Interview: Peter Joseph Goes 'Off the Grid' with Jesse Ventura - Ora TV (Repository)
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This man wants to change
the economy as we know it
to solve the ills of society.
I think he really might be onto something.
Patriot - Navy Seal - Wrestler
Independent Governor - Truth Seeker - Crusader - President?
Jesse Ventura
Off the Grid
He's a filmmaker, musician activist,
author, and most importantly
the founder of the
worldwide Zeitgeist Movement
to promote global sustainability.
Peter is an advocate of a free media
and distributes all of
his films independently,
along with his half-hour web
series ‘Culture in Decline.’
Peter’s focus these days
is on getting the masses to move away
from a market-based economy
to a resource-based economy.
Welcome real-life vigilante Peter Joseph.
Peter, thanks for joining me on Off The Grid.
- It's my pleasure Jesse,
thanks for having me.
- Peter, I guess the first thing to do:
Explain to us in layman's terms
what a resource-based economy is.
- Sure, sure.
A resource-based economy wants
to create a sustainable culture,
and to do that you've got to
create sustainable parameters:
things that actually support
public health directly,
not through the movement of money.
Things that actually support
sustainability and
equilibrium with our habitat;
again something you won't
be able to do with money.
In short,
you manage the world's resources directly
without a market system,
something we could not do by the way
many, many centuries ago.
With the new evolution of science and
technology, we can actually replace
all the mechanisms of the market economy
with a much more efficient system,
ensuring sustainability
and good public health,
and also of course alleviating all
the negative problems associated
with the market system,
which is war, which is abuse,
inhumanity, exploitation;
obvious extreme unsustainable
practices that we’re feeling severely
with the pollution problems and
everything else that's happening.
So in short, it's a way of managing
the world's resources and achieving
the highest level of public
health technically possible.
- Along those lines,
what are the arguments for moving away
from a money-based economy to resource-based,
layman's terms.
Why should people support this?
- Well I think the word “system”
is something that people don't learn
enough about when they're in school.
Let's think about the legal structure.
We assume that there is a “free will”
that overrides all of our decisions, right?
Where people that are born in poverty,
even though they may have no options,
we assume when they commit a crime
that they do so on their own free will,
with no external pressures
and no type of coercion.
This is called localized thinking.
Localized thinking is what dominates
both the legal system and the economy.
Free-market economics says “Well you know,
you're free to exchange!
If you exchange money for something
that must mean that you want that,"
and it eliminates everything
that actually coerces people into behavior.
And this is the big revelation, so
the market system right now is a
massive coercive soft slavery system.
It is merely an extension of the
abject slave systems of the past that
deeply exploited anyone
they could find, really.
It was never really race-based;
it simply had to do with any manner of
political arrangement to justify exploitation
of people for the benefit of others.
So this warring system that's emerged
has existed because we assume that we
are actually independently oriented,
when we’re actually oriented
in a system structure.
And this is profound,
because once you have a system structure
you immediately have to remove
yourself as an individual actor,
and ask yourself:
what forces are happening on you
to motivate you for a particular end?
Modern sociological science for
example has made it very clear
that we are NOT free will organisms.
We have massive influences
that happen around us that coerce
us literally into certain behaviors,
into certain propensities. So when you
take that worldview you realize that
you can’t have a market system because
it promotes the exact opposite behaviors
that you want in a sustainable
and humane society. Specifically,
we’ll divide it into two extremes. You have
ecological sustainability,
and then you have social sustainability.
Ecological sustainability
is something that we
literally can’t have based on the
system structure of market economics,
because we live in a
consumption world, right?
Everyone wants to buy and
sell and buy and sell.
It doesn't matter how long a TV lasts;
it's the turnover that matters.
And in a world that, you know,
has a finite resource amount
and has all these pollution problems,
we are not incentivized structurally
by the system to want sustainability.
In fact if we really wanted to achieve
efficiency and sustainability and conservation
we would see a dramatic loss
in GDP across the world.
So there's no structure for it in the system.
And then there's the social stability,
the humanity factor.
We’re seeing protests all across
the world because of imbalance,
inequity I should say,
the big One percent Occupy Movement,
anti-One percent Occupy Movement –
all of these things have been fomenting
for years because the system, once again,
supports massive class inequality.
I mean think about it:
the US Congress just went forward
with a $250 billion dollar tax cut
for the 0.2 percent of Americans -
roughly 600 families -
got a $250 - roughly - billion tax cut
because this is what the system creates!
So you can't fight it with
really ethics at this point,
you can’t really fight with
politics to a certain degree
(which we can talk about more so)
because all the factors once again
are pushing this incentive
structure towards certain behaviors,
and unless we change the system,
then we're not going to
really change anything;
we’re just going to
keep running in circles.
- Well Peter I've got to
ask the tough question:
How can this new economy be
implemented realistically
when you look at our country today,
and 64% of the people
in the last election
wouldn't even come out to vote?
It serves the establishment
that people don't vote.
- It serves the establishment that people
are riddled with debt and apathetic.
I don't look at the powers that be
- the elite -
as some evil class that
just happened to be there.
It's a natural outgrowth of this system that
you will inevitably have this power
consolidation problem regardless,
if you maintain a system like this. So
to answer your question,
we have to educate man!
That's why the Zeitgeist
Movement is trying to get
this word out there as fast as possible,
and to do so before the big
ecological crisis hits. By about 2030,
whether people are apathetic or not,
they're going to have a serious sting
with the complete loss of biodiversity,
the pollution problem,
the massive trends of social destabilization,
the incredible debt problem:
by about 2020 all countries will essentially
be bankrupt to each other.
The system right now is all pushing
towards 2030 as the ultimate negative ...
perfect storm if you will,
and this is why we have to do it.
And I will say this though.
We're gonna change one way or another.
The question is,
how much suffering has to occur
before the society actually wakes up?
- How do you battle this Peter,
when I give you this.
How about the religious people out there,
who put their trust in God?
“Well, God gave us this planet.
God gave us the planet to use it.
God will take care of us in the end.”
How do you answer that when you
look at the United States as being
the country that has the most
people that believe angels exist?
- The pressures that are emerging -
if someone really believes that there's
a god overlooking them and they’re
going to take care of them -
well it's not going to be very justifiable
once the negative trends really
start to materialize on this planet.
And we have never by the way
had Jesse, on this planet,
even though we've had all these wars,
we have never had a serious
resource crisis yet.
And we are on the verge
about three or four of them
if we keep trends the way they are.
- Peter another question.
- Sure.
- How would the world benefit by
moving to this type of economy?
What would be the biggest
benefit for the world to move
to the type of economy you're talking about?
- All life support systems right
now on this planet are in decline.
So apart from the reversal of all of that,
if you have a people living in a world where
you have access- so this is the term
that’s used as opposed to property.
In an access society where
everyone can get their needs met -
which is something we can do,
it’s scientifically proven -
we can literally create what's
called a post-scarcity society,
where not only 9 billion people
coming but twice that amount
can have a higher standard of living
than 99% of the world has ever known.
This is not a conjecture.
It's proven based on the trends
of science right now,
and something called ephemeralization
which I won't go into too much
but basically we're able to do
more and more and more,
with less and less and less resources,
and it's incredible. Imagine being
born into a society of low stress
where you didn't have to actually
worry about that paycheck
and submitting to labor,
and being essentially a corporate slave,
which is what 99.9%
of the world is today:
funneling the majority of that
money up to this one percent class
that's getting smaller
and smaller and smaller.
Public health would improve dramatically,
and if you really think about it,
that's all that matters.
All that matters to us
is to have really good public health,
when you really think about it.
- Well I'll tell you Peter,
you’re one intelligent guy and
I hope that people do listen to you
and I hope they get your
films and pay attention.
- Thank you.
- We've got a couple of questions from
some of your people out there.
Would you like to take a couple questions?
- Oh. Yeah, absolutely.
- Okay. From Twitter, we've got
the Devil’s Advocate who asks
“Who is going to rule your
one-world resource-based economy?
Who would be in charge?”
- This structure is not based
on a hierarchy whatsoever.
It's based on parallel societies
where everything is localized.
Gandhi, believe it or not,
had this vision in his time. He said
we don't need hierarchy, whether it's
communism or socialism or capitalism.
We need to create dense systems of societies
that localize all their production:
everything from food-...
Globalization right now is insane.
We import strawberries from Ecuador,
spending billions of dollars in
fuel and polluting the environment
to move food around that we can
easily grow in California ourselves.
This is what globalization has done.
It’s one of the most wasteful
things we’ve ever come up with.
There's no overarching committee,
it's not a dictatorship.
It's actually more democratic-... Again,
there's a book anyone can get called
‘The Zeitgeist Movement Defined,’
you can read it for free online.
It goes into the absolute detail
about how we do economic calculation,
the entire structure of it,
and it is as egalitarian and
democratic as you could possibly get,
but still respecting natural law science.
- Okay.
From Facebook, Nathan Feeny wants to know
“If we automated 90% of all human labor,
how would society be motivated to
volunteer and work the remaining 10%?”
- When you automate the majority of
things where monotonous labor is gone,
it frees people to actually do
what they’re interested in.
Again, it's as though people wake
up and they need to get a dollar
dangled in front of their face
or they won't get out of bed.
This is the propaganda;
it's absolute nonsense.
If you had a city like Los Angeles
and this type of economy was employed,
using high-tech automation,
sustainability principles,
roughly 5% of the entire population
of Los Angeles would be required.
I say “required” meaning that
to make sure that the accounting
for the machines and the structures
and everything is working fluidly,
and if you divide
all the entire population by that 5%
you're looking at somebody
“working” (and again I to use this
in the term we know today) -
"working" maybe one hour a week!
So it's a completely different value system.
I mean, you don't go home
and ... fight for minor chores, you know,
because you want to take
care of your environment.
We're trying to have people
take care of the world
and I think people will want to do that!
- So Peter, what you're telling me
is that I could work one hour a week
and play golf the rest of the time?
- If you really wanted to (Jesse chuckling)
but I guarantee you most people,
most people would really want to do
something that would be thoughtful.
Again, I know that you might-...
people would like to think it's all vacation
and there probably could be a great
deal of that, but our human drive
comes from helping and community.
And when you really break people down,
you get rid of all the pressures,
that's what people will do!
If you took simply the people
that volunteer for poverty,
and put them in the position
of maintaining this society,
you'd already have a 20-to-1 correlation.
So you already have the people
that are willing to do it.
- Finally, last question.
Terry Zimmerman asks
“What do we do right now to
transition from the current debt slavery
and social financial constraints?
Some people are optimistic,
yet still have no idea
how to get off the
carrot-on-a-stick hamster wheel
of working full throttle in neutral gear.”
- You can take all the major
industrial facets of society
and begin to use existing taxation funds,
and convert those industries
into free institutions of high technology.
For example in Los Angeles
we could put in automated farm
systems all across the coast.
And it would produce all of the
food required to feed everyone.
I've done this analysis; it can be done.
No need to import anything
as far as the main produce
for basic nutrition.
And you do that, you set it up,
you automate it with advanced means
and you make it all free.
And then you go to the next sector: energy.
You make it all free. You go step-by-step.
And of course as you might imagine,
if anyone attempted to do that,
the big corporate establishment
would flip out, because ...
you're affecting the entire
flow of money and labor.
So what you do to compensate
for that is you provide
universal minimum guaranteed income,
and you balance the two.
So everyone in society gets a basic income
so they can support themselves with
everything else they have to buy,
while other resources continually
are able to be provided free.
Does that make sense?
You just gradually do it, and eventually
you’ll end up with this system.
Now that's easier said than done
but that's as far as I
think we can go right now.
- I look at it this way Peter.
If we're going to get this done,
I guess I need to become the president
at 2016 and bring you on board.
- Hey (laughs) I’d be right there,
I’d be right there.
- No, I mean seriously, it would
require something that wild to happen.
- Probably, it probably would.
Again that's a very long conversation,
I have that conversation a lot, but ...
- Well Peter I want to thank you for
joining me on Off the Grid today,
I mean this is a concept that I had
no idea of, but it's very interesting
and I look forward to seeing a
resource-based economy go into effect
maybe- do you think it could
happen in my lifetime? I'm 63.
- I really hope this change can
happen within the next few decades
in some pockets of the world.
And once one country decides
to really push forward,
a chain reaction I think will commence.
- So it will be like gay marriage?
- (Laughs) Maybe!
- You know, once it gets going and
people realize that no one gets harmed
by gay marriage, then it will happen?
- (Laughs) I hope it could be that fluid,
yeah.
- OK, well Peter thank you again
for joining me Off the Grid
and I look forward to watching you.
We’ll keep in touch and I'll do what I can.
What do you think vigilant viewers?
Think we should move away
from the market economy model
towards a resource-based model?
Sound off on ora.tv/OffTheGrid
and tell me what you think of
Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist Movement.
Jesse Ventura, Off The Grid
ora.tv/OffTheGrid