March 29, 2025 • 19 mins
Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics by Giorgio Agamben - https://amzn.to/4jc3Pyf
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, I am Cody Allingham, and this is the transformation of
Value, a place for thinkers and builders like you where we ask
questions about freedom, Bitcoinand creativity.
Today I really want to reflect on what has happened over the
last month or so while I've beentravelling through New Zealand.
As I reflect on, I guess the country that I left behind when
(00:24):
I moved overseas and kind of what I went through during those
years when I was back in New Zealand, in particular during
the COVID era. Now this I think is a quite a
sensitive topic for a lot of people.
But for me those years, 2020 through to, I want to say 2022,
but it really depends on on sortof where you were positioned as
(00:46):
to when the so-called pandemic started and when it ended.
But for me, there was a good couple of years there where my
whole world got up, turned upside down, and it was quite a
transformative period. I mean, certainly my journey
into Bitcoin, my exploration of questions of the state, the role
(01:07):
of government, the nature of hegemony, power, all of these
things. I have been exploring this
before this time, but I really came to the forefront during
these years. And so going back to New
Zealand, seeing what has really happened to Wellington, in
particular, the city that I spent most of the pandemic
(01:28):
years. And it's been quite, quite
illuminating, I would say. I mean, this sort of that the
fallout from the cuts to the government sector, which were
kind of bloated during the COVIDyears.
So it's not even like it's a reduction.
It's, it's more that the, there was bloat and now it's just gone
back to still I, I think an excessive number of public
(01:51):
servants. But for the city itself, it's
experienced a kind of depressionfrom that.
You know, the places that I liketo go, the, the cafes and shops
I used to frequent, a lot of them have, have, have shut down
or the the the sort of having a hard time and the city just felt
this kind of this weariness to it.
There was this grayness to everything.
(02:13):
And reflecting on that, I do want to come back to really what
we experienced during that time.Now, as I said, this is a
controversial thing for a lot ofpeople.
And I think really the controversy though stems from
the fact that it's such a deep seated emotional issue.
Many people maybe had never feltthe true force of the state up
(02:34):
until this time. Maybe they had a certain
naivety. Certainly I was quite naive as
to the power of the government to basically control our lives,
to lock us in our homes, to lockus into the country.
And it was quite, yeah, it was quite shocking to really realise
that no matter how liberal or progressive a government may say
(02:57):
or profess to be, ultimately thepower that they wield, the
monopoly over violence, the the state of exception, these, no
matter where you are, these, these are corruptible.
And there is a will to power that comes from this.
And so sort of reflecting on this academically, I was given a
(03:18):
copy of this book, Where Are We Now?
The Epidemic as Politics by Giorgio A Gambon, who as well
known for his work describing bio politics, the politics of
the human body, these kinds of things, and has been described
as one of the most vital and most discussed figures in
academia. And I hadn't come across him
(03:41):
prior to actually been given this book, but I realise now
that his work and his, I guess his train of thought has been
referenced in a lot of the material that I'm interested in,
in particular in the Bitcoin world and in, in the study of
sovereignty and the state. And it's interesting because as
I understand it, A Gambin was revered by the academic
(04:06):
institutions for a long time. You know, he was quite, you
know, he's been writing for manydecades and it was only as he
came, came out during the epidemic period to discuss what,
what he saw as really the, the politics of this whole thing
that he kind of caught kicked out of this, this academic club
and he became really quite ostracized.
(04:27):
And so his writing is quite controversial.
But I think with the five years that have passed since since
COVID, we can sort of understandwhat he was talking about and,
and perhaps maybe learn some lessons from this.
So there's just a couple of essays, very short essays from
this book that I wanted to sharewith you.
So this and this is the second updated edition and I believe
it's translated from his Italian.
(04:49):
Originally he was writing primarily from an Italian
perspective, but I think the lessons from this are very
relevant to, I guess, our own reflection and recollection of
what happened during COVID. So the first piece here is The
Face and the Mask. 8 October 2020.
All living beings are in a stateof openness.
(05:12):
They show themselves and communicate with one another.
But only human beings have a face.
Only for a human being is 1's own appearance and communication
to others a fundamental experience.
Only human beings make their faces the sight of their own
truth. What the face exposes and
reveals is not something that can be put into words, not
(05:35):
something that can be formulatedin a signifying proposition.
It is in their faces that humansunwillingly drop their guard.
It is in the face, and before any words are spoken, that they
express and reveal themselves. And what the face expresses is
not only an individual's emotional state, but first and
foremost their openness, their exposure, and their
(05:58):
communication to others. This is why the face is the site
of politics. If there are no animal politics,
it is only because animals who are always and already in
openness, do not take issue withtheir exposure.
They simply dwell in it without worrying about it.
This is why they are not interested in mirrors or in the
(06:20):
image as such. Men, On the contrary, want to
recognize themselves and to be recognized.
They want to grasp their own image.
They seek their truth in it. In this way they transform their
openness into a world, into the field of incessant political
dialectics. If individuals only had to
(06:41):
communicate information, this thing or that thing, there would
never be proper politics, but only an exchange of messages.
But since they must first communicate their openness, in
other words, a pure communicability, the face is the
very condition of politics, the site on which everything that
individuals say and communicate is founded.
(07:03):
The face is in this sense, the true city of men, the
fundamental political element. It is by looking at their faces
that individuals recognize themselves and develop a passion
for one another. It is how they perceive affinity
and diversity, distance and proximity.
(07:23):
A country that decides to renounce its face to cover with
masks the faces of its citizens everywhere is then a country
that has purged itself of any political dimension.
Inhabiting this empty space, which is at every moment
subjected to a control which knows no limits.
Individuals now live in isolation from one another, they
(07:45):
have lost the immediate and sensible foundation of their
community, and they can only exchange messages directly
towards a name that no longer possesses a face, a faceless
name. Let us linger on what that means
for a moment. Do you remember the masks, the
(08:06):
mask mandates, the N 95, the controversy around the
effectiveness of the masks and what they all mean?
I think there was a certain logic, a ideology, a propaganda
that tried to expose the importance of looking after your
neighbor, you know, being a goodcitizen, doing the right thing
by wearing a mask. But when we look at this lens
(08:28):
that a Gambon shares with us, werealise that the metaphor, the
symbolism of the mask is so profound.
The masking of the voice, the masking of political dialogue,
the masking of dissent. I remember quite clearly riding
the bus, the the number 2 bus inWellington for Miramar and being
(08:52):
accosted, being abused by someone because I was not
wearing a mask. They looked at me with those
crazy eyes that you can, you canalways tell this, the, the mass
formation has worked upon this person when they have those
crazy eyes and they yelled at meand they abused me.
And I just sat there and absorbed it to, to sort of feel
(09:12):
for the first time what it really felt like to be alienated
and objectified in such a, in such a situation.
It was really quite illuminatingto me.
And I remember journaling about it quite extensively because
really in that situation, if that person was so worried about
the masking, they simply needed to mask for themselves.
If the masks were so effective, they could just wear their wear
(09:36):
their own mask and not worry about what others were doing.
And the, the, the irony of, you know, writing this public
transport of having your bare hands touching, you know, these,
these seats and these handles that every other person had
touched. You know, I don't know if the
mask would have done anything toprevent the spread of the
so-called virus in this situation.
But what it had done is it had created a clear identifier for
(09:59):
those who were willing to go along with the regime and those
who were wanting to ask questions about the regime.
Now, I think it's also interesting to reflect on how I
believe there was a certain datewhen the mask mandates in New
Zealand were lifted quite suddenly and how the way people
just stopped wearing them on that day.
And again, it wasn't as if the virus just stopped, you know,
(10:22):
spreading on that day. It was more that people needed
permission to stop wearing thesemasks.
And I think there's something quite, almost, I don't quite
know how to describe it, but there was a certain comfort in
having the mask. It maybe was sort of this
placebo effect that it gave people a sense that they were
(10:43):
able to do something about the virus, this existential threat,
apparent existential threat. And so I do feel as a, from the
semiotics of it, that is the study of the, the symbols of
the, the, the COVID era, we can really point to the masks as in
a sense a profound, beautiful attempt to create an image or a,
(11:05):
a symbol for that which people could hang their identity on.
I mean, they, they did a, such agood job that it made people's
identities reflect entirely these, these masks, these,
these, these pieces of cloth over people's faces, you know,
in, in a religious sense, it became an object of
identification. It became a, a way of outdoing
(11:31):
each other. You know, do, do you remember
the double masking? Do you remember the, again, the
whole arguments around in 90 Fives and the social distancing
and all of that stuff? So I, I think what Gambin's
writing here really is quite profound.
And when I go back to New Zealand and I don't see any
masks whatsoever. I don't know if you know people,
(11:51):
they, they were given permissionto stop wearing them and so they
did. And I just wonder what that
means when people are so responsive in this state of fear
to the directive of the state. I think that's a very dangerous
place to be. The second essay that I want to
read is actually the last one from this, from this collection
of essays. So this is on the time to come.
(12:13):
23rd November 2020. What is happening today on a
global scale is certainly the end of a world, But it is not as
it is for those who are trying to govern in accordance with
their own interests and end in the sense of being a transition
to a world that is better suitedto the needs of the human
(12:34):
consortium. The era of bourgeoisie
democracy, with its rights, its constitutions and its
parliaments, is fading. But beyond this surface level
legal transformation, which is certainly not irrelevant, what
is ending is primarily the worldthat began with the industrial
revolution and built up to the two or three world wars and to
(12:55):
the totalitarianisms, tyrannicalor democratic, that accompanied
them. If the powers that govern the
world believed that, they had toresort to measures and
apparatuses as extreme as bio security and the health terror
which they have established everywhere and without any
scruples, but which are now getting out of hand.
(13:17):
This is because, as all the evidence suggests, they feared
they had no other choice if theywanted to survive and if people
accepted, without any mitigation, the despotic
measures and the unprecedented constraints to which they have
been subjected. This was not just because they
dreaded the pandemic, but presumably because they also
knew, more or less unwittingly, that the world in which they had
(13:39):
lived up until now did not continue to exist.
It was too unjust and too inhuman.
Needless to say, governments arepreparing an even more inhumane
and unjust world. But in any case, and on both
sides, it was in a way foretold that the previous world, as we
are now starting to call it, could not continue to exist.
(14:02):
There is surely in this, as in any foreboding religious
element, health has replaced salvation.
Biological life has taken the place of eternal life, and the
Church, which has been accustomed for quite some time
to compromising with mundane X Genesis, has more or less
(14:22):
explicitly consented to this substitution.
We do not regret the ending of this world.
We have no nostalgia for the notion of the human and of the
divine that the implacable wavesof time are erasing from the
shores of history. But we reject with equal
conviction the mute and facelessbeer life and the health
(14:43):
religion that governments are proposing.
We are not awaiting either a newGod or a new human being.
We rather seek, here and now, among the ruins around us, a
humbler, simpler form of life. We know that such a life is not
a mirage because we have memories and experiences of it,
(15:03):
even if inside and outside of ourselves, opposing forces are
always pushing it back into oblivion.
Now I realize this is quite a dense writing, again translated
from the original, sorry, Italian, not Latin.
But certainly something about this I think speaks to what
(15:23):
we're going through at the moment.
Things feel very confusing. It feels as if the before world
and the after World of COVID, the demarcation of these two
periods is still somewhere deep in our minds, deep in our
hearts. I, I sort of reflect on how
these five years have gone past,yet we still seem to be stuck
(15:45):
with so much baggage still from the past, yet we're not able to
access it. We're not able to go back and
make it right. And so we just sort of muddle
through this. We, we continue on, but things
are changing and things are changing really rapidly.
And I think for me, certainly Bitcoin and my own personal
studies of the nature of the state, the nature of power have
(16:07):
really helped given me a vantagepoint from which to understand
what is happening. But still it is very confusing
in a sense. It's probably more confusing now
that I have at least a little bit of knowledge about what,
what is going on. That it just, it makes me
realize just how a little I do know.
And it's, it's, it's a hard place to be.
But I, I did want to, yeah, justshare these two, these two
(16:29):
writings and encourage anyone out there who's may be
interested in learning more to check out this this writing by A
Gambon. He does have a lot of other
books out there, a lot of other work that really speaks to this,
this the state of control of thehuman body of the political, the
changing political dynamic that we are seeing.
(16:50):
And I think it is a powerful, a powerful tool to be equipped
with the knowledge and the even the language to be able to
describe this. You know, when I first learnt
about what bio politics means, it was suddenly made sense.
You know, it's like, of course, the, the control of the human
body is a core piece of the political dynamic.
(17:10):
Yet it seemed to just get brushed away with the state of
exception that was imposed certainly upon New Zealand and I
imagine Italy as well from a gambin's position at that time.
And for me, you know, looking athow the New Zealand Bill of
Rights, for example, was completely ignored in the face
of vaccine mandates. And that is absolutely a case of
(17:33):
biopolitics and the the power ofthe state to create a state of
exception. So all I wanted to share, yeah,
with those two writings was I think there is there is more to
this. There is some literature that we
can ground our critique of the state and, and I think if anyone
wants to discuss this that you know, feel free to reach out and
(17:53):
send me an e-mail. Hello at the transformation of
value.com. I'm always happy to chat about
this in a Socratic way. That is where we ask questions,
we try and seek out truth. We're trying to seek out ways of
framing what is going going down.
I think at a very high level there is something in the air.
(18:13):
It's not the virus, it's it's change.
It is political change. And I think we will be
critiquing and exploring the fallout of those crazy years for
many decades to come. And I think the history books
will look back on that as a turning point in the nature of
politics. But as I said at the beginning,
for me that was a transformativeperiod.
(18:35):
And my own study of Bitcoin, my own study of the state.
And I do feel much more equippedto deal with a changing world,
knowing that there are people out there like a Gambon and
others who are writing about this in a very earnest,
intellectual way and in a way that we can all learn from.
So appreciate a little bit of a rant, a little bit a little bit
of a storytelling, but I hope you enjoyed this.
(18:58):
And yeah, as I said, reach out to me if you want to discuss
this, if you have any questions.Otherwise, we'll leave it there.
Thank you very much.
Hello, I am Cody Allingham, and this is the transformation of
Value, a place for thinkers and builders like you where we ask
questions about freedom, Bitcoinand creativity.
Today I really want to reflect on what has happened over the
last month or so while I've beentravelling through New Zealand.
As I reflect on, I guess the country that I left behind when
(00:24):
I moved overseas and kind of what I went through during those
years when I was back in New Zealand, in particular during
the COVID era. Now this I think is a quite a
sensitive topic for a lot of people.
But for me those years, 2020 through to, I want to say 2022,
but it really depends on on sortof where you were positioned as
(00:46):
to when the so-called pandemic started and when it ended.
But for me, there was a good couple of years there where my
whole world got up, turned upside down, and it was quite a
transformative period. I mean, certainly my journey
into Bitcoin, my exploration of questions of the state, the role
(01:07):
of government, the nature of hegemony, power, all of these
things. I have been exploring this
before this time, but I really came to the forefront during
these years. And so going back to New
Zealand, seeing what has really happened to Wellington, in
particular, the city that I spent most of the pandemic
(01:28):
years. And it's been quite, quite
illuminating, I would say. I mean, this sort of that the
fallout from the cuts to the government sector, which were
kind of bloated during the COVIDyears.
So it's not even like it's a reduction.
It's, it's more that the, there was bloat and now it's just gone
back to still I, I think an excessive number of public
(01:51):
servants. But for the city itself, it's
experienced a kind of depressionfrom that.
You know, the places that I liketo go, the, the cafes and shops
I used to frequent, a lot of them have, have, have shut down
or the the the sort of having a hard time and the city just felt
this kind of this weariness to it.
There was this grayness to everything.
(02:13):
And reflecting on that, I do want to come back to really what
we experienced during that time.Now, as I said, this is a
controversial thing for a lot ofpeople.
And I think really the controversy though stems from
the fact that it's such a deep seated emotional issue.
Many people maybe had never feltthe true force of the state up
(02:34):
until this time. Maybe they had a certain
naivety. Certainly I was quite naive as
to the power of the government to basically control our lives,
to lock us in our homes, to lockus into the country.
And it was quite, yeah, it was quite shocking to really realise
that no matter how liberal or progressive a government may say
(02:57):
or profess to be, ultimately thepower that they wield, the
monopoly over violence, the the state of exception, these, no
matter where you are, these, these are corruptible.
And there is a will to power that comes from this.
And so sort of reflecting on this academically, I was given a
(03:18):
copy of this book, Where Are We Now?
The Epidemic as Politics by Giorgio A Gambon, who as well
known for his work describing bio politics, the politics of
the human body, these kinds of things, and has been described
as one of the most vital and most discussed figures in
academia. And I hadn't come across him
(03:41):
prior to actually been given this book, but I realise now
that his work and his, I guess his train of thought has been
referenced in a lot of the material that I'm interested in,
in particular in the Bitcoin world and in, in the study of
sovereignty and the state. And it's interesting because as
I understand it, A Gambin was revered by the academic
(04:06):
institutions for a long time. You know, he was quite, you
know, he's been writing for manydecades and it was only as he
came, came out during the epidemic period to discuss what,
what he saw as really the, the politics of this whole thing
that he kind of caught kicked out of this, this academic club
and he became really quite ostracized.
(04:27):
And so his writing is quite controversial.
But I think with the five years that have passed since since
COVID, we can sort of understandwhat he was talking about and,
and perhaps maybe learn some lessons from this.
So there's just a couple of essays, very short essays from
this book that I wanted to sharewith you.
So this and this is the second updated edition and I believe
it's translated from his Italian.
(04:49):
Originally he was writing primarily from an Italian
perspective, but I think the lessons from this are very
relevant to, I guess, our own reflection and recollection of
what happened during COVID. So the first piece here is The
Face and the Mask. 8 October 2020.
All living beings are in a stateof openness.
(05:12):
They show themselves and communicate with one another.
But only human beings have a face.
Only for a human being is 1's own appearance and communication
to others a fundamental experience.
Only human beings make their faces the sight of their own
truth. What the face exposes and
reveals is not something that can be put into words, not
(05:35):
something that can be formulatedin a signifying proposition.
It is in their faces that humansunwillingly drop their guard.
It is in the face, and before any words are spoken, that they
express and reveal themselves. And what the face expresses is
not only an individual's emotional state, but first and
foremost their openness, their exposure, and their
(05:58):
communication to others. This is why the face is the site
of politics. If there are no animal politics,
it is only because animals who are always and already in
openness, do not take issue withtheir exposure.
They simply dwell in it without worrying about it.
This is why they are not interested in mirrors or in the
(06:20):
image as such. Men, On the contrary, want to
recognize themselves and to be recognized.
They want to grasp their own image.
They seek their truth in it. In this way they transform their
openness into a world, into the field of incessant political
dialectics. If individuals only had to
(06:41):
communicate information, this thing or that thing, there would
never be proper politics, but only an exchange of messages.
But since they must first communicate their openness, in
other words, a pure communicability, the face is the
very condition of politics, the site on which everything that
individuals say and communicate is founded.
(07:03):
The face is in this sense, the true city of men, the
fundamental political element. It is by looking at their faces
that individuals recognize themselves and develop a passion
for one another. It is how they perceive affinity
and diversity, distance and proximity.
(07:23):
A country that decides to renounce its face to cover with
masks the faces of its citizens everywhere is then a country
that has purged itself of any political dimension.
Inhabiting this empty space, which is at every moment
subjected to a control which knows no limits.
Individuals now live in isolation from one another, they
(07:45):
have lost the immediate and sensible foundation of their
community, and they can only exchange messages directly
towards a name that no longer possesses a face, a faceless
name. Let us linger on what that means
for a moment. Do you remember the masks, the
(08:06):
mask mandates, the N 95, the controversy around the
effectiveness of the masks and what they all mean?
I think there was a certain logic, a ideology, a propaganda
that tried to expose the importance of looking after your
neighbor, you know, being a goodcitizen, doing the right thing
by wearing a mask. But when we look at this lens
(08:28):
that a Gambon shares with us, werealise that the metaphor, the
symbolism of the mask is so profound.
The masking of the voice, the masking of political dialogue,
the masking of dissent. I remember quite clearly riding
the bus, the the number 2 bus inWellington for Miramar and being
(08:52):
accosted, being abused by someone because I was not
wearing a mask. They looked at me with those
crazy eyes that you can, you canalways tell this, the, the mass
formation has worked upon this person when they have those
crazy eyes and they yelled at meand they abused me.
And I just sat there and absorbed it to, to sort of feel
(09:12):
for the first time what it really felt like to be alienated
and objectified in such a, in such a situation.
It was really quite illuminatingto me.
And I remember journaling about it quite extensively because
really in that situation, if that person was so worried about
the masking, they simply needed to mask for themselves.
If the masks were so effective, they could just wear their wear
(09:36):
their own mask and not worry about what others were doing.
And the, the, the irony of, you know, writing this public
transport of having your bare hands touching, you know, these,
these seats and these handles that every other person had
touched. You know, I don't know if the
mask would have done anything toprevent the spread of the
so-called virus in this situation.
But what it had done is it had created a clear identifier for
(09:59):
those who were willing to go along with the regime and those
who were wanting to ask questions about the regime.
Now, I think it's also interesting to reflect on how I
believe there was a certain datewhen the mask mandates in New
Zealand were lifted quite suddenly and how the way people
just stopped wearing them on that day.
And again, it wasn't as if the virus just stopped, you know,
(10:22):
spreading on that day. It was more that people needed
permission to stop wearing thesemasks.
And I think there's something quite, almost, I don't quite
know how to describe it, but there was a certain comfort in
having the mask. It maybe was sort of this
placebo effect that it gave people a sense that they were
(10:43):
able to do something about the virus, this existential threat,
apparent existential threat. And so I do feel as a, from the
semiotics of it, that is the study of the, the symbols of
the, the, the COVID era, we can really point to the masks as in
a sense a profound, beautiful attempt to create an image or a,
(11:05):
a symbol for that which people could hang their identity on.
I mean, they, they did a, such agood job that it made people's
identities reflect entirely these, these masks, these,
these, these pieces of cloth over people's faces, you know,
in, in a religious sense, it became an object of
identification. It became a, a way of outdoing
(11:31):
each other. You know, do, do you remember
the double masking? Do you remember the, again, the
whole arguments around in 90 Fives and the social distancing
and all of that stuff? So I, I think what Gambin's
writing here really is quite profound.
And when I go back to New Zealand and I don't see any
masks whatsoever. I don't know if you know people,
(11:51):
they, they were given permissionto stop wearing them and so they
did. And I just wonder what that
means when people are so responsive in this state of fear
to the directive of the state. I think that's a very dangerous
place to be. The second essay that I want to
read is actually the last one from this, from this collection
of essays. So this is on the time to come.
(12:13):
23rd November 2020. What is happening today on a
global scale is certainly the end of a world, But it is not as
it is for those who are trying to govern in accordance with
their own interests and end in the sense of being a transition
to a world that is better suitedto the needs of the human
(12:34):
consortium. The era of bourgeoisie
democracy, with its rights, its constitutions and its
parliaments, is fading. But beyond this surface level
legal transformation, which is certainly not irrelevant, what
is ending is primarily the worldthat began with the industrial
revolution and built up to the two or three world wars and to
(12:55):
the totalitarianisms, tyrannicalor democratic, that accompanied
them. If the powers that govern the
world believed that, they had toresort to measures and
apparatuses as extreme as bio security and the health terror
which they have established everywhere and without any
scruples, but which are now getting out of hand.
(13:17):
This is because, as all the evidence suggests, they feared
they had no other choice if theywanted to survive and if people
accepted, without any mitigation, the despotic
measures and the unprecedented constraints to which they have
been subjected. This was not just because they
dreaded the pandemic, but presumably because they also
knew, more or less unwittingly, that the world in which they had
(13:39):
lived up until now did not continue to exist.
It was too unjust and too inhuman.
Needless to say, governments arepreparing an even more inhumane
and unjust world. But in any case, and on both
sides, it was in a way foretold that the previous world, as we
are now starting to call it, could not continue to exist.
(14:02):
There is surely in this, as in any foreboding religious
element, health has replaced salvation.
Biological life has taken the place of eternal life, and the
Church, which has been accustomed for quite some time
to compromising with mundane X Genesis, has more or less
(14:22):
explicitly consented to this substitution.
We do not regret the ending of this world.
We have no nostalgia for the notion of the human and of the
divine that the implacable wavesof time are erasing from the
shores of history. But we reject with equal
conviction the mute and facelessbeer life and the health
(14:43):
religion that governments are proposing.
We are not awaiting either a newGod or a new human being.
We rather seek, here and now, among the ruins around us, a
humbler, simpler form of life. We know that such a life is not
a mirage because we have memories and experiences of it,
(15:03):
even if inside and outside of ourselves, opposing forces are
always pushing it back into oblivion.
Now I realize this is quite a dense writing, again translated
from the original, sorry, Italian, not Latin.
But certainly something about this I think speaks to what
(15:23):
we're going through at the moment.
Things feel very confusing. It feels as if the before world
and the after World of COVID, the demarcation of these two
periods is still somewhere deep in our minds, deep in our
hearts. I, I sort of reflect on how
these five years have gone past,yet we still seem to be stuck
(15:45):
with so much baggage still from the past, yet we're not able to
access it. We're not able to go back and
make it right. And so we just sort of muddle
through this. We, we continue on, but things
are changing and things are changing really rapidly.
And I think for me, certainly Bitcoin and my own personal
studies of the nature of the state, the nature of power have
(16:07):
really helped given me a vantagepoint from which to understand
what is happening. But still it is very confusing
in a sense. It's probably more confusing now
that I have at least a little bit of knowledge about what,
what is going on. That it just, it makes me
realize just how a little I do know.
And it's, it's, it's a hard place to be.
But I, I did want to, yeah, justshare these two, these two
(16:29):
writings and encourage anyone out there who's may be
interested in learning more to check out this this writing by A
Gambon. He does have a lot of other
books out there, a lot of other work that really speaks to this,
this the state of control of thehuman body of the political, the
changing political dynamic that we are seeing.
(16:50):
And I think it is a powerful, a powerful tool to be equipped
with the knowledge and the even the language to be able to
describe this. You know, when I first learnt
about what bio politics means, it was suddenly made sense.
You know, it's like, of course, the, the control of the human
body is a core piece of the political dynamic.
(17:10):
Yet it seemed to just get brushed away with the state of
exception that was imposed certainly upon New Zealand and I
imagine Italy as well from a gambin's position at that time.
And for me, you know, looking athow the New Zealand Bill of
Rights, for example, was completely ignored in the face
of vaccine mandates. And that is absolutely a case of
(17:33):
biopolitics and the the power ofthe state to create a state of
exception. So all I wanted to share, yeah,
with those two writings was I think there is there is more to
this. There is some literature that we
can ground our critique of the state and, and I think if anyone
wants to discuss this that you know, feel free to reach out and
(17:53):
send me an e-mail. Hello at the transformation of
value.com. I'm always happy to chat about
this in a Socratic way. That is where we ask questions,
we try and seek out truth. We're trying to seek out ways of
framing what is going going down.
I think at a very high level there is something in the air.
(18:13):
It's not the virus, it's it's change.
It is political change. And I think we will be
critiquing and exploring the fallout of those crazy years for
many decades to come. And I think the history books
will look back on that as a turning point in the nature of
politics. But as I said at the beginning,
for me that was a transformativeperiod.
(18:35):
And my own study of Bitcoin, my own study of the state.
And I do feel much more equippedto deal with a changing world,
knowing that there are people out there like a Gambon and
others who are writing about this in a very earnest,
intellectual way and in a way that we can all learn from.
So appreciate a little bit of a rant, a little bit a little bit
of a storytelling, but I hope you enjoyed this.
(18:58):
And yeah, as I said, reach out to me if you want to discuss
this, if you have any questions.Otherwise, we'll leave it there.
Thank you very much.
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