Peter Joseph - A Democratic Precondition? - United We Stand Festival 2018 (Repository)
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My name is Peter Joseph and I've been
working for the past ten years in the hopes
to see some meaningful
long-lasting change in this world;
a long ten years it's been.
In 2009 I helped start a nonprofit
called The Zeitgeist Movement.
It's a global sustainability
advocacy organization
and we specifically
focus on economic change
because we feel it's the most
important to set the stage
for more viable levels of change
politically, socially and so on.
And as expressed in great
detail in my recent book
'The New Human Rights Movement'
published last year,
we as a species are faced with some
powerful social pathology,
(I'll let that word sink in)
a pathology driven in fact by our system
of economic survival.
A pathology if left unchecked,
and uncountered,
will only exacerbate
wealth and income inequality
and hence social instability,
it's gonna ruin our habitat through
the drive for economic growth
and no doubt continue to undermine
basic principles of equality,
justice and democracy.
And with this latter issue which
is what brings me here today,
in the free and equal event
'United We Stand,'
what enables a truly
democratic open free society?
where a population can actually
reach rational consensus
on the direction it wishes to go,
allowing for political
egalitarianism if you will,
intergroup respect, and the
elimination of power-based oppression.
And if I was to frame the issue
I would do so in the following way.
Do we have a proper "precondition"
for viable democracy,
not only in this country
but on this planet?
Now what do I mean by that?
A precondition means
something that comes before
in order for something else
to follow in causality.
For example a legal precondition
to driving a car of course
is to obtain a driver's license.
Medically a person can have a genetic
precondition for a given disease,
and the same can be applied towards
environmental exposures such as
smoking cigarettes is a
precondition for lung cancer.
But the context here is sociological.
If we as a society are to strive
for increased human rights,
social equality and egalitarian
democratic principles,
can we conclude
that the most foundational
and dominant institutions,
traditions, practices,
root philosophies of our society,
can we conclude that they
foster the proper precondition
to allow for more optimized democracy?
Are we planting seeds in
lush nutrient-rich soil?
or are we planting seeds in arid,
stone, nutrient-void soil
with little hope of growth?
To consider that,
we're gonna go back in time,
Roughly 12,000 years ago the
human species transitioned
from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies -
tribes foraging and hunting with
no real agricultural skills -
to farm-cultivating settled societies.
This has been termed the
Neolithic Revolution.
Before the Neolithic Revolution as
corroborated by numerous anthropologists
studying both existing and
historical hunter-gatherer societies,
social and economic life
was actually very different.
Small bands or tribes operated
without money or markets,
they were egalitarian, and they had
no economic dominance hierarchy.
It also is well-established
they had much less violence,
certainly no large-scale warfare.
And while modern culture would gawk
at the seemingly crude reality
of hunter-gatherer life,
it has been well argued in fact that there
was a kind of minimalistic affluence,
a happiness and simplicity.
If you don't know you're poor,
well, maybe you're NOT poor.
A unique distinction because it
challenges how we today think about
social success or even "progress" itself.
To highlight the contrast anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins once stated
"To accept that hunter-gatherers are
affluent is therefore to recognize
that the present condition of
man's slaving to bridge the gap
between his unlimited wants
and his insufficient means
is a tragedy of modern times.
Modern capitalist societies,
however richly endowed,
dedicate themselves to the
proposition of scarcity.
Inadequacy of economic means
is first principle of the
world's wealthiest peoples.
The market industrial
system institutes scarcity
in a manner completely without parallel.
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."
I'd like you to keep this
notion of scarcity in mind
as it's a central understanding
to our political economy
as I will discuss.
As far as survival,
hunter-gatherers mostly had
a gift economy it was called,
where they shared with no direct
expectation of reciprocation.
Think about that.
There are even modern stories of outsiders
having their first visit
with these cultures
and they would be given things like
handicrafts from the existing tribes,
and the Western cultures would feel
the need to give something in return
as many in our market
exchange culture would.
And this reciprocal behavior was actually
considered offensive to the tribe
as they felt the exchange
was a refusal of friendship.
British anthropologist Tim Ingold
highlights the difference between
giving and exchange has to do with ...
a social perception,
based around autonomous companionship,
versus involuntary obligation.
Autonomous companionship
versus involuntary obligation.
He states
"Clearly both hunter-gatherers and agricultural
cultivators depend on their environments.
But whereas for cultivators
this dependency is framed within
a structure of reciprocal obligation,
for hunter-gatherers it rests on the
recognition of personal autonomy.
The contrast is between
relationships based on trust
and those based on domination."
I want to read that part again.
"The contrast is between
relationships based on trust
and those based on domination."
This is a subtle the powerful distinction.
It's not only referring to
the trust of each other,
but also the trust of
the planet to provide.
So, in short,
there's a kind of
trade-strategizing dominance
that we've become accustomed
to in our day-to-day lives
since the Neolithic Revolution;
a gaming process
that we have to engage for
survival and we take for granted
and we don't really look at what it means,
sociologically and psychologically.
And the result has been
thousands of years of
in-group out-group antagonism,
elitism, stratification,
and of course oppression.
And in the thoughtful words of
neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky,
"Hunter-gatherers had 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 also allowed for
the invention of poverty."
Since the Neolithic Revolution
we have had a process of economically
driven cultural adaptation
built upon the survival requisites
of the relatively new,
settled agrarian paradigm.
This evolution of post-Neolithic
culture was self-guided
by systemic environmental pressures
and survival inferences (what you do),
a kind of geographical
determinism in fact,
common to the natural dynamics of the
new mode of production: the new economy.
This gave birth to
dominance-oriented incentives,
values and protections,
evolving of course patterns of conflict,
hierarchy, elitism,
disproportionate allocation
of physical social resources,
and hence the world you see today.
And to translate this into common terms,
in political economy as we would hear it
if we were going to college
for political economy:
Thus you have the basis
of property (ownership),
capital (means of production),
labor specialization (jobs),
regulation (government),
and protection (law, police, military).
In other words you have grounds for what is
the ultimate mechanism of survival today -
something we again take for granted
because we're so used to it -
the simple market system of economics.
And what I'm getting at here ...
is you can't understand anything that's
happening in the world, especially politically,
without relating back to the
incentives and procedures
of what creates survival in society:
its economy.
And our economy today
is explicitly based upon
the unnuanced assumption of scarcity
and is hence Darwinistic, Malthusian.
It inspires endless power
antagonists between groups, fighting.
Not to mention, of course,
extreme and unnecessary
deprivation and poverty for many.
Pick up any textbook,
introductory textbook on economics and
you'll see it's very very clear the way
the entire world apparently
is to be associated:
resources and means are scarce -
end of story.
From that premise the architecture
of not only the economy but society
has been derived.
In the book I call it the root
socioeconomic orientation of our world,
and it justifies brute competition,
narrow self-interest,
elitist hierarchy, inequality
and oppression. It's that simple.
Now, that stated,
what can we learn about the nature
of government within all of this?
Well first, we see that
government actually proceeds
from the economic premise of a society,
not the other way around.
It is this preordained economic
mode of society that decides
what government is to be, does,
and where its loyalties rest.
If you examine historical
variations of social systems,
say capitalism of course,
communism as it existed, socialism,
feudalism, mercantilism and so on,
you'll realize that the governing
architecture of those systems
serve to protect and perpetuate
the prevailing economic
and class structures that
ultimately define them.
Feudalism for example was a
structure based upon land ownership,
labor and class interdependence,
going from the peasant to the king.
Capitalism in contrast is based
upon dynamics of private property,
buying and selling, ownership,
and the mechanism of ownership
and wealth translating of course
into power and control.
And to understand the specific
nature of government today,
specifically in the United States -
the forbidden experiment of the
world as far as I'm concerned -
a detailed 2014 study conducted by
Professor Martin Gilens at Princeton
and Benjamin Page at
Northwestern University concluded
"The preferences of the average American
appear to have only a minuscule,
near-zero, statistically non-significant
impact upon public policy."
The researchers concluded that lawmakers'
policy actions tend to support - guess what -
the interests of the wealthy,
Wall Street, and big business.
And what fascinates me, fascinates me,
is that many in America -
most in America -
act like this is some kind of anomaly,
some kind of corrupt anomaly,
as though the US government and in effect,
all governments in the world,
haven't always prioritized
economic interests since inception:
business interests,
with a government constituency
generally composed
of business powers.
People act as though the society
hasn't been set up in
favor of the wealthy.
They act as though ...
elitist business freedom
is some kind of corruption.
And that troubles me because
it means that there's
a big mental block in the
way people perceive reality.
People love to say things like
"Get money out of politics!"
without really thinking about
the vast contradiction inherent.
While it may seem morally sound,
it's actually quite silly in principle,
given how our world operates.
In a world where everything is for sale,
in a world where gaming through trade,
trade-strategizing dominance once again,
is the most dominant mode of
communication and action, the virtue,
why would government and policy
be off-limits from this behavior?
In fact if we're to be
consistent in society
it would actually be poor
form to object at all frankly;
jokingly I think we should LET the
Koch brothers buy and run America!
Why? because it would be consistent.
It would be the purest,
most natural outcome in a system
for the billionaires to
buy and run everything.
That is what the system is.
And you will never stop the force
of financial and business power
as long as our society as
a whole is based upon it.
So needless to say, when it comes
to the nature of our social system,
as born from the geographical
determinism of the Neolithic Revolution,
the very idea of any kind of effective
democracy becomes increasingly illusory.
The system simply isn't designed to cater
to the well-being and democratic control
of the general majority.
Rather it's designed to
facilitate the affairs of business
and most of all the protection of
big business which are naturally
the dominant interests in the revolving
door of government as we know it.
Hence, President Trump of course.
He is not an outlier.
He is EXACTLY what this system
suggests should run a nation:
a CEO, a businessman,
the president of the
United States Corporation.
Put another way,
the social system is
fundamentally fascist by nature.
And until we change the
precondition of our economy
there's little reason to
expect much improvement.
We can push the fascism
back as we do here,
it's always gonna keep pushing forward,
and eventually based on the way
things are going, it's gonna win.
This is a book by Robert Brady called
'Business as a System of Power.'
It was written in 1943 in the
heat of the Second World War.
It is a comparative study of various
nations including fascist Germany,
Japan, Italy and others.
It links the root structure
and incentive of business
to the rise of fascist
controls in the state.
And it's frightening, because today
nothing's really changed when you look
at the structure, at the institutions
and the mechanisms that are in play.
In the forward of this text,
another economist named Robert Lynd states
the issue well in regard to America.
He says
(and this is a critical quote
that really struck me when I read it)
"Thus political equality
under the ballot was granted
on the unstated but factually
double-locked assumption
that the people must refrain
from seeking the
extension of that equality
to the economic sphere.
In short, the attempted harmonious
marriage of democracy to capitalism
doomed genuinely popular
control from the start.
And all down through our national life,
the continuance of the
Union has depended upon
the unstated condition
that the dominant member, capital,
continue to provide returns to
all elements in democratic society
sufficient to disguise
the underlying conflict in interest."
(Sufficient to disguise the
underlying conflict in interest!)
"The crisis within the economic
relations of capitalism was bound
to precipitate a crisis in the
democratic political system."
Sufficient to disguise!
You know what that is?
That's the fact that everyone walks around
with a cell phone that can make pancakes.
That's the fact that people have been
bought off in this society by gadgets and
mindless property and
associations to their identity
that really are quite trivial.
And just keep them in a place of subservience
because they don't want to rock the boat.
All of that said, my goal here
was to plant these seeds of consideration
(because usually my talks
are a lot longer than this)
and I honestly do not believe
we are ever going to see
an optimization of democracy,
as we all hope,
an optimization of democracy and equality,
until we understand the
forces that move against it.
And it just so happens that the
greatest force moving against it
is the absolute foundation
of our social system
and the foundation of our
survival as we know it.
Arbitrarily so; it can be changed,
but this is where we are.
And that is a conversation
I simply am not hearing these days.
Everyone's terrified to
talk about the social system.
They don't want to be labeled, dismissed.
"How dare you say anything
negative about our
beautiful market economy,
and all it's done and all it's created?"
Well it's created a
lot of positive things,
and it's created a whole
lot of negative things,
and those negative things are gonna start
outweighing the positive if they haven't already.
So I hope you can extend this
discussion to your communities,
food for thought. Thank you very much.
[Applause]