Improbable Democracy
The New Human Rights Movement, Sept 9, 2017
Peter Joseph
I'm Peter Joseph and I founded a
non-profit a long time ago
called The Zeitgeist Movement
and it's an organization that
still has numerous chapters,
hundreds of chapters in 60
countries and we've done about a
thousand public awareness events
since its inception.
And beyond that social
experiments working in the hope
to unify the world in a common direction,
desperately needed of course
due to the ecological crisis and
the social instability
that we're seeing emerge.
I also produce educational and
socially conscious activist media
including these two books.
I wish I'd brought some books
actually but I couldn't
get the weight in my luggage or
I would have given you all some.
The 'Zeitgeist Movement Defined'
was the original text,
kind of a joint effort but mostly
written by myself, produced in 2013.
It's the root thesis of
The Zeitgeist Movement
and it advocates in pretty
extended technical detail what
we do and what we promote.
The second book,
'The New Human Rights Movement',
was published by BenBella
earlier this year
and it takes a more
social justice approach
and a public health approach if you will,
focusing on what really underscores
a stable, healthy and peaceful society
including the active reduction
of intergroup conflict,
oppression, bigotry, racism,
xenophobia and so on,
something that this
country and the world is
starting to see a resurgence of.
Today's talk will be more or less
a derivative of this book,
specifically in regard to the history, structure
and nature of modern political economy.
Again since I refuse to repeat my talks,
and you can go on and see about 20
or 30 hours of my lectures online,
I apologize if this moves
quickly for those that are new.
But if anything is unclear -
this will be about 45 minutes or so
and I'm definitely always into questions -
so make some notes
if anything jumps out at you.
So to jump to the work's
conclusion for the sake of clarity
the bottom line is that
without the removal
of socioeconomic inequality -
meaning the various levels of
inequity we see both domestically
and internationally
as linked to economic roots -
there's a serious need for concern
about what the future holds.
Unannounced to most, there's a
strong public health argument
against the existence of economic
stratification and class.
And by extension this means that there
is a strong public health argument
against the mechanisms of
our society that create
this destructive imbalance,
namely the market system of economics:
a system that is also leading to
the destruction of our habitat
due to its archaic basis
in cyclical consumption,
perpetuating a built-in
incentive to create waste,
inspire more purchases
to create more jobs ...
And when you step back
and take all this in,
you realize that an economy
powered by consumerism,
which is what it is,
is in fact not an economy at all.
A real economy by definition is about
the strategic and efficient use of materials
and means to preserve sustainability
in the process of meeting human needs.
Yet our system does the opposite:
not only inspiring vast wealth imbalance,
limiting in fact the well-being of
60% of the human population today,
in the context of relative
and absolute poverty,
but also in the sense that the
entire system is really backwards
in terms of extended sustainability
and effectively earthly economic goals;
a complete omission from all economic textbooks.
And it's worth pointing out that this
seed of unsustainability really wasn't
easily to recognize centuries ago,
as the process and means of production
was quite manual and arduous.
But since the Industrial Revolution
and the introduction of mechanization
and increased efficiency -
increased production I should say because
it's not really efficient, it's just
the more of production that
we're able to increase -
the tables have turned.
What was once an agrarian
economy that worked to meet
core needs of a scarce society,
generating jobs to facilitate those needs,
has transformed into an economy
that has become so productive
that our sense of social inclusion
must now be manipulated
by marketing and advertising,
producing a neurotic, insatiable
and materialistic culture
seeking to buy, own and accumulate
simply for the sake of buying,
owning and accumulating.
And without that value system,
the economy wouldn't work today.
So coming back to my broad point here,
the current state of evolution
of the market economy
not only requires an insecure,
immature and selfish population,
it also requires that nothing
really work too well, for too long:
planned obsolescence.
For true preservation,
efficiency and sustainability
is really the enemy of market economics.
It's the enemy of the
foundation of our society
and the result as we see
is enormous amounts of waste,
pollution and resource overshoot.
And it's interesting
today with all the talk
about ecological degradation, climate
change, biodiversity loss and so on,
very rarely do people speak of the
most important consequence of this:
we're not destroying the earth,
we're destroying our future
capacity to coexist peacefully
and productively as a growing species.
We're setting the stage for new forms
of unnecessary scarcity and limitation.
And this is and will continue to translate
into more extreme degrees
of socioeconomic inequality,
reducing public health,
and this increased socioeconomic inequality
as social science has long confirmed,
will fuel further social fragmentation,
conflict and disorder,
both domestically and internationally.
I apologize if this idea
is new to some of you here
as it is something I have written and
talked about a great deal in the past,
linking socioeconomic
inequality and economics
to increased violence,
heart disease, mental health disorders,
child abuse, loss of lifespan and so on.
But I encourage you to look into this
largely ignored public health issue
because it's the most critical one,
and no one's really talking about it.
The central message of this talk -
as rambley as it's going to be due to
the limitations I had in creating it -
is that our economy poses
many serious problems,
not only as an instrument of human
manipulation in terms of politics that we see,
but as a structural phenomenon
in its root core foundational logic.
Or more bluntly, the real problem -
in stark contradiction to our prevailing
entrepreneurial romanticism
and free-market mythology -
is the very nature of business itself:
the inherent dynamics and
incentives that are immutable
to the logic of engaging and
winning in competitive trade
is the binding destructive force
that while creating the world we see,
with some material positives of course,
is also simultaneously destroying it
at a far more rapid rate,
in the context of sustainability
and a loss of democracy,
as I will discuss.
And with all the debate today about
party systems and corruption and
lobbying and war and so on,
you will notice,
with the exception of say conversations
about democratic socialism
or other more - more or less - passive
still ultimately pro-market
socioeconomic adjustments
the political landscape shows
very little real reflection
on what the structure of our
economy is actually doing.
Even worse,
those rare few who do approach
in a critical and thoughtful way
are quickly dismissed by myopic
and emotional impulsive reactions
and symbolic irrationality.
In fact I would have to argue that the
greatest failure in the world today
is that of creativity,
and an expanded sense of possibility.
People are afraid of things
they can't see of course
or don't understand or
haven't learned about -
a kind of indoctrination and laziness
continues to limit the debate
of what our future could be,
locked into bogus identity politics, isms,
unnuanced childish
distractions of left and right,
alt right, centric,
capitalist, socialist, communist,
and a host of other unnuanced labels
that serve only to keep
people thinking categorically,
ignorant, polarized,
and easily manipulated.
The power of language and the
associative symbolic myopic nature
of political discourse now blinds us,
and it's time we snap out of it
and expand our sense of possibility.
Brings me to part one -
Structuralism: Culture and Biology.
Again I've spoken a great deal about
things like structuralism in the past
and this will be more
of an overview of it.
And if you want to look into this
concept as I will go through a bit,
I encourage it.
But the details by which I'm gonna go
through this will be relatively advanced.
I'm going to expand the
context of structuralism
from the influence of culture,
environment and social system
to include how those inputs
interact with our biology,
given the biopsychosocial nature
of the organisms that we are.
While there is ongoing debate about
time scales of biological evolution,
specifically with respect to the human
brain and behavioral variability,
it's safe to say that if you took a
newborn child from say 25,000 years ago,
and raised him or her today,
the characteristics of that child,
and eventually adult,
would be indiscernible from the
average person born in the present day.
Likewise it is a fact that we modern
humans can trace our genetic lineage
to a woman from East Africa
commonly termed 'Mitochondrial Eve'
who lived roughly 150,000 years ago.
Hence we are all African,
we have all been set in motion so to speak,
with the same basic genetic makeup.
And while there have certainly been
selective genetic changes in groups
such as the development of
different skin colors and
physical features due to exposure
to different areas of the planet,
the idea that any groups of humans on this
planet are genetically superior or inferior,
or perhaps having developed novel
cultural behaviors driven by genetics
is completely unfounded.
And what this means
is that the vast array of human behavior we
have seen historically on the cultural level,
from the routine human
sacrifice of the Aztecs
to the polygamy of Mormonism
to the end of cannibalism of
the Amazonian Yanomami tribe,
to many other examples, can only be
linked to the influence of environment
and the social institutions and traditions
of a given society and period.
This is not to discount
the role of biology,
evolutionary psychology,
or in effect what is,
again the biopsychosocial
synergy of our existence.
This isn't about behaviorism,
in lieu of say BF Skinner.
The nature of our brains and our
genetics have an integral role
in all outcomes of behavior on some level.
But they are not actively
deterministic influences
when it comes to the
phenomenon of culture.
Sorry to drill this in:
pop society loves to separate
nature, nurture,
or more accurately
genetics and environment.
Yet biological evolution
is also a kind of molding
of our genetic makeup
through natural selection,
which basically started with a
single-cell organism some 3.5 billion years ago.
The complexity of your form,
who you are physically,
is really an environmental outcome,
and with this kind of
genetic play-doh that's
been utilized since the
single-celled organism.
And it's evolved through
environmental interactions
into the complex organisms we are today,
driven by environment.
Now the reason I bring
all this up is because
one outstanding myth that
leads to a set of other myths
we have in support of
the way the world is,
is that "society reflects
our immutable human nature,"
as if in the long term our
nature can be called "fixed."
It's a legitimizing
establishment-preserving myth,
for if society is a reflection of our
immutable human nature, well guess what -
there's no reason to
attempt to change society.
We see this worldview
throughout recorded history
to one degree or another especially in the
realm of political economy and philosophy.
In fact I am unaware of any historically
recognized political or economic theorist
that didn't propagate the
false notion that humanity's
apparent brute,
selfish and competitive nature
was simply an immutable
law of our existence
and something to be dealt with.
For example Thomas Hobbes, considered
the father of political philosophy,
famously proposed that humanity's
state was one "of war,"
therefore he implied in fact
that a dictatorial sovereign power
and hierarchy was actually needed
to oversee and control society.
When Charles Darwin came along
with his theory of evolution
his 'survival of the fittest'
notion was quickly bastardized,
distorted to support elitism,
oppression and dominant power.
This misconception further added fuel to
yet another highly influential economist,
someone of particular despotism:
Thomas Malthus.
While Malthus' fatalism is different
from general human nature myths,
his theory of population,
if you're familiar,
is still generally accepted today,
albeit rarely verbalized,
as it is very politically inconvenient
to talk about something like this,
with the basic idea that the poor
of the world cannot be helped
since nature will always be
in deficiency to some degree
in meeting an inevitable
growing population.
Malthus even went so far in his time to
criticize Europe's Poor Laws as they were called
and rejected the idea of social
compassion when it came to poverty.
He stated "To act consistently
therefore we should facilitate,
instead of foolishly and
vainly endeavoring to impede,
the operations of nature in
producing this mortality.
Instead of recommending cleanliness
to the poor we should encourage
contrary habits. In our towns we
should make the streets narrower,
crowd more people into the houses
and court the return of the plague.
In the country, we should build
our villages near stagnant pools,
and particularly encourage settlements
in all marshy and unwholesome situations.
But above all,
we should reprobate specific remedies
for ravaging diseases, and those
benevolent but much mistaken men,
who have thought they were
doing a service to mankind
by projecting schemes for the total
extirpation of particular disorders."
As an aside I wish to point out
that much of the world as it exists today
begins to make a whole lot of sense
when you consider the influence
of Malthus, who is
probably one of the first world economists
of the British East India Company,
coupled with the haphazard
conception of social Darwinism.
Whether noted in public policy or not,
this overall worldview is
clearly in the general philosophy,
[in] the back pockets of big
business and world governance,
justifying continued inequality,
social dominance, oppression,
rampant poverty, and the vast,
direct and structural violence
inherent to our economic system.
... once again from the
inherent dynamics incentives
of an economy based on scarcity
and trade-strategizing dominance,
which I'm going to expand
upon in the next section.
Trade strategizing dominance:
I want that phrase to stick with you guys.
This Malthusian,
socially Darwinistic perspective
is a significant reason
why we have seen very little real progress
in the developing poverty-stricken
and disease-laden nations today,
or even in the relative
poverty and homeless crisis
we see in the affluent nations.
I'm sorry to say it is an unspoken yet
ever-present value system and mindset
that the poor should suffer and die,
and the rich should live and prosper.
And it is this manifest structural
violence that kills more people
than all the wars,
dictators and plagues combined.
Estimates put this death toll
at about 18 million a year
due to socioeconomic inequality.
That's numerous holocausts a year.
That's more than communism
claimed to kill in a century,
in 6 years,
due to socioeconomic
inequality and poverty.
Meanwhile, 5 people today have more
wealth in the entire 50% of the world.
So tangent aside,
and returning to my central point
regarding biological determinism,
culture and the various naturalist myth's
"appeal to nature" fallacies
we find that preserve the status quo,
show through cognitive
neuroscience and other studies,
prove, and there's no reason to assume,
that there's any kind of predominant,
competitive, acquisitive
narrow self-interest in-group
out-group biased society propensity
which is some "law of nature."
In the same way there is no reason to
conclude poverty is a social inevitability.
The human mind is an extremely
powerful and flexible system
when it comes to behavior.
It can be an organ of thoughtfulness,
compassion, extensionality
and collaborative incentive,
as evidenced by the later stage
development of our frontal cortex,
or it can be an organ of fear,
hate, selfishness and domination
as evidenced by our older,
lower so-called reptilian areas
such as the amygdala and limbic system.
And when you combine
the power of culture -
the fact every word I'm saying
has been taught to me,
the fact that I'm an amalgamation of
everything that I've been born into,
the fact that I'm not wearing
a Victorian gown right now -
is because I've learned through
this society the way I should be
or in the sense of the feedback system,
the way I will end up invariably being
because of my exposures
to the environment.
And you combine this force with the
variability you see in our mind and biology
as proven by cognitive neuroscience,
and this is my point,
we realize a kind of dynamic structuralism
that very much underscores and controls
what we call our
consciousness or free will.
And we can't expect to change
our society or civilization
without understanding ourselves;
what influences us
and our shared biological reactions.
This mythology that we are strong,
individual, rational human beings
walking the earth with complete
conscious control, is a myth,
as paradoxical and complex as
that is to say to yourself
because your brain is telling you
something different all the time.
Now, stepping back,
I first heard the term "structuralism"
used by Johan Galtung
of the Gandhi Institute,
As a scholar of Gandhi he had this to say,
which I think is an
insightful qualification.
"Gandhi saw conflict in the deeper sense
as something that was built
into social structures,
not into the persons
Colonialism was a structure
and caste was a structure;
both of them filled with persons performing
their duties according to their roles or statuses.
The evil was in the structure, not in the
person who carried out his obligations.
Exploitation is violence,
but it is quite clear Gandhi sees
it as a structural relationship
more than the intended evil inflicted
upon innocent victims by evil men.
It's a deeply thoughtful and compassionate
and systemic type of perspective,
that's dramatically limited
in the modern world.
The profoundness of this,
that we humans can become subservient
to social institutions and systems,
takes a while to sink in.
To believe this is to admit to yourself
that depending on the nuances of
your biology and social condition,
you can effectively be manipulated
by larger order forces
beyond your control.
And most people's egos once again have
a very difficult time with this idea,
as it contradicts again everything
that your experience is telling you.
But the truth is, the social condition
or culture you find yourself [in],
how society is organized and incentivized,
plays a profound role in
your sense of identity
while pinging or exciting
parts of your brain that
amplify the probability
of certain behaviors to occur, or not.
If you generate a social
structure that creates
a culture of insecurity
and fear like we have today,
you're going to excite
older parts of the brain:
the limbic system that compound,
but are in effect primitive,
old primate reactions
such as competition and violence, apathy.
In contrast if you have a structure
that creates a sense of safety,
fairness, justice, security,
you will bypass primitive brain reactions
and excite areas of the mind related
to higher order intellectual functions,
leading to a strong sense of trust,
social capital, collaboration,
empathy and so on.
In fact,
this structuralist perspective forces us
to rethink our ideas
of morality and ethics.
The conclusion is that morality
and ethics can really only follow
from the social or environmental condition
and are in fact painfully subjective
from the standpoint of history.
And if you need evidence of that
think of the countless soldiers raised
by wonderful church-going families who
never had a violent bone in their bodies
who, sanctioned by their government,
are incentivized by some
abstract external threat
and are willing to murder other human beings
that they have never met, in the military.
Or perhaps consider the
numerous studies done by people
who have been tested for their sense
of responsibility or lack thereof,
such as the Milgram experiment,
the shock experiment I suspect some of you have heard of.
They're incentivized to hurt others under
the protection that it isn't really their fault
because they're just following orders.
Or perhaps the Rwandan genocide of
800,000 Tutsis in a 4-month period,
all sanctioned by government
and propagandized media
creating a vicious period
of mass hypnosis in effect
that was based on a kind of distorted
class war that didn't actually even exist.
So I hope my point is clear.
You're not an individual
in any technical sense.
We are all deeply vulnerable
to the social structures,
dominant institutions and culture
that invariably guide our perception,
and accentuate and attenuate,
attenuate aspects of our brain chemistry.
And since we can't change our brains
in biology, at least in the short term,
at least not now to any relevant degree
(someone could debate
transhumanism and things like that)
this means that we're
left with one real option.
If you want to change human behavioral
patterns and the institutions
that are political,
economic and philosophical,
you have to change the
structure we find ourselves,
or better yet to use a medical term,
you have to change the
social precondition.
And the most powerful precondition
ever-present in our lives
will be found to be the economic structure
as I'll explain in the next section.
Part 2
Origins: Power, Class and Inequality
In this section I'm going to go
through the history of our economy:
where it came from and the
core attributes that define it.
If I was to frame the academic
context of this analysis
it would be one of cultural anthropology,
a subject I hope people will look into,
with the theme being how the
logic of our existence today,
especially that of our economy,
has been carved out over
time by external forces
which could be termed
geographical determinism,
like sand and wind
that erode mountains over time.
Roughly 12,000 years ago the
human species transitioned
from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies,
tribes foraging and hunting
with no agricultural skills,
to farm-cultivating settled societies.
This was termed the Neolithic Revolution.
In form this change marked a
kind of technological shift.
Like the advent of mechanization
and the Industrial Revolution,
this development of agriculture was
basically the application of new
technology, as primitive as it seems.
I point this out because it's worth noting
that the most influential
characteristic of a civilization
is the kind of technological means it has,
and how its applied.
When very large-scale changes
in applied technology occurs,
human culture and behavior
tend to change as well.
Before the Neolithic Revolution,
as corroborated by
numerous anthropologists
studying both existing and
historical hunter-gatherer societies,
small bands and tribes operated
without money or markets:
they were egalitarian.
In fact 99% of human history had
no money or markets by the way,
with no economic dominance hierarchy.
It's also well established that
they had much less violence
and certainly no large-scale warfare.
And while modern culture would gawk at
the seemingly crude and minimalistic
reality of hunter-gatherer life today,
it's thoughtfully argued
that there really existed a
kind of minimalistic affluence,
a simplicity that was accepted
and made people happy,
a unique distinction
because it really challenges
what we think of today as
progress in social success,
which unfortunately is so deeply
tied to material progress.
To highlight this contrast here is a
quote by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.
"To accept that hunter-gatherers are
affluent is therefore to recognize
that the present human condition
of man's slaving to bridge the gap
between his unlimited wants
and his insufficient means
is a tragedy of modern times.
Modern capitalist societies,
however richly endowed,
dedicate themselves to the
proposition of scarcity.
Inadequacy of economic
means is the first principle
of the world's wealthiest peoples."
"The market-industrial system institutes scarcity
in a manner completely without parallel.
Where production and distribution are
arranged through the behavior of prices,
and all livelihoods depend
on getting and spending,
insufficiency of material
means becomes the explicit
calculable starting point
of all economic activity."
I'd like to highlight this notion
of a society based upon scarcity
because I'll be returning to that in a moment;
it's a very critical theme.
In modern terms,
hunter-gatherers basically had a
gift economy as we'd call it today,
where they shared with no direct
expectation of reciprocation.
There are even modern stories of
outsiders being given handicrafts
from existing hunter-gatherer tribes
only to feel the need to
give something in return,
as many in our market,
effectively agrarian-based cultures do.
This reciprocal behavior was
considered offensive by the tribe,
as they felt the exchange
was a refusal of friendship.
British anthropologist Tim Ingold highlights
that the difference between giving and exchange
has to do with a social
perception based around
autonomous companionship
versus involuntary obligation.
He states: "Clearly, both hunter-gatherers
and agricultural cultivators
depend on their environments.
But whereas for cultivators
this dependency is framed
within a structure of
reciprocal obligation,
for hunter-gatherers it rests on the
recognition of personal autonomy.
The contrast is between
relationships based on trust
and those based on domination."
I'm going to read that final part again.
"The contrast is between
relationships based on trust
and those based on domination."
This is a subtle but powerful distinction.
Cultivator society,
which almost always is a market society,
generates a social perception
NOT based upon mutual concern,
but rather trade-strategizing dominance:
gaming for survival.
So in short the Neolithic
Revolution set in motion
the core framework of the modern world:
settlement, property, protection,
labor specialization, trade, governance,
capacities for war, and so on.
Each one of these characteristics
was born out of the natural logic
based upon the new settled,
and producing paradigm,
hence the geographical determinism,
translating survival requisites
into eventual tradition.
We also get the formation of a culture
that learns to perceive life through this
scarcity-and-protectionist worldview.
And given disproportionate
labor skills, means,
and the unequal benefits of certain
geographical features (capital),
the outcomes of inequality,
competition and mass conflict
were simply inevitable as
this evolution continued.
In turn, ever-hardening values around
competitive self-interest manifest,
with these psychological gravitations
extending into sociological ones,
forming social structures,
institutions and customs
derived from the scarcity, competitive
and protectionist worldview once again.
Again all this was set in motion
by the geographical determinism
of the Neolithic Revolution.
Now, some may ask
"Why couldn't it have gone another way?"
In this book 'Man's Rise to Civilization'
by Peter Farb,
he describes numerous cultures
that were in fact agrarian
that lived very very differently
and very egalitarianly.
So why couldn't it have gone another
another way on a large scale?
If people realized they have disproportionate
skills in different regions of different qualities,
why didn't just a larger,
more communal connected society form
based upon the original hunter-gatherer
value system and principles?
Because hunter-gatherers didn't just
have a natural sense of egalitarianism per se,
they actually actively
preserved their egalitarianism.
It was called reverse-dominance
hierarchy by some theories
and they worked against anyone
that did rise up and start
to pollute the community
with overt self-interest.
It was an active recognition
in hunter-gatherer society.
Well, as I said historically it
did go the other way in rare cases.
We have knowledge of agrarian First Nations
people - indigenous populations - that
due to the small size of community
and the benefits of their region
- effectively surplus -
they did not fully succumb
to this overt competitive
scarcity-based dominance outcome.
But those are exceptions to the rule,
and the very fact that most of
those cultures are now extinct today
shows the power of the
underlying framework
of the survival mechanism set in motion.
In the words of neuroscientist
Robert Sapolsky:
"Hunter-gatherers had thousands of
wild sources of food to subsist on.
Agriculture changed all that,
generating an overwhelming reliance
on a few dozen food sources.
Agriculture allowed for the
stockpiling of surplus resources
and thus inevitably the
unequal stockpiling of them -
stratification of society
and the invention of classes.
Thus it has allowed for
the invention of poverty."
So to summarize for clarity:
"Since the Neolithic Revolution,
we've had a process of
economically-driven cultural adaptation
built around the survival
requisites of the relatively new,
settled agrarian paradigm.
The evolution of post-Neolithic
culture was self-guided
by systemic environmental pressures
and survival inferences -
geographical determinism -
common to the natural dynamics
of the new mode of production.
This gave birth the dominance-oriented
incentives, values, and protections,
evolving patterns of conflict,
hierarchy, elitism
and disproportional allocation of
physical and social resources."
To translate in terms of modern
political economy as we know it,
"You thus have the basis
of property (ownership),
capital (means of production),
labor specialization (jobs),
regulation (government),
and protection (law/police/military).
In other words you have grounds for what
is now the ultimate mechanism of survival -
the market system of economics."
To which all of these aspects are
actually intrinsic and immutable
despite the utopian ideals and
abstractions of libertarians
and those effectively basking in the
sociopathic free-market delusions of Ayn Rand.
Pick up any introductory
textbook on market theory
and you'll notice the rationale
of the market's very existence
starts with one fundamental premise:
"Resources and means are scarce."
There's no qualification other than that.
It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire,
these people still have the mindset
of operating as though they're poor,
at least in terms of how they
work and engage trade with others.
Their little compassion is shown in the
act of competitive trade from billionaires.
In fact as social studies have shown,
psychological studies have shown,
it actually gets worse
the more money they get.
And from this premise -
resources and means are scarce -
the architecture of not only the economy
but of society itself has been derived.
I call it the root socioeconomic
orientation of our world.
Root Socioeconomic Orientation.
It justifies brute competition,
narrow self-interest,
elitist hierarchy,
inequality, and oppression.
And the central mechanism of this system -
what keeps society divided and
accentuates the endless abuse we see,
whether individual or by
whatever elite minority -
is again trade-strategizing dominance:
the kernel incentive rational process.
It has been the root logic of trade
despite material progress
we have seen over time,
since especially the Industrial Revolution
that ruins humanity's capacity to function
in a socially just and sustainable way.
This gaming mentality,
which is also a core prerequisite
for racism, bigotry, and xenophobia,
rooted deep in the
cultural norm that we live,
and this dysfunctional scarce idea
where any surplus that happens,
any abundance,
can only appear to be transient.
You can't rationalize a world where
there's actually enough to go around
even if it was mathematically possible,
which it actually is.
And again if you dig deep into the worldview
of some of the most dominant and revered
Western political and economic
philosophers from Adam Smith
to John Locke, to again Malthus,
to John Stuart Mill and many others,
you find little deviation of
this social preconception:
one that says it is natural for us to fight,
because that's just the way it is.
In the words of John McMurtry,
"This tendency prevails from
the Continental Rationalists on.
Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes,
Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, for example,
more or less entirely presuppose
the social regime of their day
and its constituent forms
as in some way the
expression of a divine Mind,
which they see it as their rational duty
only to accept or to justify."
It's the climate of opinion.
Part 3
The State, Democracy and Fascism
So.
If global society as we know it
has undergone a systemic unfolding
from the Neolithic Revolution,
what can we learn about
the nature of government
within this unfolding and climate?
Well first,
we see that government actually proceeds
from the economic premise of a society
and not the other way around.
It is the preordained
economic mode of society
that decides what government is,
what it does and where
its loyalties reside.
If you examine historical
variations of social systems,
historical capitalism,
communism, socialism,
feudalism, mercantilism and so on
- and you'll notice I said
historical and not theoretical -
you realize that the governing
architecture of those systems
served to protect and perpetuate the
prevailing economic and class structures
that ultimately define them.
Feudalism for example was a
structure based upon land ownership,
the means of production, labor,
and class interdependence
going from the peasant up to the king.
Capitalism in contrast is based
upon dynamics of private property,
buying and selling and ownership,
and the mechanism of ownership
and wealth translating
into power and control.
Here is a quote by Australian
economist John C. Wood,
who was a scholar of a sociologist that I
often recommend named Thorstein Veblen.
And I think this summation of Veblen -
who is extremely verbose and
rather complicated to read -
gets to the heart of what
we're facing in terms of
the structure of government
within capitalism.
He states
"Veblen wrote extensively and insightfully
on the relationship between capitalist
government and the class struggle.
For Veblen, the ultimate
power in the capitalist system
is in the hands of the owners
because they control the government.
The government is the
institutionally legitimizing means of
physical coercion in any society.
As such, it exists to protect the
existing social order and class structure.
This means that the primary duty of
government is to enforce private property laws
and protect the privileges
associated with ownership."
"Veblen repeatedly insisted that
'modern politics is business politics.'
The first principle of a capitalist
government is that - to quote Veblen -
'The natural freedom of the individual
must not transverse the
prescriptive rights of property.
Property rights have the indefeasibilty
which attached to natural rights.'
The principle freedom of capitalism
is the freedom to buy and sell."
"The laissez-faire philosophy
dictates that - to quote Veblen -
'So long as there is no
overt attempt on life ...
or liberty to buy and sell,
the law cannot intervene,
unless it be in a precautionary way
to prevent prospective
violation of property rights.'
Thus above all else,
to quote Veblen again,
a 'constitutional government
is a business government.'"
In a detailed 2014 study
conducted by professors
Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin
Page of Northwestern University,
concluded in their extensive
study which I recommend you read,
"the preferences of the average American
appear to have only a minuscule,
near-zero, statistically nonsignificant
impact upon public policy."
The researchers concluded that lawmaker's
policy actions tend to support
the interests of guess what-
the wealthy Wall Street
and big corporations.
And what stuns me is that many in America
act like this is some anomaly,
as though the US government,
and in effect the governments of the world
(because this system is just existing on
different stages and levels of
incorporation in every country)
haven't always been driven by financial
business interests since inception.
As though society wasn't set
to favor the wealthy minority and
business elite freedom to begin with!
James Madison, the father of the
US Constitution as he's referred,
made it very clear in the
Federal Convention of 1787
as to why the Senate was to be created.
He stated "There ought
to be so constituted
as to protect the minority of the opulent
against the majority.
The Senate therefore ought to be this
body and to answer these purposes,
they ought to have
permanency and stability."
Madison had a unique perspective
on what he considered majority
and minority interests,
and if you read his work
in the Federalist Papers, it's very
unique to see how the language is used,
because ultimately there
is a fundamental elitism,
which is often interpreted as
against special interest minorities
but actually goes the other way.
And I hope people understand that
when you really look at the foundation
of America with all of its plusses,
it really had no interest in the
resolution of class differences,
and ensured, as it remains today,
the disproportionate support and power
is given to the opulent rich minority.
They knew that a true democracy would
force a vast redistribution of wealth
since of course, the vast majority
historically have always been poor.
In fact it should be a fairly obvious
feature of all national governments
that this kind of protection of
the rich is structurally secured
through government policy.
And if there is any catchphrase
that I am so tired of hearing,
it's this thing that people say about
getting money out of politics. What?!
First, while it may seem morally sound,
it's extremely idiotic in principle
given how the world operates.
In a world where everything is for sale,
in a world where gaming through
trade and trade-strategizing
dominance is the prevailing ethos,
it's the most dominant mode and in fact
communication in the process of our society.
Why should government be off-limits?
Why not buy legislation?
In fact if we're to be
consistent as a society,
it's actually poor form to
object at all to this reality
of lobbying and political
special interests.
We should LET the Koch brothers
buy and run America! Why not?
It's the purest and most natural
outcome suggested by this system:
for the billionaires to run everything,
which is what this system assumes,
its natural gravitation,
and you're never going to stop the force
of financial and business power as long as
our society is grounded in the way it is.
And by the way,
the election of Trump is not an anomaly.
It's just another step toward
the natural gravitation
that our system generates:
a world again run by rich monarchs.
And to some degree or another
it has always been this way
since again the Neolithic Revolution.
So needless to say when it comes
to the true nature of our system,
the very idea of any kind of effective
democracy becomes increasingly illusory.
The system simply isn't designed to cater
to the well-being and democratic
control of the general majority.
Rather it is designed to
facilitate the affairs of business
and most of all the
protection of big business,
which are naturally the dominant interests
in the revolving door of government.
Put another way,
the system is fundamentally fascist.
This is a book by Robert Brady
called 'Business as a System of Power.'
It was written in 1943
in the heat of the 2nd World War.
It is a comparative study
of a number of nations
including fascist Germany,
Japan, Italy and others,
and it links the root structure
and incentive of business -
businesses by the way which loved
the fascist institutions of this time -
to the rise of fascist
controls historically,
specifically in that period which
is very unique in terms of history.
And it's frightening. Because when
you really read this book from 1943
and you start to dissect the
structures of these economies,
it becomes euphemistic to see how they've
actually changed, because they haven't.
Things really haven't changed, they've
just become more politically correct
in the way the world is perceiving
the structures of totalitarianism
that are actually in play.
The forward of this text
was written by Robert Lynd
and I think he states the issue
very well with respect to America.
"Thus political equality
under the ballot was granted
on the unstated but factually
double-locked assumption
that the people must refrain from
seeking the extension of that equality
to the economic sphere.
In short, the attempted harmonious
marriage of democracy to capitalism
doomed genuinely popular
control from the start.
And all down through our national
life the continuance of the Union
has depended upon the unstated condition
that the dominant member, capital,
continue to provide returns to
all elements in democratic society
sufficient to disguise the
underlying conflict in interests."
Sufficient to disguise the
underlying conflict in interests!
"The crisis within the economic
relations of capitalism was bound
to precipitate a crisis in the
democratic political system."
Part 4
The New Human Rights Movement
The solution to a world at war with itself
and at war with the environment
is to change again the social precondition
from one that emphasizes scarcity,
competition and hierarchical dominance
to one that emphasizes and incentivizes
effectively the exact opposite.
Since the Industrial Revolution
humanity has been handed a gift
to change course in a
completely different direction,
with the option to create in fact a
strategic and sustainable abundance
to meet the world's needs:
a phenomenon Buckminster
Fuller called ephemeralization,
or what Jeremy Rifkin refers to more
technically as a "more-with-less" phenomenon.
As time moves forward
we're able to do more and more and more
with less and less and less.
That means that we can
create an increased abundance
without heavy impact on society;
they move in contrary patterns now,
as abstract and odd as that is to realize.
If strategically utilized
this pattern, if we adjust our society -
adjust our economy -
will put to rest the
dysfunctional social system
that is based on the exploitation
of scarcity and other human beings.
Now due to a lack of time in the
preparation of this as I mentioned,
it's not the scope of this
talk to delve into the subject
of what a new economic precondition [is],
or how to get there.
That's detailed in my book
and this slide right here, this figure
is a brief summation
of the types of transitions
that the world needs to see,
all of which are actually happening now.
And I'm not here to plug a book
but I do encourage anyone
that wants to think about
this particular subject to
read that section of it.
So in conclusion, I do want to state
that the New Human Rights Movement
has the following four realizations
before anything can actually change.
Number one.
The structuralist realization that the most
detrimental social patterns existing today
are sourced to a flawed
economic orientation.
Number 2.
These resulting detrimental
social patterns include
socioeconomic inequality as
the core public health threat.
Socioeconomic inequality is the precondition
for a spectrum of other problems,
also linking to unsustainable
negative externalities
produced by the market:
resource overshoot,
diversity loss, climate change,
endless pollution,
destruction of the oceans, and so on.
Number 3. Adjusting away from
this flawed economic orientation
and seeking to reduce
socioeconomic inequality
and generate environmental sustainability
means shifting focus to
maximize economic efficiency
through strategic,
systems-based, technical design.
(something I haven't
had a chance to get into
but that is what the secret of
economic efficiency is: its design.)
This will reduce scarcity, reduce inequality,
and reduce the environmental footprint.
It will also better harness
ephemeralization as I mentioned,
moving us closer to what could be called a
"post-scarcity" abundance
or post-scarcity society.
That's not a society where there's
an infinite amount of everything.
It's a society where
people are actually focused
on creating enough for everyone
as opposed to exploiting the fact
that people don't have things.
Number 4. Accomplishing this transition
will require creative initiative
and activist initiative.
The creative initiative has to do with
developing the efficiency-enhancing systems
that will compose the new economic mode.
The activist initiative has to do
with strategic pressure and demands
placed upon the existing power structure,
effectively coercing
change from the bottom up.
Because none of this is
going to come naturally.
It is antithetical
to the culture that's been
created in the dominant class,
and it's going to take a kind of galvanization
that the world probably hasn't seen,
even though all these paths are
actually being suggested right now,
and these trends are really
not surprising in terms of the
vast positive potential
we can have in the future:
an equitable society where
people's needs are met,
derailing all the social distortions and
intergroup conflicts and bigoted patterns
that will continue to be amplified,
as long as this system
continues as it does.
Thank you.
[Applause]
