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.

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.

Social Pathology by Peter Joseph : Chapter 1 : Diagnosis (2 of 4)

Chapter one: Diagnosis.

Before I begin this analysis of the social condition, we need to first consider the problem of value and cultural relativism. People today tend to think that their ideas are equal to other's ideas, regardless of supportive information. This obsession with opinion has created a frame of reference for so many people today, which has no physical referent, where evidence becomes inconvenient and ultimately, people think that everything is equal. And you get this argument a lot, I'm sure you've all experienced this. It's a very specific point. Everyone is not equal in their opinion. It's impossible, as quaint and convenient as such a concept might seem.
The ultimate question becomes, "What actually deserves belief?" What is important to everyone on this planet, and how do we maintain our well-being, both personally and socially, in a sustainable way? What is the indisputable common ground, which can all be agreed on, in a world of christians, muslims, capitalists, socialists, atheists, anarchists, scientologists, republicans... What can we all agree on? Well, here's one thing that's universal. Being healthy versus being sick. Being healthy is a preferred value preference, you could say. Normal versus pathological states, hence healthy versus diseased states, provide an incontrovertible value basis for all individuals and societies. Virtually all people in all societies prefer to be alive and healthy, last I checked. There is no cultural relativism about, whether having good food to eat, staying away from cancer, or having unpolluted water to drink, is a good value to have. Therefore, our analysis of the health of society is not going to be based on GDP, consumer price index, the state of the stock market, economic growth, unemployment levels or employment levels, free trade agreements, or any other commonly referenced economic attribute used to claim that society is "improving" or "growing". Instead, we will examine things that actually matter, such as rates of disease, poverty, social capital (trust), conflicts, corruption, planetary depletion, pollution, murder rates, life expectancy, educational performance, imprisonment rates, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, etc. These are things that actually matter. So let's begin.
Contrary to popular belief, evidence now shows that our early human ancestors, which predate the neolithic revolution, really didn't live in a state of perpetual conflict and extreme scarcity as many anthropologists early on had assumed. In fact, hunter-gatherer societies were a very unique arrangement immersed in both a restrictive yet self-regulating environmental paradigm.
Before the advent of agriculture, there was very little control over what was available. You didn't have agriculture, you couldn't control the environment. So, what happened is a natural balance was in order. And the societies themselves seemed to reflect this balance by having, in fact, non-hierarchical, noncompetitive, leaderless social structures. In fact, it has been found that their value systems, their social values, were essentially based on equality, altruism and sharing. And they literally forbid upstart-ism, dominance and aggression, and egoism. We know this today because of the anthropological research done on remaining hunter-gatherer societies around the world such as the Piraha, which is how is pronunciated, out of Brazil.
Amazingly it appears that well over - it is important point, for anyone that tells you that the current system is natural - for well over 90% of human beings' existence; human species' existence, on this planet as we know it, we were within social organizations that did not use money, that did not have hierarchy, and even had "counter-dominance strategies," where the majority would work together to shut down any individual that was trying to gain power and control. Pretty much the reverse of what we have today. The Neolithic revolution changed all that. It provided human beings with an ability to control their environment more intently. The sustenance of life could now be cultivated essentially at will.
Now, while this advent would appear as a profound benefit to all, it also introduced some pesky social problems as a result of conditioning attributes which we still deal with today. In the view of the anthropologist and professor of neurology at Stanford University, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, "Hunter-gatherers have 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." Since this dramatic change in the structure of human society, the creation of imbalances has continued and social stratification and income inequality are now staples of the modern world as we all know.
In fact, many who are unfamiliar with human history would probably consider these attributes again to be part of some "natural human order;" it's so pervasive today. We've gone from food cultivation, to commodity bartering, to gold exchange, to metal-backed certificate exchange, to fiat currency. We went from a system with values reflective of true natural processes to a system of values based on certificates of ownership traded for income on their own, virtually - I'd say not even virtually - completely decoupled from physical resources.
We've come from a world based on necessity, and social drive for preservation and sustainability, to a world based on strategic manipulation, pointless materialism, and obsession with property and ownership. In the words of historian, philosopher David Hume, "The first man who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors would that man have saved the species, who pulling up stakes or filling up the ditches, should have cried to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to us all, and the Earth itself to nobody."
Moreover, scarcity is now a driving force for commerce. In our system scarcity equals profit. The less there is of something, the more it can be valued in terms of money. In other words, abundance is a negative thing in a profit system. In the words of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins [corrected], "The market industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled, and to a degree nowhere else approximated 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." Likewise, I'd like to point out, as a simple aside, that the money supply in America, at all times, has less in value than the outstanding transactions required. In other words, there isn't and never will be, in the American money supply or most other money supplies on the planet, enough money in existence, at any one time, to cover the outstanding transactions within the economy.
Money is created out of debt, through loans. And interest is charged for those loans, whether it's a government bond or a personal home equity loan. If every single debt was called in right now in our economy there would be enormous amount of money that is literally impossible to payback in domestic currency. This is a central reason why stratification and inequality is literally built-in into our system: the inherent scarcity of the money supply itself. Imagine that. In this system bankruptcy isn't some irregular byproduct that negligent people just happen to stumble into, it is an inevitable built-in attribute. It's a game of musical chairs. I hope that's clear. In the words of economist Bernard Lietaer, a great quote, "Greed and competition are not the result of immutable human temperament. Greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using.
We can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, but there's clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of the central banks is to create and maintain that scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other, in order to survive." That last sentence really defines so much. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive. The consequence of these mechanisms is again extreme social imbalance, and hence social stratification. With this understood, let's now consider the state of income inequality within the world.
In 2005 the jolly folks at Citigroup put out a memo to its wealthiest clients in regard to the state of what they called the "Plutonomy". And the opening summary on this is very very clear. "The world is divided into two blocs - the Plutonomy and the rest. The US, UK, and Canada are the key Plutonomies - economies powered by the wealthy." A Plutonomy is defined as a society where the majority of the wealth is, of course, controlled by an ever-shrinking minority. And as such, the economic growth of that society becomes dependent on the fortunes of the wealthy minority and not the rest of the people. Keep that in mind. They then go and ask the question: "What are the drivers of Plutonomy?" They state, "Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, *cough* SLAVE LABOR *cough* the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time."
The basic point of this document is the understanding that the average consumer is essentially meaningless to the equity markets. For the super-wealthy, trading amongst themselves, account for the state of the economy overall. They state, "In a Plutonomy there's no such animal as 'the US consumer' or 'the UK consumer' or, indeed, 'the Russian consumer.' There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the 'non-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie." They continue. "This is why, for example, we worry less about the impact of high oil prices on aggregate consumption. Clearly high oil prices are a burden for most parts of our communities. However, without making any moral judgment, income inequality, being what it is, just makes this group less relevant to the aggregate data.
The conclusion? We should worry less about the average consumer - say the 50th percentile - what they're doing, when that consumer is (we think) less relevant to the aggregate data than how the wealthy feel and what they are doing. This is simply a case of mathematics, not morality." You gotta hand it to them for being honest. Now, before I go any further, let me clarify a bit. Plutonomy, as the Citigroup documents describe, and these are very long-winded documents, is of course the state of extreme imbalance; so extreme in certain countries, that the investment community has little regard for the average person's consumption habits. In other words, the preference mutation has occurred as a result of the financial incentive system, where the consumption patterns of the general population become nearly obsolete in the interest of the wealthy. Where they, the wealthy elite, the Plutonomy, can now just trade amongst themselves and forget about the lower classes.
In other words, so much money is being moved around between the rich, that the public consumption patterns are nearly irrelevant. This of course makes sense when you think about the methods used to gage health of the economy, which are supposed to be relating to everyone. GDP is basically calculated by how much money people spend or make on a given good or service.
So, using the example of "net worth," if you have the top 1% controlling 35% of the financial wealth in America, with the next 19% controlling 50%, leaving the bottom 80% with 15%, you have 20% of the American population controlling 85% of the money. And this is what Citigroup figured out. This very small section of the population is what actually powers everything. What this means is that the financial system has little incentive inherently to care about the actions or well-being essentially of 80% of the public. And since we all know that the financial system is the most powerful influence on most governments in the world, especially the US government; you begin to see that the only concern the ruling class has with regard to majority of the population is merely to keep us complacent enough so a backlash does not occur.
I'm not projecting this, Citigroup makes us very aware of this, explicitly, when they state, "We see the biggest threat to Plutonomy as coming from a rise in political demands to reduce income inequality, spread the wealth more evenly, and challenge forces such as globalization, which have benefited profit and wealth growth." But, don't worry, they are not too concerned: "Our conclusion? The three levers governments and societies could pull on to end Plutonomy are benign. Property rights are generally still intact, taxation policies neutral to favorable, and globalization is keeping the supply of labor in surplus, acting as a brake on wage inflation.
They summarize: "The heart of our Plutonomy thesis: that the rich are the dominant source of income, wealth and demand in plutonomy countries, such as the UK, US, Canada and Australia; countries that have an economically liberal approach to wealth creation, we believe the actions of the rich and the proportion of rich people in economy helps explain many of the nasty conundrums and fears that have vexed our equity clients recently, such as global imbalances or why high oil prices haven't destroyed demand. Plutonomy, we think, explains these problems away, and tells us not to worry about them. Secondly, we believe the rich are going to keep getting richer in coming years, as capitalists (the rich) get an even bigger share of GDP as a result, principally, of globalization. We expect the global pool of labor in developing economies to keep wage inflation in check and profit margins rising - good for the wealth of capitalists, relatively bad for developed market unskilled/outsource-able labor. This bodes well for companies selling to or servicing the rich."
Sorry to pull you through all of that long-winded text, but I hope it settles in what people at the top are really thinking about behind the financial system. And they are likely right. The rich are going to get richer. The current economic decline that we are in now really doesn't mean anything to the top 20%. It's the 80% that continue to suffer. But hey, who cares? Evidently the top 20% power the economy anyway, and I'm not even gonna go into what this means in regard to our naive assumptions of democracy in the modern world. In fact, in the words of former supreme court justice Louis D. Brandeis, I believe it's how it's pronunciated, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both."
Now, I bring all of this up as an introduction to what we are going to talk about in regards to "social health". Coupled with this, however, I think a few stats should be digested. In 2007, chief executives of the largest 365 US companies received well over 500 times the pay of the average employee. In many of these top companies the chief executive is paid more in one day than the average worker makes in a year. The Wal-Mart family, which is about 6 people, the Waltons, has a combined fortune estimated at about $90 billion in 2009, according to Forbes. The combined wealth of the lower 40% of the US population is only $95 billion. Also, the highest paid jobs on the planet are in fields of trading and investment. Occupations which have no meaning whatsoever. Create nothing. They are pointless at the state of society in the natural world. In 2005, the average annual "take home" pay for managers of the top 26 "hedge funds," aka "gambling casinos," was $363 million each! Compare that to the average medical doctor which makes about a $150'000 a year, and the biological research scientist, which are looking for cures and treatments for diseases, which makes only about $68'000 a year. You get the point.
Income inequality is here, and is growing, and it appears to be unstoppable when you look at the mechanisms of the financial markets and the culturally accepted reality of tremendous wage differentials among different fields. So now, we present the question. What does this mean to our health, to our well-being? Ground-breaking research by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket of the UK in the area of social inequalities in health and the social detriments of health has given us some profound realizations about what it means to have a society based and driven by inequality. To summarize this ground-breaking research, the common view that social problems are caused directly by singular material conditions, such as bad housing, or poor diets, or lack of educational opportunities, and so on; is being overturned. The idea that more wealthy societies do better than poorer societies in regard to health in general, is not the case.
The social problems, abundant in rich highly stratified countries, are largely caused by the scale of material differences between people within society itself. The problem is not absolute income, but rather the problem of relative income. If you compare groups of people with the same income in different countries, you'll find that those in more unequal countries do much worse than those in more equal countries with the same income. It appears to be a psycho-social phenomenon. Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional. And as based on measures of societal health, crime-rates, and well-being, it is safe to say, as you will see me point out, that really our current structure is nothing more than a social failure.
Life expectancy... On this chart we see a specific set of wealthy countries. I apologize for those that can't read this in the back; I'll do my best to point out what is going on here. Basically, the Y-axis you see is Life Expectancy and the X-axis is Income Inequality going from left to right, low to high. Life expectancy bottom to top of course, low to high. As you can see in this, Japan has the lowest amount of income inequality, but with a staggeringly high life expectancy. While Singapore, trumping only the United States in this particular set of countries analyzed, which are mostly wealthy countries, has the greatest income inequality, and the regression line in the middle shows clearly how the patterns moving from lower inequality to greater inequality reduces the life expectancy of all of these countries.
Drug use... We see the United States as having the highest level of inequality, based on the sample set, while also being within the top 4 of countries with the most illegal drug use: US, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. While in the lower echelon you have Japan, Sweden and Finland, which have the least amount of inequality and the least drug use; Greece is in there too. It's the trends that are important here. You can see the clear regression line. I wanna' expand on this particular one. The reasoning for this: There was a study done in 2002 with macaque monkeys. In the study 20 monkeys were observed and analyzed in regard to social hierarchies that developed in different circumstances noting which animals were dominant and which were subordinate. The result was that the monkeys that had become dominant had more dopamine activity in their brain, than they had before they had become dominant while the monkeys that became subordinate showed very little changes in their brain chemistry. In turn, after teaching the monkeys how to administer cocaine to themselves through levers, it was found that the subordinate monkeys took in much more cocaine than the dominant monkeys. In other words, it's a form of self-medication. Let's continue onto
Mental illness... Mental illness is much more common in more unequal countries. Once again we have the US at the peak of mental illness, we have Japan at the lowest echelon. As you can see from this chart, mental illness and inequality are very much correlated. A quick glance at SSRI antidepressant drug visits to doctor's offices among adults 18 years of age or older in the United States from 1995 to 2002 shows a clear trend of growing dependency on antidepressants. The most common type of disorders of course are anxiety and depression. A psychologist by the name of Jean Twenge did an interesting study which proved that Americans are much more anxious than they used to be. A survey of college students from 1952 to 1993 across 52'000 students found that students today were more anxious than 85% of the population at the beginning of the study (meaning 1952). By the late 1980s, the average American child was more anxious than the child psychiatric patients of the 1950s.
As far as depression, a study called "Time trends in adolescent mental health" found that in Britain depression among people in their mid-20s was found to be twice as common, in a study of 10'000 or so people born in the 1970. 10'000 people study - twice as common as it was in 1958. It also found that in general psycho-social disorders affecting the young people have risen substantially over the past 50 years. In Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, 1 in 10 are deemed "mentally ill" in a year. In the UK it's 1 in 5, and in the US it's 1 in 4. Across entire populations rates of mental illness are 5 times greater in the most unequal countries compared to the least unequal.
Now, of course, I know what you're saying: What about genetics? I think Richard Wilkinson summed it up very well: "Although mental illness can be affected by changes in the levels of certain chemicals in the brain, nobody has shown that these are actually causes of depression, rather than changes caused by depression. Although some genetic vulnerability may underlie some mental illness, this cannot by itself explain the huge rise in illness in recent decades. Our genes cannot change that fast." And let's move on to the idea of Trust. Another word for this is Social Capital. Social Capital is defined as an attitude, spirit, or willingness of people to engage in collective civic activities. hence, has a strong Trust-relationship. As you can see in the chart, those that feel they can trust one another are much more common, naturally, in societies that have less inequality. This of course is beyond obvious as I'm sure many would agree. Naturally, with greater inequality, people are less caring of one another. In fact, mistrust and inequality, I think, reinforce each other.
Now, this point is probably enough for a one-hour lecture in and of itself. What is a society if people cannot trust each other? It's important to realize that the idea of friendship and the notions that couple in with friendship, which is ultimately a quality of trust, is a characteristic completely opposed to the competition mentality and the economic theories of self-interest we see today. Empathy, reciprocation, and cooperation equates to good health, while suspicion, fight, competition, always equates to high levels of stress and hence destruction. As we'll talk about in a second, stress is one of the deadliest killers that we know of. It's a secret killer. And living in a society where you have to look over your shoulder, and where you have to fight for everything that you have; where you have to question virtually every transaction, given the initial assumption - - assumption that the person might be trying to pull one over on you for their own betterment... The fact of the matter is, we thrive socially on trust and cooperation, provably by health standards. And social structures which create relationships based on inequality, inferiority, and social exclusion, are inflicted with the greatest deal of social pain and neurosis.
Let's move on to educational scores. This one's very interesting. Not only do more unequal countries have worse educational attainment, kids are more likely to drop out of school, as well. Interestingly, class distinctions and their effect have become very obvious in this regard. For example, a study was done in 2004, where they took 321 high-caste Indian boys, and put them with 321 low-caste Indian boys, and they were given a task of solving a certain problem. The first time they did this, the caste relationship, the social status, was not announced to these children. They had no idea who was around them. And as you can see, the caste unannounced - low caste actually beat the high caste. The second time they did it, the results were dramatically skewed as the lower caste did much worse than before while the higher caste did better. This is psychological. It's a psycho-social inferiority-superiority relationship, that has been repeated many times in many cases through other studies, which has the exact same consequence.
People are greatly affected by their perceived status in society. When we expect to be viewed as inferior, very often we perform as such. Homicide rates. As you can see, the United States blows everything out of the water when it comes to homicide rates. And obviously if you look at the regression trend, homicide rates are naturally more common in unequal societies. In fact, violence itself is probably the most established attribute of social inequality over any of the things that we're talking about in these examples.
James Gilligan, who was a prison psychiatrist for 25 years, and he is currently director for the Center for Study of Violence at Harvard University, had this to say about his experience dealing with violent criminals to the extensive length that he has; "The prison inmates I work with have told me repeatedly, when I asked them why they have assaulted someone, that it was because 'he disrespected me.' The word disrespect is central in the vocabulary, moral value system, and psycho-dynamics of these chronically violent men. I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and did not represent an attempt to prevent or undo this 'loss of face' - no matter how severe the punishment. For we misunderstand these men at our peril if we do not realize they mean it literally when they say they would rather kill or mutilate others, be killed, than live without pride, dignity, and self-respect. They literally prefer death to dishonor." It's really easy to see how class-relationships, and hence income inequality, can translate into feelings of humiliation, loss of control, disrespect, and ridicule. You know, when someone loses their job, it's often demoralizing. They say, "Oh, my husband's unemployed." And that's a demoralizing thing, "Oh, he's... unemployed..." After all, the very nature of class is hierarchical. In other words, the upper class really looks down upon the lower class, historically speaking. And to be looked down upon is essentially humiliating. Therefore, it should be no surprise why the United States has the largest number of homicides in the world, given its extreme income inequality.
And this leads us to rates of imprisonment. The trend is very acute as well. Obviously as we can see imprisonment rates are much higher in unequal countries. The more unequal the country, the more people in prison. However, what is interesting about this reality is that it doesn't just relate to rates of crime, which of course is more prevalent in unequal societies, but it also has to do with the punitive attitudes toward the so called "criminal elements of society". In other words, the more unequal the society, the harsher the punishments are for a given offense. And hence, more people are put into prison for longer periods of time than they are in more equal countries. Since 1984 the state of California has built 1 new school, and 20 new prisons. As an aside, for those out there who think the prison system might serve some therapeutic rehabilitation role in the modification of human beings and human behavior, I'd like to refer back once again to the prison psychiatrist James Gilligan for his perspective. He states: "The most effective way to turn a nonviolent person into a violent one is to send him to prison. The criminal justice and penal systems have been operating under a huge mistake, namely, the belief that punishment will deter, prevent or inhibit violence, when in fact it is the most powerful stimulant of violence we have yet discovered."
Now, here's a very interesting one: Social Mobility. Social Mobility has to do with the class relationship that you have upon your birth, and how easy it is for you to move up out of that class or lower than that class, during your life. In other words, if you're born into poverty - how much of a possibility do you have to become wealthy? Well, as you can see by this chart, the United States, home of the "American Dream," has the lowest Mobility rate of all the countries in the sample set. There are very high odds that if you are born into poverty, you will stay in poverty. Likewise, if you are born into great wealth, you will stay wealthy most likely for the rest of your life. And if you think about it, it's really a form of class segregation. This reality can be blamed in part on the very mechanisms of our financial system, which keeps the lower classes poor, and the upper classes rich, deliberately. As a quick example of this, which I've stated before, but I think it's a very important example, if you have $1 million and you put it into a C.D. into a bank at 5% interest, you are going to generate $50'000 a year simply for that deposit. You are making money off of money itself, paper made on paper, nothing more, no invention, no contribution to society, nothing. That being denoted, if you are a lower to middle class person, who is limited in funds, which must get an interest-based loan, like most people, to buy their home or use credit cards, then you are paying interest to the bank, which the bank is then using, in theory, to pay the person's return with the 5% C.D. Not only is this equation outrageously offensive, due to the use of interest to steal from the poor and give to the rich, but it also perpetuates class stratification by its very design keeping the lower classes poor, under the constant burden of debt, while keeping the upper classes rich, with the means to turn excess money magically into more money, with zero labor or social contribution. This is only one mechanism, by the way, which is used to make sure these class attributes, or class segregation, is maintained.
Infant Mortality... Very simply, more high in unequal countries, than less unequal countries. Obesity. Naturally, higher in more unequal countries. Teenage birth-rates. Higher in more unequal countries. Innovation. I love this one. Because it's a total slap in the face to all those party line toting market-enthusiasts, who seem to think that the competitive-based incentive system of seeking profit translates in the new innovations for the common good. And I'm sorry to say, that isn't the case whatsoever. Using the measure of patents per million, Finland, Sweden, and Ireland trump the United States, when it comes to invention. And finally, let's take a look at an aggregate summation, that was compiled, of the many points we have just examined.
This chart shows Life expectancy, Math/Literacy, Infant Mortality, Homicides, Imprisonment, Teenage Births, Trust, Obesity, Mental illness (drugs/alcoholic use), and Social Mobility. As you can see, in the United States, with the highest level of stratification, we are the absolute worst. And just to make sure you understand this analysis clearly. Here's a chart showing absolute income, of the same thing you just saw. As you can tell, there's no pattern. There's no trend regression line. Here they are, side by side, so you can see how viable this information really is. The trend is very clear about the ramifications of inequality in a given country or social environment. As a final point on this topic of inequality and its consequences, I wanna bring up a study called "The Whitehall Study," which was in 2 rounds - 1 and 2 - stretching over I believe about 60 or 70 years. Prof. Michael Marmot of the Dept. of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London was the director of these studies. He used the British civil service system as the subject group and they found that there's a gradient of health quality in industrialized societies, which is not simply a matter of poor health for the disadvantaged, and good health for everyone else. Something else was happening. Remember, this is the UK, which has socialized health care. So everyone essentially has equal access to the same amount of health care. They found, regardless of this, that there was a social distribution of disease, as you went from the top of the socio-economic ladder to the bottom. And the types of diseases that people would get would change on average.
For example, the lowest ranks of the hierarchy had a 4-fold increase of heart disease based mortality, compared to the highest ranks. And this pattern was to a certain degree again irrespective of access to health care. This is just one example, by the way, there is a gradient of health problems that emerge that cannot be explained by absolute income. In fact, goes back to the stress response, if you go into it and research these points. Even in a country with universal health care, the worse the person's financial status and position in the hierarchy, the worse their health is going to be on average. In other words, people in higher socio-economic positions, those higher in the pyramid, live longer, enjoy better health, and suffer less from disability. While those of lower socio-economic status die younger and suffer the greater burden of disability and disease. This comes in the form again of a gradient, meaning that from the higher upper class, straight down to the lower class, bottom class, each successive step down, or up, the socio-economic ladder constitutes a respective quality change in a person's health.
The bottom line is that there's a great deal of statistical data that screams that living in a more equal society is more healthy and productive for about 99.9% of the population. It is only those at the very tip of the pyramid that could be considered unaffected by the disease known as social inequality. Equality benefits everyone, in other words.
Now, given this reality, it begs the question: What is the actual psycho-social cause of these issues? What are the most dominant mechanisms in place that continually support class division and the neurosis and sickness it generates? Well, we don't have to look very far for a viable possibility. The cultural programming wing of the market system is the advertising industry, which serves to perpetuate the consumption values that you see around you. However, it goes much deeper than that. It goes much deeper than getting people to buy things for a specific company's profit. The fact is, the values of materialism and consumption are of dire importance to the operation of the world economy. Without those values the system would falter, and let me explain why. At the core of the economy as we know it lies the unalterable requirement for constant, perpetual, cyclical consumption. In other words, the entire basis of what we refer to as "economic growth," which in turn is translated into things such as Gross Domestic Product, which are supposed to be measures of social progress and the like, is nothing more than human beings constantly and perpetually buying and selling, over and over and over again. If human beings do not buy things, companies and stores cannot afford to pay their employees. If an employee cannot be paid, then that employee, which is also the consumer, cannot go out and spend the money they receive from employment back into the system to perpetuate the cycle. If people do not constantly spend their money, the entire economic structure, including the entire labor system, would completely collapse.
Given this reality, the highest priority of any corporation or in fact any government that cares about its economy, is to make sure the public has an immediate interest to constantly consume. It is interesting to point out that America was originally founded on a certain degree of a protestant work ethic, a protestant world view, where thrift and savings were actually dominant values back then. Since that time, advertising agencies had to switch their arguments from utility-oriented angles to those engaged in for emotional appeal and status enhancement. Americans now consume twice as much as they did before the end of World War II. As an historical note, one of the lead figures in this American value "hijacking," as I would call it, is a man named Edward Bernays. Bernays is most famous for his book called "Propaganda," in which it was bought by many people, including Joseph Goebbels. He was hired by all of the major corporations many many decades ago to help influence the public into buying things very simply that they did not need. A new world of neurotic associations, such as materialism, and "conspicuous consumption" to quote Thorstein Veblen, was unleashed during this time and has grown and mutated dramatically. Today, human needs have become utterly perverted by the imposed, suggested wants, generated by the consumption-provoking mechanism of marketing and advertising. The more dissatisfied and unhappy a population is, the better it is for advertising agencies and corporations. Consumerism feeds on a form of inferiority and self-consciousness. And that translates, very literally, into identity and social status.
Amazingly, the indoctrination is so powerful, that consumerism is regarded by most of society as reflecting some kind of "basic" human interest. As though it's a reflection of human nature. This of course is baseless. In fact, our neurotic need to shop and consume is actually a reflection of how deeply social we are, and how influenced we are by the social programming, and status orientation, or possessions, and appearances, and everything else that's been pushed upon us.
Okay. On this note, I'm now going to begin a transition to the next section of this presentation, and to bridge that I want to make a point that not only does the status generated consumption patterns of most of the public, especially in America, cause a great deal of social stress, leading in part to many of the problems we have just analyzed, the propensity for constant cyclical consumption, which, again, is required for the entire world economy to function, is also outlining trends, which show a clear path to severe environmental problems, and a continual breakdown of civilization as we know it, as we destroy all of our natural resources through this idiotic act of conspicuous consumption to fuel GDP.

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.