Socialy Pathology by Peter Joseph: Chapter 2: Prognosis (3 of 4)

Part Two: Prognosis

The prior points, made about the well-being and quality of life issues associated with social imbalance, is a big issue. However, to be fair, just because there's a propensity for an overweight, violent, diseased, mentally disturbed, selfish, un-trusting, illiterate population, does not necessarily translate into the consequence of social collapse, as we are beginning to see. So, we are gonna move on putting the basic well-being of humanity aside for a moment and focus on the mechanisms of the social system itself and the larger order problems that are being generated.
Okay, here's the deal: One of the most critical things to understand, which without a shadow of doubt proves the unsustainable nature of our current social system and how it is on a collision course with nature, is this: Due to the way money, and hence the market system functions, we are locked into an incompatible paradigm, where two mutually exclusive operating principles; one, the need for constant consumption or "Infinite" growth, collides with an unyielding Finite planet, and hence, the physical laws of nature. You simply cannot have an infinite growth of commerce, and hence consumption, in a closed system such as the planet Earth.
For all those that don't fully understand this, let me explain more. The planet Earth is basically a closed system, when it comes to its resources. All the minerals and energy deposits that we currently use have rates of cultivation that dramatically exceed the lifespan of the human being. For example, oil and fossil fuels in general took over a 100 million years easy for them to come about. The same goes for our mineral resources. The 4400 mineral species out there today took outrages amounts of time to be created. The diamonds that we find today took over 3 billion years to be created. Now, given this environmental reality, it would seem painfully obvious that the most important aspect of any earthly society would be the preservation of the Earth's resources. Right? It would seem in fact that the entire basis of any economic structure would have as the number one priority the preservation of the resources of the planet. Why? Because once it's gone, it's gone.
For example, even at this stage of scientific inquiry, we cannot take a tire, which contains probably 6 or 7 gallons of oil, and convert it back into combustible fuel. So instead of having a logical system of resource-management, where we actually monitor the Earth's resources and try as the human species to strategically orient our use of these precious finite elements, we came up with something much more interesting. And it's called the "Infinite growth" economic paradigm. In our current system we grab as many resources as we can, we throw them in anything that we think someone will buy, and we try to manipulate each other into buying these things from us for profit. In fact, the entire basis of the free market ideology is using and exchanging as many resources as possible, as fast as possible, to generate as much money as possible, which in turn is used to exploit more resources over and over again. We've created a global money and profit-driven structure, which consists of a circular exchange "protocol," if you will, where money must move from the consumer, to the employer, to the employee, which is the consumer again; and the only way again that could sustain this pattern to keep people employed, the only way to keep people eating, the only way to keep GDP up, the only way to keep the stock market up, is through the mandate that goods and services, comprised again of our finite resources and energy, are constantly and perpetually used and sold ad infinitum, irregardless of purpose, utility or respect for what we actually have.
I couldn't possibly come up with a more destructive manner for organizing society. And the sad thing is, people don't see this whatsoever. They have been conditioned into ideologies. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, well, guess what? Any social ideology, specifically economic, which does not directly relate to the resources of the planet in its doctrines explicitly, meaning the attributes of our environment, which actually sustain our lives, is an inapplicable and thus irrelevant social ideology.
Case in point, oil and fossil fuels. We live in a hydrocarbon economy, as I'm sure you all know. Our entire economic structure, meaning production, distribution, food cultivation, transportation, etc; is entirely based on energy from fossil fuels. There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy in every 1 calorie of food currently consumed in the industrialized world. This is M. King Hubbert, a geologist, and interestingly enough, a technocrat. M. King Hubbert predicted in the late 1940s that the United States would peak in its oil production in 1970. Of course, he was ridiculed, laughed at, and scorned by the scientific establishment. And unfortunately, he was right, the US did peak in the 1970s.
In fact, some studies now show that global oil discoveries have likely peaked around the same time. The exact date is debatable, but it doesn't change anything. Now, before I go any further, I know some of you out there are saying, "How do we know that these statistics are accurate?" "How do we know that the research institutions are unaware of existing oil supplies that go undiscovered?" "And how do we know if the oil corporations themselves, which contain the data, are not lying to simply boost their profits?" Well, these are good questions. But there's no question about the decline in the United States. We do import over 70% of our oil now. And as far as the global peak, all you really have to do is look at the drilling patterns of the major corporations to see that almost every major oil company is desperate to find new oil reserves, and they have gone almost everywhere legally possible to do so. The oil on this planet, which took a 100 million years to generate, regardless of what you believe about depletion rates, is going to run out, one way or another. It is an unsustainable practice. And I won't even go into the obvious dangers associated with burning fossil fuels, in regards to its environmental effects, which we're all hearing about today.
As an aside, it is not at all irrational or hasty to consider that the peak oil issue just might have something to do with the fact that the United States, which consumes 25% of the world's energy, while having only 5% of the population, has the largest permanent military bases in history, situated in the Middle East with no evidence whatsoever of ever leaving this region. Obama has already stated that he is going to leave 50 thousand troops in the Middle East indefinitely. This is the guy that got the Nobel Peace prize.
As we continue in the Middle East to probe and agitate countries, which contain, guess what, the majority of the remaining recoverable oil on this planet. Such as Iran. Give it some thought. And if you take a moment to consider that peak oil and its relationship with the economic system and geopolitics might be relevant to the US involvement in the Middle East, you'll tend to find the world starts to make a lot more sense. In the words of M. King Hubbert: "We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It's unique to both human and geological history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered. This is obviously a scenario of catastrophe but we have the technology. All we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative to money. We are not starting from zero. We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. Just a matter of putting it all together. A non-catastrophic solution is impossible unless the society is made stable. This means abandoning two axioms of our culture: the current work ethic and the idea that growth is a normal state of life."
He continues in a paper he wrote in 1981, called "Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture". Hubbert writes: "The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last 4 centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin." You simply cannot have a society operate based on this necessity for constant growth to maintain, ironically, stability.
We have at our disposal a tremendous number of alternative energies, and infrastructure possibilities, and sophisticated matters of implementation, which could reduce our reliance on fossil fuels dramatically, paving the way to a world that would have zero reliance on hydrocarbon energies, at all. Unfortunately, you are not going to see this anytime soon for the economic paradigm we live in sets up another serious problem that we need to address, and I simply call this: "Establishment Paralysis"
Given our tremendous reliance on hydrocarbon energy at this stage of human evolution, people, when hearing about the obvious problem of depletion, naively brush it off under the assumption that the establishment is actually preparing for a transition out of our dependency on hydrocarbons. Or better yet, that the establishment can actually afford to create a transition. In order to understand the difficulty of moving out of our current established energy paradigm, we must first realize that from a financial standpoint there is very little motivation to move into a new system. This is the very nature of an established institution in the monetary system. The fact of the matter is, an exorbitant amount of money, I know this will sound strange to many of you, an exorbitant amount of money is going to be made on the scarcity of energy, and in fact, the collapse of society itself.
Our economic system is predicated on making money on the way up, and making money on the way down. Those in power, referencing back to that Citigroup document I talked about, have a propensity to care more about the short term, short-sighted financial benefits of running out of energy, than they care about the pivotal life-supporting attributes that it provides. If you look back at history, you see that the concern over depleting fossil fuels has been talked about for a long time. And many scientists in the 1960s and 70s felt that by the year 2000 we'll have an entirely different energy infrastructure. Why didn't that happen? Why is it that the Reagan administration ripped off the solar panels from the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed. Why is it that the US government sided with big oil, so the electric car would be squashed, in the United States?
The answer of course is that our profit-based system sets up a natural defensive propensity to stop anything; if those changes find the prior establishment to be obsolete. This is likely the most caustic attribute of our current situation. The knee-jerk propensity to stop productive change for the sake of preserving market share and profit for select groups. Think about it. If you start a company, you hire employees, you generate income. What have you done? You've created an institution, which yourself and your co-workers rely on for their income and hence survival. Therefore, you will do what you need to, to protect yourself and your life-sustaining company. It is providing for your standard of living. In other words, there's a built-in short sightedness. And this survival element, which is only operational in our current profit-oriented system, is what is stopping needed change from coming to pass.
I could probably ramble off many examples of new advents that have been pushed to the side because they are either too efficient, or too sustainable for the market system to absorb, or simply money can't be made continually off of them and you can't perpetuate the system, or it puts an industry out of work. It puts people out of work. There is a human element to this. So there's a natural attribute, where people say "Okay, this is probably better for society, but I need to make money now, I can't think about the transition, so let's just push this aside for now." That's what's happening over and over again. It's not that they are "bad" people, or anything like that. This is what this system has created.
Simultaneously, let's remember that the market system requires constant problems. In order for the public interest and consumption to be maintained, problems and cultural influence is required. The more problems there are, the better the economy, generally speaking. In this system it is inherently "good" for cars to break down. It is "good" for people to get cancer. It is "good" for computers to become quickly obsolete. Why? More money. To put it into a sentence: Change, abundance, sustainability and efficiency are the enemies of the profit structure. Progressive advancements in science and technology, which can resolve problems of inefficiency and scarcity once and for all, are in effect making the prior establishment's servicing of those problems obsolete.
Therefore, in a monetary system, corporations are not just in competition with other corporations. They are actually in competition with progress itself. Thank you. And again, this is why it's so difficult to have any form of change in a monetary system. You simply cannot have a social convention where money is made off of inefficiency and scarcity and misery and expect a quick incorporation of new advents that can relieve these problems.
Okay, with that understood. Let's get back to the energy problem. The final issue I like to point out is this. Apart from the fact that there's a great deal of money to be made by the select few, as the majority suffers. Apart from the fact that the established energy institutions have little motivation to forgo their profitability to alter society's energy mediums; is the very harsh reality, that due to the outstanding debts, globally right now - I think as we all know, the Earth is essentially bankrupt, as hilarious as that is. - there's likely not gonna be enough money to change anything. I want everyone to think about this very critically. As exciting as the potentials are for renewable energy in the fields of solar, geothermal, tidal wave, and the like, potentials that have been documented thoroughly, that will far exceed the global energy consumption by thousands of percent; we still have this serious problem in our current structure of financing the infrastructure to make this transition.
How do we transition into a new infrastructure, where every single government on this planet, in every country, owns money to someone else. Where, there's seen a systemic breakdown of bankruptcy starting to occur in Europe; and in the United States it's just a matter of time. Given the current state of affairs, and the urgency of renovation, especially with peak oil, how could we possibly afford to make a transition to these renewable energies, before the scarcity of oil begins to shut down, due to excessive oil prices, because of supply and demand.
One study by a leading expert in Sweden predicts by 2030 the world will be using 10 barrels of oil for every new barrel discovered or extracted. That's really not that far away. So, how can we expect the United States with over $12 trillion worth of debt barely able to cover its interest payments to other governments with state bankruptcies occurring, near depression level unemployment, cutting social programs. We are already selling off infrastructure to foreign countries. How can we expect to afford to move into a new infrastructure?
I'm using energy as just a single example, there's many other problems we have to deal with. In 2008 the executive director of the International Energy Agency stated that it would take $22 trillion in investment to update the global energy supply and infrastructure by 2030. 22 trillion dollars! Where's that money gonna come from?! Do you really think they are gonna get away with just randomly printing more and more money in the central banks, and expect no inflationary repercussions, or debt collapse repercussions?
Remember, all money comes into existence from loans. There has to be an initiator. Every single dollar in all of your wallets is owed to somebody by somebody. And this again leads us into the heart of the disease: The economic monetary-based system, or "The Game," as I like to call it. Because that's all it is. That's all it ever was; a game. And we can change the game anytime we want. We just need to convince those who are winning the game to put down their pieces for a moment and ask themselves if the game they are playing is really gonna reward them in the long run.
In a report coming out of the AFP, there's growing evidence that the current rate of our resource exploitation indeed has a time frame. The report states: "As it is, humanity each year uses resources equivalent to nearly one-and-a-half Earths to meet its needs" said the Global Footprint Network, international think tank. "We are demanding nature's services - using resources and creating CO2 emissions - at a rate 44% faster than what nature can regenerate and reabsorb. This means that it takes the Earth just under 18 months to produce the ecological services humanity needs in 1 year. And if humankind continues to use natural resources and produce waste at its current rates, we will require the resources of 2 planets to meet our needs by the early 2030s. A gluttonous level of ecological spending, in their terminology, that may cause major ecosystem collapse" - the report said.
I wanna point out that people hear that and they have a Malthusian notion, they think that our consumption patterns are somehow inherent, and they are not going to change. I read a statistic recently, and for my new film I'm gonna put a huge section on waste attributes of certain industries. And what I've come to find is that of all the production that is done, on average 75% is waste. 75% is waste. Of all the materials that are created and put into circulation and taken out, 90% of those end up in landfills, I believe within 6 months. This isn't about some natural human thing that we are doing. This is about the social system's obsession with constantly consuming for the sake of economic growth.
In an analysis done by the IRRC, by 2025 it's predicted that 2/3rds of the world will experience water scarcity. Two thirds of the world, by 2025. Many seemingly wealthy countries are already turning to desalinization processes. In turn, over 1 billion people are starving on this planet. Do you, with everything that we have discussed, think that any of these things are going to get better? Given our current financial crisis? And again, in case you haven't figured it out, the problem of water scarcity and food scarcity is indeed 100% economic. There are many types of desalinization processes which could take salt water and convert it into clean water, in all of these poor countries. But guess what? No one has any money to implement these types of solutions in poor countries.
The same goes for food; we've gotten into a point with scientific invention that we don't even need arable land anymore which, by the way, is eroding at a rate of about 1 inch a year due to the abusive agricultural methods that are being utilized. And please note: it takes about 500 years for fresh topsoil to emerge. Hydroponics and Aeroponics, alone, if applied correctly, could provide for all the world's people, without the wasted water resources, in part, and the excessive need for nitrogen-based fertilizers. In fact, you could build these facilites on the land that has been depleted; in stories. You could have sky-scrapers, if you will, of organic food production on industrial level. But once again, who has the money to do that?
And on an extremely enraging and sad note, the more we experience social breakdown, the more human exploitation, crime and abuse will occur. While here in America we think that slavery was abolished many decades ago, the fact is there are now more slaves in the world than any time in human history, given the definition of slavery. However, this time it doesn't come in the form of owning people, it is simply the globalization attribute of exploitation for cheap labor. I'm gonna stop here, as far as talking about the negative attributes inherent in our system along with the ongoing social collapse, which by the way I personally can't see it end for a very long time, if at all, frankly, until we move into something more sustainable. The personal and private debts, for example, are so high right now that it's gonna take another number of bubbles to burst before any type of so called stability is going to occur.
Anyway, before I go on to the final section of this talk, which is essentially an introduction to The Venus Project and resource-based economy, let me summarize by saying that the monetary paradigm economic structure, as we know it, is again, the basic systemic source of the majority of the world's problems we have around us. In this system, if this cancer is allowed to grow unabated, spreading its malignant propensities across the globe, utterly decoupling from the natural world and the carrying capacity of the Earth, destroying the finite resources we all share, we are on pace with nothing less than something, that no one can even consider, of a collapse. I'm not talking about waking up one day and there's nothing anywhere. It's not like that. It's where slowly it erodes to a point where the values and the culture and the awareness becomes so distraught and so confused that the levels of quality of life become justified. When you start to accept less and less. It's gonna slow everything down to a crawl. And invariably there will be some dramatic "accents," if you will, of severe problems. Especially, when it comes to the energy crisis that is looming. Something radical has to be done. We are approaching a terminal stage.