Garrison Davis

All right, and welcome.

Thank you, yeah.

The new normal.

Yeah.

the ever-shifting normal, the phantom of normal, and why it is that it's really not coming back.

And why normalcy as a concept is actually pretty weird.

You know, we don't engage with the degrading reality of the world around us because we're wrapped up in this all-powerful fate.

We're bound to progress.

And progress is linear that we are ever striving forward.

You know, and we point to examples of things like social progress, but as he quotes in the book, it's like what Malcolm X said, you know, if I stick a knife into you and I only pull it out three inches, that's not progress.

Pull it out six inches, that's not progress.

Nine inches, that's not progress.

progress to be you know removing the knife completely and mending the wound but i'll take it a step further and say that is it really progress to go back to a state that already was is it progress to abolish slavery when there was a time when slavery did not exist you know

Same thing with patriarchy.

You know, patriarchy did not always exist.

Can we call that progress or is it just rectifying a previously imposed state?

And so these are some of the questions he grapples with.

Yeah, I mean, it's almost in everything, right?

It's a fundamental myth of liberal capitalism.

I guess it also underlies a certain logic of colonialism, right?