Ben McLeish - The Innovation War - London Z-Day, 2011 (Repository)
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About 2 months ago I found myself on the comment section of YouTube.
Unfortunately, I was commenting on a video about the famous Ayn Rand
and I posted underneath against this woman's tirades
against what is essentially the human race
that this monetary system seems to have no point
and seems to actually hinder people and hinder progress
and one of the responses I got (and I didn't answer it) was:
"Well, actually money creates an incentive
to invent the new items. That's the driving force behind it."
So what I thought I'd do is, instead of answering on a YouTube comment
is organize a global awareness day
being streamed in a few thousand countries
in which to answer that with a graphically supported lecture.
So that's what this is.
[applause]
The Zeitgeist Movement calls for and supports
the urgent need for transition out of our current debt- and waste-based
economic model into a truly sustainable
abundance-based, non-monetary, technologically-advanced culture.
As you might imagine, this is no easy task to communicate.
Adopting a wider lens than single issue organizations
we seek a transition out of the old folk ways of global life
into a new paradigm focused on global cooperation
a true appreciation for the value and role of our environment
and the employment of science and technology
for social concern above all else.
There are, broadly speaking, two revolutions
which need to occur in human society to meet this goal:
One is the physical and technical one.
As we approach the end of the coal and oil era
a global revamp of energy production and distribution is needed.
As clean and drinkable water become scarce
systems need to be put in place to desalinate
and purify water for human consumption.
With the emergence of soil-less agriculture and vertical farming
we can not only clean up food production
but also save vast amounts of space.
And, as we become an ever-more global society
we must develop a new, high-speed method of transport
that is clean, safe and globally unified.
Unbelievably, that's the easy part.
Another revolution that needs to occur
involves the value system which we all share.
It is the dominant cultural perspective
which is shared by almost every society on Earth
despite perceived surface differences.
Amongst these are attitudes to change and innovation
attitudes to resource use and consumption
the role of our society in the field of healthcare
or public transportation or housing
or anything that is a shared human attribute and service.
It affects the first transition as you will see
but it's the second transition I want to speak about today.
Fear of the unknown!
They are afraid of new ideas.
They are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality
but based on: "If something is new
I reject it immediately, because it is frightening to me."
What they do instead is just stay with the familiar.
You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe
are the most mysterious.
Thank you, Pixar. [applause]
On a cold boxing day in 1935
inventor Edwin Armstrong, standing atop the Empire State building
in front of his peers of the Institute of Radio Engineers
turned a dial on an old-time radio.
The familiar noise of static and interference
chopping and hissing as his dials skipped through the wavelengths
echoed out across the packed room.
Suddenly, amid the noise -- silence
as the radio locked onto a station so clear, it appeared silent.
Then a voice spoke on air:
"This is amateur radio station 2Y2AG at Yonkers, New York
reporting on frequency modulation at 2½ meters."
The voice and the subsequent sound of the water being poured into a glass
the sound of paper being crumpled
were all emanating from a studio 17 miles away
and had been deliberately organized by Armstrong
to demonstrate a brand new technology
called frequency modulation or FM
which he had discovered and patented four years previously.
With clarity and immediate realism
never before demonstrated or experienced in that medium
FM technology was the most obvious and beneficial
user impacting-technology improvement
since the invention of the entire radio technology.
It is this reason we have high quality recordings
in the BBC archives as far back as we do.
It made radio more credible for the medium of music
and it actually uses less power and generates less static
for higher quality output.
And perhaps the story should have ended there.
Evidently the invention was a good thing
а general improvement of a widely-shared system.
However, at the time of his invention
Armstrong was working for RCA.
RCA was one of only a few handfuls of companies
that owned 1000+ radio stations already running
on the AM wavelength in 1935 in the US.
David Sarnoff, RCA's president and one of Armstrong's friends
had set Armstrong about the task of creating a filter
for the static that had plagued AM technology.
When Armstrong's discovery was demonstrated, Sarnoff commented:
"I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of filter to remove static
from our AM radio. I didn't think he'd start a revolution
start up a whole damn new industry to compete with RCA."
FM was a superior technology, but instead of embracing this technology
RCA's dominant profit earner was in AM and Sarnoff saw to it
that it would stay that way for as long as possible.
In the words of Laurence Lessing, Armstrong's biographer
"The forces for FM largely engineering
could not overcome the weight of strategy devised by sales
patents and legal offices to subdue this threat to corporate position."
For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained
posed a complete reordering of radio power
and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted AM system
on which RCA had grown to power.
Over the coming years, RCA embarked on an anti-FM propaganda campaign.
First, RCA kept the FM technology firmly under wraps
keeping it in-house and refusing to apply it to any of its businesses.
In 1936 RCA went a step further
and hired a former head of the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC)
to lobby the industry regulations into assigning FM
to a spectrum that would essentially make it redundant
and marginalized despite its evident benefits to the medium of radio.
Under the cloak of destruction afforded by
the eruption of World War II, RCA's tactics gained traction.
Soon after the war ended, the FCC announced a set of policies
that would cripple any spread of FM technology.
FM was deliberately assigned a marginalized spectrum.
A motion was passed to ensure less electrical power
was at the disposal of FM stations, making it impossible
to beam long distance, which in turn forced FM stations
to buy wired links from AT&T to maintain their geographical reach.
Then RCA began incorporating FM technology into
the emerging television market in which they had invested heavily.
They declared Armstrong's patents invalid
a full 15 years after Armstrong had originally registered them.
RCA reneged on any and all royalties which were due to Armstrong
crippling him financially as they had previously crippled
FM's technology by technical methods.
A 6-year patent lawsuit erupted with Armstrong
on one side and RCA on the other.
Armstrong was additionally met by lawsuits from other inventors.
The legal action destroyed Armstrong financially.
Finally, right as Armstrong's patents expired
therefore becoming of no financial support to him
RCA offered to settle for a fraction
of what his legal costs were adding up to.
Armstrong asked his wife for money.
She refused.
At the end of his rope, distraught, broken, and mentally annihilated
Armstrong lashed out physically against his wife.
They separated. Armstrong penned a brief note to her
and on a cold January morning in 1954
he stepped out of his 13th story window to his death.
Ten years later FM was the medium of choice for music stations.
In the world that surrounds us today, our air is saturated with FM
and barring a few gestural honours in Armstrong's name
such as his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
his name has now largely been forgotten
even though it was him that we always hear
every time we turn the dial.
Do you still listen to radio? I do.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Armstrong's not alone in this.
Galileo, hailed as the father of modern science
one of the main minds which brought about the scientific revolution,
posited that the nature of the Earth's place in the universe
was in a trajectory round the sun:
a heliocentric viewpoint based on observed evidence.
Clerics and philosophers who, by their nature
have nothing useful to say on the subject, denounced him.
He was the subject of the Inquisition, forced to recant his theory
and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.
Nicola Tesla, another great radio inventor
who invented wireless technology, has two of these stories himself.
Tesla's invention of alternating current threatened
Edison's empire of direct current.
Edison even electrocuted an elephant with an alternating current
to prove it was dangerous. She was called Topsy
and there is actually a video on the internet called
'Electrocuting an Elephant' that Edison released
where he zaps this beast.
Second story: Tesla began a project in 1901, whose ultimate goal
was to test the possibility of the supply of free energy
the world over by wireless technology.
He decided to build the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham
Long Island, for this experiment.
When JP Morgan learned of the project's aim
for wireless technology in abundance to the point of being free
he asked, "How can we get money from electricity
which Tesla is supplying to every part of the world?"
The project's funding was withdrawn; the tower was torn down
and is now a historical site.
Tesla died broke and alone in the New Yorker hotel.
Or perhaps Georg Cantor, a mathematician
whose development of understanding of transfinite numbers
makes him one of mathematics' big names today.
His concept of different types of infinity was originally regarded
as so counter-intuitive, even shocking, that it encountered
furious resistance from the mathematical contemporaries
while some Christian figures saw Cantor's work as a challenge to God.
He was ascribed as a scientific charlatan
a renegade and even a corruptor of youth.
Yet, any mathematician today must be familiar with at least
some of set theory and transfinite mathematics.
Not all of them own toasters, as well.
The most striking example is that of Ignaz Semmelweis
a clinician in the first half of the 19th century.
After observing a statistical correlation between hospital workers
who had handled cadavers in the morgue, and then immediately afterwards
delivered live babies and the incidents of often puerperal fever
or childbed fever in those delivered babies
Semmelweis posited that washing ones hands
after touching a dead body might be a wise thing.
By introducing hand washing, Semmelweis lowered
the incidence of contamination below 1%. Yet he was derided
and medical text books debunking his position were published
and then used as establishment material to educate
new medical students against his idea.
In 1861 in his books, Semmelweis lamented the slow adoption
of his ideas in the medical community
while deaths resulting from the non-adoption
of his proven method continued.
"Most medical literature halls continue to resound
with lectures on epidemic childbed fever
and with discourses against my theories.
The medical literature for the last 12 years
continues to swell with reports of puerperal epidemics
and in 1854 in Vienna, the birthplace of my theory
400 maternity patients died from childbed fever.
In published medical works, my teachings are either ignored or attacked.
The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph
written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected."
It is perhaps no small irony that Semmelweis died
in an insane asylum from septicemia
the very illness his discoveries would have helped cure.
But Galileo and Armstrong were all part of a by-gone era for us.
Perhaps we can't relate, because it's such a long time ago.
While in the modern day we have our own examples of this trend.
This is doctor Stanislaw Burzynski
a Polish native doctor who practices in the [United] States.
A number of years ago he discovered that individuals with cancer
had very low amounts, or a complete absence of certain
heretofore undiscovered peptides in their blood and in their urine.
Theorizing that a reapplication of an isolated dose of these peptides
might have an effect on tumours, he formed a treatment
based on them and tested it.
Remarkably, Burzynski's theory proved right.
Among other achievements are his first cures for
normally incurable childhood brain stem cancer
which traditional treatments had never successfully cured.
Thus, Burzynski patented non-toxic treatment
is the first paradigm changing cancer treatment
with serious effectiveness, which is owned by a man
not a pharmaceutical company.
He is a real guy. Go look him up!
It is then perhaps no small surprise given what we saw in Armstrong
Tesla, Semmelweis and so on, that Burzynski, instead of being funded
enabled, and celebrated was vilified as a "pee doctor,"
a quack, and a fraud.
He was taken to the Texas Supreme Court six times!
Despite the acknowledgement in the court that the treatment was non-toxic
and even with the admission that the trials weren't even
about the effectiveness of the treatment.
The National Cancer Institute finally ran their own controlled trials
on his treatment, watering down his recommended dosages 200 times
so they wouldn't work. Just imagine if the $5 billion
that were thrown annually at the cancer industry
were even fractionally made available to doctors like Burzynski.
In the intervening years, Burzynski is still battling
to have his cancer treatment accepted.
Meanwhile, one can only reflect on the untold lives cut short
slowly and violently, while the FDA and the Texas Medical Board
the guardians of the status quo, do everything they can to limit
the spreading of a treatment they cannot profit from
and for which only Burzynski holds the patent.
American consumers spend $90 billion annually on cancer treatments.
Burzynski's case is unusual in that he is still alive.
Ladies and gentleman, this leads me to conclude that we do not live
in an advanced society.
And with this small percentage of examples examined
what are the governing mechanisms that prohibit paradigm shifts
within society, be they technological, ideological or cultural.
Having established their root causes, what is the change
that needs to occur in our attitude and how does that change
in our attitude to what is important
then change the social structures we are surrounded by.
The goal is to expose the underlying mechanisms that govern this pattern.
We are quite certain it's not dictated by RCA's David Sarnoff
or the medical practitioners of Semmelweis's day
or of Burzynski's, or of Gallileo's ruling church fathers.
These individuals are also players on this stage.
Their actions aligning with an unspoken set of values
generated by the nature of the common landscape
in which they have found themselves across the ages.
We need to adopt a wider lens that includes economics
social and cultural theory, and an understanding
of how human society develops in an information age.
I'll focus on three main limiters, three blocks that interfere
with the smooth, and emergent development in a society.
In identifying these, we will start to lay bare
the train of thought we need to reassess our current society.
The most obvious, which relates particularly to Edwin Armstrong, Tesla
is the profit-supportive behaviours
of any and all established institutions
not the particular CEO's or those who had flipped the kill switch
on any new advent like David Sarnoff of RCA's essentially did
but the dominant market forces of the companies
and institutions which they represent
and which give rise to their need for their positions.
As John McMurtry puts it:
"Behind the selection and development of technology's advances
over every step of its planning, design, assembly
manufacture and displacement of past ways of life
stands one commanding value-decision:
to maximize the difference between input and output
of money demand in market investment sequences".
In other words, if the technological advent "A" has the potential
or even short term negative retroaction on money output
"B", it is selected against by a company
or by the market or by a person as a matter of pure economic survival.
This is true of any society based on monetary requirements to survive
and we call it 'Competitive Deselection'.
In other words
needless to say, any revision to a company's offering
would require heavy restructuring, heavy staff turnover and retraining
and true innovation; therefore inevitably, heavy investment
...would be in the short term in many cases
a costly or negative effect upon the balance sheet.
Given that many companies' results are often offered quarterly
and have an immediate impact on the share price if they're below
the expected maximized money output-to-input ratio
the dominant market ideology has to select
against a ground-up remodeling of the market-offering
to avoid this negative effect upon its stock.
Equally, this is of course true of technologies or market behaviours
from outside the company, which may threaten the normal way
in which said company would be able to generate revenues
even if it has a positive force upon society. Anything that changes
or threatens your business is considered a problem.
Innovation is the enemy of established institutions
is quite a simple way of putting it.
So when digital downloads provide a more beneficial and efficient
means of content distribution than prior hardware
it is opposed and criminalized, despite the speed of ease
the size you can consume
ease of access by anyone with a computer
savings in plastic, transportation, storage...
The dominant music companies sue individuals for criminality
and lobby the government for protection of their industry
judging this to be the best way to guard their profits.
Thereby, they hope to scare the rest of the consumer base
into sticking with what is best for the established market.
Not because they're evil: it's their job.
It's the survival of those employed in that market.
They stick with the familiar.
Even more starkly, should a solution for a problem come to the floor
that would cancel the need for an existing service
that hitherto only treated, rather than solved
the problem in question, it is shunted to the side
often by employing the full force of law or propaganda.
This all too often falls into the hands of advertising.
Bottled water is a quick fix with recurring profits
for water companies, while desalination and purification plants
that would enable an abundance of water for all humanity and all uses
is considered a risk to business, rather than what it actually is:
a necessity for survival.
In turn, we produce more plastic waste
which is then measured in the positive light of units
manufactured and sold, rather than their actual effect:
a pollution detriment and an increased footprint
caused by the treatment of the problem.
The end effect of this market-lock mentality is not really hard to discern.
You cannot set in motion long-term thinking
in a system which rewards short-term behaviours.
While human beings have to support themselves
from the monetary profit of their enterprises
no matter how decoupled these enterprises are
from producing something that is useful
or the harm on basic life-organization to the environment
short-term wins every time.
There is no money in solutions or learning to produce and consume less;
for either you lose too much money and you're removed
from the position you're in, or you're ostracised completely
as were our doomed engineers.
The system's overriding logic is to deselect
the non-profit-maximizing solution for we cannot afford to tolerate it
in a system that discerns the metrics for positive growth
in the factors of higher consumption, higher profits, more units shifted.
The first limiter then is established: market-lock.
The innovation that threatens established institutions
are criminalized, ignored, hamstrung, and suppressed
by the established institutions whose market value would be
even if only temporarily, slowed or curbed by their adoption.
This is regardless of how effective, efficient or beneficial
these innovations are or would be in a society adopting them.
In fact, the more beneficial, advancing
or efficient the new development would be
the more it is pushed back by the elements of society
that would be within the sphere of its influence.
Second limiter to innovation and its progress
lies a little more deeply within the societal mindset
than the monetary paradigm, and it's just as invisible.
This is one we like to call 'Mind Lock'.
This is the tendency alluded to by Dr. Wayne Dyer in his address
that you heard in that portion of Pixar's "Day and Night"
and which is also keenly expressed once again by John McМurtry:
"When people come to examine any way of life in the world
they are conditioned not to expose their own social order
to the same critical eye with which they view
a different or opposed social order.
This is because they identify with their own way of life
as normality, and thus the other as abnormality.
If the other is not only different, but also opposed to the home order
then to abnormality is added the offense, of enmity."
Given that there is such an abundance of examples of systemic failure
in society, why have we not easily moved beyond it?
The question comes down to more than just money as a powerful barrier
that it is. Societal self-analysis is not built into our psyche.
It is an irreversible option in our critique of planetary life.
We do not like to talk of how our society might be less than perfect.
We don't even like those who criticize our football teams.
Tell someone that their social system is geared towards
something other than complete chest-swelling awesomeness
and you're often told that if you don't like it you can just [dialect] "GIT OUT"!
It's the social theory version of "Well, I think YOU'RE a dick!"
Yeah? Its like that.
[applause]
Normal is normal. Normal can't be what could be said
to be necessary for scrutiny.
As we look outwards from our societal perspective
we do not factor in the preconditions of convention and presuppositions
which we have been arbitrarily born and raised into.
What is normality? You were all born at 1044 miles an hour
the rotational speed of the earth, yet you believe
you are static sitting in those chairs right there.
When you stand up, you're actually standing outwards.
Downwards is actually inwards. The sun doesn't set or rise.
We're in a different position in the universe, every single minute.
It appears, then, that we can get used to just about anything.
This then, is what I mean by normality.
Much of society appears pretty much normal to its inhabitants
and therefore, natural or inevitable, not begging questions.
What is considered by any of us to be mundane or a given
becomes mundane or a given only by repetition
and whatever we are always surrounded by defaults to that status.
A few years ago a television program traded on this possibility
of showing an unaccustomed culture confronted by a modern city system
what the viewer would consider normal and unsurprising
by dropping a culturally unprepared group of Amish people
into a modern hi-tech city environment
where they're confronted by vending machines and escalators.
The show's attempt at exposing the humorous response of culture shock
and societal unpreparedness actually underlines
a very deeper issue of general custom.
The culture shock is a product of a non-initiated standpoint
and becomes at once surprising and almost unbelievable.
One can't imagine an unknowing fear of an escalator's basic operation.
Even my daughter loves playing with them
for one is never not been used to them.
Additionally, we tend to assume that our societal level of trust
and coherence exists that would mean that dangerous
architectural, hazardous obstacles are minimized.
Therefore, we trust the escalators will not mangle us.
The lift will not plummet 18 floors suddenly
that any household item will not explode when used...
...or plugged in, and that our house will not collapse
when we are about to open the front door.
Over and above these general trust and belief systems
in established cultural aspects is the established values which operate
and which are also bought into the same level of trust
as the physical ones. Amongst them may be the following:
"The army are fighting for my freedom." "Surveillance
is for the provision of safety." "Advertising is a means to educate me
(for example) about the best way of looking after my health," and so on.
Amongst them, more often than not, is also the general value
that it's highly unlikely to me, that the values
of the surrounding social order are or would be harmful
misleading, predatory or detrimental to me and my fellow inhabitants;
for to believe that the values are out of order
would be to appear to be rather paranoid
and what is tellingly called "antisocial".
There must be something wrong with you if you don't support
the structure and find it predatory. After all
that's not what society is about, is it?
What we consider to be our values are in fact
arbitrary conditioning by-products of, on one extreme
which evolved out of our need to feel perpetually...
sorry, our need not to feel perpetually worried, surprised
and disoriented by the regularly appearing environment
and cultural attributes, and on the other extreme
are deliberately reinforced by the dominant perspective
of the ruling social order. As Dr. Gabor Mate puts it:
"What you have to understand about an intellectual culture of a society
is that it actually reflects the power interests
in that society: the dominant perspective."
And built right into the dominant value structure
is the taboo of questioning the authority by which it is delivered
Fear of the unknown and fear of ostracisation
ensure that the advent of new opinions, new realizations
or anything that is new at all
is met with discomfort, fear, even anger
and it's true of every existing society today.
Again, McMurtury: "This block against exposing the habituated
and socially constructed self and more deeply the regulating order
which has constructed it, is a transcultural problem."
Here is our second limiter to add to the first market-lock.
Resting within and under the market system shared by most of this planet
is the culture blindness of basic societal functional analysis:
our values, the mind-lock. It is the inability and ill-equipped nature
to understand how the system is operating around us
and how our views are being informed by it.
Third and finally, there is the sphere of education
something which Jim Phillips has dealt with in the applied sense.
By education I don't simply mean school, university, grades
and cheating, but also the methods of the distribution of information
that exists within a society, including schools, universities
television, radio, internet-based media, films and documentaries
books, printed materials, conversations and so on.
Education in my sense is the systemic assimilation
and distribution of information within a society.
The furthering of any knowledge and its modification
adjustment, development, and redistribution.
It is what you learn from the daily interaction with that society
whether it's through a concerted and defined institution
like a school, or personal endeavour like a book or a science kit
or leisure; be it what you are told by others
or by television programs: what they display to you.
As James Phillips has dealt with in his lecture in a little bit more detail
"Education is often believed to be somehow separate from culture:
a supra-societal, free of the biases of tradition, myth, and so on;
whereas in fact, education is in many of its areas a product of culture.
One need only to really read a history book written under Communist rule
or the modern American school system to witness this bias."
Not only are the teachers, journalists, and authors, and so on
all victims of that culture, but the syllabus of an institution
born of a traditional society with set doctrines
is itself a machine that pumps out information
well below the rate of actual advance that the society experiences
which is, as discussed already, hindered by the previously discussed
mechanism of market-lock.
Look only to Semmelweis' experience of how his discoveries
were dealt with by the established colleges.
The dominant educational model often implicitly supports
the ruling value system. It is the dominant perspective.
Thus, schools which produce well-adjusted citizens
and well-rounded individuals are in fact producing individuals
which are adjusted to the flaws and presuppositions of that society.
As Jiddu Krishnamurti put it: "It is no measure of health
to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
At the same time, the place of
systems of knowledge, learning and research
and inquiry must stand at the forefront of such a society
if we are able to gather such feedback in a cohesive, meaningful way.
If we are to progress, these systems must be open
and freely available for all to access. Issues we see in the stories
we discussed and what we see in the world come from restricted access
from blocking and compartmentalizing pre-existing areas of culture
or of information. This, if we are able to progress, must be overthrown
and if you think about it, there is no actual way
of successfully cooperating and working together
if we continue the practice of ownership
because ownership presupposes non-cooperation.
There is already a value program, an attitude, a practice
that fits this bill. With the necessity of proof, testing
self-awareness, and self-critical analysis, the scientific method
is the method by which we conserve and update our society.
Its referents are in the physical world, not the opinion of some politician
nor the folkways of industry, nor the traditions of a religion.
As you look around in this room, I'd ask you to become mindful
of the things which the scientific method has actually given us.
My voice is audible; I have something called slides
which underline my point. We sit on and in constructed edifices
and wear clothes that are all the result of technical processes.
Indeed, many of us are alive because of science.
Had I been born with medical technology set back a hundred years
I would, most likely, not be speaking to you today.
Now, it must be made clear, that the scientific method
is not the same as some elements of the modern scientific establishment.
Indeed the horrors, inefficiencies, slowness to adapt
and other attributes previously mentioned are the results
of the interference of the dominant culture value-set
with the attempts of the scientific method.
The results are systematically downgraded and diluted, scientific landscape.
If the scientific method were the act of running
we are currently running under water.
Rather, it is the system attributes of the scientific method themselves
that, when promoted to the overriding value orientation of society
will yield a system where efficiency and sustainability are promoted
and where the obsolescence and waste-generating mechanism
of present-day life are deselected in favour of those processes
that take care of every human being, well beyond
what we would believe actually possible in a market system
based on competition, inefficiency, tradition, so on.
Many people consider this to be cold and unfeeling.
Well, if using science to solve our social issues
sounds cold to you, you may want to consider this:
You employ the scientific method every day.
Placing one foot in front of the other will enable you
to walk forwards. Having learned this and that it's generally a good idea
to face forward, you employ this method
because of the results you have come to get from that.
You know that turning a door handle and either pushing
or pulling the door will enable you to pass through.
Nobody attempts to simply walk trough a closed door
because of the environmental feedback from testing it
resulted in the proven knowledge that it is an unsuccessful practice
and the cause of many, many headaches. At least for me.
The most metaphysically orientated minds
will still interact with the physical world in a way
that the human body requires and is able to.
It is a physical referent in that sense that drives every action.
This is why we propose a Resource-Based Economy.
Money is not scientific. It's made up.
It no longer works as a positive force in society
instead, dividing, blocking and usurping human ingenuity
that has been present since the absence of money as a motivational force.
Tesla didn't do it for the money. Armstrong wasn't a radio genius
since his teens because of the money. Galileo didn't do it for the money.
Martin Luther King didn't do it for the money. If you're only doing it for the money
it's probably not worth doing to begin with! OK?
[applause]
Using what science and technology can truly offer us
we will evolve beyond the need for money
and with it, we will free ourselves from the inefficiencies
debt slavery and tendencies toward manipulation
that the present system's faulty self-analysis
puts down to human nature and the way things are.
In fact, we are already evolving beyond the need for money anyway
or at least our ability to maintain it usefully within society.
We have in the last 50 years automated phone operators
while massively increasing phone operator services.
We've automated bank teller positions and you're telling me
we're taking less money out now?
People actually forget there was even once a job called a bank teller
and were those guys (those token ones in Barclay's) not there anymore
you'd forget it immediately because they're not necessary.
We got rid of the lift operator; he doesn't exist any more
nor does the ice man, thanks to the refrigerator.
Blockbuster and similar stores are basically going out of business
because of online DVD services, largely automated
as are entirely automated DVD machines.
This alone will do away with the entire concept of money
a system which is now resulting in poorly applied technology
stunted innovation, death and destruction, not to mention
the social ills of poverty, crime and gaming for advantage.
In a society based on the scientific method, applied for social concern
we do away with vague human opinion in the operation of society.
I don't care what David Sarnoff may think of FM technologies
or what a large pharmaceutical company thinks about
Stanislaw Burzynski's treatment of cancer:
If the science works, it stays.
If it is one day surpassed by better methods, it goes.
End of. No politicians, no voting, no straw polls, no vox-pop interviews
with people who do not know what the fuck they're talking about.
[applause]
It is the election of ideas that we're in desperate need of
if we are to survive in the most abundant, enjoyable, safe, free
and fair society we can possibly create at any given moment.
And I will just say about that "freedom".
This is one of the big things that we are going to face.
"Um, you are affecting my freedom with your new system".
You don't have any freedom whatsoever other than laws of nature.
Sorry, that's the way it goes, and any society that affords you
new freedoms, it's because of the architecture of that society
not something that was written down on an old piece of paper
that people pay money to go and see or any of that rubbish.
It's the architecture of the society you are in. OK, just remember that
because people are going to bring it up to you all the time.
And if science has taught us anything
it has taught us that working together is better than working alone
or against each other. We can be so wonderfully achieving
were the world simply to stop, look around, assess the situation
look at our tools, take stock of what resources are left
and where, and fight the common enemy.
And the enemy we all face now is what our culture is doing to us.
It's the stage we are setting for our own destruction
should we not reform our society and base it on resource management
enabled through the scientific tools that we have.
This are our three limiters. The market itself
is the determiner of options you see in society;
the forces of profit, competition and ownership;
the mind-lock, our second limiter, blocks our ability
to assess our market-lock, the way things are
within a wider context, what we would call a new frame.
And our education, including the media and every other available
source of information, informs both the ability to think
and our ability to act on one side, and represents, promotes
and governs the discourse of the market
on the other side in the form of propaganda.
Combined, they are the overarching lock mechanism.
They are the three bars on our prison cell window.
The social model we promote contravenes the need
for these limiters based on the understanding that strategically serving
every human, is to our individual and collective advantage.
By using our only proven tools: the scientific method
and our knowledge of technology. Everything else
is just whistling past the graveyard.
A couple of months ago I was debating on how to end this talk
other than by just telling you to join the movement.
Here's something that I actually took from Charlie Veach
when he was on V-radio. Are you still here, Charlie?
He is gone, OK fine. I'll send this to him.
He said something about fractals.
I only vaguely knew what a fractal was, so... bear with me.
This is a fractal. Some of our doomed engineers
even worked on them. Geo Cantor's works actually led
partially to the understanding of fractals that we have today.
It's a mathematically generated image, in some cases
which is self similar. That means that any one portion
will at least approximately resemble the whole if zoomed in on.
It is infinitely scalable, either up or down.
And the shape will reach a point, eventually
where any constituent part will look the same as the whole.
In turn, the shape forms one of the constituent parts
for a larger self-similar object. We even see these patterns in nature:
Romanesco broccoli, sort of a big kind of thing that goes up.
It's also made of other things, and they are made of other things
the constituent parts, basically.
The veins of a leaf are nice and easy to understand.
A fern is composed of self-similar portions;
each self-similar portion also composed of other self-similar portions.
What about an atom? An atom is a nucleus surrounded by electrons
which circle in orbits. The Earth is orbited by a moon.
In turn the sun is orbited by multiple bodies in space.
Solar systems orbit a centre to become galaxies.
The orbiting bodies are all made of their constituent parts
all with their own orbits and orbiters.
Change a portion of the constituent part
and the whole shape changes.
Change the whole, and the constituent parts change as well.
Of course when you witness a change in a fractal
one has to decide whether the change came from
the constituent part or the whole. Perhaps its a little bit of both.
Geo Cantor didn't go into it.
I would like you for a second to evaluate your actual position
in this world. You are an individual in a collective whole:
a cog in a societal frame.
Yet your individuality is a supportive mirror of the values of your system
whatever those values are. In that sense
you're a portion of a fractal society.
It reflects you and you reflect it.
And as we begin to assess our society from the true perspective
the overarching perspective, the global perspective
perhaps you, like me, can entertain the fractal metaphor:
"One person can change their mind, several people can change the mood
but the whole world of people changing their minds, changes the world."
Thank you.
[applause]