Interview: Peter Joseph on The Big Picture RT - Can We 'Design' Our Way Out Of Civilizational Crisis
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The Big Picture
with Thom Hartmann
As runaway global warming
continues to accelerate
along with the gap between the rich and poor,
there's a sense among many that
our civilization is in crisis.
What could be causing
this crisis and how do we
move beyond the broken status quo
and literally design a better future?
Those big questions
are at the heart of social critic
and activist Peter Joseph's new book
‘The New Human Rights Movement:
Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression.’
Peter is also a filmmaker and the
founder of The Zeitgeist Movement.
He joins us now from our Los Angeles studios.
Peter Joseph, welcome to the program.
- Thank you Thom, I appreciate you having me.
- Great to have you with us. First off,
what kind of questions are you
trying to answer in this book?
- I guess the core activist questions
of why the world is the way it is,
why we've been banging our heads
against civil and human rights
for many centuries now if not millennia,
why we end up with 48 million
slaves still in the world today
by UN standards -
more slaves at any time in human history -
and while we're on a
collision course with nature
which nobody seems to be
actively trying to really detour.
We have little policy
adjustments here and there,
the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Accord,
but are we really going to see an
end to this negative trajectory
that we've been seeing on multiple levels?
So, the book attempts to do just that.
- So why do we have these situations Peter?
- Okay, well fair enough.
At the heart of it all
it comes to our economy.
We have an economic system that was
birthed in the Malthusian period.
That's the period of time between
the Neolithic Revolution up
until the Industrial Revolution
around the 18th century.
So you go back about 12,000 years ago and
we had a kind of geographical determinism
if your people are familiar with
cultural anthropology,
it's a very unique field.
And when we started agrarian society
we developed property and ownership,
we developed capital and
the means of production,
labor specialization,
regulation and government, law enforcement,
and eventually we gave birth to what we know
today as the market system of economics,
which has been fluid throughout
this entire period of time.
We call capitalism today
something separate as though
Adam Smith invented this in the Enlightenment
but really it's just another kind
of variation on the same theme
of a society based upon scarcity,
based upon competition
between parties and groups,
based upon exploitation,
which leads to dominance and oppression.
And as we found out in the 21st century
and the mid-20th century
starting this trajectory,
we are now in complete ecological crisis
because our entire economy
is based on consumption.
So long story short, we have an
economic mode that's entirely outdated.
And I really appreciate your introduction
where you mentioned the word design,
because at the heart of our progress
as a civilization is design.
It's our ingenuity,
it's our ability to do more and more
with less and less and less.
Efficiency and design,
that's the true wealth:
our strategic use of the environment
in order to make an amiable culture that
isn't constantly at war with itself,
where it gets what it needs,
it doesn't exist in deprivation and so on,
and that's what the book
attempts to arc through.
So I walk through the history of economics,
I walk through
to where we are today and why the
general activist community,
the libertarian community,
the false dualities between the state
and government need to be moved past.
There's a great deal of mythology;
people talk about
crony capitalism as though
that's kind of a real thing,
as though we should focus on corruption,
when in truth the whole system
is foundationally corrupt!
It's foundationally
opposition-against-opposition type of structure
and a consumer-based structure.
Those two things put together
is a completely caustic reality,
and until we override this system and
start to design out all of these problems,
focusing and amplifying what
has actually improved our lives,
we're not going to get
very far as a civilization,
as the trajectories show.
- You talk about cultural anthropology.
Peter Farb was probably one of the
most brilliant cultural anthropologists
certainly in my lifetime. He's passed away now
but his book ‘Man's Rise to Civilization,’ which
chronicled 34 first contacts with Native
American groups back in the 1600s,
points out that with one exception,
one single exception,
none of those societies were organized
the way that you're describing.
In fact in all of those societies,
the people with the greatest,
the most highly elevated position,
had the lowest amount of power.
The Potlatch society:
that you gained status by giving things away
rather than accumulating.
- Absolutely.
- People who acquired more and more and more
were viewed as mentally ill
and ultimately expelled from societies.
- Yeah.
- And there's theories
about how those evolved
but how do we get from here to there,
if that's desirable?
- Well I'm glad you brought that up, that there are
pockets of civilization that have lived differently.
Native American cultures,
aboriginal cultures,
that have basically been weeded
out over time unfortunately due to
the power system that we know as capitalism.
And I want to just point
that out before we move on
that it's a great testament to
the variability of human nature.
We've been peddling this argument,
at least mainstream academia,
has peddled this argument that this system
that we have now is a representative of us,
in our most core state,
and we compete and we fight
and some win and some lose.
And that's completely debunked
by examples that you just said
not to mention advancements
in neuropsychology and other things
that complement all of that.
Now, in terms of how we actually move forward
there are five major
transitions that need to occur
to take this from where we are today to a
new system that actually respects itself,
that doesn't thrive on
competition and oppression.
First we have automation.
The rise of automation is
extremely powerful and it's not
something that should be belittled or
looked at as some kind of sci-fi fantasy.
We should look at this for what it
really is and that's the alleviation
of the core attribute of
the civil rights battle
going back to Egyptian slavery,
going back to union busters.
Labor has always been the core edifice
of oppression and exploitation.
That is a well-established phenomenon.
And with automation we're
able to now move past this.
We're able to now realize that we're not only
more efficient with the application of automation
but we can actually alleviate this
core woe that has kept people,
this group-istic problem at hand,
kept people at odds with each other,
the haves and the have-nots.
So labor, human labor to automation,
is the first step
which is again being implied
through our society right now
if you read modern social study
on the advancement of technology.
Then you have a property-to-access system.
We see this new phenomenon having to do with
sharing systems, library systems,
car systems, house systems.
People are beginning to collaboratively share
and that's a very interesting phenomenon.
And what it implies is that people
are less interested in ownership
and they're more interested in access.
And in truth if you have an access society
where people are getting what they need through
access as opposed to property and hoarding,
you enabled more stuff to
be available to more people
with less ecological footprint.
Less cars being driven around.
Obviously that's not good
for the market economy.
The market economy assumes that there should
be one person owning one of everything,
that's the highest optimization,
and repeat purchases.
Create more efficiency,
you create more egalitarian structure.
The third thing - I'm just going to
go through these really quickly -
is your proprietary neuroses.
We have boardroom people sitting
together and they're hoarding
their intellectual property, not sharing it,
and at the root of course of all
of our development is sharing.
Whether it's sharing historically from
the development of science over the
course of time or sharing horizontally.
The fact that
we invariably are a
civilization that is based upon
people eventually sharing,
through market dynamics.
That's what markets actually do.
The competitive mechanism
eventually leads to sharing,
interestingly enough,
so that leads to open source.
So if we can open source our sectors,
open source all major industries,
that would be a tremendous step,
build in the emphasis of a
collaborative system, incredible step.
And the fourth one,
globalization to localization.
We have globalization,
the average American meal
travels about 1400 miles
before it gets to the individual's plate;
that's lunacy.
We can localize,
we can use the advancement of technology
to do things in the most
efficient way possible
in that manner.
And the fifth issue has to do with
this old idea that you can't have ...
can't have an economy without market
dynamics and money being exchanged.
The idea of Ludwig von Mises:
you have to have an economic calculation
with this constant
preference-assuming exchange,
and that's no longer feasible.
We have digital feedback
that can be stretched across the
world to know exactly what we have,
again without that kind of proprietary
neuroses where people are hoarding their data.
And then this is how we can actually
create a sustainable civilization:
when we can look at all the resources,
look at the behavior,
and begin to work around this behavior
and that would be the fifth and final step.
And all of this is detailed extensively
far beyond what I'm saying
right now in the book,
specifically chapter 5 which
is the solution chapter.
- Yeah. Absolutely.
Peter, talk about the Zeitgeist
Movement that you started.
What is it, or was it, and how does it fit
into what you're talking about in this book?
- The Zeitgeist Movement was
started about 10 years ago,
it's a global sustainability advocacy group.
It promotes exactly more or less
what I‘ve just talked about.
The New Human Rights Movement
book takes a different angle to it
because I'm always trying to use
communication in different ways.
But it supports a natural
law resource-based economy
and this is effectively embodiment of that
train of thought that I just described,
where you're moving from
a system that's basically the
antithesis of sustainability,
the antithesis of preservation,
the antithesis of collaboration,
to one that supports those
values in a design approach.
I want to give an example of this because when
to talk about this, people- their heads spin,
they think you're a Marxist and so on.
They think that there's
going to be some boardroom
that sits around and
makes all these decisions.
You can have CAD, computer-aided design,
computer-aided engineering,
through open source connected
to metrics across the world
that is gauging what people are doing,
and people can actively design
anything at their computers.
And through this collaborative Commons that
can be established through modern technology
you no longer even NEED corporations,
because the open-source
mechanism, the ability
to actually democratically participate
and I emphasize that word democracy.
It's very hard to hear people talk about
democracy and capitalism in the same sentence
because they're completely antithetical.
But this is the kind of phenomenon of
interaction that we're speaking of:
a very autonomous but yet
unified global consciousness.
So the Zeitgeist Movement promotes that,
we've been doing events for about 10 years,
and we will continue to do events and
hopefully grow that train of thought.
I often joke that everyone's in the Zeitgeist
Movement whether they know it or not,
because as the term "zeitgeist" defined,
it's basically the ethic of a species,
it's the defining characteristics
and values of a species,
and we're all contributing to
that with our everyday behavior
one way or another.
But yeah, people should look into
the Zeitgeist Movement as well.
- Yeah, the spirit of the times.
We have just 30 seconds Peter.
We're seeing the rise of democratic
socialism around the world as a real force.
How do you interpret that in light
of what you talk about the book?
It's a great step forward but I
don't think it's enough because
rarely do people that speak
of democratic socialism
actually get to the heart of
the root structural problems
that I just spoke of:
a society based explicitly on scarcity,
an infrastructure that's still
oriented around competition.
You know we can have cooperatives,
I'm all for all these
different things we could do
to revise the financial system:
complementary currencies,
again cooperative corporations and so on.
But until we realize that the system
is fundamentally unsustainable,
it's fundamentally
competitive and oppressive.
It's like a river Thom.
And we can put up barricades,
we can put up dams to try and hold
the natural flow, the natural
logic back of what this system is,
or we can work to change direction
and create an entirely new system,
which is what I really
hope for and what I bank on
because I don't think the piecemeal things
that we're seeing, even if successful,
will really overcome what
we're facing right now.
- Brilliant! Peter Joseph,
thanks so much for being with us tonight.
- Thank you Thom, I appreciate it.