Social Pathology by Peter Joseph : Introdcution (1 of 4)

I've entitled this "Social Pathology". I've decided to use the metaphor of disease to describe the current state of social affairs and the trends it foreshadows and perpetuates. I was first introduced to this idea, of relating social state to a cellular state, by a man named John McMurtry, who wrote a book called "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism". The rationality is pretty simple. Just as human beings have to deal with pathogens invading and harming their life system, so too does the social system we all share.
Societal diseases are not generated by ways of physical germs or the like; rather, they come in a form of presupposed principles of preference; cultural memes that transfer from one to another based on values, and hence, belief systems. These memes or patterns of perspective and behavior are what eventually result from or comprise the cultural manifestations around us, such as the ideas of democracy, republicans, democrats, the american dream, etc.
In chapter one we will examine the symptoms, and hence diagnose the current stage of disease we are in. Then in chapter two we will establish a prognosis, meaning what can we expect from the future as the current pathogenic patterns continue. And finally, in chapter three, we will discuss treatment for our current state of sickness. And this is where the concept of a resource-based economy will be initially examined.
As an introduction to this, I'm first going to describe what I call the "invisible prison". This is the closed intellectual feedback system, if you will, that consistently slows or even stops new socially altering concepts from coming to fruition. Stops progress. The social order, as we know it, is created out of ideas, either directly or as a systemic consequence. In other words, somebody somewhere did something which generated a group interest, which then led to the implementation of specific social component, either in a physical form, philosophical form, or both. Once a given set of ideas are entrusted by a large enough group of people, it becomes an institution. And once that institution is made dominant in some way, while existing for a certain period of time, that institution can then be considered an establishment.
Institutional establishments are simply social traditions giving the illusion of permanence. In turn, the more established they become, the more cultural influence they tend to have on us, including our values and hence our identities and perspectives. It is not an exaggeration to say that the established institutions governing a person's environment is no less than a conditioning platform to program, if you will, that person with the specific set of values required to maintain the establishment. Hence, we are going to call these "established value programs".
I have found the analogy of computer programming to be a great way to frame this point. While there's always a debate about genetics, an environmental influence which, by the way, as I mentioned Roxanne Meadows will go into at length, later in the program, it's very easy to understand in the context of values, meaning what you think is important and not important, that information influences or conditioning is coming from the world around you.
Every intellectual concept, which each one of us finds merits with, is the result of a cultural information influence, one way or another. The environment is a self-perpetuating programming process, and just like designing a software program for your computer, each human being is, advertently and inadvertently, programmed into their world view. To continue the analogy, the human brain is a piece of hardware and the environment around you constitutes the programming team which creates the values and perspective. Every word you know has been taught to you one way or another, and thus, every concept and belief you have is a result of this same influence.
Jacque Fresco once asked me, "How much of you is you?" The answer, of course, is kind of a paradox, for either nothing is me, or everything is me, when it comes to the information I understand and act upon. Information is a serial process, meaning the only way that a human being can come up with any idea is through taking independent information that allows that idea to be realized. We appear to be culturally programmed from the moment we are coming to this world to the moment we die. And I'm not gonna' drill in it much more than that. However, consequently, the cultural attributes we maintain as important values are most often the ones that are reinforced by the external culture. I'm gonna' say that again. The most dominant cultural attributes maintained are the ones that are reinforced by your environment. If you are born into a society which rewards competition over collaboration, then you most likely will adopt those values in order to survive.
We are essentially bio-chemical machines. And while the integrity of our machine processing power and memory is contingent, in part, on genetics, the source of our actions comes fundamentally from the ideas and experiences installed on our mental hardware by the world around us. However, our biological computer, the human mind, has an evolutionarily installed operating system, if you will, with some seemingly difficult tendencies built in which tends to limit our objectivity and, hence, our rational thought process. This comes in the form of emotional inclinations. You know, I'm sure many people here have heard the phrase "Be objective!" No human being can be fully objective. That's one of the important things I learned, actually, from Mr. Fresco. There's a very common propensity for us humans to find something that works for our needs given the social structure, and then to hold on to it for dear life rationally expect a logical change to occur regardless of new conflicting information which might rationally expect a logical change to occur. Change tends to be feared, for it upsets our associations. And, by the way, when it comes to maintaining income in the monetary system, you see this propensity in full force, which I will talk about a lot more later. Therefore, any time someone dares to present an idea outside or contrary to the establishment programming, the reaction is often a condemning of the idea as blasphemy, or undermining, or a conspiracy, or simply erroneous. For example, in the academic world, investigation often becomes confined to self-referring circles of discourse. Closed feedback loops, which assume that the foundational assumptions of their schools of thought are empirical and only these experts, as defined by their established credentials, are considered viable authorities, therein often dominating influence over the public opinion.
A doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis was a physician who lived in the mid 1800's who performed child births. Through a series of events he realized the pattern that there was a relationship with the transfer of disease and the fact that the doctors of the time never washed their hands after performing autopsies. The doctors of the time would handle dead bodies in the lower elements of the hospitals and then they would go up and they would perform child births without washing their hands. So, this doctor, realizing this pattern, he started to tell his colleagues about this; he said, "Hey, you know, you should wash your hands before doing this; before performing any type of surgery or childbirth, especially after handling a dead body." He was laughed at. He was laughed at and ignored. He published papers and they were dismissed and ridiculed. And after many years of trying this issue, he was finally committed to a mental institution, where he died. It was many years after his death when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease that his observations were finally understood, and people realized what a horrible mistake had been made.
In the words of John McMurtry, professor of philosophy in Canada, "In the last dark age, one can search the inquiries of this era's preserved thinkers, from Augustine to Ockham, and fail to discover a single page of criticism of the established social framework, however rationally insupportable feudal bondage, absolute paternalism, divine right of kings, and the rest may be. In the current final order, is it so different? Can we see in any media or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of the global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available? In such an order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda. Only one doctrine is speakable, and a priest caste of its experts prescribe the necessities and obligations to all.
Social consciousness is incarcerated within the role of a kind of ceremonial logic operating entirely within the received framework of an exhaustively prescribed regulatory apparatus protecting the privileges of the privileged. Methodical censorship triumphs in the guise of scholarly rigor and the only room left for searching thought becomes the game of competing rationalizations." People tend not to criticize the social order because they are bound within it. We are running a thought program which has been installed on our mental hardware which inherently controls our frame of reference. To use a different analogy, it's like they're in a game and the idea of questioning the integrity of the game itself rarely occurs. In fact, members of society often become so indoctrinated by their socially acceptable norms, that each person's very meaning is framed by the dominant established value system and the interpretation of new information is consciously or even sub-consciously prefiltered to be consistent with their prior biases.
Now, this basic idea understood, let's hone our focus and briefly consider this mind-lock phenomenon, as you could call it, in the context of economics. Specifically, market economics. Actually, a more accurate term at this stage would be economic theology. For, as this presentation will explore, the majority of people on this planet, not only have no idea how they're being affected negatively by the market economy at large, they actually, on average, hold a steadfast commitment to its principles based on nothing more than the traditional indoctrination. I got an email once that said to me, "If you're against the free market, you're against freedom." And, naturally, I shuddered at this state of mind control that the dominant established orthodoxy has successfully imposed. Of course, this is how power is maintained and has been maintained by the dominant established orthodoxies since the beginning of time. And the trick, again, is to condition people so thoroughly into the established value systems, that any thought of an alternative is inherently ruled out without critical examination.
To show how deeply pervasive this phenomenon is, you will notice that virtually all the activist organizations in the environmental, social and political movements of the day always exclude the market system itself as a determinant of harmful effects. Doesn't even occur to them. Instead, they focus on individuals and certain groups or corrupt corporations, and while, you know, it is needed on a per-case basis to target problematic areas, it avoids the mechanism which is essentially creating the problem. This is the fatal flaw of what's happening in the so-called activist community today. And, as will be firmly and clearly established over the course of this presentation, the greatest destroyer of ecology; the greatest source of waste and pollution; the greatest prevailer of violence, war, crime, inhumanity, poverty, and social distortion; the greatest generator of social and personal neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety; and the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for global sustainability and hence progress on this planet; is not some government. It's not some legislation. It's not some rogue corporation or monopoly or cartel. It's not some flaw of human nature. It is, in fact, the economic system itself, at its very foundation. The market system, monetary system, free market, capitalist structure; whatever you wanna call it, is not only the source of some of the greatest social problems we face today. it is also setting us up for what could be called the terminal stage of this disease, where the pathogenic social value cancer has mutated and multiplied to a point where we are now faced with nothing less than the death or collapse of modern civilization as we know it.
Now please understand; I'm not a doom's day theorist. I'm not here looking for general knee-jerk emotional reaction to say it's the end of the world. It doesn't take a genius to see where the trends are going. The trends that the media won't talk about. And given the pattern of political, economic, and environmental negligence and abuse, we are on a collision course, which I will explain as we continue. Are there solutions to these problems? Yes, there are. But they are so far outside of the status quo, and a threat to those in power, both politically and economically, that they are just outright dismissed as irrational and absurd. The self-appointed guardians of the status quo won't even hear it, because it's far outside of their reference and identity. Here's a few examples of some of the things that are currently happening right now and there's many more, these are just a few that have pop out in the mainstream media. This is where The Zeitgeist Movement comes in.
I'm really sorry to say we can no longer rely on government institutions to steer us in the right direction. Every government on this planet is locked into an economically-oriented social program which is self-serving, unsustainable, and destructive to one degree or another. The possibility of a smooth transition into a new enlightened social design, which does not have the negative byproducts, which I'm going to talk about, is extremely limited, given the options made available in the current order. Meaning the legal system, the political system, etc. Likewise, we can no longer endure the profit-driven ethos("character") of the corporate and financial powers which control all of our precious resources on the planet. Resources we all need for survival. Society today is sick and the illness permeates all life systems within it. And I see The Zeitgeist Movement as the immune system of the social world, if you will. Thank you.

A Transcript of Ben Mcleash's speech on common objections to a resource based economy : Part 2

Who makes the decisions in a resource-based economy? This question actually needs to be rephrased.

It’s not who makes the decisions, but “How are the decisions arrived at?” The running of society is a technical process. There are very few things that need to be “decided” by human opinion. Technical processes aren’t even decided by you now. Did you vote on the structural attributes of a bridge? Did you vote on which materials are used to construct houses? Did you vote on the internal mechanisms or designs of an MRI machine? No, because most of us, certainly me, don’t have the knowledge necessary to make large decisions like this. We already arrive at these decisions based on the best available information we have at the time.

So what about, you know, lazy people?

If I am busy in a contributory role, or not over-consuming,

won’t others simply sit around,

live off the fat of the land that the economy is now producing at no cost to the individual?

First off, why is it that when people talk to me about lazy people, lazy people are always other people? I find that quite interesting. And if you do know a lazy person, when did they become lazy? Was it on their 20th birthday? Were they lazy as a child? Who here has toddlers who have chronic laziness? Who here remembers the day they became lazy? No, it happened over time didn’t it? Slow creeping laziness set in. You get home tired from work, you crack open a beer, you slam on the box and sink into the couch. Laziness is an effectual by-product of our society. Either we are spent from our jobs, demotivated by the treadmill lives so many of us are made to lead, conditioned by advertising to sit and consume, or by social infexibility to be able to go out and do the things you want to do. In a world of far greater personal freedom, these tendencies towards laziness would drop off hugely. Even if they did not, a system of technologically enabled abundance would not suffer from lazy behaviours the way it does presently. The Pixar film "WALL*E" imagined a world in which all the jobs had been replaced, but people were still hapless, over-indulgent consumers. Note that in the film they actually had left the earth to be massively inefficient and non-productive in space. The people had not changed in themselves, the society behavioural mechanisms had not changed, as technology does take over more and more of our jobs, so we must adapt to new tasks, and not simply replace the old tasks with a void. It's a change we are advocating. Coupled with the updating of technology is the updating of our behaviour, the abandoning of the over-consumptive, passive behaviours so excellently satirized by "WALL*E." *** lazy people.

What about dangerous people? Bad people.

Well, here's something you may have heard before: There is no such thing as a bad/evil person per se. Quite apart from the fact those two terms, bad ***, it could mean anything. We are the products of our surroundings. People who commit crimes against the rest of humanity, whether it’s violence, theft, corporate crime, are the products of a sick society whose mechanisms either encourage, necessitate or reward those actions. If you don’t believe this, why is it that some countries have much higher crime rates than others? Are there more “bad people” on that landmass? Surely if “human nature” were to blame we’d have identical crime figures all across the world. We don’t because the situations, the environmental influences, are different in each location. Everything from the wealth gap, pollution levels, positive or negative media influences, right through to the weather, influences our behaviour. It is the ultimate litmus test of society’s soundness. Higher crime rates are symptoms of the flaws of the system. Yet, right now we react to crime, not by looking at the aberrant behaviour as a symptom of our social mechanisms, but by blaming the individual and locking them up, creating more laws and ultimately creating a less flexible and more oppressive society. In turn, this oppressive, illiberal society produces more crime and a higher prison population. Criminals and ex-cons are precluded from successful lives after jail. No-one wants to employ a criminal. They also have most likely been given a decent education *** Violent crimes are more prevalent in societies with greater inequality. This slide comes from the Equality Trust who are just south of the river. It shows the clear correlation between inequality and homicides. Remove the underlying cause, inequality, and the incidences of crime decrease as well. Stressed family environments, relationship breakdown, school shootings, gang violence, bank robberies, fraud; which of these cannot be traced back to social stratification based on income, greed or spending power or the ability to gain differential advantage over others? If you remove the mechanisms that essentially encourage aberrant behaviour and reward aberrant human interactions, the behaviours themselves will go away. As yet, we have not implemented a system which does this. Mental health issues, for the most part, stem from monetary issues aswell. Mental illness can almost always be stemmed back to economical and societal inequality. This slide shows the correlation of mental illness with income inequality. It illustrates this point more than amply. Greater inequality, facilitated by the narrow self-interest, the internal logic of a monetary system and differential advantage and competition, directly negatively affects everyone in the population, including rich people. Based on 30 years of research by the Equality trust, If the UK were more equal, we'd be better off as a population. For example, the evidence suggests that if we halved inequality there would be: halve murder rates, mental illness would reduce by two thirds, obesity would halve, imprisonment would reduce by 80%, teen births would reduce by 80%, levels of trust would increase by 85%. Imagine how little crime there would be if we put true equality into practise in this country. And were there global equality and partnership, can you imagine how quickly war would disappear?

What about the law?

Legal restrictions are present in our society to limit problems we've not been able to solve through technological means. We have drink-driving laws because our cars will crash if we’re drunk behind the wheel. But if we build cars that can’t crash into each other via GPS guidance systems, and with pendulums built into the base that corrects a swerving motion, drink driving laws become irrelevant. You can get really *** and go out and drive. It is technologically more than possible. We've already fly into the moon, by the way. But we don't do it 'cause it is “too expensive.” A society structured around resources, equality and efficiency will mean the automatic redundancy of laws pertaining to finance and money, property, crime and socially offensive behaviours. Having a lot of laws is not the sign of a well-adjusted society. It is a demonstration of the flaws that society has. Laws attempt to patch up the inabilities to function correctly within that society. Perhaps... *** like this one.

Perhaps you think that we can solve our problems with politics.

We are not a political movement. We will not stand for election. In both senses of that. Why is that? Michael Ruppert said it best when he said that politics is economics by other means. Politics is simply another power outgrowth. To be elected, or even run for election, requires a large amount of money to canvas support. Once you are beholden to large corporate donors, it is literally impossible to fulfil real change in a society, since the wishes of your backers need to be fulfilled first. Those wishes are always to produce favourable laws and fiscal policies that will benefit those very donants and corporations, the promise of which was their sole reason for backing your party in the first place. Why do politicians break promises? Is it because they are “bad people”? No they aren't. Politicians are not here to change things. How could they be? They are raised, conditioned, promoted and admitted by the current established societal notions. They are not technical experts. How could they solve society's problems, which are technical? Most of them come from a legal background, which is semantic manipulation and nothing else. They aren't qualified to make changes. This man is an economist by trade. Given that he is absolutely indoctrinated into a monetary system, how is he going to bring about the change he promises? The same is with every other politician. We cannot achieve lasting, real and meaningful change through politics. We need to move beyond politics. The simple fact is that politicians are not there to enact real change to the underlying root causes of society. Constrained by relatively short voting cycles and financial pressures, even the best, the most worthy and honest "leaders" have to operate within the system.

It's time to take the next step in our social evolution.

It is time to evolve along the only path that is relevant, one rooted in the real world, one that is truly possible. We have outgrown the needs for the mechanisms to manage scarcity. We have outgrown scarcity itself. We have outgrown the need for war, poverty and profit at all cost. It's time to ditch the false divisionary notions based on belief, opinion, hearsay, surmise, and any and all inherited assumptions. Human beings are amazing. On this tiny pale blue dot we have come from the simplest of organic life against all odds to our present state of sophistication and consciousness. We have put to task our ingenuity and our creativity to produce astonishing results. It is only money now that is holding us back. We must not let our own failings to continue our evolution destroy the most valuable thing we have... ourselves. You don’t join us by voting for us. You don’t join us by canvassing. You don’t join us by signing up for a mailing list. You don’t join us by buying a book, or a T-Shirt, or a DVD. As mentioned before, any and all information we disseminate is offered completely free of charge. And you certainly don’t join us by giving us donations. We won’t accept them. You join us up here, in your head. You join us by realizing the logical limitations of our current lifestyle and calling for a new global model. We all join by breaking down the barriers we have had imposed on ourselves or have imposed others, to rejoin the other members of the human race waiting on every other side. Thank you.

• A Transcript of Ben Mcleash's speech on common objections to a resource based economy : Part 1
• Alright, I’m Ben McLeish and as Harvey Milk would say, "I'm here to change your mind." Who here... Hands up whoever, at this point, can understand and agrees with what our movement is about and would describe themselves as on board. Who would say that maybe in principle they understand the idea, they understand the logic behind it, but they have some questions and they are not quite sure? And who here thinks it's an Utopianist culture with plans for world domination . We kind of cover that already. But here are some common objections and responses to a resource-based economy.
• First off, it’s not a Utopia as Tom said.
• There's no such things as Utopia. We aren’t under the illusion that we can create a perfect world. There is no such thing as “perfect” in a practical world. What we are proposing, however, is a whole lot better than what we have now. There will always be problems. But a global emergent system, where innovation, change and development is put centre-stage, rather than being hamstrung by the profit mechanisms and interestsof established power structures of any kind, is going to be more able to meet and solve these problems than our current so-called “established” societies.
• This is not communism, or socialism, or any of the "isms" out there. Quite apart from the fact that no two people here will agree what "communism" is, since it is a high-order abstraction with no real-life referents, and with mutliple varied real-world “versions,” even the most boiled-down version of Karl Marx's philosphy was still based on money, differential advantage, profit, earnings, various degrees of qualities of life and thus, social stratification was built into its foundations. Communism also pre-supposes property. Property, if you remember, is an outgrowth of scarcity. Because there may not be enough to go round, you need to “own” things to deter their use by others, to reserve, essentially, or guarantee, the things you need and are now conditioned to want.
• Communism also didn’t have access to the technologies to create abundance, or certainly didn't envision or strive for a world of deliberate abundance, and didn’t imagine a world where all labour was automated, all necessities were supplied free of charge and where the structure of society is a global integrated system. Marx never considered a global economy based on resources. It's just a monetary system with slightly more or less government control coupled with varying degrees of romanticism of labour or the labour class, which ironically, they didn't want to get rid off. The fundamentals are the same as any other monetary system. What we propose and advocate lies outside the logical referents of this box of monetary-ism. The box itself, we feel, is structurally unsound.
• Well, if it’s not communism, it sounds like a commune!
• Well, again, a commune is defined by the deliberate artificial separation that we are trying to get past. We cannot simply separate ourselves from society and build a resource-based economy. The logic of living according to planetary resources and total efficiency cannot be anything other than global, all-encompassing operation - one system. The logic of efficiency demands it; multiple societies attempting to operate separately would require duplication of effort, resources and waste, as we see in the current system. It would also create competition, which would ultimately create war, as we fight for resources, space and so on. And you know what else? Everything that divides us, whether be race, religion, or national identity, political affiliations, social classes, are false divisions invented or promoted by our respective societies to get you to buy in and not defect from that country or society you have to be in. Why? It's about maintaining a group economy. Stability. In the face of scarcity, real or artificial. Even geographic boundaries, which are at least based in spatial reality, are fading fast as we improve transport technologies.
• We are, and always have been, one global human race. We must live as such to ensure our survival at the maximum quality of life possible. Climbing into a forest, shedding all the benefits of technological advances and reviving esoteric English witchcraft religions isn't going to do anything except devolve us, and only temporarily, before necessity forces that separatist society back into long-term contact with other human civilizations. There really isn’t anywhere left in the world for people to be able to do that anyway. Life on this planet tends towards complexity and sophistication. Communes are artificial, isolated, unsustainable and achieve nothing but to stave off large-scale social interactions for brief periods, mostly due to protest or divisionary beliefs based on inherited notions. Perhaps you think that competition would be a better ideology to base society on. That competition somehow speeds up innovation, makes pricing fair, provides choice and so on, and it's generally a good thing. The concept of the resource-based economy is based on the same logic as the human body, as Jacque said on that video. Were your brain to decide tomorrow that it is the most important organ in the body, and demanded more of the resources, oxygen, than the liver, or the left lung is more important than the right and demanded most of the resources itself, you'd rot away in a month.
• Animals live in harmony with their surroundings, not in competition with them. Nature has examples of competition within it, but in areas where food and resources are abundant for animals, you find they don’t fight over food. Nature is symbiotic. We must become symbiotic too. To be in competition with each other and attempting to “dominate” nature or each other, is to ensure our own demise. Nature, however, will carry on just fine without us.
• One question I hear all the time and it's in fact a question, is: What would I do in a resource-based economy? Where's no traditional work or money, what would I do?
• It's a valid question, as we can only presume to imagine a massive void of inertia where once a 9-5 stood in its place. Oddly, I am actually asked this by friends of mine who work in the arts, or who have expensive, time-consuming or unusual hobbies. Or cab drivers who are amateur scientists. Why do you work in the arts? Why do you have hobbies? Why do you do favours for others? Why do you give to charity? Why did you come here tonight? Why do you do all of these things? You did all of these things absent the desire to make money. Especially if you work in the arts. How much more could you do without the monetary restrictions you have now? In low-power countries where people walk for hours to get water, one could imagine them thinking, "Well if I could just turn a tap and get water instantly and not spend 4-5 hours a day getting it, what would I do with the spare time?" That's the same kind of logic that people can't seem to make that jump. It’s a little like being in a cell all your life. Offering a prisoner a way out of his or her cell, they then turn to you and say, “Well, what do I do now?” A related point; what about motivation to do anything if you aren’t essentially forced by economic pressures, as we are now? What will motivate us? Your motivation to recycle is not profit driven, in fact, it's far the opposite; it costs you money and time, when you only factor in the drive to the bottle bank.
• Nikola Tesla’s motivation to create free energy the world over was certainly not profit driven. In fact, JP Morgan, his backer, had to shut it down because of the impact it would have on the ability to profit from this. And what about this? The world has written a continually growing, emergent encyclopaedia of 15 million articles in 272 languages in 9 years. Money has nothing to do with it, except for when they run out of it, periodically, and have to ask you for more. Imagine what Wikipedia looked like if they didnt have moneraty restrictions to do it, if money were literally no object. Imagine what the world would look like if money were no object. We are already have a motivation, and it's more than money. What we are suggesting is a world where this place the centre-stage.
• Let's stick with the Wikipedia example. Who runs the societal infrastructure in a resource-based economy? And could they take it over? Two big ones I get a lot, and valid questions aswell, speaking about the world being dominated, although is quite ironical we live in this system now where we clearly are dominated, and we're kind of worry that we wouldn't be, but it's okay. It feels a little sinicial today. At its core, a resource-based economy's systems, very much like Wikipedia, would need very few people to service any parts of the system that are not already self-repairing. Essentially systems maintenance. Are those people more powerful than those who live and thrive on the system without directed linking to those kind of interfaces? Could they take it over? Well, are the individuals who run Wikipedia powerful? Could they "take over" Wikipedia? There's nothing to gain by attempting to own or control Wikipedia. It's a social system, run in spite of the profit mechanisms. What benefits us all, including those who maintain aspects of its infrastructure, would only hinder everyone including the maintainers, were it compromised. The question of people “taking over” a society seems a rather moot point. Right now we live in the kind of society that can be taken over, and is regularly taken over by corporate interests, political powers and groups of wealthy people. And it is this precise mechanism of dominance that is absent from a resource-based economy in the same way that it's absent from Wikipedia or any similar non-monetary resource.