From what I interpreted of your message, our maturation calls on us to not just do differently and to not just know differently, but to be differently and to embody differently. So can you illuminate this further for us and share why? Perhaps learning new information and changing what we're doing might not be enough and that there is a deeper deprogramming and reconditioning that we need? Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements,Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism VA: In the book, hospicing is about offering palliative care to something that is dying—in this case, modernity—which means that you’re not investing in its futurity. You’re offering care that allows something to die with dignity, integrity, and compassion. You’re not trying to kill modernity, but you’re not trying to keep it alive either. At the same time, you are offering prenatal care to something that is being born out of this death, that is potentially—but not necessarily—wiser, without suffocating this baby through your own projections, nor assuming that this baby is coming through you either. Vanessa Andreotti: Exactly. Yes, you said it beautifully. I think that happens quite a lot if you're focused on form because you're also coming from the same desires, right? It's not in the book, this came out of something that happened through the book, but we're trying to think about what is intelligible as subjectivity and in terms of politics within the house of modernity. We mapped five different things that make politics intelligible. So part of my work, or maybe the focus of my work around the paradoxes of global and social change stems from having been born or even conceived in a paradoxical context where somebody wanted to change the world but also carried baggage, right? A cultural baggage where these hierarchies were being reproduced and the social violence was also being reproduced. So having been born in that context, I think I developed a sensitivity and a sensibility towards identifying the complexities and the paradoxes of social and global change.

One of the things I’ve learned is that when you are struggling with pain and difficulty, talking about it may not be the best thing you can do, but dancing with it can really help move it. So it’s about figuring out what we’ve been missing out on, what our bodies’ exiled capacities are, and then reactivating them, so we can begin undoing all the separation that has been imprinted and ingrained into us. That’s the spell modernity has us under, and that’s the work that needs to be done. This involves not only changing how we relate to each other, but also how we relate to ourselves, to language, to knowledge, to critique, and to reality itself. If you're involved in social activism, in walking on this tightrope, you have to walk with a bar of the weight of both rational rigor. But it's not just one type of rationality. There's the reasoning that needs to be rigorous, but the relationality also needs to be rigorous in this work. We talk about four “ages:” which is honesty, which is the ability to sit with everything; then there's humility, the ability to center yourself; hyper-reflexivity, which is about tracing where things come from and where they're going to and also how we are complicit in harm... Then there is the second theme which is exaltedness. This group needs to be above and great in a specific way, and this greatness needs to be reinforced by constant repetition of how great this group, activist, or party is. Then there is the externalization of culpability, which is this group is also innocent in some way. The empowerment of the ego and the expansion of entitlements are the two other things. So it's five E's: exceptionalism, exaltedness, externalization of culpability, empowerment of the ego, and expansion of entitlements. A politics that is based on decentering ourselves and on not communality, but commonality—and not commonality as in sameness, but as in sharing the commons, sharing a world and being responsible for it—currently is basically unintelligible and unimaginable, within modernity. So part of this maturity is actually shifting the waste that we've been conditioned to think about, [and] even, what is the work by the house of modernity and within the house of modernity, right? Part of this mode of consumption is also to consume what's pleasurable but to give us a sense of certainty of control, of authority, of autonomy, and a sense of arbitration in the world that is also connected with a sense of righteousness and gratefulness. So this mode of relating to the world is antithetical or is not conducive to us actually sitting with the proverbial shit that we have to compost together. It's not just individual shit that we have to compost, but also collectively, the collective shit that comes from the bad decisions that have been made in the past that has brought us to the mess we are in. Many people want to think about hope and the future as a better space, but this "better space" depends on what we do today, on us building our capacity to compost this shit, which is not necessarily a pleasurable process. So looking at how, for example, for societies in the Global North, we've had a bubble of prosperity for people who were born just after the war that were presented with certain promises of progress of incremental social mobility. For them, now in their 70s or late 60s, it's very difficult to understand why people who are in their twenties or late teens want to bring down monuments and statues. They're saying we need something very different. The generations in between are also being asked to do this role of translation and in mediating a little bit of this conversation.

This is an outstanding book—truly original and profoundly perceptive in its contents and arguments, and multimodal in its pedagogic approach. It examines a range of urgent philosophical issues about modernity and its deep contradictions, and the ways in which its inevitable demise might be steered toward more morally and culturally productive futures. It is a book that is not only thought provoking but also helpful in guiding genuinely worthwhile discussions.” For Indigenous communities, the teachings that are necessary for engagement with sacred plants are very rigorous and require a lot of discipline. Informed by these teachings, this book is a call for responsibility and for collective healing, as we face the demise of the house of modernity, a house built upon delusions of separation and superiority. I invite you to read this book as a ritual that can prepare us to do the work that is necessary to interrupt the harm humanity is inflicting on itself and on the planet.” One methodology from the book I will continue to use is, "The Bus Within Us," which the author describes as follows:

Kamea Chayne: And for listeners wanting to learn more about this, they can head to lastwarning.org. And the last thing I would love to touch on because I was personally so moved by it. I didn't know how much I needed to read this until I did, but you coauthored a book called Radical Tenderness, which it's quite short but so impactful to read that people can probably go through it within 10 to 20 minutes or so. But it's a part of the broader artistic pedagogy collaboration, engaged dis-identification and the collaboration attempts to translate post representational modes of engagement into embodied experiments that reconfigure the connections between reason, affect, and relationality.This is not a book meant to be consumed the typical way we treat books, but more a body of work that you will need to revisit. To me, it is more akin to a guide for collective ego death of Western culture as we know it - if that makes any sense to you. Understand the "5 modern-colonial e's": Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism I'm not sure the mix works, but I've been thinking about it for a while, which means it certainly had an impact.