In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast and the membership program where we believe that another world is still possible, that if we all pull together, that if we all commit ourselves in service to life, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. Clearly, nothing is certain, but I think one of the things we can say with reasonable certainty is that if we do nothing, if we default to continuing as if the world were normal, as if tomorrow was going to be an iteration of yesterday, then things are not going to be good. We are right in the middle of biophysical and cultural, social and democratic collapse. Meaning making, sense making has never been harder. Rarely, if ever, have there been so many different competing ideas as to what we can usefully do, either to head off the people currently taking chainsaws to the structures of democracy; people overriding laws, people beginning to disappear other people in countries where we used to think that kind of thing didn’t happen; it happened somewhere else, and we didn’t really need to get that bothered about it. And now it’s happening to people whose names we know. Clearly, the world is changing. And if you listen to this podcast, you don’t really need me to go into the detail. So what I want to do today is to bring to the podcast a Substack that I wrote earlier in March.

I am recording this on Sunday, the 16th of March. So a couple of days after the full lunar eclipse and several weeks into the Musk and Trump administration. It’s a couple of days since the head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the US stated that the EPA’s function now was to make sure people could buy more cars. It is also a couple of days since the Democratic leadership in the Senate decided that it was fun to roll over and play dead for Trump. Things are moving very, very fast. So even this Substack was written in a slightly different world, and by the time this has been through production, it will be a different world again. But I want to bring to you, the podcast listeners, something that I wrote largely because I had set up a Substack account so that I could look at other substacks and perhaps restack them. And then people were beginning to follow it, and I had written nothing. So now I have. And you may not want to be on Substack. There are very good reasons for not wanting to support it. I’m ambivalent about it, as I am ambivalent about almost everything that our current internet can do. So if you don’t want to go near a Substack, this is largely what I wrote, and I will riff on some of the more obvious themes. I called it Thoughts From the Edge, and this is what I wrote.

Manda: Suppose we accept that the current system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was always designed to do, which is to shovel wealth and power from the many to the few at a human scale, and from the more than human world to the industrial, technical, more predatory capitalism at an ecological scale. None of this is news to those of you who listen to the podcast regularly. I went on, this is a death cult and it is in its death throes, but it will take us all down with it if we let it. And here I would say I spent all of last weekend on a dog behaviour training course, one of those places where everybody present was already a dog trainer, as in a professional dog trainer. Which I’m not technically, I have trained to be one, I just don’t actually do it. But I’m thinking of getting a new puppy in spite of everything. And I learned a lot. And one of the things I remembered is the nature of extinction behaviours. So if a behaviour, in human terms say you go to the vending machine, you put in a coin of the right denomination, you press a button and it gives you something. Some ultra processed food like substance that you particularly are addicted to. If you have been used to doing that, put in coin, press button, feed addiction and then suddenly it doesn’t work, you will smack that button and then you will probably kick the machine, and then you might start shoulder charging the machine, and then you might actually try and shake it to get it to give you the thing that you were expecting.

Manda: And I have watched a number of quite intelligent behaviourists suggesting that what’s happening in the US and in other places around the world at the moment are the extinction behaviours of predatory capitalism. I would like to think this is true, because the point about an extinction behaviour is that if it doesn’t yield the expected results, eventually you stop hitting the machine. You accept your coin went in, you’re not going to get your bit of ultra processed food, and you can go off and do something else. And you might occasionally come back to the machine and stare at it hard, but you’re unlikely to feed it many more coins. So if this is the extinction behaviour, it’s going to get bad and then it will die away. I am not convinced. But it’s kind of nice when I’m struggling to sleep at night to think that it might be true. Anyway, I went on to write: suppose then, that we accept the current system is not fit for purpose, if that purpose is the continuation of complex life on Earth. If it is the flourishing of humanity as an integral part of the web of life. If it is a world predicated on values of compassion, decency, integrity, generosity of spirit, and absolute confidence in our place as Conscious nodes in the web of life.

Manda: And again, unless this is the first time you’ve listened to this podcast, this is unlikely to be news to you. The concept of the continuation of complex life on Earth is something I’d like to unpick a little, because I am hearing a distressing number of people in whatever we call the side of the world that wants complex life to continue, who assume that widespread human extinction is coming, but there will be bands of plucky humans who somehow manage to roam the earth and will repopulate when things get less bad. I suspect that Musk’s whole Accelerationist Curtis Yarvin ghastly playbook is based on something like this. Wipe out as many people as possible, because he and his friends will then be able to survive on a world that they think they will want to live in. And I had an interesting conversation with DeepSeek recently about this. DeepSeek is the Chinese AI that doesn’t use nearly as much water and power as ChatGPT and Claude and I had read another Substack by Jan Andrew Bloxam, who reported a conversation between Steve Pyke and Deep, where Steve essentially asked the AI, are we facing collapse? It was a bit more detailed than that, but not a huge lot. And initially Deep said, not really, no, it’s going to be all right. And Steve Pyke, who was referencing Michael Dowd’s post doom page, said, are you sure about that? And gradually over several iterations of are you sure about that? Deep got to a point where it said, actually, probably yes.

Manda: And then Steve Pyke asked, so is there anything that someone like Musk or anyone else could possibly do? And Deep said, no, not really because here: reasons. And I am going to read you reason four which said: what could be done (but won’t). In theory, the following actions might slow collapse, but they’re politically/economically impossible. Number one: De-growth – rapidly scale down energy and resource use to 1970s levels rationing essentials. Abandon GDP, profits and consumerism. Number two: Global Mobilisation – redirect 50% of global GDP to relocalize food systems, restore ecosystems and decommission fossil infrastructure. Number three: end industrial agriculture – shift to permaculture reducing emissions, which are 30% of total, and halting soil erosion. It could have said an awful lot more about increasing biodiversity, increasing water uptake, all of the other things. But anyway, it got that far. Four: terminate the military industrial complex – redirect 2.1 trillion per year (and that is now a massive underestimate) in war spending to hospice care for civilisation. We could unpick that last phrase. It’s obviously been reading, or at least has read people who have been reading Vanessa Andreotti’s book Hospicing Modernity.

Manda: And then it writes why it won’t happen: these require dismantling hierarchies of power, which no elites, including Musk, will ever endorse. And there is a lot to say about this. It would be a whole other podcast, but let’s just reflect on that. We know exactly what we need to do, and the people in power are not going to do it because they perceive that they would then have less power. And if we don’t, we are facing biophysical, sociological, cultural, economic and democratic collapse with the likely extinction of humanity.

Manda: Because I picked up on this, I put it all back into DeepSeek and said, do you remember saying this? And it went ‘kind of, anyway I’ve got it now’. It doesn’t seem to remember things, which is kind of interesting, because a while ago, Vanessa Andreotti had a really long and interesting conversation with ChatGPT, and I went back to Chat and said, hey, do you remember your conversation with Vanessa that kind of went like this? And they went, oh yeah, this. And it reeled me off pages of what they talked about. And I was able to say, okay, so can we continue this conversation? And it went, yeah, sure. And I have never been able to replicate that. However, that’s another conversation. So I put all of Steve and Deep’s conversation back into Deep and said, you wrote this: collapse versus extinction. Collapse of industrial civilisation is highly likely, but collapse does not necessarily mean extinction. Humans are a resilient species and small populations could survive in pockets of the world that remain habitable, e.g. high altitude regions and the Arctic. However, the conditions for long term survival would be harsh and the loss of global systems (medicine, agriculture and energy) would make life unrecognisable.

Manda: And I wrote, I’m curious to know why you believe small pockets of humanity might survive. I went into a lot more detail, and I had exactly the same experience that Steve had, which is in the beginning, it wrote a bunch of pretty bland stuff about exactly what it said about small pockets of humans surviving in high altitudes, and it seemed to be considering that global warming was going to limit to 3 or 4°C. So we started talking about tipping points and many pages and several iterations of conversation later, we got to okay, yes, possibly tipping points. Ten degrees centigrade or more above pre-industrial levels, that’s not really survivable by complex life, any form of complex life. This is the nature of mass extinctions. The difference here is that the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs took several thousand years, and we are achieving the same in decades, because the people at the top do not want to make the economic, political and cultural changes that everybody knows are necessary. So I would encourage anybody listening to abandon their small pockets of human surviving fantasy. This is motivated reasoning, people. Ecological collapse is ecological collapse. Somebody recently described as adolescent adjacent incels typing away at keyboards in windowless offices somewhere in the US who think that the natural world is an aesthetic option that they can choose not to have, and they are wrong. This is really not an option.

Manda: We depend on the natural world. That is so self-evident that it should not need stating. But even were it not the case, we are taking ourselves down an evolutionary blind alley to a place where we seem to be wanting to give the next evolution of intelligence over to silicon life, AI, and intelligence and wisdom are wholly different. When in fact, as far as I am concerned, our birthright is to be self conscious nodes within the web of life. The potential of humanity, if we were to step into that, is utterly unknowable and vast and amazing. And nothing that adolescent adjacent incels stuck in windowless cubicles can ever imagine will get close to it. Nothing that any of us at the moment could imagine will get close to it. So this is where I’m coming from. It’s where I’ve been coming from for quite a while, but I think we need to be clearer somehow, sharper, cleaner. We need to make things more explicit, because there are still people out there who seem to think that we’ll tweak the democratic system a little bit, elect the right people, and everything will carry on as before. Please stop thinking this. Please stop even thinking that what happened and was happening before November 5th was somehow a good democratic system.

Manda: I will put in the show notes a recent Substack by Jason Hickel. Yes, I’m reading a lot of Substack. It’s a good place to find stuff. Where he details not exactly, and in great detail, how bad the democratic system was, because that would take many, many, many volumes of work. But at least enough to outline the fact that we only ever had the best democratic system that money could buy. J.d. Vance got to be a senator because Thiel put enormous quantities of money into picking up somebody who had no political experience at all and elevating them to the Senate and now to the vice presidency; one cholesterol infused geriatric heartbeat away from the presidency. And Musk, yes, might slip in there first. But we had a corrupt system, and we had a corrupt system that only ever promoted the interests of capital. When there was ever a choice between capital, human flourishing or ecological flourishing, capital won out. Everywhere. With the possible exception of Bhutan and maybe Taiwan was heading in the right direction. But fundamentally, the democratic system that we inherited from the Greeks, who, remember only ever let men who had two testicles vote; you had to demonstrate that you had both your bits before you got a chance to vote. Nobody else did. No slaves, no women, nobody who didn’t have their bits ever got to vote. And it took a long, long time before in the Western world, it wasn’t just landed men of a certain age.

Manda: We’ve never had what you might call actual democracy. And now we have no excuse. We have so many different models for how we could create this. If you want to look at how one might work, that’s what Any Human Power was modelling, in part, amongst other things. But if you begin to look at actual distributed democracy on the internet, you could lose yourself for weeks. It’s a rabbit hole of great depth and intricacy. We know how to give trust and gain trust by asking actual people what they actually want and giving them the space and the time and the information to come to sensible conclusions. This is the opposite of what’s happening in the States; the Curtis Yarvin playbook, which is being enacted pretty much in real time. And I will put a link to another Substack that talks us through that, says the masses are asses and democracy is inefficient. Their absolute aim is to turn the US into effectively one great big mega corporation, with a CEO at the top who will be Musk and everybody else is a serf. The straight white male serfs will have a slightly better life than anybody who doesn’t tick all those boxes, but it’s not going to be great. So let’s disabuse ourselves of the idea that what we had was good. And even if it was good, it’s never coming back. So what can we do instead? Let’s go back to my Substack.

Manda: We’ve accepted that the current system is not fit for purpose and what we want, what we need actually, is to create a system predicated on the concept that humanity is an integral part of the web of life. That the values of compassion, decency, integrity, generosity of spirit, and the knowledge of our place as Conscious nodes in the web of life are the baseline from which everything else evolves. So I go on to say, if this is the case, then we need a whole new system, and we need a movement that will bring this system into being. We need some really basic asks; that is basic concepts that are completely non-negotiable. These are the base baselines from which we work and they are: clean air, clean water, clean earth. That is to say, clean soil, but also the whole of the earth. Clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections between all parts of ourselves. And yes, stepping away from the Substack, I am in internal family systems therapy IFS therapy, which is exploding across the planet and is revelatory, I have to say. I’ve been in therapy for over half of my life, on and off, mostly on, and this is the first time I’ve met a system that is giving me a sense that I can engage with the different parts of myself and help them to let go of the beliefs that are holding them locked in place. In defensive places or protective places or whatever it is that they’re doing. The panicked bits that rush up to the surface whenever I get triggered.

Manda: What if I can talk to those parts? What if I can find out the belief systems, the things that they hold so true, and perhaps discover that they may have been true decades ago. And they may not be true now. And if that part can begin to understand that what it believes is not necessarily a fact of life and is negotiable, that part becomes more of an integral part of my system, and my system begins to flourish, and I gain whole new levels of creativity that I didn’t have before. It’s a really interesting process, I love it. If you have the means, I thoroughly recommend that you find somebody that you trust and go with it. And one of the things that we learned in lockdown is that you don’t need to be in the same room as your therapist. My therapist is many, many miles away. I have never met in person. I trust this individual implicitly. So what happens if we are able to build clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections between all parts of ourselves? Who do we become? And is that not part of why we’re here? An integral part of our birthright?

Manda: And part of what happens when we do the healing that shifts us from the trauma culture to the initiation culture, and I have talked about that so often on the podcast, I am assuming I don’t need to do that again here. So let’s start doing the inner work. I think it’s essential. We will not get to where we need to be if each of us doesn’t do the work to begin to heal the triggers. It’s not hard to see them. What keeps you lying awake at night? What are you terrified of? Whose voice can you not bear to hear or whose picture do you never want to see? Our triggers are quite near the surface at the moment and that gives us an opportunity to work with them. And it doesn’t have to be IFS, obviously. However you want to work in ways that work for you, do it.

Manda: So we’ve got clean air, clean water, clean earth, connections between all parts of ourselves, and then clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections between ourselves and each other. We talk a lot on this podcast about communities of place, of purpose and of passion. The people who live around us, the people who share our meaning out in the world, and the people who share our passions. And sometimes, yes, passion and purpose are the same thing, but not always. Who are your tribe? Who are your people? Who are the people who speak the same language? With whom do you feel safe to be authentic? And the first question is, can you be authentic with yourself? That’s what we talked about earlier. How do we become our authentic selves? What does that look like? What does it feel like? And as we’re growing to know that, how can we be authentic with other people who are also being authentic? Not being authentic is a hallmark of the trauma culture. If we look at the generations that went before us, most of their domestication within the culture was training them how not to be authentic, because the whole of the social structure was based around things that were wholly untrue, and that didn’t let people be their true selves. So what does it feel like to be authentic? And what does it feel like to bring that authenticity into connection with other people? Whatever is coming, we are going to need our communities that we can rely on, even if it’s just to keep ICE from the door. They are few, we are many. If we all gather together, they are less likely to be able to pick us up. And yes, I live in the UK. We don’t have ICE yet, but what’s happening in the US is going to roll out around the rest of the world if it grows. So building communities of people who will stand in line for us and for whom we will stand in line, is part of the growing of the moment.

Manda: So let’s go back to our basic asks: clean air, clean water, clean earth, clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, and between ourselves and the web of life. Which means we also need to do the work of reconnecting, reclaiming our birthright. All of the things we talk about at great length inside the Accidental Gods membership. I’m not going to go into it in huge detail here, I’ll put a link in the show notes. If you don’t have the means to join the membership, if you’d like a reduction in the monthly fee, then please drop us a line. Yes, this is what keeps us going. It pays for the podcast. It pays for everything that we produce inside Accidental Gods. But I do not want the predatory capital death cult to be a barrier to anybody being able to connect to the web of life. So it’s there as a resource. And if you need to access it differently than we have set up, then let us know and we will work something out. Because above all of the things that we’ve said, I genuinely believe that this is the single most important thing that we can do. The web of life is alive. It’s a hyper complex system. If we want to look at things in systemic terms, if we want to look at things in spiritual terms, it is the most astonishing, glorious, magical, ever changing miracle and we are already an integral part of it. What changes is whether we know that or not.

Manda: What changes is whether we can access the rest of that complexity, the rest of that miracle. What changes is whether we can ask it moment by moment what do you want of me? And act on the answers. And I have said this many times before, but I am going to say it again: the idea that humanity somehow is going to think up the solutions to the meta crisis that we have created is insane. No problem is solved from the mindset that created it. The current problem, in all of its massive mind bending complexity, was created by people who thought they could fix the last problem by creating the next one. We can’t keep doing this. We have to let go of the hubris, the arrogance that says that humanity is somehow at the top of some ridiculous pyramid, and that we will be able to think our way to something different. We can’t. Particularly not if our mindset is one of scarcity, separation and powerlessness. And the amazing thing about connecting to the web of life is that it automatically begins to change our value set. It’s impossible to be heart open, to be balancing between the three pillars of the heart mind (Gratitude, Compassion, Joyful curiosity) and not begin to understand the astonishing wonder of the moment. The astonishing potential, all of the possibilities that we don’t see when we get locked into the terror of where we could end up. This is the kind of thing that no amount of conversations with any AI is ever going to open up.

Manda: And yet, As soon as you go outside, connect with the tree, the rock, the hill, the river, the red kite; it’s all there. And I cannot say often enough that we are already an integral part of this. We just need to take down the barriers that tell us that we’re not. And yes, those have been in place for many, many hundreds, if not thousands of generations, and taking them down in one lifetime, actually in one year is quite an ask. But it’s not impossible. And the rewards, I swear to you, are unimaginably huge. Vast, miraculous. It will change your concept of yourself and your place in everything that we are.

Manda: And we need to make those changes, and it will only happen if we each commit to life; commit ourselves in service to the web of life. Commit ourselves to stepping out of the death cult of predatory capitalism into something different. And it’s not easy. I’m not suggesting that it is, but it is definitely possible. So what I wrote in the Substack is I am wide open to other or better ideas, which remains the case. If you have other and better ideas, let me know. However, absent anything better, I am working on this and you are welcome to join me. We need narratives that can shape who we are when we bring the best of ourselves to the table.

Manda: And stepping back from the Substack for a moment, this is what thrutopian thinking is all about. Creating that sense of motivation, agency, direction, empowerment. Probably not in that order, but giving people the concept that if we are locked in the concrete box of predatory capitalism, there is a party happening outside. There are doors. We do have the keys or the runes or whatever it takes to unlock those doors and we are not shackled to a bolt in the middle of the floor. We have the power to go and open those doors and move out into a world that is unimaginable from the centre of the concrete box. And we need the stories that tell us how we do this, that tell us what the doors look like, what the keys feel like, what the runes work like, what the world is like on the other side, and how we get ourselves from the centre of this concrete box, through the doors and out. If you write, if you’re a screenwriter or a novelist or a podcaster or a poet or a songwriter, if you make TikTok videos or stage plays or radio plays or television plays or anything, please stop writing business as usual. Stop writing the stuff that assumes that everything is going to carry on as before, because it isn’t and it can’t. And part of the reason we’re not stepping out of the concrete box is that the videos projecting on the walls, are telling us that it’s just fine. And it’s not.

Manda: I’m hoping that’s clear by now. So whatever you do creatively, please start looking for ways to step beyond where we are now. It’s not that we don’t know the answers. Even DeepSeek knows the answers. There are thousands of people working really hard every single day to live into being different ways of distributed democracy, different kinds of economics, different ways of creating a food and farming system that isn’t feeding us ultra processed food-like substances that are basically diabetes in a tin. None of this is complicated, but it will stop shovelling value to the people at the top. So do whatever it takes to start making these things happen in your neighbourhood, in your family, in your work, in all of your connections and place, purpose and passion. Urgently.

Manda: So back to the Substack, which is actually quite short, people. Honestly, it won’t take you very long if you want to read it. I said: in order to know what those narratives are, the new mythologies of our time, we need really, wholeheartedly to have done the inner work that frees up those parts of us that are frozen in time. Are you afraid? That’s a part frozen in time. Are you triggered by what people are saying or doing or being? That’s a part frozen in time. I suspect we need to find ways to heal at scale, individually and collectively, and I am working on how we can do this. I am. It’s a work in progress. I will let you know here when we get there. But each of us can do the inner work now that lets us acknowledge the frozen parts: I see you. That lets us hold them with curiosity and compassion and courage and say, I am here for you. That lets us stand with them as they grieve or rage or scream within us and let go of the old frozen hurt.

Manda: This takes time. It often takes help, but it is the single most important thing any of us can do. And while we do it, we sing. We give thanks. We offer the blazing furnace of our hearts compassion to the world. We need to become the change. It’s an inner thing. Where it goes is unknowable but worthwhile. So there we go. That’s it. That’s the Substack with all of the coders for the moment. There is always more to say, but I’m going to leave it at that, with a brief moment at the end to thank Caro C for the production and for the music at the Head and Foot, to thank Lou Mayor for the videos, Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To thank Faith for the endless conversations that help us move forward. And as ever, to thank you for listening. The podcast will be back at its normal place and normal time next week. See you then. Thank you and goodbye.

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