Annotated captions of Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011) in English

In a decaying society, Art, if it is truthful,

must also reflect decay.

And unless it wants to break faith with its social function,

Art must show the world as changeable.

And help to change it.

-Ernst Fischer

... deadly riots over the government's plan

to avoid defaulting on its loans ...

is that the unemployment keeps rising

and it has to keep rising

just because we have an excess supply of goods...

this is all borrowed money...

and that debt is owned by banks in other countries...

M-O-N-E-Y, in the form of a convenient personal loan...

... a filter cigarette that delivers the taste...

45 malt liquor... Are You Hot?!...

is the US planning to bomb Iran?...

...America is sponsoring terror attacks in Iran...

Now, my grandmother was a wonderful person.

She taught me how to play the game Monopoly.

She understood that the name of the game is to acquire.

She would accumulate everything she could

and eventually, she became the master of the board.

And then she would always say the same thing to me.

She would look at me and she would say:

“One day, you'll learn to play the game.”

One summer, I played Monopoly almost every day, all day long.

And that summer, I learned to play the game.

I came to understand the only way to win

is to make a total commitment to acquisition.

I came to understand that money and possessions-

that's the way that you keep score.

And by the end of that summer, I was more ruthless than my grandmother.

.

I was ready to bend the rules if I had to, to win that game.

And I sat down with her to play that fall.

I took everything she had.

I watched her give her last dollar and quit in utter defeat.

And then she had one more thing to teach me.

Then she said:

“Now it all goes back in the box.

All those houses and hotels.

All the railroads and utility companies...

All that property and all that wonderful money...

Now it all goes back in the box.

None of it was really yours.

You got all heated up about it for a while.

But it was around a long time before you sat down at the board

and it will be here after you're gone: players come, players go.

Houses and cars...

Titles and clothes...

Even your body.”

Because the fact is that everything I clutch and consume and hoard

is going to go back in the box and I'm going to lose it all.

So you have to ask yourself

when you finally get the ultimate promotion

when you have made the ultimate purchase

when you buy the ultimate home

when you have stored up financial security

and climbed the ladder of success

to the highest rung you can possibly climb it...

and the thrill wears off

- and it will wear off -

Then what?

How far do you have to walk down that road

before you see where it leads?

Surely you understand

it will never be enough.

So you have to ask yourself the question:

What matters?

They're Hot!

They're Rich!

And They're Spoiled!

America's #1 Show is Back!

Gentle Machine Productions Presents

A Peter Joseph Film

When I was a young man

growing up in New York City

I refused to pledge allegiance to the flag.

Of course I was sent to the principal's office.

And he asked me, 'Why don't you want to pledge allegiance?

Everybody does!'

I said, 'Everybody once believed the Earth was flat

but that doesn't make it so.'

I explained that America owed everything it has

to other cultures and other nations

.

and that I would rather pledge allegiance

to the Earth and everyone on it.

.

Needless to say it wasn't long before I left school entirely

.

...and I set up a lab in my bedroom.

There I began to learn about science and nature.

.

I realized then that the universe is governed by laws

.

and that the human being, along with society itself,

.

was not exempt from these laws.

Then came the crash of 1929

which began what we now call

“The Great Depression”.

I found it difficult to understand why millions

were out of work, homeless, starving,

while all the factories were sitting there;

the resources were unchanged.

It was then that I realized

that the rules of the economic game

were inherently invalid.

Shortly after, came World War II

where various nations took turns

systematically destroying each other.

I later calculated that all the destruction

and wasted resources spent on that war

.

could have easily provided for every

human need on the planet.

Since that time, I have watched humanity

set the stage for its own extinction.

I have watched as the precious finite resources

are perpetually wasted and destroyed

in the name of profit and free markets.

I have watched the social values of society

be reduced into a base artificiality of materialism

and mindless consumption.

And I have watched as the monetary powers

control the political structure

of supposedly free societies.

I'm 94 years old now.

And I'm afraid my disposition is the same as it was

.

75 years ago.

This shit's got to go.

[ ZEITGEIST ]

[ ZEITGEIST: MOVING FORWARD ]

[ Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful

committed citizens can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. -Margaret Mead ]

.

[ Part 1: Human Nature ]

So you're a scientist, and ...

somewhere along the way, hammered into your head

is the inevitable “nature versus nurture”

and that's at least up there with Coke versus Pepsi

or Greeks versus Trojans.

So, nature versus nurture: This, by now

utterly over-simplifying view of

where influences are-

influences on how a cell deals with

an energy crisis up to

what makes us who we are on the most individualistic

levels of personality.

And what you've got is this complete false dichotomy

built around nature as deterministic

at the very bottom of all the causality.

Of 'life is DNA' and the 'code of codes'

and the Holy Grail, and everything is driven by it.

At the other end is a much more social science perspective

.

which is: We are 'social organisms'

and biology is for slime molds;

humans are free of biology.

And obviously both views are nonsense.

What you see instead is that

it is virtually impossible to understand how biology works

.

outside of the context of environment.

[ It's Genetic ]

One of the most crazy making yet widespread

.

and potentially dangerous notions is:

“Oh, that behavior is genetic.”

Now what does that mean? It means all sorts of subtle stuff if you

.

know modern biology, but for most people out there

what it winds up meaning is:

a deterministic view of life,

one rooted in biology and genetics.

Genes equal things that can't be changed.

Genes equal things that are

inevitable and that you might as well

not waste resources trying to fix,

might as well not put societal energies into trying to improve

because it's inevitable and it's unchangeable.

And that is sheer nonsense.

[ Disease ]

It is widely thought that

conditions like ADHD are genetically programmed,

conditions like schizophrenia are genetically programmed.

The truth is the opposite. Nothing is genetically programmed.

.

There are very rare diseases, a small handful,

.

extremely sparsely represented in the population,

that are truly genetically determined.

Most complex conditions

might have a predisposition that has a genetic component,

but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination.

The whole search for the source of diseases in the genome

was doomed to failure before anybody even thought of it,

because most diseases are not genetically predetermined.

Heart disease, cancer, strokes,

rheumatoid conditions, autoimmune conditions in general,

mental health conditions, addictions-

none of them are genetically determined.

Breast cancer, for example. Out of 100 women with breast cancer

only seven will carry the breast cancer genes.

93 do not.

And out of 100 women who do have the genes

not all of them will get cancer.

[ Behavior ]

Genes are not just things that make us behave in

a particular way regardless of our environment.

Genes give us different ways of responding to our environment.

And in fact it looks as if some of the early

childhood influences and the kind of child rearing,

affect gene expression:

actually turning on or off different genes

to put you on a different developmental track

which may suit the kind of world you've got to deal with.

So for example,

a study done in Montreal with suicide victims

looked at autopsies of the brains of these people.

And it turned out that if a suicide victim

(these are usually young adults)

had been abused as children, the abuse actually

caused a genetic change in the brain

that was absent in the brains of people who had not been abused.

That's an epigenetic effect.

“Epi” means on top of, so that

the epigenetic influence is what happens

environmentally to either activate or deactivate certain genes.

In New Zealand, there was a study

that was done in a town called Dunedin,

in which a few thousand individuals

were studied from birth into their 20s.

What they found was that they could identify

a genetic mutation- an abnormal gene-

which did have some relation to

the predisposition to commit violence,

but only if the individual had also

been subjected to severe child abuse.

In other words, children with this abnormal gene

would be no more likely to be violent than anybody else,

and in fact, they actually had a lower rate of violence

than people with normal genes

as long as they weren't abused as children.

Great additional example of the ways

in which genes are not “be all - end all.”

A fancy technique where you can

take a specific gene out of a mouse,

that mouse and its descendants will not have that gene.

You have ”knocked out” that gene.

So there's this one gene that encodes for a protein

that has something to do with learning and memory.

And with this fabulous demonstration you “knock out” that gene

.

and you have a mouse that doesn't learn as well.

“Ooh! A genetic basis for intelligence!”

What was much less appreciated in that landmark study

that got picked up by the media left and right,

is take those genetically impaired mice

and raise them in a much more enriched

stimulating environment than your normal mice in a lab cage,

and they completely overcame that deficit.

So, when one says in a contemporary sense that

“Oh, this behavior is genetic”

to the extent that that's even a valid sort of phrase to use,

what you're saying is: there is a

genetic contribution to how this organism responds to environment;

.

genes may influence the readiness with which

an organism will deal with a certain environmental challenge.

.

You know, that's not the version most people have in their minds.

And not to be too 'soap-boxing'

but run with the old version of “It's genetic!” and

.

it's not that far from the history of Eugenics and things of that sort.

.

It's a widespread misconception

and it's a potentially fairly dangerous one.

One reason that the

biological explanation for violence,

one reason that hypothesis is potentially dangerous-

it's not just misleading it can really do harm-

.

is because if you believe that, you could very easily say:

.

“Well, there's nothing we can do

to change the predisposition people have to becoming violent.

All we can do, if somebody becomes violent is

punish them- lock them up or execute them-

.

but we don't need to worry about changing the

social environment or the social preconditions

that may lead people to become violent

because that's irrelevant.”

The genetic argument allows us the luxury of ignoring

past and present historical and social factors.

And in the words of Louis Menand

who wrote in the New Yorker, very astutely he said:

.

“It's all in the genes, an explanation for the way things are

that does not threaten the way things are.

Why should someone feel unhappy or

engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living

.

in the freest and most prosperous nation on Earth?

It can't be the system.

There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.”

Which is a good way of putting it.

So, the genetic argument is simply a cop-out

which allows us to ignore

the social and economic and political factors

that, in fact, underlie many troublesome behaviors.

.

[ Case Study: Addiction ]

Addictions are usually considered to be a drug-related issue.

.

But looking at it more broadly, I define addiction as any behavior

.

that is associated with craving, with temporary relief

.

and with long-term negative consequences

along with an impairment of control over it, so that the person

wishes to give it up or promises to do so

but can't follow through.

And when you understand that, you see that

there are many more addictions than simply those related to drugs.

.

There's workaholism, addiction to shopping,

to the Internet; to video games.

There's the addiction to power. People that have power but

they want more and more; nothing is ever enough for them.

Acquisition - corporations that must own more and more.

The addiction to oil, or at least to the wealth

and to the products made accessible to us by oil.

.

Look at the negative consequences on the environment.

We are destroying the very earth that we inhabit

for the sake of that addiction. Now, these addictions

are far more devastating in their social consequences

.

than the cocaine or heroin habits of my downtown Eastside patients.

Yet, they are rewarded! And considered to be respectable.

The tobacco company executive that shows a higher profit

will get a much bigger reward.

He doesn't face any negative consequences legally or otherwise.

In fact he is a respected member

of the board of several other corporations.

But, tobacco smoke related diseases

kill 5 ½ million people around the world every year.

In the United States they kill 400,000 people a year.

And these people are addicted to what? To profit.

To such a degree that they are addicted

that they are actually in denial

about the impact of their activities

which is typical for addicts, is denial!

And that's a respectable one. It's respectable to be

addicted to profit, no matter what the cost.

So, what is acceptable and what is respectable

is a highly arbitrary phenomenon in our society.

And it seems like the greater the harm

the more respectable the addiction.

[ The Myth ]

There is a general myth that drugs, in themselves, are addictive.

In fact, the war on drugs is predicated on the idea

that if you interdict the source of drugs

you can deal with addiction that way.

Now, if you understand addiction in the broader sense

we see that nothing in itself is addictive.

No substance, no drug is by itself addictive

and no behavior is by itself addictive.

Many people can go shopping without becoming shopaholics.

Not everyone becomes a food addict.

Not everyone who drinks a glass of wine becomes an alcoholic.

So the real issue is: what makes people susceptible?

Because it's the combination of a susceptible individual

and the potentially addictive substance or behavior

that makes for the full flowering of addiction.

In short, it's not the drug that's addictive,

it's the question of the susceptibility of the individual

to being addicted to a particular substance or behavior.

[ Environment ]

If we wish to understand what then

makes some people susceptible

we actually have to look at the life experience.

The old idea- although it's old but it's still

broadly held- that addictions are due to some genetic cause

is simply scientifically untenable.

What the case is actually is that

certain life experiences make people susceptible.

Life experiences that not only shape the person's

personality and psychological needs

but also their very brains in certain ways.

And that process begins in utero.

[ Prenatal ]

It has been shown, for example,

that if you stress mothers during pregnancy

their children are more likely to have traits

that predispose them to addictions.

And that's because development is shaped

by the psychological and social environment.

So the biology of human beings is very much affected by

and programmed by the life experiences beginning in utero.

Environment does not begin at birth.

Environment begins as soon as you have an environment.

As soon as you are a fetus, you are subject to

whatever information is coming through mom's circulations.

Hormones, levels of nutrients...

A great landmark example of this is

something called the Dutch Hongerwinter.

In 1944, Nazis occupying Holland

for a bunch of reasons, they decide to take all the food

and divert it to Germany;

for three months everybody there was starving.

Tens of thousands of people starve to death.

What the Dutch hunger winter effect is:

if you were a second or third trimester fetus during the starvation

your body 'learned' something very unique during that time.

As it turns out, second and third trimester is when

your body is going about trying to learn about the environment:

How menacing of a place is it out there?

How plentiful? How much nutrients am I getting

by way of mom's circulation?

Be a fetus who was starving during that time and

your body programs forever after to be

really, really stingy with your sugar and fat

and what you do is you store every bit of it.

Be a Dutch Hunger Winter fetus and half a century later,

everything else being equal, you are more likely to have

.

high blood pressure, obesity or metabolic syndrome.

That is environment coming in a very unexpected place.

You can stress animals in the laboratory when they're pregnant

and their offspring will be more likely to use

cocaine and alcohol as adults.

You can stress human mothers. For example, in a British study

women who were abused in pregnancy

will have higher levels of the

stress hormone cortisol in their placenta at birth

and their children are more likely to have conditions

that predispose them to addictions by age 7 or 8.

So in utero stress already prepares the gun

for all kinds of mental health issues.

An Israeli study done on children

born to mothers who were pregnant

prior to the onset of the 1967 war...

These women, of course, were very stressed

and their offspring have a higher incidence of schizophrenia

than the average cohort.

So, there is plenty of evidence now that prenatal effects

have a huge impact on the developing human being.

[ Infancy ]

The point about human development and specifically

human brain development is that it occurs mostly

under the impact of the environment and mostly after birth.

.

Now, if you compare us to a horse

which can run on the first day of life

we see that we are very undeveloped.

We can't muster that much neurological coordination

balance, muscle strength, visual acuity

until a year and a half, two years of age.

That's because the brain development in the horse

happens in the safety of the womb

and in the human being, it has to happen after birth,

and that has to do with simple evolutionary logic.

As the head gets larger, which is what makes us into human beings-

the burgeoning of the forebrain

is what creates the human species, actually.

At the same time we walk on two legs, so our pelvis narrows

to accommodate that. So now we have a narrower pelvis, a larger head- ...

.

Bingo! We have to be born prematurely.

And that means the brain development that in other animals

occurs in utero, in us, occurs after birth

.

and much of that under the impact of the environment.

The concept of Neural Darwinism simply means

that the circuits that get the appropriate input from the environment

will develop optimally and the ones that don't

will either not develop optimally or perhaps not at all.

If you take a child with perfectly good eyes at birth

and you put him in a dark room for five years

he will be blind thereafter for the rest of his life

because the circuits of vision require light waves for their development,

and without that even the rudimentary circuits

present and active at birth

will atrophy and die and new ones will not develop.

[ Memory ]

There is a significant way in which

early experiences shape adult behavior,

and even and especially

early experiences for which there is no recall memory.

It turns out that there are two kinds of memory:

there is explicit memory which is recall;

this is when you can call back facts,

details, episodes, circumstances.

But the structure in the brain which is called the hippocampus

which encodes recall memory

doesn't even begin to develop fully until a year and a half

and it is not fully developed until much later.

Which is why hardly anybody has any recall memory

prior to 18 months.

But there is another kind of memory which is called implicit memory

.

which is in fact, an emotional memory

where the emotional impact and the interpretation the child makes

of those emotional experiences are ingrained in the brain

in the form of nerve circuits ready to fire without specific recall.

.

So to give you a clear example, people who are adopted

.

have a lifelong sense of rejection very often.

They can't recall the adoption.

They can't recall the separation of the birth mother

because there's nothing there to recall with.

But the emotional memory of separation and rejection

is deeply embedded in their brains.

Hence, they are much more likely to experience a sense of rejection

.

and a great emotional upset

when they perceive themselves as being rejected by other people.

.

That's not unique to people who are adopted

but it is particularly strong in them

because of this function of implicit memory.

People who are addicted, given ...

all the research literature and in my experience,

the hard-core addicts virtually were all

significantly abused as children

or suffered severe emotional loss.

Their emotional or implicit memories

are those of a world that's not safe

and not helpful, caregivers who were not to be trusted

and relationships that are not

safe enough to open up to vulnerably.

And hence their responses tend to be

to keep themselves separate from really intimate relationships;

.

not to trust caregivers, doctors

and other people who are trying to help them

and generally see the world as an unsafe place.

And that is strictly a function of implicit memory

which sometimes has to do with incidents they don't even recall.

[ Touch ]

Infants who are born premature are often in incubators

and various types of gadgetry and machinery

for weeks and perhaps months.

It's now known that if these children

are touched and stroked on the back for just 10 minutes a day,

that promotes their brain development.

So, human touch is essential for development

and in fact, infants who are never picked up will actually die.

That is how much of a fundamental need

being held is to human beings.

In our society, there is an unfortunate tendency

to tell parents not to pick up their kids, not to hold them,

not to pick up babies who are crying for fear of spoiling them or

to encourage them to sleep through the night- you don't pick them up-

.

which is just the opposite of what the child needs.

And these children might go back to sleep because they give up

and their brains just shut down as a way of

defending against the vulnerability

of being abandoned really by their parents.

But their implicit memories will be

that of the world that doesn't give a damn.

[ Childhood ]

A lot of these differences are structured very early in life.

In a way, the parental experience of adversity-

how tough life is or how easy it is- is passed on to children

.

whether through maternal depression

or parents being bad tempered with their kids because they have

.

had a hard day or just being too tired at the end of the day.

And these have very powerful effects

programming children's development, which we know a lot about now.

But that early sensitivity isn't just an evolutionary mistake.

It exists again in many different species.

Even in seedlings, there's an early adaptive process

to the kind of environment they are growing up in.

But for humans, the adaptation is to the quality of social relations.

And so, early life:

how nurturing, how much conflict, how much attention you get-

is a taster of the kind of world you may be growing up in.

Are you growing up in a world where you have to

fight for what you can get, watch your back,

fend for yourself, learn not to trust others?

Or are you growing up in a society where you depend on

reciprocity, mutuality, cooperation, where empathy is important,

where your security depends on good relations with other people?

And that needs a very different emotional and cognitive development.

.

And that's what the early sensitivity is about.

And parenting is almost- quite unconsciously-

a system for passing on that experience to children,

of the kind of world they are in.

The great British child psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott, said

that fundamentally, two things can go wrong in childhood.

One is when things happen that shouldn't happen

and then things that should happen but don't.

In the first category, is the traumatic and abusive

and abandonment experiences of my

downtown Eastside patients and of many addicts.

That's what shouldn't happen but did.

But then there is the non-stressed, attuned,

non-distracted attention of the parent that every child needs

.

that very often children don't get.

They're not abused. They are not neglected

and they're not traumatized.

But what should happen-

the presence of the emotionally available nurturing parent-

just is not available to them because

of the stresses in our society and the parenting environment.

The psychologist Allan Schore calls that "Proximal Abandonment"

when the parent is physically present but emotionally absent.

.

I have spent

roughly the last 40 years of my life

working with the most violent of people our society produces:

murderers, rapists and so on.

In an attempt to understand what causes this violence,

I discovered that the most violent of the criminals in our prisons

had themselves been victims

of a degree of child abuse that was beyond the scale

of what I ever thought of applying the term child abuse to.

I had no idea of the depth

of the depravity with which children in our society

are all too often treated.

The most violent people I saw were themselves the survivors

of their own attempted murder often at the hands of their

parents or other people in their social environment

or were the survivors of family members who had been killed-

their closest family members- by other people.

The Buddha argued that everything depends on everything else.

He says 'The one contains the many and the many contains the one.'

That you can't understand anything in isolation from its environment.

The leaf contains the sun, the sky and the earth, obviously.

This has now been shown to be true, of course all around

and specifically when it comes to human development.

The modern scientific term for it

is the "bio-psycho-social" nature of human development

which says that the biology of human beings

depends very much on their interaction with

the social and psychological environment.

And specifically, the psychiatrist and researcher

Daniel Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA

has coined a phrase “Interpersonal Neurobiology”

which means to say that the way that our nervous system functions

depends very much on our personal relationships:

in the first place with the parenting caregivers,

and in the second place with other important

attachment figures in our lives

and in the third place, with our entire culture.

So that you can't separate the

neurological functioning of a human being

from the environment in which he or she grew up in

and continues to exist in.

And this is true throughout the life cycle.

It's particularly true when you are

dependent and helpless when your brain is developing

but it's true even in adults and even at the end of life.

[ Culture ]

Human beings have lived in almost every kind of society,

from the most egalitarian-

hunting and gathering societies seem to have been very egalitarian-

for instance based on food sharing, gift exchange...

Small bands of people living

predominately off of foraging and a little bit of hunting,

predominantly among people you have

at the least, known your entire life

if not surrounded by third cousins or closer,

in a world in which there is a great deal

of fluidity between different groups,

in a world which there is not

a whole lot in terms of material culture...

this is how humans have spent most of their hominid history.

And, no surprise, that makes for a very different world.

One of the things you get as a result of that is far less violence.

Organized group violence is

not something that occurred at that time

of human history and that seems quite clear.

So where did we go wrong?

Violence is not universal. It is not symmetrically distributed

throughout the human race. There is a huge variation

in the amount of violence in different societies.

There are some societies that have virtually no violence.

There are others that destroy themselves!

Some of the Anabaptist religious groups

that are complete strict pacifists

like the Amish, the Mennonites, the Hutterites...

Among some of these groups, the Hutterites-

there are no recorded cases of homicide.

During our major wars, like World War II

where people were being drafted

they would refuse to serve in the military.

They would go to prison rather than serve in the military.

In the Kibbutzim in Israel

the level of violence is so low that the criminal courts there

will often send violent offenders

-people who have committed crimes-

to live on the Kibbutzim in order to

learn how to live a non-violent life.

Because that's the way people live there.

So, we are amply shaped by society.

Our societies, in the broader sense, including our theological,

our metaphysical, our linguistic influences, etc.,

our societies help shape us as to whether or not we think

life is basically about sin or about beauty;

whether the afterlife will carry a price

for how we live our lives or if it's irrelevant.

In a broad sort of way, different large societies

could be termed as individualistic or collectivist, and

you get very different people and different mindsets and

.

I suspect different brains coming along with that.

We, in America, are in one of the most individualistic of societies,

with capitalism being a system that allows you to go

higher and higher up a potential pyramid and

the deal is that it comes with fewer and fewer safety nets.

By definition, the more stratified a society is,

the fewer people you have as peers; the fewer people with whom

you have symmetrical, reciprocal relationships

and instead, all you have are differing spots and endless hierarchies.

A world in which you have few reciprocal partners

is a world with a lot less altruism.

[Human Nature]

So, this brings us to a total impossible juncture which is

to try to make sense in perspective science

as to what that nature is of human nature.

You know, on a certain level

the nature of our nature is not to be

particularly constrained by our nature.

We come up with more social

variability than any species out there.

More systems of belief, of styles, of family structures,

of ways of raising children. The capacity

for variety that we have is extraordinary.

In a society which is predicated on competition

and really, very often, the ruthless exploitation

of one human being by another-

the profiteering off of other people's problems

and very often the creation of problems

for the purpose of profiteering-

the ruling ideology will very often justify that behavior

by appeals to some fundamental and unalterable human nature.

So the myth in our society

is that people are competitive by nature

and that they are individualistic and that they're selfish.

The real reality is quite the opposite.

We have certain human needs.

The only way that you can talk about human nature concretely

is by recognizing that there are certain human needs.

We have a human need for companionship and for close contact,

to be loved, to be attached to, to be accepted,

to be seen, to be received for who we are.

If those needs are met, we develop

into people who are compassionate and cooperative and

who have empathy for other people.

So...

the opposite, that we often see in our society,

is in fact, a distortion of human nature

precisely because so few people have their needs met.

So, yes you can talk about human nature

but only in the sense of basic human needs

that are instinctively evoked

or I should say, certain human needs

that lead to certain traits if they are met

and a different set of traits if they are denied.

So...

when we recognize the fact that the human organism,

which has a great deal of adaptive flexibility

allowing us to survive in many different conditions,

is also rigidly programmed for certain environmental requirements

or human needs,

a social imperative begins to emerge.

Just as our bodies require physical nutrients,

the human brain demands positive forms of environmental stimulus

at all stages of development,

while also needing to be protected

from other negative forms of stimulus.

And if things that should happen, do not...

or if things that shouldn't happen, do...

it is now apparent that the door can be opened for not only

a cascade of mental and physical diseases

but many detrimental human behaviors as well.

So, as we turn our perspective now outward

and take account for the state of affairs today,

we must ask the question:

Is the condition we have created in the modern world

actually supporting our health?

Is the bedrock of our socioeconomic system

acting as a positive force

for human and social development and progress?

Or, is the foundational gravitation of our society

actually going against the core evolutionary requirements

needed to create and maintain

our personal and social well-being?

[Part II: Social Pathology]

So, one might ask where did this all begin?

what we have today... really a world in a state of

cumulative collapse.

[The Market]

You get it started with John Locke.

And John Locke introduces property.

He has three provisos for just private right and property.

And the three provisos are:

There must be enough left over for others

and that you must not let it spoil

and that you, most of all, must mix your labor with it.

It seems justified- you mix your labor with the world

then you are entitled to the product.

And as long as there's enough left over for others

and as long as it doesn't spoil

and you don't allow anything to go to waste then that's okay.

He spends a long time on his famous Treatises of Government

and it's since been the canonical text

for economic and political and legal understanding.

It is still the classic text that's studied.

Well, ... after he gives the provisos

and you're almost thinking at the time

whether you are for private property or not-

he has given a very good and plausible and powerful defense

of private property here-

Well, he drops them!

He drops them like that. Right in one sentence.

He says, 'Well, once the introduction

of money came in by men's tacit consent..." then it became-

.

and he doesn't say all the provisos are canceled or erased-

but that's what happens.

So, now we have not

product and your property earned by your own labor-

oh no- money buys labor now.

There is no longer consideration

whether there is enough left over for others;

there is no longer consideration of whether it spoils-

because he says money is like silver and gold and gold can't spoil-

.

and therefore money can't be responsible for waste...

which is ridiculous. We are not talking about money and silver,

we are talking about what its effects are.

It's one non sequitur after another.

Just the most startling

logical legerdemain that he gets away with here.

But it fits the interests of capital owners.

Then Adam Smith comes along

and what he adds is the religion to this...

Locke started with 'God made it all this way- this is God's right...'

.

and now we get also with Smith saying 'it's not only God's...'

.

well, he's not actually saying this but this is

what's happening philosophically, in principle-

he's saying that 'it is not only a question of private property...'

That's all now 'presupposed'- It's Given!

And that there's 'money investors that buy labor' – Given!

There's no limit to how much they can buy of other men's labor,

how much they can accumulate, how much 'inequality'-

that's all given now.

And so he comes along and what his big idea is-

and again it's just introduced in parentheses, in passing...

You know, when people put out goods for sale- ... the supply-

and other people buy them- the demand and so forth,

how do we have supply equaling demand or demand equaling supply?

.

How can they come into equilibrium?

And that is one of the central notions of economics,

is how do they come into equilibrium.

And he says: it's the “Invisible Hand of the Market”

that brings them into equilibrium.

So, now we have God as actually immanent!

He just didn't give the rights to property

and all its wherewithal and its "natural rights"

regarding what Locke said...

now we have the system itself AS "God".

In fact, Smith says, when he talks

and you'll never find this quote, and you have to read the whole of

the Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations to find it.

He says: 'the scantiness of subsistence

sets limits to the reproduction of the poor

and that nature can deal with this in no other way

than elimination of their children.'

So he anticipated evolutionary theory in the worst sense...

this is well before Darwin.

And so he called them the 'Race of Laborers'.

So you can see: there was inherent racism built in here,

there was an inherent life blindness to kill innumerable children.

.

And he thought: 'That's the Invisible Hand making supply

meet demand and demand meet supply.'

So, see- how wise "God" is?

So you can see a lot of the really virulent

life destructive, eco-genocidal things

that are going on now have, in a way,

a 'thought gene' back in Smith too.

When we reflect on the original concept of

the so-called free market capitalist system

as initiated by early economic philosophers

such as Adam Smith

we see that the original intent of a “market”

was based around real, tangible, life supporting goods for trade.

Adam Smith never fathomed that the most

profitable economic sector on the planet

would eventually be in the arena of financial trading

or so-called investment, where money itself is simply

,

gained by the movement of other money in an arbitrary game

.

which holds zero productive merit to society.

Yet, regardless of Smith's intent

the door for such seemingly anomalous advents

was left wide open by one fundamental tenet of this theory:

Money is treated as a Commodity, in and of itself.

Today, in every economy of the world

regardless of the social system they claim

money is pursued for the sake of money and nothing else.

The underlying idea, which was mysteriously qualified

by Adam Smith with his religious declaration of the 'Invisible Hand'

.

is that the narrow, self-interested pursuit

of this fictional commodity will somehow

.

magically manifest human and social well-being and progress.

The reality is that the monetary incentive 'interest'

or what some have termed the "Money Sequence of Value”

has now completely decoupled from the foundational

'life interest', which could be termed the

"Life Sequence of Value".

What has happened is that there is a complete confusion

in economic doctrine between those two sequences.

.

They think that the Money Sequence of Value

delivers the Life Sequence of Value.

And that's why they say if more goods are sold,

if GDPs rise and so forth...

there would be more enhanced well-being

and we could take the GDP as being our basic layer indicator

.

of social health. Well, there you see the confusion.

It's talking about Money Sequences of Value-

that is, all the receipts and all the revenues

that are derived from selling goods-

and they're confusing that with life reproduction.

So, you have built right into this thing from the beginning

a complete conflation of the money

and life sequences of value. So,

we are dealing with a kind of structured delusion

which becomes more and more deadly

as the money sequence decouples from producing

anything at all. So it's a system disorder.

.

And the system disorder seems to be fatal.

[Welcome to the Machine]

In society today, you seldom hear anyone speak

of the progress of their country or society

in terms of their physical well-being, state of happiness,

trust or social stability.

Rather, the measures are presented to us

through economic abstractions.

We have the gross domestic product, the consumer price index,

the value of the stock market, rates of inflation,

and so on.

But does this tell us anything of real value

as to the quality of peoples' lives?

No. All of these measures have to do with

the money sequence itself and nothing more.

For example, the Gross Domestic Product of a country

is a measure of the value of goods and services sold.

This measure is claimed to correlate to the

“standard of living” of a country's people.

In the United States health care accounted

for over 17% of GDP in 2009

amounting to over $2.5 trillion spent,

hence creating a positive effect on this economic measure.

And, based on this logic it would be even better for the US economy

.

if health care services increased more so...

perhaps to $3 trillion or 5 trillion,

since that would create more growth,

more jobs and hence boasted by economists

as a rise in their country's standard of living.

But- ... wait a minute.

What do health care services actually represent?

Well, SICK AND DYING PEOPLE.

That's right: the more unhealthy people there are in America

the better the economy.

Now, that is not an exaggeration or a cynical perspective.

In fact, if we step back far enough you will realize that the GDP

.

not only doesn't reflect real public or social health

on any tangible level,

it is, in fact, mostly a measure

of industrial inefficiency and social degradation.

.

And the more you see it rise, the worse things are becoming

with respect to personal, social

and environmental integrity.

You have to create problems to create profit.

There is no profit under the current paradigm

in saving lives, putting balance on this planet,

having justice and peace or anything else.

There is just no profit there.

There's an old saying: 'Pass a law and create a business.'

.

Whether you are creating a business for a lawyer or whatever.

So, crime does create business

just like destruction creates business in Haiti.

.

We have now roughly 2 million people incarcerated

in this country (USA)

and of those many are in prisons run by private corporations:

.

Corrections Corporation of America, Wackenhut,

who trade their stock on Wall Street

based upon how many people are in jail.

Now that's sickness!

But that is a reflection

of what this economic paradigm calls for.

So what exactly does this economic paradigm call for?

What is it that keeps our economic system going?

Consumption.

Or more accurately- Cyclical Consumption.

When we break down the foundation of classic market economics

.

we are left with a pattern of monetary exchange

that simply cannot be allowed to stop

or even substantially slowed

if the society as we know it is to remain operational.

.

There are three main actors on the economic stage:

the employee, the employer and the consumer.

.

The employee sells labor to the employer for income.

The employer sells its production services and hence goods,

to the consumer for income.

And the consumer, of course, is simply another role

of the employer and employee,

spending back into the system

to enable the cyclical consumption to continue.

In other words, the global market system is based

on the assumption that there will always be enough

product demand in a society to move enough money around

.

at a rate which can keep the consumption process going.

And the faster the rate of consumption

the more so-called economic growth is assumed

and so the machine goes...

But, hold on-

I thought an economy was meant to, I don't know...

“Economize”?

Doesn't the very term have to do with preservation

and efficiency and a reduction of waste?

So how does our system, which demands consumption

and the more the better, efficiently preserve

or “Economize” at all?

Well... it doesn't.

The intent of the market system is, in fact, the exact opposite

of what a real economy is supposed to do,

which is efficiently and conservatively

orient the materials for production and distribution

of life supporting goods.

We live on a finite planet, with finite resources

where, for example, the oil we utilize

took millions of years to develop...

where the minerals we use took billions of years to develop.

So...having a system that deliberately promotes

the acceleration of consumption

for the sake of so-called “economic growth”

is pure ecocidal insanity.

Absence of waste, that's what efficiency is.

Absence of waste?

This system is more wasteful than all the other

existing systems in the history of the planet.

Every level of life organization and life system

is in a state of crisis and challenge

and decay or collapse.

No peer-reviewed journal in the last 30 years

will tell you anything different:

that is that every life system is in decline

as well as social programs... as well as our water access.

.

Try to name any means of life that isn't threatened and endangered.

.

You can't.

There really isn't one and that's very, very despairing.

But we haven't even figured out the causal mechanism.

We don't want to face the causal mechanism.

We just want to go on. You know that's what insanity is

where you keep doing the same thing over and over again

even though it clearly doesn't work.

So you're really

dealing with not an economic system

but I would go so far as to say an anti-economic system.

[ The Anti-Economy ]

There is an old saying that the competitive market model seeks to

.

“create the best possible goods at the lowest possible prices”.

This statement is essentially the incentive concept

which justifies market competition, based on the assumption

.

that the result is the production of higher quality goods.

If I was going to build myself a table from scratch

I would naturally build it out of the best

most durable materials possible, right?

With the intent for it to last as long as possible.

Why would I want to make something poor

knowing I would have to eventually do it again

and expend more materials and more energy?

Well, as rational as that may seem in the physical world,

when it comes to the market world

it is not only explicitly irrational

it is not even an option.

It is technically impossible to produce the best of anything

.

if a company is to maintain a competitive edge

and hence remain affordable to the consumer.

Literally everything created and set for sale

in the global economy is immediately inferior

the moment it is produced,

for it is a mathematical impossibility

to make the most scientifically advanced

efficient and strategically sustainable products.

This is due to the fact that the market system

requires that “cost efficiency”

or the need to reduce expenses

exists at every stage of production.

From the cost of labor, to the cost of

materials and packaging and so on.

This competitive strategy, of course,

is to make sure the public buys their goods

rather than from a competing producer

...which is doing the exact same thing

to also make their goods both competitive and affordable.

This immutably wasteful consequence of the system

could be termed "Intrinsic Obsolescence".

However, this is only one part of a larger problem.

A fundamental governing principle of market economics,

one you will not find in any textbook by the way, is the following:

.

“Nothing produced can be allowed to maintain a lifespan longer

than what can be endured in order to continue cyclical consumption.”

.

In other words, it is critical that stuff break down,

fail and expire within a certain amount of time.

This is termed - “Planned obsolescence”.

Planned obsolescence is the backbone of the underlying market strategy

of every goods producing corporation in existence.

While very few, of course would admit to such a strategy outright

.

what they do is mask it within the

Intrinsic Obsolescence phenomenon just discussed,

while often ignoring, or even suppressing new advents in technology

.

which might create a more sustainable, durable good.

So, if it wasn't wasteful enough

that the system inherently cannot allow

the most durable and efficient goods to be produced,

Planned Obsolescence deliberately recognizes

that the longer any good is in operation

the worse it is for sustaining cyclical consumption

and hence the market system itself.

In other words, product sustainability

is actually inverse to economic growth

and hence there is a direct, reinforced incentive

to make sure life spans are short of any given good produced.

.

And, in fact, the system cannot operate any other way.

One glance at the sea of landfills now spreading across the world

show the obsolescence reality.

There are now billions of cheaply made cell phones,

computers and other technology

each full of precious, difficult to mine materials

such as gold, coltan, copper,

now rotting in vast piles

usually due to the mere malfunction or obsolescence

of small parts which, in a conservative society

could likely be fixed or updated and the life of the good extended.

.

Unfortunately, as efficient as that may seem in our physical reality

living on a finite planet with finite resources,

.

it is explicitly inefficient with respect to the market.

To put it into a phrase:

“Efficiency, Sustainability, and Preservation

are the enemies of our economic system.”

Likewise, just as physical goods need to be constantly produced

and reproduced regardless of their environmental impact,

.

the service industry operates with an equal rationale.

The fact is, there is no monetary benefit

to resolving any problems

which are currently being serviced.

At the end of the day

the last thing the medical establishment really wants

is the curing of diseases such as cancer,

which would eliminate countless jobs and trillions in revenue.

And since we are on the subject,

crime and terrorism in this system are good!

Well, at least economically.

For it is employing police,

generating high-value commodities for security,

not to mention the value of prisons

that are privately owned- for profit.

And how about war?

The war industry in America is a huge driver of GDP-

one of the most profitable industries-

producing weapons of death and destruction.

The favorite game of this industry is to blow things up

and then go and rebuild them! For profit.

We saw this with the windfall billion dollar contracts

made from the Iraq war.

The bottom line is that socially negative attributes of society

.

have become positively rewarded ventures for industry.

And any interest in problem resolution

or environmental sustainability and conservation

is intrinsically counter to economic sustainability.

And this is why

every time you see the GDP rise in any country

you are witnessing an increase in necessity

whether real or contrived.

And by definition, a necessity is rooted in inefficiency.

Hence, increased necessity means increased inefficiency.

[ Value System Disorder ]

The American dream is based on rampant consumerism.

.

It is based upon the fact that

mainstream media and

especially commercial advertising-

all corporations who need this infinite growth-

have convinced us or brainwashed

most people in America and hence the world

that we have to have X number of material possessions

and the possibility of gaining infinitely more

material possessions, in order to be happy.

That's just not true.

So why do people continue to buy in this way

which is ultimately eco-genocidal

in its systemic effects cumulatively?

And it just is classical operand conditioning.

You simply put inputs of conditioning into the organism

and you have outputs of desired behaviors

or goals or objectives.

And it has all the resources of technology.

And they boast about how they get into the minds of infants;

.

what they hear is already making them

conditioned to the brand.

Then you see, that's how people have been such fools.

.

In a way, they have been taught to be fools.

It's a value system disorder.

You know, if there is any testament

to the plasticity of the human mind;

if there is any proof to how malleable

human thought is and how easily conditioned

and guided people can become

based on the nature of their environmental stimulus

and what it reinforces:

the world of commercial advertising is the proof.

You have to stand in awe

at the level of brainwashing

where these programmed robots known as "consumers"

wander the landscape

only to walk into a store and spend, say-

$4000 on a handbag

that likely cost $10 to make

in a sweatshop overseas.

Only for the brand status it supposedly represents

in the culture.

Or perhaps the ancient communal traditions

which increase trust and cohesiveness in society-

which have now been hijacked

by acquisitive, materialistic values where now annually

we exchange useless crap a few times a year.

And we might wonder why so many today

have a compulsion to shopping and acquisition,

when it is clear that they have been conditioned from childhood

to expect material goods

as a sign of their status with friends and family.

The fact is, the foundation of any society

are the values that support its operation.

And our society, as it exists

can only operate if our values support

the conspicuous consumption

it requires to continue the market system.

75 years ago consumption in America

and much of the first world was half

of what we see today, per person.

Today's new consumer culture

has been manufactured and imposed

due to the very real need

for higher and higher levels of consumption.

And this is why most corporations now spend

more money on advertising

than the actual process of product creation itself.

They work diligently to create a false need for you to fill.

And it happens to work.

[ The “Economists” ]

You know economists, in fact, are not economists at all.

They're propagandists of money value.

And you will find that all of their models basically

get down to token exchanges that are true to profit

.

of one side or both sides or whatever.

But they are completely disconnected from the actually

existing world of reproduction.

In Ohio, an old man failed to pay his electric bill;

you may be familiar with the case.

And the electric company turned off the electricity and he died.

The reason they turned it off was because

it wouldn't have been profitable for them