Episode Summary:
Episode 57 covers a vast range of topics surrounding the idea of Democracy. Peter explains how a working democracy, from a cybernetic standpoint, would need to be organized very differently from the representative structure seen today.
He describes why contemporary democracy is a catastrophic failure, then spending some time on the “activist industrial complex;” then moving into dominant cultural mechanisms of system preservation that limit social change and more, including a detailed dissection on “social inheritance” and the philosophical neuroses that stops society from sharing the fruits of collective society’s technological efficiency, with all the world’s citizens.
He also addresses the 4 major feedback loops of societal destabilization, coming from market economics, using an analogy from Stafford beer to express how the sequence of perturbations will begin to accelerate faster than any resting time, along with discussing first principles of environmental sustainability, and how it will serve as the baseline foundation of democratic thought in the future, including with the Integral Project.

YOUTUBE
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Transcript:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody.

Peter Joseph:
This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now episode 57.

Stafford Beer:
Let me tell you what happened when I first explained it to President Allende himself. Yendi was a doctor, a medical doctor, as you may know. And therefore it was very easy to explain the model to him in terms of neurocybernetics, as the way of controlling the body. And then I went into the business of controlling the state.

And so I said to him, let us suppose that these elements of the state are the big departments of state, like the foreign affairs and the economy and home affairs, so on. And then we’ll have those and the following things will happen and then we must have a system two. And I built it up on a piece of paper lying on the table between us. Then a system three and a system four, and I got that far. And then I got to system five, and I drew a big histronic breath. And I said, I was going to say, ‘this Companero president is you!’

Before I could say it, he suddenly smiled very broadly, and he said, ah, ‘system five at last, the people.’ That was a pretty powerful thing to happen. It had a very big influence on me. I can’t go into that aspect, the political aspect in this program. It’s not what it’s about. But I’m sure you’ll bear in mind that I don’t have to go and work in places where I don’t want to be.

Peter:
It has been a minute since the last episode. Life on the domestic front has been more complex than usual. Before I start, in fact, for a little while now, I’ve been promising a white paper regarding this Integral project, which I continue to develop along with a preliminary web development interface. With the intent, in fact, to start with this paper and give people open access to it, to enable analysis, critique, engagement, contribution in a kind of open source way, which relates, in fact, to something I’ll talk about today in regard to recursive democracy, which is the focal point of today’s podcast, if you will, even though we’re going to jump around quite a bit.

It’s important to state up front that we have to develop a form of community interaction at every level of the development of Integral or any such social system design that’s going to work as it will be that mechanism that will create the requisite variety to allow the system to adapt and balance itself out. But we’ll going to get to more of that a little bit later.

And one more thing before I jump in here, as I’ve always said, being an activist is really a luxury in terms of the ability to spend such time outside of the battle for survival in the current unfortunate condition. It is largely a thankless pursuit and the more dedicated someone becomes, the more they put their various survival at risk on multiple levels. And for those that are frustrated with projects and my progress on them, believe me, I am too, such as my film work and this node development network. Please keep in mind that I’m strained just as anybody else’s for time and resources with complex domestic obligations, financial responsibilities, and so on.

A friend of mine even asked me recently regarding this 20 year span of work, how much longer I intend to keep going as it’s an extremely poor career choice and deeply tenuous in terms of being sustainable. The burden of overall stress aside having to just think about these things and watch the world, and I think many people watching this program can relate to that. And my response was this: there is nothing in life that demands the most meaning as working to repair and progress society.

You can take all the personal interests we have and all the ideas of success related to them from perfecting a skill to winning at one of the many games we’ve invented in our society, to of course the almost universal idea of success, having lots of money and fame. You can take all of the seemingly important of evolutionary functions, the joy of having kids and that family ideal that people gravitate towards. And at the end of the day, I hate to say this and it’s not an insult. None of those things actually matter because none of those things hold a candle to the importance of the overall sustaining of human life on Earth.

Doesn’t matter how successful you think you are in your profession or your art or whatever hobby. Doesn’t matter how well conditioned and smart and happy your children are or how loved you feel in your local community. If the house you live in is still on fire, then your priorities are wrong. I refuse to become part of the soft sociopathology that defines normality, based entirely on narrow myopic self-interest. I refuse to dedicate my life to arbitrary activities for the sake of a kind of fashionable satisfaction or the lure of luxury through income or whatever contrived idea of success and meaning people have conjured artificially for themselves.

So here I sit, knowing and feeling that as long as my species and spaceship earth are failing in totality, there is no other choice but to seek correction. And I think to have any self-respect, to have any integrity at all, you have to have that as part of your own value system. And believe me, I wish it wasn’t that way. As lots of other things I like to be doing with my life. Truly tragic that we haven’t even gotten the basics right in terms of how to live on this planet. But as George Carlin once said, we are barely out of the jungle and it’s going to take a dedicated group, relentless, dedicated group that will without any true reward, being ridiculed the entire way to pursue corrective measures that will probably never even find resolution in their lifetime.

So if we’re going to concern ourselves with meaning and purpose in life, it comes down to the very act of living a principled life in this way, ultimately focusing on the well-being of everyone and everything. And that is not a poetic disposition. It is a realistic one.

All right, let’s get into this. As touched upon, the subject of today is democracy, more specifically recursive democracy, as a model of how society can govern itself effectively, sustainably, and equitably, both locally and globally. A subject of great importance, which dovetails explicitly with the Integral Parallel Economy Project, I keep talking about. However, before we jump into all of that, I want to set up a few introductory issues.

Naturally, we wouldn’t discuss such a subject if it wasn’t for an obvious problem in the way things are today. So let’s consider for a moment why our contemporary democracy, if you even want to call it that, as we see on average throughout the so-called free world, continues to be a colossal failure. Failure measured by what, you ask? Well, I guess there are three levels.

First, society is not working toward any level of sustainability or proper responsible action collectively by any measure. Second, general polling shows — statistical study — shows that across the world government policies and actions rarely if ever express the true interests of a citizenry. Some countries do better than others. The United States of course is the absolute worst, but the idea of public will as expressed through these democratic processes is largely a myth and that is a fact.

And third, and this links back to the first point made, the degree public policy does reflect public interest is generally only related to the most vile, “populist,” and propagandized interests, such as punitive intent toward immigrants, as if that’s the most evil presence that any country can have, or the removal of civil liberties for minorities, or whatever within this culture war…anti-trans, or whatever.

In other gravitations that are really a general consequence of distraction and propaganda sourced back to elite interests once again. That is the energy that’s flowed into the system and unfortunately a certain large number of people have absorbed it so they feedback and they’ve been conditioned to think that that’s what they should be concerned with and that’s really a form of brain washing more than anything else and not really the will of the people unless you say the will of the completely uneducated populace which we’re going to talk a little bit more about later as well.

That said, and note that in most of my prior discussions on the failure of democracy is obviously the influence of business and money and the pressures and effects that it has. I mean, that’s an intractable problem within a monetary system, within a business system. So I’m not going to be talking about that. We’re going to focus again on these other layers of the overall structural problem.

And let’s jump into this by actually addressing what I affectionately call the activist industrial complex. We often hear activist movements being described as part of the democratic process uniquely. And if you ask me, activism is a form of antagonism, is it not? It would seem to actually be a failure of democracy, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it always found that strange? You go out there and protest. It’s part of your democratic right or force. As, but a people protest, that means that the systems of feedback and society aren’t really working. So they have to yell at the wind for a while and hope for the best. That’s not an efficient system of democratic input. It’s almost kind of tragic that people would even think that. Just, I mean, that’s kind of silly to think about.

But that’s secondary to what I’m gonna be talking about now. Today, every activist, commentator, writer, podcaster, filmmaker, every NGO and nonprofit, even every political party, is in fact, as their first priority going to be concerned with financial survival before anything else. And they will move towards necessitating that, at the expense of true, honest intent. People often use the phrase, selling out and motivations become more about comforts and gains in a given situation as opposed to objectivity, autonomy, bravery, challenge, and so forth. But today, virtually everyone has “sold out” before they even begin because of the requirement of financial survival, which is why the nature of activism has been experienced at whether via social media or news networks or books, films, whether on the street as well, is highly uniform in what it does. There’s a distinct needed fashion inherent to the activist industrial complex.

And perhaps the first thing to be sacrificed is the offering of solutions. People will happily listen to critiques and criticism, but the moment you say, well, here’s something we can do to change things. Everyone’s back goes up for some reason, even in just conversation. It’s very fascinating. And the only solutions that are to be discussed are once again, “in-system” solutions, as opposed to “out-system” solutions, as I’ve talked about, out-system meaning solutions that actually challenge the very structure of society, which is what rewards the activist agent via income and for many by extension status, be it sales, donations, sponsorship, YouTube followers, monetization, whatever.

And the emphasis here isn’t on the obvious nature of this reality, which is not profound to point down, as it’s not just a problem for activists, it’s a problem for literally everyone in society as the old phrase goes not to “rock the boat,” to move against the system is to slap the hand that feeds you quite tragically. But to understand just how detrimental this basic force of loyalty truly is, because the limits of debate that result as a consequence of this homogenization serve as a form of paralysis in both the nature of analysis and the nature of action and influence, normalizing the limits of debate. And I routinely point this issue out because self-awareness about the inherent cognitive dissonance is a productive position, as difficult as it is for people to emotionally take. Like an alcoholic, the person has to admit there is a problem occurring.

We have to recognize this system-level gravitation to begin working against it, broadening the envelope and nullifying those reinforcing limits of debate. It needs to become fashionable, so to speak, to truly move against the system and not fear its reprisal. It needs to become a trend to want to propose radical solutions and methods, because today it’s almost non-existent. There’s nothing that makes me cringe more than things like protest signs that say something like, “Change the system.” We see that, it’s become an emerging slogan, yet few seem to know what they’re even saying, because there’s no literacy on the issue, aside from programs like this that barely survive in this activist industrial complex, speaking from the wilderness to a very small group of people.

People seem to think in this sort of change the system phenomenon that’s in the periphery that that change just means more regulatory intervention against markets essentially, or the political system or some kind of combination of the two. Not understanding that the only true form of system change has to move against the source of all the crises we see, which requires the dismantling of market economics. The abolition of capitalism is the only potential workable goal. In fact, I would go so far to say that the marginalization and limits of debates set forth by the vast majority out there in the activist community are doing far more harm than good.

And I get it, some say, well, it’s better to get people talking about society and its problems rather than just talking about video games or celebrities, right? Well, of course, but to a degree. As it creates a normalization process, constantly reinforcing subjects and conditions that aspiring new youthful people begin to think that’s what they should focus on if you want to join the club of improving society. No, that’s not what you do to improve society. This is what you do to be part of the activist industrial complex and survive as a professional social critic or whatever.

Greenpeace is an activist institution? Is it or is it a business that makes money and pays thousands of people a bunch of money and salaries to support their lives by a small narrow field of engagements, legal pursuits and so forth. Is it really activist or is it a self-contained group that has a limited range of debate that really runs in place?

Just open any social media or seemingly progressive news platform podcast, whether mainstream or grassroots. And you’ll see this self-contained, homogenized, debate-limited spectacle repeat in a mundane loop, composed of observation, complaint, analysis of corruption. And if you’re very lucky, occasionally some crude vague in-system set of solutions that have already proven largely effective. Or perhaps as an extension of that, they’ll invoke historical concepts like socialism and the invocation of worker democracies or worker cooperatives and other really old-world counter-capitalist conceptions that suffer from a lack of definition, first and foremost. But also weak historical efficacy.

Such are the repeated subjects, observations and reposals that have been deemed acceptable within the bounds of activist discourse and its tragic. It is a critical cognitive dissonance that must be understood. You must feel it. Everyone must feel it. They must accept it. The activist community has to realize it lives in this control system in effect. Because if you at least recognize the pattern in force, you can start to be more conscious. You can probe those limits, eventually breaking this entertainment and catharsis-rooted activist media cycle that has trapped pretty much everyone today in what is really a business and status mind and pathology.

Remember, the most powerful form of social control is limiting people’s sense of possibility. So expanding this to the general elements of social preservation, or I should say system preservation, I think we can break it down to two dominant mechanisms. Competition and by extension, the philosophy of Anti-entitlement. Competition as we’ve talked at length before, including an interview with Alfie Cohen, a number of podcasts back. I recommend people watch it. It’s presented to us as natural and noble. And ultimately it makes systemic inequality and structural violence appear normal as well with these winners and losers that people expect as the natural order of things, making the existence of suffering that is in effect desired.

I mean that quite literally the expectation of suffering makes it actually desired. This is the downstream sociological outcome because you can’t accept a competitive economic condition without the expectation of suffering, which makes the absence of suffering actually immoral outcome in this worldview as strange as that may sound. Now, as far as anti-entitlement, more importantly, we have this value that nothing should be provided and survival must be earned individually in a kind of abstracted form of compulsive, immediate reciprocity. And I want to dig into this a little bit more, because it’s fascinating.

In early societies, as many anthropologists have studied, this was not a value. The icon saw of southern Africa, and I know I’m saying that wrong, it spelled exclamation point K-U-N-G space S-A-N. They are noted for having a value structure based on giving without the expectation of return. Anthropologist Marshall Salons described this as a “generalized reciprocity” as opposed to “balanced reciprocity” or tit for tat exchanges. You know at Christmas when someone gives you a gift and they are disappointed to find that you forgot to get them one or that sense of indebtedness you may feel when somebody does something simply kind for you and you feel like you now owe them something.

This is clearly a side effect of market-based culture. Everything has become an exchange even when money isn’t involved and you see it on many levels. The old “if it wasn’t for me” phenomenon, people are keeping tabs and a kind of mental ledger. And as natural as that sense of reciprocity and expectation may seem to many today, which does kind of symbolize the basic need for contribution and return that rest of the core of civilization. But not in this way.

What we have instead is a neurosis. An neurosis that takes the common sense dynamic of general social reciprocity and distorts into a singular exchange snapshot, reducing what is a systemic phenomenon to a contrived requirement of engagement in order to be entitled to anything. And it is that mental model that leads people to this, you must earn your living phenomenon. Discounting all the other dynamics that quite logically and rationally should facilitate a society that holistically takes care of itself without the need for perpetual direct exchange.

Think about what we already are born into and get as a kind of societal inheritance that can’t be stopped really. Rooted in the cumulative development, true wealth through the advancement of science, technology, design, and overall ingenuity. Ingenuity, which is a social process without exception. With influences coming into play that are almost impossible to separate. Thomas Edison was not the origin point of any of his inventions. That is a contrivance. He was an inflection point, part of an endless line of serially developed knowledge. He was a talented inflection point, but not the origin point. And on that basis alone, the contradiction is apparent.

So you want a cell phone, well them. If you’re going to earn that cell phone, you need to develop the scientific knowledge from scratch yourself to arrive at that design and make it yourself before anything else.

And no, you can’t just say price is what determines this entitlement and brings it all into some intelligence, as theorists have tried to do. Price does not account for any of that, even though that is part of the propaganda. Likewise, you will notice that society as a whole does show pockets of moving toward a ‘more with less’ pattern of economic efficiency, what Buckminster Fuller called a “ephemeralization,” in some areas, even though it’s done chaotically. The move toward ‘zero marginal cost,’ as Jeremy Rifkin would say, is a thing, even though randomly amplified, but it is precisely the efficiency phenomenon that leads to the logic that society can operate without this labor for income structure and this contrived transactional reality, but that’s not the system’s incentive, of course, and which is why it doesn’t actually flow outwards and become part of the system in a normalized way. Such outcomes are really anomalies because the society is not focused on the generation of cost abundance, so to speak, lowering cost to produce abundance, lowering cost not only in the sense of price, but the cost of actual labor, the actual input into something.

The system can’t function that way, as I talked about before. It can only exploit scarcity overall in order to work, so you can infinite growth as we talk about more so in a moment. So the ‘zero marginal cost’ of things that we do see are really true side effects. They’re not features. They’re fought, in fact, more than they are preserved. But those side effects are revealing the true potential that is being lost in terms of system function. Compounded, of course, once again by the reductive propaganda that everyone has to engage in a transactional life at every turn in order to earn a living.

A propaganda so profound that people consider it morally wrong for there to be any kind of true collective social provision or service to society that people do not engage in direct transactions for. It’s mind-blowing when you really think about it. Even pseudo-radical, yet common-sense proposals that made it into the mainstream, like universal basic income, which is feasible as a stopgap to help the majority that’s suffering.

With how much disturbance to the system as a whole, it’s ridiculed and dismissed. Remember when Andrew Yang ran for president on a platform of UBI? The idea was mocked as free money for lazy people issued by the derisive nanny state. As if, as if, once again, people don’t actually already receive countless unearned benefits as a consequence of our basic material and design evolution. It’s like one of those crude sociological studies you see with a person handing out free money on the street, and people just walk by cynically assuming that it can’t possibly be real, or there’s just something fundamentally wrong with a very idea.

Another way, imagine 10 people that work on a farm in equal capacity, each getting a tenth of the fruits of that farm as a collective. And then automation technology is developed, and it removes the need for any labor by those 10 people. Now those 10 people can use the automation and then get the fruits of the farm for essentially free. But then comes the market structure, and the source of that efficiency, whoever claims ownership in private property, decides that no, no, those 10 people have to now go out and get some other job in order to get the money to exchange for the fruits of that farm now rather than getting direct support from the efficiency tool itself. This is the market pattern of sabotage we see.

And again, what are we actually dealing with in this scenario? The source of that automation technology was most certainly not created in isolation. It’s impossible. It embraces a long-term developmental process that is completely nonlinear, serial. Hence, all technological innovation in the end has to be linked to a social source and not an individual or group source, which means society should get the fruits of what society ultimately creates. The whole idea of intellectual property here is what I’m really getting at is an absurd contrivance. Born entirely from the logic of market economics, It’s needed within the system because the system has to have it. That’s what the system is premised on. It’s premised on property. You know the true dynamics and meaning of wealth creation in society are utterly lost And yet the delusion prevails.

What did Margaret Thatcher wants to clear? There is no such thing as society. She said in 1987 fully entrenched in this kind of libertarian propaganda chastising the idea that people should have any expectations from the larger order development of society and that everyone can only look to themselves for bootstrapped improvement. This kind of thinking feeds into that old puritanical ethic of hard work. And there’s nothing wrong with that ethic. It is certainly noble and important for everyone to be as self-sufficient as possible in a literal sense, expanding versatility in their own survival. But that is completely separate from the object disregard the culture has absorbed from capitalism where the very notion of social support as a consequence of the overall wealth created as a civilization that we all own so to speak is derided and dismissed and so the culture drags along essentially a green with the philosophy that creates their own oppression and deprivation once again along with countless other related problems associated to the overall model of market economics and the sick values it supports.

As I had my Simon character say in my film Interreflections, “the slaves don’t want to be free. They want to be slave owners.” Which by the way is another reason why I emphasize the step-by-step scaling nature of the Integral Parallel Economy Project because if a nation state just assembled a post-scarcity, steady state, resource-based economy, whatever you want to call it, and they did it without any culturally adaptive process, most people would fundamentally reject it. I’m convinced they would just reject it in this weird moral conditioning they’ve been given.

Hence, the move toward true system change, no matter how dire the circumstances are in need, and they are dire today, can only be done in a graduated process, if you will. I’m not saying it has to take 100 years. I do believe people can adapt quickly once certain conditions and incentives are created and set in motion. But the adaptability process is still just as much a part of the development of all of this as the end goals themselves. Society can only adapt through experience, not just education.

For example, as I argued in the prior podcast, the very concept of abundance, and post-scarcity demands a minimalistic sensibility. The value system of society must gravitate towards the opposite of what it does now, which is material expansion and increased standards of living. And that has nothing to do with reducing people’s quality of life. As quality of life is not synonymous with material living standards, past the point of very basic universal needs being met. After that point, it all becomes an issue of social relations and insecurity.

We all know the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses,” but it really doesn’t do justice to the kind of psychological stuff we are seeing. If all of your friends like to go to that $200 a plate French restaurant, you adapt to feel like it’s just normal to spend $200 for a single meal, and the treadmill of hedonic adaptation begins. And I suspect some people listening would say, “Well, you know, I can think from myself. I have integrity. I’m not victim to that kind of thing.” But the effect is far more subtle than people recognize. If people didn’t generally adapt to social inclusion requirements, we would have a very different world today.

Today a person without electricity is considered to live essentially in poverty. Yet for the majority of humanity’s existence, there was no electricity. Does that mean everyone prior to the state of electricity was in poverty? No, obviously not. It’s a relative notion. Once you move past abject deprivation poverty is a relative notion. And no, I’m not sitting here saying we should regress our world to one without electricity. What I’m saying is once we acclimate to a certain level of benefit, technological benefit, usually, it’s very hard to reverse. And the simple fact we call something like that poverty shows the mindset, shows the cultural conditioning.

So to be clear, it isn’t that we want to stop technological advancement or become luddites. It’s that this basic knowledge and recognition of our ongoing dissatisfaction with material life as a consequence of step by step societal adaptation to force these material luxuries into normality, endlessly turning wants into needs and necessities is far from healthy.

And of course it’s largely driven by the growth nature of our economy, moving the needs of the system into the sociology and psychology of the cogs in the system, which is us. And my point here is that there is no debate. The only viable value orientation a society can possibly have in regard to material existence is a move towards simplicity and dematerialization. Anyone that tells you otherwise is insane because you have to respect the homeostatic balance of your ecosystem. And again, it doesn’t mean everyone has to live in a straw hut somewhere eating grubs.

You can determine the viability of a species material standard of living by analysis of the environmental impact alone, seeking homeostasis. And the beauty of the trajectory we are actually on, if we were to embrace it properly, is what of doing again more with less, focusing on efficiency, which means it’s absolutely conceivable that people could move into ever-increasing, high-material standards of living while actually having no detrimental footprint on the planet.

You know, when pro-market people say things like, “Well, during the time of capitalism, we’ve seen the standard of living rise more than any time in human history,” which proves It’s power and efficacy and superiority. Even if that were true, it doesn’t matter how fast you increase production and distribution if it’s not a sustainable practice. You’re simply delaying the inevitable drop in standard of living that is going to come as a consequence later of this lack of sustainability.

“Living the dream” on a train that is on its way to fly off a cliff. And if one still doesn’t get that, just imagine for a moment if the entire planet lived like the upper class of the United States in terms of standard living. The math has been done on that kind of thing. The planet would blow up, figuratively speaking, overnight, if the whole society attempted to live like the American upper class.

Why? Because it’s utterly unsustainable. You know all those statistics you hear about the rich and their CO2 footprint and their pollution, their energy consuming mansions and so on and so on. Can you imagine? If the American dream so speak, the American nightmare, was applied globally to everyone in a egalitarian sense, it would never work. It’s possible. In fact, it’s not even working now. The imbalance is huge in inequality, still a billion people essentially in poverty in a true sense of direct deprivation and even with all that inequality and people without, it’s still unsustainable.

Anyway, back to my point here. This is about acclimation to a grounded value system, a value system that is rooted in something tangible by which philosophy and practice arises as a consequence of the root goals of sustainability and public health. At an important point about Integral, this aspect is built right into it. It’s part of its efficiency process. Minimalism isn’t something you pursue. It’s the way the system works by default.

Now say one more thing about this need for a far more gradual Just think of the American Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just a product of enlightened moral arguments. It had to be put together with incremental intervention. New laws, new protections, new corporations, new experiences to get people used to things. You can’t just explain to a bunch of conditioned white racists that human beings are equal, regardless of their color of skin. of skin, so schools became slowly desegregated and slowly a population of mixed ethnicities began to proliferate. Sadly, those processes are being shut down under the umbrella of anti-woke, but that’s for another conversation.

Anyway, I’m all over the place here. One final point before we move on, on this idea of cultural acclimation, we’re going in the other direction, so to speak. In the last podcast I talked with Abby Martin and she reminded me of a talking point I should bring up more often especially when it comes to those that think we’re going to magically develop something new as a social system. When problems get to a certain point of unacceptability. In other words when problems reach a collapse point or a point of destabilization that everyone finally wakes up and emerges a new way of thinking a new way of living and so forth. And the tragic reality is that the worst things get in society, particularly in a gradual manner, the more people will simply accept those degradations on average, as opposed to being inspired to a revolutionary change.

We see this empirically, and you can kind of understand it psychologically, boiling the frog. Instead of walking over, say, one homeless person in the street, which people are perfectly fine with on average, they will walk over 20 or through a giant tent city and they will become acclimated to that. The house will continue to increasingly catch fire and people will increasingly just think to themselves, “This is fine. Something’s going to save this in the future past the mashed potatoes, please.” Rather, we have to create a positive reinforcement type of environment for people to start to acclimate to the solutions proposed, learning why they are important, scaling from micro to macro, as I described in the Integral project I keep talking about and will be in the white paper and so forth.

Now one more thing before we move on to the subject of democracy. I’ve never done this in a fully structured way and I put this together even though I’ve said this stuff before I think it’s important to put it in the structure I’m about to express. To summarize what our really the four core feedback driven processes that are unifying to ensure civilization does indeed continue to spiral and ultimately fail if radical system change doesn’t get underway. And if you meet people that sit around pretending that technology or economic growth or even artificial intelligence or whatever is going to save the day, fundamentally ignoring the system flaws, I suggest these four feedback loops or influences are what you tell them.

Number one, the need for infinite growth. Market economics isn’t biased towards growth, it requires it, as I have discussed at length in many prior episodes. Something that many in the prevailing world of anti-capitalist capitalists still don’t seem to understand, assuming that you can have de-growth while still preserving a monetary-market infrastructure. In this, if growth slows, unemployment rises, debt defaults, social instability spreads. De-growth or even non-growth within a market economy creates systemic pain that moves in multiple directions, increasingly amplifying that pain, the more de-growth continues. The farther de-growth goes, the more unstable market economics becomes harming the people. So the only alternative is to constantly grow the economy in this society to avoid that pain at the expense of course of the ecosystem, fostering perpetual resource overshoot and a vast array of negative market externalities that will increasingly further societal disorder over time.

We see this cartoonishly happening in the United States with the essentially the shutting down of the environmental protection agency and other deregulations entirely for the purpose of growth. It’s just they’re stripping everything down to the bare bones of the free market delusion and it’s frightening. Which of course has always been the general path of political short-term interests to deregulate and privatize, pushing as much economic growth as possible because it makes the administration look good in the short-term logic of the entire thing.

Same with the short-term logic of the president of a corporation. With the problems and inevitable destabilization resulting from all of this behavior ignored and essentially postponed: short-term gain with long-term destruction is the core market incentive structure and it defines the overall global trend, as everyone remains loyal to this logic. Open any peer review assessment of the state of the environment today, from water to the atmosphere, to emerging scarcity, to the condition of the oceans or whatever, and you will find that every major life support system is in decline, and accelerating in that decline.

Second we have the endogenous generation of inequality. Markets can’t equalize anything. They concentrate in a state of perpetual imbalance. And the distribution of income and wealth is no different. Wealth generates wealth through interests, rents, and capital returns, of course. Those with assets will accumulate faster on average than those without. The result is what Thomas Piketty called a “fundamental law.” “The rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of the economy.” That’s called wealth-attamed advantage, and it is one of the most obvious feedback processes that keep the rich rich and the poor poor.

But we also have implicit advantage, which compounds this, put forward in the affine wealth model for one through agent-based analysis through the application of a econophysics as discussed by people like Bruce Boghosian of Tufts University. The system inherently moves money from the poor majority to the rich minority as a system function by the very act of trade, regardless of investment strategies, common to what we traditionally think of in the rich advantages that we see.

The model show that left at a vacuum all the wealth in the system would essentially move to one person, by the force of trade itself, which is maddening to think about. And people may ask them, “Why hasn’t this happened?” Well, let’s start with the fact that 1% of the global population owns more wealth than at the bottom 95% combined, and then examine the mechanisms that pose some constraint on this endogenous force: taxes, social safety nets, charity, and various welfare programs of redistribution and inhibition. It is only through such intervention, in fact, that both the environmental crisis and the inequality crisis haven’t exponentially blown up even more.

And of course, as wealth concentrates, so does political power, bringing us to the third loop to talk about, which we’ll call the ‘wealth power self-interest cycle.’ The wealth power self-interest loop embraces how the protective self-interested interests of the wealthy who ultimately gain the most control over the workings of society will mold that society in their image and to their advantage not as a matter of conspiracy or corruption, but as a matter of internal self-preservation.

On the basic level, elites are simply doing what everyone else is doing in the market system, defending their self-interest and what they have with only an afterthought regarding social interest and long-term intent. Billionaires operate with precisely the same sensibilities as a mom and pop shop within the sociological conditions of markets. The difference is the level of access that the wealthy have, the tools, and by nature of competition logic, they use their money and their resources to shape laws, to fight regulations or make regulations in their favor, and affect public opinion, moving that into their favor.

And in terms of truly important, obviously needed helpful interventions against the system, they are ultimately agents of sabotage. Campaign contributions, lobbying, media ownership are only some of the most commonly recognized mechanisms employed, but they go way, way beyond that. And democracy has never and will never stand a chance against this kind of power force as long as it exists as it does for one. But as long as the hierarchies are being produced through the market, it’s almost impossible to even conceive of a workable democracy. You know, people desperately do want to believe that our modern democracy, as we’re going to talk about more so in a moment, does have the power to override elite business and monetary power. “Get money out of politics,” they often say, Sorry, it doesn’t. You will get waves improvement here and there, but overall everything will move in favor of elite, growth pursuing hierarchy accentuating business interest, forever generating class and antagonism and conflict, which they are in every position to keep winning at.

And fourth, the intrinsic instability that is built into the very fabric, the very dynamics of markets, which we could also call the failure of “general equilibrium theory.” This isn’t something I’ve really touched upon that much, and rather than being a defined feedback loop in a traditional sense, it’s really a bunch of disarrayed influences and distorted feedback loops producing an overall instability at once. a lot of things happening that just crick these waves and gyrations of instability. As we know, markets are prone to bubbles, crashes, and crises. Booms create busts, debt cycles, and shocks. Every few years, some new market crises emerge rooted in many different intersecting causes.

And in the most core theory of market dynamics, none of this is actually supposed to happen. Markets are supposed to maintain equilibrium between supply and demand represented by price throughout the entire network, which is to translate into a mildly wavering but never faltering flow of intelligent economic behavior, maintaining balance or homeostasis. And theorists of general equilibrium spent decades trying to prove that there is some kind of homeostasis to be found through this price mechanism if proper conditions were respected.

And those theorists failed, admitting that the conditions required simply do not exist in the real world and markets are inherently unstable. And this is putting aside the other feedback loops I’ve described. Supply and demand in prices as a regulatory system, as a regulatory dynamic system are utterly self-referential in their logic, myopic, and unable to account for what is required to even suggest the capacity for stability.

Just because supply meets demand to produce a given price in the market doesn’t mean the price has any relationship to anything real or is a balancing force of anything. General equilibrium pretends that if the market is left to its own devices, there is inherent efficacy and meaning; there is efficiency as well in the price of things, including not just goods and services, but things like wages and stocks, whatever. Unemployment shouldn’t exist through the lens of general equilibrium theory. Wages should find meaningful uniformity across all levels of income in this intelligence of the hierarchy where it should should be distributed based on truly its value and use. Well, anyone paying attention to the nature of general wages over the past few decades knows that there is no balance occurring. Supply is most certainly not meeting demand in any true quantitative sense. And empirical data shows stagnation of median wages relative to productivity growth since the 1970s.

This undermines any assumption of fair compensation in the balancing of markets, the labor market. And as an aside, of course, there’s not gonna be fair compensation when people pull their head out of the abstraction and simply look at the reality of a competitive economic system. You don’t even need complex mathematical models to figure this kind of thing out. It is intuitively inferential. Competition is not a balancing force. It can’t be. It is explicitly an unbalancing force that gives the illusion of balance as everyone fights to remain imbalanced, in fact, as ridiculous as that sounds.

The price of oil should be many times what it is today. If you were to ever account for its true costs, such as pollution, climate damage, damage to the rivers and oceans, and so forth. And if you were to remove subsidies themselves from farming across the world, the global food supply would literally collapse. The price people pay for food does not at all reflect the true costs that go into it or surround it. And there’s of course destabilizing factors that can’t be taken into account by price as well, such as seasonal problems, droughts and so forth.

Furthermore, today globally, there are more houses vacant than homeless people on the street. How is that balancing supply and demand in the real world? Now, of course, market proponents will simply move into abstraction once again and say ‘that’s not the financial context of supply and demand or the market context, as it comes down to having actual purchasing power or what they call “affective demand.”’

And who has it? That’s why it works. Well, how convenient. And if you expand that logic and ask the question, “Well, why then isn’t purchasing power through wages itself finding balance across the working population, enabling everyone to be part of this effective demand? Are people that can’t afford a place to live simply not part of something called “effective income”’? See the problem, it’s all ridiculous.

In fact, one of the most hilarious adaptations of this kind of abstract thinking relates to the utilitarian or marginal theory of value, which rejects the labor and resource theory of value, which does have a basic grounding, instead deciding that the value of everything is simply what people are willing to pay for it. Now that’s super convenient as it brings everything down to a level of pure abstracted subjectivity, a philosophical end run that reduces the value of everything to trivial speculation.

Anyway, I can go on and on when it comes to the total insanity of how markets attempt to create and understand value. It really does distort, in fact, our most basic sense of who we are and what we are doing in fact. If you really think about it, it’s just bizarre. And people wander around this planet with this idea of value contrived from markets as opposed to actually relating to things that are useful and needed.

Anyway, if you put all of these four states together, these four feedback loops in general, you have a recipe for perpetual increasing disorder. The system must, as a consequence, of perpetual needed turnover, materially expand and grow in an infinitely reinforcing loop, moving against the most basic principles of earthly sustainability, the system by function concentrates wealth in the same kind of unbalanced reinforcing loop, which is truly destabilizing, in the form of extrinsic and intrinsic inequality pressures, as noted. In turn, that reinforcing loop helps for a inevitable power hierarchy by which the elites control everything, seeking short-term gain blocking democracy itself. In fact, coupled, of course, with the fact that the system is still subservient to business at its root. And hence, it’s inescapable in its true loyalties and gravitations, which means once again, democracy in any true form is never going to work.

And those three loops exist on this bed of price-rooted market dynamics that are forever out of balance and unstable, which guarantee periodic crises and an overall requirement of perpetual intervention to keep things somewhat stable. Intervention, once again, that will be routinely and persistently sabotaged by the power elite concentration as described prior, that loop. And you put all this together and you can begin to understand why the direction of civilization is moving as it is, and why even authoritarianism and fascism is also rising. Because sensing all of this emerging instability, power inevitably feels insecure. And rather than attempt to change the true source of their power, which would resolve the problem as well, they can only become more hostile in the class war and oppressive.

So when people ask, “why not just repair capitalism? Come on, this is too fringe. You don’t have to go through all this. We just need more ethical people. You have to get in there and regulate it. It’ll be fine.” The answer is simple because the system’s most defining feedback processes are inexplicably and intractably destructive.

And to wrap up this subsection, I want to quickly put it all into a cybernetic perspective from Stafford Beer from his book called Designing Freedom. And he uses an analogy in the opening of the book to describe, quite simply in fact, its a good analogy, of how complex systems fail. Imagine a ball suspended on a set of elastic threads. You swipe the ball, it wobbles, but the threads eventually bring it back to equilibrium. The system has absorbed what you could call a perturbation, right? But what happens if you swipe it again before it has time to stabilize? And again, and again, Well, obviously, equilibrium does not return. Hence, if perturbations or disturbances are coming faster than the system’s ability to recover, the whole thing becomes chaos. And that’s what we are moving into today and what some people term late stage capitalism.

For centuries, our industrial market society has absorbed crises, wars, recessions, depressions, environmental shocks, and each time, The system has wobbled, but kind of return to an acceptable state of balance, at least in the short term, at least in the sense of activity of us humans. But what we can expect now as time moves forward as these shocks are going to compound in terms of these perturbations becoming more piled on and the downstream effects will become more complex and unpredictable, and hence you have what will be the characteristic of societal collapse. Remember the law of requisite variety? Mechanisms of control of any system have to be able to match every potential state of the system to be controlled in order to maintain balance. A viable system is one that can absorb variety, respond adaptively and maintain coherence under a range of stressors. Our current system can’t do this as the perturbations that are disturbing the system and hence society are actually coming directly from the system itself in a loop of self-destruction.

In fact, as a good singular example of this move from simplicity to unruly complexity in general and the potential introduction of extreme levels of uncontrollable variety, consider what’s happening in the realm of artificial intelligence. The competitive business mindset is impulsively advancing highly complex AI technologies, slowly introducing these inherently unpredictable systems into different levels of societal operation. And each advance increases the variety of the total societal system, which means, once again, in a cybernetic context, that we have to increase the means of controlling to match this increased variety to solve new resulting problems. And ultimately, you have to have human conception and expectation there as well, with some type of in this system regulatory or legislative approach to attempt safeguards. And that leads to another problem to consider how can our old primitive government law system possibly know everything that can go wrong as we move into such complexity?

The modern apparatus of control, if you wanna call it modern, through the legislature and hierarchical regulation has already failed miserably for many other far more simplistic problems in situations with less variety. This is why Stafford Beer didn’t look at hierarchical structures as just oppressive, but also deeply inefficient when it comes to dealing with system complexity. And what will increasingly happen as per the prior analogy is once one particular problem is solved, a hundred more have already appeared, and then a hundred more on top of that.

So anyway, to summarize this tangent, we are, as an advancing technological society, haphazardly layering complexity upon complexity, hoping ancient systems and ideas of regulation can match the variety we’re creating. And when you bring that back to the level of democracy and which government, and its most fundamental definition, means system management, it becomes clear that the nature of democratic participation and societal administration must have enormous flexibility, far more than what we’re dealing with today to again match the variety.

Okay, moving on to the subject finally of democracy itself, specifically this recursive democracy and what it means. Today in sustainability and post-scarcity movements, we find plenty of healthy vision for new models. People imagine say a resource-based economy or a steady-state economy, cooperative commons economy, whatever you wanna call it. And some put together structures of how these economic models are going to work in general, like a schematic, and that’s great. However, I find that the mechanisms of development and governance, which is in a way the most critical issue in all of this, is sidelined.

In all the models I’ve ever seen in terms of post-scarcity, it’s rarely clear how public engagement is to really occur, or how the system evolves itself. This becomes even more important, as I touched upon in the prior podcast, because the truly defining nature of any new system is going to be rooted far more in how it comes to be by nature of transitioning into it than anything else.

Which means within the kernel seat of development, we have to have a clear picture and design for how this kind of thing we call democratic participation is going to work because it’s absolutely required to assist not only a sense of contribution, but once again, requisite variety. That dynamic feedback coming from the community is critical to keep things updating and working properly. It’s no surprise that many reactions to much of what has been put out there gets framed as, say, technocracy, as opposed to democratic, meaning an elite group of protected, isolated specialists that administer society in their expertise without public input.

Which is an interesting objection because really the framework of what we have now is really not that much different than representative democracy. As representative democracy is kind of a technocracy just without the technicians. Which makes it even more incompetent frankly. Since elected representatives are almost exclusively associated to business and law and rarely have any focused understanding of science or humanities or anything.

But anyway, some may be familiar with a guy named Murray Bookchin, who had some interesting ideas in this regard, worth checking out. And in his later works, describe the role of technology in assisting more efficient forms of democratic participation, particularly in an anarchist kind of setting. Why technology? Well, it’s obvious enough because it can help digest the plurality or the variety needed to filter the signal from the noise in a sea of endless opinions throughout society, which seems like a daunting task with hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of independent minds all thinking at once about what they think should happen.

And so I ask you, at the core of this problem, the problem of conflicting opinions by what mechanism can consensus actually be arrived at in this complexity?

Well, the generic answer is education. Cynics of democracy or mob rule democracy are quick to point out that an uneducated population will just move society in an uneducated direction, which is obvious enough. But what is the purpose of education? Is it just conditioning to get everyone to believe fundamentally the same thing?

Well, in the current cultural climate, absolutely. At no time in my lifetime have I seen such mass deviation of public opinion into absolute fantasy and this kind of post-truth reality, which means education has to be grounded and inferential. There has to exist some kind of generally accepted beliefs: the first principles, if you will, by which inference can be drawn to make increasingly more complex decisions.

Naturally, we all hope that this grounding comes from science, scientific understanding, testable theories and beliefs that simply cannot be dismissed as opinion, and assuming that is even achievable, which certainly feels daunting in the insane world we have today, then there must also be a facilitating system, some kind of system design that enables democratic participation.

For example, if we believe we should not have resource overshoot in society, using more resources at a given period of time, then the earth is able to regenerate those resources. Hence, achieving homeostasis if followed. From that foundational belief, democratic inputs need to come in to think about how that principle is utilized in other contexts of economic management. This is directly linked, of course, to the computer-aided design element I’ve talked about before with Integral, which allows economic democracy through the same logic.

Do people come into a design arena with completely random chaotic ideas? Can we design a computer that’s made of butter, tin foil, and pixie sticks? No, clearly there are technical inferences in terms of what design requires and the more the goal of that design is refined, the less options become available and less dispute. Variety is attenuated by that internal logic and that is the trick to variety attenuation in a democratic economic system.

It is also the trick in a general democratic system if things can be properly grounded once again mediated by some kind of mechanism that fosters proper digestion and attenuation and amplification and so forth. As opposed, of course, to the traditional idea of democratic participation, which is a bunch of people raising their hands in a city council to decide on a new local bridge, all of that is obviously far too crude for the complex society we endure today.

And so then, how do we create such a dynamic mechanism? Well, this is where the broad idea of recursive democracy comes into play. Now, what do I mean by recursive here. The term actually has two senses. The first is a nested structure, generally speaking, communities layered within larger communities, each with autonomy but also linked to the whole. Imagine concentric circles, neighborhoods feeding into towns, towns and to regions, regions and the nations, power rising up from the bottom layer by layer.

The second sense is about a shared method. The actual mechanism, the structure of operation that each layer works with in order to arrive at decisions, repeating at every scale: the way a neighborhood deliberates should mirror the way a city deliberates, which should mirror the way a country deliberates. This creates cohesion. Same pattern just scaled like we see in nature.

And while I’m using examples here that are traditional, such as a neighborhood or a city or a country. The same thing applies as alluded to prior to more specific developmental processes such as we see with open source software. This leads us to economic democracy. The same method can exist in the process of designing and updating a good, as can exist in the process of designing and updating and guiding society itself. This is another layer of that recursion. It’s finding a system that can do that at all scales.

As talked about before, Stafford Beer made this recursion. The foundation of his viable system model showed that any complex organization, company, an ecosystem and society — remains viable only if it is composed of smaller viable subsystems each mirroring the whole, interconnected by feedback for cohesion. Recursive democracy then is about creating a structured mechanism that scales from the local to the global without losing coherence, cohesion, allowing for adaptability through the nested architecture.

And while crude versions of this have and still exist, as I will touch upon in a moment, this idea is very different than what everyone thinks about when it comes to democracy. Again, we’re not talking about common voting. In fact, voting would be the lowest, weakest, and last resort form of participation. It would happen, but last resort. This is about direct creative engagement in the network of development. In fact, before we go any further, let’s quickly address this pop culture understanding of democracy.

Mainstream society reduces it to two caricatures, both rooted in famous historical objections, as I’ve already alluded to. On one hand, democracy means representative government: elect the leader every few years, and you hope they act in your interest and the interest of the citizenry. On the other hand, democracy is deemed mere mob rule, chaotic and potentially irrational and dangerous: the tyranny of the majority.

And as an aside, I don’t think this polarized framework of thought is an accident. Historically, there’s been a biased gravitation by power to pervert concepts that pose any threat to the power establishment. And the idea of democracy is not exempt. Why? Because democracy is simply not compatible with market capitalism.

The systems don’t share the same properties at all, which means democracy is not compatible with the system of power we have. Capitalism is an authoritarian structure, which is highly evident. In fact, it’s being made even more apparent today with the rise of administrations like Donald Trump and right wing, highly conservative policies and values, all authoritarian by nature.

It’s no coincidence as well that during the Cold War, Latin America was rapidly assaulted and dominated by Western capitalist interests. What did they do when some so-called socialist leader in their way trying to nationalize, remove their Western businesses? They overthrew the government or many governments. And what did they install? Did they install a democracy? No, because democracy is dangerous to the power system generated by markets.

They installed one dictatorship after another from Chile to Brazil, incorporating sadistic ideas like the Jakarta method or Operation Condor, which literally imprisoned, tortured, murdered millions of so-called leftists under the shadow of fighting communists. They weren’t communists. In fact, there’s no such thing. What they were, were different levels of anti-capitalists and, of course, anti-imperialists by extension. That is the true face of the power that comes from a market-based society.

And dictatorship is what works. In fact, if you look at the lexicon of ideas that offered something different outside of the purview of markets, you see a perpetual debasement of ideas. Needless to say, of course, including those abstractions like socialism, communism, and Marxism. And what do they call people who dare to suggest we can overcome these false scarities and whatnot? Oh, you’re a utopianist, right? That’s another one: ‘we can’t possibly end to object poverty, that’s just utopian.’

Same with the word, in fact, anarchy. Anarchy is never referred to in its political context, self-regulation, and self-organization. It’s simply referred to as a symbol of chaos and disorder. And the reason I point those examples out, coming back to democracy, is democracy really undergoes the same kind of general debasement, even though it seems like people welcome it within the general umbrella of market capitalism. It’s been hijacked, in other words, and given very absurd, polarized meanings, as said before.

And it’s no surprise that in the kind of Trumpian world in the United States here, there are people that are literally wanting and suggesting more dictatorial patterns in this cultish belief in the administration. It’s quite incredible.

Anyway, coming back to this false duality specifically about representative democracy versus chaotic mob rule, These ideas didn’t come out of nowhere. Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously argued that laws are only legitimate if they express the general will of the people. And the moment you hand sovereignty to representatives, he said, you’ve lost your freedom and effect.

He stated in the 18th century, “The people of England regard themselves as free, but they are gravely mistaken. They are free only during the election of members of Parliament, as soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes them, and they are nothing.”

Now compare that with James Madison writing in the Federalist paper number 10; he takes the alternative view dismissing essentially directed democracy as implied by Rousseau. As to him, pure democracies were spectacles of turbulence and contention, prone to majority factions trampling minority rights and hence unstable. His solution was hence this representation, ostensibly filtering public opinion through elected elites who would supposedly refine those opinions in the interest of the constituency. Human, variety, attenuating machines for the better.

And it’s obviously no surprise that modern democracy sided with Madison because, again, of the high variety problem, which brings us back to recursive democracy as a key to all of this, moving from micro to macro through nested federated layers connected by organized, well-designed feedback structures.

In contrast, even though you could kind of call current representative democracy recursive in the most general sense, as noted before, it’s actually completely dysfunctional. People think that if you have city council meetings and then elections, local elections, then national elections, and then appointees for international conferences, and whatever, that this represents the same thing as indicated by cybernetics.

But the nested structure of modern representative democracy actually isn’t really recursive at all in any true technical sense because it just flattens diverse inputs into a handful of representatives that ultimately have different motivations rather than nesting self-similar layers of true input in ultimately decision making.

Not to mention it can’t represent the complexity properly. Feedback is delayed and distorted. There’s no active movement that really keeps things continuous and updating and in a balancing operation. And ultimately, representative democracy is just a pyramid of authority, rather than anything you could ever call truly recursive, regardless of its sort of micro to macro nest and structure.

Constantly allocating power to the top, rather than truly facilitating information and influence from the bottom, which explains again why it’s so ineffective. Oppression aside, it just doesn’t work as a system. even if you removed some of the corruptions, as we call it. An ancient design increasingly unable to respond efficiently to, again, emerging problems and complexity. So there’s that.

And for the sake of a hypothetical, since this is all broad stroke stuff we’re doing today, let’s assume we were able to create a truly recursive decision-making structure in society, enabling dynamic feedback for self-regulation, self-organization with requisite variety potential to enable efficient management and homeostasis. So we have the system.

Now what’s the problem? Well, you have to figure out now what the inputs are actually going to be, meaning not just where they’re coming from, but the nature of them. And again, this is a thought exercise. I’m being purposefully abstract. If the tyranny of the majority is a real thing, then the inputs are going to suck, right? Which brings us back to the need for a grounded sense of belief that allows for reliable inference to occur, by which decisions are simply not made but arrived at through reason once again. This is an incredibly important point. It’s an incredibly important conversation on so many levels philosophically, tangibly, morally.

How do we establish rational, common ground? What are the baseline first principles that have to be shared? Does such a thing even exist? Does truth exist? Well, we’ll leave that to those philosophers. But rather than think about this truth idea, let’s just think about goals. Because goals are going to be the foundation by which most everything else can be inferred one way or another.

And if there’s any goal that we can all agree on, whether people are willing to even say it or not. the interest in maintaining survival and well-being. And if we can all agree that in the pursuit of survival and well-being, we must apply the idea of sustainability, then we are handed literally a framework of reasoning that is almost color by numbers, given basic sustainability science understandings; basic rules of nature, hence rules of our behavior built into the structure of reality we live in, if the goal of the species is to be healthy, sustainable, and stable.

Now more tangibly and to give this kind of traditional relatability, consider the United States Constitution or any national Constitution. What is the purpose of the Constitution? To provide a set of first principles by by which everything else essentially builds, particularly development of legislation and who it affects in the kind of system we have now. Now, re-imagine that kind of baseline document, except dealing with economic principles, sustainability principles first, because economic and sustainability principles are the first priority of survival. That is the grounded state. We can talk about all sorts of other democratic conflicts in society, such as the abortion debate or various levels of culture war, shit. And in the end, all that stuff will take a back seat to the most basic interest of individuals’ survival.

And what would be a simple example of this kind of paint by numbers inference for a species that wants to be sustainable and survive and maintain good health? How about a constitutional rule, first principle, that the society does not overshoot its resources. It does not use more of the Earth’s resources than the Earth produces. Now, how is that rule enforced? Well, it’s built into the very decision-making systems. That’s an important point. Going back to the prior example I gave with the open source design CAD system in Integral, which uses sustainability constraints dynamically, that people will agree upon prior, of course. This isn’t a technocracy, along with many other efficiency constraints that guide the most responsible intelligent design toward a given goal, all grounded in these first principles of sustainability. And of course, why we would like to believe those first principles will remain static because they seem to be universal truths. We always have to remember that things change, which means the process of democracy itself would have to extend to altering those very first principles as well.

So to emphasize this, we want the recursive decision-making process to apply to everything. Even the very nature of how the recursive process is formulated. All levels of economic and societal decision-making have a recursive democratic layer assigned to it, so to speak. And it sounds enormously complex to think that way, but it actually isn’t as complex, once something like this is established.

Remember the CAD system from earlier? Someone says, well who designs the program to start? Well the community does, obviously, who designs the components of that CAD system such as the related modules or the code: the community does. And people that are interested in those tasks will gravitate based on their skill set in an open source design context, keeping everything dynamically adapting.

Now does that mean that every single person is going to have interest to engage every single element of minutia for everything? No, it’s about the people that are actually interested in looking at it, interested in working in those areas. Big decisions can have traditional democratic direct democracy and so forth. But the economic democracy, which is the ground of all of this, has people interacting at every single level of development.

And it isn’t that every single person gets an email to decide at every single thing, those interested in those areas of development such as as creating the modules with code for the universal design system, they will move in a democratic process to work together an open source setting in that pocket. And if anyone else has the skills and wants to come into that world, they do it as well. I hope that makes sense.

This is how you create a dynamic, adapting, evolving, variety absorbing system in a truly democratic way.

At the beginning of this program, I briefly mentioned this white paper that I’m struggling to finish. Does that mean that this paper is set in stone as some universal document by Peter Joseph? And all the projects will be based on this, all the integral structure will be based on it and so forth? No, it’s just a series of analysis and ideas and inferences that I think are well thought out, but I know it will change. I know have layers of complexity within them that have to be assigned upon in a democratic way.

So when this document is produced, it will be a live document that allows input, allows conversation about it, which is literally the kernel seed of the kind of democratic process I’m describing, coming right down to that very document, which is kind of a spearheading document to get this project off the ground.

Therefore, with shared goals, democratic development can occur through an entire social system on every scale possible, which is exactly how you satisfy the requisite variety of an extremely large number of people.

So overall, as I wrap this podcast up, Integral is going to attempt to incorporate the core principles of cybernetics when it comes to meeting requisite variety through a recursive democratic structure, which is far more about design processes than it is fleeting cultural opinions. By which everything is literally open for contribution. And individuals within the system can decide what level of contribution works for them based on their knowledge and education and skills.

Not everyone’s going to be interested in the minutia of coding a module for a program once again. Not everyone is going to want to oversee an additive manufacturing system or work with the technical materials of a library system, like a tool library or whatever. And so it’s through this development of natural specialization and democratic participation. that the structure begins to form with everything open and transparent, not a technocracy, certainly not authoritarian and not mob rule.

And I will conclude by saying that when it comes to other democratic conflicts in society, particularly those rooted in cultural identity noise or culture war stuff: people blaming mass shootings on this or that or thinking any woman or a black person that’s given a job is a result of diversity, Equity, Inclusion, DEI, Benefit, or the Idiot President wanting to revert the Pentagon back to being called the Department of War, we have to remember that so much of the absurdity we see in public debate is sprung from the deepest inefficiencies in our understandings and our processes, particularly the process of democracy as we know it.

I think a lot of those problems will subside. The beauty of Integral as a transition project as well is that people will gradually get into certain ideas as they join it or they learn about it. But given the complexity of plurality, when you think about trying to get the public to agree to some new type of way of living, new social system, you’re going to get hostility, right? You’re going to get people that are going to fight back against the system, people that are in it that don’t like it.

Well, that’s not going to happen with the development of Integral because only people that believe in it will join it. It’s not a political condition of imposition. If you don’t like these ideas, continue doing what you’re doing. But as things gain strength, as the influence rises and people learn about it, I think people will gravitate towards it, enabling that intellectual evolution. And you’ll have far less conflict within it in general by this method, though once it gets to a big enough point, you will see ruthless attacks against such a counterculture system by the establishment and agents of it as it grows just large enough to be an influence.

Anyway, I’ll leave it at that. Sorry for all the tangents. I hope this was relatively clear. I’m going to try and be a little more concise in future programs. My name is Peter Joseph. This program is brought to you by my Patreon, which I hope people will help with. Please share this material if you can. Subscribe if you appreciate it as well. And I will be back very soon with more stuff as I continue to plow away with the other projects that are weighing me down. But everything is coming together. So I’m excited for when the film comes out and the website is up and so forth. Alright everybody take care out there. Talk to you soon.