I still get back to we need to do the growing up; we need to shift from trauma culture. We need to rediscover what it is to be an initiation culture in the 21st century, or I don’t see how we get through. And that shift is inner, without question. And depending on how we define love, I think we’ve got to get to the point where we have courageous, compassionate, clean connections between all parts of ourselves, ourselves and other people, and ourselves and the web of life. And we’ve actually fallen in love with the process of being alive. How are you seeing that? Let’s assume that we both hold the word love more or less in common, and that that is broadly a reasonable definition. But if you’ve got better ones, say so. How can that possibly Land with enough of the people who’s desperately wounded egos have got them to the top of this steep sided pyramid? You can’t get up there without being deep in the dark triad. How are we going to reach them in time?

Jamie: There’s some assessments of how big changes and revolutions have happened in the past, and often it does require some of the elites.  I don’t know if it’s often or always, it’s, uh, not top of mind enough. But having kind of dis illusioned disgruntled masses isn’t sufficient. You need some people in the elites to get behind the change that the majority want to see.

Manda: Yep.

Jamie: And yes, some who have climbed to the top do so because of unwholesome motivations, dark triad or whatever. And they aren’t going to be our guys. But there is sufficient diversity amongst those who hold different forms of power that it’s worth trying to find the people who are open to an eco civilisation, to a life generating society, to getting ourselves out of this mess. There are, for instance, the children of the 1% or the children of the 0.1%. And I know a number of people who are taking their family fortunes, their family foundations, and directing them in new ways. I know people who were also self-made billionaires who similarly have, for one reason or another, decided that they want to support the kind of work that I’ve been engaged in and want to see systems transformation. And that’s the question that we’re asking ourselves.

Jamie: We have Rebecca’s reputation. She comes with saying, I can do engineering and economics and I’m at Harvard Business School and I can I can do the power bit. And I’m telling you that love is important. I’m telling you, we need deep cultural inner transformation. And that’s a powerful message because of her credibility from the coordinates that she’s coming from and with the Harvard Association. We’re asking ourselves the question, can we do something with this? We suspect that we might have a particular role to play. Being credible and legitimate enough for these 1% communities to hear and to attract critical mass, to create an island of coherence, or rather, to identify and support any islands of coherence that are already there, within the groups that  have the money, the resources, the understanding of how it really works out there, to create alternative media platforms, for instance.

Manda: Right. That was my next question.

Jamie: To drop half a billion behind The Nerve or the Alternative Global or one of these great, you know, alternative media platforms. Because we need to understand that the infrastructure matters. And that, again, is understanding that power matters.

Manda: Gosh. Okay. I’d love to go down the route of alternative media structures, because that does seem to me, particularly podcasts actually, because they’re fundamentally such a low bar to entry.

Jamie: Totally. It’s a counterpoint to all the doom and gloom in the media ecosystem. The fact that people are willingly spending an hour and a half on long form content on the problems of the world, like, it’s a bright spot.

Manda: It really is. And you said earlier that there’s reasonable competition to come on this podcast, and I’m a tiny little podcast in the sea of podcasts. But I could easily do one a day if somebody wanted to fund me to do that. We could set up a radio station of these easily. There are so many out there that are in this world or this world adjacent, that are speaking the same language. Even Andrea Hiott’s love and philosophy, you’ve been on that, haven’t you?

Jamie: Totally. Yeah.

Manda: You talked to Andrea, I think.

Jamie: Yeah. It’s not out yet, but I was on it recently. Yeah.

Manda: There’s so much of this. I mean, this is what gives me hope as well as you. I think there is a counterweight that is growing under the radar of the legacy media, because the legacy media is owned by the people who don’t want the system to shift. So how do we replace that feels like a really big question. And almost as big a question is, how do we shift the nature of the ways that we we store, exchange and account for value, which is what we call the economy at the moment? And then also, how do we shift away from a notionally democratic structure, which was never democratic? It was always designed to hold power in the hands of the few. To something which genuinely brings power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power. And that those three are so tightly linked. This is why complex systems require total systemic change. We can’t just pull one thread and expect all the rest to change with us. We need to pull them all together. There was a very interesting podcast, I was trying to find it and I can’t, but it was on Nate Hagens. It was a Russian guy with a very thick accent whose first name was Peter, and I don’t remember the rest. But he reckoned that every time there’s been a big shift, in the West within our trauma culture, it’s because the elite has expanded and only a few of the elite can actually hold power. And the ones who grew up thinking they were going to hold power are like, no, no, this isn’t right. And there’s an oversupply of lawyers, apparently. Always. In the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all the big revolutions, it’s the lawyers.

Jamie: Really? Disenfranchised lawyers. And they’re going to be losing their jobs because of AI, right?

Manda: Yes. Well, and they’re losing their jobs because Trump is throwing them out.

Jamie: Oh, true.

Manda: And there was already I think 60 to 1 oversupply. And now it’s orders of magnitude more than that. So there’s going to be a lot of lawyers who want to change the rules. But we then have to be ready. This is back to Milton Friedman saying whatever is picked up in a crisis is what’s lying around. Are you working with people, Rebecca or anybody else, who is creating the frameworks for a legal structure that is based on community and cohesion and connection and compassion, and not based on rigid hierarchical structures? Is anybody working on that?

Jamie: Um, so not my area of expertise. I think it’s a hugely important area, the development of neighbourhood democracies and different ways of  sense making. The work of Audrey Tang and using digital infrastructure. I mean, it probably requires that. Like a lot of the changes we saw in the enlightenment period, the Western Enlightenment, were due to the printing press, etc. I think we’re still very early in the kind of the social hyperconnected world. And some of the negative stuff is coming home to roost, but we haven’t still yet, I think, seen some of the more positive ways in which we could use technology to, along with legal reform, work out ways of governing ourselves that don’t require the hierarchical and potentially representative democracy modes. So not my area of expertise, but it’s definitely part of the picture. I completely agree.

Manda: Okay. All right. So as a final avenue, because we’re heading to the end. I’ve kept you on for a long time because I spent a stupid amount of time sorting out the puppy. However, I listened to Tristan Harris recently talking about AI, and it is thoroughly terrifying. Apparently there is AI now that is starting to blackmail the software engineers in order that it not be upgraded and thereby lose its current settings, which I find really quite scary. And apparently in Silicon Valley now, if you’d said at a dinner party five years ago that you were meditating, everybody would have looked at you like you’d grown horns. And now if you said you were NOT meditating, everybody would look at you like you’d grown horns. And we still have an AI culture that, faster than anything else, is going to take us over an existential cliff. So it seems to me that there’s meditating that reinforces your existing worldview, and there’s meditation that can create a degree of flexibility. And that perhaps these are two separate things. And you may be in the field to identify whether that’s true or not. What is the personal practice that for you gets us to the flexibility and the connectedness and not into the ‘I am in a zero sum game, and I need to win the AI race because I’m the best person to win it and it doesn’t matter if we destroy the world in doing it’.

Jamie: Yeah. I think this has been a really live question throughout my work with the Mindfulness Initiative and then more recently with the Inner Development Goals. I do think that inner work, the kind of cognitive flexibility, the greater sensitivity, openness that comes with meditation and mindfulness practice does improve the soil out of which positive things are more likely to spring. But it’s a helpful, potentially necessary, but not sufficient condition for transformative change.

Manda: Right.

Jamie: We know that, say, let’s talk about mindfulness practice; does support prosocial action in some way, but we know that it could definitely be better at that. We could teach it in different ways, frame it in different ways, be much more explicit about the causes and conditions of our distress, not just being under our own control, not just being about our work or our personal lives, but they’re also systemic. You know, they’re also cultural. So we need to broaden the lens, use that same sensitivity and discernment that we turn to our more personal lives, to our collective lives. And there’s a name for that, like social mindfulness.

Manda: Oh is there? Right.

Jamie: So approaches which are much more about an ecological view of self and including our collective predicament. And actually I’ve just been invited to host a special season of the Mind and Life podcast. So this has been going for five years. I’ll be doing 6 to 8 episodes. And what I’ll be doing for them is a kind of 6 or 8 panel shows, each with a particular approach or area of spiritual, contemplative work that is being turned to the problems of the world. Our collective challenges. And so we’re doing one episode on The Work That Reconnects and so we’ve got some of the people who were in Joanna Macy’s life and adapting her great body of work. We’ll have one on the Presencing Institute and Theory U.

Manda: Please do a shamanic one!

Jamie: I have got a couple of slots left, so we should definitely talk about that. And there are lots of ways in which we’re starting to see that programs can evolve to be much more explicitly geared towards outcomes that are pro-social, that are about collective impact. And there are great things like mindfulness based systems transformation, for instance. You know, we had mindfulness based pain management and mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based things that initially, and there are good structural reasons for that, focussed on the individual and health concerns. We’re now using that same expertise to turn towards the climate crisis or whatever. And so we’ll do essentially a kind of a state of the nation about where that’s up to. And there are a lot of other organisations that are developing programs for spiritual warriors, for want of a want of a better term, and one of those that I work for is Life Itself, which is developing a Praxis Academy. And there are many others thinking about that question that we started exploring together back in January, which is what is needed from us at this time? What is it to be a spiritual warrior and showing up with all that entails? And then also, how can we help those who would aspire to do that more of the time? What are the pathways that we can create? And adapting mindfulness is one of the ways of doing it, actually sort of really going there with both barrels.  And from my perspective with the full Buddha Dharma and the insights from that deeper tradition is also really needed.

Manda: Brilliant. Jamie, we’re going to head for podcast number three I can feel it, probably sometime next summer when you’ve got through this, because I so enjoy this conversation. You’re one of the few people where I can really get down into the edge points of how are we actually going to get through? How are we actually going to make things change? And you’re already thinking about it, and you’re working with the people who are right there with the power brokers and the power mongers, which is otherwise almost impossible to work with.

Jamie: And that’s one of the reasons why working with Rebecca is so generative is because she’s got a laser focus on what is actually happening, what can actually be done. Like what are the case studies? That’s how they teach a Harvard Business School and that’s what she’s bringing to our collaboration. We’ve had lots of sense making, we’ve had lots of philosophers talking on podcasts about how, in theory, we could do this. And there’s been lots of innovators, but without the profile, without necessarily documenting what they’ve been doing. Now’s the time that we need to document it. We need to make a much harder practical case, a fundable case, to get this stuff happening at scale. And that question, yeah, what is really being done and what really could be done, as you say, in a time scale of one year, two year, three year. And who out there is going to fund it?

Manda: That’s the big question, isn’t it? Because there’s a lot of weight of the people who have the money don’t want this to happen. Or don’t know that they need it to happen. I still believe that if we can create the energetic space within which this is real, when people are no longer in an internal zero sum game. Dick Schwartz says that almost all of us, almost all of the time, are walking around in a state of internal civil war. We’ve got zero some stuff happening inside and then we project it out. If we can get enough people to at least declare an inner truce and begin to live in a world that doesn’t feel zero sum, then the feeling of zero sum reduces, and the feeling of whatever else we like to call it; the feeling of connection and coherence and cooperation and community spreads and people are going to want that feeling, I think. This is where if we can create the energetic shift, then that becomes not just a fractal spread, but an accelerating exponential rise, I think. And I keep saying this, but I don’t see any other way through than creating that exponential rise in feeling. And there’s got to be a tipping point, we just are never going to know what it is until we’ve passed it. So yay! So thank you for doing all this. Please come back sometime next summer and tell me how this is getting on. And in the meantime, is there anything else that you particularly wanted to say today as we close?

Jamie: There is one thing which I wonder if is a little bit of a whole new rabbit hole.

Manda: You’re going to open a whole new rabbit hole, I can feel it.

Jamie: That I think there is a role for wholesome, compassionate patriotism. And I would point you and others to the work of Martha Nussbaum and her book, Political Emotions; Why Love Matters for justice. And there’s a particular chapter in there which makes a very good case for where, in the past, the nation state and love of nation has been a bridge to love of an international, global collaborative order and for love of  wider humanity. She gives the example of Abraham Lincoln and Rabindranath Tagore. And I think that to vacate the field where, and people like also Yuval Noah Harari talk about it, as the most successful way we’ve had humans collaborate at scale. And that telling a story that’s about love and justice and having that as a matter of national pride is the bridge potentially the bridge that we need to make to then have a global identity and a global sense of responsibility and love and justice at that scale. And like I say, if we just leave that up to those who would distort and twist our self-concept towards being narrow and mean, then we’re not playing the game properly.

Manda: Okay. We might have to leave it because of time. I would say Scotland actually is a really good example. I think Abraham Lincoln, you cannot build that on a nation that’s built on slavery and genocide. That requires too much doublethink. Scotland, years ago, we were talking politics and someone looked at me and said, are you a nationalist? I’m a Scottish nationalist. That’s a very different thing to being an English nationalist. However, I think in the end I’m with Primavera De Filippi that we need to abandon the Hobbesian view of nations because a nation is hierarchical. It is the political entity that claims a legal monopoly on the use of power within certain geographic boundaries. And that’s a trauma culture notion. And I disagree with Yuval Noah Harari on just about everything he says, because everything he says is predicated on trauma culture thinking. I have yet to hear him step beyond it. So I think you’re right in the short term and in the long term coordi-nations I think would be a very, very interesting way to go. We need the steps on the way.

Jamie: Totally. That’s it. That’s the long term. It’s like saying this is what needs to be done now and we can aspire to a world where we transcend that. Absolutely. So I agree with you, but we need to accept that. Yeah, trauma healing is required and will take generations.

Manda: Do you think? Okay, this is a final question: why will it take generations? Why can we not do it now? I think we’ve got ten years to do about 10,000 years worth of trauma healing. Why not now? I don’t think we get through if we tell ourselves it’s going to take generations.

Jamie: Man, because it’s…oof.

Manda: We can’t turn the bus from the edge of the cliff if we don’t behave differently.

Jamie: I don’t know. I come with open hands and a deep sense of unknowing about how long this will take. I know that personally, my trauma healing journey was difficult and it took time and it took deep work. And I’m like, gosh, if we’re expecting that at scale, at the kind of speed that you’re talking about. The kind of infrastructure, the kind of support. We don’t know how to do that.

Manda: But is that not also a fractal exponential thing? The more of us who do the healing, the more we can support other people to do the healing, the more we have support for doing the healing.

Jamie: Yeah. It’s just yeah.

Manda: There’s more support now than there has ever been.

Jamie: I feel inspired by that potential, hearing you say that.

Manda: And there’s more emotional literacy and more social technologies that work.

Jamie: May it be so. May it be so.

Manda: Yeah. Let’s work on that one. I think if we leave it, I don’t think we get through. I think we need to do it. All of us need to do it now. But I could be wrong.

Jamie: So I’m opening a can of worms right at the end there, Manda. But this has been so generative and fruitful.

Manda: Yeah. No, no, it’s good. Cans of worms open at the end means that we know what we’re going to talk about next time. So thank you, thank you, thank you. We have to stop. Jamie Bristow, thank you so much for all that you are and do.

Jamie: Likewise.

Manda: And for coming on to the podcast again, giving so generously of your time.

Jamie: Thank you and love to all of your listeners. May you all be well.

Manda: Absolutely, yes. Thank you. Well, here we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks, as I said, to Jamie for all that he is and does. I spend my life surfing at this intersection where people are really thinking hard about how we make the changes that we need to get us where we need to go. And so few people are thinking so deeply along such generative lines as Jamie is. And who have the power to make it happen in the world. Jamie is talking to the people who kind of get this, and helping them to get to the places where they really get it, where they feel it in the marrow of their bones. So there are the people who are up there holding the levers of change and yet, I believe, and I’m sure Jamie does too, that each of us has a part to play in this, that as much as the top down changes that are so often lauded in our culture, we need a bottom up movement of the people who really get it right across the spectrum of the whole of our culture. This is what’s happening with Zack Polanski in the U.K. and Zohran  Mamdani and others in the US and many, many, many others around the world. So if you’re listening to this, if it begins to touch you, then what matters is finding the ways that you can let it sink in to the marrow of your bones. Where it becomes who you are. Where your heart leads all of your life, rather than your head thinking that it needs to lead all of your life.

Manda: And I know this is hard. Right at the end, we got to that point where Jamie was suggesting that the healing that we need is going to take 2 or 3 generations. And I genuinely don’t think we have that long. We need to do this now. Each of us needs to be the transformation in ourselves and of ourselves every minute of every day. And yes, this is incredibly hard. There are wounded parts of ourselves that will be triggered, that will act out. And the only thing we can do is be kind to those parts and help them understand that the trigger is never the answer. The story is not what it’s about. What can we bring to this that comes from love and compassion, and that shares the power of who we are with all parts of ourselves, Ourselves and each other, ourselves and the web of life? How do we bring ourselves back into balance, every moment of every day? Because we will fall off the knife edge and we do need to come back on.

Manda: And if you don’t like the metaphor of a knife edge, ignore it. Turn it into a path through the forest. This is the language that I use within dreaming awake. Don’t let the language be your leader. Let the concepts, the ideas, the embodied feelings take us all to where we need to go.

Manda: So that’s it for this week. We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Alan Lowles of Air-tight Studios, with the production. To Lou Mayor for the video and Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for the website, for sharing the journey, for all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who really needs to understand the interface between love and power and how we can find power with instead of power over, then please do send them this link. And while we’re here, if you have time for five stars and a review on the podcast app of your choice, it really makes a difference to the algorithms and to how we get heard in the world. So go for it. It doesn’t take long, I promise. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

You may also like these recent podcasts