in this episode i'm joined once again by

the author chad

haag to discuss his book the later

philosophy of penty linkola

in this episode we discuss the deep

ecology of pentilincola alongside

discussions on

the environment sustainability

and ecology i'd like to say a big thank

you to my paid patrons and subscribers

for making all of this work possible

and if you would like to support a

medic's podcast or become about the

community please find links in the

description below

enjoy so chad hogg thanks once again

for joining us on mythic's podcast thank

you so much for having me

we are discussing um your book the later

philosophy of pentilenkola

neither of us are actually too sure on

the pronunciation but that is sort of as

you said the americanized version

uh pentilinkala was a he died not too

long ago i believe it was last year

um he was a finnish deep ecologist

and writer of ecology but

it's not ecology in the contemporary

sense where we all have this super

lovey-dovey we all get along and it just

works out via some magic words such as

sustainable

and you know eco-friendly and things

like this um

if you want to read someone who in my

opinion truly

goes to the lengths to say no no no you

know this is what we have to do

this is how we have to live lingalar is

your man

and it's not easy reading for people who

are in their sort of comfortable

western lives but chad you've written a

book called the later philosophy of

pence lincoln

which i guess is sort of done because

the only

other text which is translated

in english is can life prevail which

focuses is what focuses on lincoln's

early work um so really we only have

these two texts in english

uh about his work at all there's

probably a few essays translated and

things along these lines and i've seen a

few

um documentaries which he was in been

given subtitles

but um so how did this book come about

and why did you decide to

write it well first of all thank you so

much

for the opportunity to have this

discussion with you

one reason why i wrote a book on linked

list philosophy is because

the term environmentalism has basically

become meaningless

everybody knows that the same ceos

corporate employees

media democrat party politicians and

hollywood celebrities who are the very

worst defenders against the environment

all somehow claim to be

environmentalists just because it's

politically correct to do so

lincoln actually does provide an

alternative to this hypocrisy but i

think that lincoln is a plus we might be

best understood through uh comparison

with an episode of alfred hitchcock

presents

about a young man named seam plots to

kill his aunt to get access to his

inheritance

and he disguises himself as a fictitious

person named antonio bhattani to do so

he feels he's committed the perfect

crime until he realizes that when the

police interview locals for details on

antonio there's only one thing they

could not agree on that's a

both antonio and seymour have the same

large birthmark

on the face one which he simply spent

his entire life pretending not to see

he was however the only one who couldn't

see a birthmark which was

obvious to everyone else and on

environmental grounds one might compare

this to when facebook opened a data

center in upper finland near the north

pole

to unanimous applause by the global

intelligence on

ground so this was the eco-friendly

option simply because

less energy was required for cooling

purposes in reality of course the

birthmark of ecological contradiction

remained that

even the so-called eco-friendly options

still required enormous inputs of

hardware which consume

many times their weight and fuss fuels

to be produced and then

shipped across the globe only to burn

out rather quickly and then have to be

replaced by even more hardware inputs

social media giants think they've

committed the perfect crime against its

nature and then gotten away with it by

paying lip service to politically

correct cliches of environmentalism

which are

so empty as to be meaningless but the

birthmark of ecological contradiction is

still really there for anyone with

enough

guts to acknowledge it i think um the

1980s hollywood film they live

is another good um

film reference to understand lincla

because it tells the story of a man who

found a pair of sunglasses which

revealed that some of the people in the

population are actually

aliens sent to the earth to take it over

from within

as since lincoln is basically the man

who found the

deep ecology sunglasses and is trying to

expose

the birthmark of ecological

contradiction for the rest of us you see

in fact the point of his work is to show

that nearly everything that passes as

real in our world is just an

ecologically impossible object in

disguise

it dissects them one by one such as a

universal

automation universal sanitation

universal veganism

universal animal rights and of course

the worst one of all

global overpopulation so those we'll

probably get into i mean i'm interested

on the veganism

and the sanitation my favorite essay by

linkela which i think we sort of have to

touch on which has become a meme is

the uh the moldy the moldy jam essay

and him stirring the mold back into the

jam and this whole

how he utilizes the concept of hygiene

to realize

how utterly ridiculous um our sort of

attempts to be sanitary are um but that

might come

actually you know we could we could put

that in now i mean perhaps we'll start

with

this sanitation idea if if you're okay

with that

to sort of look at how lincoln you know

sees
ecology sees the environment sees nature

so

yeah if you could expand on you know

how lincoln sees sanitation that would

be great

all right so in a well-known asc called

humbug lincla

observed that health inspectors have not

actually made us more healthy

they have destroyed our health it's

proven by the way that uh

first world people's immune systems have

been weakened to the point that any

western tourist travels to egypt peru

vietnam etc

will probably get sick eating the same

food which locals have no problem with

uh there's something which i found out

firsthand when i traveled to india for

the first time

years ago on an economic level universal

sanitation also drives up unemployment

because

all of the regulations are just a

euphemism for everything being

at exactly the right temperature for

exactly the right time

sanitized with exactly the right blend

of chemicals which is of course just the

euphemism for a huge amount of money

which

only a handful of corporate monopolies

can afford

even considered purely as a technology

though universal sanitation is

incredibly inefficient because

some 40 of food produced in the united

states

ended up in the trash even as some 1

6 of the population faced hunger even

before the pandemic began

universal sanitation is therefore

something of an ecologically impossible

scenario which

on a metaphysical level um is devoid of

being but it's also deeply unethical and

would be worthy of serious punishment in

an ideal society

okay okay so what do you think it is you

know we live it we we

in the west we now have this compulsion

you know we have this

cell by day or use by day and for many

people

as soon as that use by date is over you

know let's say oh

it goes out of date on the 25th today's

the 24th

you know the next day they're like right

it's out of date even though that every

one of their senses you know looking at

maybe this package of bread or this

piece of meat tells them it's absolutely

fine what do you why do you where do you

think that

compulsion comes from to sort of give

into basically just this artificial

idea of perfect hygiene

well i think it's a luxury of living in

an era of cheap

easily accessible abundant fossil fuels

this is the only

thing which could allow um an attitude

which is historically anomalous even

compared to the recent past uh

winkler's own experience in the 1950s of

how

fishermen would um you know take their

fish around town without having it at

exactly the right temperature

exactly the right time with the right

blend of chemicals something which i see

by the way on a daily basis here in

india i live on the

coasts of the arabian sea where i see

exactly

what lincoln mentioned decades ago going

on the west you still have that

in the third world and the reason is

quite simple we don't have the fossil

fuel

per capita in india that is taken for

granted

in the west so we really couldn't afford

this

way of doing things which uh the west

also will not be able to sustain

into the indefinite future okay okay

um yeah you know you mentioned lincoln's

fishing there and i think

i think one part of lincoln's biography

um

which is sort of important to mention is

he

walks the talk right he lives in the

same small hut he's

basically his entire life goes

everywhere by bike or via

horse and it's just a a i don't think he

has like one plate

doesn't have what you know doesn't have

washing up water or any like anything

close to what we consider you know

in quotation marks modern so in terms of

people who've genuinely can genuinely

sincerely say they care about the

environment

lincoln is in the very small camp of

people who actually do

right he actually um came from an

academic family

and everybody expected him to follow in

his uh his father's footsteps and

be like an academic scientist it was

precisely because

he learned too much about ecology that

he realized he had to

be a fisherman a traditional fisherman

instead

i didn't know that um so for

lincoln i mean we might have touched on

the these ideas when we spoke about ted

kuczynski

but why for lincoln

do we as a society dislike criticism of

you know technology of all these

technological comforts that we've

that we've got well i think we dislike

criticism of

modern technology because modern

technology

allows the gap uh between pursuing what

link look um

basically my own german ecologically

impossible situation um

uh between pursuing it and finding out

that it is not viable

this is something which modern

technology allows us to maybe extend

uh but it does not allow us to actually

overcome it and therefore modern

technology

is basically for link level what kant we

call metaphysics it

allows you to seem to overstep the

limits of ecological reality

but it's really just causes a certain

transcendental illusion in which

something

seems to appear where there's actually

just nothing

hmm i don't know yeah okay i've never

really thought about it like that so

in in modern society we sort of just use

we

but there's a belief there of course

that we are going to keep going

technology's always going to keep going

right well if you look closely at

the kinds of solutions to which modern

technology offers specifically for

ecological problems they are often just

as bad as whatever they try to solve

um when jane fonda for example was

arrested in 2019

after flying all the way from california

to washington dc to protest against the

same global warming she was herself

caused

she remarked later that she was

relocating to dc full-time so she could

get arrested every week

so she could be in the news every week

she claimed that she had to do this

because she had already done everything

else she possibly could for the

environment such as

driving a hybrid car she completely

missed the point that

electric cars are every bit as

ecologically unsustainable

and the only viable alternative is to

just walk or bicycle

um similarly yet thomas friedman's hot

flat and crowded

when she claimed that the solution to

global warming be as simple as having

corporate professionals

take one for the team by just using

video conferencing software instead of

flying all

over the world for international

business trips in other words he

promised that

skype will save the world but this

fantasy actually did come true amidst

the global lockdown but we

know a year later that people's overall

consumption actually did not go down

even if they spent slightly less energy

commuting to work

i think friedman really just missed the

deeper point that this expectation that

anyone with a quote-unquote real job

will have to do international business

trips

has misses the point that this corporate

aristocracy of office drones which

he presumes are the only normal people

is itself parasitic

upon a global technological system which

is ecologically unsustainable

and which will in fact guarantee human

extinction if left intact

um he can easily imagine a world of zoom

meetings but

he cannot imagine a world of agrarian

peasants let alone

hunter gatherers or nomadic herdsmen

despite the fact that these are some of

the only ecologically viable options for

the far future

i mean but this is the this is sort of

the double bind that people always find

themselves in i mean it's funny that you

mention
um hybrid cars i mean it's one of my

favorite favorite examples of sort of

that modern day sort of spiel you know

that this it is basically a western

society wants to eat their cake

and have it too right they want to uh

maintain the illusion that they're

saving the world saving the planet

saving the environment

but at the same time they want the

the gizmos the gadgets the tech which is

the thing

which is destroying the environment so

they still want to be able to drive

which is

you know the primary thing which is

destroying the environment but they want

to do that in a way where they don't

feel guilty

so just buying a car and of course you

you you mentioned

that that third option is so so

abhorrent to most people

how about you don't drive but that's

abhorrent right no one

we can't the problem we're stuck in is

we

deem ourselves unable to go back

right we are in a society which just

cannot accept return we can't go okay

you know what we made a mistake

this isn't as good we need to go back

and it's funny i was listening to the

radio the other day and um

this is in the uk and sort of some

government scheme had given

a two million pound grant to um

make this certain factory somewhere more

efficient and you know as soon as i hear

that word i think oh god

but luckily for me they've given an

interview to

um like the manager there and he seemed

very honest

you know in comparison to most people

and he said oh you know this whole

system is now in place

um it doesn't seem as good as the the

way we used to do things so far

but we'll see and you know there was

this sort of you could tell that there

was this bind in his mind where

you know he didn't want to have to sort

of throw it in their face but

usually upgrade innovation improvement

we all know what this means it just

means things are going to get worse

but look better right do you think

there's
you know there's something in that idea

that we we

find it impossible to sort of return to

a previous

state yeah i think of a 2011 interview

which

uh lincoln had with uh francisco

martinez and larissa

vanamo in which uh they asked him why no

amount of

scientific information which we don't

exactly have a shortage of um in the

modern world

um can actually get people to change

their behavior

he answered with just three words which

were

as long as as long as people still can

vacation internationally or buy cars

shop in malls

eat fast food they will on a formal

level as long as

any gap remains between pursuing an

impossible situation and

realizing that it can't actually be

completed we'll still continue acting

out and

this is why lingala actually associates

desire with death

and associates life with natural

necessity

because these artificial desires which

is sort of created by

the war developed by corporations or

businesses these are the things which

lead us to do things which

are against our natural inclination

right desire for lingala allows you to

imagine anything even if it's

ecologically impossible and um desire

really goes

with language because language allows

you to construct an elaborate illusion

which eventually becomes

indistinguishable from reality in

lincoln's

terms necessity is what has to adhere to

this trick system of ecological law

even when it contradicts what we wish

were the case

and the problem with democracy is

really for lincoln that it is a

political system based solely on this

kind of desire

he noted in an essay called what is

majority and what is minority

that um partisan conflict in the west is

actually largely an

illusion both parties promise the same

economic growth

despite environmental damage because

both are held hostage

the same politics of desire rather than

politics of necessity

he notes that this is not a

contradiction of the ideal of democracy

because it's precisely when the right to

vote is universalized that political

parties realize

that a numerical majority can only be

acquired through buying votes with

giveaways that are all equal crimes in

disguise in fact

political parties don't even limit

themselves to meeting

pre-existing desires people already have

they actually work to artificially

generate

new desires that did not exist before

despite the fact that all of these

desires are just euphemisms for

a certain ecological impossibility in

disguise

and for linkolo any political system

based on desire

is fundamentally flawed because desire

will always

choose ecological impossibility it will

always choose um the birthmark if we

consider the episode of

alfred hitchcock presents um only

necessity

will choose um ecological form and

this is why democracy for lincoln is

simply the political

formation based on desire and the green

police which basically

force people to live on ecologically

sustainable grounds is a political

formation of necessity

okay and i mean this is where probably

most um

contemporary theorists or people who are

working in the environmental field

would completely switch off from lincoln

and deem him you know silly because

he is highly highly critical of

democracy and you know he emphasizes

that this idea

of a government which gives us what we

need versus what we want

and he sort of brings forward i don't

know if you'd agree a form of like

totalitarian

or no totalitarian's probably the wrong

word because they control every facet of

society i don't think he wants that

but he wants authoritarian government

which puts ecology as the primary

you know the primary idea um

so what do you think you know this this

what what's the difference then for

lincoln between what we need and what we

what we want what do we what do we need

i think would be a good question

right so a great example of how what we

need and what we

want are at odds with one another is a

link for his own example that

in an ideal society weight just would be

low and the cost of

raw materials would be high this would

maximize human

employment while minimizing the use of

resources and pollution

uh the mind of man of course doesn't

want these things he wants high salaries

and cheap materials and

in the west we have um just mandated

these things formally and the result has

been

widespread unemployment and unspeakable

environmental damage

pollution waste and actually a life that

is

less satisfactory overall even for the

people lucky enough to find employment

there
in contrast um a government

based on um natural limitation for

lincoln

is something he's actually extremely

specific about what that would look like

you know

that um you'd have to have a drastic

reduction in a cereal grain

production you have to eat nutritious

low unfashionable

fish which can be sustainably harvested

you can eat some species of rodents also

instead

um you'd have to have a coordinated

destruction of any machine which steals

a person's

job no matter how convenient it might

seem to be you'd have to have

food preservation be the job of

individual households rather than of

major corporations who

once again waste some 40 of all food in

the united states um you'd

have to have localized transportation

networks even to the extent

of criminalizing suburban sprawl and

needless building construction

you'd have to rule out energy waste by

literally making
sailing against the wind illegal

needless to say there would be no

personal cars because the only options

would be walking

skiing but icicling or paddling you'd

have to stop producing plastic in the

first place then there would be no need

to find a way to deal with all of it

you'd have to remove house cats for

many homes because they will hunt wild

birds and negate even the greatest

efforts at wildlife preservation in

certain habitats

you'd have to destroy power plants with

the full realization that the rest of

the technological system

will collapse as a result of

intentionally tipping the first

domino in an interconnected system and

of course the most

controversial is the world should be

billions of people less populated

so you have to dismantle the myth of the

freedom of appropriation by having

the green police grant licenses allowing

reproduction

only to those who have been deemed

worthy don't you think though that um

once you remove various

facets and outlets of modern technology

that the the growth rate

would decrease you know naturally

because we no longer have

all these sort of artificial apparatus

allowing

you know not to sound too uh pessimistic

and

and realist about it but not allowing

those who normally wouldn't live

to to live right it bears mentioning

that overpopulation

is an ecologically impossible object in

the very specific

sense that as michael rupert noted it

was forbidden by the natural cycle

in which the soil could be replenished

in agrarian context

um by only so much manure each season it

was only fossil fuels which interfered

with this

natural cycle and overstepped the limit

of overpopulation

despite the fact that it is completely

unsustainable even when examined on a

quantitative level some 85 of water

consumption in the united states is by

the agricultural industry

yet the aquifers they're depleting are

only replenished
some 0.1 each year by natural rainfall

global population really cannot exceed 2

billion

people under any other circumstances so

in very blunt terms this

means as michael rupert noted that a

massive die-off is unavoidable

in which population figures revert to

their pre-modern norms if only by sheer

ecological necessity

link differs from other thinkers however

by knowing that this reduction of human

population might

seem like the ultimate moral evil but

from an ecological standpoint it would

actually be the ultimate good because

in a very real sense all of our other

ego crimes are parasitic upon this one

okay so

in what sense then fallen color would a

sort of a green police

you know what criteria would people have

to me to be able to

allowed to be allowed to have children

or be able to procreate

well he has um you know a number of

specific criteria

um the fitness of the parents on on many

levels intellectually is one um

physical fitness is another you know

various things but

um the idea that we have any

alternative um i think is a delusion

there really is no way

um out of um uh respecting the

limit of just two billion humans on this

earth however we get there

so i mean you know not to say sound uh

or try

pitch and hold him or try be too hasty

isn't that isn't that like an eco-based

eugenics

um i i think that that might be an

interpretation

but i i think that um the lingala is

is kind of ambiguous in this regard and

there's a number of different

interpretations people might have

about how exactly you would go about

this but once again there really is no

alternative

um you know certainly not sustaining

seven

billion humans or even more than that

yeah i mean

the the the data in square code

quotation marks

supposedly states that it's the human

population is going to
plateau at 9 billion and then slowly

decrease

but it's still going to decrease down to

a number which is you know fairly high

so i don't i don't know what lincoln

would make of that um

but one interesting question there i

mean with with with just jumping back to

technology is of course

you know people or people modern society

i think

uh has this sort of illusion of or

delusion of what technology is you know

when they when you say the word

technology

they think of super super high tech

things such as computers or cars or

gizmos gadgets you know apple watches

these kind of things you know that's

technology

whereas any pretty much you know a

hammer

is technology so you know i think this

is always an interesting question to us

for these

the thinkers which are dealing with

technologies what is the line for

for them you know what is the line for

lincoln because obviously he had plates

he had a
he lived in a shack he did use um a

trailer on his horses with rains etc so

you know where is the line for lincoln

where we can say

right you know this is as much

technology as we we should have

well i think the line for lingula is

simply the criteria of ecological

impossibility um it's um quite fitting

that uh jacques example know that

technique

um is actually not or rather technology

is not a set of physical machines it was

rather an

artificial system of rationalization

which

replaces a spontaneous free expression

of nature with a coordinated method to

maximize

efficiency and adaptation a little noted

therefore the

paradox that the machine itself depends

upon the system of rationalization

because that alone uh can tell its

proper location as a clock within the

whole system

rather than the other way around at its

core for lincoln as well technology

is just a certain abstraction of

linguistification

which is shockingly lacking in positive

being despite being thoroughly

materialistic i think that lincoln

would group modern technology along with

language um

in that it allows for a certain

unlimited

madness uh which is uh in contrast with

ecology's adherence to a set of strict

forms bound by

natural law so this reason that um

lingala is emphasised on the negativity

of modern technology

as that which has failed the ontological

test of

being precisely because it is

ecologically impossible something i

think we have

to um reject the temptation to describe

this with

marxist cliches specifically the

shizekin idea that

this ecological impossibility is like

the gap of the real or the

abstract negation which sets a dialectic

in motion by

shaking the foundations of the current

order and moving us

forward to a more sophisticated stage um

very end of his uh 2012 book the year of

screaming dangerously zizek actually did

describe

ecological crisis in exactly these terms

and you know the book by knowing that um

this

emphasis on negativity for its own sake

actually

excused him and other communists from

having to provide a

detailed positive description of what

the uh coming

post-capitalist order would look like or

that would miss the whole point that

abstract negation is exactly what

provides

the ontological conditions for this sort

of openness to radical change

yet this is exactly not how lincoln

views the situation and this

led um zizek to claim that nature does

not exist because

one can only be a materialist if matter

itself

is de-substantialized into an illusion

which vanishes

amidst the paradox that something can

only emerge if nothing negates itself

um for lincoln on the other hand nature

is the only thing which does exist

because

nature is not a set of isolated natural

objects but is rather a fully rational

system of ecological law which

you can never actually overstep you can

only fall for a certain delusion of

modern technology and a

linguistification which make it seem

that you could and therefore

although ecological impossibility

doesn't exist it's not

simply a purely empty gap which can only

be described negatively it's more like a

linguistic message which just happens to

gesture towards

a situation which can never be fully

realized kind of like how in mathematics

an asymptote will remain inaccessible no

matter how close you seem to get to

reaching it but

you can still describe it with a

definite numerical formula

although an ecologically impossible

situation for linking

lingualia can never be fully realized it

can still

eat up an enormous amount of resources

in the real world while you

fall for the seeming legitimacy of it on

purely linguistic grounds and therefore

the birthmark is

more like a virus than a gap of

nothingness

plain and simple it's a set of

instructions which hijack the host and

induce it to replicate

a certain algorithm of death until the

host itself is killed

and this is why you know many of the

contemporary uh feats to

you know whole or help the the ongoing

environmental crisis you know these

ideas of sustainability or eco-friendly

or

environmentally friendly these are all

largely just complete hoaxes really

which

buy into that same drive right you could

consider

um the clean energy hoax as one of the

worst

examples of this um michael rupert noted

that um

there is no alternative energy because

each one is not just a new source it's a

whole new infrastructure

because you can't store transport or or

burn the alternatives in a system

currently used for petroleum um no

alternative however is concentrated

enough to

pull itself out of the quicksand by its

own bootstraps by

providing enough energy to replace the

entire infrastructural grid while

simultaneously providing enough leftover

energy to power

everything else in the global economy

and by the most delusional claims

an even higher standard of living for

all seven billion humans

in fact some so-called alternatives are

actually net losers which exist um

more for the purpose of making money off

gullible investors and politicians than

for actually uh providing a return on

that investment and

this really makes sense because uh

michael rupert noted that any claim to

zero pollution is actually ruled out by

the laws of thermodynamics themselves

these are just a marketing gimmick to do

world governments into dumping tax funds

into companies which will

never actually make a profit but can

skate by on

unearned wealth and promises they'll

never fulfill and therefore it's not too

different from a hamburger from a fast

food drive-through which

still really contains trace amounts of

cow manure

but because they've airbrushed all of

the taste smells

sites of it the clean energy uh

gimmick also um has all of the pollution

costs

uh there but are hidden from the public

eye and

are accepted as a technological

simulation simply because we're already

living in one

so uh the green new deal not gonna work

hey chad

um i i haven't been following the news

by choice

um but uh i would assume that if it's

being proposed

by the democrat party um and being

praised by the

corporate media hollywood celebrities

and uh

and the like i would assume it's just

another ecologically impossible

situation so i mean

you know i sort of already touched on

this question and this isn't specific to

lincoln but why do you personally think

we you know i think most people can

admit

to these glaring you know the the

you know the emperor's is it the

emperor's clothes you know where the

emperor is invisible but no one wants to

admit

to it i think driving down or being in

the average traffic jam most people can

admit that this isn't normal this can't

be sustained when you think about it but

people go back into that sort of

days where they just believe it you know

what what's

truly stopping people breaking out of

that is just

just comfort i think it's uh um

a fundamental mismatch between what i

call

the mind of man which of course will

always be held

hostage by desire and the mind of nature

which is really

nobody's mind but is a system of

rationalized ecological laws

which are not um to be uh held

accountable

to any one person's desires

and lincoln noted you can only have an

ecologically sustainable government if

it's founded

not so much on any one person's opinion

but solely on this uh this mind of

nature

okay and that you know that's why you

state for lingala that

to be is to be ecological you know

before anything

this is almost heideggerian though that

um

to to be is to be ecological before

anything we have to

um understand and respect the

limitations of our

our world our environment but lincoln

takes this very seriously

on a practical level as did heidegger

right it has uh too

rarely been noticed i think that lincoln

is can life prevail and uh ted

kaczynski's anti-tech

revolution weinhauer remarkably similar

text

in that each one provides something of a

euclidean geometry for possible and

impossible objects

and also on political rather than

mathematical grounds
um kaczynski noted in anti-tech

revolution uh wyanhow for example that a

self-predicting social system would

violate russell's paradox because a

formal system

cannot use its own resources to talk

about itself

recursively and what this means in the

real world is that it's uh categorically

impossible for any

conscious agent to willfully steer the

society in exactly

the same direction he or she intends

even if

big historical changes do occur they

never unfold

exactly as people envisioned that they

would uh for example enlightenment era

intellectuals believe that the result of

technological automation would be that

everyone would have enough free time to

compose classical music or write

you know renaissance style poetry in

reality the boredom resulting from

having all work

done by machines just led people to

binge on reality tv

instead of having everyone become

another mozart or shakespeare

people wasted their lives following

every move by kim kardashian

on an even more serious level um no

corporate ceo or

engineer working to further

technological progress on the ground

level

intends the outcome of that to be human

extinction but that's certainly what

will happen if the current trajectory is

allowed to reach its own logical

conclusion

and whereas kazinski's background in

pure mathematics

led him to do this a sort of test of

whether something has

being or not on a purely rational

grounds linkle his own background in the

life sciences um as well as his

experience living naturally it led him

to do this

sort of work on strictly ecological

grounds uh by showing that

nearly everything that passes as real in

our world is actually

an ecologically impossible object which

on a metaphysical level is

quite literally nothing at all i cite

the example in the book

of the um super obscure 2015 dystopian

science fiction novel the doors you mark

are your own as a ridiculous book which

somehow combines the mutually exclusive

themes of extreme water shortage

and alcoholism a story about a medical

student who

has to basically promise to solve world

thirst just to get

an eight-ounce cup of tea at a cafe but

then drops out of medical school and

spends all of his time getting wasted in

shady bars planning a

pseudo-marxist revolution with his

drinking buddies who are

somehow able to waste limitless amounts

of beer despite the fact that they're

too poor to afford water

it's interesting that if the authors of

this book had spent just two minutes

researching the topic online they would

have realized that

some 155 liters of water are required

just to produce one liter of beer so

this situation is quite literally

ecologically impossible

and it proves that um even when we try

to imagine

an eco dystopia specifically defined by

the ecological problem of water scarcity

we somehow
still take for granted that limitless

alcohol availability for the poor is a

given

yet this is just a very unclear way of

talking about a technological society

washing

cheap easily accessible abundant fossil

fuel energy of

certain modern technology which allows

one to ignore

ecological limitations but only for a

very short temporary period of time

i think liquidly differs from other

ecological thinkers though and they

points out that um this is not merely a

matter of

epistemological curiosity but of ethics

as well

ecologically and possible objects are

evil for lingala precisely because

they're not real they don't exist but

deceive us

into thinking that they do and this once

again because the mind of man is a

fundamentally out of chord with the mind

of nature

and this is why lincoln introduces the

idea of uh

eco crimes right you know if we're

talking of an impossibility

in lincoln sort of preferred mode of

governance there would be such a thing

as eco crimes

right um it's interesting that even pope

francis was kind of introducing

something like eco crimes

in a recent encyclical but many roman

catholics i think missed his point

that ecological violation and sin are

formally identical in essence

i think many people assumed that

calling something a sin was just an

arbitrary

designation by the vatican which changes

from pope to pope in that eating meat on

friday used to be mortal sin until they

decided that it wasn't

just as was the case for a usury in the

medieval era

but um for lincoln as well eco-crime is

a formal designation of ecological

impossibility um rather than

an arbitrary designation founded on any

one person's opinion

and if you examine um many so-called

rebellions against the eco

crimes of global capitalism on a purely

formal level they're actually just as

bad in themselves
for example um last summer the uh

pseudo-accelerationist

sjw rioters in the united states were

trying to collapse the global capitalist

system

simply to become better consumers they

were destroying mom-and-pop

businesses on main street just to force

the government to distribute a universal

basic income

so they could turn around and buy stupid

junk online to be shipped to their

houses

not realizing that this would only

concentrate even more economic power

into a handful of corporate monopolies

in the technological industry

this is of course just an unclear

euphemism

for the ecologically impossible object

of a universal automation

in which nobody has a job but

everybody's still a consumer

jim rickards proved though that a

universal basic income is

financially impossible because it would

add some 300 billion dollars

per year to the national debt in the

united states
yet the keynesian multiplier actually

goes negative after you get to gdp

ratio surpasses 90 percent um after a

certain point more government spending

a paradoxically inhibits rather than

stimulates

economic productivity and usa is well

past 100

in this regard so this is no longer even

an option yet um even worse than the

financial impossibility of

ubi is the ecological impossibility

because lincoln

noted that universal automation is just

an unclear way of saying that we've

already

given the roles of producer distributor

and seller to machines and

the joke is on us because the only

remaining role is that of the

mindless consumer yet that's also the

easiest to automate away and

after that does occur he warns that only

the sound of

robots will follow and then a deep

silence because

we'll all be dead by that point and this

is this is the

the learned helplessness that lincoln

sort of mentions right

right there's a learned helplessness uh

specifically on a physical level

um because the body itself

has vanished amidst the abstraction of

ecological impossibility precisely

because

it doesn't really factor into what it

passes as

work today um you'll notice that an

entire

industry of uh recreational facilities

has merged

precisely because people have to try to

squeeze in exercise after work

by doing the same work they refused to

do earlier that day

when they were clocked in i mean uh 2012

one company decided to just cut to the

chase

by introducing the medicine directly

into the poison by

marketing a treadmill with the computer

directly attached to it

needless to say though the revolution of

jogging wall typing

never really took off now this shows

that uh even in our attempts to

try to be healthy we cannot help falling

into ecological impossibility

it's interesting that a medieval peasant

could get plenty of work with just hand

tools and

the daily chores on the farm but we now

require

enormous facilities such as winter

sports in the summertime and

indoor football stadiums in the winter

just to play around in a half serious

manner

once again it's an example of that sort

of um just being in a

a complete bind you know going to work

all day and then driving

10 miles to the gym to then run 10 miles

on a treadmill

always made me laugh but there you go um

one thing i want to touch on um and i

mean you know

it's something that i i think is a

really great articulation of

how lincoln once again thinks about

nature and ecology is actually his views

on veganism because i think obviously

this is a touchy subject

hence why i want to bring it up so

how does lincoln view this and how does

he view you know our relationship to

food because i think that's one of the

most important
aspects of his work is is how we

confront daily life and how we actually

understand

what it is that we need to live yeah

i've noticed in my own experience of

um having video lectures on link line

youtube one of the most

common topics uh to still get comments

on

is um veganism because um lingala

does not think that forcing the entire

world to go

100 vegan is the answer and if you look

at this

for geographical reasons alone you'll

notice that it's actually impossible

because

much of the world surface area is unfit

for permaculture gardening of the short

currently fashionable among bolder

hippies but it

is fit for grazing lands for livestock

central asia continues to reflect this

with

a diet heavy on sheep goat and cow

lingala

noted that um not even the human body's

anatomical features support any notion

of universal veganism as
an unbiased examination of human teeth

bowels etc will reveal not even the

problem of global overpopulation can be

blamed on

eating meat because it was grain surplus

because this it wasn't simple fishman

like linkla

and by the way anyone who claims that

fishing is inherently unethical

tends to forget that virtually every

fish in the wild will eventually be

eaten by

some other animal and it is precisely

part of the natural

cycle for that to occur so long as one

does not disrupt

the natural process for the population

to maintain itself

it's a very good overview i mean is just

does lincoln

ever give any sort of practical advice

to to people who

you know want to start towards a a more

environmentally friendly life i mean

he's clearly quite cynical

so do you do you think he actually sees

that as an option you know that

individual efforts will overcome this

or is he more of a we need an absolute

you know
shut down the we almost need like to put

all the corporations on trial kind of

thing

is it is individual efforts even a thing

for lincoln

it's really interesting that um lingala

explicitly endorsed centralized

government and a tireless control of the

citizens

he um noted in a 2011 interview

that media accusations that he favors

dictatorship um are not hyperbole at all

in fact um

he openly admitted that even among

dictatorships

the more draconian the better um this is

why

he did not um entertain any possibility

that adopting green lifestyles on an

individual level

be enough um if you do not address

the central problem of a human

overpopulation he

noted that no amount of recycling

bicycling

organic gardening or veganism will make

up for

the underlying problem of having 7

billion
humans consuming resources or polluting

displacing other living things from

their natural habitat

and you can only really have a global

reduction in a human population on a

coordinate level if you have this sort

of

centralization which of course um

i think is the exact opposite of a lot

of peak oil thinkers like um

you know james howard kunzler uh michael

rupert john michael cruz who do

emphasize

that sort of localized individual effort

of richard heinberg is another a link

really is more um on the other extreme

i think of saying you have to have a

centralized

um totalitarian really a government do

this

otherwise the the sheer problem of

overpopulation will

negate if one person is living

sustainably

but billions others are not it's really

going to

uh make it meaningless unfortunately for

the for the ecosystem

the ecosystems not on the global scale

what about students do you believe that

individual efforts are worthwhile

i think uh individual efforts certainly

are worthwhile but i

um think after living in the united

states and then living in

india as a two source of extremes in

terms of

especially fossil fuel per capita

availability um

there really is something to be said for

the system as a whole

having to function a certain way many

things which

would be illegal in the united states um

are still taken for granted as normal

here in india

um such as you know the the sanitation

stuff

that we were discussing um as well as

just even keeping chickens

in in my backyard would be illegal in

the city of denver uh police would come

and confiscate them

obviously because they just want you

spending way too much money

on chickens from factories that lived in

um

truly horrific conditions and are so

unhealthy they have to be

completely cooked or you'll get very bad

food poisoning from

salmonella but backyard chicken here in

india

my experience can be slightly pink

because the chicken itself was not um

submitted to uh incredibly unhealthy and

unethical

conditions during its uh six weeks or

whatever of life within some

uh overcrowded factory so there really

is something to be said for the whole

system having to function a certain way

because

even if you try to live um sustainably

in a nation like the united states my

own experience is you'll basically have

to hide

from the authorities who will punish you

if you try to do things the right way

okay is there anything you would like to

add about your book or about

lincoln that we you know you feel is

important that we haven't touched on

yeah i think uh lincoln i i noted in the

book

i called him uh one of the greatest

thinkers alive today

um it was uh it was uh interesting i

don't know the right word that

um lincoln himself passed away about

five days i think after i released this

book i released in march

of uh 2020 and um

it was uh only about five days later

that um you know

we got the news and um but i uh i i

called him one of the greatest

thinkers alive um today one of the

greatest

thinkers um now i would say of you know

recent

memory despite uh being basically

totally

ignored by the academic industry which

is still

you know pumping out monographs on freud

marks and dairy dawg as though that's

something new

um and i think it's precisely because

linkla

is willing to um say what is

ecologically

necessary um precisely when it is

unpalatable

you could compare with uh norwegian um

deep ecologist

arness who actually coined the term deep

ecology
but wasn't willing to take it quite this

far if you read

arnessa's work he um he

pays lip service to all of the same

politically correct cliches

regarding well you can only really be a

deep ecologist if you're committed to

social justice

right um and lingala is not playing that

game um and i i think maybe one reason

for that

is he was living this um lifestyle as a

simple fisherman

which he was not held hostage by certain

institutional

forces which um will inevitably force

even the best intentions um to

have to be watered down and i think

that's what makes him such an

admirable thinker in addition to

producing such fascinating works um

which i i really look forward to the day

that more of it is translated um from

finishing to english

yeah me too but i think could be a while

i think

i know a few people who are who someone

who's sort of learnt finnish to a basic

extent to

translate their the videos so there's

clearly you know the the sort of the

die-hard fans out there

um but so we can find the the book uh

the later philosophy of pennsylvania by

yourself on on amazon i believe

yeah there's a paperback edition as well

as

ebook available now on amazon

okay okay uh seems like a good place to

finish up so

chad hogg thanks very much i thank you

so much