Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

If you've listened to this show, one thing that comes up a lot is how much I dislike the faux radical statement that everything is political.

I think I've expressed in some ways my problem with a statement before, but I'm going to go into it a little bit more.

You know, the statement is obviously an enlightening one to people who have no political conscience or consciousness at all.

So someone who's never thought about politics, it might be a good thing to say everything is political to draw their attention to especially the labor politics and class politics of their everyday lives.

There is a political dimension to the everyday, to entertainment, to design, whatever.

That's all there if we seek it out.

But this statement also relegates us to being subjects of the political sphere in everything we do.

And that's something I think we need to resist.

As David Wengro and Against Everyone with Connor Beeb, episode 99 guest and departed friend David Graber point out in their latest book, The Dawn of Everything,

A New History of Humanity.

It's not a coincidence that the word for politics shares its roots with the word for

police and politeness.

These are words of subjection and of submission.

The word polis, the location where governmental and religious decisions were made in a city is a seat of authority.

If everything is political, everything is extending in a, from our subjugation to the political.

The political becomes a sort of completely determining or infecting being.

And it's one that does not deserve to determine the ground of our lives, all the fundamentals. And it's not something that I really

care for. The idea that in all my actions, even in meditation, in sleep, in creating art, all

that, the main focus, the thing that I need to turn my attention to is how I am

a subject of the state. It feels almost like a mind parasite to me. Furthermore, politics is best defined,

I think, as a question of relating and rights. How do two or more people work together? How should we have regulations and

...