Love and Liberation in Times of Crisis with Rupert Read (and Wittgenstein)

In this episode, which was recorded in the autumn of 2024, Andrea Hiott talks with environmental philosopher and public intellectual Rupert Read. They delve into Read's realization that 'this civilization is finished,' his engagement with Wittgenstein's philosophy (especially the book he edited with Alice Crary), his subsequent involvement with Extinction Rebellion, how he has come to understand crisis as inflections of love, and the 'moving forward' work of the Climate Majority Project. The conversation explores themes of crisis, consciousness, intergenerational solidarity, and the liberating power of love and truth in the face of existential challenges. Read shares insights from his academic and activist career, emphasizing the importance of inner work, eco-spirituality, and the collective struggle for a better future.

00:00 A Shocking Revelation
00:20 Philosophy and Freedom
01:02 Wittgenstein's Wonderful Life
01:20 Embracing Difficult Emotions
02:29 Introduction to the Interview
02:33 Rupert Reed's Background
04:21 Philosophy as Therapy
05:06 Love as Action
07:51 Rupert Reed's Crisis
09:50 Philosophy and Personal Crisis
11:33 Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy
23:28 Spiritual Practices and Eco-Spirituality
37:05 Climate Courage Campaign
39:16 The Importance of Truth
44:07 The Path to Truthfulness
44:55 The Revelation: Civilization is Finished
46:49 Engaging with Students and Public Reaction
47:54 Joining Extinction Rebellion
48:50 The Challenge of Facing Hard Realities
51:18 The Importance of Paradox and Love
55:21 The Role of Anxiety and Dreams
57:48 Extinction Rebellion's Evolution
01:01:49 The Climate Majority Project
01:10:51 Intergenerational Solidarity and Responsibility
01:17:24 Embracing Difficult Emotions
01:22:50 Final Thoughts and Invitation to Action

Links to what we discuss:

New Wittgenstein book with Alice Crary

Cora Diamond

Civil Disobedience

Love in the time of Corona

New Statesmen Article

Joanna Macy

Foucault
Rupert on Politics Live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5oAr9q277g 

https://dark-mountain.net/the-deluge/

https://www.parentsforafuture.org/ 

Thrutopia https://youtu.be/b1trbea-BkU?si=YlhO13yioc6jTekO

Transcript

 [00:00:00] these words popped into my head, this civilization is finished. I was, I was pretty shocked by this, what felt like a kind of awful revelation. It kind of stopped me, literally stopped me in my tracks 

Rupert Read: whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

It confirmed my sense of a certain kind of Fragility in what we assume in society 

what one is always seeking to attain in philosophy is freedom from ideological preconceptions, from thought traps, from assumptions that make an ass out of you and me.

And some of those thought patterns are exactly the things which divide us from other people. Philosophers getting stuck in thinking of ourselves as separate from other people. 

When we really manage to free ourselves from those kinds of philosophical entrapments, we find ourselves in in a web of intense care and interrelationality with other people. 

Rupert Read: Although I've gone through a lot of suffering, as have some of the other people we've named, Wittgenstein being a famous [00:01:00] example, it's interesting that Wittgenstein his last words were, tell them I've had a wonderful life. And luckily I'm not at that point in my life yet, but I feel somewhat similarly,

the argument that I've made in recent years is that all of these difficult emotions are in fact inflections of love. That we, for example, are angry because what we love is threatened. 

being honest is a lifelong project, 

there's nothing better that can happen to one than finding one's life's purpose and what I actually believe. is that the epochal crisis we're moving into provides an enormous opportunity for all sorts of people to find true meaning again and true community in their lives, 

the disasters that are coming, the epidemic of difficult emotions that are coming.

the attempt to avoid despair.

Is a profound mistake. Many people are going to be tempted to despair in the years to come, because of the immense [00:02:00] difficulty of our situation and what I say to those people is, don't try to avoid it, to work with it. 

These are exactly the things. That give us a chance, that give us some real hope,   

Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea. Today I'm talking with Rupert Reed, who's a philosopher and a public intellectual and much more. You've maybe heard of him for all kinds of different reasons, depending where you live, depending what you're interested in. Today we're going to talk about crisis.

We're going to talk about Wittgenstein. We're gonna talk about liberation. We're gonna talk about love. I came to Rupert Reed's work because of Vichtenstein, but also because of this idea of through utopia, which you might have heard mentioned here before, relative to writing through dystopia and utopia towards through topia. I'll put [00:03:00] that episode in the show notes, but the reason I wanted to have Rupert on this time was because I came across his book about paradoxes and Wittgenstein. And I wanted to talk to him about it. But also because in his own life, he holds a lot of different worlds, as you'll hear. I won't try and summarize it all here because we have a very good discussion about it. But it's really about how we hold these seeming contradictions or Even, for example, this very conversation and all of the things that Rupert is involved in. There will be some people who will hear certain words and find them difficult, while others will find them very inspiring.

And the same is actually true about Wittgenstein and the ways that his philosophy is interpreted. For example, there's a book called The New Wittgenstein, which Rupert Reed edited, and I remember coming across and reading quite often when I worked at the bookshop in New York. And it sees Wittgenstein through the lens [00:04:00] of thinking of philosophy as being possibly therapeutic.

I encourage you to look at the book, read some of the essays, Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam and others. But there's this older idea in philosophy, of understanding that philosophy can do something therapeutic if we look at it as a practice. Pierre Hadot has been mentioned on the podcast recently, and I'll write about that on the substack eventually soon. But this idea of philosophy as a way of life, and I think right now I find it rather comforting to think of philosophy in this way it's something that can help us disrupt thought patterns and also deal with disruptive thought patterns.

Learn how to get some space around them to look at them. And also, there's this underlying theme through this conversation of crisis and of love as a form of action. Love as action, not a form of action, but this, podcast that People discuss [00:05:00] how love isn't a feeling for them so much as an action.

That love is, is an action in the world, and that's an important idea right now. In this conversation you'll hear us talk about his teachers, Joanna Macy and Thich Nhat Hanh, and also his Quakerism. And you'll also hear him talking about beginning, being part of the starting Extinction Rebellion. You'll also hear him talk about being a scholar of Wittgenstein, all these worlds are the worlds of Rupert Reed. And, he's got a lot of pushback for trying to hold all those worlds. And, I really wanted to understand how he's done it and how it feels. And, also just talk to him about some of his philosophical writing relative to these ideas and to paradox. Thanks.

And to Wittgenstein. And to just the excessive internalization, that we we might be at risk of as people who do read a lot of philosophy. or neuroscience or [00:06:00] whatever, one can get stuck in the head. And for a long time I sort of almost had this fantasy of Wittgenstein as being, trying very hard to get out of his own head, to, to realize his embodied love, his action in the world, whether it was, you know, fleeing, His money, or going to teach, and, or building houses, or, he did a lot of different things too.

He also had a lot of seeming dichotomies in the space of his own life. And Rupert is doing that too, and that's what we talk about here. And, I hope it brings something loving into your life, somewhere, somehow. It helps you hold whatever it is you need to hold right now. My voice is almost gone, but, we are here, and we are creating the future together, and we can do that. Everything we do, every action, really does matter. And let's try to stay ´focused on [00:07:00] just the moment, the everyday action. Being grateful And realizing how much power and beauty and connection is potent in that moment. And in learning and loving. Alright, .

Andrea Hiott: Hello, Rupert. It's so nice to meet you. Thank you for being on Love and Philosophy.

Hi, Andrea. Good to be here. 

 There's a lot I want to unpack you've done so many things, and this is a broad audience. But to start, I I was wondering if you remember the first crisis, That you came to in your life.

Andrea Hiott: Maybe it doesn't have to be the first one, of course, but when you think back, do do you remember any sort of crisis that you had in your life?.. 

Rupert Read: I would offer two things. Firstly, when I was very young, we had quite a crisis in the UK. So this isn't really a crisis in my life, but it's something that's made a mark on me.

We had the so called three day week in the early 1970s. [00:08:00] which, during which time there were quite serious power cuts. So one of my earliest memories is sitting around a dinner table with or breakfast table even, but probably dinner with candles because there was no power, no electric power. And that was, looking back on it, that was very interesting.

It kind of confirmed my sense of a certain kind of Fragility in what we assume in society and that we shouldn't assume that our civilization is nearly as stable as we usually most of us even now still assume that connects with things I've been doing recently in terms of a personal crisis. My youth was relatively problem free compared to many people's I had a very happy childhood and a happy family.

And it was only later, really, that that I came into what I would call true personal crises. So, In my [00:09:00] thirties, I had a serious, long episode of anxiety and depression.

And that taught me an enormous amount. And quite a lot of my philosophy and my writing about art and my spiritual teaching comes freely in a way from that period of my life, which was immensely painful. But I tried to treat it in the way that Nietzsche teaches, whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

Andrea Hiott: Is that when you discovered philosophy? Where were you by then? 

Rupert Read: No, no. So I did philosophy as an undergraduate at Bayville College, Oxford University. And that was absolutely amazing, brilliant. And I fell in love with philosophy and did a philosophy PhD at Rutgers. And that was the, obviously led into my academic career, which has been most of my, um, professional and adult life, although increasingly in recent years it's given way to other things.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. So I used to work at a [00:10:00] bookshop in New York called St. Mark's Books. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. I know it. I used to. 

Rupert Read: Yeah. Because when I did my PhD, I was at Rutgers University. And so I spent a, yeah, I spent a lot of time in New York and that was, I think that was probably my favorite bookshop.

So you used to work there. Incredible. I used 

Andrea Hiott: to work there when I was in school. It's gone now, unfortunately, but yeah. Oh no. Yeah. I worked there. You know up as long as I could but the point is it's very strange But as I was, you know looking at your work I was reading your Wittgenstein which I hope we can talk about but I suddenly came across the the the book the new Wittgenstein it's kind of got this it's a picture of him and it's kind of gold 

Rupert Read: Yes, and 

Andrea Hiott: I used to pick this book up all the time in that bookshop and read it.

Rupert Read: All right. Nice. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. But I hadn't associated it it was literally just kind of finally kind of came back around. Yeah, but yeah, 

Rupert Read: successful ever academic book project in the sense that it became as much as academic books do it became a [00:11:00] kind of minor. bestseller and, you know, helped lead a kind of revolution in thinking about who Wittgenstein is and what his philosophy was.

We argue in that book that his philosophy was fundamentally Um, therapeutic, if you will, throughout his career, throughout his life, including in his early work, and that, therefore, the, the, this talk, the common talk of there being two different Wittgensteins, or two different Wittgensteinian philosophies, is much overstated.

Andrea Hiott: So, speaking of therapy, speaking of philosophy, Yeah. One of your books you write about Wittgenstein. It's liberator, liberatory philosophy, I think. Yes. Yes. And I guess I want to see how this connects. So you'd already studied philosophy when you had the crisis that you had or? 

Rupert Read: Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And had you already been working on this thinking of philosophy therapeutically or?

Yes. Yeah. Okay. And I just wonder if when you had that crisis, if it [00:12:00] was in fact, You brought up Nietzsche, but, um, 

Rupert Read: I 

Andrea Hiott: can see, I guess I'm kind of getting towards, I can see how what you're doing now is informed by a lot of philosophical points earlier in in your life.

But I, I wonder about you for you kind of, you know, in your private self, if you were thinking. About these kinds of things early on or in terms of crisis, right? Because it's still about crisis, but in a different nested level. 

Rupert Read: Yeah, yeah, so I would say two things on that. The first is that yes, I have found philosophy sometimes very personally helpful across the years, especially in this period of crisis that I mentioned earlier, and it's long aftermath.

I have found philosophy, philosophies like Nietzsche's useful, but also the Stoics have been important to me. I, these days I'm a big fan of Stoicism, and in my final days teaching at the University of East Anglia, teaching philosophy [00:13:00] there. I would teach the, the Stoics and also Wittgenstein himself in his in his therapeutic philosophizing and in his more or less religious and spiritual attitude to the work that he did, his intensely ethical attitude to the enterprise of philosophy and the enterprise of life.

And the second thing I would say is that as you've correctly picked up on my book, Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy, which was my final work in academic philosophy, and I regard it as my magnum opus, as definitely my most important book, at least among the books that were, that I've done that were written by me, as opposed to edited books.

In that book, Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy, I go one step further than this idea of philosophy as therapy, and talk about philosophy as liberation. And And part of that exercise Wittgenstein to suggest a different idea of liberation and freedom from the idea that we usually [00:14:00] have. So I argue that Wittgenstein's philosophy is really that what one is always seeking to attain in philosophy is freedom from ideological preconceptions, from thought traps, from assumptions that make an ass out of you and me.

And I argue that when you understand liberation in this way, firstly it coheres with, um, the, the spiritual enterprise and the enterprise of seeking, um, to free oneself from entrapment by thought patterns that hold one captive, as occurs over and over again in, for instance, anxiety and depression. And secondly, and crucially, that part of this redefining, therefore, of freedom is that you don't think of freedom anymore in anything like the way that Isaiah Berlin famously thought about it when he said that that freedom is basically negative freedom, i.

e. freedom from, um, [00:15:00] other people. Um, instead, on the contrary, you think that, that freedom is, and liberation are, are indissoluble from other people. So I coined this slogan in Dickinsonite's Liberation Philosophy. Autonomy is relationality, that the kind of autonomy that, that Wittgenstein seeks is autonomy from thought patterns that trap you.

And some of those thought patterns are exactly the things which divide us from other people. I argue that this is what's at the heart, for example, of his famous anti private language considerations. That what those are really about is about philosophers getting stuck in thinking of ourselves as separate from other people.

And that when we really manage to free ourselves from those kinds of philosophical entrapments, we find ourselves in a, in a web of intense care and interrelationality with other people. We don't, for example, um, speculate about whether other people have minds or not. On the contrary, we move immediately to regard other people as [00:16:00] part of our concern and not just other people either, by the way, other beings at large.

So yeah, my, my philosophy, my, my final philosophy, if you will, the final version of it as expressed in that book, um, is intensely about the way that philosophy, if you do it right, if you do it in the spirit of Wittgenstein et al., is actually A doorway to care and love for other people rather than anything that gets in the way of such love and care.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think that's very beautiful. And I guess that's why I wonder about the crisis you were going through. And also, I mean, I also feel kind of close to Wittgenstein or I always have. I mean, obviously, when I was at the bookshop, I'm picking up that book and reading it. And, and there's this strange kind of paradox, which connects also to other work you've done talking about Wittgenstein.

Um, of. This solitary sadness or this being sort of trapped, right? I think in that book you talk about how he's the freedom is finding the [00:17:00] right word and and also when When you're introducing that book you're talking about this feeling that we all know if we've ever tried to really do a writing project or think really deeply where it's just so hard in a way and so liberating and so wonderful, but so It's really riding that weird razor edge of almost too much to handle and I think of Wittgenstein in this way often as if he was maybe I'm romanticizing it, but and you brought up Nietzsche too, but you're so alive and so desperate to get out of these patterns you're in or find another way of looking at them.

Rupert Read: Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Um, so I'm bringing all this up because I wonder if, In writing that book, because it became a transitional moment for you, right? I wonder what was happening there if I'm reading too much into it or if it really was this kind of a, the tide going out and you really having to look at things deeply and deal with them.

In this way that's solitary, but then you find the love in the community. Yes, 

Rupert Read: yes. Gosh, there's such a lot I could say there. I guess one thing I'd [00:18:00] start with is that, yes, so this was my last academic book, my last work of philosophy as such. And partly it was so because I felt, right, I've really done the work I needed to do in philosophy as such, in academic philosophy.

And it's time to move on. And partly that coincided with the increasing Urgent, emer, emergent, um, aspect of my life to do with. Wrestling with the huge civilizational crisis, including crucially the ecological crisis that we find ourselves in and finding that now more imperative now, but that makes it sound a bit too much either or because, you know, the work that I do now leading the climate majority project, which I'm sure will come to Later that work still involves a lot of what they call thought leadership.

It involves a lot of deep thought about, for example, the nature of social movements, the possibility of fundamental [00:19:00] transformational change. And these things are not actually alien to philosophical thought patterns. And moreover, um, if anyone is strong enough to read all the way to the end of Victorstein's Liberatory of Philosophy, you'll find that in the, in the final chapters, I kind of bring out a dimension of this already there.

So I, I argue there, as I mentioned briefly earlier, I argue there that when one understands autonomy correctly, it is the same thing as relationality, that the kind of freedom that we are looking for is a freedom from, for example, the kinds of assumptions that are Stuck, keeping us stuck in a civilization which is, as my former friend and colleague, only former because he's dead, David Graeber as famously said, our predicament that we seem to be stuck in a certain mode of social organization, unable to understand other modes of social organization, and this stuckness is killing us.

We need to overcome, um, assumptions [00:20:00] such as the idea of of progress. And such as the idea that we are in any meaningful sense, cut off from other people or that we should try to pursue liberation from them or from other beings or from nature. And I come to all of these things, um, by the end of that book and these things are things that I'm trying to realize now, but continuing to use thought as I do so, in in the life.

That I'm weaving now. And you ask, you know, how do I connect that back to crisis and there's many ways again, I could do that. I've mentioned briefly a couple. Um, one is that, as I said, my belief and my experience is that a fundamental dimension of of anxiety and depression is being stuck in certain thought patterns, which in a way, which is quite similar to the ways that we get philosophically stuck in those thought patterns.

And arguably Wittgenstein himself was pursuing this kind of theme in the first half of the Philosophical Investigations, which is [00:21:00] what my book is about. is about. So there's a whole kind of sequence of sort of parallels here, right? It's the situation that somebody is in when they're in a psychopathological situation.

It's a situation a civilization is in when it's in. Broadly speaking, psychopathological situation when, when, when one's society is stuck and sick and the way in which philosophy can give one clues as to how to get out of these situations, although it can't, as it were, do the one, do the work for you, and this is one, um, caution I would give, by the way, that if anyone's listening to this thinking, Oh, I've got anxiety and depression maybe philosophy can help me get out of it.

Yeah, maybe it can, but you do have to be quite careful because another thing that you can do if you're not, not really careful with philosophy is get endlessly stuck in more and more thought that just kind of spins around, which is often itself a characteristic of, um, being stuck in a psychopathological situation.

So that's what you don't want to do. You have to find the the [00:22:00] break, the pathway into action. And, Well, speaking for myself, I've managed to find that pathway, I would say, quite effectively in recent years, which has been a great blessing. 

Andrea Hiott: Yes, indeed. And I want to get to this because there's these nested levels of it, of of trying to change thought pattern or notice thought pattern.

Sometimes it sounds even when you're talking, or when I was talking, that it's all in the individual head or something like this. You talk about that a lot, about it's not, and actually those patterns are in the community or maybe in Wittgenstein's family or in that kind of world he was in or yes, yes. 

Rupert Read: In Wittgenstein's Vienna, for example, to use the title of a famous book. 

Andrea Hiott: Exactly. So how do you see that? the way that we can awaken to perhaps almost a practice, of noticing patterns and thinking through them, but also for him, maybe it was through going into kind of being a school teacher or putting himself in these environments different environments I know we want to talk about nature and that you [00:23:00] connected with nature, but How did you get out of your own individual thoughts and notice the thoughts around you I guess?

Rupert Read: Well, that is a huge Many parts of the answer. Yeah, one part of the answer is nature. Another part is spiritual practice. I'm a member of the Religious Society of Friends of the Quakers. I'm also a Buddhist practitioner. I'm a former student of Thich Nhat Hanh's and of Joanna Macy's. And Quakerism and Buddhism, they come from opposite sides of the world, but something that they profoundly have in common in Buddhism at any rate in its most crucial forms, in my view is that you might say they are fundamentally practice based religions or spiritualities or philosophies.

Um, they do not, so in Quakerism, for instance, there is no creed. And in Buddhism, one might say something like, if you don't take part in Buddhist meditation, or if you don't naturalize that kind of meditative attitude or practice into your life, then it's kind [00:24:00] of silly to say that you're a Buddhist, you're not a Buddhist by virtue of believing in certain, in the truth of certain propositions.

For me, when I had my personal crisis, my Quakerism became more important to me, and it was then that I actually went deeply into Buddhism and ending up spending time at Plum Village in France, for example, with Thich Nhat Hanh and his colleagues and Chan Kong and and so forth. So, I'm giving that as a kind of, um, example because I think it's quite an important example.

Um, not just because it's been important to me personally, but because One of the problems with our civilization is that it has tended to lose grip on the importance of religious and spiritual practice of some kind or another, right? I'm not saying everyone has to become a Quaker or a Buddhist. I'm saying that in wisdom traditions, as these get embodied in practices as for example, in, um, [00:25:00] Buddhism, there is something very precious and profound, which I believe is a, crucial resource to getting us out, if we can get out, of the absolutely terrible bind that we are stuck into.

And one of my future projects, which is influenced by philosophy, but also influenced by the work I've been doing in the world, and influenced very much by my spiritual and religious experience, and by my attempt now to be a spiritual teacher, one of my key future projects is a book that I've got a lot of material for on eco spirituality.

And I believe that eco spirituality is sort of nature connected orientation to the world, which has a broadly spiritual dimension. I believe that eco spirituality is almost certain to be a rising trend in the very difficult period of of our life as a species that we are moving into. Why? Well, it's simple, really.

People are going to seek something to take refuge [00:26:00] in in these difficult times and refuge, a word that is very important to, to Buddhism. I think a lot of that refuge will be taken in nature and going beyond that, I think a lot of it will be taken in, in nature based religious practice or spirituality.

Andrea Hiott: Yes, I'm so glad you brought both of those names up, Thich Nhat Hanh, and also Joanna Macy, because that's where I wanted to go with you, is I wondered, did you seek them out? I mean, because, when you look back, when when I'm looking at your life, I didn't mention earlier, but you, I think you were with Stanley Cavell, maybe, with the philosophy, and I remember in that book, there was Hilary Putnam and others, and then I want, that world is one very particular kind of world, and then this, I was also reading I always say his name wrong, Tick Tock Hunt and Joanna Macy and that's love, right?

That's his, he's writing so much about love and then she's writing about the difficult emotions based in love And I don't see these as different. I mean philosophy, of course, has the word love in it But it's did you [00:27:00] go seek them out? Were you missing something? Did it all come together? Was, were you already deeply in the Quaker kind of feeling because that's another thing I've That's a really powerful, tradition, I've noticed, and people that I know that are part of it.

Rupert Read: Yeah, yeah. So, in terms of Wittgenstein, I've had, I've had many great Wittgensteinian teachers. The most important of all, for me has been, um, Cora Diamond, and it was her who oriented me towards, um, towards what became the new Wittgenstein, towards the resolute, so called resolute reading of Wittgenstein's work, which you, you find across all of my philosophical work of the last 25 years or so and, Um, that has more of a possible bearing than some might think on where, if you will, I've I've ended up.

Because Cora, for example, well, she writes quite a bit, actually about love and about, um, its manifestation in life, in [00:28:00] literature in philosophy, or its absence in, in philosophy. So that's one. Starting point in terms of why I got into Buddhism in such a serious way as I did, as I say, that was very much coming initially from my own personal crisis, and that led me onto a journey of taking, um, Zen, especially much more seriously than I had done previously and getting to know much more about it and practicing it a lot more that led me eventually to Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh.

Han and also led me to write, um, some stuff, about Zen and philosophy and in particular about Zen and Wittgenstein which people can find out there if they want. In terms of Joanna Macy, that's an interesting little story. So I have a a great colleague. His name is Andrew Boswell. He has been a friend for many years and is a sort of collaborator now in the climate majority.

Project and he and I, um, have done quite a lot of Buddhist stuff together too and Green Party stuff together as [00:29:00] well. Um, anyway, um, he urged me to listen to these lectures by Joanna Macy called World as Lover, World as Self. I was very busy it's just an incredible title, isn't it?

World as Lover, World as Self. And I instantly recognized the, the power of the title. But at the time I was very, very busy my, with my important philosophical writing and with my important political work. So for ages I didn't listen to it and he kept nagging me to listen to it and he said, she's coming, she's coming to, to England.

Please, you know, have a listen because I want you to, to to go and, uh, and study with her with me. And so finally I did listen. As soon as I did, I was like, Oh my God, you know, I don't have heard this before. And so I signed up and went on this course where I met and studied with Joanna and this work became.

As you've noted, very important to me and is a big, big influence on a lot of my writing and my actions over the last, um, especially decade or so, and Joanna has [00:30:00] become a really important mentor to me. Um, so that's kind of the, the, the story there. And yeah, for me, a really crucial aspect here. Um, is the way that Joanna Macy really gives us, I think, a full embodied understanding of the importance of the difficult emotions.

So shame, anger, grief, anxiety. And the argument that I've made in recent years is that all of these difficult emotions are in fact inflections of love. That we, for example, are angry because what we love is threatened. That we are afraid because what we love is is threatened. And what we most value, and those we most value, including ourselves.

Andrea Hiott: That's so rich that I almost feel like it's the soil or something and you're showing everything sort of growing out of it. I [00:31:00] want to pause just a second because that's a really important moment there where your friend's trying to get you to go

see her and you're stuck in your philosophy because I've been there and I see it a lot in colleagues who are Philosophically inclined especially towards more analytic right where you just think you have to do this very serious work and it's even one reason I call this love and philosophy because people find it very uncomfortable often to Talk about love, yes as philosophers yeah, 

Rupert Read: it turned out he's pushing it an open door, but you have to push it a little while before Before I fell into it and and what became the most important part of that of all for me Was going deep into the understanding these are embodied understanding and the philosophical understanding of grief Which I think is the most neglected, um, difficult emotion, still of them all.

And the way that, that grief is, is love in the sense of grief is the, is the terrible rip that we feel when something or someone that we love [00:32:00] is is removed. From the world, and I, I've argued that what, the way to understand this is that our very world is, therefore, has a rip in it and that is what grief is.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it does feel like that, and as you're talking, I'm remembering, Joanna Macy's tearing up or something. She's so present with it, right? There's a embodied feeling you, you get of we can sit with this. And that reminds me of things you say about truth. Just sit with the truth, look at the truth this is hard and it's even messy for me to try to understand how I want to talk to you about it. But it's so important. Even someone like Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or these philosophers, I feel they're also trying to do that or find that space, so 

Rupert Read: yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: and I wonder do you feel that's part of the The healing that's kind of a weird word too But these aren't disconnected from other areas of life either, right?

Love itself, I always thought as a kid, it's very hard to feel so much love for my parents or for whoever because you can't do anything about it, you really just have to sit there with it.

Rupert Read: Right, you mean, you can't do anything about it in the sense of you can't you can't [00:33:00] help it, you can't 

Andrea Hiott: change, make things good for them, or you can't not love them, or but except 

Rupert Read: that you, there is, of course, stuff you can do about that, which is why I've argued for many years that we think about love wrongly if we think of it as, a feeling.

Um, love ultimately devolves into, into what we do. And I've argued slightly controversially that love is a kind of activity or, or action. But actually I think this is a very helpful perspective and alternative to this kind of excessively internalized version of the emotions which tends to grip us in our individualistic civilization where we're imagining ourselves cut off from each other which takes us back to my argument about why that's the wrong way to think of ourselves based again in Wittgenstein's thinking.

So yeah, for me love, if you will, is a kind of work and I think that that connects helpfully with the way in which people sometimes [00:34:00] talk about brief work, people like Joanna, um, it also connects, I think, with what rationally I accepted for a long time, but until I think relatively recently hadn't fully actually realized or actualized in my life and my work, which is the importance of, of inner work, as it's called.

So for many years, I would say, I would say, and I heard others say and agreed with them, that when it comes to, say, activism or politics inner work is really crucial. If you just kind of engage in campaigning and, um, behavior change and so forth, that isn't enough. It needs to connect with stuff that you're doing.

Within yourself, usually along with other people, by the way, not just typically by yourself, sequestered away somewhere. But, it, it wasn't until, um, maybe, well, the last decade at the most, that I really came to Find more effective ways of embodying that truth that inner work is a crucial dimension [00:35:00] that you can't actually separate the inner work from the outer work, ultimately.

By inner 

Andrea Hiott: work, do you mean thinking through your own patterns? Yeah, 

Rupert Read: thinking through your own patterns, meditating meditating on on yourself, on what's important. Working to process and handle things that you find difficult, dealing with with traumas, et cetera, unless we do these kinds of things.

We can't actually be fully effective in the world and it's an ongoing process. It's not like you just, you sort of get yourself sorted with a therapist and then you can just go to it. It's an ongoing practice. And then they find out Yeah, and that's that therapeutic and 

Andrea Hiott: liberatory thing. I'm sorry to stop you, but this does connect to what I was trying to get at and also that it's not easy, right?

So you're so right what you just pointed out that it is, love is an action, but as a kid or when you're a teenager you you don't quite know how to you feel overwhelmed. Yeah. Yeah, you're 

Rupert Read: good. Yeah 

Andrea Hiott: emotions, but also just by by that you want to participate in the [00:36:00] world or you want to Sometimes it was just that I want to show this.

I don't know how to to do something with the love, like that's going to be worthy of it, so to speak. Right. So that's interesting too, how you learn how to even notice it. That also gets to the vision sign and the other things we've talked about. Of course, a lot of stuff you've written about, but how you come to notice those patterns, and I guess it is community based.

And again, this does nest up to all these other challenges we're facing, but. I don't know. What does that bring up for you? 

Rupert Read: Yeah, well, very good. I agree. I would say a couple of things. Firstly, to try to illustrate a bit more what I mean by talking about the way that this, um, handling of these of these difficult emotions is crucial, the way the inner work is unavoidable.

One of our key campaigns in the Climate Majority Project is called the Climate Courage Campaign. And what that involves is the idea That what we, what we must do in relation to telling the truth, the difficult truth as it inevitably is around the climate and nature crisis and so forth, is help provide people with resources [00:37:00] to handle that difficult truth.

If we, you can't just kind of dump the truth on somebody and walk away, right? You have to help them. With that the inner work has to be done, and it is typically shared in a work. So, for example, what the Climate Courage campaign is saying is when kids get taught about the climate crisis in schools, they need to be resourced, um, psychologically to deal with the content of that teaching.

And that speaks to the way in which in the Climate Majority Project, we see the work of transformative change. as really very holistic. It's about the importance and the centrality of truth. It's about handling that difficult, often difficult truth together. Also, the wonderful truth needs to be handled too.

It's about effective pathways to action together, which are to some extent tailored to individual people, but also bring it together. And it's about collective awareness of all of these things and collective awareness that this kind of movement, this kind of, [00:38:00] as I describe it as a kind of natural movement together, a kind of wave even of action, once we start to actually face up to the difficult reality, once we start to feel the emotions that inevitably occur, then those, those emotions move us, you know, that's built into the idea of emotion, actually, if one understands it adequately, which is another reason why thinking of emotions just as feelings is.

Those emotions move us towards other people towards action towards what is needful. And what we say in the climate majority project is you've got to have all these four things together. The truth, the handling of the truth, the pathways to action on that basis and the collective awareness of all of this and of all of this as being an inevitable process.

And the only questions being whether that process will be wise enough and wide enough and deep enough and and smart enough. And, and Swift enough. Um, and so that's one thing I would say. The other is kind of connecting this back to what we've been talking about in relation to philosophy and truth is [00:39:00] that yes, as you imply, I think that one can find roots for this in the philosophy of Wienstein and also in the philosophy of Nietzsche and Fuko.

Some people take Nietzsche and Fuko to be philosophers who weren't really, um, at the end of the, at the end of the day, that. Um, that much on the side of truth, but we're rather sort of unmasking truth itself among other things as a kind of a strategy or something like that. I think that's a misunderstanding of both Nietzsche and Foucault, and I've written accordingly.

I think if you look at where Foucault got to in his final years. And of course, you know, he died tragically young, really. He was the same age as I am now when he, when he died. What Foucault was trying to do, Michel Foucault in those final years was to, was to actually take seriously the importance of truth in a way that other intellectuals such as Bachelet, Pavel and many others have, have made made prominent.

Um, and the way in which we have to do, um, [00:40:00] Well, in a work, basically, if we are to, and that's what the history of sexuality is about if we are to, um, get anywhere with that truth. In the case of going right back to Nietzsche I argue that, um, Nietzsche did not, as people have sometimes said he did, think of of himself as a sort of, um, unmasker of, of truth or the will to truth, et cetera, from, um, the outside.

He saw himself actually as an exponent of it from the inside. And I think that what Nietzsche and Foucault and Wittgenstein all have in common is an absolute passion for truth, without which I think it's impossible really to be a proper philosopher. at all. So when we talk about, um, philosophy as the love of wisdom, I think we're part of that is inevitably the love of truth.

And this is, this is an absolutely vital characteristic for our time, right? Truth and truthfulness are under very real threat in our [00:41:00] world from, um, dangerous politicians from, um, from people who are hungry to, to make money in various ways, um, through conspiracy nonsense, through fomenting antagonism on so called social media.

We need to counterpose that by doubling down. On truthfulness and authenticity and in their different ways, I think it's a capacity to do that, which is given to us by the best philosophers very much, including Wittgenstein by people like Joanna Macy, and that's what I'm seeking to realize in my work, and that's and that's integral to the to the practice of the climate majority project.

One way of seeing it is that we are trying to bring what was palpably present in in movements like Extinction Rebellion or Fridays for Future, the school climate strikes, the absolute emphasis there on truthfulness and being willing to manifest the difficult emotions that arise in relation to it.

We're seeking to bring that in the Climate Majority Project to a much wider audience. [00:42:00] 

Andrea Hiott: What is it about truth that's so hard? We haven't talked much about language and it is, of course, a part of Wittgenstein and your work, but a lot of this truth gets caught up in language or logic or those kind of things, but what I hear you talking about is the kind of truth where you're Present, you're embodied, you're just trying to see things the way they are, not even just see, but sense the world as it is, and that's the hard thing. The language games are almost easier because you're playing them, but this kind of truth that I think you mean is, it's different also next to that, all these people that you named aren't exactly people that we think of as having what's a joyful life or something like this. That could be a completely wrong characterization too, but I love all of them too, but they seem to have suffered a lot, right? 

Rupert Read: Right. So, um. One thing I would say is that, yes, this is not easy. Why? Well, because truth is, and truthfulness, these are constant hard taskmasters, [00:43:00] right?

And being honest is a lifelong project, including being honest with oneself. Being honest in relation to the civilizational crisis, which is now unavoidable for anyone who is a citizen. serious, I would say human being, certainly a serious intellectual, is really, really hard. Like, how do we, how do we, what's the project exactly of being honest with our children about this, for example?

That is incredibly hard, because what you don't want to do is It's for, like I said earlier, you don't want to throw anyone, especially a child, into a kind of vulnerability where they're not protected and supported in relation to dealing with something which is, which is difficult. So there's a kind of, there's a genuinely Genuinely challenging, um, path that one has to walk there.

But my claim, our claim, is that it is a path that one nevertheless has to find a way to walk. My experience [00:44:00] with students, for instance, at university, is that they have been grateful to me whenever I've taken difficult steps in the direction of being more truthful than I was previously. Being the first time I gave a talk, which was at my own university, which was, um, fully up front about the extent of the crisis that we're in.

 Is this when 

Andrea Hiott: you were writing the civilization is over or the civilization is 

Rupert Read: finished? Yeah. It was in that exact period. Exactly.

Yeah. All right, yeah, maybe I'll take a step back and tell you that story properly. So it starts really in 2015 with me, um, walking down the street in this, the city where I then lived. Norwich, and here in Norfolk in England and looking at the, the state of the gardens, so gardens which had obviously had Wee Killer applied to them, gardens that had been paved over, gardens with an abandoned fridge or whatever in them.

And these words popped into my head, this civilization is finished. I was, I was pretty [00:45:00] shocked by this, what felt like a kind of awful revelation. It kind of stopped me, literally stopped me in my tracks for a while. I pondered on it, and then did what any self respecting intellectual philosopher would do, I started writing about it.

I wrote a bit, shared it with one or two trusted friends and colleagues, and said, Look, I'm writing this, um, it's rather different from anything I've written before I'm worried about it because I think A, it might demoralize people and B I might get attacked for saying it, what do you think?

And every single one of them got back to me and said, this looks to me like probably the most important thing you've ever written, um, keep going Is 

Andrea Hiott: this after the Wittgenstein? 

Rupert Read: So this is, we're now in, we're now in 2016, so this is the, the period where, um, the, the work that's, that goes towards Wittgenstein's liberatory philosophy is underway, but, um, but it's, it's sometime before that book, um, takes its final form.

That makes 

Andrea Hiott: a lot of sense to me. You said something that people wanted to [00:46:00] have had articulated. Was that the feeling that you got? Exactly. 

Rupert Read: Exactly. And so that's what I found. The first thing I did with it is I published it anonymously, pseudonymously, which I'd never done before to sort of gauge reaction and reaction was, was positive and resonant.

Um, then I started very kind of tentatively in a rather scared state giving talks with titles like this civilization is finished. And the resonance was really strong. Then and this is where I got to a few minutes ago. Then in 2017, for the first time I gave a talk, um, along these lines. to my students, i.

e. to a load of students at the University of East Anglia. And that felt kind of especially difficult because these were, um, 18 year olds, right? So, you know, on that, on that difficult kind of cusp of if you, if you will, full, um, adulthood. Um, and I really didn't know how it was going to go down and felt quite kind of doubtful about it.

But the responses I got were students coming up to me afterwards and saying things like, This feels like the first time that any adult or [00:47:00] anyone in authority has ever really leveled with me. And it feels good. So, you know, this was the way that the response was not what I'd expected. It seemed like I wasn't demoralizing people and nor except with it with certain exceptions was I getting attacked.

I was mostly creating residents. People, there was a, people had a kind of, reaction of feeling relief, actually, we can finally kind of talk about it, we can find and our feelings can come out, etc. You know, this, this relates to everything we were talking about 10 to 15 minutes ago, that was then that carried on into 2018.

I then came across the people who were who were Getting busy with setting up Extinction Rebellion and was very impressed with what they were trying to do because they were basically saying the same thing as what I was saying, they're saying we're headed on a path which could even result in extinction, um, but they had a plan on what to do about it, namely to do what they called rebelling and so I got involved and helped launch Extinction Rebellion in the UK and then spread Extinction Rebellion.

Around the world. And in 2019, we had some actual success with our [00:48:00] truthfulness, with our emotional disclosure and resonance and disrupting business as usual, Extinction Rebellion and my friend and colleague, young colleague Greta Thunberg and and others of course, many, many others had some success in breaking through the wall of, of, um, denial really around, And that was that was a crucial moment.

That moment hasn't been followed up on in the way that it should have been, but that's what I'm still trying to do is do that. Do that following up. Now one thing I want to just get to which I haven't got to yet, Andrea, which you asked me, is, yeah, but does this make for a difficult life? Is one, um, unhappy as a result?

If one spends quite a lot of one's time, for example. Looking at the hard climate reality and the reality of the polycrisis at large, the terrible artificial intelligence situation, et cetera, et cetera. Does this make one miserable? Because that's what a lot of people assume is going to happen to one if one goes down that path.

And my answer is, is no, it's, it's [00:49:00] certainly true to say that my life even now is by no means easy and I continue to undergo various kinds of sufferings, including those that come from, um, looking with an open eye at the crisis. But, although I've gone through a lot of suffering, as have some of the other people we've named, Wittgenstein being a famous example, it's interesting that Wittgenstein his last words were, tell them I've had a wonderful life.

To his disciples who were around his bed and luckily I'm not at that point in my life yet, but I feel somewhat similarly, I mean, the last. I had a wonderful time being an academic, but the last several years of my life with Extinction Rebellion and you and sort of applying my academic work towards movement building and becoming an organic intellectual and becoming a bit of a spiritual teacher and now leading the climate majority project.

I am having the time of my life. I've found my life's purpose. There's nothing better that can happen to one than finding one's life's purpose and what I actually believe. is that the epochal crisis we're [00:50:00] moving into provides an enormous opportunity for all sorts of people to find true meaning again and true community in their lives, the very things that so many of us are lacking and one dimension of that is that by anyone who's listened this far into this podcast will hopefully realize that Actually, there is no incompatibility between facing difficult truths, feeling difficult emotions, suffering in various ways, and having absolutely the time of one's life.

And that's one of my, one of the central messages, if you will, of my work over the last decade. And the practice that I'm trying to embody is that that's, basically, that's exactly what we need to do. We need to go into the difficult places. And what we start to find there, precisely there, Is our salvation, or at least a very, very strong, compelling, and often, as one experiences it, wonderful way forward.

Andrea Hiott: I'm so glad you said that. I often have this thing I say, which is hold the paradox, or, or be the [00:51:00] paradox, or open the space for the paradox. And I do feel like that's what you're doing, but before we get to that exactly, there's a few kind of things there.

First that, that moment when you had the idea of Civilization is finished. Did you think about just turning away from it and not doing it? Was it a because it sounds like not to be too spiritual. I mean, if this is about holding all dichotomies, but it sounds like that was a kind of a moment of Something opened and are you going to follow it and because when I hear you now saying you've never been happier Even though this is hard you found this way to ride the wave or hold the paradox but I just wonder about that moment. Did you almost say no to it or was it? 

Rupert Read: No, you've exactly understood. I was very I was tempted right and part of the the the temptation to not Listen to it or do anything about it was these quite, you know, rational seeming, um, fears and it's not as if they're substanceless.

But well in particular what I didn't want right was [00:52:00] to demoralize um allies, young people people that I respect and I was also afraid of I was afraid of being attacked.

I have been attacked worse than I ever have been before over this last decade. But to be honest, that becomes increasingly water off one's off one's back when, for example, when I, something quite, quite good that I've managed to help engineer, um, in terms of my The time I spend on social media in recent years is that when I get kind of very nasty negative comments on social media now, most of the time, it literally doesn't bother me at all.

I, it just does not affect me at all. I simply ignore or move instantly to block that person. There, there is no negative impact is that 

Andrea Hiott: because you know where you are and what, why you're doing it and you're, are you clear about those things? Is that part of 

Rupert Read: I'm, I'm, I'm at some very fundamental level confident that I'm doing what I need to do.

I found my purpose that's, that's that I'm with many [00:53:00] others, roughly speaking on the side of the angels. But it's also to do with, you know, having worked through some, some issues around not just kind of, Lack of confidence, but, um, uncertainty about, um, whether I was really kind of entitled to, to, to make these kinds of, um, ambitious and and difficult and risky claims.

By the way, one important dimension for those who haven't, um, encountered my, This civilization has finished up before one important dimension that I do need to bring out briefly is that I do emphasize the word this here. So it's not it's this is not saying, for example, it is certain that everything is going to collapse.

What it's saying is It's certain that this civilization is going to come to an end, either through collapse or through transformation. The path we're on, it's looking more and more like collapse is the most likely route, tragically, for that transformation to occur. But I, I hold open the window of possibility that we could transform [00:54:00] in a way that does not, um, involve, Um, collapse.

One other thing, um, I, I'm totally with you, Andrea, on the importance of paradox, and this is absolutely fundamental to, to my work, too. It's fundamental to a lot of what I've done in philosophy. It's fundamental to my spiritual teaching. It's fundamental to the way that It's, I live, we have to be able and willing to hold all sorts of paradoxes especially in the time that we are living in.

Otherwise it's just important, it's just impossible to to keep going forward. So yeah, I love that theme in, in what you were saying a minute ago. 

Andrea Hiott: Earlier you said when we were talking about love, that's not just a feeling, it's an action. So relative to what we were just talking about, that's interesting I want to hear a little bit more about because you had a kind of feeling you're walking down the street and you got this idea and it's wanting you to follow it. And then you have to, of course, act. It becomes an action. Practice, just to link back to this idea of practice and liberating, liberation 

Rupert Read: yeah. So I try [00:55:00] to, I try to do what you say, to take w when, if something feels like a strong, what we call in COism, a strong leading I try to to, to follow it and to not give into the, the kind of small minded voices that would encourage me, um, not to, and this, I think, has to do with, with wrestling with, and in a certain sense, overcoming, um, anxiety. Anxiety is, is often fundamentally about being more willing to listen to those small minded voices, and to not take those kinds of risk that one needs to take if one is going to really, as Nietzsche famously remarks, become who one is, become who you are.

 I want 

Andrea Hiott: to connect that to love too. And also just to say for people listening, because I know a lot of people, this is really a hard thing still, you know, to not feel anxious or to not feeling 

Rupert Read: anxious, right. It's about not enabling the anxiety to control you. So, the way [00:56:00] I see it with anxiety, it's, if you feel it, it's crucial to feel it and not attempt to, to, to suppress it.

And to be, to be present with it and to know that there is something something deeper. Than it, and, and that it is itself a refracted form, as I was describing earlier of, of love. A lot of, a lot of anxiety is a, is a refracted, distorted form of of love for oneself, which is a very just form of love, provided it doesn't get in the way of love for for other people.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and I think that's a very important thing if people can sit with that, because just noticing that you're anxious, first of all, can be a big step. And then understanding there's probably some connection to love there, if you can sit with it. It's a lifetime process. It's a lifetime project. You have to do it 

Rupert Read: over and over again. Yeah. I try also to take leadings from my dreams. I'm very fortunate to have an incredibly rich dream life. It can be a bit exciting. 

Andrea Hiott: Have you always had that?

Rupert Read: Yes, although it's become, um, [00:57:00] stronger actually as I've got older and I try to really listen to to my dreams, um, and I've written things about things that I've learn from my dreams. Philosophical things, for example, that have come out of my dreams, I've published on on that. And that's another kind of ongoing practice, which I think is relevant to what you're asking.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely connected. It would probably be a whole other conversation. It makes me think of Jung and all of this stuff, but 

Rupert Read: yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: For now, let's, we haven't really unpacked Extinction Rebellion and gotten into where you are now because this is also a whole turning and paradox holding process.

 It's almost, I won't, violence isn't the right word, but when you had that statement come in, so this civilization is finished, it's almost shocking.

And extinction rebellion and just the words themselves, there's this quality about it that is kind of, I don't know how to get into this, but. Somehow waking us up or or jarring us so that we don't have to be radical or something I mean to get to where you are now but [00:58:00] that moment where you had that feeling and others were having it too is very interesting and then you sort of all met up With this extinction rebellion just for people who don't know what it is Really and they they maybe just have heard words about it This was early on 2018 and it really was trying to be something very how would you say? I don't know about loving but Um Yeah, no, I think very definitely 

Rupert Read: loving. Um, so I'll give one concrete example, perhaps we can put a, the, a clip in the, the show notes of of a time on, on telly where I, um, took on the criticism from a conservative government minister of Extinction Rebellion and he sort of leant across the table and wagged his finger at me and said, you want everyone to feel guilty about their, their flying or eating or whatever.

You're essentially trying to lay guilt on people. And I responded by saying, well, sorry, look, I don't think you've actually understood what Extinction Rebellion is all about. Yes, Extinction Rebellion is about [00:59:00] waking people up to the awful situation we're in. Yes, therefore it's sometimes about being.

disruptive, absolutely, definitely disruptive of existing assumptions and sometimes, you know, disruptive in a practical way. But Extinction Rebellion was not about seeking to be unpleasant to people or calling them out or anything like that. We actually had a, um, a practice, a a motto, if you will, of no naming, shaming and and blaming and far from saying, oh, you bad people ought to feel guilty.

For your carbon profligacy, we instead said, Look, we've got a real problem here. It's more than a problem. It's a predicament. It's society by the civilizational wide. We need to face into it together. We need to figure out together what to do about it. And I would say that was love. Um, the reason why I eventually in 2020 moved on from Extinction Rebellion, um, is a lot to do with [01:00:00] coming to realize as as a lot of other people in Extinction Rebellion came to realize that you can't carry on.

disrupting and seeking to Wake people up in this kind of way forever. It starts to get old after a while And it starts to produce kind of polarizing Responses which become a problem in their own, right? so that's part of partly why I and others started to talk about the need for what we called then a new moderate flank in in climate action, a really encompassing way of bringing, well, everyone eventually, but certainly many, many people building up to a majority, bringing those together to try to find a way forward that we could all gather behind, which ultimately is going to be essential if we actually are gonna, um, survive and find a way to transform this civilization into something better, something that can last.

So, yeah. We, a crucial kind of icon for this [01:01:00] change is that Extinction Rebellion, yes, it was loving and was based in love, but it was polarizing inevitably in a lot of its methods and approaches, um, because that's the way it tried to force a conversation and succeeded in forcing a conversation. And ultimately what we need to have is something which instead is depolarizing.

And that is the ambition of, of the form that the New Moderate Flank Project has taken, which is now embodied in this idea. of of assembling a climate majority and that's why the organization that I lead is called the Climate Majority Project. And absolutely essential to our DNA is depolarization across society at large, in social media, in the way we campaign and talk, and in the way that we discuss with others.

So, for example, I Quite often debate with, um, labor or conservative politicians or politicians, even from the hard right in this country, people like Nigel Farage. Um, but when I do so on the one hand, [01:02:00] I'm, um, I do not back away at all. Not one bit from the truth and I engage where appropriate in emotional disclosure and resonance.

Um, but on the other hand, what I don't do is the kind of, denunciation and kind of calling out and and anger, anger, anger, which sometimes has too often been the way that that climate activism or other kinds of activism or indeed politics at large has proceeded. 

Andrea Hiott: Do you find that is a matter of your embodied sort of presence in a way?

 Not to get carried away in your thoughts or your anger when you're in those situations, because 

Rupert Read: absolutely. Yeah. Is that the difference? Totally, it would not have been possible for me to, to have this kind of poise, um, and people often say, God, I don't know how you do it, Rupert, you know, how do you stay calm when you're talking with somebody like this famous unpleasant, um, posh um, ultra rich, hard right wing.

Conservative politician who we have here called Jacob Rees Mogg, for [01:03:00] example. How do you stay calm when you're talking with him? It wouldn't be possible without having done a lot of this inner work that we spoke about earlier. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it was even when you, when I was reading the Wittgenstein, the, this discipline of writing and thinking through, and of course, also the meditative side of, you know, both of those seem like they would be helpful.

But I wonder if you ever get the feeling from them even, or from the audiences that There's a kind of relief in the way that the students felt that somebody's doing that or that somebody's Holding the space like that or saying something truthful, but in a without the anger behind it or 

Rupert Read: yeah Well, that's interesting you ask that.

Um, I've got some evidence in relation to that question I think that I know that sometimes these folks that I've I've Interacted in this way with have been, um, very put out by it because it doesn't enable them to do what they want to do, which is to have a you're 

Andrea Hiott: breaking the scripts, right? [01:04:00] 

Rupert Read: But other times I, I've had feedback that actually they have really appreciated it.

So that's, for example, how things went, I think, with my conversation with Nigel Farage, who is not one of my favorite people, but we were able to have a genuine. And the feedback I got was that he actually appreciated that because, you know, quite often, if he speaks with someone who is superficially like me, he just gets shouted at and yeah, at the end of the day, we have to move on beyond shouting at each other.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And we also become the people that others see us as, unless we're really strong enough to kind of change this habit. So 

Rupert Read: yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: it's kind of interesting to how we can kind of shift each other's, Yeah. Ability to see ourselves differently if we see each other differently in the situations I do wonder if you always if you think that depolarization is always the answer or if Again, we're kind of holding the paradox of where sometimes polarization is Can be held as polarization and looked at and [01:05:00] not always bad I mean when I think of extinction rebellion or even the statement of your book there the civilization is finished I mean, there's something polarizing about that in a different way and I'm in a practice based way, or what do you think?

Rupert Read: Yes, well I totally believe in um, there being contexts where provocation is essential and and absolutely what we need is various kinds of of awakening, and sometimes the way to do that is to be Very direct with people is to, is to seek to get them to focus on things that they don't really want to focus on.

Wittgenstein once said something along the lines of, I don't want you to believe what I tell you to believe, what I want you to, what I want you to do is to do something that you very much don't want to do. And 

Andrea Hiott: That sort of reminds me of your parenting. Book two and this idea that I mean, do you think of it that in a way that there are certain things that we can become?

Aware enough of that. We can do something. I mean, you've written [01:06:00] about parenting the planet or sort of yeah You can probably unpack it better than me. But do you see all this? Do you see this is connected in this kind of maturity in a way? Yeah, 

Rupert Read: we we we need a project of maturity in the kind of way that Foucault and many others have spoken about the people coming after the, the Frankfurt school and so forth.

It's incredibly difficult. Um, there are many features of our, um, civilization that seem very immature. Um, we, we need at the same time, I mean, the, the basic idea in the parents for a future book, um, is it starts with the idea of, look, let's start from some kind of simple, basic, unarguable premises that many, many people would buy into.

This is always the strongest kind of philosophical argument. You can come up with something, no one would disagree with this, right? But look, if you agree with this, then it eventually proves that, which you would, we were surprised by. [01:07:00] So the argument of the book is. If you start from the assumption that you simply love your own children, which is what pretty much everybody says, and I believe them, um, they do, um, then it turns out the conclusion is that you are logically compelled to engage in, to engage with others in very serious action to save together our future, um, now and deeply into the, the future of this entire.

And that's a surprising conclusion from Simply I Love My Own Children, but I show in the book how this is a compelling argument and a compelling way to go. So, coming back to the question from a minute ago, um, sometimes I say things that are very, um, um, provocative. And that people find difficult, but I hope to do it in a way and certainly in a spirit that is not objectionable and I hope obviously to do it in a good cause and what I strongly believe is that [01:08:00] while there are occasions when even being Um, quite polarizing is the right thing to do.

I'm totally convinced that what we did in 2019 with Extinction Rebellion and what Greta was doing at that time and so forth was actually the right thing to do. And while I continue to believe that there are occasions absolutely where nonviolent direct action is justified. Um, what I also think is that an awful lot of people are unlikely ever to take part in nonviolent direct action.

And we absolutely have to find compelling ways. Of bringing together huge numbers of people if we are going to have any hope of having a future and of our kids having a future and that we need to do that in a way which doesn't also just create doesn't just create a, a, a violent or whatever counter reaction from those who feel threatened by what we're trying to do.

That's the, that's the project, that's the ambition. 

Andrea Hiott: That's the finding new paths or telling your stories or the Threwtopia is something else you've written about that we've talked about on this show already. But, um, I guess I wonder how you do that. How you, because, It [01:09:00] seems like it's either to go extreme or Even when we're talking about parenting this can very easily sort of go into oh Well, they think they know better and they think they're more mature and there's a kind of everyone Feels a little bit better than those who they are parenting or something How do you find the balance with these things of because we need each other as groups But communities can also get kind of carried away you know, in a kind of Elias Kennedy sort of way too.

So how do you, how have you found a way to keep a balance there or not to get carried away by those group thoughts? 

Rupert Read: Yeah, sure. Well, so you mentioned my concept of Threwtopia, and this is the idea that, that we're heading towards Dystopia fast and that the traditional opposite of Dystopia, which is Utopia, um, is unfortunately no longer available to us.

Maybe it never was, but it certainly isn't. now. Um, utopian ambitions now are merely wish fulfillment fantasies. But what if we try to [01:10:00] create a way through what is coming at us, which is going to be very hard, a way through of coming way through what is coming at us that is as good as possible. And that's a through topia.

It's a thoroughly kind of process oriented way of, of thinking about how we co create a future together. And it's comes, it's a lot influenced by Ursula Le Guin's. Work. And if I try to imagine a Threutopian future a key dimension of it is genuine intergenerational solidarity. So we need to be, we need to respect our elders more and, and find a way of taking seriously The wisdom and importance of old people in a way that is in indigenous cultures and peasant societies is, is guaranteed, but is often absent in our society.

We need to find a way of taking our children much, much more seriously. That's what the school climate strikers were urging them to urging us to do when they said to us save our world. Um, that is [01:11:00] what is, um, central to my ambition in the parents for a future. Book and we need to combine all of these things, um, together and find meaningful ways of making them real.

So one little example of a missed opportunity here, in relation to the COVID crisis, a key dimension of that crisis was young people made sacrifices so that many fewer older people died than would have died if the young people hadn't made those sacrifices. intergenerational solidarity would mean that the older people really repaid that sacrifice.

So what does that mean? Well, what it means, it's not hard to guess, is that Old people now need to take absolutely seriously their responsibility to the young to help them to have a future. And that means getting absolutely serious on the climate crisis and all the other crises that, that face us. You know, what should have happened after COVID is the old people of the world basically should have got together and said, Thank you for saving our lives.

We're now going to [01:12:00] For example, give loads of our money. Quite a lot of old people have a lot more money than young people give loads of our money to the cause of of having a future nature wise, climate wise, et cetera, that hasn't happened, but it can still happen. Something along those lines can still happen.

We badly need genuine intergenerational solidarity and those who are older, who have power or expertise or wisdom or money or other resources. They need, you need, if that's you listening right now, to apply that in a powerful way to what our young people need, what the future needs, because, well, if you don't, they're, they won't have a future, it's, it's as simple as that.

Andrea Hiott: Is that what you're doing with the Climate Majority, offering, helping people find ways to do that? 

Rupert Read: Yeah, absolutely. That's what the Climate Majority Project is all about. It's also what Threatopianism, kind of, is all about, really. 

Andrea Hiott: I guess it comes down, in a way, to thinking of self a bit differently, too, and Yeah, and that kind of brings us back to the, [01:13:00] yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And she has those three levels, which I'm not remembering now. System change, consciousness is the third one, right? And I don't remember, but 

Rupert Read: Well, I think the key dimension of what she offers here is the thought that if you're thinking of yourself as an individual that's held apart from from the natural world, you're not really thinking of yourself.

That yourself correctly viewed, um, is thoroughly interrelated, exhibits what Thich Nhat Hanh calls, um, interbeing. Um, and what I do in Parents for a Future is sort of bring out the way that that also extends fully into the future. If we think of ourselves as only alive here and now, we're, in that sense, making a kind of big mistake. So william Faulkner famously said, the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. So we might say something similar about the future, you don't cease to exist when you when you die, because among other things you live on in [01:14:00] your ideas and your influences and your genetic descendants and so forth, and what, what the future is in a certain sense, therefore, is your love manifested and rolling down through the generations.

Or, alternatively, it isn't, if you don't succeed in manifesting that love. If you don't succeed in contributing to any projects which are going to outlast you. And that's a way in which, um, we need to parent the future together and a way, it's another way of seeing this absolutely ineradical responsibility that we all have.

to do our best in this time of extreme crisis to ensure that there is a future. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I don't think we can get away from, even if we all at some point are putting forth into the future in the way you just said, just because that's what we're doing. So there's some relief, I think, and some real motivation in what you said about, or what a lot of [01:15:00] people are You and many others are we're trying to understand this what I call an ecological orientation There's something wonderful about understanding you're not stuck in your head in your body 

Rupert Read: And you 

Andrea Hiott: are there is a different self, but I think it does have to do with that responsibility Right, what you say at the market today to someone could change the course of their life You'll never know But we're doing it all the time to each other and if you're doing it from a space of love It's super powerful, right even if you can't see it 

Rupert Read: Yeah, I totally agree.

And that's one reason, by the way, that so another of my future book projects is a book I'm hoping to publish on counterfactual history, which I think is really important. Imagining how the past could have been different if certain quite small things, in some cases, had happened or not happened. Because when we get clear on the way that the past didn't have to be the way it was.

That can really help us to see how the future is to some significant extent, an open book. Doesn't mean that absolutely anything is possible. It's too late for various things. You know, we've left it too late for [01:16:00] various things that we should have done, vis a vis climate and nature and much more. But it does mean that there is still an enormous breadth of possibility for what could could be what could come to pass after us and, and through us.

And that sense of of agency and possibility is enormously exciting. And so what this is partly about is about people finding their, their power, which inevitably means finding their power together and, and realizing, as you say, Andrea, that, um, that much of our power will go beyond what we ever know.

Um, and therefore that responsibility is, is continual. 

Andrea Hiott: I just look at my own life and I know there's little things people have said who I never saw those people again that I think about or, or teachers, I always hear about there was some teacher, but in any case, I love that idea that you are going to write about counterfactuals because I think that fits very well with that practice that we started with Of learning how to notice patterns and change them, which is also part of this utopia Which is also [01:17:00] part of a lot of these other things we've been talking about.

So that's it feels like a beautiful way of expressing it and I can't wait So the last question we didn't get into it a whole lot here But a lot of people feel it and you write about it a lot of this and we talked about joanna macy these difficult emotions The crisis, which we started with, there's a lot, every, there's a crisis for everything now, there's a polycrisis, a metacrisis, everything crisis, and it's real.

Yeah, and it can feel so overwhelming and there's a lot of difficult stuff there and we didn't really get into it but I wonder Do you still think we can be motivated by love and the way that we've brought out here without? All those difficult emotions or have you come to a point where you really do sort of hold all that together.

 Because sometimes I feel like we're striving for a data through topia, but a utopia and Where we're just gonna not have those difficult emotions, but is it more about the practice of Self that we were talking about where you hold those the space of all that differently and so everything sort [01:18:00] of changes or how do you see that?

Rupert Read: Yeah, so interesting. I think it's possible that after an hour and a quarter We finally found something we disagree with each other on a bit because yeah, I guess my goodness Yeah, yeah. I guess my view is that there is no coherent way of imagining the future without imagining a strong role for those difficult emotions.

And yeah, sure, it's possible there are contexts where there can be love present and love enacted without, um, those difficult emotions being present. But I would say it's pretty unusual, and I would say that it is, perhaps tragically inevitable that in the future, um, a lot of the way that we express our love, which means express ourselves, um, is going to be through the the, the medium, at least initially, um, of shame and guilt, anger fear, um, depression despair.

You know, I've written even about these things. People sometimes say, [01:19:00] well, there's obviously nothing good about depression or nothing good about despair. I don't even agree with that. I think that these emotions, too, have their place and have their moment and that they, too, are ultimately forms of of, of love and that the attempt to avoid despair.

Is a profound mistake. Many people are going to be tempted to despair in the years to come, um, because of the immense difficulty of our situation which is going to get worse. And what I say to those people is, don't try to avoid it, to work with it. I mean, it's for a good reason that Joanna, in her early years, called the work that she did, despair work.

Um, we can work with our despair. We're, we're, we're scared of our despair. We're scared of these difficult emotions. And part of what I'm saying is we don't need to be as scared of them. We can befriend them more. We can, we can use them more. We can find a way through them. They are, they maintain, they embody a [01:20:00] tremendous energy and.

All of that energy, in my view, and I've argued this, you know, in detail, all of that energy comes back to love, that despair and depression are, are, are forms of love refracted through a glass very, very darkly. And when we stop being so afraid of depression and despair. They lose their, they start to lose their grip on us and they start to become available.

So part of my excitement for, for the years ahead, and I am excited, even though I'm immensely trepidatious about how difficult and often horrible it's going to be and how it's gonna, it's gonna kill some of us, including, you know, possibly, obviously, myself, that can't be ruled out. Part of my excitement is that, I think we can go all the way with these things, the disasters that are coming, I write about this in my book, Why Climate Breakdown Matters, the disasters that are coming, the, the epidemic of difficult emotions that are coming.

These are exactly the things. [01:21:00] That give us a chance, that give us some real hope, and none of them have the power in and of themselves to overwhelm us. They only have that power if we let them, and we can actually find a way that instead puts them to the best possible use, which is expressing the love that we are.

Andrea Hiott: Beautiful. Unfortunately, I think we don't quite disagree, but, because I, I think what I was trying to point out is that it can be fetishized or something, the the depression, the sadness. I mean, just coming 

Rupert Read: as a 

Andrea Hiott: kid, you know, I, or even like in, in later years, it opens you up, right? It cracks you open and you want more of that.

And there, you said it, like at the beginning of the conversation, you have to be careful that you don't go too much into the thinking and get too caught in it. So I guess I was trying to bring that in this balance of holding it. The nuance, I think that I read in in your work, that the way you try to kind of be in this space is, is being optimistic.

And seeing [01:22:00] things clearly, and being, feeling things that are hard. But, looking for people, finding ways to get out of that. It's an ongoing practice in action, right? Like what you brought up about the love. It's not a, it's not just the feeling. 

Rupert Read: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, sorry you're right.

We end up agreeing once again. 

Andrea Hiott: Well, it's just been so wonderful to talk to you and to read you and your work. And I wonder, is there anything before we go that you want to be sure said? 

Rupert Read: Maybe I'll just reiterate that, um, although, I've suffered a lot and I still suffer a lot and I am absolutely confident that there's going to be a lot more suffering in my future.

I am absolutely having the time of my life. And I wouldn't be missing it for the, for the world. And I think that I would sort of invite people in whatever way that is, because it's going to be different for different viewers or listeners. I would invite people into the space of something like the Climate Majority Project.

You know, check us out on our [01:23:00] website if that's something that you can in any way relate to. And we've tried to design it in such a way that it can be related to by pretty much anybody and everybody. Try to think about, you know, what your role is in addressing this deep civilizational crisis and, and what your superpower is.

And if you haven't already done that, if you haven't already, you know, really seriously done that. And I think what you're quite likely to find not necessarily immediately is that, um, you find that you find the exact, um, meaning and role that perhaps you hadn't quite found yet, and there just isn't anything better in one's life.

In that sense, you know, in as much as philosophers are trying to pursue what is the meaning of life I feel like to some extent I've, I've found it and I invite other people into that space. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, well, thank you. I think that feeling of liberation that liberatory philosophy, you know is kind of present I think you know in in that thread that we've been following [01:24:00] and where you've gotten now So thanks for the work you're doing and I guess I just want to ask for people who are in the States And they're looking and a lot of this is in the UK is it's is it still possible to be part of these groups and talk about this and 

Rupert Read: Right, so just on the climate majority project, we are mainly at the moment trying to prove concept in Britain, and until we feel that we've really done that, which may take a while, we are not going to put a lot of effort into trying to spread the climate majority project as and the idea is that we have to do this in a way that's not just such abroad, although we already have strong liaison with people in other countries, such as California, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland.

But what I would say is the ideas that we've been talking about, hopefully this obvious, this is obvious, the ideas we've been talking about, including these ideas of the climate majority, of the new moderate flank, of Thutopianism, of depolarization. These can be applied absolutely anywhere. And in a way, the invitation is to people.

Find an effective way to apply it with others in your [01:25:00] life, using your skills and your resources, et cetera. And so, yeah, that applies to Americans and anybody anywhere, I think. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, good. I just wanted, yeah, people can create this for themselves wherever they are in the world. I mean, anyway, not just A lot of that 

Rupert Read: is what is needed.

You know, this is, this is not going to be a project which is, if you will, led in a thoroughly top down fashion that is completely incompatible with what it is. You know, this is about a kind of huge distributed emergent phenomenon. 

Andrea Hiott: Have you ever read the book Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley? 

Rupert Read: I've heard of it.

Andrea Hiott: I haven't read it. It's I have this little rule that until, um, two or three people have recommended a book to me, I don't usually try to, to read it, so this one is now working its way up the, the list. Why do you mention it? 

It's something I read when I was a teenager or maybe in my early 20s.

Andrea Hiott: I loved it. It's a beautiful, as I remember it, but it, you remind me, you could be a character in that book. I don't know what that means because literally I haven't read it in a [01:26:00] decade, but it just came to mind. But anyway, it's been wonderful to talk to you and thank you so much. And we'll put all the stuff in the show notes for everyone to look at and check out.

And of course all your books. It's been a pleasure. 

Rupert Read: Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Thanks. All right. Thank you.