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Episode Summary:
In Revolution Now! Episode 16, Peter Joseph discusses the socio-political state in the U.S. on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, critiquing the extravagant security measures and high costs involved. He emphasizes the ongoing issues like the rise of right-wing extremism and socio-economic inequality, asserting that while Trump is out of office, the systemic problems that created him remain. He calls for focused political activism but highlights the limitations of traditional politics. Joseph also touches on the “Great Reset,” criticizing it as a superficial attempt to preserve capitalism, and ends by teasing a future discussion on post-scarcity potentials.

Transcript:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph. Welcome to Revolution Now, episode 16. January 20th, 2021. Today, I’m going to start off with a few questions and then talk about post-scarcity potentials.

But first, today is inauguration day here in the United States with an amount of outrageous security in Washington due to right-wing domestic threats unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Now, I know these ceremonies and rituals are important to people, but with 25,000 National Guard and millions spent on barricades and all of this fortification, at some point, it just all becomes rather wasteful for a ceremony, don’t you think? Recently, the general number I found over the past few inaugurations was about $200 million an event, which I think is just another classic waste of money that could be used to actually help people, such as the rampant and growing poverty around in Washington, D.C. This speaks to a general pattern by government that wastes extraordinary amounts of money on all sorts of things that really have no value, tangibly, to the public’s wellbeing. That list, of course, is endless.

So just put Biden in a courtroom, have him put his hand on the Bible and state his acceptance on live TV and get it over with. Not to mention once again, the right-wing agitation is palpable and the very existence of this public inauguration is quite provocative. Most likely nothing serious will occur, but then again, this country has a rapidly resurfacing right-wing extremism.

Now that said, a lot of people out there are drawing great relief knowing that Trump will no longer have any national power. It is not a time to be complacent. Nothing has actually improved in the broad view. We just have had four years of general regression with neither the public nor the political establishment actually learning anything, as far as I’m concerned. We are simply back to a square one. The past four years have advanced a deeper rejection of science, a deeper rejection of any attempts at earthly sustainability, an even deeper generation of socioeconomic inequality by force of the policies put forward by the administration and of course, corollary to that is the even deeper cultural division that really links back to racist values and apprehensions from the civil war period, sadly enough. And arguably, perhaps worst of all, Trump’s very existence has validated the prior mainstream establishment. You actually hear people now speaking positively of someone like George W. Bush who spearheaded an illegal invasion that caused the death of a million Iraqis and so on.

I’m sure there’s a psychological term for the phenomenon where, by the relativity of a circumstance, what was once a completely unacceptable condition becomes acceptable simply because conditions happen to get so much worse by comparison. And if there’s anything to learn from the past four years, aside from how poorly designed our government really is, it’s understanding how easily duped many, many people can become, many angry, vulnerable people by one man with a vocabulary of a ten-year-old who constantly repeats how great he is and how everything he’s done is great, brainwashing tens of millions of people in trusting him and him alone. An entity that literally took a planned ruse, something Trump admitted internally to his administration going into the 2016 election, and that was to deny any possible loss in the election by claiming voter fraud. He did exactly that in 2020, as he was always planning to do, and millions and millions of people believed him and suddenly you have a bunch of misled, ignorant people storming the Capitol building cartoonishly with, unfortunately, a handful of people dying as a result.

This is all very important sociological information. Again, Trump as an individual is irrelevant. The power one can yield through propaganda and manipulation feeding this sort of imperfect antihero perception to many… People identify with the imperfection of Trump, it’s a unique characteristic, and pulling people into this cult mindset. It’s really interesting and important to think about. It reveals just how vulnerable mass society actually is. As I stated in my film, InterReflections, we are social beings first and intellectual beings second.

Make no mistake, our society created Trump. He is a symptom. And the power system and the economic foundation that created him is alive and well. And there will be more like him coming, and the structure of business being dictatorial naturally breeds fascist tendencies. I would even go so far to say that fascism is effectively an extreme version of the capitalist power hierarchy. As a general rule, historically, societies that suffer great destabilization, along with confusion about why that destabilization is happening, usually invoking group versus group blame, will periodically manifest such fascistic personalities.

Now, as far as politics in general, as I’ve stated many times, I’ve very little faith in traditional political action. The common players are simply too compromised by the structure to institute any substantial change. And the few players that attempt to do so, even in the most minor deviation, are strategically shut down by the majority, as we saw with people like Bernie Sanders.

However, that doesn’t mean political involvement in the system has absolutely no value. You still try. Traditional political activity trying to affect the policies being put forward by the American government in particular, in this case, is something public lobby should attempt to do with sharp focus, with specific focus because you never really know. The failure, however, is not recognizing the improbable nature of the kinds of changes that society really needs in the political sphere, which is foundationally supported by economic gaming. In other words, when it comes to actual activism, political activism probably would constitute, say, 15% of what you should actually be doing. That’s the degree of efficacy, as far as I’m concerned, loosely speaking.

Today, the focus desperately needs to be getting some kind of regard for science back into the White House, focusing on the fact that every life support system is in decline, along with reducing caustic, socioeconomic inequality. Whatever policies that can be put forward in terms of deep wealth redistribution that’s required, coupled with deep ecological regulation, should be at the forefront of every major nonprofit NGO, public lobby, and constituency, and the general activist community overall.

But once again, we’re dealing with the neoliberal establishment, which has very firm limits of debate. Yes, we could have universal basic income. Yes, social safety nets could be expanded to the effect that no one has to be in poverty or homeless. Something that’s needed more than ever now, not only in America, but across the world due to the ravaging effects of COVID-19. But any lip service aside, none of that is going to come from our neoliberal establishment without a massive confrontation.

The most proactive thing I can think of in this context of traditional in-system activism, once again, is reinvigorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s demand for an economic bill of rights to end poverty and effectively, low socioeconomic status. The Poor People’s Campaign as it was called, and still is by those that took the movement’s name and promote it today. The only way it would happen is by bringing a critical mass, never before seen in Washington, literally presenting an economic bill of rights that has been completely clarified and exists as a document, telling the government it must adopt it. With millions of people blocking the entrance to every single government building, refusing to end the peaceful occupation until that bill of rights is approved and adopted directly into the United States Constitution, maybe some kind of improvement can happen through this sort of general political, activist protest mechanism. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

By the way, I say it has to go directly into the U.S. Constitution because any kind of superficial legislation or policy could easily be overturned in the next administration, assuming any of this was adopted in a prior administration. This is the way people need to be thinking if they ever expect their government to do anything for them, which is also why I continue to talk about ways of breaking out of the dependency of modern society’s institutions and structures primarily through applied de-marketization, getting off the grid in a sophisticated way. Subjects I’m working on, once again, for a spring lecture event that I will inform everyone about as we move forward in time. Ideally for late March.

All right, all of that said, let’s jump into a few questions. Number one, “Peter, what is your opinion on the great reset put forward by the World Economic Forum?”

So the great reset was put forward by Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, if I remember correctly. He started talking about this around the beginning of COVID-19 in early 2020. Here’s what it says on their actual website, “To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country from the United States to China must participate, and every industry from oil and gas, to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a great reset of capitalism.” Yes, the great reset of capitalism. Which makes no sense at all since capitalism is actually the fundamental problem, effecting sustainability and all other such issues that this great reset professes to address.

I suppose it’s good to see more conversation, especially when it comes to the environment, but the very fact that the limits of debate have been set and that this is really about preserving capitalism, even though they want to create some idealized version of it called stakeholder capitalism, all this simply reveals another well-meaning pro-establishment spasm in the end. No different than all the climate conferences and biodiversity conferences that accomplish nothing because everyone refuses to look at the system structure as the actual problem, the economic system. It’s actually quite comical if you think about it, “We want to change the world, but not capitalism.”

And of course this notion of stakeholder capitalism is one from a long line of nonsensical, qualifying adjectives that people amend before the word capitalism to try and pretend like some sub distinction would ever make a meaningful difference. You see all over the place, crony capitalism, responsible capitalism, vulture capitalism, the social entrepreneur. My favorite is conscious capitalism, as if it ever could be given the very nature and incentives of the structure, once again. It doesn’t matter who’s in the positions. It matters what the structural incentives are.

Just to be clear here, this stakeholder capitalism is defined as “a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. Among the key stakeholders are consumers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and local communities. Under this system, a company’s purpose is to create longterm value and not to maximize profits, and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.” I’m not even going to address the insurmountable idealism in that vague description other than to say, you can never take the core incentive out of the system if the system remains in any respect or form. It is nonsensical to say that somehow corporations are going to orient themselves respecting everybody in this kind of stakeholder environment and the ecosystem without maximization of profit and hence, exploitation. You can’t have capitalism without exploitation and profit and hence, exploitation. If those things are removed, then you’re in a completely different system by default.

So this great reset thing is just another spasm, a well-meaning joke, a ploy in fact to sort of pretend like we can make capitalism better when all empirical evidence shows that we can not.

Question two. “Hi, Peter. I think you have yet to talk about the problem of population and its current growth. You’re not taking into consideration the construction of new homes, new cities, and how urbanization is arguably one of the most destructive processes to our environment. A growing population needs more housing to accommodate for them, which thus demands more of the wildlife forests to be cut down to build urban cities for them to live. Very, very few studies have spoken of this phenomenon, and I wish you’d start talking about this too. Your idea of efficiency through post-scarcity can not account for physical space being used by homes which cannot be solved by efficiency, but only by there being a decrease in humans’ needs to be housed in the first place. One of the largest reasons for the loss of wildlife is due to urbanization.”

So first, the systemic requirements and downstream effects for any human being to exist is obviously complicated, which is why I always point out that efficiency allows for proportional increases and that we do not know the true carrying capacity of the Earth because efficiencies will change. In other words, a small island in its most basic state may have a little pond of potable water coupled with fruit trees and some animals. These resources could be easily quantified as being able to feed X amount of people on the island, the carrying capacity. They only have so much water that can regenerate over time and so much vegetation that naturally regenerates and so on. There’s a self-limiting ecosystem and obviously so.

However, if people learn and they start to apply science and technology to, say, convert the saltwater around them into potable water, suddenly there’s a possible abundance of water. If people learn agriculture and can start to take control of the environment, they can plant more things, support more people. They might learn methods to breed and domesticate animals in more efficient ways to produce milk, kinds of labor and so on. So an island that once could maybe take care of, say a hundred people, can now support a thousand people. So there’s that. And as I’ve talked about before, you couple that with Buckminster Fuller’s concept of ephemeralization, or approaching zero marginal costs, and you have another kind of efficiency that’s created where you can do more and more and more with less and less and less.

That aside and more specific to your question regarding the construction of new homes and how urbanization is deeply destructive in general, these related efficiencies change as well. If more renewable energy is used, suddenly the footprint becomes less when homes or cities are built. If more intelligent materials can be found or generated away from wood or polluting concrete, the more sustainable things become. So it’s an issue of design. The more networked and integrated and urbanized environment is, the more efficient it will also become, which is why holistic city design is critically important. So I agree that it’s something needs to be addressed. However, the problem doesn’t reside in population growth singularly. Obviously, if there were less people, there would be less stress on the environment, but that does not necessarily mean that that’s the route you go when faced with trials, as we are today.

As far as land space, it is still true that you could take the entire world and fit it into the state of Texas with every person having roughly a thousand square feet. A very crude old statistic, but the fact is we technically have an enormous amount of space on this planet, even though the capacity of that space will vary based on what can be done and can’t be done, which again comes down to technological efficiency. So I hope that answers your question.

I will say that I always encourage people, gently, to consider not having children. Not because we couldn’t possibly support them, but because the current system already has an excess. I mean, there’s already a billion people, or close to it, that are not getting their most basic nutrition met, not due to the nature of reality, but due to the nature of a completely inefficient global economy.

Question number three. “Hello, Peter. What do you say to people that argue sexual competition removes the ability for a truly egalitarian society?”

A very interesting question, indeed. I’ve heard this many times in the past, giving talks. I don’t know why it’s such a prevalent question. The argument basically, which is deeply presupposed, goes something like this, since men compete for women against other men, while women posture themselves in some attractive way as their own form of competition against other women, this dynamic throws a curve ball into any attempt at an egalitarian non-hierarchical society. Overall, the whole idea is born from early Darwinian notions of sexual selection, predominantly focusing on male behavior since males have held the dominant power institution in the socioeconomic hierarchy, historically, which we also see, of course, in many other primate species.

The first problem is that the idea that men engaging in this competition for women basically implies women really don’t have a choice. As if without some kind of competitive behavior of this nature, the woman would have no information as to who they wanted to be with.

Now, maybe I’m missing something in this argument and I could be off, please correct me if I am out there, but I don’t know anybody that engages “competition” for any partner. You certainly have the jealousy phenomenon and stuff like that. You certainly have men that trick out their homes and buy fancy cars and try to make themselves look successful to attract women, of course. And you have women that do elaborate things to their bodies, breast implants, and so on sometimes in the interest to attract men, I suspect. And I suppose you could call that a kind of competitive behavior as immature as it all is. But the true absurdity rests in the idea that this behavior somehow has a coercive influence, a gaming influence in the most competitive sense of the idea. That’s why I find it all fundamentally sexist and patriarchal because this stuff seems to be always framed as a male-initiated kind of environment.

What I think has happened is the primitive behavior of baboons and chimpanzees has been superimposed as an analog to say, “Well, this is how the males act in this hierarchy, obviously dominant over females and therefore, we should expect nothing less from human society,” which is just absurd. Everyone is different. Everyone has different characteristics they appreciate. And yes, we do have the cliche forms of the idealized woman or the idealized man, and they might be coveted on magazine covers, but who in their right mind actually goes out and seeks these people because of those superficial characteristics alone, fighting for them? And even if they did, there is still a mutual contract. You can’t just beat up a guy at a bar and take his girlfriend home without his girlfriend consenting to want to hang out with you. Such a gesture might work to impress a female chimpanzee or a baboon, given of course they’re fundamentally oppressed by the nature of those hierarchies anyway. But that does not fly with human society, at least I hope it doesn’t.

However, while such baggage may exist in some distant place in our evolutionary psychology, humans, once again, can think to a fair degree. We can consider our actions. We have judgements. The idea that a woman is so unconscious and driven by primal association that she will gravitate toward the mate who is perceived as the most powerful, or dominant, or successful is a pretty powerfully pervasive, sexist cliche, which could be found in stories and literature going back to antiquity.

In fact, the sexism is actually quite ubiquitous on many levels, even though many don’t recognize it. For example, a woman cheats on her partner and the partner, while to a degree is upset with the woman, is actually far more upset with the other man she cheated on him with. As if the other person and abstraction has any relevance whatsoever. The woman made a decision to cheat and hence that decision is hers and hers alone, right? It’s really fascinating because I’ve met so many men that react this way in my life, and the implication is fundamentally patriarchal. Basically, women are seen as helpless, vulnerable, easily manipulated into sleeping with other men by the force of those men and therefore, it’s always the other man’s fault if she cheated. The same absurdity applies to this idea of male competition for women as if that is the driving function for mating or partnering in contemporary human society, as if basically women are too stupid to consider any other qualities.

And of course, to a degree, the reverse is true as well. Look at how outrageously obsessed our society is with female beauty, what women are put through due to media and advertising. It’s been stunningly destructive the images that women are groomed into thinking they need to mirror if they are going to have value, not only in the eyes of men perhaps, but also in the eyes of society as a whole, jobs, everything else. The cosmetic industry rakes in billions of dollars off of female insecurity. And I’m not even going to go into all the double standards that effectively our patriarchal society has set forward as well, such as the fact that if a woman sleeps with a bunch of men, she would be called a slut, while a man that sleeps with a bunch of women is a conquering hero. He’s a stud.

Anyway, I don’t want to belabor all this because it’s a huge conversation. The point here is that this sort of Darwinian selection idea is too crudely theorized. It’s not really applicable to the human condition the same way it is to other primate species like chimps and baboons.

It also presupposes cliche gender roles, which of course do not hold up in the 21st century, that men are to be big, strong, fighting, providing creatures while women are to be docile, nonintellectual pretty creatures that just exist to mate and pump out children. In an egalitarian society, I believe gender relations would improve greatly because it would remove a lot of the stressors female culture has experienced for thousands of years, being effectively economically subservient to men. There’s no grounds to believe that the natural dance between the man and the woman would somehow destabilize an egalitarian society. And remember for 99.9% of human history, we did live in egalitarian, hunter-gatherer realities and, of course, people were clearly partnering and reproducing.

It’s also important to point out that social stratification takes on many infinite forms. The classic example is someone at the lowest in their hierarchy, in their job, perhaps as a janitor in some company could very well be the best chess player in his community, teaching children, greatly revered by the local community and hence, held in highest social status by comparison. Which is why targeted angling for attraction is really just a stupid idea. Life is too complex. Preferences are different. If you want to try and present yourself in a certain way to attract a mate, you’ve already failed because you can only be who you are. All right, that’s enough for questions. Let’s now talk about post-scarcity potentials.

Now to clarify once again, when I say post scarcity, I’m not referring to a magical condition where everybody can get whatever they want out of thin air like a Star Trek replicator. It is not a condition or a state of humanity. It is an economic disposition. It implies a different kind of economic structure that does not exploit scarcity for personal business gain, rather seeking to actually meet human needs by the generation of a sustainable abundance.

You’ll notice I said sustainable abundance, as opposed to just abundance. It’s been very frustrating over the years to watch people slap the label of utopia on any kind of conversation about earthly abundance. And it’s important people think about that in their language and make sure their language is qualifiably specific. Scarcity will always exist. It’s how we manage scarcity that is the important point. A post-scarcity society doesn’t exploit scarcity for profit or gain. It works to overcome it, utilizing industrial and economic efficiency. In other words, using science to solve the problem of relative scarcity through efficient management.

It’s also critical to point out that a post-scarcity society cannot have a shared value system based on acquisition, wealth, and property in the caustic and sick toxic degree we see today. We live inside one of the greatest value system disorders that has probably ever occurred in human civilization, religion aside. Our society suffers from a kind of addiction that has been created by generations of market behavior. So much effort has been spent on propertied material advancement, people seem to believe that that is what social progress is. You can’t make the comparison that a rich person with a 40-room mansion and four Ferraris is somehow more advanced or has progressed more in some way than a person living on a small farm that enjoys their means of labor and enjoys spending time with their family as a source of pleasure, as opposed to having vast material possessions, like our rich person with the 40-room mansion.

If you take the position that material advancement in society is evidence of social progress, then the whole thing neurotically flies into infinity because you’re basically saying that progress is perpetual development of material goods. It’s here where you find the hedonic treadmill and the addiction of keeping up with the Joneses, as media saturation constantly makes people feel insecure socially if they don’t own something. It never ends. It can’t end, which is why it’s not purposeful and why the whole thing is neurotic. If you want more, you’re always going to want more. That is just a train flying off a cliff in terms of culture.

Not to mention dominant psychological studies of human happiness always resolve down to positive social relationships, not wealth and ownership. Positive social relationships, developing relationships, that’s where human meaning and happiness rests. Aside from of course having interests and to be able to investigate and do things. And creative interests do not require a 40-room mansion.

And of course the impulsive reaction, as I’ve heard many times, is it, “Oh, must be human nature to be infinitely acquisitive,” as I think I’ve talked about before. This is such a ubiquitous claim. Traditional economic market theory really does try to support this idea. When the fact is when you compare cultural diversity over time, you see very different behaviors. Once again, it comes down to what the system is reinforcing. It comes down to our social nature, which does have an evolutionary or psychological place, but that social nature isn’t necessarily about acquisition. It’s about acceptance. It’s about inclusion. It’s about security by way of perceived social status. You don’t see lines going for blocks for the Apple store when they release some new gimmicky item because people feel the utility of that item is very important and they have to have it. They do it because of the social inclusion inherent to the status related.

And most importantly here, all of this is a side effect, a social psychology coming from a system that is fundamentally based on economic growth and cyclical consumption. I’m going to state that again, this is a resulting social psychology that has been born and transferred from an economic system fundamentally based on economic growth and cyclical consumption. It makes perfect sense that in a social system that requires endless consumption to keep everybody employed and money moving around, that a value system disorder would be generated where people literally become agents of that very act. They become functional agents of that, emotionally.

By the way, I’m still trying to find a word for that kind of transference. Maybe one day somebody will come up with one.

Now, I just realized I’m at the 28-minute mark of what is supposed to be a 30-minute show, and given how tired I am and how much I want to say regarding post-scarcity potentials, which we’re going to talk specifically about water and food and energy, which are the three core elements that basically support our lives on this planet, I’m going to postpone that conversation and expand upon it more so on next week’s show.

This program is brought to you by Patreon. And I am working on the Culture in Decline season two project simultaneously along with this lecture in the spring, along with another documentary film, along with sketches for some other stuff as well, and I think I’m going to end up having to push this show out to being every two weeks in general because it’s a lot to do and I really want to focus on some of this other stuff. But I’m Peter Joseph, peterjoseph.info, and I’ll be back once again next week for sure to talk about post-scarcity potentials.

Just a reminder, if you have anybody that you think would be ideal to come on the show, I’m trying to find people that mainly deal with out-system ideas as opposed to in-system ideas. But obviously I welcome anyone that’s forward thinking, that is somewhat in line with this train of thought. Please go to the subreddit or send me a message through my social media or through the websites. All right, everybody be safe out there and I will talk to you folks soon.