The Politics of Entropy

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I think there needs to be a political theory of entropy. I don't think we're at a point where the American people are just like total nihilists. We should all be able to say, hey, norms have actually been really terrible. Norms can be right. They can be really regressive. All sorts of terrible things have been legal and are legal slavery was legal. You know, so we don't want to fetishize rules for their own sake,. But I do think we want to be attuned to the fact that, yeah, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to build things and entropy will get us.

“Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone” — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor’s new book. We all know how democracy falls short, in practice, of its lofty ideals; but we can also appreciate how democratic values are crucial in the fight for a more just society. In this conversation, we dig into the nature of democracy, from its origins to the present day. We talk about who gets to participate, how economic inequality affects political inequality, and how democratic ideals manifest themselves in any number of real-world situations.

Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal.

Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, author, and activist. Her documentary films include Zizek!, The Examined Life, and most recently What Is Democracy? Her books include The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital age and the new Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. She has taught sociology at the university level, and written for publications from n+1 to The London Review of Books. She was active in the Occupy movement, and is a co-founder of the Debt Collective.