CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age. How do we bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into step with our desires for healing and connection?    

In this episode, Dean is joined by CIIS Anthropology and Social Change Associate Professor Targol Mesbah in a liberating conversation on how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, better preparing us for the work of changing the world.

This episode was recorded during an in-person and live streamed event at California Institute of Integral Studies on February 28th, 2025. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Targol Mesbah: Hi everyone. Super excited to be here. I have known Dean for quite a few years but we've never actually met in person until today so it's also really special for me and I've been following your work for a long time, normal life and I'm a student of your work and I'm so glad that we have a chance to have this conversation together. And you went ahead and wrote a book called Love in a Fucked Up World, which is fantastic, and I wanted to, staying true to the topic for today thinking about liberation and liberating our relationships, to think about the way that you have anchored your critique of capitalist modes of relating to each other through this idea of the romance myth, right? It's primarily as a way to think about romantic or intimate relationships but it has reverberations across all our relationships. And so I thought maybe I would just sort of begin there and move through the different ways in which you have broken this down for us to think about in different contexts. So maybe we can start with you sharing a little bit about the romance myth. 

Dean Spade: Yeah, totally. Yeah, the romance myth, for me this idea which I feel like I learned from Second Wave Feminists, I remember the moment I was in like a feminist archive in 1990 something and I found this image from a 70s feminist newspaper or something and it was like two straight people very conventionally attractive walking through Central Park holding hands like the image of romance like in autumn and then they had like pie faces and it was like done with collage and it said something like fuck the romance myth or something. I've never been able to find it again if anyone is a better researcher than me which pretty much anybody would be. And that idea like that this whole thing because I already kind of knew something as a feminist about like the beauty myth. My ideas about like it's pretty heavy that we, our lives are so thoroughly regulated by like the marital family norms and marital law and all of that and that the way that works for us psychically is a story about how you're like going to be miserable and unhappy unless you have this certain kind of relationship. It's the most important kind of relationship you can have. If you don't have it there's something wrong with you. There's a kind of scarcity idea like if you don't like you could compete for people with others for the best you know partners and that there's all these like you know you should use wealth and whiteness and able-bodiedness and things like that to decide who's worthy or valuable and if you're not desired enough you're bad and that like all of that makes us treat each other terribly like we're shopping for each other and it also makes us like ditch our friends and we get a new date and ditch our political projects and get into really isolating relationships that are very dangerous and you know it's very profound right like we're more likely to be hurt or killed by people who are in those relationships than anybody else so it's like it's a serious kind of danger or just to like be in relationships that are really dead and really stultifying of our creativity and our wildness you know and of course like a society like this needs to contain the feralness of our sexuality and our desires to connect and share inside something as self-hating and kind of damaging as the romance myth, and so for me it's been helpful to identify that and also in the book I talk a little bit about like the romance cycle like most people are familiar with this you know you first meet someone and this could be a friend or a group or anything and you're like this thing is amazing this has the answers I finally found someone like me or these people understand me I'm finally gonna have a political community and you kind of collectively don't notice the things that are like are not aligned with that and you kind of have these projections and then later when those people disappoint you the projections can be kind of proportional to how overblown it was how great you thought they were and then you got to tear them down. And so this that cycle going through that with dates with friends with roommates with political groups can really cause a lot of damage because then I'm like going through my community like tearing down other people needing other people to hate them or tearing down groups I was in that I was in love with five minutes ago now there's a you know human error is happening inside this group they they're making mistakes and I'm and I'm needing to like destroy the group. And so I think even talking about the romance cycle is potentially a way for us to help support each other through it like we all go through it it's totally normal there's nothing wrong with it like it's completely part of our it's part of our cultural training it's part of our how we're shaped and could I have a friend remind me hey I know you're really into him don't move to the side of the world for him yet Dean please still stay with your friends or I know that this group seems really amazing to you and we can joke around how right now we're at the beginning of the romance cycle and later when something is disappointing can I get some help to not need to tear everybody apart. I think that's been useful. In the book, I also think I talk a little bit about like there's a romance myth also around like home ownership having the perfect body having children there's a lot of things that are like people were denied the chance to have a real assessment of them for ourselves because there's such a big story about how this thing will make your life meaningful or make you safe. So I think a lot of the book is about like acknowledging that safety doesn't come from the places we've been told it comes from and that also our safety is just really not guaranteed and if it's going to come from anywhere it's having like really robust support systems of lots of people who care about us and know about us and not from one person or one group or one form of property.

Targol: You connect this romance myth so strongly to capitalism and you know when we talk about capitalism or we're teaching it or analyzing it we talk about it in terms of it's not just about the social relations of production it's not just about the way labor capital profit circulates but that it structures all our relationships so capitalism is about the way it structures our most intimate social relations but we don't we haven't we don't have a really great system of going beyond or way of going beyond that other than acknowledging it so I think this is one of the reasons I really loved reading this book for the ways that you open up our way of being able to talk about how our social relations are connected to these ideas around private property ownership competition and then sort of have us reflect on this but then you wrote a kind of anti-self-help self-help which is not an easy–

Dean: I’m glad you think so. Oh, sorry.

Targol: Because it's um and you know you do you give a critique of the genre throughout the book or mainly in the beginning but it carries through and this idea that most self-help genres or books tend to focus on the individual how you need to change yourself only and you're the problem consequently by implication but that there is this relational way that you're asking us to be introspective that is the way I think about it sort of rescuing the notion of the self from the concept of the individual which is a very capitalist neoliberal notion of relating to the self but we can talk about the self without having to have recourse to this very individualized idea of how we live in the world. And that is I think one of for me that's one of the most powerful contributions to be able to do that because the flip side of it is to not look at yourself at all and to always be like oh the problem is out there so 

Dean: Yeah I it's such an honor to have my work read by brilliant people who say it better like I'm rescuing the self from the individual I really appreciate your thoughts on this. Yeah I mean it's you know the self-help genre is like so terrible it's it's all about you know pretending that we're having these problems not in any context of white supremacy and capitalism and ableism you know it's like it's so hard and yet I've like religiously read those books my entire life because I'm over here suffering you know and so it's like how do you you know like somebody needs a self-help book real bad and so and that was you know that was my project here I was just like I can't like in good conscience give these to friends and people in the movement and stuff who are having a similar problem because like I was willing to read between the lines maybe but some really damaging unfair uncool stuff in here so how to take out some of the useful ideas and then put them in the context they belong in anyway like how could we talk about dating and and like just not mention patriarchy and capitalism you know like it's it's in it's in here. So that is the hope of it um I think also I'll say that like this book is so much about my work in prison and police and border abolition because uh what it looks like to do that work in the day-to-day is to stop seeking safety from the cops from the border from you know like right like like that system tells us that like safety is going to come from some institution some something um that's armed and out there and um strangers you know what I mean and we say no like safety comes from us like what's a good safety plan for getting us all to the bar tonight or to you know like what's our it's very like what's immediately actually safe instead of these fantasies of safety through outside and I think that's the other piece like that's never individual. I cannot individually keep myself safe and I'm not kept safe by these ideas that I'll be safe through US imperialism or whatever being done in my name and so then really the only way to find safety is through connection and belonging and relationship and that would require me being able to like know if I want to do something or not and be able to tell other people which most of us like you know we live in such a coercive society that we have a really hard time getting to a place of having practices of consent even with our friends and lovers and family members and you know we all know you know. And so that it's like it just brings all these practices it really actually matters what we do in here like I think that the worst of our political movements is sometimes they're so outcome oriented that it's like who cares if we treat each other terribly and at the end of the project we hate each other or we're like we've overdone it to our bodies and we're sick or like it doesn't matter. We've got to get to and it's we act like we're in the capitalist workplace and driving ourselves into each other even though we're not getting paid and it's a long haul there's this the end of this project is not there's no chance it's going to solve the things we're fighting if at the end of the project we aren't more connected and more able to like trust each other and do the bolder thing next time then it you know it really didn't get us where we were going and that is that level of collectivity is something I think we're taught to still be in denial about and just be like at the end of the project I want to say I did this or you know there's a lot of individualism and even in how people relate to the politics which again it's like no shame no blame we're all we're all in that together. What would it look like to try to practice something else together as we do stuff you know? 

Targol: Yes I also really appreciate that there's the tracking of these reactions and then there's this non-judgmental approach because what you're doing is you're helping us link it to these larger cultural patterns that we've internalized or we repeat unwittingly sometimes most of the time so that's super helpful and in relationship to movement work some of the patterns that you identify in intimate relationships sort of carry over many of them to sort of the extreme reactions or the kinds of projection we have when we're doing movement work or resistance and we talk about sort of definitions in a little bit. But I was wondering if you could say a little bit about this highly polarized reactions that we have or relationships that we have like the sort of over investment and then the betrayal that sort of also not only in an intimate relationship but in movement work or when we're working in different collectives.

Dean: Yeah I mean on the one hand I want to say that I think that friendship has been the least friendship has been the most liberated space in my life like that like compared to like dating relationships you know family of origin or childhood caregivers work relationships like friendship has been the place where there's like more likely to be more consent where I really actually feel like people like we're each like we want the best for the other one more than to control the other one you know there's less threatened by your friends being different from you maybe than you are by your lover being different from you or your child or your sibling you know there's something I think it's because in our society we're told that like you're born into some natal family or you have caregivers or whatever and then you're supposed to just like get married and graduate to the next one and there's this brief period of adolescence where friendship is sort of tolerated but friendship like doesn't matter and who cares and because it's like less of less interest to that system of control it tends to be more liberated like we actually I don't know I feel like the best feedback I've ever gotten to that I actually listened to was from friends you know like that kind of like some kind of ability. So I think say that because I think that people joining resistance work is a chance to have a lot of that kind of relationship like a lot of people in your life you know instead of just have most people's lives I just have like too few connections that are supportive like there's just lots of you know research about our loneliness and how a lot of people like don't have any friends besides their lover or their blood family or don't have any at all and so no one to take care of them when they're sick or like these things that we all need so I do feel like the movement is a place to get that and we show up in those spaces with all the same baggage like you're saying like you know um I think that for some people probably that the stuff in the book that's about childhood shaping will feel the most unpleasant and unfamiliar because it sounds you know more psychology-ish but it's just really deep how like if you spent your childhood like having to appease everybody to get by then you're gonna show up in any other group and do the same thing or if you spent your child like you know actually I thought about this recently like the difference between people just like just to draw an extreme picture like people I know who like appeased a lot to get what they needed in childhood and had to kind of give up a certain level of dignity to keep belonging and connection and safety and then people I know who ran away really young and gave up belonging and connection to keep their dignity and both of those are beautiful reasonable traumatizing choices and everybody made some set of choices like that. Like when you show up to whatever you show up next you got that with you you're like that's what I know to do to be safe especially when things get hard like when you first get there we're all getting along and then you know I feel like you looked at me funny or I feel like everyone else you know is in a clique and I'm not in it or we're disagreeing about something and I don't feel seen in this really important political thing or whatever and now I'm feeling I'm gonna ghost or I'm gonna appease and not tell anyone here what I really think and then later ghost or blow up like we just get we start to use coping mechanisms. And so it's helpful to be like when I'm here in the group what's happening that is maybe historical. Do I kind of feel like this person's like my sister or do I kind of feel like this person's acting like my dad or do I kind of feel like this was like when it was like when I was school and I was the only one with my identity in the class or you know just is this bringing up some of that stuff and that's that's not blaming ourselves it's just being like I want to respond to this reality now and it's like I think that that's what I'm trying in the book what I was trying to do is like the self-help genre makes you feel like you're fucked up there's something wrong with you if you have baggage. Well, it's 100 percent of people are traumatized by this society and we all but we all don't cope with it the same and then we can get in these reactive patterns where we have kind of matching you know I push too hard and you back away or whatever you know we get into some matching dynamics with people that are that can really go far and become horrible and all of us have been there and so trying to just be like we're all here in. This one thing I will say about this book my worst fear is that people will like use it to diagnose others and weaponize it because that's what we're all doing with everything and someone asked me in an interview why didn't I mention the term toxic masculinity in the book and I really had to think about it because of course toxic masculinity exists um but I realized that toxic masculinity is the kind of term you use like in a group or within another to like motivate somebody to look at change but when you go inside to deal with your behavior it's not labeled toxic masculinity inside. It's labeled like neglect of my parent, fear of abandonment, you know what I mean? The book is for us to use on ourselves and with our close friends where you could have that kind of like hey this is coming up or hey I know you're newly in love please stay you know whatever where you actually have the relationship to kind of have that but it's not really meant to be used that's the non-judgmentalness is really trying to help us all not turn this into a well I was at the meeting and you were having a fear of engulfment and so you know what I mean like that that's not working out very well for us 

Targol: Yeah um I'm thinking about um in the context of movement work and when we have these um you call them big feelings right and how one of the things been really thinking about is how do we have a space where we can have a critical reflection in the context of doing resistance work again we can define that a little bit um. In a way that allows us to be able to have uh engage more deeply in the kind of analysis that we need to at this moment you know because I find that sometimes those big feelings um either the feelings themselves or our trying to mitigate them um then we're either too harsh or we don't sort of have our critique um because we don't want to hurt someone's feelings but actually a lot might be at stake in certain contexts and how we can have a kind of conversation or what are the mechanisms for being able to do that in the collective in a way that is um yeah that's not um hurting our movements. I'm not sure if I said that correctly…

Dean: Yeah I understand exactly. I mean I think I've been one thing I've been trying to think about I'm interested in conflict prevention like or what we do to have conflicts come out when it's smaller not wait until it's huge you know like because most of us just don't give each other any feedback and then we blow up or ghost and then you know that's the pattern and or we talk behind people's backs and gossip and so then people feel like everyone's against them and they kind of are and then we take sides and then we you know the beautiful work that we're trying to do is harder to do um and so I've been thinking about you know one one thing for me like the tools that are in the second half of the mutual aid book a lot of them are like that like there's a tool about like qualities of group culture and the idea is that you would sit around with the group and talk about these qualities of group culture we're we're punctual we celebrate well we're we rush each other you know there's things that are kind of aspirational and things that are kind of hard and you would just have this open conversation about like oh yeah I think we're kind of like this I wish we were more like this or I was once in a group that did this or maybe this would help us become like this instead of it become instead of that conversation not starting until I'm accusing you because you know can we make these things just like lighter topics oh all groups have tendencies. You know like I've been in groups where there's a tendency there's a thing I often use as an example like in groups sometimes people who are really security oriented and they're they want to make sure that we don't have cops in here or whatever and they are less likely to let people in and then there's people like me who are like let's bring everyone I'll give everybody the keys cash box the minute they walk in and somewhere in there is wisdom you know what I mean. But it's a lot easier if I know I'm like that you know like we can we'll have a I'll have a conversation with people I'm staying with like tonight Dean don't just invite everyone to stay over you meet tonight like you know what I mean like just like right like I need help with the security aspect and other people need help you know making the group open enough and like if we can just lightly identify those tendencies instead of being like that person's so fucked up their and then have a whole political rationale about why maybe add on some identity stuff you know like this is what we do um. So though you know there's like another chart like like the qualities of mutual aid groups versus qualities of like charity it's just like a chance to be like let's just have a conversation about this instead of accusing each other when we do something that is a is a hard point of this difference about how we're going to do something because we're doing like impossible work you know so like I think stuff like that like I've also been thinking about I haven't done this in a group but what if you had a thing you said at the beginning and end of every meeting that acknowledged that we will make mistakes that it's okay to make mistakes in public that we believe it's possible to forgive people and to apologize that we're all like agreeing that we're open to trying that so that if that's if you've never been in any group that has that culture which most of us haven't because that's not how our culture is you just even be getting that idea in the room you know what I mean like just I just feel like what happens is everything gets addressed when it's like a five alarm fire or whatever instead of you know like just learning you know another workshop I do with people is like how to just give and receive small feedback like how to just be like oh when you're late sometimes it has this impact on me because I've got this babysitter thing or you know when you're like I wish that you would invite me when you guys all go out or whatever just actually saying the stuff instead of like having it only come out when people are really distressed and the experience of saying something like that to someone and then having them actually listen to you and not be defensive builds so much trust in that person and in all people like it really can repair. Because most of us have never had good situations where we could give feedback and get be heard like that's just not how families jobs school none of it so to me like I think most of our wounds happen in these groups when we're kids and in school and whatever and we can also most likely heal in groups and actually like restore our our capacity to have faith in the goodness of other people which we like desperately need right now because we have to work together in like enormous numbers to stop what's happening like nothing else is going to work besides like the mobilization of almost everyone. You know what I mean like to be very unruly and destroy existing systems and care for each other and that's like we're not there we're very demobilized terrified of each other um you know a few people doing the work in an overworking way and resentful I mean it's rough you know.

Targol: Yes I agree very much and I think that the um the need to do that work because there will be the what did you call it the five the five –

Dean: Five alarm fire.

Targol: Five alarm fire, right.

Dean: I just made that up. I have no idea what that means.

Targol: I don't know but it sounded really good it sounded dramatic.

Dean: There’s probably some really butch firefighters in here who can tell us about it later.

Targol: No but but when things get really uh critical we need to be able to discern the difference between the minor differences that we have and security risks because that will happen so which is an argument for needing to do this work when you know in a context that that moves us through and gives us the ability to be able to um be alert to the other part.

Dean: I want to give an example of this actually. When I was first coming out as trans 1000 years ago and there and nobody would use my pronoun right and stuff I was I had a lot of rigidity about it because it was really awful and I didn't feel supported now I can be in groups and someone can come in who's not really been around trans people before and use my pronoun wrong a bunch and I'm just like I love this person I want to be in this group with them I'll tell them again and again other people will there's so many people in here who see me. So that is about like also like learning the capacity to to feel safety where it is instead of stay on alert historically. Now I'm mostly in groups where a lot of people are down with trans people so I and also my life is like that so I can spend a little of that political ed work with somebody who is otherwise well-meaning you know I want to work with and connect with. We have to welcome a lot of new people who don't know a lot of things about how we want to treat each other in our movements we've all been that person a million times still are being it so like that's just an example of how like my internal emotional work about finding out that I have support system might make me better at welcoming new people nobody has to do that but like it'd be great if more of us tried you know what I mean.

Targol: Yeah one of the things you said a little while ago about the fact that we all make mistakes and sort of make you normalizing that there's a quote by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, an Aymaran anarchist feminist in her last book where she's talking about this problem of nobody likes to change they're like nobody talks about how they used to think a certain way but then they shifted they're thinking or that you know they can change their analysis or and that she would go around for a while she made it a point that whenever she was talking she would start with I used to think this but now I think this just to sort of normalize the fact that we can you know we can change. I mean hopefully we do change more than we think but but that but we're so unaccustomed to that and I think spending a lot of time in the classroom space here at the university now more virtually but I think that that would be such a great exercise to do you know it's like can we think about something we thought like believed in really strongly and now we've shifted just to normalize it because there's so much anxiety around being wrong or saying the wrong thing in the most stifling way and I just it would be so nice to be able to just loosen things up a little bit.

Dean: And maybe that's why people defend sometimes like I think sometimes when I'm just thinking about like the years and years and years of being the first person to talk to somebody about abolition and you know people a lot of people are like whoa when they first hear that idea maybe not as much now but it used to be and like that moment might be partly just needing to adjust and open to this new idea but also it could be like I'm embarrassed that you know what I mean. There's there can be like it's like could we just take all the shame out of learning in public or learning in a conversation with another person just like oh well cool tell me more about your idea you know 

Targol: Yeah. Another connection I was thinking about when you're talking about friendship the importance of friendship. There's this concept of friendship in the Kurdish freedom movement that Nazan Üstündağ writes about which is the and the Kurdish freedom movement the women's movement actually there is kind of a sense of I wouldn't say it's I don't know if it's a strong interdiction but definitely romantic relationships are not encouraged at all right and as in a lot of movements I think historically that's been the case. But she's she talks about this idea of the of friendship of what friendship means a movement and she talks about it in terms of a structural relationship to the movement and and so there's a kind of depersonalization of it but it's not about and this is why I thought we could talk about definitions of like what do we mean by movement what do we mean by resistance because in this context it's about a commitment to an ethical relationship to the defense of life and not some sort of loyalty to a central dogma you know. But that this idea of depersonalizing it in a way that's that's connected to some set of commitments ethical commitments you know that are about relationships in general and life relations in general that is something that I find really valuable and I'm just wondering if that sort of how that resonates with you and your thinking.

Dean: That makes me think about like 12-step meetings when they're like we may not like you but we already love you in a very special way. And I think that is actually what we need to be doing is like you know it's interesting it comes up sometimes I've also seen people in groups that I'm working with defend their cliqueishness by being like well I don't to be friends with everybody in the movement and I'm like yeah but you can't act like a dick like you know like everyone here yes these people are not all your ideal dream friend. Like so many people I know who I love the most I met in movements we wouldn't have gotten along because I talk really fast and they talk really slow but we figured it out and now we're like oh my god there's so much here you know what I mean that's just like one things like that really do turn people off from each other or different subcultural norms or just whatever you know really different ages and they're and learning how to be more open to more kinds of people and also to just love strangers on principle and support people even if they're really annoying like a lot of the people in our communities when they're in crisis they act really difficult to be around that's when we most need to love them and support them through it this is not like a fair weather deal there's no fair weather coming ever again in our lifetimes. It's real so um so yeah. I think that's that's huge and I also just want to go back to the thing about not having sex in our movements. People ask me this question a lot they're like my group is thinking about saying that you can't hook up with anybody in the or saying that if you do you have to tell people. Please don't do this. Like what this does is it makes people lie about their relationships and it makes the relationships less safe because then you have to have it in secret and you've already you already have shame about the relationship before you even start and then when something's hard you don't get support from your friends and making people tell others when they have sex when they don't know if they're going to have sex again. It's just like it's just it's at it'll make them keep the secret you know what I mean this is queer wisdom would like to be added to this terrible idea. Instead what if we I mean it's kind of like let's not say no drugs here let's instead be like how do we use drugs safely right how do we have ethical relationships you can also treat someone terribly if you're not having sex with so how do we in general you know like try I mean my hope for this book would be that people would just like screenshot one of the lists and then talk about it with their friends or at the meeting like just like not have to read the whole that's why I try to make it really skimmable but just use some of these things that come from some of them come from self-help literatures that are otherwise hard to use but just use the parts that can ring with what the political project is that we're doing anyway and lift all these dynamics out of you know there's this vibe and that's like relationships are like a girl thing they're like not serious like that's you know like that it's like this is for you know um I can't even think of Cosmo this is like for Cosmo quizzes. I really wanted the book to feel like a Cosmo quiz. I don't know if that's still a reference culturally but um anyway um you know. There's a kind of feeling that's like and then you know feminism is like the personal is political like how you do anything is how you do everything if people are treating each other badly in this group and the only thing our movements are made of is groups of people who do or don't stick together do or don't take the next really bold action that requires even more trust we're fucked. You know what I mean? So how to be like this is serious and there's like relatively light ways to bring up ways of having principled engagement with each other in the group there's ways to be like tools around feedback tools around communication values around not um campaigning against others in the group values around getting support when you're in a conflict but there's things like that values around making things in public there's things like that that could make it easier that would if what I find over the years is like groups only come in and ask for support around conflict when the conflict is already pitched and people don't before that people are like we're just oh my god we're getting out all these papers we're doing all these banner drops or we're you know we're getting out of this food we're not talking all about what's going on inside here until it's so bad that it blows up. So what have we talked about what's going on how we do it earlier. This is just like feminism 101 but it's most of our groups don't do it we're very like outcomes outcomes outcomes. If we talked about the group dynamics earlier if we did things to welcome people if we tried to create social dynamics that were supportive that let people be who they really are and have trouble and need support and all that then I don't think the conflicts would get as pitched and we wouldn't have I mean I I would love for someone to confirm or deny this but I I have this feeling from my 25 years of doing this stuff that most people in US movements that I've been part of do something when they're youngish they do something once some organizing they have a really hard conflict, they feel burnt out by the unresolved conflict, they leave the movement, and then they never organize again but they talk about organizing and they're it's a political identity but they're not doing stuff which is so this is a really this is not sustainable way to have our movements we need people to stick around it is rough out here there's not enough people doing anything like every kind of mutual aid all we need like hundreds and hundreds more of every one of those in every neighborhood like how many elders are there that aren't being checked on how many children are not being supported you know how many people are not having what they need and so we have to have people go to stay and if people are mostly leaving because of unresolved conflict in groups like that is that is a really big emergency to me and yet we're just like no if we could just come up with the right strategy it's like if this is not a stra– like you know I mean we all know the problems and we know a lot of what needs to be done but there's a kind of like top-down mentality but how we're gonna solve everything that doesn't care about kind of just every ordinary person in all of our movement groups is vitally important and all the ones who have not joined are extremely important. 

Targol: And I think the the conflict most of the time they're emotional they're not they're actually not ideological. I mean they can be but I think that what happens is they get hijacked by the emotional and then you can't actually ever have like a real conversation about the meaty stuff because we're so hijacked by the emotional aspect of it and I think that's like I see that both in some organizing spaces but also sometimes in the classroom especially when we're doing like critical theory or like looking at stuff that's hard that sometimes destabilizes people's sense of themselves I think that sort of happens in a way that we don't know how to deal with I mean I know that there is this thing about like well you know the classroom is not group therapy like we don't you know we want we don't want to do that and yet…

Dean: And yet it is. This is– Every room is group therapy.

Targol: Yes, yes. So I just think yeah we collectively need to be more skilled at navigating those spaces and being able to you know have more emotional awareness so we can get to the real stuff because I mean not that what is the Buddhist way the what's in the way is the way. So I mean in some ways that is what we need to figure out in order to have it reverberate through all these other you know every aspect of our life but it is definitely I think in so many contexts like conflict is our growth edge like that's where we're stuck you know. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the relationship, backtracking a little bit but I think we can loop it back in, sort of when we talk about when you talk about the the emotional dysregulation that happens and you you have a section where you're talking about sort of the biochemical relationship and you talk about it in relationship to social media but not only and I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that aspect of how those yeah the polarities happen in that context of conflict.

Dean: Yeah I mean I think that most of us go into what the self-help books call primal panic but we go into that panic a lot like the fear and anything can bring it up you know I think a lot of us go through it many times during the day or you'll have spend weeks in it or a whole relationship will feel like it for a while you know the fear that the fear of being seen the fear of being left the fear of being crowded and controlled like these kinds of fears that are like very primal fundamental core feelings that live in us that are you know practiced from our early lives when those dangers were truly dangerous right like you have to get your caregivers to care for you and if they do leave you or they do overly crowd and control you it is life-threatening. And so we still have those kind of panic buttons in ourselves and they just get like flipped on and off like all day long and most of it's happening unconsciously and it can happen in a way where I blame myself for it I'm just like oh I'm terrible I'm going through a shame spiral but it's because that thing was flipped or I'm blaming others or I'm like if if he would just text me back like you know all of that all of these panics if they would just do their task in the group or you know and it can lead to really intense narratives about other people and ourselves that are not true and not useful and for me what the panic feels like it's like tunnel vision it's like now all that's happening is our conflict and I'm just like tyroles you know [mummbled] gonna ruin the group and you know what I mean or like whatever it is about a lover about a family member about somebody in a creative project or organizing project and that kind of television that's like when you're up all night thinking about it you know when you just can't think of other stuff and one thing I recommend in the book is this like exercise called what else is true where you just you you draw two circles on the page and in a small circle you write the thing you can't you know stop thinking about and then the bigger circle you write like what else is true about that person or group can I try to remember you know usually it's somebody who's actually close to you most of us aren't doing this about the government we're doing it about you know people who we actually do share values so can I remember any kind thing they ever did any way that we do share values anytime I ever saw them do anything I admire can I try to fill out a little bit what how I'm seeing them out of this tunnel vision. Then this one is like what do I not know maybe I don't know like you're right now you know you're not feeling well or you there's a reason that you're you know taking care of someone or you just had a breakup or something that might be a reason there might be all kinds of things going on that I don't know before you sent that text what was going on or why you looked at me that way at the meeting or whatever it is I'm why you disagree with my proposal whatever I'm losing it about there's things that what do I not know and the third one is like what else is true about me uh there's other people I have in my life. I you know there's other there's parts of this work I really love like anything it's just about trying to bring context around this like hyper-focused panic thing it can be coming to do with a friend someone else can help you try to remember what else is true about this person who right now can only think bad things about or whatever and then there's a part where you write on the left like. Things about this that I can control and things I can't control like I can control I'm gonna take a walk right now or I'm gonna do my tasks for the group or you know I'm gonna ask questions in the meeting. I can't control what people think about me or whatever you know what what she's gonna do with her tasks or whatever and then a lot of people like to just like rip that off and like burn that or throw that away you know I can't control that. And um and some there's also part of the exercise that's about asking myself are there historical links? Am I feeling a way I felt all the time in school as a kid? Am I feeling how I felt and my family you know can I support parts of myself that may be being stirred that are beyond this and that's also nice because I'm like then not acting like this is really all about you it's also all about other things that happen to me and they might need to be grieved or I might need to get support around them or talk to someone about them you know like all of that is about trying to get out of that funk because it just gets so narrow and you people get I mean I'm sure you all know if you have it in yourself and see it in others like we can like get on a like a long bender about some story. The story is no longer serving us even if even if it's true you know um so yeah I think that has been helpful to me I also want to say something about the classroom piece like I was just thinking about you know us trying to teach radical ideas in our classrooms. And like of course those ideas should be like upsetting and livening like my students go through a whole grieving process about the United States and what it is you know about the law about what they thought they were going to do with their lives and I'm like you know over here raining on their parade being like a lawsuit won't save your community shit. You know it's it's a big loss they're doing some really hard unpleasant things to try to get that degree you know their family's counting on you know what I mean right um actually we're in an apocalypse you know I'm laying down some unpleasant truths and um and that um I just told my students yesterday that a coup was happening they didn't know it was really intense um some of them didn't know um anyway um and I'm and I'm like I we're we're taught to act like the classroom is just like purely intellectual and also professional space and it's like. Now I'm a facilitator of a group process and I've decided to bring I'm choosing to bring these ideas in here that are about like racism, colonialism, like it's gonna stir us all up it implicates us all it implicates the worst things that have happened to us and our families and our ancestors and are happening you know in front of us right now all around the world you know it's just like and there's no skill building for teachers or about that you know and then there's the same thing in our movement spaces people act like it's a business or a non-profit we're all gonna act professional or you know what I mean like. It’s like no this is a space for like sacred work trying to heal um you know impossible conditions and so yeah it could just like what would it be like if we thought oh wow we're not quite skilled enough yet how will we build those skills together not like that it's bad about us but just that it's like part of our aspiration just like we study radical histories we'd also study these questions about group dynamics and emotions. 

Targol: Um in the book you referenced the resistance and I'm just I'm like I want to know how Dean's defining the resistance.

Dean: I really struggle with this language in the book of course. I tried to write this book more um more easy to read than anything I've ever written before. I really wanted to ideally be read by young people if possible you know and just a lot of people hate to read right now totally fine um I just want to meet people wherever they are we're making a podcast about it in case you all hate to read um. But um so I struggled with I wanted to yeah like I I could really go into language deeply here but um even the okay so like I'm I'm in a process of deciding to not use the term Left to include things that I'm part of because I'm an anarchist and I don't think that I think that the Left mostly means– wow I can’t believe I’m saying this on TV.

Targol: Say it.

Dean: Um I mean now I need to play you a series of voice memos that my friend Peter Gelder left me to help me understand this because I've been really trying to listen he really is like knows everything um. But um essentially that uh the consistent process in many different historical moments is that a lot of anti-state um people are part of resistance and also are people who want to take over the state and that in the you know as those processes go forward if they gain any traction and to the people who want to take over the state like often like outright assassinate the people who are anti-state or they do other things like just kind of like co-opt the energy of the entire movement take credit for it and like use it to build an electoral system. Even inside like 2020 and see this like there's all these people out there burning cop cars but then there's people who are like building a political platform platform on it to become city council members and then raise the police budget the following year that kind of thing. So you know that is the kind of this is kind of like dynamic in particular I'm interested in how this is in local movements I'm part of and I think the term Left often does the work of erasing the difference between anti-state um resistance work and um and resistance work that wants to like be part of those institutions and. So yeah I used the word resistance I felt more active and I also use the word movements to some degree but I find that my students don't know what that word means at all it's very loosely used in our culture people use the word movements to describe like a single organization like it's very confusing um. And so I wanted to capture you know I think what we should be doing right now is direct action and mutual aid that comes in lots of different formats um and sizes and so I wanted to use a word that suggested like active engagement and and then I use a lot of examples in the book like you know sabotaging pipelines or burning cop cars or um feeding people or you know just. I also wanted the book to be read by people who are maybe like waking up because of distress about their own personal lives which I think is the way a lot of us do wake up and then going to a self-help book about love and then like hearing more stories about stuff people do who are involved in resistance with others like helping people cross over towards that who are getting like good radical ideas from social media and from their own distress um yeah.

Targol: Yeah that makes a lot of sense.

Dean: I’m curious about the what how those terms land for you.

Targol: Yeah well um yes I also have a stumbling over the word Left more and more and um but a reference point that's been really helpful is the Zapatista movement who um makes a distinction between the Left from above and the Left from below so the Left from above is sort of kind of integrated into the state system and the Left from below um is not it's is it's trying to create um just build the other world build um autonomy outside of the state and outside of capitalism and um and maybe this is like um the really um we have to dig deep for the gift of this moment but um that is the realization on a much larger scale that the state is not the place to seek our liberation in any way but that we need to be building our own sort of autonomous projects and mutual aid projects.

Dean: This is my big question right because this happens to some degree the last time Trump was elected too but it's more this time right you could just like yeah there's it's a no-go there's no way to beg our way out of this there's no way to convince great maybe everyone will realize liberalism is dead and whatever, I mean sadly it's alive, but that liberalism should die um. And and then at the same time the democrats and liberals regroup during this time they're like civil liberties we're gonna fight for them you know they like it just moves the bar even further to the right for their project so it's like I feel like it's about it really reminds me of this thing where that um Ruthie and Craig Gilmore wrote an essay they wrote years ago in that book Policing the Planet where they said that like over and over again in the history of the U.S. the police have been delegitimized during various movements but what usually happens afterwards so far is that they expand so they are delegitimized and they're like now we're gonna have women police we're gonna have police of color and we're gonna have police who are homeless outreach workers and we're gonna have police who stop rape or whatever you know like all these ridiculous right they actually get bigger when they're delegitimized and I think it's a similar kind of moment it's like does this help people be like you can't avail yourselves of this government now so let's actually fight like hell and care for each other as intensely as possible to survive. Or is everyone just like I mean wait I'm waiting even harder to vote I'm even more invested in any democrat no matter how genocidal you know I mean wow they're gonna give us a person with that kind of identity who's gonna you know destroy the planet you know I mean I don't know I we are like in a real battle right now and I think that the best thing to do is to demonstrate that direct action and mutual aid work like that that is what helps is when people actually experience and see and have that move from that disempowerment of waiting for elites to solve problems to being like I can be part of this and I was welcomed here and there was a different framework around why I was having this shitty experience and you know like instead of I'm gonna just wait for and hope the ACLU sues them good and hope that you know that somebody better runs next time you know. And until then watch it all burn and have my neighbors be deported and imprisoned you know like so that's that's I think I think right a pivotal moment.

Targol: Yeah um you recently did a podcast on mutual aid 101 is that true I saw some but I didn't I haven't watched it yet. But can you talk a little bit about that the work that you're doing in the domain of mutual aid and how you're framing it and how you're trying to get more folks plugged in?

Dean: Yeah there's been a lot of renewed interest in mutual aid um I think because of recent storms and fires more people and more people are reading the um the book mutual aid again and I've been doing more of these kind of bigger workshops um you know I think it's just very clear to so many people that we have to care for each other and that no one else is coming even just the decline in FEMA response across each disaster you know even. And then also increased size of every disaster because of the ecological crisis you know it's unrelenting um and I think people are like oh it is hard to work in groups how do we you know how do we do it what are the common problems that come up what are common stumbling blocks that actually lots of people have tried stuff um. So yeah this is a lot this is a lot of what I spend my time on is like I'll do like workshops for smaller groups trying to figure that stuff out and putting out a lot of like videos about that stuff so that people can do the workshops themselves because I do think that um the you know already most people are not cared for in this context and the few the few shreds of any kind of care are are going fast and the level of crisis you know I'm just like seeing people really like jumping into forming rapid response networks. I've heard people talking about like this like ICE chasing like when you see ICE vehicles then you and all your friends follow the ICE vehicles all day like really smart forms of community defense and mutual aid that people are trying to think lots of people working on how to get each other abortions and trans health care and other things that are falling away um are being attacked and so figuring out how to not reinvent the wheel with like how do we make decisions in the group and how do we form a group culture that's sustaining and how we let new people in but also keep security around things that we're doing that are more risky you know like it seems like um and I hope a lot of people are turning towards it's just like so many resources um in the anarchist world on you know like crime think. Or it's going down it's all these you know the anarchist library there's just so much out there that's free and like really well organized and a lot of it has graphics are just so much good stuff right now about how to do risky things how to you know build security how to do things in groups I hope that people are finding those resources.

Targol: Yeah well I think the sort of the move from mutual aid your book on mutual aid to this one it seems um uh it tracks like I mean I'm thinking about this moment where there's so much fear um all the time I mean it's it's and it's intensifying and it's not new but it's getting more and more intense and I think sort of having the tools um you know you call it the nuts and bolts you know um is really really helpful to sort of navigate this way of doing the work so that we can do the work.

Dean: Thanks a lot of people told me that the second half of mutual aid felt like a self-help book and that is because it's drawn from another this book is a longer book and I cut it in half and the second one is right now called Getting Shit Done in a Fucked Up World but it's all this stuff about working together in groups and so it's literally second half mutual aid is literally self-help um we were going to finish by reading this poem together. I also just want to say you know the main thing is isolation. The more people we all know and meet who are doing different things the better. This is a room full of like really interesting people who would invite you all to actually just meet meet each other like just like let's just I just changed the vibe and now we're all like it's totally cool to walk up to a stranger um try it um okay um so this is a poem called Life Chant by a Diane Di Prima it's from I think 1973 I uh it's an excerpt. At the end of every line there's a it says may it continue and we can all repeat that together if you want to I find it useful. We'll pass it back and forth “cacophony of small birds at dawn may it continue sticky monkey flowers on bare brown hills may it continue bitter taste of early miners lettuce may it continue music on city streets in the summer nights may it continue kids laughing on roofs on stoops on the beach in the snow may it continue triumphal shout of the newborn may it continue deep silence of great rainforests may it continue rolling fuck of great whales in turquoise ocean may it continue clumsy splash of pelican in smooth bays may it continue clean snow on the mountain may it continue rite of birth and of naming may it continue rite of passage may it continue —

Targol: Love in the morning love in the noon sun love in the evening among crickets may it continue long tales of fire by window and fog and dusk on the mesa may it continue the night music may it continue grunt of mating hippo giraffe foreplay for snow leopard screeching of cats on the back backyard fence may it continue —

Dean: Without police may it continue without prisons may it continue without madhouses marriage high schools that are prisons may it continue without empire may it continue in sisterhood may it continue through the wars to come may it continue in brotherhood may it continue though the earth seem lost may it continue through exile and silence may it continue with cunning and love may it continue as woman continues may it continue as breath continues may it continue as stars continue may it continue 

Targol: may the wind may the wind deal kindly with us may the fire remember our names may springs flow rainfall again may the land grow green may it swallow our mistakes we begin the work may it continue the great transmutation may it continue a new heaven and a new earth may it continue may it continue. 

Dean: Thank you so much.

Targol: Thank you everyone.

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