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.