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Episode 50 – The Paradox of Enlightenment with Lua Kamál Yuille
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What are the mental roadblocks to achieving a system that creates prosperity for all? We often talk about the neoliberal narrative on this podcast, but this week’s guest, Lua Yuille, peels the onion a few more layers to reveal the structure beneath the story-telling — what some may call brain-washing — showing us how our minds have been colonized and need to be untrained.
Our entire legal system is framed and structured to convince people that they are achieving or failing on their own. We frame certain types of support as supporting their initiatives. It’s deeper than storytelling; it’s a structure that exists to make invisible all of the ways the government props you up. If someone buys a house there are tax breaks for the homeowner. Estate laws allow you to inherit a house you didn’t pay for. In these ways you’re rewarded for being an autonomous individual (or being born to one). On the other hand, if you need housing assistance, you’re in public housing. It’s seen as largesse for losers.
You can look at any tiny thing that happens in your life and see the ones that are coded positively and negatively. The government has made those choices. The government makes itself undetectable by coding things positively, and it highlights itself – and the people are denigrated – by coding negatively. When we call some support “welfare” but call other kinds of support “breaks” or “benefits” we’re teaching ourselves to see these things in a divisive way. It makes it hard to engage with one another and find solutions.
Lua demands that we deal in actual reality. She says we need to engage in a clear-eyed process of “naming, claiming, blaming” — calling things out for what they are. We must understand the way economic policy itself shapes our brain and convinces us what is possible and what is not. When our conversation about policy includes the “pay for” question we’re training the entire nation to understand that the necessary consideration is “how do we pay for it?”
Steve and Lua use the latter part of the interview to talk about their own lives and delve into the complex questions of race and privilege. In the civil rights movement, Black people literally put their lives on the line because they felt they had nothing to lose. Will we reach the point where white people are willing to do the same? In a world of winners and losers — where very few are winners — what will it take for people to risk it all?
This is a fascinating episode that will add nuance and clarity to your understanding of our social, political, and economic crisis. It may be that nothing short of a revolutionary movement will free us.
Lua Kamál Yuille is an interdisciplinary scholar whose current work connects property theory, business law, economics, critical pedagogy, and group identity. She is Associate Professor in the School of Law and Core faculty in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kansas.
@ProfYuille on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 50
The Paradox of Enlightenment with Lua Kamál Yuille
January 11, 2020
Lua Kamal Yuille [intro/music] (00:03):
When we say, “have an insight of Modern Monetary Theory, create policy decision-making space,” the people who are going to feel the benefits first are the people who are least well-served by our present system. So we talk about white progressives who want things, and we need to speed up this process.
And I think that it’s terrifying. But what we don’t see is any meaningful way is people putting their physical well being on the line.
Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (01:23):
Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
Steve Grumbine (01:34):
And this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. Today I’m very, very happy to bring on my guest Lua Kamal Yuille, and she is a phenomenal, phenomenal speaker. I saw her at the Modern Monetary Theory Conference here in September in New York and the great Stony Brook where Stephanie Kelton is a professor and she is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work connects property theory, economics, business law, critical pedagogy, and group identity.
Her recent projects include studies of the economics and pedagogy of street gang identity and control mechanisms, corporate personality, and the communicative impact of citizenship, law and policy. Her career as a lawyer and as an educator has taken her all over the world from prisons in the Bahamas to board rooms in Argentina, homelands in South Africa to immigrant enclaves in Italy and more.
And with that, welcome to the show, Lua.
Lua Kamal Yuille (02:40):
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Steve Grumbine (02:44):
Well, I gotta tell you our talk before this was really powerful to me. And so I’m really excited about this conversation. We frequently talk about a Green New Deal and get very excited, and got rose-colored glasses, because we, as MMTers know that we can afford to do these great things. And then there’s.
Yeah, but there’s some roadblocks there. There’s some things there. There’s some challenges that we have to get past because everybody can’t quite get on board with this because there are certain ways people are cut out and there’s certain institutional areas that we have created that block us from being able to see the possibilities. And you spoke about this false claim of personal autonomy, the Ayn Rand makers and takers and the rugged individual.
Talk to us about that real quick. What is that all about?
Lua Kamal Yuille (03:42):
Well, I even think this goes further than sort of Randian narratives that might be picked up by the likes of lawmakers and the movers and shakers of the world to help people, you know, submit their cognitive dissonance. Our entire legal system is framed and structured to convince folks that they are doing it on their own.
We make sure that we frame certain kinds of supports that people get to make things happen as supporting their initiatives so that they can do things on their own. So I think it’s deeper than just storytelling. It’s a structure that exists to make people invisible all of the ways that the government supports you.
Right? So we can think about this. If someone buys a house, they get tax breaks, right? There’s tax breaks for homeowners. If you need support to get into housing, you’re in public housing. And one is considered a reward for being an autonomous individual who’s free from external influences and who is participating in the market like they should, and one is considered largesse for losers. And so it’s really deep.
And a lot of folks don’t realize just how much it influences, not just how they feel about policy ideas and progressive policy making spaces, but also what they envisioned as possible because whatever we want the government to be, we don’t want it to be engaging in work that promotes people being, you know, bad people, even the Progressives, right. We don’t want to promote piggy.
We don’t want to promote the person who sucks out more than they contribute. And that’s even right, if you are completely communitarian. And I think that all comes back to how we shape those concepts and present a legal structure to you that makes the support that you get from the government or that I get from the government be treated like it’s invisible and the support that someone else who has been considered an outsider to be highlighted, right? And now they have to do means testing, and they have to do drug testing so that you can get a French fry, but I get, you know, break after break and support after support.
Steve Grumbine (06:19):
How do we get those individuals’ voices into the mix? How do we begin building those kind of collaborative decision making, not just decision making, but how do we get inside the psyche of those individuals so that we can elevate all of us through this process?
Lua Kamal Yuille (06:37):
You know, I am a huge, huge proponent of, you know, actual reality. In US Supreme Court jurisprudence, they talk about different levels of review. Like how much scrutiny, how closely is the Supreme Court going to look at a decision made by the government in order to determine whether it’s constitutional or not.
And they have this version of that review that’s called strict scrutiny. And that means we’re going to look really closely. And they have a version of this review that’s called rational basis review. And under rational basis review, they’re like, if there’s any possible reason, any possible reason at all, that this could be lawful, we’re going to conclude that it’s lawful.
And I say, I don’t like any of these kinds of reviews. What I really want to do is have an actual basis review, right? And I think that that should apply to the whole world, which is ultimately a task of naming, claiming, blaming — saying what it is because when we spend the time to help people understand the ways that their mind has been colonized, the ways that the law itself, that policies themselves, right, economic policy itself, shapes our brains about what is possible. When we have conversations about economic policy and include the pay for question, right?
What we are training the entire nation’s brain to understand is a necessary question is how do we pay for this. When we call welfare ‘welfare,’ but we call other kinds of supports, breaks and benefits, right, we are training our brains to see these things in the divisive way that makes it hard for people to engage. And so for me, the first step, and I do this and people don’t always like it is to sit down with folks and highlight for them all of the ways, right, that you didn’t make that.
All of the ways that government sanctioned structures allowed them the quote, unquote “freedom” to make the choices that they made. And this goes all the way down to the market, right?
You don’t have a market if you don’t have a robust set of laws that allow that space to be there. And if we make it visible, you’re not going to win everybody by just making things visible. But you’re finally able to get a better sense of who actually would be willing to join the team because they’re engaging on your terms and in your language, instead of in this false language of lies, that says, what we’re really trying to achieve is, you know, independence and self-governance, because that’s not really something that we’re going to get to. And it’s not really something that we want, right?
We live in a world of interdependence. We wouldn’t need policies if we were Robinson Crusoe’s alone on an Island. So we don’t want independence. We don’t want complete autonomy. What we want is interdependence and figuring out and having conversations in those terms allows us to identify potential allies. And I think without that, we find ourselves in these spaces when suddenly the folks that we thought were allies, show that they’re not allies when it gets down to brass tacks.
Steve Grumbine (10:05):
That’s powerful. Can you help me unpack some of these things that we have been mentally, dare I say abused almost, that we have been manipulated into believing, like, for example, the terminology, specific terminology of welfare and such as some of these trigger words, these dog whistle words that have been put in there, that kind of connotate ne’er-do-good on one side, and on the other side, the deserving.
There’s like a real divide there. Can you help unpack some of that?
Lua Kamal Yuille (10:41):
You know, it’s not as hard as we might imagine when we know that we’re looking for it. And when we start from this fundamental concept and that is, there’s no place, there’s no sphere that is not already a regulatory space that’s not already regulated because even the space like inside my house, I am sitting inside my father’s house right now.
In every possible way you can imagine, this is a space where there is no government in the sense of there’s a lawyer sitting in here. So if the police were to knock on the door, I do what anybody is supposed to do.
When the police knock on the door, you don’t know this, now you do, you do not let the police into your house. You do not stand at your door with the door open. You step out of your house, close the door behind you and walk the police off your property while you respond to them. Right?
So this is sort of, can’t think much more of how there’s no government here, unless I was in a bunker and I’m not in a bunker, but even in this space, the government’s here, right? Because there has been a policy choice to not exercise regulatory power in all of the ways that we might expect people to exercise regulatory power. There’s been a policy choice of how we actually sanctioned family definition, right?
And so I wouldn’t have the same space and range of movement in say maybe a friend’s house versus my father’s house and a set of obligations that are there. And, you know, there is a default set of rules that if my father were to die without a will, that I would acquire his property and I would have to share it equally with my two siblings. Right?
And so all of our relationship is already organized by lots of policy decisions. So if we started, we realized that government’s everywhere, then it becomes really easy to see, right, wealth transfer. We talk about wealth taxes. We talk about inheritance rules. We talk about intestacy’s statutes – those are the rules that apply If someone dies without a will, right? All of that functions to distribute wealth.
And it’s distributing wealth from a person who quote, unquote “earned it,” to people who are sanctioned and recognized as their family members. And we don’t discuss that as government welfare — that’s government welfare. Because my dad worked, I will get money. Because my dad had a house, I will get money.
Because my dad acquired enough wealth, I get money. That’s welfare. But we talk about that as inheritance, and we just want to, we just want to protect and respect the decisions you made after working so hard for however many years it is that my dad will have worked when he passes away. Right?
But that is a choice for the government to transfer wealth from one party to another. It’s a choice for the government to have, we could — think about it. We could cancel that wealth.
Steve Grumbine (14:08):
Yes, yes we could.
Lua Kamal Yuille (14:09):
Right? In fact, if there were no people, if there were no family members, that’s what the policy says. If we can’t find any family member, your wealth upon death, escheats to the state, that’s what it says right? It escheats to the state, it goes back to the state. We could cancel it. We don’t. We choose to pass it on.
That’s welfare in the same way that we see someone who doesn’t have money to buy food. And what do we do? Some States that have the least regressive possible policies, Oh, we give you food stamps. We make a choice to transfer that wealth, right? And so you can literally look at any tiny thing that happens in your life. And you can see the ones that are coded positively, and you can see the ones that are coded negatively.
And if you realize that the government was making the choice, then you see in every case, Oh, this is the way that the government is made invisible by coding this positively. And this is the way that the government is highlighted and the people are denigrated by coding it negatively. This is the same thing with health insurance, right?
I am employed by a university. It’s a public university. So the state of Kansas where I am employed, provides my insurance. And we on ironically have a conversation that says that I have private insurance without joking. We say that I have private insurance, that I was able to go out in the market and get some insurance. And then the person who has Medicare, right, with a person who requires Medicaid, they have government insurance, right?
I don’t have private insurance. Nobody has private insurance. That’s not true. There are a tiny number of people in the United States who have private insurance, but in this country we have employer insurance. And since my employer is a government entity, I have government insurance, right?
But we don’t want to have those conversations cause I’m a good guy, right? Because I get my insurance from my employer. And so we pretend that I went into a market and I got that. Now I used to work for a big fancy law firm in New York City. So I don’t feel liberated by my university provided government insurance because the insurance provided by my previous private employer was way fancier.
But we pretend like I have a choice, that I’m making choices here. And we sanctioned those choices as autonomous choices because I am a fully actualized human; but the losers who need government provided insurance, we give them whatever they can take. And then we literally fight about who should be deciding which non-free decisions we make about giving me insurance.
For me, it all goes back to recognizing this first issue of the policies are made in the first place. Not in a sense of free decision-making, but they’re, pre-decided not fatalistic, but they’re pre-decided government decisions. But if you start looking at that, people will not be happy at first because you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The man did it, the man did it; but sooner or later, it becomes clear that, okay, the fact that the man did it, does it actually mean it’s bad or good? It means that I want to justify why I did X and Y and why that person should be treated as less than; and I, with my equally bad insurance, but you know, I don’t have shame insurance. It might not be great, but it’s not shame insurance.
And the person who’s being provided, you know, emergency aid in a hospital because they don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare is going to be denigrated about it.
Steve Grumbine (18:11):
You know, I got to jump in. This is amazing. You know, I frequently talk about how poverty is a political decision. And when I say that, I’m usually talking about the lack of spending. What you’re talking about is about seven layers deeper than that in terms of, you know, the way that government regulates things and does this, it has nothing to do with spending.
It has everything to do with the way the laws themselves are structured to basically paint the ne’er-do-goods into this role, because we’re trying to structure society based on a set of laws that kind of inform our world view. And it also penetrates the people’s psyche as well.
It’s not just a law that you’re breaking or gaining access from. It fundamentally changes how you think of yourself and how you think of the world around you. This is amazing. Keep talking. I just wanted to . . .
Lua Kamal Yuille (19:12):
No, I think that’s exactly right. Right. Like what you just said, fundamentally changes how you see yourself. It is to use big fancy words, right? It’s ontological and epistemological. It determines how you see yourself as a human. It determines how you understand the world. I think that’s exactly it.
And that’s huge because we like to act like these things and you know, this is the globalist, global elite, right? We like to act like these things are natural. We like to act like some stuff just happens. And while, you know, I’m not a botanist, right. I think that some stuff just happens with plant life, but in human society, most stuff just doesn’t happen. Right?
That individualized, the hyper-individualized experience might be, you know, impossible to predict, right. But the broader structure is there and it’s a set of decisions. And we train our brains to see those decisions in one way or the other. And it’s not about money, and we make it about money; and we make it about just desserts so that we can hide, you know, a whole set of who were the winners and who were the losers without any critical analysis of why certain folks are more likely to be on the losing end than other folks. And .
. . how, whatever ostensibly major changes we institute in a political system, ostensibly aimed towards economic prosperity for all, tend to wind up with the same folks on the losing end or the same folks, more likely to be on the losing end, and the same folks, more likely to be at the very top. We make invisible all of these decisions.
We train our brains to see things in certain ways. And then when the winners are always the winners, we say it’s natural. And when the losers are always the losers, we say it’s natural because they deserve to be there. So it is deep and sort of the process of decolonizing our minds, the process of regaining our consciousness is a long one. And then it becomes what you described as trying to talk to folks who are in, you know, different stages potentially of this process, right?
If you’re talking to the self-proclaimed Progressive, they’re likely in some stage of this process of trying to reclaim their minds from this training, and you might wind up at a hurdle, right. When suddenly they have some regressive thing, right.
So it’s, I want global prosperity for all, but Oh wait, we can’t have a job guarantee that would extend to the whole world because like then all of these people from other countries would flood in and how would we be able to take care of them? Let’s say, say, okay, okay. You might have some institutional like administrative questions that we would want to ask, but what is your instinct around this exclusive posture, right?
Why are you wanting everything to be scarce? Because you still buy in to the idea that there’s some inherent value in scarcity. That’s a part of the myth of autonomy, right? Because if you’re all individuals and we’re in this fight to get what we can and be independent and self-governing, we’re fighting over these limited resources and the whole process doesn’t work if there’s absolute abundance, right?
Because if we’re having an idea, this Randian idea, that looking out for yourself as good, and you’re the only one that matters and hedonism is a moral foundation, right? Hedonism is an ideology that is ultimately the right ideology.
It only works if you’re juxtaposing that against, if you’re comparing that to interdependence and you only need interdependence, right, in a world of scarcity. If there’s complete abundance from this position, at least, right, if there’s complete abundance, you don’t need to work together. Right?
And so in that case, everyone would be naturally independent. That’s in fact where they say, Oh, way back in our imagined history, it was every man for himself. And despite talking about Rand, right, you know everyone was a man in this worldview. It was every man for himself, right. And that’s the imagined history. And then suddenly things got scarce.
And we’re trying to reclaim our independence right, in this narrative. This is not at all a real historical story. Right. We’re trying to reclaim our independence now that the resources are scarce. Now that our population is so big that we can’t all have everything. And people only work hard and they only become good if the resources are scarce, right.
That’s why we want to make air a scarce resource. And that’s why we want to really “scarcify” water. And that’s why we want to make marriage a scarce resource, and people fought to the tooth so that we couldn’t have marriage equality in the United States and continue to fight to ensure that whatever the benefits of marriage are; and that could be debated separately, that everyone doesn’t enjoy them statewide. And you know, just like general scarcity – rights are no good if everyone has them.
So we got to make sure that Black people and Brown people and non-speakers of English somehow are burdened. So that when I have freedom, my freedom is valuable. That all is built in to that idea of the rugged individual. Like, right.
Like you’re only rugged if you’re triumphing over nature, but if nature just provides and the government just provides right, then you’re a dusty boy who is not worth being called rugged. And I use these terms, obviously in gest to illustrate, not because I talk like that in my private life.
Intermission (25:46):
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Steve Grumbine (26:35):
It’s funny you say this. I have listened to you and have been immersed in my own thoughts as you’re talking, which is dangerous. But as I listened to you, I’m mentally connecting dots. And, you know, I think to myself, I’ve been trying to advance as an activist, the concept of Modern Monetary Theory and the lens by which to judge programs and to understand finance for almost 10 years now.
And through that process, you know, various people have connected based on certain messaging, certain framing; but this whole concept of everyone trying to break free and reorganize their own mind and become disconnected from the matrix, so to speak, it’s just a very, very amazing thing to think about because this simplistic understanding that the government is the currency issuer that in and of itself should be very easy to understand. But there has been so many things said throughout the course of time, so many laws created, so many fake political theater bytes over fiscal cliffs and, you know, Obama, we’re going to have to eat our peas.
And it’s immoral to take out a credit card from the Republic of China and so forth. And these narratives have been played into our heads so, so deeply, it’s almost like the fear of, you know, if you’re not a good boy or girl, Santa Claus is going to leave you a lump of coal in your stocking and we’ve bought it hook, line and sinker. And you know, it’s kinda hard.
And as you break away from that, and you realize how many lies and how much gaslighting has occurred and how much intentionally structured programs, programs intended to fail so that they’re not seen as a viable alternative. So they’re not funded or structured in such a way that they produce long term benefits, it’s maddening. And I think that the curse of being asleep is that your impact then you feel hopeless to change it.
And the curse of being quote, unquote, “awake” to this idea is that now you know and you still feel powerless to change it. And it’s a maddening circle to be on. I’m curious, given that, how do you keep sane in a world that is obviously clearly trying to keep us insane?
Lua Kamal Yuille (29:03):
You know, you know, you’re gonna have to ask me that on a different day, cause I am deep in dystopia right now, but I think, you know, for me, at least the core strategy, right, because I live at the intersection of a lot of stuff and a lot of, you know, they call them multiple marginalities, right.
And so I don’t necessarily see lots of lights at the end of the tunnel in a lot of places at any given moment in history.
Um, and my, my present posture is, you know, frustration, desperation, anger, rage, all of those are real valid emotions. And I’m by the way, no expert on emotion. So maybe they’re not, but all of those are real and valid emotions. And if you engage them, you can really decide what the next step is going to be.
For me, sometimes being mad is just like healthy and good, right? Cause if you’re not mad at this stuff, if you’re not enraged, that means it’s not impacting you. Right? Sometimes I’m not enraged that there are children in cages and the moments that I’m not enraged, I realize, Oh, that’s cause my kids wouldn’t be in cages. And right now my children are so young that they are not likely to be targeted by the police.
That I keep them in a fancy private school where I can use the power of my dollar to ensure that they do what I say so that my Brown children are safe from the reality is that less fortunate Brown children might face at any given day. Right?
And so I get lulled into not being enraged by what other kids are facing. And then I get no, no, no, no. It’s good when I’m enraging. It’s good when I’m enraged, because that means I’m actually connecting to those parts of my community whose problems might not actually be on my daily plate and those are the moments, right? Like, and as well, those are the moments for me when I think about what is the action that makes it.
And sometimes it’s little action, right? And the platitudinous action and tomorrow my kids and I are going to a soup kitchen to do service. And I realized that that’s much more a part of building a culture of communitarianism rather than actually making any change. But then I also am able to actually talk to people who live with housing insecurity and live with food insecurity that I actually find myself within this university setting and go around the country, meeting with other academics and occasionally getting an opportunity to engage with real activists.
Okay.
But now I get to talk to the actual real people who are going to be most immediately benefited by the kinds of changes that I’m talking about wanting to make. When we say that, you know, MMT creates policy decision space, not MMT. Let’s be clear. When we say that the insights of Modern Monetary Theory create policy decision making space, the people who are gonna feel the benefits first are the people who are least well-served by our present system. And while I don’t see myself as being particularly well-served right, I have a house that I can live in.
I have food to eat regularly. I have a job. So I might not be well-served, but I’m not the least well-served. And talking to those people, which doing some of this again, I think it’s mostly planned to do this work does gives me an opportunity to figure out how I can most usefully channel this dystopian moment, right. And I also talk about things like, you know, I don’t know what I can tell you a lot about what the structure, the legal structure makes sense for a job guarantee to look like.
I can tell you how to structure that legally. I can write contracts that ensure that this is implemented in a fair way, if, and to the extent that we’re implementing it through a private market space. I can write laws that think clearly about the kinds of marginality that we don’t want to reproduce in, let’s say, a job guarantee, but I don’t know what the conditions of a good job are because I don’t spend my time, not for lack of desire, just our lives are organized the way they are.
Our lives are siloed and they’re siloed on purpose. Right?
I teach at a university and the university is structured to create hierarchies in which I don’t talk to the people who are cleaning the university. And not because I don’t want to talk to them, but because they are brought into the university right in the dark of night to clean it up. So I don’t actually see those people on any regular basis to get to know them and have conversations with those people about what it means to have a good job. And so having these sorts of conversations helps me figure out, okay, this is the work that needs to be done.
That I can take my frustration at any given moment, which is mostly there. I can reanimate my rage because I want to be in community with those folks. And then I could figure out what the steps are. And for some folks, the steps are, you know, talking someone’s ear off and letting people know and bringing that bearing witness and truth telling that I talked about to the table and other people have contacts and they’re like, I’m going to move into the government.
And some people are like, you know what? I make pies — first add people.
I make pies for protesters. But I think all of that is good. And all of that is necessary because if you’re doing your one little thing and someone else is doing their one little thing, we get to a point where people are realizing that everyone is doing something small and that if we built coalitions, we would actually be able to get real political change done. Sometimes I think that we’re in a moment where that could actually happen meaningfully today, but most times I think what’s most important is for us to keep slogging at it because there will be those moments when the change can actually happen.
Steve Grumbine (35:38):
You know, when I think of neoliberalism, I spoke with Scott Ferguson, who is one of the leaders of the humanities division of the Modern Money Network. And, you know, he talked about how we don’t just live in a neoliberal era. Everything is neoliberalism, every aspect of our lives is neoliberal and the entire ethos, the entire thought process of every synopsis, every single connecting point has been connected through the lens of neoliberalism.
And based on what you just said, it’s obviously that we’ve ingested neoliberalism in heavy doses, you know, high dosage of led kind of in, ingestation. I mean, we, we are completely filled with this faulty ne’er-do-goods fail.
Only the good people win. If you’re failing, then that means you’re bad. And we’ve got debt prisons. We’ve got all kinds of cash bail for people to show. So you’re no good. So you’re going to jail and we’ve got so many of these built in to our brains that it’s no wonder when you think about this centrist view of the world, how they think they’re going way left by just simply acknowledging people have a right to survive. They think that they’re really stepping out into the wilderness by doing that.
And when I think of a fair and just society, it’s so much further away from that center point that they see as center. I mean, MLK said: “be terrified of the centrist, the moderate, the white moderate in particular.” And I think that part of that plays into what you were saying. I mean, there’s a bunch of, I’m sure there’s a bunch of layers to, I don’t want to oversimplify it, but at the same time though, as we’re trying to change, it’s going to take a whole lot more than just progressive activists and left wing circles that are pushing the narrative. It’s going to take those folks that are in various stages, as you said of their awareness of their stage in life here and their process.
An somehow or another, we’ve got to expedite that process because if you are a believer in climate science, for example, you know, we’ve got a very short clock here we’re working against. If you’re looking at people suffering today as we go into these winter months, you think to yourself, poverty’s a choice.
And these people could die from lack of action from legislative perspectives. So the entire progressive movement, every day we slow play this people die from it. But the problem is, is that to get the kind of consensus we need to move forward, we’ve got to be able to pull the plug off the back of their head from the matrix and deprogram them, which is going to take an act of listening as well. Timelines, how do we mash up the very real existential crisis of climate change and this very real mental, psychological state of incomplete journey, if you will, in terms of being able to make the kind of changes we need to survive?
This is a bit terrifying to me.
Lua Kamal Yuille (38:45):
Yeah. I don’t want to seem like I’m coming out of left field, but it might and my potentially coming out of left field statement. But I don’t think at all is out of left field is like capital White, capitol People, White People. And why I say that is, think about what is now an opioid epidemic, right?
What happened in the context of the opioid epidemic? I think it’s great when people realize that our socioeconomic system is so messed up, that there are a lot of people who can’t survive the day without using drugs. That’s what it really is about. Our communitarian system is so awful that people need drugs, that people choose drugs to survive it, but that’s not why I bring up the opioid epidemic.
I bring it up because when finally white people were obviously ensnared, what happens? We have entire states who were standing up to figure out how to save white people. And so we talk about white progressives who want X, I just added white, right?
We talk about progressive as well. When we talk about progressive they’re white, right? And so we talk about white progressives who want things that we need to speed up this process. And I think you’re absolutely right. I think you’re absolutely right.
That it’s terrifying. But what we don’t see in any meaningful way is people putting their physical wellbeing, their life on the line. If you go back to the civil rights movement, Black people in America during those periods had nothing to lose. These were people who had houses. These were people who had jobs, but they had nothing to lose in the sense that our society was so problematic.
Things were so unsatisfactory. The idea that they had rights were so clearly not a real idea that people said this life that I have can’t get worse. Things can’t be worse, right? Being beaten on the street is the same as staying in my house and doing nothing. And that’s not to say every single Black person went out on the streets and was participating in the civil rights movement.
But there was a whole lot of people who put their physical being on the line because they had nothing to lose. Well, what we see today, right, is that, you know, during the civil rights movement, there was a really powerful piece of change, which was that most white people didn’t appreciate and understand just how desperate Black people in America felt their situation was. Right.
Well, today we’re at a point in time where we’re seeing that white America doesn’t actually care about the desperation of Brown people, right? And so what we really need to me is a bunch of white people to really and consistently lay it all on the line. And this gets back to this idea that we’re so infected by neoliberalism, right? Cause people are going to protest, but they’re going to protest with their chai tea latte and with their venti caramel macchiato.
And I’m not going to hate on you. I live in this space, this dissonant dialectical space of appreciating and enjoying, and the comforts of my life are provided by neoliberalism. So I would go to a protest with a grande caramel macchiato as well, right? Like I’m not critiquing that you like coffee with caramel, right. But you go to the protest to say we must change things with a $7 coffee.
Steve Grumbine (42:24):
Right.
Lua Kamal Yuille (42:24):
You’re not actually risking anything. You’re just yelling.
Steve Grumbine (42:28):
Yeah.
Lua Kamal Yuille (42:28):
And it turns out that white people love white people. And so when white people are at risk, things change. We have entire laws that exist because we thought, right, like our criminal justice system was revised on the idea that white women would be violated by these free Black guys. And we needed a whole sense of things, right?
We try juveniles as adults today in America. We only began doing that in the 1960s. Like after we’ve appreciated that children were children. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that we started thinking about trying juveniles as adults. And why did we try juveniles as adults because a Black kid in New York City who was deeply damaged and needed, you know, social services committed a bunch of crimes and the crimes he was committing left Harlem and moved into white spaces. And so we will do a lot to protect white people.
And right now we don’t have enough white people laying it down on the line and talking about climate change. And you know, we see climate change activists who are talking about things that feel far off, and they’re not showing us pictures of white people sleeping in their cars. And they’re not showing us pictures of white people in Flint who can’t have water.
Right? And so what we need are white people to make it real. What we need are white people to own it and to be willing to risk and to feel like they have nothing to lose. And that is such a challenge because white people have a lot to lose because white men or women, white women are white. And so they’ve got privilege.
And the idea of losing that, I don’t know, I don’t live in those bodies. I don’t live in those positions, but the back of your mind, the idea of losing that privilege and actually having to suffer during the growing pains towards something better, I think that that is a real challenge. But if we could get enough people, right, to get on the line and show: I am hurting.
I, white person, I’m hurting by this. When you put children in cages, you hurt white people. To me, that’s the change that the world needs: white people to own it.
Steve Grumbine (44:52):
I gotta tell ya, I’m going to stop you right there. I was a major victim of the global financial crisis. In fact, that’s what spurred most of my hardcore activism since then, and has created Real Progressives, our organization, and has really been the genesis for my interest in Modern Monetary Theory.
I needed to make sense of the pain and suffering of divorce and loss and the rules that put you into these debt traps that never let you out and mind you. I’m always mindful that I have it better, as bad as it is and those thoughts of suicide and those thoughts of desperation and those fears, you know, I kept it real.
I kept it raw and I would try my best to show that here’s this white guy, white dude with two master’s degrees that started into his Ph.D. Has a resume to choke a donkey.
And yet at the same time was one moment away from complete and utter destitution. So it was my wake up call — the privilege of being white, the privilege of having opportunities to screw up over and over again and get bailed out. And then you finally hit this point where there’s just nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to turn.
And again, I come from a position of privilege in the sense that I did get multiple choice, multiple options, multiple bailouts, multiple I’ll — “he’s ok.” Okay. In fact, there was one time back in 2002, where I was arrested for marijuana. And I was sitting there in a jail cell with these three young Black kids. They couldn’t have been more than 18 years old. And I had more than they did mind you. I was an older guy and it wasn’t like I was running around. I just used it for my own purposes, but these kids had a single joint and they were being held without any potential of getting out.
They were going to be held for three weeks to wait for the trial date. I was going to be released that night because I was a member of society with a good job. And I went to church and other, such things that, you know, and really at the end of the day I was white. And the weirdest thing is the commissioner was Black.
And I sat there and I thought to myself, as I went back into the holding cell and I looked at these three kids, they’re like, man, what’s going on? You getting out? And I was like, yeah. And they were staying for three weeks. I was like, what? We’re in the joint? Yup.
And I listened to the police, talked to him was so much different than how they talk to me. Everything was different from soup to nuts. I can only imagine how angry. Now they didn’t get angry at me. There was a kindred spirit in that tank, but there was definitely an incredible imbalance in treatment and an incredible imbalance in the execution of justice and ultimately incredible difference in terms of how they saw their options and how I saw mine. But the impact nonetheless here all these years later, it’s what coming into 2020.
I have never dug out. I’ve never been able to get out of it. And as a white person who wants to be an ally, who wants to help be a change agent, I’ve tried to lay these truths out there for people. And I’ll be honest with you. There are a lot of white academics.
There are a lot of white privilege people that don’t want to hear it. They want me to shut up and it makes them uncomfortable. I think that that’s a major challenge in the white community is to get over yourself. People are suffering and they tend to be a Black and Brown persuasion, but you know what, it’s coming for you. If you don’t stand for them, it’ll come for you.
And I think that that’s somehow or another has got to be made part of their psyche is it won’t change. You’re right until they’re suffering until there’s enough of them suffering. It won’t change.
Lua Kamal Yuille (48:43):
The crazy part, right? Is you are suffering, right? The fact you shouldn’t have to go, right? No one should have to go through the things that you went through, right? So people are suffering and people are suffering regardless of race, right? We have a socio-economic political system. Now I’m being completely Ameri-centric.
But if we were sitting in the UK or if I was sitting in the UK, I would say the same thing cause it’s true there. If I were in Italy, I would say the same thing. I can look anywhere in the world, but the question is the same. But now I’ve been very specific. My American context, we have a sociopolitical economic system that doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work in any scaled way, right? Some people are winners, but most of us are losers. Whether we’re losers in our pocketbook, whether we’re losers because of the narrowed, combative, social milieu that we’re forced to navigate, whether we’re losers, just because our moral compass can’t see north, we’re all losers in this system. So I don’t even want it when I say white people.
I’m not necessarily asking for more people who are white to suffer more. Right? When I look at extra judicial killings of Black men who are unarmed, I don’t want extra judicial killings of white men who are unarmed. So that we’ll fix police. I want the suffering that white people face to actually be brought to the conversation. And ultimately then when we juxtapose it against the quantitatively more frequent, the suffering of Black and Brown communities is of a greater degree; then when we’re able to have those conversations, we can really get people to buy in.
But I think it’s important to recognize that everyone’s suffering. But I also think, and this is sort of getting back to the beginning, obstacles to activism around these issues, right?
It’s really important that the folks who benefit the most, who are the poster beneficiaries of this system, it’s really important that they are at the forefront of the conversations about how it doesn’t work, but also recognize that their positionality makes it actually hard. Those kids who didn’t hold it against you, that you got out and they had to stay in because they recognize that this was an institutional and not a personal problem.
It wasn’t you, it was the institution that was going to treat them unfairly. I don’t know if they’re going to be on your picket line tomorrow. I don’t know if they’re going to protest because getting white people to lay it on the line and be at the forefront also risks — and this is another challenge — risks framing the conversations in ways that they’re not included, right.
And framing the conversation in ways that marginalizes the interests of those Black kids. Cause you know, what was the, even the context of their marijuana possession versus yours.
And I’m not saying I have no idea what the context, right? But the conversation and the realities that they face might look different and they don’t frequently get to be a part of the conversations. It’s a big challenge. But I think for me, the first step is to see and really get white people telling those stories, risking it, being willing to lose in the battle in order to win the longer term fight of revolutionary change.
Now I can really came out of left field, right? I just said revolutionary change because I don’t think winning an election is what we need. We need radical change for every single piece of our economic system, every single piece of our social structure.
And so we’re going to lose something, right? And it might be something that you didn’t expect, but probably is going to be a part of those things that are infected by the injustice that is ingrained in the system. And those folks who step up I think they also have to always be trying to be allies and try to make sure that there is a parallel, but also symbiotic relationship of various liberation movements, right?
Because the economic liberation of Black people doesn’t necessarily look exactly the same as the economic liberation of white folks. And there’s lots of movements, right?
Cause the economic liberation of the working class, isn’t the same as the economic liberation of the middle class and the economic liberation of Latin X populations or immigrant populations or Muslim populations, isn’t the same as the economic liberation of other folks. And so maybe another one of our, how do we get people moving today is to not feel beholden to the idea of a big tent because you know, it’s the quickest route to centrism that harmful most scary kind of political position because the road to centrism is making your tent so big instead of interlocking, right?
We want interlocking tents. We want tents that have permeable boundaries, but we don’t want a big tent because if you are everything to everybody, you’re nothing to everybody.
Steve Grumbine (54:16):
I get it. That’s absolutely amazing. Lua, with that in mind, I want to just thank you for taking the time with me today. Let me ask you how can people follow you, your work? I mean, the stuff I’ve read is just amazing. And listening to you at the MMT conference, you lit my mind on fire and this conversation here, it’s begging for a part two. So I hope we can get back together in the future.
Lua Kamal Yuille (54:44):
That’s awesome. You can follow me on Twitter at profyuille, or you can hop over to www.profyuille.com and see what I’m up to.
Steve Grumbine (54:59):
Awesome. So with that, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time with us today. This was really, really powerful. A lot to think about and look forward to talking to you soon.
Lua Kamal Yuille (55:09):
My pleasure. This was great.
Ending Credits (55:17):
Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patrion.com/real progressives.
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What are the mental roadblocks to achieving a system that creates prosperity for all? We often talk about the neoliberal narrative on this podcast, but this week’s guest, Lua Yuille, peels the onion a few more layers to reveal the structure beneath the story-telling — what some may call brain-washing — showing us how our minds have been colonized and need to be untrained.
Our entire legal system is framed and structured to convince people that they are achieving or failing on their own. We frame certain types of support as supporting their initiatives. It’s deeper than storytelling; it’s a structure that exists to make invisible all of the ways the government props you up. If someone buys a house there are tax breaks for the homeowner. Estate laws allow you to inherit a house you didn’t pay for. In these ways you’re rewarded for being an autonomous individual (or being born to one). On the other hand, if you need housing assistance, you’re in public housing. It’s seen as largesse for losers.
You can look at any tiny thing that happens in your life and see the ones that are coded positively and negatively. The government has made those choices. The government makes itself undetectable by coding things positively, and it highlights itself – and the people are denigrated – by coding negatively. When we call some support “welfare” but call other kinds of support “breaks” or “benefits” we’re teaching ourselves to see these things in a divisive way. It makes it hard to engage with one another and find solutions.
Lua demands that we deal in actual reality. She says we need to engage in a clear-eyed process of “naming, claiming, blaming” — calling things out for what they are. We must understand the way economic policy itself shapes our brain and convinces us what is possible and what is not. When our conversation about policy includes the “pay for” question we’re training the entire nation to understand that the necessary consideration is “how do we pay for it?”
Steve and Lua use the latter part of the interview to talk about their own lives and delve into the complex questions of race and privilege. In the civil rights movement, Black people literally put their lives on the line because they felt they had nothing to lose. Will we reach the point where white people are willing to do the same? In a world of winners and losers — where very few are winners — what will it take for people to risk it all?
This is a fascinating episode that will add nuance and clarity to your understanding of our social, political, and economic crisis. It may be that nothing short of a revolutionary movement will free us.
Lua Kamál Yuille is an interdisciplinary scholar whose current work connects property theory, business law, economics, critical pedagogy, and group identity. She is Associate Professor in the School of Law and Core faculty in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kansas.
@ProfYuille on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 50
The Paradox of Enlightenment with Lua Kamál Yuille
January 11, 2020
Lua Kamal Yuille [intro/music] (00:03):
When we say, “have an insight of Modern Monetary Theory, create policy decision-making space,” the people who are going to feel the benefits first are the people who are least well-served by our present system. So we talk about white progressives who want things, and we need to speed up this process.
And I think that it’s terrifying. But what we don’t see is any meaningful way is people putting their physical well being on the line.
Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (01:23):
Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
Steve Grumbine (01:34):
And this is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. Today I’m very, very happy to bring on my guest Lua Kamal Yuille, and she is a phenomenal, phenomenal speaker. I saw her at the Modern Monetary Theory Conference here in September in New York and the great Stony Brook where Stephanie Kelton is a professor and she is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work connects property theory, economics, business law, critical pedagogy, and group identity.
Her recent projects include studies of the economics and pedagogy of street gang identity and control mechanisms, corporate personality, and the communicative impact of citizenship, law and policy. Her career as a lawyer and as an educator has taken her all over the world from prisons in the Bahamas to board rooms in Argentina, homelands in South Africa to immigrant enclaves in Italy and more.
And with that, welcome to the show, Lua.
Lua Kamal Yuille (02:40):
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Steve Grumbine (02:44):
Well, I gotta tell you our talk before this was really powerful to me. And so I’m really excited about this conversation. We frequently talk about a Green New Deal and get very excited, and got rose-colored glasses, because we, as MMTers know that we can afford to do these great things. And then there’s.
Yeah, but there’s some roadblocks there. There’s some things there. There’s some challenges that we have to get past because everybody can’t quite get on board with this because there are certain ways people are cut out and there’s certain institutional areas that we have created that block us from being able to see the possibilities. And you spoke about this false claim of personal autonomy, the Ayn Rand makers and takers and the rugged individual.
Talk to us about that real quick. What is that all about?
Lua Kamal Yuille (03:42):
Well, I even think this goes further than sort of Randian narratives that might be picked up by the likes of lawmakers and the movers and shakers of the world to help people, you know, submit their cognitive dissonance. Our entire legal system is framed and structured to convince folks that they are doing it on their own.
We make sure that we frame certain kinds of supports that people get to make things happen as supporting their initiatives so that they can do things on their own. So I think it’s deeper than just storytelling. It’s a structure that exists to make people invisible all of the ways that the government supports you.
Right? So we can think about this. If someone buys a house, they get tax breaks, right? There’s tax breaks for homeowners. If you need support to get into housing, you’re in public housing. And one is considered a reward for being an autonomous individual who’s free from external influences and who is participating in the market like they should, and one is considered largesse for losers. And so it’s really deep.
And a lot of folks don’t realize just how much it influences, not just how they feel about policy ideas and progressive policy making spaces, but also what they envisioned as possible because whatever we want the government to be, we don’t want it to be engaging in work that promotes people being, you know, bad people, even the Progressives, right. We don’t want to promote piggy.
We don’t want to promote the person who sucks out more than they contribute. And that’s even right, if you are completely communitarian. And I think that all comes back to how we shape those concepts and present a legal structure to you that makes the support that you get from the government or that I get from the government be treated like it’s invisible and the support that someone else who has been considered an outsider to be highlighted, right? And now they have to do means testing, and they have to do drug testing so that you can get a French fry, but I get, you know, break after break and support after support.
Steve Grumbine (06:19):
How do we get those individuals’ voices into the mix? How do we begin building those kind of collaborative decision making, not just decision making, but how do we get inside the psyche of those individuals so that we can elevate all of us through this process?
Lua Kamal Yuille (06:37):
You know, I am a huge, huge proponent of, you know, actual reality. In US Supreme Court jurisprudence, they talk about different levels of review. Like how much scrutiny, how closely is the Supreme Court going to look at a decision made by the government in order to determine whether it’s constitutional or not.
And they have this version of that review that’s called strict scrutiny. And that means we’re going to look really closely. And they have a version of this review that’s called rational basis review. And under rational basis review, they’re like, if there’s any possible reason, any possible reason at all, that this could be lawful, we’re going to conclude that it’s lawful.
And I say, I don’t like any of these kinds of reviews. What I really want to do is have an actual basis review, right? And I think that that should apply to the whole world, which is ultimately a task of naming, claiming, blaming — saying what it is because when we spend the time to help people understand the ways that their mind has been colonized, the ways that the law itself, that policies themselves, right, economic policy itself, shapes our brains about what is possible. When we have conversations about economic policy and include the pay for question, right?
What we are training the entire nation’s brain to understand is a necessary question is how do we pay for this. When we call welfare ‘welfare,’ but we call other kinds of supports, breaks and benefits, right, we are training our brains to see these things in the divisive way that makes it hard for people to engage. And so for me, the first step, and I do this and people don’t always like it is to sit down with folks and highlight for them all of the ways, right, that you didn’t make that.
All of the ways that government sanctioned structures allowed them the quote, unquote “freedom” to make the choices that they made. And this goes all the way down to the market, right?
You don’t have a market if you don’t have a robust set of laws that allow that space to be there. And if we make it visible, you’re not going to win everybody by just making things visible. But you’re finally able to get a better sense of who actually would be willing to join the team because they’re engaging on your terms and in your language, instead of in this false language of lies, that says, what we’re really trying to achieve is, you know, independence and self-governance, because that’s not really something that we’re going to get to. And it’s not really something that we want, right?
We live in a world of interdependence. We wouldn’t need policies if we were Robinson Crusoe’s alone on an Island. So we don’t want independence. We don’t want complete autonomy. What we want is interdependence and figuring out and having conversations in those terms allows us to identify potential allies. And I think without that, we find ourselves in these spaces when suddenly the folks that we thought were allies, show that they’re not allies when it gets down to brass tacks.
Steve Grumbine (10:05):
That’s powerful. Can you help me unpack some of these things that we have been mentally, dare I say abused almost, that we have been manipulated into believing, like, for example, the terminology, specific terminology of welfare and such as some of these trigger words, these dog whistle words that have been put in there, that kind of connotate ne’er-do-good on one side, and on the other side, the deserving.
There’s like a real divide there. Can you help unpack some of that?
Lua Kamal Yuille (10:41):
You know, it’s not as hard as we might imagine when we know that we’re looking for it. And when we start from this fundamental concept and that is, there’s no place, there’s no sphere that is not already a regulatory space that’s not already regulated because even the space like inside my house, I am sitting inside my father’s house right now.
In every possible way you can imagine, this is a space where there is no government in the sense of there’s a lawyer sitting in here. So if the police were to knock on the door, I do what anybody is supposed to do.
When the police knock on the door, you don’t know this, now you do, you do not let the police into your house. You do not stand at your door with the door open. You step out of your house, close the door behind you and walk the police off your property while you respond to them. Right?
So this is sort of, can’t think much more of how there’s no government here, unless I was in a bunker and I’m not in a bunker, but even in this space, the government’s here, right? Because there has been a policy choice to not exercise regulatory power in all of the ways that we might expect people to exercise regulatory power. There’s been a policy choice of how we actually sanctioned family definition, right?
And so I wouldn’t have the same space and range of movement in say maybe a friend’s house versus my father’s house and a set of obligations that are there. And, you know, there is a default set of rules that if my father were to die without a will, that I would acquire his property and I would have to share it equally with my two siblings. Right?
And so all of our relationship is already organized by lots of policy decisions. So if we started, we realized that government’s everywhere, then it becomes really easy to see, right, wealth transfer. We talk about wealth taxes. We talk about inheritance rules. We talk about intestacy’s statutes – those are the rules that apply If someone dies without a will, right? All of that functions to distribute wealth.
And it’s distributing wealth from a person who quote, unquote “earned it,” to people who are sanctioned and recognized as their family members. And we don’t discuss that as government welfare — that’s government welfare. Because my dad worked, I will get money. Because my dad had a house, I will get money.
Because my dad acquired enough wealth, I get money. That’s welfare. But we talk about that as inheritance, and we just want to, we just want to protect and respect the decisions you made after working so hard for however many years it is that my dad will have worked when he passes away. Right?
But that is a choice for the government to transfer wealth from one party to another. It’s a choice for the government to have, we could — think about it. We could cancel that wealth.
Steve Grumbine (14:08):
Yes, yes we could.
Lua Kamal Yuille (14:09):
Right? In fact, if there were no people, if there were no family members, that’s what the policy says. If we can’t find any family member, your wealth upon death, escheats to the state, that’s what it says right? It escheats to the state, it goes back to the state. We could cancel it. We don’t. We choose to pass it on.
That’s welfare in the same way that we see someone who doesn’t have money to buy food. And what do we do? Some States that have the least regressive possible policies, Oh, we give you food stamps. We make a choice to transfer that wealth, right? And so you can literally look at any tiny thing that happens in your life. And you can see the ones that are coded positively, and you can see the ones that are coded negatively.
And if you realize that the government was making the choice, then you see in every case, Oh, this is the way that the government is made invisible by coding this positively. And this is the way that the government is highlighted and the people are denigrated by coding it negatively. This is the same thing with health insurance, right?
I am employed by a university. It’s a public university. So the state of Kansas where I am employed, provides my insurance. And we on ironically have a conversation that says that I have private insurance without joking. We say that I have private insurance, that I was able to go out in the market and get some insurance. And then the person who has Medicare, right, with a person who requires Medicaid, they have government insurance, right?
I don’t have private insurance. Nobody has private insurance. That’s not true. There are a tiny number of people in the United States who have private insurance, but in this country we have employer insurance. And since my employer is a government entity, I have government insurance, right?
But we don’t want to have those conversations cause I’m a good guy, right? Because I get my insurance from my employer. And so we pretend that I went into a market and I got that. Now I used to work for a big fancy law firm in New York City. So I don’t feel liberated by my university provided government insurance because the insurance provided by my previous private employer was way fancier.
But we pretend like I have a choice, that I’m making choices here. And we sanctioned those choices as autonomous choices because I am a fully actualized human; but the losers who need government provided insurance, we give them whatever they can take. And then we literally fight about who should be deciding which non-free decisions we make about giving me insurance.
For me, it all goes back to recognizing this first issue of the policies are made in the first place. Not in a sense of free decision-making, but they’re, pre-decided not fatalistic, but they’re pre-decided government decisions. But if you start looking at that, people will not be happy at first because you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
The man did it, the man did it; but sooner or later, it becomes clear that, okay, the fact that the man did it, does it actually mean it’s bad or good? It means that I want to justify why I did X and Y and why that person should be treated as less than; and I, with my equally bad insurance, but you know, I don’t have shame insurance. It might not be great, but it’s not shame insurance.
And the person who’s being provided, you know, emergency aid in a hospital because they don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare is going to be denigrated about it.
Steve Grumbine (18:11):
You know, I got to jump in. This is amazing. You know, I frequently talk about how poverty is a political decision. And when I say that, I’m usually talking about the lack of spending. What you’re talking about is about seven layers deeper than that in terms of, you know, the way that government regulates things and does this, it has nothing to do with spending.
It has everything to do with the way the laws themselves are structured to basically paint the ne’er-do-goods into this role, because we’re trying to structure society based on a set of laws that kind of inform our world view. And it also penetrates the people’s psyche as well.
It’s not just a law that you’re breaking or gaining access from. It fundamentally changes how you think of yourself and how you think of the world around you. This is amazing. Keep talking. I just wanted to . . .
Lua Kamal Yuille (19:12):
No, I think that’s exactly right. Right. Like what you just said, fundamentally changes how you see yourself. It is to use big fancy words, right? It’s ontological and epistemological. It determines how you see yourself as a human. It determines how you understand the world. I think that’s exactly it.
And that’s huge because we like to act like these things and you know, this is the globalist, global elite, right? We like to act like these things are natural. We like to act like some stuff just happens. And while, you know, I’m not a botanist, right. I think that some stuff just happens with plant life, but in human society, most stuff just doesn’t happen. Right?
That individualized, the hyper-individualized experience might be, you know, impossible to predict, right. But the broader structure is there and it’s a set of decisions. And we train our brains to see those decisions in one way or the other. And it’s not about money, and we make it about money; and we make it about just desserts so that we can hide, you know, a whole set of who were the winners and who were the losers without any critical analysis of why certain folks are more likely to be on the losing end than other folks. And .
. . how, whatever ostensibly major changes we institute in a political system, ostensibly aimed towards economic prosperity for all, tend to wind up with the same folks on the losing end or the same folks, more likely to be on the losing end, and the same folks, more likely to be at the very top. We make invisible all of these decisions.
We train our brains to see things in certain ways. And then when the winners are always the winners, we say it’s natural. And when the losers are always the losers, we say it’s natural because they deserve to be there. So it is deep and sort of the process of decolonizing our minds, the process of regaining our consciousness is a long one. And then it becomes what you described as trying to talk to folks who are in, you know, different stages potentially of this process, right?
If you’re talking to the self-proclaimed Progressive, they’re likely in some stage of this process of trying to reclaim their minds from this training, and you might wind up at a hurdle, right. When suddenly they have some regressive thing, right.
So it’s, I want global prosperity for all, but Oh wait, we can’t have a job guarantee that would extend to the whole world because like then all of these people from other countries would flood in and how would we be able to take care of them? Let’s say, say, okay, okay. You might have some institutional like administrative questions that we would want to ask, but what is your instinct around this exclusive posture, right?
Why are you wanting everything to be scarce? Because you still buy in to the idea that there’s some inherent value in scarcity. That’s a part of the myth of autonomy, right? Because if you’re all individuals and we’re in this fight to get what we can and be independent and self-governing, we’re fighting over these limited resources and the whole process doesn’t work if there’s absolute abundance, right?
Because if we’re having an idea, this Randian idea, that looking out for yourself as good, and you’re the only one that matters and hedonism is a moral foundation, right? Hedonism is an ideology that is ultimately the right ideology.
It only works if you’re juxtaposing that against, if you’re comparing that to interdependence and you only need interdependence, right, in a world of scarcity. If there’s complete abundance from this position, at least, right, if there’s complete abundance, you don’t need to work together. Right?
And so in that case, everyone would be naturally independent. That’s in fact where they say, Oh, way back in our imagined history, it was every man for himself. And despite talking about Rand, right, you know everyone was a man in this worldview. It was every man for himself, right. And that’s the imagined history. And then suddenly things got scarce.
And we’re trying to reclaim our independence right, in this narrative. This is not at all a real historical story. Right. We’re trying to reclaim our independence now that the resources are scarce. Now that our population is so big that we can’t all have everything. And people only work hard and they only become good if the resources are scarce, right.
That’s why we want to make air a scarce resource. And that’s why we want to really “scarcify” water. And that’s why we want to make marriage a scarce resource, and people fought to the tooth so that we couldn’t have marriage equality in the United States and continue to fight to ensure that whatever the benefits of marriage are; and that could be debated separately, that everyone doesn’t enjoy them statewide. And you know, just like general scarcity – rights are no good if everyone has them.
So we got to make sure that Black people and Brown people and non-speakers of English somehow are burdened. So that when I have freedom, my freedom is valuable. That all is built in to that idea of the rugged individual. Like, right.
Like you’re only rugged if you’re triumphing over nature, but if nature just provides and the government just provides right, then you’re a dusty boy who is not worth being called rugged. And I use these terms, obviously in gest to illustrate, not because I talk like that in my private life.
Intermission (25:46):
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Steve Grumbine (26:35):
It’s funny you say this. I have listened to you and have been immersed in my own thoughts as you’re talking, which is dangerous. But as I listened to you, I’m mentally connecting dots. And, you know, I think to myself, I’ve been trying to advance as an activist, the concept of Modern Monetary Theory and the lens by which to judge programs and to understand finance for almost 10 years now.
And through that process, you know, various people have connected based on certain messaging, certain framing; but this whole concept of everyone trying to break free and reorganize their own mind and become disconnected from the matrix, so to speak, it’s just a very, very amazing thing to think about because this simplistic understanding that the government is the currency issuer that in and of itself should be very easy to understand. But there has been so many things said throughout the course of time, so many laws created, so many fake political theater bytes over fiscal cliffs and, you know, Obama, we’re going to have to eat our peas.
And it’s immoral to take out a credit card from the Republic of China and so forth. And these narratives have been played into our heads so, so deeply, it’s almost like the fear of, you know, if you’re not a good boy or girl, Santa Claus is going to leave you a lump of coal in your stocking and we’ve bought it hook, line and sinker. And you know, it’s kinda hard.
And as you break away from that, and you realize how many lies and how much gaslighting has occurred and how much intentionally structured programs, programs intended to fail so that they’re not seen as a viable alternative. So they’re not funded or structured in such a way that they produce long term benefits, it’s maddening. And I think that the curse of being asleep is that your impact then you feel hopeless to change it.
And the curse of being quote, unquote, “awake” to this idea is that now you know and you still feel powerless to change it. And it’s a maddening circle to be on. I’m curious, given that, how do you keep sane in a world that is obviously clearly trying to keep us insane?
Lua Kamal Yuille (29:03):
You know, you know, you’re gonna have to ask me that on a different day, cause I am deep in dystopia right now, but I think, you know, for me, at least the core strategy, right, because I live at the intersection of a lot of stuff and a lot of, you know, they call them multiple marginalities, right.
And so I don’t necessarily see lots of lights at the end of the tunnel in a lot of places at any given moment in history.
Um, and my, my present posture is, you know, frustration, desperation, anger, rage, all of those are real valid emotions. And I’m by the way, no expert on emotion. So maybe they’re not, but all of those are real and valid emotions. And if you engage them, you can really decide what the next step is going to be.
For me, sometimes being mad is just like healthy and good, right? Cause if you’re not mad at this stuff, if you’re not enraged, that means it’s not impacting you. Right? Sometimes I’m not enraged that there are children in cages and the moments that I’m not enraged, I realize, Oh, that’s cause my kids wouldn’t be in cages. And right now my children are so young that they are not likely to be targeted by the police.
That I keep them in a fancy private school where I can use the power of my dollar to ensure that they do what I say so that my Brown children are safe from the reality is that less fortunate Brown children might face at any given day. Right?
And so I get lulled into not being enraged by what other kids are facing. And then I get no, no, no, no. It’s good when I’m enraging. It’s good when I’m enraged, because that means I’m actually connecting to those parts of my community whose problems might not actually be on my daily plate and those are the moments, right? Like, and as well, those are the moments for me when I think about what is the action that makes it.
And sometimes it’s little action, right? And the platitudinous action and tomorrow my kids and I are going to a soup kitchen to do service. And I realized that that’s much more a part of building a culture of communitarianism rather than actually making any change. But then I also am able to actually talk to people who live with housing insecurity and live with food insecurity that I actually find myself within this university setting and go around the country, meeting with other academics and occasionally getting an opportunity to engage with real activists.
Okay.
But now I get to talk to the actual real people who are going to be most immediately benefited by the kinds of changes that I’m talking about wanting to make. When we say that, you know, MMT creates policy decision space, not MMT. Let’s be clear. When we say that the insights of Modern Monetary Theory create policy decision making space, the people who are gonna feel the benefits first are the people who are least well-served by our present system. And while I don’t see myself as being particularly well-served right, I have a house that I can live in.
I have food to eat regularly. I have a job. So I might not be well-served, but I’m not the least well-served. And talking to those people, which doing some of this again, I think it’s mostly planned to do this work does gives me an opportunity to figure out how I can most usefully channel this dystopian moment, right. And I also talk about things like, you know, I don’t know what I can tell you a lot about what the structure, the legal structure makes sense for a job guarantee to look like.
I can tell you how to structure that legally. I can write contracts that ensure that this is implemented in a fair way, if, and to the extent that we’re implementing it through a private market space. I can write laws that think clearly about the kinds of marginality that we don’t want to reproduce in, let’s say, a job guarantee, but I don’t know what the conditions of a good job are because I don’t spend my time, not for lack of desire, just our lives are organized the way they are.
Our lives are siloed and they’re siloed on purpose. Right?
I teach at a university and the university is structured to create hierarchies in which I don’t talk to the people who are cleaning the university. And not because I don’t want to talk to them, but because they are brought into the university right in the dark of night to clean it up. So I don’t actually see those people on any regular basis to get to know them and have conversations with those people about what it means to have a good job. And so having these sorts of conversations helps me figure out, okay, this is the work that needs to be done.
That I can take my frustration at any given moment, which is mostly there. I can reanimate my rage because I want to be in community with those folks. And then I could figure out what the steps are. And for some folks, the steps are, you know, talking someone’s ear off and letting people know and bringing that bearing witness and truth telling that I talked about to the table and other people have contacts and they’re like, I’m going to move into the government.
And some people are like, you know what? I make pies — first add people.
I make pies for protesters. But I think all of that is good. And all of that is necessary because if you’re doing your one little thing and someone else is doing their one little thing, we get to a point where people are realizing that everyone is doing something small and that if we built coalitions, we would actually be able to get real political change done. Sometimes I think that we’re in a moment where that could actually happen meaningfully today, but most times I think what’s most important is for us to keep slogging at it because there will be those moments when the change can actually happen.
Steve Grumbine (35:38):
You know, when I think of neoliberalism, I spoke with Scott Ferguson, who is one of the leaders of the humanities division of the Modern Money Network. And, you know, he talked about how we don’t just live in a neoliberal era. Everything is neoliberalism, every aspect of our lives is neoliberal and the entire ethos, the entire thought process of every synopsis, every single connecting point has been connected through the lens of neoliberalism.
And based on what you just said, it’s obviously that we’ve ingested neoliberalism in heavy doses, you know, high dosage of led kind of in, ingestation. I mean, we, we are completely filled with this faulty ne’er-do-goods fail.
Only the good people win. If you’re failing, then that means you’re bad. And we’ve got debt prisons. We’ve got all kinds of cash bail for people to show. So you’re no good. So you’re going to jail and we’ve got so many of these built in to our brains that it’s no wonder when you think about this centrist view of the world, how they think they’re going way left by just simply acknowledging people have a right to survive. They think that they’re really stepping out into the wilderness by doing that.
And when I think of a fair and just society, it’s so much further away from that center point that they see as center. I mean, MLK said: “be terrified of the centrist, the moderate, the white moderate in particular.” And I think that part of that plays into what you were saying. I mean, there’s a bunch of, I’m sure there’s a bunch of layers to, I don’t want to oversimplify it, but at the same time though, as we’re trying to change, it’s going to take a whole lot more than just progressive activists and left wing circles that are pushing the narrative. It’s going to take those folks that are in various stages, as you said of their awareness of their stage in life here and their process.
An somehow or another, we’ve got to expedite that process because if you are a believer in climate science, for example, you know, we’ve got a very short clock here we’re working against. If you’re looking at people suffering today as we go into these winter months, you think to yourself, poverty’s a choice.
And these people could die from lack of action from legislative perspectives. So the entire progressive movement, every day we slow play this people die from it. But the problem is, is that to get the kind of consensus we need to move forward, we’ve got to be able to pull the plug off the back of their head from the matrix and deprogram them, which is going to take an act of listening as well. Timelines, how do we mash up the very real existential crisis of climate change and this very real mental, psychological state of incomplete journey, if you will, in terms of being able to make the kind of changes we need to survive?
This is a bit terrifying to me.
Lua Kamal Yuille (38:45):
Yeah. I don’t want to seem like I’m coming out of left field, but it might and my potentially coming out of left field statement. But I don’t think at all is out of left field is like capital White, capitol People, White People. And why I say that is, think about what is now an opioid epidemic, right?
What happened in the context of the opioid epidemic? I think it’s great when people realize that our socioeconomic system is so messed up, that there are a lot of people who can’t survive the day without using drugs. That’s what it really is about. Our communitarian system is so awful that people need drugs, that people choose drugs to survive it, but that’s not why I bring up the opioid epidemic.
I bring it up because when finally white people were obviously ensnared, what happens? We have entire states who were standing up to figure out how to save white people. And so we talk about white progressives who want X, I just added white, right?
We talk about progressive as well. When we talk about progressive they’re white, right? And so we talk about white progressives who want things that we need to speed up this process. And I think you’re absolutely right. I think you’re absolutely right.
That it’s terrifying. But what we don’t see in any meaningful way is people putting their physical wellbeing, their life on the line. If you go back to the civil rights movement, Black people in America during those periods had nothing to lose. These were people who had houses. These were people who had jobs, but they had nothing to lose in the sense that our society was so problematic.
Things were so unsatisfactory. The idea that they had rights were so clearly not a real idea that people said this life that I have can’t get worse. Things can’t be worse, right? Being beaten on the street is the same as staying in my house and doing nothing. And that’s not to say every single Black person went out on the streets and was participating in the civil rights movement.
But there was a whole lot of people who put their physical being on the line because they had nothing to lose. Well, what we see today, right, is that, you know, during the civil rights movement, there was a really powerful piece of change, which was that most white people didn’t appreciate and understand just how desperate Black people in America felt their situation was. Right.
Well, today we’re at a point in time where we’re seeing that white America doesn’t actually care about the desperation of Brown people, right? And so what we really need to me is a bunch of white people to really and consistently lay it all on the line. And this gets back to this idea that we’re so infected by neoliberalism, right? Cause people are going to protest, but they’re going to protest with their chai tea latte and with their venti caramel macchiato.
And I’m not going to hate on you. I live in this space, this dissonant dialectical space of appreciating and enjoying, and the comforts of my life are provided by neoliberalism. So I would go to a protest with a grande caramel macchiato as well, right? Like I’m not critiquing that you like coffee with caramel, right. But you go to the protest to say we must change things with a $7 coffee.
Steve Grumbine (42:24):
Right.
Lua Kamal Yuille (42:24):
You’re not actually risking anything. You’re just yelling.
Steve Grumbine (42:28):
Yeah.
Lua Kamal Yuille (42:28):
And it turns out that white people love white people. And so when white people are at risk, things change. We have entire laws that exist because we thought, right, like our criminal justice system was revised on the idea that white women would be violated by these free Black guys. And we needed a whole sense of things, right?
We try juveniles as adults today in America. We only began doing that in the 1960s. Like after we’ve appreciated that children were children. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that we started thinking about trying juveniles as adults. And why did we try juveniles as adults because a Black kid in New York City who was deeply damaged and needed, you know, social services committed a bunch of crimes and the crimes he was committing left Harlem and moved into white spaces. And so we will do a lot to protect white people.
And right now we don’t have enough white people laying it down on the line and talking about climate change. And you know, we see climate change activists who are talking about things that feel far off, and they’re not showing us pictures of white people sleeping in their cars. And they’re not showing us pictures of white people in Flint who can’t have water.
Right? And so what we need are white people to make it real. What we need are white people to own it and to be willing to risk and to feel like they have nothing to lose. And that is such a challenge because white people have a lot to lose because white men or women, white women are white. And so they’ve got privilege.
And the idea of losing that, I don’t know, I don’t live in those bodies. I don’t live in those positions, but the back of your mind, the idea of losing that privilege and actually having to suffer during the growing pains towards something better, I think that that is a real challenge. But if we could get enough people, right, to get on the line and show: I am hurting.
I, white person, I’m hurting by this. When you put children in cages, you hurt white people. To me, that’s the change that the world needs: white people to own it.
Steve Grumbine (44:52):
I gotta tell ya, I’m going to stop you right there. I was a major victim of the global financial crisis. In fact, that’s what spurred most of my hardcore activism since then, and has created Real Progressives, our organization, and has really been the genesis for my interest in Modern Monetary Theory.
I needed to make sense of the pain and suffering of divorce and loss and the rules that put you into these debt traps that never let you out and mind you. I’m always mindful that I have it better, as bad as it is and those thoughts of suicide and those thoughts of desperation and those fears, you know, I kept it real.
I kept it raw and I would try my best to show that here’s this white guy, white dude with two master’s degrees that started into his Ph.D. Has a resume to choke a donkey.
And yet at the same time was one moment away from complete and utter destitution. So it was my wake up call — the privilege of being white, the privilege of having opportunities to screw up over and over again and get bailed out. And then you finally hit this point where there’s just nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to turn.
And again, I come from a position of privilege in the sense that I did get multiple choice, multiple options, multiple bailouts, multiple I’ll — “he’s ok.” Okay. In fact, there was one time back in 2002, where I was arrested for marijuana. And I was sitting there in a jail cell with these three young Black kids. They couldn’t have been more than 18 years old. And I had more than they did mind you. I was an older guy and it wasn’t like I was running around. I just used it for my own purposes, but these kids had a single joint and they were being held without any potential of getting out.
They were going to be held for three weeks to wait for the trial date. I was going to be released that night because I was a member of society with a good job. And I went to church and other, such things that, you know, and really at the end of the day I was white. And the weirdest thing is the commissioner was Black.
And I sat there and I thought to myself, as I went back into the holding cell and I looked at these three kids, they’re like, man, what’s going on? You getting out? And I was like, yeah. And they were staying for three weeks. I was like, what? We’re in the joint? Yup.
And I listened to the police, talked to him was so much different than how they talk to me. Everything was different from soup to nuts. I can only imagine how angry. Now they didn’t get angry at me. There was a kindred spirit in that tank, but there was definitely an incredible imbalance in treatment and an incredible imbalance in the execution of justice and ultimately incredible difference in terms of how they saw their options and how I saw mine. But the impact nonetheless here all these years later, it’s what coming into 2020.
I have never dug out. I’ve never been able to get out of it. And as a white person who wants to be an ally, who wants to help be a change agent, I’ve tried to lay these truths out there for people. And I’ll be honest with you. There are a lot of white academics.
There are a lot of white privilege people that don’t want to hear it. They want me to shut up and it makes them uncomfortable. I think that that’s a major challenge in the white community is to get over yourself. People are suffering and they tend to be a Black and Brown persuasion, but you know what, it’s coming for you. If you don’t stand for them, it’ll come for you.
And I think that that’s somehow or another has got to be made part of their psyche is it won’t change. You’re right until they’re suffering until there’s enough of them suffering. It won’t change.
Lua Kamal Yuille (48:43):
The crazy part, right? Is you are suffering, right? The fact you shouldn’t have to go, right? No one should have to go through the things that you went through, right? So people are suffering and people are suffering regardless of race, right? We have a socio-economic political system. Now I’m being completely Ameri-centric.
But if we were sitting in the UK or if I was sitting in the UK, I would say the same thing cause it’s true there. If I were in Italy, I would say the same thing. I can look anywhere in the world, but the question is the same. But now I’ve been very specific. My American context, we have a sociopolitical economic system that doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work in any scaled way, right? Some people are winners, but most of us are losers. Whether we’re losers in our pocketbook, whether we’re losers because of the narrowed, combative, social milieu that we’re forced to navigate, whether we’re losers, just because our moral compass can’t see north, we’re all losers in this system. So I don’t even want it when I say white people.
I’m not necessarily asking for more people who are white to suffer more. Right? When I look at extra judicial killings of Black men who are unarmed, I don’t want extra judicial killings of white men who are unarmed. So that we’ll fix police. I want the suffering that white people face to actually be brought to the conversation. And ultimately then when we juxtapose it against the quantitatively more frequent, the suffering of Black and Brown communities is of a greater degree; then when we’re able to have those conversations, we can really get people to buy in.
But I think it’s important to recognize that everyone’s suffering. But I also think, and this is sort of getting back to the beginning, obstacles to activism around these issues, right?
It’s really important that the folks who benefit the most, who are the poster beneficiaries of this system, it’s really important that they are at the forefront of the conversations about how it doesn’t work, but also recognize that their positionality makes it actually hard. Those kids who didn’t hold it against you, that you got out and they had to stay in because they recognize that this was an institutional and not a personal problem.
It wasn’t you, it was the institution that was going to treat them unfairly. I don’t know if they’re going to be on your picket line tomorrow. I don’t know if they’re going to protest because getting white people to lay it on the line and be at the forefront also risks — and this is another challenge — risks framing the conversations in ways that they’re not included, right.
And framing the conversation in ways that marginalizes the interests of those Black kids. Cause you know, what was the, even the context of their marijuana possession versus yours.
And I’m not saying I have no idea what the context, right? But the conversation and the realities that they face might look different and they don’t frequently get to be a part of the conversations. It’s a big challenge. But I think for me, the first step is to see and really get white people telling those stories, risking it, being willing to lose in the battle in order to win the longer term fight of revolutionary change.
Now I can really came out of left field, right? I just said revolutionary change because I don’t think winning an election is what we need. We need radical change for every single piece of our economic system, every single piece of our social structure.
And so we’re going to lose something, right? And it might be something that you didn’t expect, but probably is going to be a part of those things that are infected by the injustice that is ingrained in the system. And those folks who step up I think they also have to always be trying to be allies and try to make sure that there is a parallel, but also symbiotic relationship of various liberation movements, right?
Because the economic liberation of Black people doesn’t necessarily look exactly the same as the economic liberation of white folks. And there’s lots of movements, right?
Cause the economic liberation of the working class, isn’t the same as the economic liberation of the middle class and the economic liberation of Latin X populations or immigrant populations or Muslim populations, isn’t the same as the economic liberation of other folks. And so maybe another one of our, how do we get people moving today is to not feel beholden to the idea of a big tent because you know, it’s the quickest route to centrism that harmful most scary kind of political position because the road to centrism is making your tent so big instead of interlocking, right?
We want interlocking tents. We want tents that have permeable boundaries, but we don’t want a big tent because if you are everything to everybody, you’re nothing to everybody.
Steve Grumbine (54:16):
I get it. That’s absolutely amazing. Lua, with that in mind, I want to just thank you for taking the time with me today. Let me ask you how can people follow you, your work? I mean, the stuff I’ve read is just amazing. And listening to you at the MMT conference, you lit my mind on fire and this conversation here, it’s begging for a part two. So I hope we can get back together in the future.
Lua Kamal Yuille (54:44):
That’s awesome. You can follow me on Twitter at profyuille, or you can hop over to www.profyuille.com and see what I’m up to.
Steve Grumbine (54:59):
Awesome. So with that, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time with us today. This was really, really powerful. A lot to think about and look forward to talking to you soon.
Lua Kamal Yuille (55:09):
My pleasure. This was great.
Ending Credits (55:17):
Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patrion.com/real progressives.
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