Barrett Holmes Pitner: [00:00:00] When I think of race dynamics in the United States, I don't really think about it as race. I think it as a cultural issue, it's culture. And so when I was thinking of how to describe racial division in America, really what it is is colonizers and slavery had a agenda of destroying African culture. And keeping black people and that's ethnocide.

Jenny Stefanotti: That's Barrett Holmes Pittner. He's the author of The Crime Without a Name, Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America. He's also the founder and philosopher in chief of the Sustainable Culture Lab. And this is a Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti. In this episode, we're discussing racial justice in America through the lens of ethnocide, a word Barrett both coined and resurrected.

Ethnocide refers to the destruction of a people's culture [00:01:00] while keeping the people and helps us. make sense of America's history of systemic oppression. Last week was intense for most of us witnessing Trump's inauguration on a holiday dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. From Barrett's point of view, Trump's reelection is not cause for disbelief, but a glaring reminder of what America has been since its inception, a country founded by white men for the purposes of wealth accumulation, whose rhetoric of freedom and equality has always been tenuous alongside the prevalence of white supremacy and patriarchy in our politics.

What I love about Barrett's work. As it runs the gamut from the philosophical to the practical. In this conversation, we discuss existentialism as well as the concrete projects underway at the sustainable culture lab that can help us both heal from the past and create new rituals that support true reconstruction in America.

As always, you can find show notes and the transcript for this episode on our website, becomingdenizen. com as well as our newly launched sub stack, which I am excited about. On either channel, you can also sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your [00:02:00] inbox alongside information about virtual Denizen events, including community conversations with our podcast guests.

I'm really excited to host a discussion with Barrett next week. So if you'd like to join us, sign up for our newsletter or contact me directly from the website. Again, that's becomingdenizen. com. It's a really potent moment to be having this conversation with Barrett. I'm really proud of this one and I can't wait for the discourse.

It will spark. You know, I didn't think about it when we set to record this conversation this week. What a potent week it would be to have this conversation with Trump's inauguration on a holiday devoted to Martin Luther King Jr. And I'm curious, how are you feeling? This week, right now,

Barrett Holmes Pitner: to be honest with you, I'm not super sure how I feel there's not like a overarching feeling of dread or anything.

It's like from looking at the book and my work, I've kind of, I wouldn't say predicted, but like, it's [00:03:00] kind of general trump winning again, but something that I kind of like mentally had prepared for. Being like a possibility there wasn't an idea that America was just like so inherently good that this couldn't happen again And like I'm shocked and now I'm just hmm devastated because I'm sure some place that I didn't think it was.

This is more like yeah Problematic stuff's gonna happen and it's gonna be quite similar to problematic things that happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s and we just have to be more and more aware of that And so that's kind of how I feel and we'll just have to See what unfurls and hopefully we're smart enough to respond appropriately.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I think what's so potent about your work or one of many things that I want to surface in relevance to this moment is this sentiment of yours that might be like, why are y'all surprised? You said in one of your blog posts, there was a misguided belief that the inherent goodness of America and the American people would solve our Trump problem.[00:04:00]

We did not understand that Trump was an inevitable outcome of society rather than a flaw that could be easily and naturally fixed. And I think this is the big eyeopening insight or one of them, again, from your work, which is like, this is America. This has always been America, and this is actually just a more blatant manifestation of what has been there all along in a very natural outcome of the hundreds of years of history of this country.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, totally. It's very simple, and I think it's fascinating how complicated our society has made it. Like, I'm African American, and my family's been here since before I'm able to even document their presence. And we didn't come here. for economic opportunity. It's like, like, black people weren't here because this place was gonna do something good for us, or that the people that were making it were doing good actions.

My existence here is just, shows [00:05:00] this, the foundational, like, Negative stuff that this country is built upon and so it's just fascinating and that we will be surprised that our country will behave in a way in which it always has and there's people. That have been here for hundreds of years that just like our physical presence is proof of that core flaw, yet we act as though the flaw doesn't exist or it inevitably fixes itself or something and it's like, that's just.

What do you mean it just inevitably fixes itself, just something magically outside the world is going to take care of it? Some inherent good is just going to solve problems without us actually having to figure out how to do it? Like that's just a very bizarre way of thinking about things. And if you apply that just in your everyday life, you know, people will think that you're insane.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, you also speak a lot to bad faith and lies. The [00:06:00] founding rhetoric of the country vis a vis reality of the individuals who are writing it.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Totally. I think you could sum it up with just like how we understand the word we. When they're writing like we the people, that was not including all the people.

That was a clearly a divisive we that excluded african americans and indigenous people the women in that we also had like less representation but soda also did they know the white men that didn't own property like this is a we that if we look at it is not how we would even perceive we to mean and so if these just foundational basic words the meaning of it.

is up in the air, and you're encouraged to think that it means something besides what it really meant? That's just bad faith. That's them having a conversation with you where they want you to believe [00:07:00] something that's not true because it's beneficial to them and detrimental to you. And that's just how it is at the beginning, our documents are based around that, like it's not a coincidence that they don't mention slavery in the constitution, cause they don't want to advertise just how widespread and foundational and core to our society slavery was, they wanna Hide that.

So that's clearly bad faith. They're trying to conceal and obfuscate what their intentions are and what the reality of the place is. And if you're built on bad faith, it's really hard for people to have an accurate perspective. of the place in which you live. It's hard to trust what words do and don't mean, you know, there's so many problems when people engage in bad faith as just a foundation for structuring a society.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. That's something that the American people have just refused to confront to this [00:08:00] day.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Like I said, as an African American, I'm here as an example, just my physical presence of that bad faith. We're like, they're going to make a democracy. And exclude people based off of the color, and then still say that it was equitable.

Jenny Stefanotti: And sex and property.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: 100%! And it's like, how does that make any sense? That's not some flaw that you can just kinda brush aside and be like, ah, it's not that big of a deal. That's a very massive deal. And then when someone shows up, and they're articulating in America that clearly, Is not treating people of color fairly, is questioning people's status and right to be a citizen, the rights they can have over their body based off of their gender, all sorts of stuff.

That division that people are outraged about now is not dissimilar from the division that the country was built upon. And so, it's really fascinating when they are [00:09:00] shocked

Jenny Stefanotti: that

Barrett Holmes Pitner: like, The foundation has remained.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah, it's just presenting itself in a form that one can no longer deny or ignore.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: But I will say the, the key thing of the, we should anticipate for the Trump administration is they're going to make it very easy to start denying things like just the pardoning of the January 6th rioters.

They're going to have a lot of rhetoric and language denying that being an attack.

Jenny Stefanotti: There's another really important concept that you mentioned in some of your more recent writings on Reconstructionists relating to notions of freedom at the inception of the country. Freedom from versus freedom with.

And in fact the way that freedom from fuels and creates fascism. Can you say more about that?

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, this is a newer theory I've developed over the last year or so, but like when we talk about freedom, it's very abstract, and people talk about the [00:10:00] freedom that they have to do whatever they want, and often they talk about they're free from oppression, and I heard this being free from Authority or pressure, which now I I'm able to do whatever I want.

I found that to be really fascinating as this is a freedom that expression has nothing to do with the people you're interacting with. It's more expression of the people that you feel are no longer oppressing you, which if you look at America, that's really how we've always understood freedom to be like.

We're free from the British and now we're free to do whatever we want and free to pursue our own interest. And it's a very. Much an individualistic understanding of freedom, and it has nothing to do with how you live with other people. And it's like, we were talking earlier about family, and having family means that a lot of stuff that you consider to be free, in a freedom from sense, you can't do anymore.

Yes. But, [00:11:00] you're surrounded by people. That you love and that love you, and now you're free to do all sorts of things with those people, which often means not doing stuff that you were able to do before those people were around.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: You enjoy being free with those people and it can be like real monotonous type of things.

You know, just sit on the couch. Back when I was a kid, I played soccer all the time, and every weekend my dad would get in the car with me and we'd go to soccer games. And as a kid I didn't really think about it. It was like I, I couldn't drive myself. My dad had to drive me. But he really enjoyed spending those weekends with me.

That was being free with me, you know? And so I think as we start thinking about democracy and how to be stable in a democracy, freedom with is far more important than freedom from. And if you look at the times in American history where we [00:12:00] started to have a idea of freedom with like reconstruction was, I'd say the first real attempt and engaging in freedom with at a national scale because they want to be free with African Americans, which then meant that they had to increase the size of the federal government.

They had to create the Justice Department. They had to create civil rights. They had to create three amendments to the Constitution so that freedom could be something people could have and they could have it with white people and they could be free together in shared communal space. Stuff like that.

This is, unfortunately, like a massive shift in American society, where you have to go from freedom from, to freedom with. And so, like now, we have a conversation about gun rights in America. The capacity for someone to have a gun is just something that's protected by the Second Amendment. And the Second Amendment, in language, was created to fight against the British.

So it was something that we needed to ensure our freedom from the British. [00:13:00] That's it. In the South, the Second Amendment was a tool that was used by militias to prevent slave rebellions. So that was another exercise where they could be free from black people. And now, that freedom from People are now, they have guns, and if they go and get those guns and shoot up a bunch of people, we're just like, that's nothing we can do about it, that's just the price you have for freedom, that's the price you have with freedom from, but if you want to live free with people, then you'd be more inclined to regulate guns.

Because you wouldn't need those to try to live a nurturing, sustainable life with another person. Like, you shouldn't want or need a gun as part of that equation.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. At a very fundamental level, social harmony. Entails a compromise of freedom not doing whatever the fuck you want even in like the dyad in the home, right?

You're not just gonna stay out late and not call your spouse and tell them that you know, you're staying out late It's just a [00:14:00] consideration and care that is inherent in a thriving society

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, like the idea of freedom being something that's not attached to other people and interacting with them is just some Absurd theoretical concept that I think only like alienated Europeans could even imagine it being a real thing We all Do things and it's wild that Telling your family that you've arrived at some place so that they feel better Because that's how you want to be free with them and like not doing something crazy Like we view that as almost a negative like a compromise like i've lost something.

It's like You didn't lose anything. You're sustaining a valuable connection. Even how we articulate the beneficial actions of being free with people always has like a negative connotation. Where we feel that something negative has happened. It's like, no, nothing negative has happened. Freedom with is a thing [00:15:00] that We all do at a micro level.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: We just don't have language for saying it in a positive way. Hmm. So that we can like, articulate it to ourselves and other people and continue to do it. And then if you start doing it at a macro level, a sustainable, healthy democracy, I don't think is viable without it. And a freedom from, that starts creating fascism, because fascism focuses on the need to have an other to blame for the problems.

And then you have to mobilize military forces and all sorts of stuff to suppress and eradicate that other, because once they're gone, Then you'll be able to be free.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm. Yeah. That's

Barrett Holmes Pitner: just freedom from.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. And that

Barrett Holmes Pitner: clearly destroys democratic institutions. And so I, I think the West and America's reliance on freedom from is a key reason why their democratic institutions don't last as long as they would like them to.[00:16:00]

Jenny Stefanotti: We were commenting just now about language and the importance of language, and this is a really key tenet of your work. So can you say a little bit more, because you've come up with some new words for us that we're going to learn today, and you've resurrected some words that other people came up with that are really essential.

So can you explain how you think about the importance of language for social change and particularly addressing racism in America?

Barrett Holmes Pitner: If you're going to interact with other people, you have to be able to have precise language where we can Understand that shared meaning and I think our society has used language in very much like a bad faith way for a very long time, which makes it very, very hard for people to have.

agree upon a shared meaning for things. And so what that results in is that a lot of times our language is corrupted, so now I can't articulate my own [00:17:00] thoughts to somebody without them having a completely different idea. That's a big, big problem. And so when that, that divide happens, the answer is sometimes you have to create new words.

And also if your society is doing something bad, You are gonna spend a lot of time making a word to describe that bad thing that's just not where their energy is going to be so when you see something bad happening there's a good chance your society's not gonna have a word for it really precise accurate word to describe that bad thing so that we then can have that conversation and if you can't converse with other people and share ideas like there's not much you can really do because what you know the ideas aren't the end.

The ideas are the beginning. Once you have the shared ideas, you can create shared practices and habits and relationships and things can grow, but you can't do any of that growth without language. And so the language is all about interacting with other people. Like, you don't need language to [00:18:00] communicate with yourself.

Jenny Stefanotti: Right, right, right, right. Like if I

Barrett Holmes Pitner: move my arm, my brain's not saying, move arm. It just does it. Yeah. And if I want somebody else to move their arm in a particular way that's beneficial, I need to have a language that they know what's happening.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. It's critical for facilitating a collective, shared sense.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. That's what language is for. Like, the West has these weird ideas that like, meaning comes from something in the sky and like, shines down on us. But like, meaning comes from us communicating and having a shared understanding of something.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. I often start my conversations with like, hey, let's get really basic and make sure we're on the same page about the meaning of this word.

So there was a lot of context to get us here that I thought was important. But in this case, it's not an ostensibly obvious word that isn't necessarily obvious. This is a new word, the word ethnocide. It's the word that your book is centered on. It's part of your dual mission at the Sustainable Culture Lab.

So tell us what the word [00:19:00] ethnocide means and how you came to discover and resurface and why it is so central to your work.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, so ethnocide means the destruction of a people's culture while keeping the people. And this word, I, like, discovered it, but I also, like, kind of coined it because when I came up with the word ethnocide, I didn't know about Raphael Lemkin.

When I think of race dynamics in the United States, I don't really think about it as race, I think of it as a cultural. Issue. It's culture. And so when I was thinking of how to describe racial division in America, really what it is is colonizers and slavery had a agenda of destroying African culture. And keeping black people, and that's ethnocide, and we just haven't had a word for that.

Like, we know slavery, and we know the word genocide, but [00:20:00] genocide is you're trying to eradicate a group of people, or forcibly remove them, and live in the absence of them. America clearly had no desire to live in the absence of African people, because if they wanted to live in the absence of African people, they just wouldn't have done the slave trade.

So they wanted to Keep African people and destroy their culture, and that cultural destruction would make it easier to oppress a large swath of people. Like if you're breaking up families, you're destroying language, you're not letting them practice their religion, or wearing any of their cultural, ancestral clothes, items.

You just eradicate everything that has meaning to them. It makes it easier to oppress that group of people. And that's what America and other colonizer nations that they engage in the slave trade decided to do in the Americas. And we just have never really had a word that precisely described that. And so, that's what ethnocide is.

So I kind of came up with that word. And after I came up with it, I was like, uh, let's see if somebody else has come up with it. Like, what's the likelihood that [00:21:00] I just made a brand new word, you know? And then fortunately, I found out that Raphael Lemkin coined the word in the 1940s. And Raphael Lemkin also coined the word genocide.

Jenny Stefanotti: And

Barrett Holmes Pitner: so he was a Polish Jew who was escaping the Nazis, and he came to the Americas. And when he came to the U. S., he was trying to tell the U. S. government and all sorts of people about what was happening to Jewish people. And the Americans just didn't believe him. Part of world war two germany was the epicenter of philosophy in europe like berlin was the equivalent to paris prior to the world wars no one thought the germans were capable of that it just didn't make no sense and so to try to clarify.

The severity of what was happening, Lemkin realized he had to make a new word, and so he made the word genocide, but he also coined the word ethnocide at the same time, and his original idea was that they'd be interchangeable, because Jewish people, they were a [00:22:00] genos, but they're also A nation culture of people, which in the Greek is an ethnos, and so genocide and ethnocide, he envisioned that they would be interchangeable, but clearly genocide became the word that stuck, and cultural destruction kind of got subsumed into genocide, and the word disappeared.

Around the 1970s, ethnographers started using ethnocide. To talk about the destruction of indigenous land and the impact on indigenous communities because indigenous cultures have a connection to the land and they view the land as an extension of their culture so, you know, when they're drilling for oil or chopping down trees and destroying all the indigenous land, that was cultural destruction.

Also, the same vein, the residential school system, where they're taking indigenous people from their communities and putting them into school so they could kill the Indian and save the man, as the slogan goes. That was ethnocide on indigenous people. But for my work, I [00:23:00] think I'm one of the first to focus it on the transatlantic slave trade and the African American experience.

Jenny Stefanotti: And I think another really critical point that you make is that capitalistic foundations of ethnocide.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, African people were brought over here because Europeans believed it would help make them money.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: It made people a lot of money. If you're going to make a business, no matter what the business is, and you don't have to pay your employees, and you can work them.

Forever and never get punished for abusing them and you can say that they're workers for life and their children Are gonna be workers employees for life. You're gonna make money

Yeah within

Barrett Holmes Pitner: a capitalistic system. And so that's what it was all about We feel it makes sense to destroy a whole group of people's culture Because it'll make us money and when your society agrees to that Faustian bargain, you've really opened up a Pandora's box.

We're [00:24:00] destroying anything in exchange for money can be justified We confront that dynamic all the time in America

Jenny Stefanotti: Mhm. Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned before, we started recording the book. The half has never been told is a very potent book that talks about the foundations of the American economy and the growth of the American economy.

What happened within the slave trade within the U. S. As the cotton industry evolved and grew and just confronting the fact that America is the superpower that it is because its economy was built on the back I think that's another essential point to confront. Anybody who has been privileged to come into the system and accumulated wealth, it is built upon that foundation.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: I think the books I write about all of that stuff are essential because people need to be made aware of it. But these are facts that just stare us in the face every day and they're just so. [00:25:00] Disturbing and problematic that people want to imagine that what they see is different than what they see like people came here to make money.

Sure we love the story of the pilgrims and they came to like escape religious persecution in england but no one really likes to talk about how the pilgrims are trying to overthrow the british government and create a theocracy over there that's. Gets erased, but most people came to the U. S. to make money, economic opportunity, and so slavery was part of that pursuit to make money, because that's how they're going to do it.

I think, if you've ever been to the South, the cities in the South, it's not like we just moved into indigenous cities. The cities are located where they are because of the economy. Based around slavery and plantations. North Carolina is this fascinating state if you look at it, where it doesn't have.

Really any major cities [00:26:00] and they're all spread out into these small little cities where it's like, you know What if you really think about it? It's just a landscape that was defined by Plantations and making little town square cities were like, you know the various plantations in the area They would go to that city and that's how scattered across like the South doesn't have big industrial hub cities like the North does because The economy there was slavery.

You just had to have plantations scattered across and places where people could go and trade people. Yeah. And then the goods that those people made. Like, the cities we live, the southern coast, the south made a lot of money, but like, our coast don't look like the coast of like, Boston in New York, where it was a different kind of commodities that they're dealing with.

These are different ones because they had to bring people in and distribute them all through the city. They didn't need to make big warehouses to stack rice and goods [00:27:00] and just the landscape of how America looks on the East is all defined. by slavery. And it's just one of those things that if you just take two seconds and see it, you see it.

Jenny Stefanotti: Of course. Then you can't unsee it, which I think is also really important.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Totally. So the books are important, but the answers are just always staring us in the face. We just don't want to look at it.

Jenny Stefanotti: Very fair. I appreciate how philosophical. You are, and your writing is, and there's a really central concept in your book that stems from existentialism, looking at existence versus essence.

Can you explain that to us?

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, yeah, totally. So I'll say one of the strategies for the book was when you look at ethnocide and its problem that's been a problem from the inception, but everyone thought it made sense, I thought it then started to find, to pursue answers. I had to look at some [00:28:00] European thinkers who are questioning European ideas, you know, that would make it relatable, like clearly there, there's other people that question European ideas, but like the people that already speak that language and are accustomed in those philosophical traditions, unraveling it.

I thought it would be a good vehicle for us unraveling it because they're already speaking the same culture. And so once Europe started trying to blow itself up and wipe itself off the map in World War I, World War II, there became a big desire for Europeans to think differently so they could figure out a way to not blow themselves up.

And existentialism was one of those endeavors. And the big idea of existentialism is existence precedes essence, like existentialism has existence in it, because it's a philosophy about existence, which is really striking when you think about it, because it implies that prior to that, European philosophies didn't really have a concern about [00:29:00] existence, existence was a secondary thing, which And that's why when existence is secondary, it becomes very easy for you to destroy existence as an extension of your philosophy.

And so, the philosophy that existed before existentialism, that was shaped largely by René Descartes, his Cartesian philosophy, prioritized essence. And essence, it's like a, Fairly vague, abstract idea, but essence are just ideas, and Rene Descartes phrase of I think therefore I am is like a summation of that, where your existence is defined by your capacity to think, which then proves that you exist.

So I think therefore I am. So my idea, my essence, proves my existence. It's just a very stupid idea. Like, I [00:30:00] have a child. He's three. I know he existed before he had anything even resembling what we would consider to be an idea. He might not know that he exists. He has no idea what existing even is. You know, when he was born, he was just like What happened?

I was in my house and my mom, and now I'm in this room with a whole bunch of random people and I'm freaking out, you know, but I knew he existed. So existence clearly happens before you have an idea. To existence clearly precedes essence. But Europeans, for a very long time, thought that essence, their ideas, preceded existence.

And so what that empowers people to do is their idea becomes more important than existence. So say I have an idea that other people aren't people. That idea is more important than that other [00:31:00] person's existence. The idea is more important than existence. If, if the Germans have an idea that Jews aren't real people and that they would have a happier existence if Jews just didn't live on the planet, then they're like, cool, now we can just wipe them out.

That's what a philosophy where essence precedes existence would be able to justify. And you can see this approach. Man, like, almost every walk of life in Western civilization, they're gonna be able to give some theoretical, sometimes theological, justification for ruining someone's life, a whole community's lives, and killing people because it supports an idea that they have.

That they believe is good, and that goodness doesn't need to have any sort of substance backed out on existence. It's just good, because something, an idea I have justifies it, you know? So, if [00:32:00] destroying people's culture, and oppressing and terrorizing people makes you money, and money is more important than the existence of the other, then now it's, oh cool, slavery makes sense.

There you go. Boom. And so Europeans engaged in these wars that consumed the whole globe because they just had the idea that other people just weren't really people. And when those other people were fellow Europeans, they're like, uh, we're about to blow ourselves up. And so we have to think differently.

And so existentialism showed up. And so I think it creates a really simple framework to articulate how bad Things have always been and the counter is something alarmingly easy where you just care about existence More than the idea that shows up in your head

Basic stuff

Jenny Stefanotti: [00:33:00] You spoke to how white became the new European essence Like genesis of the even the concept of white in the u. s. I mean, it's a very interesting things to say about that kind of evolution of whiteness and even with the second wave of European immigrants in the late 1800s and the way that white was able to absorb that group while othering others.

I just think because white essence, it's such a central thread in this. Yeah.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: White's just an idea. Like most people around the globe that have a culture, a philosophy that's based off of existence, the name they have for the people that they belong to is attached to place. If you're from the physical place, that's Japan.

You're Japanese, you know, and Europeans, no matter how much they want to have their ideas be more important than existence, they still exist. And so they have to do stuff that's based on [00:34:00] existence. So if you're from France, you're French, real basic. But once they got on those boats and set sail and they weren't physically in those places anymore, they then had to create an idea.

Of who they are that would survive in these new places that wasn't attached to their place of origin and white's just one of those ideas. No one is in charge of what their skin color is. No one picks their parents before they're born and knows what they look like. So this is not a critique on white people or people that are, you know, of any complexion that are alive today.

This is just, like, articulation of the horrible linguistic constraints that we are forced to live within. Because of these bad ideas and philosophies that preceded us by hundreds and hundreds of years. And so like, white is just an idea. And in the American context, it was an idea that was based off of having, you could [00:35:00] only have it if you didn't have a drop of anything else.

The one drop rule meant that if you had a drop of black, you weren't white anymore. Even if you looked white. If you looked white, you could pass as white. But you weren't it. So, it's an identity that's zero sum, and that's just an idea that these Europeans came up with, and as they have tried to live in America, they've tried to do everything they can to sustain this zero sum identity, and they've tried to sustain a zero sum identity in a place that claims to be a democracy, and if you're claiming to be a democracy, and you want to live equally with other people, you're going To share things, you're going to get some type of a drop of something that's not European at some point.[00:36:00]

Jenny Stefanotti: I'm really curious how you think about just this question of identity. You mentioned the we. There is no we in the we in the founding documents, but it's just like a high order question that I grapple with a lot are these questions of the need to belong. And identify with some group based on some commonality and the ways in which identity divides.

So, I'm just curious, this isn't something that you explore in detail in the book, but I'm just curious your own thoughts about identity in the context of this conversation.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, so, I guess the key thing is, essence isn't a thing that should not exist. It's just a thing that happens after existence, you know, so you can have an identity, but if it comes secondary, it should be understood that that identity is gonna evolve and change and you can hold on to it and let go of it and it's adaptable because it's going to adapt during life.

And if you think about existence first, it becomes very easy to see that your [00:37:00] identity changes all the

Jenny Stefanotti: time.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Like a real simple example, and people forget about this all the time, it's just like, The weather

Jenny Stefanotti: like

Barrett Holmes Pitner: some people their identity in the summer is very different than their identity in the winter Yeah, sometimes people in the summer are very happy.

It's great to be around in the winter

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah,

Barrett Holmes Pitner: ain't fun to be around. They're just grouches the environment impacts it And so I think when the West when they put Essence first. They try to talk about identity as it being some static, absolute, universal, fixed thing that always you should hold on to forever.

And if you don't have it, you're now gonna be some person who's condemned. To just exist as a person,

Jenny Stefanotti: but your comments got me thinking about what you think is really fascinating. It's just that I think a lot about okay, here we are in a conversation and I'm holding so steadfast to my ideas because it is a threat to [00:38:00] my identity to acknowledge that those ideas might be due for an evolution.

We'll get into dialectic. And critical theory in a moment. And so, by understanding that existence precedes essence and identity is simply an idea that should be dynamic and not fixed, that admits fluidity in discourse, in deliberation, that is not permitted when we're so tied to something that's like a threat to our very existence, when you're almost conflating essence with existence.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, this is what happens when you're doing everything upside down.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: And that's basically what the West has tried to do. And this is a real simple example, like we were talking about kids earlier. At my kid's school, they just know me as a parent. When my kid was at daycare, we became friends with all these people in the neighborhood.

No one. knows that I wrote this book or did this, their identity, [00:39:00] their idea of Barrett is completely different than the idea of Barrett that your audience is going to have.

You

Barrett Holmes Pitner: know, I also love playing soccer. People that I play soccer with. They just know me as a guy that's pretty good at soccer. That's it.

These are multiple different identities that exist at the same time that they can bleed into each other like there's no but like There's always fluid and as I get older like my identity as a soccer player is basically one That's like I get worse at it every day cuz I'm older

But like the fact that existence comes first means that I'm perfectly okay with holding on and letting go to those things because Existence matters more than these ideas I have of myself Or these ideas that other people may have of me like and at some point one parent was chatting with me about something And he asked me what I was gonna [00:40:00] do this weekend if our kids could have a playdate or something I told him I Couldn't.

I was busy. I had to do something for work. He's like, what are you doing? I was like, I got to go to Harvard and talk about this project. And like what? And so then he started talking to me about my work. It's like, Oh wow. And so now this guy wanted to like read the book and that's the thing he wants to talk about now.

So now those two identities are merged and that's just like how life is. But also there's plenty of times where I have an idea of something that I think makes sense. And then I go talk to somebody else and they tell me that it doesn't They have some really valid points. And now all I have to do is Take that information and keep on thinking but if I my identity is like I'm really smart and someone tells me something then I'm just gonna feel like Everything about me has been shattered because this idea is gone even like I'm still on earth and nothing bad Actually happened.

The only thing that's happened is I've gotten more information And now I found some way to be devastated about that because it wasn't information that I [00:41:00] already had That's nuts. That's crazy.

Jenny Stefanotti: Totally. Well, that's a natural bridge to, you mentioned dialectic and critical theory are essential to understand to combat ethnocide.

So let's speak to that.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. So let's see. First off, like dialectics are just the basics of philosophy. And I think like Westerners make it more complicated than it is. But like a dialectic is just a relationship you have with anyone or anything. And so if I have a relationship. Where I have to be correct all the time.

That other person's relationship in that dialectic is basically going to be one where I'm just like traumatizing and abusing them all the time. You know? That's just how it's going to be. And Hegel came up with this concept called the master slave dialectic to describe that. Where like the master has all the power, but none of the responsibility.

And the person who's being oppressed, the enslaved person, the serf, [00:42:00] has all of the responsibility and none of the power. And so, like, if I have power over somebody else and they do really a great job at something, I'm gonna take the credit for it and say that I'm a genius. You know? And if they do a horrible job.

I'm going to say, you screwed up, you're an idiot, I'm still a genius. And this is a relationship where like, I have all the power, I'm not responsible for anything. As a society based off of slavery, I think it's important for Americans to understand the master slave dialectic, because that's how we communicate.

That's this unequal dialectic is key to how everything works. And that's also why language gets corrupted, because if, say you're an enslaved person and a slave owner is Abusing you and you say that hurts he's gonna say this enslaved person's crazy She's just he's weak or [00:43:00] something like that word hurt won't mean What it actually means because they don't want to have a shared meaning because it's based off of inequality And so if you want to change that you have to start having dialectics Where people are equal.

And that would be a dialect. First off, existence has to be like, primary to have that. Where you're just talking to another person. And this is also like a Hegelian thing. And you were like, one person's the thesis. Hegel calls the other person the antithesis, which I think is problematic. It should be more like, uh, equithesis or heterothesis.

I think, like, equa is, like, equal thesis, or hetero is, like, other thesis, but not something that's anti, as in, like, antagonistic.

Jenny Stefanotti: Right.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: But the goal is that these two people talk, and they engage in this word, Aufheben, which is German, it's hard to translate into English, but it means to preserve, [00:44:00] destroy, transcend, and to lift up.

And the goal of that is, like, if these two people interact, and they have different ideas, we should try to preserve. the good ideas of both sides and destroy the bad ideas. And in doing so we will transcend the previous dynamic and then lift everybody up. And then once you lift up, that creates a new thesis and then the process happens at infinitum.

This is what democracy is about. This is what relationships should be about. This is just your basic interactions where you engage like that. I think the Western perspective, and Adorno in the Frankfurt School talked about this following World War II, is when you have this essence based idea, You basically create negative dialectics, where you're just traumatizing people, and society regresses.

And I think we do that one far too often. And I'd say like, that regressive dialectic is [00:45:00] happening right now.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. Can you put this in the context of culture? Ethnocide is the stripping out of culture. Your organization is called the Sustainable Culture Lab. So a lot of your work really centers around making sense of history through the lens of culture and obviously the philosophical things that we've been discussing.

What I want to turn to now is how do we actually transcend? How do we get ourselves out of this mess? And culture, I think, as I mentioned, is one of the six pillars of our conversation. Curious how you think about culture.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah. So first off, I think how most people perceive culture. Is already within this, like, divided Western perspective, where, like, culture is a luxury that you get when you have, like, free time to go to a museum or watch a movie or something like that, like, a cultured person has, like, paintings in their house and things like that, in a particular place, making the stuff for them to survive.

That's why most people in a particular place, [00:46:00] they name the place, and then when they name themselves, their name is basically people from that place. But America's based on people who aren't from this place, creating a society based off of division, and viewing that like, perpetual division and exploitation is sustainable, when it quite clearly is not.

And so we view culture completely inverted. It's a completely corrupted understanding. And so what you first need to do is look at it as for what it authentically is. Because if you're trying to create culture, it becomes really obvious that if you have a group of people together. The amount of effort you have to do to prevent somebody from freely participating becomes like an all consuming endeavor.

It's a lot of energy, and that you can clearly get way more done [00:47:00] if you don't exert all of that energy. to oppress and marginalize people within your group. And so sustainable culture is one without that division. Mm. And what makes it really daunting in the US is that linguistically, our language has always been one.

that normalizes and justifies that division and depicts it as something which it isn't. Like, it's depicted as a natural thing. It's depicted as a really efficient way to do things. And privatizing things and demonizing the public space and demonizing the commons is just the regular language. We're almost like completely devoid.

of language to advocate for using common space for good reasons. And so, the act of creating culture in the U. S. is, I think, far more complicated than people think because it requires a new [00:48:00] vocabulary. And so the book exists in many ways as an endeavor to commence that linguistic shift.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: But it's a lot of words, and it's like, everyone's been walking on their hands, and you have to tell them like, actually, your feet are better.

You need new words, a new perspective, it's a whole deal, and that's kind of like where we're at.

Jenny Stefanotti: And that kind of mirroring ethnocide, ethnogenesis, is one of those words.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: A hundred percent. Ethnogenesis means creating culture, birthing culture, which is fascinating because we live in a place that's based off of division.

And so everyone thinks they have a sustainable culture that thrives within the division. And even the notion of creating new culture. Just seems absurd like they want to create like a new group a new subset a new whatever But like the notion that we just have [00:49:00] to create a new culture for the whole space just seems outrageous But like that's really what you have to do.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm

Barrett Holmes Pitner: because Everything else is inadequate And so ethnogenesis is just like part of that linguistic shift, where like, the goal is to create culture. And then you have to have the clarity of like, what that re defining of culture is. Where, oh, this is how it's always been used throughout most of human existence.

People just in a particular place, collectively working together to survive in that place in perpetuity. And, you know, exploitation and extraction is not the way to do that.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I think the Altars of America project is a really fascinating example of creating new culture through a really critical component of culture, which is ritual.

And it is also, I think, a very fascinating example of ethnogenesis, where you [00:50:00] really thought deeply about cultural appropriation versus. Appreciation and inspiration, and how might you take ideas from other cultures in a way that makes them unique to a new place, a new people. So I just think it's a fascinating example that just really brings this to life, so why don't you tell us about it.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, yeah. So first of all, I'll say that the project, it's taken many, many years, and each year people doubt the capacity to even do it, because the expectation is that the norm of America will just consume and commodify and corrupt and devour it. They just don't think it's possible. They can't even conceive of it as being real.

But the process is very simple once you kind of invert your perspective. So indigenous cultures and cultures from around the world have always had ancestor remembrance practices. The West doesn't really have them and America definitely doesn't. [00:51:00] And so with these ancestor remembrance practices, the idea, if you think about how they did it way back when they're normally in the fall after the harvest.

Before the winter was like we now have enough food. We're really confident. We're going to survive the winter So now we can remember the people that came before us and their wisdom and celebrate them because quite confident. We're not gonna perish When the winter comes around and so it's a way of sustaining your culture and bringing people together

Jenny Stefanotti: And

Barrett Holmes Pitner: it also helps people deal with the trauma of loss Because losing a loved one is very difficult, and it's even more difficult if you're doing it in isolation.

But if you do it in a way with your community, where people can embrace you as you grieve, and you can tell the fond stories about them and make it more of a celebration, then that makes it a nurturing practice, which is vital for existence, because loss is gonna happen. And so you have to figure out a [00:52:00] way to make that loss Something that becomes nurturing over time, and not just perpetually traumatic.

The West isn't really concerned with that. But as I thought about it, I was exposed to Dios Muertos, and Dios Muertos is really popular in Mexico, but it's an indigenous Nahuatl practice. Like, it's something that was adapted by the Spanish because they couldn't extinguish it. Because if the goal of it is to remember the people who have perished, colonizers can't.

Wipe it out unless they wipe out all the people because if someone survives now that practice becomes even more important because now they have to remember hundreds of people like they have to remember their entire culture because they're going to be the ones preserving it and so it becomes a thing that structurally.

Can survive [00:53:00] colonization, and so as we're thinking of African Americans and many people in the Americas who have generational trauma, and there's not an outlet to do that, and there's not a community to do it, Ancestor remembrance practices are a way to address it, and it's, you know, I wouldn't say foolproof, but it's something that has shown the test of time that it can survive.

Western colonization. And so I saw it as something that could be very beneficial for African Americans, especially when you think about the Black Lives Matter movement, we were making altars, and the motivations for those altars were always after something tragic happened, after the cops Killed someone unjustly then we would make alters and we would remember them having a time on the calendar we make an alter every year now it's proactive reactive now it creates an opportunity to transcend and create something new because the impetus for remembering somebody isn't someone inflicting a tragedy upon them.

If you're always waiting for something bad to happen to do something [00:54:00] good, then you're, you know, you're not going to do as much good as you would like, so put on the calendar, now I'm going to do something good every time, and so when I first started doing this, and this has been multiple years of like, refining and trying to figure out how to articulate this to people, because people have so many stigmas Around alters, they'll think it's voodoo or devil stuff or something, like there's just so many notions regarding alters that people have that you're just like, I never anticipated this rebuttal, but you have to figure out how to get around it and articulate it.

So it's been many years of adapting this.

Jenny Stefanotti: I just really appreciate the depth and the nuance of your thinking behind the impact of this ritual. The notion of it being an annual cadence so that it becomes proactive rather than reactive after the next person gets killed. Just the way it's also grounded in the historical practice of Obviously, indigenous cultures, but also societies in the face of great atrocities that need to, [00:55:00] as is the case in Germany, have a culture of remembrance and not forgetting, and that's a practice that helps us not repeat those things, but also having the richness of being shared space for the future.

Processing trauma and healing and how deeply you thought about, okay, this is inspired by De Los Muertos, but what does it look like to do something that is unique to here? You worked with many artists. De Los Muertos

Barrett Holmes Pitner: looks like it does because it's attached to that place that's Mexico, like the aesthetic.

looks like the environment in Mexico. And if you go to different parts of Mexico, the altars look different because those areas look different. Like, America, we're all about commodifying stuff and making it a depiction that has no attachment to place. Like, we get excited that McDonald's tastes the same on the East Coast as it does the West Coast.

It's like, that's crazy. Like, that's the other side of a continent. Like, the food over here should taste diametrically different than the food over there if it's attached to place. Yeah. I [00:56:00] want that. So, like, if you're making an altar, In the U. S. And so this speaks to like the amount of layers of like, of unraveling, like, you know, deconstructing that's required for people to understand how to do this properly.

It should look like the physical place that you live, and it should be a representation of your experiences. So as the project has scaled, it started bringing in more and more artists to make altars. Before, it was mostly like, people of color. Yeah. And then once the people of color make those altars, then like, You can expand it to more people because they get it.

And one thing that was fascinating is once it got expanded and white Americans were participating, it becomes very clear that they have a lot of generational trauma and cultural erasure that's happened to them just due to the norm of the U. S. and they just haven't really Had time to process it or think about it, but once they stopped and thought about it, they're like, you know what, when I was a kid, my parents used to definitely do this German thing that I really, really enjoyed, but we just stopped doing it.

But now that I think about it, that was actually [00:57:00] foundational to my entire parents life and what brought me up, and now I don't do it anymore.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: And so then when they want to make an altar, their altar is about the German culture. That they just like consciously transacted away because they thought it'd be financially beneficial to not be attached to their own culture.

Jenny Stefanotti: That's really fascinating. My last name is Stefanati and just thinking about the way in which the assimilation into whiteness stripped out culture from the Europeans who came here as well. My last name is Stefanati with an I, but when I was 18, I changed it back from Stefanati with a Y. Because it was this little thing that my ancestors did to to blend in here because there was so much discriminations at the time and people are like, Do you speak Italian?

I'm like, No, I don't speak Italian anymore. I don't even make Italian food. And it's so fascinating to just the cultural homogenization of capitalism globally. You think about I consider capitalism, cultural colonialism.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Oh, yeah, it's just an extension of like Western [00:58:00] philosophy that prioritizes ideas more than existence.

You're going to just normalize dehumanizing people in exchange for something that you believe has value, but doesn't necessarily actually have it. And so everyone in America has ethnocidal trauma, you know, whether you're the person who was like culturally the victim, it was forced upon you, or the people who have like consciously made that decision to absorb it into your life.

So when the alters get made, it becomes really evident that everyone. Is really missing culture and when, like the last one we did in Richmond, we had such a diverse array of people and all of their alters spoke to their different cultural backgrounds. But when you put them all in a shared space, you can see that they're the same.

They're all from the same community. And so, like, it brings people together and that I feel. Makes new culture. They're [00:59:00] engaged equitably equally in the same space talking about culture that they want to collectively share with each other and talk and as they do this year over year over year, then that's going to weave.

A new cultural fabric.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. And

Barrett Holmes Pitner: also due to interracial, intercultural coupling in the U. S., it's going to be very common that someone from, say you're Mexican and your partner's, I don't know, Japanese. You want to make an altar. That altar is going to look part Japanese, part Mexican. That's going to make sense.

That's new culture. And so part of like this cultural shift is you have to engage in these practices. Which my hope is that the practice is something that is very accessible. And a motive. And then that can create the opportunity for people to do, delve deeper into the larger philosophy behind it. Mm-hmm

And so the goal is to do this Alter America project and put [01:00:00] alters in cities all across the country and just expand and that will alter. So we're kind of using both concepts of the word, like making alters to alter. So yeah, last year we finally got to the final form. Where I think people can really grasp it, so this year we're looking for funding and investment and stuff to try to scale it to multiple cities and like really actionably grow it.

Jenny Stefanotti: Okay, well, and this happens around that time of year, the end of October.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, so the plan right now is to have it go from the end of October through Thanksgiving.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mmm,

Barrett Holmes Pitner: okay. Delos Muertos is the month of October. So I don't want it to be like, on Dios Muertos, like, you know, Dios Muertos at the end, but like, the Mexican community makes their altars, so it kind of consumes October.

So have it go right afterward, because then I think also, like, Thanksgiving's really interesting in that. Exactly.

Jenny Stefanotti: I had that thought. People come

Barrett Holmes Pitner: together and have their family and there's a lot of controversy about the holiday as a whole and how [01:01:00] the proper way to celebrate it and what we should remember.

So if we are already creating altars to remember our authentic culture at the beginning of November and then at the end of November we have a gathering of our community, I think it connects and makes like a great opportunity for a healthy, sustainable, nurturing tradition that could alter America for the better.

Jenny Stefanotti: No, it's again, I just am so appreciative of how deeply you think about this intervention. It's really beautiful. Thank you. You've got another new word for us. I love the investigation of words. Ev topia. This is the second part of the mission of the Sustainable Culture Lab. So tell us what Ev topia means.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: The story behind the word is basically once I created Ethnocide and I talked to people about it, it became really evident that a lot of people now realize that a bunch of things that they thought were good were bad. And they weren't sure what good could be, and they needed me to [01:02:00] tell them.

Jenny Stefanotti: Oh yeah, you said you had an answer for what good is.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yes, yes. And so the end of the book touches upon that, where one thing I found really Fascinating, and also quite disturbing, is that the word utopia doesn't mean what people think it means. Thomas More coined the word in 1516, and it means non existent good place. E U in Greek means good, but O U in Greek means doesn't exist, non existent.

And topia means place, and so when Thomas More made the word, he cut off the E and cut off the O and put the U on the front end. So that it means non existent good place, but also like it sounds like good place You know, so all these Europeans have been using utopia to mean good place But it means non existent good place and then they created the word dystopia afterward which means bad place And so linguistically [01:03:00] Western civilization just has a word that means non existent good place And a word that means bad place.

That's a big, big problem. How can you envision a good place, create a good place, or even live within a good place, if your society doesn't even have a word that means good place? That's bleak. And so Evtopia is just, I got the EU, that means good, and topia, and put it together. But the key thing is that EU in Greek is pronounced Ev.

The U sounds like a V. And so I put a charon on top of the U, which is like a, it's an accent that looks like a V, to indicate the V sound. Because if you don't put that there, then people are going to pronounce it like Utopia, and like the distinction between a Utopia and a Utopia just sounds ridiculous.

Jenny Stefanotti: So

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Evtopia actually like adheres more to like the Greek pronunciation and makes it clear that it's not, Utopia when you say it and so [01:04:00] what that means is that means good place so now the question is like when you look at western civilization good is always a pursuit it's always a thing that people want to arrive at and they talk about how the pursuit is good and done it like even America we pursue happiness and since we.

Discuss the arrival at the good place as like an inevitability, like a guarantee. We just talk about the pursuit of happiness as also being happy. But what it really means is that you're unhappy, and you now have the opportunity to try to be happy. They just, in our founding documents, they wrote out, We're unhappy here.

But you can try to be happy and everyone looks at me. Oh man, this is a happy place. This is the dynamic of the West. And so what I then had to think of is what is good in a way that's not a pursuit, not an end destination. What's good in a way that's like a thing that you actually do, like you do good.

[01:05:00] And the example that came to my mind Was a good friend, a good friend is not a thing that you pursue is not a thing that you arrive at. It's a thing that you actively engage in pretty often because that's what you do with a friend. And so in this context, the good of a good friend is someone that sustains and nurtures you.

If you imagine if 10 years down the road, it's probably because they've helped sustain you. Imagine they would have sustained and nurtured you. They'll keep you alive. If you need help, you can call them up. If you need them to pick you up from the airport, they'll do so. If you're in a bad mood, you can call them up and talk or do whatever.

That's a good friend. They exist to sustain and nurture you. So good in an experiential way, not a pursuit, not an end goal, like a thing that you just actually do means to sustain and nurture.

Jenny Stefanotti: That makes me think of the love ethic that bell hook speaks to and all about love.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: One thing I will say is a [01:06:00] lot of the language we have is still attached to western Notions of pursuit where, like, ethics speak to, like, absolute ideas and not just, like, stuff you just practically consciously do all the time.

You know, like, being sustaining and nurturing is just good, and an expression of that is friendship. Another expression of that is love. Another expression of that would just be respect. There's so many ways that we express it, and there's different nuances, but at the end of the day, like, good is just sustaining and nurturing.

And that's yourself, that's other people, that's the environment, and this should guide your micro and macro actions, and democracies thrive and are dependent on people being able to do experiential existence. oriented ideas of, expressions of good, not just pursuing ideas of good where existence is secondary.

So, like, creating an [01:07:00] altar, that is an existence based experiential good. That's a thing that's good because it sustains and nurtures people. That's also why eating healthy food is good and not polluting the air. Stuff like that.

Jenny Stefanotti: You say this word gives us the potential to cultivate obtainable good places, both big and small, dedicated to a lived in existence focus, goodness.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: 100%. Like when you have the word good place and you can explain to somebody what good means like in an action. We're doing this all the time you then create of topian spaces just simple stuff like say you're tired and you don't want to put up the dishes. Well you know that if you don't put up the dishes but i was gonna show up in your house and get like you know the energy is gonna be off everything's become problematic and so you'll do it.

Because you know that doing the dishes helps sustain and nurture [01:08:00] the place in which you live and that makes your house like an utopian space and now you can have a conversation with someone like, Hey, I get that you don't want to do it, but we're trying to make a, just a good place here. Just like a good place that can sustain and nurture us for as long as we live here.

And so let's think about our actions in that way and then we'll do it. And that changes the dynamic. It's not like. some personal affront, you're not trying to condemn someone to live in a crappy place when they're dead or anything like that. We're just having a practical conversation. Are you committed to engaging in actions that can help sustain and nurture us while we're like sharing space and being free with each other?

Jenny Stefanotti: I was gonna say this really, for me listening to you, it's really grounded in that concept. It's making actionable that concept of freedom with.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Yeah, and that's what it's all about. It's like, we're always attached to people our entire life, like, you have parents and you engage in ways to live well with your parents, you have friends at school, you grow up, you get in [01:09:00] relationships, and all the stuff that you do, your opportunities, everything is due to your connection to people and places and the environment, and so you have to have practice and a philosophy for engaging And those spaces and with those people and those things in a sustainable nurturing way because I think we'd all like to live for a long time in a good environment around people that love and care about us and it's much easier to do that if you have the language for articulating that and the practices for sustaining and growing and developing it and if you can do that then things will get better and the tragedy is that I don't think it.

Western civilization has really spent much of any time cultivating that, and so we live in these toxic environments where we just lack the precise, the simple language to do the good things that we just are, as human [01:10:00] beings, inclined to do.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I, I really appreciate the way that you couple just getting really philosophical, which is so important that sometimes we just fail to ask these foundational questions and come to a kind of foundational common ground with these very practical actions.

When you lay it out, like it's so simple, it's understanding that we're centering around good in a way that's obtainable. And then you say, okay, well, this is what it looks like with respect to your own relationship with yourself by caring for your body. And this is what it looks like in your home by doing the dishes.

And this is what it looks like in your community. And so I'm just deeply appreciative of how you're. Not shying away from those hard, big concept conversations, but you're coupling it with, with action, which I think both of which are so needed in the world. And it's an approach that really inspires and gives people a space to have agency in [01:11:00] when.

You know, you look at what's in the news this week and you just feel like fuck, you know, what can I do? It's it's depressing and you know, I'm keeping my head down and taking this approach in my work But I just wanted to say thank you for your work I was grateful to be reading your book over the last two weeks I'm super grateful to be sharing your ideas with the audience and community.

I am now Following and subscribed to the reconstructionist. So I'm looking forward to Continuing to Read what you put out.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Oh, thank you very much for the kind words. And I appreciate that you appreciate it. My, my, my job essentially is to try to have these complex thoughts and be able to articulate it in a way that people can act and do beneficial things.

Because if I'm a philosopher and everything I say is gibberish and no one can do any of it, then like, what's the point? Totally.

Jenny Stefanotti: 100%.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: I've spent a long [01:12:00] time trying to Articulated in a simple way and so it's I'm happy that it seems to be Receptive to some extent and hopefully it grows one thing. I will say regarding the present dynamic in the US is Trump and his people.

They have a whole philosophical linguistic foundation that frankly is just Western civilization that they can rely upon to engage in destructive practices. If we want to counter that and do nurturing sustainable stuff, it It does require like a significant linguistic and cultural shift that I hope I help make easily accessible.

Mm. Because you have to have the language and the clarity so that you can then do consistent actions.

Jenny Stefanotti: Totally. Yeah. I love that. A lot of what I try to do is take the time to read your book and [01:13:00] be able to share it with people in a succinct conversation that doesn't shy away from robustness. Huh.

Barrett Holmes Pitner: Thanks for having me.

It

Jenny Stefanotti: was a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Scott Hansen, also known as Tycho, for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you can find resources for each episode on our website www. becomingdenizen. com, including transcripts and background materials. For our most essential topics like universal basic income, decentralized social media, and long term capitalism, we also have posts summarizing our research, which make it easy for listeners to very quickly get an overview of these particularly important and foundational topics.

On our website you can also sign up for our newsletter where we bring our weekly podcast to your inbox alongside other relevant Denizen information. Subscribers are invited to join our podcast recordings and engage with the Denizen community in our online home, The Den. We're partnered with some incredible [01:14:00] organizations at the forefront of the change that we talk about.

We share announcements from them in our newsletter as well. Finally, this podcast is made possible by support from the Denizen community and listeners like you. Denizen's content will always be free. Offering Denizen as a gift models a relational rather than a transactional economy, enabling Denizen to embody the change that we talk about on this podcast through the reciprocity of listeners like you, that we were able to continue producing this content.

You can support us or learn more about our gift model on our website again, that's www. becomingdenizen. com. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time.