The Response: Building the new in the shell of the old with Joey Ayoub

On this episode of The Response we’ve brought on Joey Ayoub, a Geneva-based writer, researcher, activist, and host of The Fire These Times podcast, which asks the questions: How do we build the new in the shell of the old? How do we tackle global warming and its associated crises? How do we build bonds across nation-states and groups? How do we make it easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world?

“What I find quite interesting is that it still seems to surprise people that we do come together when sh*t hits the fan, rather. And I think that’s probably a result of the term ‘elite panic,’ that there is a certain worldview that people of influence usually see the world in a certain way. Often they have some kind of private property or big properties and it’s very easy to think in the sense of ‘I just need to protect my own and everyone else that’s outside of the walls is a threat’. And you can then expand that. On a nation-state level, ‘build that wall’, so many of these examples — the idea really is keeping that external threat out to save or protect whatever is in. And I find that quite interesting because it goes against that basic human instinct of the fact of the matter is that when things go bad, in most cases that we know of that have been already studied, people do come together.”

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