For episode 153, anarchist writer, musician and podcaster Margaret Killjoy joins Elia J. Ayoub and Aydın Yıldız to talk about the very easy topic of apocalypse. What does that even mean? And how do we deal with that without falling into complete despair? Many of y’all know that one of the taglines of this pod is building the new in the shell of the old, right? Well, this is about that. Sort of. It’s mainly about staying sane and healthy and as hopeful as possible long enough to even want to build the new in the shell of the old.

Show notes:

• Penumbra City, the new ttrpg by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
• Margaret’s two pods: Live Like the World is Dying and Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
• Margaret’s essay for Slingshot Collective that’s behind this episode’s title as well as one of her podcasts
• Margaret’s essay Don’t Let Nazis Have Nice Things republished by Antidote Zine

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Episode Credits:

Hosts: J. Ayoub and Aydın Yıldız
Producer: Joey Ayoub
Guest: Margaret Killjoy
Music: ⁠Rap and Revenge⁠
Sound editor: Joey Ayoub
Episode designer: Joey Ayoub

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

I want to make sure I have done what I want with any outcome, and since one possible outcome is dying, I just want to make sure to tell my friends I love them, and spend more time with my family, and hang out with my dog.

Joey Ayoub: Today we’ll be joined by Margaret Killjoy and Aydın. We’re going to be talking about a topic that Margaret has discussed at length on various podcasts and in her writing: how to live like the world is dying, the question of hope versus doom. Is it two sides of the same coin? Are they two different things? We can get philosophical; we can be very practical.

Let’s start with basic intros. Aydın this is your first time on the podcast, even though you’re part of this collective that is working with The Fire These Times, which you can talk about if you don’t mind.

Aydın: My name is Aydın; I use they/them pronouns. I work with Antidote Zine, which works in collaboration with The Fire These Times as well as other grassroots movement media outlets. We publish transcriptions, translations, and transmissions that focus on stories that don’t ordinarily get told, or stories that need to be uplifted more in movement spaces. We come from an anarchist and anti-authoritarian perspective, and we focus predominately on struggles that are going on around the Mediterranean circle, and now in Minneapolis, because that’s where we’re based. It’s a pleasure to be here with y’all.

Margaret Killjoy: I’m Margaret Killjoy; I use she or they pronouns. I am a US-based anarchist, and I do a lot of media work. I write a lot of fiction, some nonfiction; I do a lot of podcasting. I work with a publishing collective called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness that puts out podcasts and books and zines and things like that. I have a couple podcasts, but the one that’s probably most relevant to what we’re talking about is called Live Like the World Is Dying. I’m one of three hosts, but it’s a show that I started right before the COVID pandemic as a way to try and reach out about this thing that I felt a little bit alienated from in anarchist circles, which is my interest in individual and community preparedness for disaster and crisis and apocalypse. It came out of an essay I wrote called “Live Like the World Is Ending”—and then someone pointed out that I had a really easy pun right there; live and die. I got really excited about that.

The essay isn’t like, Hey, the world is ending. It is: It might be, I don’t know. What does that mean? What do we do about it?

JA: We’ll definitely get into that. That’s been a healthy/unhealthy obsession of mine for quite some time now, this concept of hope and apocalypse. I’m from Beirut, and we had an image of that in 2020 with the explosion that felt very apocalyptic—and that’s how it was described.

Because this could go in a thousand different directions, I figured we’ll start with a pretty broad question that we can then narrow or branch out, or see where the wind blows. It’s a how-to question. Not necessarily how to live like the world is dying, because it’s not a prescriptive thing necessarily, but how have you been thinking about that? You have essays that go back several years, to before the pandemic. Obviously the pandemic from 2020 onward made that topic feel more pressing for many people than it did beforehand.

Talk to us a bit through the trajectory, if that makes sense.

MK: On some level, I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time. There was this book Desert; it’s a very short book presented as “green nihilism.” It comes out of anarchist circles and presents the argument that we’re not going to fix the climate disaster—what then? What does that mean for us in anti-authoritarian struggle? It was very good. But even when I read it back then, I was like, This is naively optimistic! It thinks that we’re going to survive!

From my reading of climate news and climate science (I’m not a climate scientist), I thought things might be bad enough that we might be living underground and growing food in greenhouses only, and relying heavily on hydroponics if the climate on the surface of the world becomes completely untenable. And I’m not saying that is what’s going to happen. But I’m saying it could. So when I read Desert, I thought it was a good start—everyone else was freaking out because it was so doom-and-gloom while I thought it was naively optimistic.

But the way it started interacting with my life was: I started really taking into consideration what it meant for the lack of future that I felt. Which is funny because I come from this punk anarchist background where NO FUTURE is tagged on all the squats and stuff. But then I made it into my thirties (I’m in my forties now) and thought, I made it past the “no future” I thought I was going to have; why am I more “no future” than I was before? I actually think it’s a sober look a society.

This doesn’t mean I am going to die. It doesn’t mean any individual person is going to die. It means I think the way that things are happening is not going to continue to be the way that things happen. I think we’re already starting to see this breakdown. And of course this breakdown looks very different in different places. In a lot of ways it’s the West that is insulated from this level of disaster—especially in North America, in the United States and Canada, because Europe still has within family memory (and sometimes living memory) World War Two and the devastation of that, and the Cold War was even more present there than it was in the United States.

But one of the ways it influenced me is that for a little while I stopped writing books and I started focusing on music. Writing books is this long-game cultural influence. It takes you a year to write a book; it takes a year to find a publisher; it takes a year for the book to come out; and it takes two or three years for it to percolate out and start having an impact. In a lot of ways, especially as a fiction writer, what I’m hoping to do is influence how people think about problems, and how people think about themselves—and that change happens generationally. A song, you listen to it and you can immediately get what’s happening. So I thought, I don’t have time to write books.

And then the world didn’t end. We didn’t fall immediately into a fascist thing. It’s much slower and more annoying than that in the United States. All my friends weren’t rounded up and killed. And I got back to writing books eventually. And as I started writing more about this, I realized what it means to me is not putting all of my eggs in one basket—and that includes the basket of apocalypse, or I’m about to die. There’s roughly four way things can go:

The status quo can continue. That is absolutely a possibility. Capitalism has proven very sturdy. Marx was entirely wrong. Much like when Jesus said the world was going to end in his lifetime back in the day, and it didn’t happen, the same thing is true of all the people who said that capitalism was going to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. It just didn’t happen. It may happen. I don’t know. But I’m not counting on it.

Then, we could stop climate change—or stop the worst of it: we all come together and do a big Green New Deal on a worldwide level but more radical, and create everything good. That’s a possibility, and I’m not trying to rule that out. I would be very excited to be one of the assholes trying to push for that to be less hierarchical.

Then there is: Climate change is coming and we’re going to die. That’s a completely possible thing. Especially as fascism comes to the United States, being a really public anarchist isn’t going to do me a lot of favors. I could be about to die. Which is always true, but a little bit extra true right now.

Then of course, climate change could come and make everything bad, and we could survive it, and it would be sort of Desert-y or post-apocalypse or whatever cool thing where we can run around in weird clothes.

JA: “Mad Max is a documentary.”

MK: Yeah, I’m going to put on a nice outfit and hang out in a cage and lure men to their deaths the way I was born to do.

I don’t want to tell people to count on one of those things or the other. If you read financial planning documents, they’re like, Don’t put all your eggs in one basket; diversify your assets. That’s what I want to do. I want to make sure I have done what I want with any of those outcomes. And since one of those outcomes is dying, I just want to make sure to tell my friends I love them, and spend more time with my family, and hang out with my dog.

That’s the big picture. That’s what I’m about.

Hope is slightly irrational, in the way that anxiety is slightly irrational. So it’s good: it’s good to cultivate hope during dire times, because it allows us to do more with what we have now.

JA: You said you stopped writing books for some time. For me it was: I stopped watching nature documentaries for a long time, maybe it was a decade. I was completely unable—I would be genuinely very happy for the most part, just watching cool whales doing cool stuff. I like whales, and turtles. At the time I had the DVDs of the David Attenborough ones. The way it was set up was nine episodes of how the world is amazing and beautiful and wild, and the last episode was, This is how we’re fucking everything up, this is how everything is being destroyed, and maybe we shouldn’t do that! It seems bad to destroy the entire rainforest!

And I’m like, I know, but what do I do with this information right now? I’m in Lebanon; what do I do with this? It got overwhelming at some point, and I just stopped. Books as well—to some extent I still enjoy doing it, but definitely less so than I did before. Even camping. I was so traumatized by this overarching reality.

This was fifteen years ago; I’m not going to say I got over it, but progressively I started approaching it in a different way. I was one of the people who was genuinely inspired by Greta Thunberg doing her thing; we’re both autistic, so there was this link. When she was saying she couldn’t get rid of the thoughts that This is not enough; we’re not doing enough,I was able to understand and sympathize with that (I also felt bad that I also wasn’t doing enough, but that’s a different thing).

Aydın, I want you to talk—you know me, when I send voice notes to my friends, it’s like an entire podcast. And this is an actual podcast so I need to shut up!

MK: I haven’t heard those thoughts externalized before, and I feel them deeply. I remember—for a while I lived in a van, and part of it was: I need to see the stuff that’s going away. But every time I go see the stuff, I’m very aware of the fact that it’s going away. And it’s so hard to handle. It’s so hard to really sit and think about what this all means. We get overwhelmed by these problems, and we shut down our processes; we stop being able to think about it. It’s too much problem.

A: I really appreciate the framework that you have in this essay. I read it in the fall of 2020. I live in the neighborhood where George Floyd was murdered, and after living through the uprisings here in Minneapolis, in the heart of it, I came across this essay and I thought it was extremely helpful to be reminded to look at the longer term. I had been feeling this Act like we’re about to die all summer long. It was really helpful to remember that it’s just as important to look at the long term, even if it feels slightly delusional, and to think about What is the slow work? What is the long term healing? What new systems and social infrastructure are we building?

And then there’s the personal life-giving force of focusing on joy and wonder. I found that piece particularly challenging. Relevant to the conversation of watching nature documentaries, or just going camping, being in and seeing the things: the prospect is we’re going to lose a lot of the beauty in the natural world. I think there’s something to honoring the grief that we encounter in that experience. It can feel like too much; it can be super overwhelming. It’s like, How could I possibly love something that is slipping through my fingers as I encounter it? At the same time, grief is the way that we, in our bodies, are honoring the beauty and joy and wonder that we are experiencing.

It can be so hard, emotionally, to hold those contradictions. And yet I think that’s some of the most important work we can do to be able to carry on and continue fighting for these things that are so precious and fragile.

I was curious if you still reference this framework of Act like we’re about to die / Act like we might not die right away / Act like we have a chance to stop this / Act like everything will be okay. It was very—dare I say—prophetic for you to write this in late 2019. So I’m curious if any of these resonate with you more now, or if you feel like that framework has changed for you, or if you’re holding on to it, and what it means to you now after the past four years.

MK: I still hold on to it. I have come a little bit more (I’ll say this right now and maybe it’s not true tomorrow) to a peace with Whatever happens, happens. I still believe in holding on to those four ideas and not making assumptions. And the way I prepare is absolutely built on it. I think about whether I want to pay down my mortgage—I moved somewhere incredibly cheap and live rurally and pay a mortgage—or whether I want to buy a table saw. I don’t put money towards retirement. If I made enough money, I probably would. But I “save for retirement” by drying food and keeping it in my basement, and buying a table saw.

I remember I didn’t have enough money, and I was like, Do I really need this table saw? Hyperinflation is happening; even from an economic standpoint, this object that has value to me (not monetary value, it doesn’t resell for a lot) is important for me to have, and is cheaper now than it will be six months from now. When I think practically, I use that framework.

But personally, and how I’m back to writing books: I just sold a trilogy to a press called Feminist Press, and I’ll be talking more about it in the near future. I’m really excited about it. But only one of those books is written. I’ve got to write these two other novels that are going to come out over the coming years. I’ve got to have conversations with the press about which states are legal for me to do talks in. I’m kind of an asshole so I’m going to do it anyway, and there hasn’t been a big crackdown on white trans ladies giving book talks—but there could be! The laws are in place to do it. There are a lot of places where if I give a talk it is technically a strip club because I am there.

But I’m still going to write these books, because fuck it. And I read a lot of history, and it’s like, poets living through wars, and people surviving or not surviving genocides by continuing to do the things they do. I read about a surrealist photographer who was Jewish and survived World War Two hiding in the bathroom of a different surrealist, and developed new techniques for photographing miniatures while in this bathroom for two years. That man could have died any day, absolutely.

I used to think this was a punk quote, but I think actually punks got it from the Quran: “If the world were ending tomorrow I would plant a tree today.” When I came up in anarchy, everyone had back patches that were cute with bicycles and trees and stuff (I came up during a very positive time in anarchy that I’m sometimes nostalgic for; now we all have guns and stockpiles of food). But one thing that anarchists in particular and leftists and atheists are really bad at is recognizing that wisdom can be found in theological texts and ideas. So it was really meaningful in my own journey towards realizing that theology is interesting and useful, to realize that this thing I assumed was a punk quote was from the Quran.

That’s the attitude I’m trying to have, and it’s actually literal where I live. I’m going to go plant an orchard. I think it’s about fifty-fifty that I’m never going to eat fruit from the trees that I plant. A lot of the things we do are “for the next generation.” I’m going to write this book or I’m going to plant this tree and keep up the fight for the next generation. And the next generation does exist; I’m not trying to write them out of existence preemptively. But they’re in trouble. And it is completely possible that I will plant an orchard, and if the trees survive climate change and the shifting growing zones, no human will ever eat their fruit. So I just need to learn to enjoy the process of planting as if I have a future.

I’m really trying to hype myself up for planting this orchard. Growing season is kicking in early because it is February and sixty degrees Fahrenheit—a very nice, lovely temperature outside. I’m not planting yet. I’m spreading the path to the orchard right now, that’s what I came in from doing. I was shoveling mulch around onto cardboard.

JA: I live in Switzerland, so obviously lots of mountains, and almost exactly a year ago we were in this chalet for a week. I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s book Orwell’s Roses. It’s one of the few nonfiction books I’ve read twice, which is not a thing I usually do. And George Orwell was really into gardening—it’s not something most people notice.

Rebecca Solnit also wrote a book called A Paradise Built in Hell, which was one of the early books for me that dispelled the notion of a “dog-eat-dog” world (which really annoys me because dogs don’t do that—I grew up with nine dogs, I’ve always lived with dogs all around, my aunt has a dog shelter in Lebanon. If it gets really bad, dogs just get exhausted, like humans do). That book points out that actually people come together in disaster situations. Hurricane Katrina was the big case study at the time in that book, alongside many other examples. What usually happens in disasters is more like elite panic. There’s a book by that name that is very good too.

But Orwell’s Roses was interesting because a lot of the metaphors he used were about gardening. And he took it very seriously—he took gardening as a political act. I found that very interesting, for the thirties and forties. For me it’s not just a generation away, it’s a whole world in the past I can’t conceive of, and this book helped me do that.

Hope is the opposite of anxiety. And anxiety is what is wrecking all of our nervous systems right now and making this precious little time we have on Earth less good.

Regular listeners know the other thing: we’ve had a daughter recently, born a few months ago. If all goes well for her (we use her and them), they might live until 2100! It’s feasible, all things considered. It really puts things in perspective. Whenever I think about the late 1800s, it feels like it’s so ancient—you may as well be talking to me about the pyramids. But it’s not that far away! I was born in the nineties. It’s the same timeline. It makes it really concrete for me, as someone who is very worried. I realize that a lot of my despair—maybe we can segue to this topic—was a privilege I was indulging in. That’s not quite the term for it; that feels too harsh. And to be clear I do feel there is a space for it, and there are times where I really need to feel the despair in order to get over it and move on. It is a form of mourning, a form of grief as well. But because there is this new timeline in my head, it’s no longer about, I’m turning thirty-three this year, but rather, my kid is turning three months old.

I don’t know if I formulated a question. But the concept of despair is something that’s built into a lot of the work that you do, at least struggling with that concept. Doomerism is pretty common these days, especially online. In my circle of friends, it’s very common for us to be there for one another as much as we can, but ultimately a lot of what we talk about is how bad things are, without exactly knowing what to do about it in that moment. It’s like the flipside of the documentary series I was talking about: for nine episodes everything is bad, but hey, you can have some hope! And I get lost.

So let me put it very basically: what do you think about despair?

MK: I’m going to go into theology. There’s a quote from Mariame Kaba that “hope is a discipline.” I love that quote, and when I researched more about it, she says she learned it from a Catholic nun. It wasn’t her quote—she popularized it, and that’s good work, and I don’t love intellectual property. But the fact that it came from a Catholic nun is not a coincidence. There is a Catholic concept that despair is a sin.

In the Catholic conception of sin, it’s a bad thing but it’s not a real bad thing. It’s like, Well, of course you did a sin, you’re a person. You just try not to do it again, but you know that you will, and when you do, you go and talk to someone. (I’m not saying, And therefore the Catholic Church is good.) But you go and talk to someone, and you say, Argh, I did the thing again! And the guy is like, Well, don’t do it again. / Well, but I’m going to. / Yeah, but don’t. But when you do, come back here again.

In this conception, despair means ceasing to believe in heaven—but as a broader concept, there’s this idea that despair is this thing that we fight against, and we do it by cultivating the discipline of hope.

When I first came up in anarchism, talking shit on hope was the cool thing to do, because what we like to do as radicals is come up with a word that everyone knows what it means, and then redefine it to mean something slightly different and say that we’re against it, and then get mad at everyone who says that they still believe in the thing, even though we’ve redefined it and we’re talking about two different things (I don’t love Discourse™). So you would talk shit on hope because hope was being defined as hope-that-someone-else-is-going-to-sweep-in-and-save-you. You don’t “hope” that you eat today, you go out and find the food! is the example people would use.

This is all wrong. Whatever, we can redefine words however we want. But I don’t think this is a useful redefinition. Because if I don’t think there’s a chance of finding food when I go out, I might not. I might just sit around and starve, and give in to despair. If I hope that I will succeed when I do the thing, then maybe I’ll do the thing. And I like that hope has a certain irrationality to it. Hope (and/or faith—I’m not trying to go crazy religious on this, but I think it actually does tie in) is the opposite of anxiety. And anxiety is what is wrecking all of our nervous systems right now and making this precious little time we have on Earth less good.

We’re anxious all the time about all these things that could happen. But we can be more just like, Well, bad stuff is going to happen, of course it is. That’s what happens. We’re alive, and one day we won’t be, and the process of going from one to the other is going to hurt. That’s guaranteed, so fuck it. Don’t worry about that now. Hope is slightly irrational, in the way that anxiety is slightly irrational. So it’s good: it’s good to cultivate hope during dire times, because it allows us to do more with what we have now.

That said, I do have a certain love for the nihilist attitude. There’s a book, Blessed Is the Flame, I’ve only read part of it, that talks about how when you know you’re going to die, you go out in a blaze of glory and kill your Nazi captors or whatever. That’s great too—but personally, if I embraced a more nihilistic attitude (by which I mean a non-hopeful attitude), I wouldn’t go out in a blaze of glory. I would eat junk food and watch TV until I die. So I allow hope to get me up in the morning.

I have a lot of weird mixed metaphors in my head: I play a lot of strategy games, and you’re often losing when you’re me and you play strategy games—or when you’re an anarchist or anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian and you’re trying to end all of the bad things at once. We don’t tend to win, at least not long term. I still think we can. I think we’ll pull this off, because hope is a discipline. But if I’m playing a game, I am playing to win, and I want to look soberly at the conditions of the game, and figure out what my best strategy is to win. No matter where I’m at in the game. If I’m in the process of winning, I can’t just sit back and stop thinking about it and just roll with inertia. I have to keep thinking about what’s involved, what’s happening, and how I win. When I’m losing, I have to do the same thing.

The only other thing is forfeiting. And that’s no fun for anyone, on either side of the chess board—I don’t play chess. In my head the game I’m thinking of is one I played as a kid called Stratego. Anyway. You have to look at what’s happening and ask, What are the win conditions and how do I move towards them? That’s how I feel about climate change. At any given point, I want to look at what the avenues are by which we can win, and move towards them. Because that is a better way to live. I don’t “expect” to get there. I don’t “expect” to win.

A: I love that you bring up faith. As an anarchist, it’s a little bit of a contentious topic sometimes.

MK: It’s taboo.

A: Very, and I love talking about it. I wasn’t raised Christian, but I do practice Christianity now, which is also kind of a strange thing in my circles. But recently I was with a group of friends, all of whom have anarchist-leaning beliefs, and who are really spiritual people, and we got together and found a particular space that does a particular kind of worship service that works for us. It’s called Taizé; it’s a beautiful nighttime, candlelit, repetitive singing practice. And we got together afterwards to have dinner and talk about all of the things that we wouldn’t otherwise have space to voice either with other anarchist friends or other church communities that we’re a part of.

Something I was reflecting on in this space was, What do I do about the question of hope and despair?Especially right now—honestly, before October of last year, I still felt like I was holding onto hope as something I could practice, and something I could get behind. Since then I’ve felt more and more of the despair; looking at the world is really exhausting and hard and depressing. I’ve struggled since then. But I’ve come back to this question of faith—it’s similar to what you were saying about hope. I don’t know if “delusional” is the right word. It feels like I have to believe, in a time where believing that there’s something to work toward is extremely challenging and could even be misguided in some ways.

But the thing I was reflecting on with this group of friends, particularly about faith, was also how I have been able to tap into my own spirituality and my own sense of connection with the world around me and the divine by having faith in myself: having faith in the things I experience as worth following, worth listening to, and worth practicing. These are things that are really hard to put into words, and really confusing. I mean, I identify as a mystic. That stuff can seem really out there sometimes. But it is really what keeps me going in a lot of ways.

And similar to what you were talking about in planting an orchard, it’s also gardening and stuff like that which has given me peace and life and something to look forward to every winter. I live in Minnesota; every winter except this one has been really challenging. It’s just many months of frigid cold; the world is ice. But I know the plants are coming back! I know that I’m going to see new growth and new life, and that alone inspires so much hope for me. That’s something that, for now at least, I can really count on.

I love winter solstice. It’s not the coldest time of year, it’s the darkest time of year. It’s when the light returns and the cold sets in. That’s the pattern I think about the most. The sun starting to return does not make the world warmer—it’s a turning point, but everything is about to get worse.

There’s something to that practice of holding on—I’m not saying you have to be religious to find this. I’m not even saying you have to have a regular spiritual practice. But there’s something there that’s immaterial and not quite tangible, and that’s what’s beautiful about it. And we have so much wisdom to pull from, from the histories that exist in these traditions. And believe it or not, there are a lot of really radical and values-aligned people in the Catholic tradition, for example, that we can pull from.

And there’s also something to that long view of time, being able to pull from those histories and see the ways that people were dealing with the same kinds of repression from empire and persecution that in many ways a lot of us are dealing with today. I love being able to look at that stuff more, and personally, my politics and spiritual practice are deeply intertwined, because of this particular element of being able to pull from my faith tradition’s history and looking for what is worth fighting for, even when the whole world around me is telling me there’s not much left to fight for.

The other piece about despair that I wanted to bring into the conversation is accepting it as a natural reaction to the world we’re living in. My therapist is constantly reminding me, If you weren’t feeling bad about this stuff, there’s probably a bigger problem. It’s pretty natural to respond with despair when things are really bad. The question, then, for us becomes how to deal with that. Do we let it knock us down? Or do we look at it, accept it, and move with it, forward somehow?

MK: Or do we get knocked down and then get up again?

A: Exactly.

JA: I will use this as an excuse to paraphrase Baldwin, because this podcast is named after one of his books. He mentions the hypocrisy of the Christian world, as he called it. His own religiosity was complicated. I would say he was still a believer, so to speak, at the end of his life. But he was raised very Christian: he was a choirboy; his stepfather, who he would call his father, was a minister. And he said something like, Jesus said feed the poor, clothe the needy, and if you don’t do that, you’re not a believer. He was referring to how people in positions of power—politicians, high-ranking members of religious institutions—would use a lot of talk about what Jesus said we should believe in, the gospels.

I was raised Catholic, I was very religious up until a certain point, and then I told myself I was an atheist. This was when New Atheism was a vibe on the internet—I used that as a refuge, and now I take that as a lesson of things not to do. Because (with that Baldwin quote in mind) there was this argument that the New Atheists at the time would say: belief in and of itself is irrational. What comes with that is that they don’t have beliefs. They are just “fact-based” humans, they just follow logic, and if it’s not logical they don’t believe in it. I don’t need to ‘believe’ in science, because science is fact-based.

The problem is: do they still believe in capitalism? Do they still believe in patriarchy? Usually, yes they do. That’s a belief! Belief in a nation-state is also belief! It’s a social construct, the whole imagined community thing. That flipped it in my head. If your definition of religiosity is “having faith” in the sense of believing in something you don’t know for sure is true—by that definition they would also fit in that category. They have faith in capitalism. They have faith in American supremacy.

Now I’m in the mindset that people’s individual beliefs are what they are, and in communion and community there are different types of practices that I find very valuable. I personally am very inspired by a lot of Jewish practices. I don’t do them myself, but friends of mine do. Something about it I find admirable and inspiring is that after thousands of years there are still practices that are reproduced generationally, and the people reproducing them and participating in them may themselves have a thousand different reasons for doing so. They could be atheist, super-religious, agnostic.

That’s where I’m coming from in terms of defining oneself as religious or spiritual—it’s not that it doesn’t mean anything. It does. It’s more that I’m usually skeptical of those who say that they are reasonable, rational people. It’s very gendered usually (obviously). I question it because I don’t buy it—it’s that straightforward—when people say “be realistic.” Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is what I’ve got in mind here. The term being realistic is usually synonymous with whatever we think the status quo should be or will be. This is also inherently a form of belief.

A: I appreciate that perspective; it’s not something I’ve explored too much. It’s making me think about this blog post you wrote in 2017, Margaret, that we republished on Antidote, titled “Don’t Let Nazis Have Nice Things.” You talked about how important it is to defend cultural terrain, even and especially in places where we share common interests and practices. It’s coming to mind right now with the way that people react to religion or these kinds of spiritual practices as often associated with the far right. Like, Oh, Christianity is a thing for the far right—No! They don’t get to have that! That’s not where it started.

I’m just wondering how we’re doing since 2017 in defending cultural terrain from fascists, in your opinion. Where are you focusing your efforts right now, and what could we be doing more of?

MK: In my twenties and thirties I felt like I had my finger on the pulse of culture in a lot more ways, partly because I traveled full time, and I was constantly meeting new people and seeing how different radical scenes were handling things. Now I’m much more “specialized”—which is my nice way of saying I live alone on a mountain with my dog—and I work on the things that I work on. So in some ways I’m not sure.

But in other ways, there are a lot of things that I’ve seen. As things get very dire on the global level in a way that is penetrating the safety bubble of privileged people in the Western world (again, things have been very dire for a lot of people for a long time, and apocalypses happen all the time), I don’t think it’s a coincidence that religious radicalism and openly spiritual practices are returning to a space that, if it were to be identified religiously, would have been atheist (“the left” in general comes out of this European Marxist materialist thing that I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about).

Part of the reason that this is happening is because of a broader anarchic understanding that similar conclusions as anarchismcan also come from non-Enlightenment-European thinking. In the United States, it’s very influenced by Indigenous anarchists—a lot of Indigenous anarchists are atheists, but a lot of them are also like, Shut the fuck up about atheism.

I do this history podcast, and the most recent episode that I just finished researching is about the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. It was this wild combination of Irish nationalists who were interested primarily in Irish culture and poetry and thing like that, and a socialist movement. There were a lot of things that differentiated the socialist movement of the Easter Rising, primarily identified with this guy James Connolly, from the larger Marxist tradition that he was ostensibly part of. And one of them is he kept writing these essays that were basically like, Shut the fuck up, atheists. And he wrote more critical of the Church than he did about anything else.

But it was like the New Atheist thing is a hundred years old! It was like, Oh, y’all are dum-dums because you think there’s a Sky God. Anyone who has explored theological understandings is like, Most of us don’t think there’s a guy on a throne in the sky with a beard who throws lightning bolts.

JA: That would be cool, to be honest.

MK: I know! I’m not anti. Then we have a clear enemy. Anyway, Connolly was writing all this stuff trying to reconcile faith with materialism. Primarily it was a political thing. Primarily it was like, We don’t need you [the Church] to come in here. What we need to do is get the Protestants and the Catholics to realize they’re on the same side and end colonialism. At the end of the day, that’s what the Easter Rising was. Later, the Catholic Church comes in and says, Ah, we’re a theocracy! The Catholics are the Real Irish People. And it’s really easy for radicals today to fall into believing that. But most of the old radicals, the ones worth listening to, were all about people getting over their religious differences.

The other thing I just finished researching was—you mentioned Paradise Built in Hell and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I just finished an episode about Common Ground Collective, which was the collective that I would say spurred American mutual aid in the last nineteen years. It was nineteen years ago that Common Ground formed; [movement] has been influenced heavily by that. And people conveniently write that history as if the Black Panthers’ free food program wasn’t started by churches—or, in this case, the first medical clinic that the Common Ground Collective started was at a mosque, because Malik was Muslim and started it at the mosque he went to, and it was pastors helping anarchists and Panthers coming together.

This shouldn’t be left out of history, because it’s one of the coolest things about it. Not that it was religious, but that it wasn’t anti-religious. All of the people were saying, Hey, we can make this happen. We’re going to fight the largest institution in the world, the American government, and we’re going to fight the largest economic system that’s ever existed, Western capitalism. You have to have a certain amount of faith or hope in order to think that’s worth doing (again with the exception of the wild nihilists; full respect to them).

But the people who were willing to say that and do that were “wild-eyed.” They were wild-eyed coming from one background or another and there’s a lot of different ideological and theological frameworks that provide that to people, and some of them are Muslim, and some of them are Christian, and some of them are Jewish, and some of them are atheistic anarchist, and some of them are atheistic materialist Marxist. It’s not like all those things are samey-samey, but there’s a reason that group was called Common Ground. It was literally this former Black Panther, Robert King, who was like, All we need to do is find common ground.

Things opened up even more when I started realizing that I have an interest in a blurry and permeable barrier around my anarchism, so I can start seeing these broader struggles that may or may not have identified the same as I do. It’s been really interesting then to open that up beyond the past two hundred years that people have called themselves anarchists, and see the same patterns, and to know that I am part of these patterns, I am part of a great fabric of the world.

I feel like I sidestepped your question. How are we doing in terms of cultural terrain? I will say I think overall people have stepped up and not let them take European paganism. Overall it has proliferated that people are like, Odin is the Allfather not the Somefather, and Get your [Nazi] hands off those runes. Overall that has started to happen. I am interested to see how that will and won’t happen with other religious spaces. (Sorry to the listeners who are like, Oh, it’s another American lady just talking about America. But this is what I know the most about.)

One of the other things happening here is all these far-right evangelical Protestant white nationalists have all decided that they’re Catholic, because Catholicism offers the most rules and the most bootlicking. And then they show up, and they’re like, Wait, Catholicism is antiracist as hell! Again, Catholicism has a lot of problems; I’m not trying to become a specific apologist. But it is a very multiracial faith, and it has very specific teachings around taking care of people and not being a fucking racist.

So you run into all these “new Catholics,” these white Christian nationalists, who are like, What do you mean the Pope says that we’re not supposed to hate gay people? Even though Catholicism has a very complicated history with LGBT rights—but it’s fundamentally based not in hatred of gay people; it’s more like a condescending We love you but you can’t do that. And they want to come in with hate, and it’s not working, and they’re like, What the fuck? You can read all these threads from all these fucking Naziswho are very confused about the Catholic faith—for one thing, the Catholics voted against Hitler. Sorry, I research this shit way too much.

But I think that there is maybe starting to be a turning point: white Christian nationalism probably is not at its peak. It will probably continue to grow, and it will continue to make the majority of Christians look bad and be real sad (or a majority of Christians will join them, I don’t fucking know).

One more weird thing that I think about too much: I love winter solstice, it’s my favorite time of year. I have a weird thing where I love winter—to go with the topic of mourning, the grief that I feel is every time it snows I’m like, Is this the last time I’m going to have fucking snow? I am so grateful for snow. I live in the mountains; I don’t live in the north. But I love winter solstice. It’s not the coldest time of the year, it’s the darkest time of year. And it’s when the light returns. And the light returns as the cold sets in.

That is the pattern I think about the most. People are like, It’s always darkest before the sun rises. That’s not fucking true! It’s the worst quote because it misses what’s right there, which is that it is coldest when the sun rises. The sun starting to return does not make the world warmer, it puts in place the thing that will eventually make the world warmer. So when we’re at the turning point, it means everything is about to get worse.

That’s something I hold onto for hope: maybe we’re at this turning point. Which doesn’t mean shit isn’t about to get real fucking hard. That’s my rant.

A: That’s beautiful.

JA: We prepared questions, and we ignore most of them…

As I say, I grew up in Lebanon, and I’m from a pretty religious background. Most of my family are very religious; there are monks in the family and shit like that. One thing I tell folks, I only recently realized how unusual or bizarre of a story it is: I genuinely did not know until the age of sixteen or seventeen that the word Allah is the same word used by Muslims. I genuinely did not know that.

MK: You just knew it as the word for god.

JA: That’s it. When you say Our father who art in heaven we say the same thing with Allah in there. It’s just the word. There’s no different word for god-but-not-that-god; it’s just god. I’m reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger so I have a lot of her “Mirror World” imagery in my head, and for me one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever experienced, and it’s just gotten weirder since, is white Americans, especially evangelicals, talking about Jesus as a white guy. I grew up in an environment where he’s like, five minutes away. Like, my church is older, he could be a cousin. It’s a joke in many ways, but it’s also something that I felt: I needed to defend Christianity from Christians, because I had this different perception in my head.

The Levant is small compared to the rest of the world. The distance between where I grew up and what’s now Israel-Palestine is very short. You can miss it on a map. Now it’s very long because there are borders, but historically it was very short. And in my head it was just one of those things I took for granted until there was a violent clash: 9/11 and then the war in Iraq and all of that, framed very obviously by Bush and others at the time in “Crusader” terms. Then I remember being obsessed by the Crusades and understanding, You mean those people over there who came here to…

It’s all of that, and I was very disoriented for a very long time because I genuinely thought, for the period of my life when I was very religious, that the center of Christianity was actually here, where I was living. It brings me back to what I was saying before about What is belief, even? They’re saying Jesus was a white guy, or even if they don’t say so, the imagery is there as the default, normalized, hegemonic portrayal of Jesus—in Lebanon there are lots of Ethiopians who come as migrant domestic workers, and many of them would have pictures of Jesus, and Jesus is a Black guy. For me, that felt as “normal” as the Jesus portraits in our house. But when I saw the very white one, I was just confused. It was just weird, because I know what people from my region look like; I’m from here and these are my people!

I’m just confused by this different interpretation of things, and that’s what brought home this notion to me that “realism” is a social construct—as in, you don’t know that you have a belief because you’re acting as if it’s the status quo, just normal, the air we breathe. That’s what put these things in perspective for me.

You mentioned “hope is a discipline.” For me, it’s also a verb. Like how David Graeber would say anarchism is a verb to him. It’s something to do. Maybe sometimes I feel like I “have” it. But honestly sometimes—I’ve been doing this podcast for four years now, I started with the pandemic, and I would have conversations with other folks who were in different mindsets than the one I was currently in. They’d be talking about hope, or we’d be talking about solarpunk, something that we do a lot, or climate fiction, and I would be talking as if I was currently feeling it, if that makes sense. And I realized at some point that it’s not that I’m lying to myself if I’m feeling particularly depressed that day but I’m talking about something hopeful. I don’t see this as lying; it’s actually part of the practice of dealing with that depression.

Last thing is, there was a quote in a Lausan piece that I contributed to where revolution isn’t something that dies off, it just picks up steam elsewhere; you’re just picking it up where someone else left it, basically. That’s labor. That’s work. That’s something that had to be done for years. Just like with shifting baseline syndrome—sorry, for those who don’t know: usually the example that’s given to explain shifting baseline syndrome is let’s say three generations ago a fisherman would fish one hundred tons of fish, and that’s normal, and let’s say their kid starts fishing fifty tons of fish, that’s the new normal, so they forget that the previous normal was one hundred. You complete that logic, and we don’t think about the dodo, we don’t think about the mammoth, and so on. And at some point down the line, unfortunately (it’s very depressing to say), we may very well get to a world where the very notion of a polar bear is just not a thing that a generation knows anymore.

That’s a very hard thing to hold. But the reverse is also true. We take for granted the progress that has been made. We take for granted that today we live in a world where there can be trad-catholic women especially in the US who talk about how they want to be housewives (whatever, do your thing), but they do so in the language of choice—which is a language that could only have been possible through the work and labor of feminists and others. So they take advantage of that—they don’t recognize it, of course.

Meloni in Italy is the best example. God, family, and whatnot—if you follow that logic through, you should not be in that position. But it doesn’t matter, because as we see with beliefs, it’s really flexible. Whether they are a hypocrite about it or not—what I’m trying to say is I don’t think this is the framework that ends it all. In many ways, we’re all hypocrites, it’s okay. It’s going to happen, and it’s more important to recognize it and do something about it than to play this purity politics of who is better than the other. Because it usually goes downhill pretty quickly when we start playing that game.

Jesus was not an anticapitalist, because there literally wasn’t capitalism. He was opposed to the economic systems that were happening, and worked against them in ways that made sense and that don’t translate to today, because we live in a different world. He did what made sense to him in the conditions he was in, and we don’t have to claim him.

MK: Wait, you mean people are sinning? Only they’re using the word sin to mean this horrible thing that could never be erased from your soul, whereas, at least in the Catholic faith, you just deal with it, it happens all the time, and it’s not a big deal?

These are these moments where I’m like, sometimes people just decide to create everything from scratch, and forget all of this work that’s happened for thousands of years, and so we just recreate all these horrible problems.

There is a tangential problem with how we talk about how everyone needs to be pure; “The left will kick you out for one sin; the right will accept you for one virtue.” The really clever antifascists do the work of infiltrating the right and being like, That guy’s not pure! and get them to fight in that same way. That’s some black magic.

A: I remember the article you mentioned, Joey, and the sentiment that you’re getting at, that at any given moment there are uprisings and attempts at revolution happening everywhere. As people are very steeped in that work, it can be harder to look at the bigger picture of how amazing that is, and not get stuck in the [feeling that] Okay, we’re doing some cool work, but we’re not there yet; we haven’t toppled the regime, these zombie capitalist forces are still holding on! I still have to go work my job after we’re done with this interview. We’re not fully there.

But the amazing thing about getting to step back and look at that bigger picture is that we are continuing that momentum even as things get worse and worse. I think this ties in really well with what you were saying earlier, Margaret, about the light and the cold, the light coming back as the cold sets in. There’s a contradiction there—and I think there are a lot of contradictions in the things we are talking about, and in the framework that you use in that essay. Broadly, as people who are trying to bring about a new world in the shell of the old, all of these contradictions can be really difficult to hold, especially when we’re dealing with so much anxiety about the immediate worries like Am I going to be able to count on tomorrow?

That’s super real. How do I think about long-term work and finding joy when tomorrow feels really uncertain, when these immediate needs feel really uncertain? And there’s a privilege in knowing that I’ll be able to eat later—does that mean that I can’t also feel despair? The beauty of feeling connected to one another, around the world and to different social movements, even if we don’t completely agree with everything that other folks in other places or even in our own communities believe in, is that we’re a part of a broader, bigger movement toward things changing. It’s being radically different in the midst of everything falling apart.

So I appreciate the conversation of being able to remember that bigger picture, and have faith in it, so to speak.

MK: I remember the first time I really started caring about history was after I became an anarchist, because when I was a kid and I was being taught American history by some people who were vaguely good at it and some people who were very bad at it, I didn’t see myself in it. I was a white kid in America, so I saw my demographic represented all over the place, especially because I didn’t know I was trans yet. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about history, and then I became an anarchist, and I started being like, I am part of this tradition, and I started to realize that regardless of where people are born or what struggle they’re in, we’re all connected in this fight against authoritarianism and capitalism and all that shit.

Then I started being like, Oh, here’s me in Patagonia, and here’s me in Siberia! (“Me” is not literal in these cases.) Here are several Japanese women who tried to kill emperors and shit because they believed the same things I believe. Learning an ideological tradition started opening things up. And then things opened up even more when I started realizing that I have an interest in a blurry and permeable barrier around my anarchism, so I can start seeing these broader struggles that may or may not have identified the same as I do. I obviously don’t see myself among the Bolsheviks, but I see myself among the people who were not sure, and went back and forth; and I see myself in a lot of people who specifically identified with things that I would probably be in conflict right now.

But that starts to open things up, and what’s been really interesting is then to open that up beyond the past two hundred years that people have called themselves anarchists, and see the same patterns, and to know that I am part of these patterns, I am part of a great fabric of the world.

A: That brings to mind a chapter in a book by Cindy Milstein, Rebellious Mourning, a chapter about organizing in Japan after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear situation. They are talking about how there are all these anarchists who are making a mess trying to organize; they aren’t super coherent, they’re not figuring out how to bring things together—then they talk about the moms and the grandmas who are organizing their communities to test the water for radiation. I remember having this moment reading this: Oh, these are the people who are doing the true anarchist practice—and they’re not calling themselves anarchists.

That was such an eye-opening moment for me in my own political development. We can also look at the bigger picture. You don’t have to “believe” in these things or hold onto them as an ideology; it’s more about how you act in the world and treat one another. Of course the natural place to start is to ask who we have beliefs in common with and then look at the broader arc of history—there have been people everywhere, all the time, fighting to take care of their communities and love one another better.

MK: And we don’t have to claim them to celebrate them. We don’t have to be like, Oh, these are the real anarchists! You start running into Was Jesus a communist? Was Jesus an anarchist? I’m like, Jesus is a dead Palestinian man who did what made sense to him in the context he was living in. He was not an anticapitalist because there literally wasn’t capitalism. He was opposed to the economic systems that were happening, and worked against them in ways that made sense and that don’t translate to today, because we live in a different world. He did what made sense to him in the conditions he was in, and we don’t have to claim him. Jesus wasn’t anything! He’s a dead guy who was interesting.

JA: We do have to wrap up. But I wanted to ask about Penumbra City—and it came out today just as we’re chatting. Let’s talk about it a bit, because it’s also something people can do, which is fun. After that, Aydın, if you have any closing thoughts. So yeah, Margaret, tell us about Penumbra City.

MK: I am a co-writer on a tabletop role playing game called Penumbra City. You can get together with your friends in real life or on Zoom, and play this fun game where you make characters and run around pretending to be them, and roll twenty-sided dice and all that stuff. It came out today as we’re recording—we kickstarted it last summer and I’m really grateful and humbled by people’s interest in it. It is set in an alternate nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century world ruled by god kings, and you play in a decadent, collapsing city that has Weimar Germany vibes as various different gangs fight for power. You can eat mushrooms and talk to rats, or summon demons from other worlds, or ride a horse with a sword-cane, or run around with a sword and play-armor screaming about anarchism from a two-thousand-year-old tradition.

There’s lots of stuff you can do in the game! And it came out from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is the publishing collective that I work with. We tried to make the PDF affordable; the book itself is hardcover and embossed, and role playing books are expensive and we’re not sorry; we try to make up for that by making digital versions as affordable as possible.

How this all ties in to what we were talking about before is that I first started writing this world as a novel more than ten years ago in Mainz, Germany, staying at a Wagenplatz [autonomous trailer park], and I was bored and didn’t have a computer so I started filling notebooks with this weird world. And then this role playing game maker was like, Hey, we want to hire you to write a gameworld, and I was like, Great, I got one. And then I wrote fifty thousand words, almost a novel’s worth of words, about this gameworld—and then the publisher just disappeared. He had a different kickstarter that succeeded, but he didn’t successfully make the game, so he sort of disappeared.

So I was sitting around with this orphan work; I’d written this whole gameworld. And I’ve been on this page for the past several years where I’m not usually starting new projects now, I’m tying up all the ends. I’m doing the Swedish death cleanse but for my projects in life. Because I could die tomorrow! I hope I don’t, I hope I live another sixty years. But I found an amazing team of people. I am not a game mechanics writer, really, but my friend and co-writer Inmn has been working on it, and Robin Savage is the illustrator; Cassandra is doing all the design. We got an amazing team of people together to put this game out that you can play.

JA: Awesome. Listeners, do that!

Aydın, do you want the final word? If I start talking, no one can stop me.

A: I’m super grateful for this conversation. It’s been fun and I’m sure we could go for a very long time.

So yeah, as I mentioned earlier I collaborate on this website called Antidote Zine dot com, check it out, there’s something for everyone on there. If you are interested in helping us transcribe particularly podcasts from The Fire These Times, we have a page dedicated to those transcriptions; we post polished versions of them on Antidote and we’re also working on posting transcripts to The Fire These Times website as well. If that’s something you like to do, you can reach out to us at antidote at riseup dot net, and collaborate with us on making these lovely podcasts more accessible in written format.

It’s been a real pleasure to be with you both. Thank you for having me on too.

JA: This was really fun. Thanks a lot Margaret, thanks Aydın.

MK: Thanks for having me.