Jeremy Rifkin - The Empathic Civilization (BREAKNECK DUB MIX)
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We may be at a pivotal turning point.
Human beings have only been here about 175,000 years
We're the youngsters
But I suspect that we may be seeing the potential extinction of our species
sometime in the next century
it's difficult to say this ...
but I'm going to share a little statistic with you and you make the judgement call
The real economy is photosynthesis
The sun's energy bathes the earth
We pick up photosynthesis in our plants
And all the rest of the economic activity for our fellow creatures
and our species is all dependant on that bottom line
We're now using 24% of all the photosynthesis
It takes my breath away
We have become monsters
It just isn't sustainable
We have to change
You remember in July 2008
Price of oil went up to $147
Inflation soared
Basic items, including groceries at the food store,
all of our pharmaceutical products, most of our clothes,
our transportation, our power, our heat, our light,
our logistics, our supply chain
It's all made of carbon deposits
the engine turned off
That was the meltdown
The collapse of the financial market 60 days later,
that was the aftershock
Right now the economy's starting to grow but what's happening?
You tell me how we get through that wall of $147
This is an endgame
We are there
Fast Forward: December 2009, Copenhagen
World leaders of 192 countries come together
to address the spent cO2 from two centuries of using fossil fuels
The frame of this seems to big to comprehend
I believe the problem lies deeper than just the inability to come
up with a new global mechanism to regulate a global economy
My sense is that the problem lies with the fact that
we are continuing to rely on 18th and 19th century ideas
about human nature and the human journey,
that were spawned at the beginning of the market era, the nation state era.
For 1500 years the church had the last say on human nature
The little baby is born in sin, depraved
and if we want salvation, we have to wait for Christ
End of story
John Locke, the great political philosopher of the enlightenment said
look babies are born 'tabula rasa', blank slate
He said however there is a predisposition to acquire property
Somebody should've caught him on that
Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist of the enlightenment said
but he said our key nature is we are born with a drive to be
autonomous and pursue our material self interest in the market
The very basis of classical economic theory
Later in the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham said little babies
are actually born with a desire to have pleasure, and to avoid pain,
and we are driven by utilitarian desires
Charles Darwin said every organism
Sigmund Frued said actually little babies are born with an
insatiable sexual appetite and want to extinguish their libido
Is that what it's all about? Our little babies?
And mom and dad looked in their eyes, is that what we're seeing?
Evil, depraved, rational, calculating, detached, autonomous,
self-interested, driven by materialism, utilitarian to the core and seeking to extinguish their libido
If that is our human nature, I suspect we're doomed
But there is another frame of reference emerging in the sciences
Which is quite interesting, really challenges these assumptions
And with that the institutions we have created
Our educational institutions, our business practices,
our governing institutions, etc,
Let me take you back to the early 1990's
Scientists had a MRI on a macaque monkey
So the monkeys's trying to open a nut, neurons light up
And he was hungry, saw the nuts, opened up one of the nuts
and tried to crack it open
The macaque monkey didn't move
he just gazed up at this human trying to open up the nut
opening the nut as when the monkey opened the nut
They then began to put MRI's on other primates
And then they went to humans
And what they found is something called 'mirror neurons'
and that is that we are apparently soft-wired with
mirror neurons so that if I'm observing you
Your anger, your frustration, your sense of rejerction, your joy
I can feel what you're doing, the same neurons will light up in me
as if I'm having that experience myself
This isn't all that unusual
We are actually soft-wired to experience anothers
plight as if we are experiencing it ourself
Mirror neurons are just the beginning of a whole range of research
going on in neuro psychology, brain research, and child development
that suggests that we are actually soft-wired for sociability,
attachment, affection, companionship, and that the first drive
is the drive to actually belong
What is empathy, very complicated
The other babies will cry in response, they just don't know why
Once a toddler can identify themselves, then they
know that if they're observing someone else have a feeling...
they're feeling it because someone else has it
They're two separate beings
Selfhood goes together with empathic development
Increasing selfhood, increasing empathic development
and that every moments is precious,
and that they have their own unique history
It allows the child, then, to experience another's plight
in the same way
So if you think about the times when we've empathized with each other
their struggle to be and to flourish
and we show solidarity with our compassion
empathy is the opposite of utopia
There is no empathy in utopia because there is no suffering
So when we talk about building an empathic civilization
we're not talking about utopia, we're talking about the
ability of human being to show solidarity not only with each other
but our fellow creatures who have a one and only life
on this little planet
We are Homo Empathicus
So here's the question:
We know that consciousness changes in history
The way our brain is wired today is not the way a
medieval serf's brain would be wired
So the question I asked at the beginning of this study is:
How does consciousness change in history?
The historians were not of much help to me because the
historians chronicle pathology
The holocausts, the genocides, the blow-backs
the colonization, the wars, the exploitation, the redress of grievances, why?
They're newsworthy because they're not what we ordinarily know every day
But then when you chronicle all of history with the pathological moments
We get a pretty dim vision of the human race
George Fredrick Hegel said
"Happiness are the blank pages of history"
Historians don't write about them
But if we were pathological the way historians said we would've perished a long time ago
we'd be so monstrous
when we create more complex energy regimes
in more complex civilizations
It requires a second thing
A communication revolution to manage these new energy regimes
These convergences of communication and energy are very interesting
because the communication revolution not only organizes the energy
it changes the mind, it changes consciousness
fundamentally
Empathy is what allows us to stretch our sensibility
with another so that we can cohere in larger social units
To empathize is to civilize
To civilize is to empathize
And this doesn't happen in some kind of a beautifully linear way
There are blowbacks
And many times the blowbacks happen at the end of one
civilization and the beginning of another when new identities
put in doubt the old identities
and the xenophobism kicks back with a vengeance.
But if we have gone from empathy in blood ties
To empathy in religious associational ties
Is it really a big stretch to imagine the new technologies
allowing us to connect our empathy to the human race writ large in a single biosphere?
And for what reason would we stop here?
At the nation state identity? and only have ideological empathy,
or theological based empathy, or tribal based, blood tie empathy?
There is a deep paradox to history
As we create increasingly more complex energy consuming civilizations
They certainly bring more people together,
stretch consciousness, stretch empathy
but at the expense on entropy.
It's really an empathy/entropy paradox
Today we're in a globally connected world
Our youngsters can begin to empathize across all the
traditional lines
In the last 50 years,
imaginehow empathy has extended:
Women, the disabled, those of different sexual preferences
the people of color, minorities, and now to our fellow creatures
We're beginning to recognize as having rights
and recognition, and law
This has all happened very quickly in terms of the long history of empathy
We almost can grasp the possibility of global empathy
It is a bittersweet irony.
The empathy/entropy paradox
How do we break it?
We are on the cusp of a new energy/communications convergence
We had a very impressive communication revolution the last ten years
This second generation communication is very different than first generation
That was top down
Telegraph, telephone, cinema, radio, television: centralized
The new communication, the ICT revolution is open source, flat,
It's distributed
Meaning 2 billion people can put a little utensil in their hand
and they can send their own video/audio/text to all the
other 2 billion people at the same time, at the speed of light
What I want to suggest to you is that this distributed communication revolution
is just now converging with a new energy regime:
Distributed Energy
What are distributed energies?
Let's compare them to elite energies: fossil fuels
first and second industrial revolutions are the most elite
centralized energy infrastructures we've ever created
They're elite because they're only found in certain places,
they require huge military investments to secure them,
huge geo-politicial investments to manage them,
massive capital flows to organize them,
those energies are sunsetting, the infrastructure based on them
has been on life support since July 2008, it is not coming back
It is not coming back
Not coming back
What are distributed energies?
Go home tonight you have all the energy you need in the backyard
Wind blows across this world every day
The sun shines on this planet
We all have heat under the ground
Wherever there is water you have small hydro-electricity
We have agriculture and forest waste in the rural areas
and the ocean tides coming in and out every day
These are distributed energies
The first idea is "oh, let's go where the sun is, the
Mediterranean, harness the sun and ship it across Europe"
"Or let's find the wind, or Ireland, harness the wind, centralize it, ship it back."
I do not oppose centralized solar and wind
but that's not 21st century thinking
If renewable energies are distributed
found in virtually every square foot of this world
Why would we only collect them in a few central points?
The vision in the third industrial revolution roll out is
converted to a partial power plant
So it can collect the distributed energy around the building
We have buildings up now in Spain, and Paris
they actually produce more power than they need
Just from the local energy around them
How do we store renewable energy?
Cause the sun isn't always shining, the wind isn't always blowing
So let's say the sun is hitting your roof, generate a little electricity
we have some surplus: electrolyze water; high school chemistry
We got the anode, the cathode, we slip it in the water
and the hydrogen comes out, you put it in a tank
Hydrogen storage technology to store these energies
We also like other storage: batteries, fly reels, capacitors, water pumping, whatever works
And then when you need the electricity because the sun isn't shining
convert it back to electricity
Yes, there is an energy loss
Second Law of Thermodynamics: Whenever you convert energy you lose energy
you always lose
And if we understood the amount of conversion loss in
bringing uranium to the nuclear power plant or coal to your house
It's through the roof compared to what I've just talked about
We use the same exact technology that created the internet
We take the power grid and transform it to an inter-grid
that acts like the internet
When millions of buildings are producing just a little bit of their own energy
Storing it with hydrogen like you store digital in media
And then what they don't need sharing it across europe
with distributed IT, the actual power exceed anything you could
imagine with centralized nuclear and coal fire power plants
and everyone under the age of 30 that grew up on file sharing knows exactly what I'm talking about
We called it cheating: file sharing
and the music companies collapsed within 6 years
The newspapers did not see the blogosphere's coming
and the newspapers are now in trouble
Microsoft did not see Linux coming
Distributed power, won't work, on the commons?
Not a chance
And encyclopedia Britannica didn't see Wikipedia coming
For a generation that grew up with the idea of
producing your own information and sharing it
of generating their own energy and be responsible for sharing it across continents
This gives us distributed consciousness, maybe biosphere consciousness
because when all of us take responsibility for that small
swath of the biosphere where we're husbandering the photosynthesis
and then we share it with our neighbors across continents
The kids in first grade are learning that everything they do,
the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the electricity they use
the car their family drives...
All of that impacts some other human being or some other creature
somewhere else in the biosphere, cause we're all connected
That's a revolution.
We have the technology that allows us to extend the central
nervous system and to think viscerally as a family
and the young people took to the streets because of the flawed election
You recall that one young woman was shot down
Within four hours an entire generation around the world knew her name
her family, her facebook,
It was visceral, we could see it right there
We are extending the central nervous system to connect the human race
It's not going to give us utopia
It's not going to eliminate the fragilities, and the inconsistencies
But it will give us a sense of our stewardship of this planet
People say; "well how do we do this in time?"
I don't know if there's enough time
The only thing I know for sure is we didn't need the scientist to tell us about empathy
We know at the end of our life and we look back, we don't look back and we don't say
"Gee that moment where I made a new deal, I felt really impregnable as an island to myself,
I felt really detatched and rational, really objective,
I was able to extinguish my libido and enjoy my utility"
There may be some pathological person that does that
But when we look back at our life, we look back and it's the moments
where we had that empathic connection, where we transcended ourselves
and could actually feel a loved one or someone else as if we were experiencing ourself
We feel super-alive
It's one of those moments where we actually feel transcendence
And you don't have to be religious
And we felt we're connected to this mystery called life
it makes us feel alive to be in solidarity with someone else's struggle to be
That would make a darn good civilization
If all of us felt that way
When the astronauts took their last apollo mission across the
dark side of the moon and our boys came out on the bright side
and the sun was shining on the Earth and all of it's color
They snapped a few photos showing the Earth from outer space
in all of it's fragility, it's beauty, it's majesty,
Everyone under 30 has this everyday with Google Maps today
The new energy communication changes consciousness
we have to rethink the human narrative
Rethinking human nature to bring out our empathic sociability
So that we can rethink the institutions of society and
prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilization
If we can do that we may have a enough time
before we face extinction
It'll be up to us, and especially the young people here to
make sure this discussion happens
(applause)