“They’ve got this thing in Tamera,” which is a peace research and education centre, explained the psychoanalyst and author Anouchka Grose when I spoke to her a few weeks ago, “they talk about sending trust ahead. So, trust the other person before they prove it to you. Don’t mistrust them until they prove they’re decent, but do it the other way around and you’ll see what you get if you do it that way around.”
I’ve wanted to talk to Anouchka for a long time as part of the foundations of the Constructive Programme that I’m working on, mainly by speaking to as many spiritual and insightful people as I can.
I read Anouchka’s new book, The Revolution Will Be Internalised, when it came out earlier this year. One of the new ideas she introduces there is “inner prepping”, which she described in our conversation (that was split over two sessions) as helping her, and hopefully others:
be slightly less afraid now by having more faith in the other people and less, much less, faith in the systems, much less faith in ‘power’ — all of that. They’re not going to look after us, no one’s going to look after us, we’re going to look after each other and if there’s one percent of them that’s a really small percentage, so what the 99% do when things get shit is actually what matters.
When I was preparing this conversation to share I went through the transcript to highlight the bits to clip out… but there were so many I realised I had to put out the whole conversation (minus the technical fuck-ups, me going to the loo, etc!).
We talked about Sonder, about Tantra, about love, more inner prepping, weirdness, and of course about trust. Specifically, the relational trust that’s foundational to the type of power that I think, as does Anouchka, is going to be much more important in a collapsing future than state or market power.
It is relational power. And it is really all that matters, it is all that makes us happy (not money, not working hard) and it is what, as I’ve written before, neoliberalism has tried to take from us: neoliberalism on purpose has tried to destroy our relationships, because our isolation is much more profitable, and much less threat, to the one percent who hoard the market and state power.
“We need to be with each other,” says Anouchka. That’s it. Not least because, as she also says, “You can’t be sort of in the system having a good time if the system’s fucked.”
I really hope you enjoy the conversation. You can watch, listen along, but if you like it, please let us know. And please, buy and read Anouchka’s new book.
