Last Saturday, we had the privilege and pleasure of hosting Awakin Call with Rupa Marya & Raj Patel.

Academic author/filmmaker Raj Patel and physician Rupa Marya have exhaustively found that our economic, political, and social structures fan disease. In Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, they arrive at a systems-level of diagnosis that incorporates history and the pathologies of power, offering options to heal people and planet. “The social, environmental, and political structures around us are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation,” Marya says. “Capitalism primes our bodies for sickness,” Patel adds. Rupa Marya, MD, practices internal medicine, works to heal "the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, learning and restoration,” and is a songwriter/guitarist. Raj Patel, PhD, is a best-selling author, filmmaker, and academic who explores the sustainability crisis and inequities in the world food system, housing, and health care.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

• Rupa and Raj first crossed paths when Raj was dressed up as GMO tomato. :) They described their collaboration on the book "Inflamed" as a decolonizing process in itself. Which involved investigating colonial capitalism, and its impacts on modern human health. Economic oppression, such as debt, creates threats that affect a person's cellular level (the "biological substrate").
• Oxford dictionary defines capitalism as "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit." Raj summarized capitalism as a system that "socializes cost, and privatizes benefit." Colonial capitalism was highlighted as the combination of an extractive economic approach with the last approximately 600 years of colonial conquest efforts.
• The system, Rupa added, is set up to necessitate abuse of critical relationships [to the rest of nature], which then triggers inflammation.
• An analogy was drawn to slavery: just as slavery was justified by its economic "necessity", so today is capitalism justified by its "too big too fail" framing.
• Rupa shared a deep realization through having her worst fear realized: the loss of family--in this case, her father. "I realized I can't be afraid; I can't be at odds with who I am anymore." That included owning both of her professional paths, however unusual: a practicing doctor, and a performing musician. "As long as you're not afraid of what's going to happen to your career, then go for it. By the time my father died, the thing I feared so much losing -- my family -- had happened. So it's like, 'Well, what do I have to be afraid of?'”
• Raj shared an early seed of inquiry: a simple desire to understand why people are hungry. And the recognition of complicity that led to "class suicide" and an introspective journey that continues.
• When asked how social change might come about, Rupa acknowledge this might be an unusual belief: it starts with a song, reconnecting as our elders did to being in right relationship with the web of life. "The songs are gone. And so now these things [disasters] will come -- because it was the action of being in a certain kind of relationship with all of the elements around us that kept those things away." The elders knew the harmony and memory of song, both in music and in living.
• A dictionary definition of solidarity reads, "union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests, as between members of a group or between classes, peoples, etc." Raj stressed how vital an ingredient solidarity can be to any movement, encouraging anyone who feels moved to join a life-affirming, revolutionary movement.
• Healing from the societal causes of inflammation is a communal, not individual spiritual, act. And it is intergenerational: "it's not something that we can do for the benefit of our lifetimes. And this is where, while the body is very plastic and can heal somewhat in our lifetimes, the real, intergenerational changes and benefits are going to be seen in our great-grandchildren."
• Rupa added, especially for folks in the U.S.: "find out whose land you are on," and support and follow the lead of the indigenous peoples of that land.
• This is the time to be courageous.

Much gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!

--Chris Johnnidis



Additional Nuggets from the Transcript

Example of colonial capitalism triggering an inflammatory response (Raj on debt): "Debt ... can trigger inflammatory responses, because the threat of losing your home is a threat of danger. And that threat works itself out at a cellular level. And, so if we were to get rid of things like payday loans and the acute stress that they engender, we would see suicide rates drop by 2%, and accidental drug overdose deaths dropped by 8.9%. Discovering the sort of economic oppression that I've been studying for a while has its sort of biological substrate [while working with Rupa], and vice versa, was super exciting."

Co-writing as a decolonizing process (Raj): "Often, writing is about ego and self and one's ideas on the page, and the joy of writing with Rupa was the joy of discovering what one can let go, and how one can care for one another, care for other people, and care for one's co-author and be part of a web of care of copy editors and developmental editors and editors -- you know, sort of all along the way and peers of various kinds. ...

"Part of colonialism and colonial capitalism was the discrimination of whose minds counted in the process of peer review. And what we discovered in the process of writing together, is the joy of decolonizing ourselves in terms of the sort of sacrosanct character of individual writing and expression, and learning the joys that Rupa has known for so long of collaboration and, you know, what it's like to be in a band."

Rupa on colonial capitalism and altering our relationship to the web of life: "conscious capitalists come forward and tell us ... "oh, we just need a kinder, gentler, more loving capitalism that takes care of the earth." But there's a mindset that can remove personhood from a mountain so that you can riddle it with holes to extract silver. There's a mindset that can look at a river as a thing instead of a living entity or the blood-ways of the earth, so that you can dam it for your own purposes, and put the priorities of profit ahead of any other system of relationships that have been intact and in place for thousands of years. ... What has been happening over the last 600 years with capitalism has been an alteration of our understandings of who we are in relationship to the entire web of life."

Raj on capitalism as socializing costs and privatizing benefits: "Capitalism is the tendency towards monopoly. It’s the tendency towards privatization. It’s a tendency towards socializing costs and privatizing benefits. ,,, This isn’t to say, private property shouldn’t exist. This isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be exchange. But the market, the souk, the exchange -- the place where people come together and become better through their engagements with one another -- is a fantastic idea. It’s just that capitalism is the process through which we alienate workers from their labor. We take the web of life and recognize it not as this rich teeming web of things that keeps us alive, but instead, an opportunity either to private -- you know, to profit from it, and we can privatize and enclose what we like, or we can just toss everything away into the web of life and web of life will take care of it for us.

"And that carelessness is endemic to capitalism, on which capitalism depends to be able to privatize the costs and then generate these externalities the rest of society picks up. That is not what we love. And so if we’d like exchange and innovation and enterprise, then capitalism’s a bad venue for that."

Raj on being both an activist against the system and complicit in it: "we are complicit in capitalism. ... It's okay to find ourselves complicit and want to do something about that. Like, for example, patriarchy. Rahul, you and I will, for the rest of our lives, be fighting the patriarchy within us, but no one wants us to be more sexist. No one wants to be just as sexist as we are. We want to be less sexist. And that’s the work of recognizing that we're complicit, and the work of recognizing, “Look, there's a better way of doing this,” and we can do it because we are capable of that. It’s the same with capitalism. Of course we're caught up in it. But you know, the fact that we’re here today talking in this language, in this space, with this history -- it means of course we’re caught up in it. We don’t have to be happy about that ...."

Rupa on the failures of imagination and capitalism as "too big to fail": "we have the failure to imagine other systems. ... Why do we have to imagine that something has to be big? Why can’t something be extremely tiny and highly effective and scaled through its tininess as a network, like we see with viruses, or we see with other communities of microbes, like we see in the world around us, when we look at nature and the different ways that things adapt and move and survive. And so, I think it's a good time to really question, where does the lineage of thought come from that you’re maintaining right now that capitalism is too big to fail? Well, slavery was too big to fail, and there were a bunch of committed people who worked to abolish it in the United States -- chattel slavery. ...

"I do think there are exciting experiments of economies right now. I was just in a meeting yesterday of one of a network of indigenous groups that are working to reestablish their food systems, reestablish their medicine systems. And they’re talking about creating a trade -- reawakening ancient trade routes along the West Coast and into the inland. And when you see these kinds of imaginings, you realize that these economies have existed throughout time. And that we have to recognize that the way things are right now, it’s only 600 -- it’s only relatively recently, which the inevitability of it must be questioned. It should not be maintained."

Indigenous alternatives to capitalism (Raj): "there are nations that are non-capitalist. And if you look at indigenous communities, those nations are abundantly capable, not only of managing internal inflammatory disease, but capable of doing that because they have dominion over the world around them and they do much better at managing biodiversity and the web of life than the private sector or the public sector."

Rupa on integrating her twin loves of music and medicine: "the way that we section off our minds in medicine and in western society in general is part of that colonial process -- that we don't understand the song and the patient. We don't understand the harmony in a team of medical providers or in a team of people working together to stop a pipeline going through drinking water as a public health measure."

Rupa and Raj on why healing begins with a song: (describing a conversation with a Dene elder in Arizona) "[S]he was describing how a storm had gone through the week prior. And they started to see funnels coming down from the sky. And she had never seen in this territory a tornado come through. She added that the elders who knew the songs, the people who knew the way to relate to not only all of the entities that are here, are gone. The songs are gone. And so now these things will come -- because it was the action of being in a certain kind of relationship with all of the elements around us that kept those things away. So the science part of me says, "well, that's crazy. That's silly." But the other part of me says, "well, in the singing is attention, is a relationship, is an acknowledgement, is a reciprocity of seeing and acknowledging and caring for.” So I think that the song allows us to care for things that we are careless about right now in our colonial capitalist mindset. ...

"When you're singing those songs, you're situating yourself within that whole network. And you're seeing your role that you play in maintaining that network. And so I think it's that consciousness. So I will say it starts with the song. ....If all of us can work together to just take a little part of the commons that we value, that we know is critical for our health, and just start chipping away at these corporations and taking back what's ours ... That requires that we all start entering the song, this song."

Decolonization as a communal, not individual spiritual, act:  Raj: "I think that to have a song, you need organizing, you need memory, you need elders, you need the infrastructure. A song is never solo. The idea of that, I think, is tremendously important. If you look at the social change that you like over the past century or two, what has it been characterized by? Well, it's been characterized by organizations of people who have occasionally had to throw their bodies on the line. And in that process, there's always a song. Whether it's movements against colonialism, movements for civil rights, movements for rights for women, all of these movements entail organizing. They bring a sense of solidarity, bonding and care. For instance, when you make meals for one another, when you sing together or when you care for one another as children. You do all of this stuff together. It's hard under COVID to remember these times where we all used to hang out together and feed one another, but that's actually the sort of protocols of care that matter the most. ... If we are all to win, then we will have to believe in that solidarity. We're held together by the songs and the movements that hold the solidarity."

Rupa: "Recognize that the work of decolonization, which is what we're talking about, is not something that we can do on our own.  It is not an individual spiritual path. It is something that we must do together collectively. And that's the joy -- is that it's a way of building new bridges between people that you may not have seen or understood were there or recognized in your social circle, and to build those webs of relationships again.  And to work collectively, that's really the exciting part of this work -- is that it has to be done together."

Rupa: "we've been so atomized by this culture over the last 600 years, we've been so relegated to our individual solutions and our individual spirituality and our individual wellness culture that we do not stop in our tracks and sob on the street when we see someone left there because of the reality of being poor. You know, we've turned that into a problem of individual choices as opposed to seeing how it's socially constructed. And so, yes, inflammation of our society, looks like we need a lot more damage to start seeing it be really transformative, to heal."

On alchemy, healing, and a song: Rupa: "So like how do we find our way back or find a way forward? How do we find language that's disappeared? How do we reinvent songs? How do we find those songs, find those things? ... [T]hat's where art, as I mentioned, like art and song, that's why this is so critical because it's in the re-imagining, in the action, in the taking of the action, and connecting it with something much bigger than us -- and much bigger than our tiny little atomized life -- into seeing the vastness of who we are and where we are and what our actions can be. And so I share that just to say that “that is the alchemy.” It's not trying to recreate something. It's understanding the act of creativity is always present. It always is today. And it's always in that kind compassionate solidarity, that working together. ...

"It's a matter of presence and choosing what you're doing, and how you're doing and with whom you're doing, and being okay with not having the answers and sitting at the edge of the unknown and the blankness and go, “What do we do? What is the kind thing? What is the right thing?” And sitting with elders around a fire who will sit and discuss that with you, because they've been thinking about these things much longer than you have."