Social Pathology by Peter Joseph: Chapter 3: Treatment (Part 4 of 4)

Part 3: Treatment

There are 2 angles to consider when attempting to resolve these problems. The first is the mentality of the culture, as we discussed before. The cultural "programs". And the second is the actual structure of social operation. As noted earlier in our discussion, these two attributes are deeply interlinked. However, regarding the first issue of cultural conditioning, as a movement, we need to employ what I call "Social Therapy". Social Therapy refers to adjusting a society's values. Changing the value programs. We must have sustainable values in order to have sustainable practices. I would suggest that the first program that needs to be uninstalled, from our mental hardware, is the social distortion that generates conspicuous consumption, pushed forward by the corporately aligned advertising agencies. The value orientation of having more and more stuff, regardless of their utility or function, is an unsustainable ideology, inherently, on a finite planet. Consumerism and materialism again are sicknesses culturally created to perpetuate the cyclical consumption needed to fuel the market and labor system. This is precisely what The Zeitgeist Movement is trying to do. We can't do anything until people understand the need for this direction, which is why we are here, right now. Which is why this is being webcast. Which is why those involved in the movement are diligently working, not to create infrastructure yet, but to try to get these values out there. We'll address the movement's directors in the second half of the program. Beyond that, as far as the actual structure of society; I'm afraid we require nothing less than a complete and total revision. And this is where The Venus Project again comes in. I'm gonna run down 5 of what I consider to be the central attributes required to move into a resource-based economy.

1. We must move from a Growth economy to a Steady-state economy. The cancerous consequences of the infinite growth paradigm must be stopped before it's too late. In the final analysis, given our technological ingenuity at this stage, we propose the absolute elimination of the monetary system itself. There's no reform possible to stop what this system is doing. The scarcity and waste we see around us is created by us. Not some intrinsic process of nature or some Malthusian inherent tendency. The need of money is no longer relevant and is extremely detrimental, in fact.

2. We must move from a primitive competitive invention-oriented system, work system; to a collaborative system. Not only are all goods, produced in our current society, inherently inferior, by the way, due to the need to maintain a competitive cost-basis in the market place; but the competitive system also generates massive amounts of corruption. Yes, I agree, the incentive to compete does produce some improved goods and services, to a certain degree. But that positive is utterly overshadowed by the inherent planned obsolescence, and the general environmental indifference generated by the necessity to stay ahead of someone else. As an aside, imagine for a moment that the top engineers of the major car companies, rather than competing, got together and decided to collaborate on making the best car possible at a given point in time. Imagine if we established an incentive system that pulls people together to create the best, rather than compete and produce inherent inferiority. Think about that. An open-source world, where all lines come together and produce goods, so everyone can benefit. Think about that, the progress would just be unbelievable. Not to mention it would save tremendous amounts of resources. For there be no longer a need to duplicate perpetually. You don't have 2 companies making the same thing anymore; it's a form of preservation, if they worked together.

3. We have to move from our piece mealed dispersed industrial methods to a central planned system of streamlined functionality. Is it me or is it absolutely insane, that we import strawberries from Brazil, or bananas from Ecuador, or water from Fiji; when all of these things could be produced locally? As Jacque Fresco would describe in regard to his city systems, everything is as self-contained as possible. As another example, consider the general routes of production. From mining the materials, to creating the preliminary components, to assembling the components, to distribution. And there's a constant move of transportation to go from one place to another, wasting tremendous amounts of energy.
Give that some thought for a moment. Think about if you streamline all of the actions of society; think about how fluid things could be, and what that actually means. Now, to extend this point, in a talk I did called "Where are we going?", I described a ground-up global approach to a network organization, which is in fact a resource-based economy. And I described why the parameters are what they are. I don't have time to go through all of it, but let me give just a quick run down of the reasoning for those that have never even considered any other social system outside of what we know today. Very simply, the Earth is a system and must be treated as such. There are resources all over the Earth, and therefore you must have a system that can monitor these global resources within a global technological infrastructure. Therefore, we have to have a feedback system, which has to be global in nature, coming from the carrying capacity of the Earth, which is the starting point of all industrial decisions. The first step in this - we do a full survey of the Earth's natural resources. You can't make intelligent decisions if you don't know what comprises the attributes of those decisions.
We must first understand the full range and capacity of the earthly components in order to derive inference as to our capabilities. There are many natural resources to consider on the planet, but for now I wanna focus on energy again. Since energy is essentially the fuel of society, this is a good focal point. So what do we do - we scan the Earth; holistically. Yes, we scan the entire planet, listing all relevant energy locations and potentials. The potentials of course, to clarify, are based in part on the state of technology. I don't wanna go into all the techno-attributes of harnessing, and things like that. For example, solar technology has dramatic potential at this stage, due to the advent of nanotechnology. We are seeing a possible exponential increase in this potential, where really small solar panels could have up to 97-98% efficiency in the radiation that they pull in.
Moving on - so we have this raw data. What do we do? We just rate each resource, based on its renewability, pollution, and all the factors that have to do with the act of extraction, and everything that goes along with it. It becomes self-defining. Based explicitly on the goal of sustainability and maximum efficiency. Those resources that have the most negative retroactions are given the least priority in utilization. For example, fossil fuels are no longer needed. They are not renewable, they pollute the environment. Given the tremendous power of geothermal, wind, wave, and solar combined, there's again no reason to burn fossils fuels, at all. Once we realize this, we move to a third point: distribution and monitoring. Energy distribution and infrastructure projects would logically be formulated based on technological possibility and naturally, proximity to sources. In other words, if you have wind energy being utilized in Asia, it's not likely gonna be delivered to Latin America. So distribution parameters would be self-evident based upon the technology and proximity practicality. Likewise, again, active resource monitoring, done through Earth sensors, would allow a constant awareness of our rates of use, the rates of depletion, the rates of renewal, or any other parameter relevant to know. This is pivotal for us to maintain what we consider a balanced load economy. If the scarcity of any resource is going to occur, we will see it far in advance, and we can forecast it, and we can make proper actions to adjust accordingly before it becomes a very large problem.
This idea of course is nothing new. You see this in your ink-jet printer. Your printer has an ink level. Comes up to tell you what you have. And just to show you that this isn't some bizarre idea that's impossible, Hewlett-Packard just recently came out with what amazingly they called "A Central Nervous System for Earth," which the first time I heard that sentence was actually out of the mouth of Jacque Fresco, and that's exactly what they are attempting to do in a limited sense. They are trying to develop a wireless sensoring system to acquire extremely high resolution seismic data on land. And this is exactly the direction.
It's funny with these things that have been talked about for a long time, and people say "Oh, that can never happen," and we see it beginning to happen in small pockets, if you will. All we have to do is scale this out and expand it for the needs that we acquire. Okay, so what do we have so far? We have the locations of our energy resources. We have the outputs and potentials and distribution qualifiers based on strategic usage - you would survey the public to see what they wanted. Just as someone goes to a store. They say to the salesman "I want this", they get what they need, and it becomes a statistical point. Therefore it's a dynamic monitoring of the consumption rates. And finally we have a system of active resource monitoring that reports the state of energy supplies, rates of usage, and other relevant trends.
I know I'm moving very quickly with this. If you want to hear more expanded expression of this point, you can go online and watch the lecture "Where Are We Going?" In other words, with this entire concept, we've created a system. A system's approach to energy management on the planet. The system is comprised of real-time data and statistics. The process of unfolding is based not on a person or group's opinion, not on the whims of a corporation or government; but on natural law and reasoning. In other words, once we've established the interest - that survival, and hence sustainability is our goal, as a species, which I hope everyone here shares; each parameter to consider in regard to resource management becomes completely self-evident from the ground up. It's called "arriving at decisions", as opposed to "making" them, which is a subjective act, based on incomplete information and very often cultural or personal biases. Using this energy model as a procedural example, and I'm gonna start moving very quickly, cause I didn't realize how long this presentation was, we would compile this information into a computer database management program, and this will be a logical means to monitor and have automation systems to correct elements that are problematic. We want to eliminate the subjectivity currently dominant in our society. This is like a nervous system, there's no reason to vote on anything. There's no reason to debate anything in congress. Moving on to point

4. For the sake of humanity and efficiency, we need to stop wasting time on labor processes that are generated by the market system to maintain employment. We need to move into deliberate automation of everything we can. Given the current state of technology today, there's absolutely no reason for a waiter to exist in any restaurant. There's absolutely no reason for anyone to work at the post office. There's absolutely no reason why anyone should be in virtually any factory whatsoever. I've been working on a statistical data set for a project that I'm doing in regard to employment in America, considering what percentage of the current workforce could be automated at this stage of technological know-how. Coupled with eliminating occupations that have no social return, such as Wall Street, including all jobs that have to do with money. As Jacque would describe, our system has no money, there's no banks, there's no cashiers. I have recently come to the generalized conclusion, which I'm continually working on, but I'm gonna throw it out there.
I believe 65% of the American jobs could be eliminated tomorrow, with the knowledge we have now. Not trend-projections, which make things cataclysmic, but the knowledge we have now. But this isn't just a fanciful notion of, say "Oh, we can have more free time"; there's also a social imperative here. It's a very critical thing to point out, that historically speaking, the more that we have moved to automation, or what's called "mechanization", in any industry, the greater the productivity. In fact, productivity is now inverse to employment in many sectors of study, which means it is socially irresponsible not to automate as much as possible, for it allows for greater abundance and efficiency.
Here's a chart of the G7 advanced industrialized countries, showing how employment in manufacturing has been dropping, while manufacturing output has risen substantially. And this particular trend is happening across the board, and why wouldn't it? These machines don't need to take lunch breaks, they don't need vacations, they don't need insurance. It makes perfect sense. And as a very quick point, what you're gonna tend to find is that the "inexpense" of machines; machines are becoming so inexpensive now; technology is exponentially growing at such a rate. In your cell phone you have a little microchip that's more powerful than the greatest super-computer that existed 50 years ago. And it's really cheap now; the first great super-computer costed millions and millions of dollars. People aren't gonna be affordable anymore to most corporations. They are gonna automate because they can't figure out a way to reconcile keeping human labor anymore, except for ideological things, of course.

5. We have to move from a system of materialism and property to a system of universal access. Now, before this point is dismissed as communist propaganda, let's consider the train of thought. In a resource-based economy, where the production is streamlined to maximize quality and minimize waste and duplication, the idea of property becomes obsolete and in fact detrimental. People do not need to hoard and protect anything. They simply need access to what they need at the time they need it. The best example is the automobile. We've been finding in science now, there have been tests done of cars that can drive themselves. It's been tested. Satellite-driven automobiles that can navigate very well. And Jacque talked about this years ago as well, using Doppler radars, so cars simply cannot hit another car. These things are coming to fruition.
So in the future if you need to go somewhere, you call up the car that you need, it comes to you, you utilize it, and then, when you are at your location, it goes back and helps somebody else. As opposed to sitting at some parking lot, wasting time and space for likely 80% of the automobile's life. This is what we do. We waste so much space and resources... We waste so much space and resources with this primitive concept of personal ownership. It is environmentally detrimental and socially inefficient. And by the way, property isn't an American or capitalist idea. It's really a primitive mental perspective generated from generations of scarcity. People claimed legal ownership because it was simply a form of protection. It's also controlled restriction, in fact. You know, no longer would someone to live in one place. One could travel the world constantly, getting what they need, as they move along. Anything needed is obtained without restriction. There's no reason to even "steal" something, and this is an extremely important point. How could you steal something that no one owns? You certainly couldn't resell it 'cause there's no money. Right there you have 95% of all crime gone.
In conclusion, as paradoxical as it may seem, the more efficient and conservative we become, the more streamline we become; the higher the level of abundance we can generate for all of us. Today around the world many people often say, "I wish we could live like Americans". I know you've heard this before. Well... no. The contrived ostentatious orientation and conspicuous consumption patterns of the American culture should be despised by all other countries on this planet. We have 5% of the population... We have 5% of the population and we consume 30% of the world's resources. It's insane. In a resource-based economy where we base our production distribution on physical referents starting with the carrying capacity of the Earth, where we streamline our labor expression towards things that have a long-term social return, where we get rid of the cancer known as the financial system and start to share our resources in a diligent way, working together, avoiding the false values of materialism and consumption pushed upon our culture, we find that we can provide a high quality of life for everyone on this planet, while eliminating all of the central reasons for war, poverty, destitution, violence, criminal behavior, neurosis. It would be the dawn of a world we could actually label a "civilization". and if that isn't a goal worth working towards, I don't know what is. Thank you.