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Episode Summary:
In Revolution Now! Episode 22 (May 2, 2021), Peter Joseph reflects on life, death, and systems thinking. Drawing from Alan Watts’ view of death as a natural part of life’s cycle, Joseph emphasizes the need to recognize interdependence in both nature and society. He critiques modern society’s hyperindividualism, arguing that it blinds us to the larger systems at play, leading to unsustainable outcomes like poverty, inequality, and ecological decline.

Joseph advocates for a system-level philosophy where ethics and behavior align with scientific and natural laws. He critiques the current economic system, noting that its negative outcomes are not accidents but inherent features of the structure. He also challenges transhumanist notions of living forever, emphasizing the importance of death in cultural and biological evolution.

In terms of activism, Joseph encourages out-system activism, focusing on leveraging key points within the system to foster systemic change. He argues that traditional activism is often limited by working within the existing structure. Lastly, he highlights the role of education in fostering a sustainable society, where a truly educated population would naturally respect and align with the natural world.

Transcript:
Alan Watts:

Now, I’m not preaching. I’m not saying you ought to be willing to die, and that you should muscle up your courage and somehow put on a good front when the terrible thing comes. That’s not the idea at all. The point is that you can only die well if you understand the system of waves, that your disappearance as the form in which you think you are you, your disappearance as this particular organism, that you are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light interval called life. These are just two sides of you, because you is the total wave. Nobody ever saw waves which just had crests. So you can’t have half a human being, who is born but doesn’t die. But the propagation of vibrations, and life is vibration, it simply goes on and on, but it’s cycles are long cycles and short cycles.

You go to a hospital and you’re at the end. You’ve got terminal cancer, and all your friends come around and they wear false smiles and they say, “Cheer up, you’ll be all right. In a few days from now, you’ll be back home and we’ll go out for a picnic again.” The doctors, he’s not allowed to help you die. So he’s going to keep you indefinitely on the end of tubes and all kinds of things. So the moment comes when this thing called death has to be taken completely, but the main thing is the attitude, that death is as positive as birth and should be a matter for rejoicing, because death is the symbol of the liberation. In other words, that man dies happy if there is no one to die. In other words, if the ego has disappeared before death caught up with it.

Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now!, episode 22, May 2nd, 2021. Please excuse the multi-day delay in this upload. In context with the opening Alan Watts segment on life and death, which I’ll touch upon more so in a moment, things have been a little bit complicated recently as I worked through something we all deal with in our lives, and that is familial loss or the death of anyone we are close to. But after taking a little bit of time away, I find that returning to focus on the subjects common to this podcast actually proves to have a kind of solace, a kind of comfort, at least a therapeutic distraction, for to talk about nature through the lens of system science, systems theory, systems change, systems thinking, realizing there are no islands in reality on any level and everything is an interdependent network. A kind of spirituality, if you will, is to be discovered in such a perspective.

There is no doubt great ontological relevance to a system’s worldview, as it’s the only way of comprehending nature with any sense of totality. It’s also about what is actually happening, not what we think should happen or shouldn’t happen. It’s about relationships. The etymology of the term spiritual, generally links to that which concerns the spirit, as vague as that is, whatever spirit is supposed to be defined as. But both in the theistic and secular sense, the term invariably implies connection or relationship of some kind. It doesn’t have to be a metaphysical notion, in other words. To me, understanding the structures and dynamics of life, this soup of complex adaptive systems, systems inside systems inside systems, and a dancing panarchy of deeply synergetic influences is ultimately a pursuit of self-discovery, and hence a sense of place or purpose in life. Therefore, seeking an understanding of nature in this way can only be a spiritual pursuit in the most basic sense.

As Albert Einstein once stated, “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.” He added, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” So understanding the nature of life’s dynamic interrelationships and evolutionary unfolding is understanding life itself. The more we refine that understanding, ideally the more in line we become with nature and its sustainable processes.

In other words, the more we can properly adapt to changing conditions and emerging problems. Something we are clearly failing miserably at right now as a species, evidenced by the accelerating decline of our habitat, along with the vast growth of debilitating socioeconomic inequality, breaking down global public health and social integrity inch by inch, day by day, action by action, year after year, all because we don’t understand the systemic nature of our personal actions, our resulting institutions, and the incentives of our social system properly, as such behaviors and organizations violently clash with the natural laws of earthly existence. We don’t understand the collective system level outcomes, in other words. Now, we certainly don’t have a shared frame of reference by which to draw conclusions about what to do. It’s a disaster of consciousness, if you will, collectively. Hence, we seriously need a new philosophy of existence, if I could be so bold.

Western philosophy, of course, has had its merits. The enlightenment of the 18th century helps set course for more objective, generally less superstitious worldviews, at least in terms of religious thought, but it also helped perpetuate a reductionist worldview, breaking things into parts, not focusing on relationships, moving towards a hyperindividualism. As has been talked about at length in this podcast before, our schools, intellectual institutions and mental schemas organize by looking at parts in a linear fashion, not non-linear holistic relationships. We break things down to understand them and rarely place them into contexts that observe larger order relationships. It’s a kind of cognitive blind spot, for lack of a better expression, a tendency to reject holism by force of intuition compounded by a system of academic education that divides the humanities and sciences into parts as the basis of analysis and understanding, compounded even more by an economic system of vocational specialization and a hyperindividuated incentive structure.

Same could be said for our language, in fact, as I talked about before in the last podcast, referencing David Bowen, his idea that we could create a language based on verbs as the Blackfoot Indians had achieved. Again, we see the tree defined by its parts, superficially, the branches, the roots, the leaves. However, the sun, the atmosphere, the rain, and the entire ecosystem surrounding it, it was just as much a part of that tree as the more obvious branches and leaves. Even more and most critically, by extension of all of these synergies that keep creating feedback loops, we have fostered and reinforced a highly individualized sense of identity, which has led to our overly specialized fragmented, separatist, groupistic, egoist culture, where people seem to not only misunderstand the responsibilities they have to others in the ecosystem, but they willfully seem to avoid such truths as inconvenient or economically impractical.

Speaking of which, and by the way, this podcast today is going to be a little less organized than usual, so bear with me if it sounds a little stream of consciousness, but speaking of which, some may have read studies in regard to cultural differences between so-called collectivist societies and so-called individualist societies. Those terms are, of course, polarizing and not equivocal in gravity, mind you. In fact, I would generally try to bypass such duality-oriented terms entirely, but these are dominant terms within the academic literature, sociological literature, cross-cultural analysis literature, for those that want to look this kind of thing up. Note, there’s no society on earth that is not individualistic overall right now by force of economic incentives and the competitive scarcity based social order. But there are subtle differences found between societies that have historically embraced more of a community sensibility versus those that have deviated from it, and that is the spectrum to recognize in this, again, cross-cultural study.

Individualism generally favors independence, while so-called collectivism generally favors interdependence. The United States is, of course, probably the most individualistic culture on earth. In contrast, Japan or East Asian cultures tend to have much stronger social cohesion in this kind of collectivist sense. There is a deeper sense of social responsibility, in other words. In fact, I’m going to change that term right now. We’re going to use the term prosocial societies, because collectivism is something you hear from some Ayn Rand book about people being thrown in Gulags and beyond. What we’re talking about are prosocial sensibilities. More emphasis exists on the consideration of others’ perspectives and needs and feelings and so on.

Some may be familiar with something called theory of mind. Around the age of five kids begin to realize that other people actually have their own thoughts, their own understandings, motivations, and perspectives. This evolutionary advent allows us to relate to others in a way to put ourselves in their position, recognizing differences or alignments. I can’t really prove this, or I haven’t investigated this attribute enough, but I strongly believe that psychopathic and sociopathic personalities are people that fail on some level to develop this tendency properly. You can’t have empathy without an attuned theory of mind. Collectivists or more prosocial cultures tend to embrace this mental attunement more so than more individualist societies. Anyway, I don’t wish to belabor this, but more prosocial cultures do show different language patterns, different motivations, and embrace a stronger sense of general responsibility to others, and by extension, the habitat.

One interesting study took people from these two cultures and had them draw what’s called a sociogram. A sociogram is a visual representation of the relations between a particular group. So it’s your social network, if you will. You were to draw out how this network exists with different levels of emphasis. Those from more individualistic society has tended to place themselves, of course, at the very center of the visual chart with big emphasis, while those from more prosocial societies do not place themselves in any outstanding way or emphasis, seeing themselves as part of a whole. It’s all very interesting to look into. I definitely recommend Roberts Sapolsky’s book, Behave, and other works by him as he was the first introduced this idea to me in his writings. Obviously, it’s all a balance. We are individuals, and yet we are part of society and nature. Our harmony within that balance is what will define sustainability on a cultural level.

Sadly, as time has moved forward, global society has moved away from more prosocial cultural values and increasingly so. It’s only going to get more selfish out there based on current trends and the collapse of the ecosystem. The general sickness, the social psychology born from our ever pervasive competitive selfish economic mode continues to dwindle our empathic prosocial sensibilities, reducing our ability to correct deeply problematic patterns, such, again, as ecological decline and social instability. So I hope that makes sense. What I’m getting at in my roundabout way is that we have a serious philosophical problem with our now highly dominant hyperindividuated and competitive society, reducing our ability to adapt properly. A cultural crisis. If I had to come up with a term for a new beliefs being formed from a proper source, I would call it system level philosophy.

System level philosophy would have to do with understandings of science and nature that serve as a guide in deciding upon proper worldviews, belief systems and behavior. Not a new idea, of course. Some proponents of science, such as Sam Harris, and many, many others have written about the idea regarding how we navigate ethics, morality, and behavior in general, coming from a natural law scientific perspective. As an aside, there’s the age old myths still propagate it today that without the forest of some kind of God-fearing religion, where you have to be paralyzed by fear in order to do the right thing; if we didn’t have traditional religion and the moral codes therein, everybody would just be cannibals with no moral sense, raping everything that moves and so on, which is a very strange delusion when you think about it empirically, because the very idea ethical behavior has ever come from established religion is simply unfounded.

Anyway, the Axial Age religions have deeply perverted human sensibilities. It reminds me of the clip of George Carlin or audio clip of George Carlin in Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. He makes the point that established religions, whether they know it or not, exist to create false separation. Separation from the oneness as he puts it. Religions exploit the fact that people are striving for connection, so they hijack it and they manipulate it. We are all stardust, as Carl Sagan would say, with this intuition that everything is wholly interconnected and systemically one. It’s also interesting in terms of broad cultural evolution when it comes to religion. The Axial Age religions that have been dominant for the past few thousand years have done nothing but foster human conceit, attachment, confusion, perpetuating a completely artificial spirituality and sense of relationship, one that is completely separated from the natural world once again. The moral and ethical value systems that have been born from such religions are almost entirely based around the individual.

The point I wish to emphasize here is it wasn’t always that way. Indigenous peoples, ones that were able to not fall entirely victim to the geographical determinism and eventually this horrible economy of conflict and materialism born from the neolithic revolution, as I’ve talked about numerous times in this podcast, tend to express great stewardship for the habitat and nature itself. For instance, animals are not just harvested and exploited for meat with total disregard as we see today. In many native cultures, the animal sacrifice for food was a very sacred ritual. They used all parts of the animal. There was a process of respect that we have lost today in all of our earthly exploits. Western society likes to look at these indigenous cultures as if they were primitive. Well, who is really primitive here?: the society that exploits with virtually no regard for the outcomes, priding itself on its ability to abuse the ecosystem for short-term gain, or the society that takes great care in its action to preserve integrity in its actions and foster sustainability in a spiritual context.

More broadly, if you think about the long history of religious evolution, comparative religion, as crudely introduced in my first film, Zeitgeist, you can see the deviation as well. Everything comes from something. So paganism expressed itself with symbols oriented around sex and reproduction, solar worship, astrotheology, as it’s called, animal worship, of course: nature worship. This makes perfect sense, right? Navigating by the stars, paying attention to seasons for crops, respecting the mechanisms of procreation, the mystery of it all, and hence spiritual conception was built around that in ritualistic practice to remind ourselves in whatever crude way. But then something happened and systems of power and control, ultimately born from the neolithic revolution once again, and all of that paganism, the nature worship began to morph into these personified, anthropomorphized religions based around leaders and figures and hierarchies and deities. We created these God entities in our own image and have been fighting about who was right ever since.

In a term, we have become increasingly denatured. As I have argued many times, this pattern of separation seems to only be getting worse on many levels. We are losing our most basic intuition and true common sense of our relationship to the world around us. There’s nothing metaphysical about this. In Africa, women will carry their babies really close to them at all times. And then the Western world comes along and says, “You know what, maybe we should just leave the babies crying in the crib.” There’s a German school that taught back in the mid-20th century that thought this way. You don’t want to spoil your child. You just let him cry and cry and cry. Gabor Maté talks about this. By all recognized study today, after witnessing the consequences of this kind of thing, what happens to the body of children that are not touched, all of those kinds of sociality developments, the development of trust, the feeling of love.

In fact, even going back to a Harlow’s monkeys and all of those studies, you do not do that to children. You don’t just leave them there to cry because it starts to imprint, so to speak, a sense that the world around them does not care. It may seem like a stretch, but there are a lot of studies to support that. The people in Africa, they have a child. The woman, the mother holds that child close at all times. They have a natured intuition that that’s the proper way to behave with the child. We are indeed animals and we possess instincts and all the complexity of the nature, nurture, synergy, the environments that affect our genes, our epigenetics, and we build and create behaviors around all of that as a natural output. It appears to me, we’ve fostered such a terrible reinforcing feedback loop from so many different directions that we’re losing our most natural sense of behavioral biology, the things we’re supposed to understand intuitively.

So anyway, this is all generally speculative, but I think it’s good food for thought. The economic system we live in is consistently reinforcing that very detachment from reality as well, combined with the ongoing sickness of theistic belief. Returning to one of the most brilliant organic intellectuals, George Carlin, he wrote in one of his books and I’m paraphrasing, “Imagine what the world would be like if the market traders and the priests did not ruin everything.” And so, the question becomes, as the purpose of this podcast, what is it going to take to get humanity back in line on all of these levels? The answer is structuralism. The answer is system redesign. The structure we live in has its own agenda, and we are agents and actors within that system. We think we can override it. We think we can do something against the grain, but it doesn’t play out that way empirically so because of the system level complexity. So this is all about systems. The bottom line of all of this from a spirituality standpoint, as I’ve emphasized, is that our recognition of nature in this way will lead to a new philosophy.

So, let’s shift gears here a bit and return to the conversation of systems more exactly. I’d like to begin returning to that quote I had by Stafford Beer, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” Again, this highlights our bias when it comes to how we view outcomes and consequences in reality. And then, also, returning back to our opening with Alan Watts and our own personal trials when it comes to life and death, it highlights the yin and yang of life cycles itself. As a system, we tend to celebrate birth and we tend to condemn death. We see death as something to avoid, and of course, we naturally are careful with our lives to bypass such danger, harm and fatality, but no matter how careful we are, the end is always approaching. While each of us knows this, we most certainly don’t accept it and we most certainly don’t celebrate it. Even more, we invent delusions.

For example, the age old fountain of youth utopian idea of living forever, currently promoted actively by people like Ray Kurzweil and other eccentrics around the singularity university stuff and all of that, posits such a superstitious denial or arrogant denial, if you will. If I remember correctly, Kurzweil actually thinks people will start living forever around 2029, which is, of course, preposterous. Yes, none of us want to die or see others die, and yet the idea we could create technological conditions to actually live forever appears to not only be just as irrational as the theistic conception of an afterlife, but, and here’s my point, from a system science perspective, one could well argue that the very idea of any organism living forever is actually an assault upon nature itself. We are not islands. Biological evolution is a system with properties, deeply synergized.

From a larger order of system level perspective and ecosystem and biological perspective, the very concept of living forever is wholly unnatural by all measures. So as Alan Watts poetically stated, “The darkness of death is just as important as the brightness of life when it comes to nature.” Hence, that is respecting the same idea noted before, the purpose of a system is what it does. We don’t like death, but this is what the system shows us, the biological systems of nature cycle in this way, universally. So just like the mythology of capitalism, how proponents are quick to claim total success of the market economy by talking about its wealth creation capacity, production efficiency, innovation, and so on, they never look at the negative outcomes in the same way, as I talked about last episode. They reject the idea that poverty pollution, oppression, and other outputs are just as much a part of the market system as things they see as good.

Hence, our biological systems, the cycle of life to death in a kind of perpetual matter energy phase transition, if you will, has to be viewed the same way and respected on many levels. The sadness of death being what it is, few of us would actually celebrate the loss of a loved one. It’s an idealism and the way that Alan Watts puts it, because we don’t want to feel the pain that’s associated with it in our selfishness, right? We want people to remain alive in our interests so we can enjoy the mind, love, support, experiences that person may offer us. It’s certainly natural in that emotional sensibility. But having recently assisted in an end-of-life death, a purposeful death of a very sick loved one, someone I most certainly wished would remain alive in my own selfish interests, I better understand now that the march toward death needs the same respect as the appreciation of birth and growth.

I have to state this again, excuse my kind of stream of consciousness here, but in this context, the freedom for one to actually take over their life and say, “Now, is the time. It’s time for me to end my life,” and have people that care help in that process should be a completely accepted and welcomed rite of passage. We are still stuck in an immaturity fighting nature once again. Helping someone end their life who is suffering greatly should have no moral outcry from religious cults or other forms of philosophical denialism, as far as I’m concerned. It’s natural.

One more thing I have in my notes here that I wanted to point out, because I think it’s actually very interesting. Speaking of Ray Kurzweil, I watched a movie years ago called Plug and Pray, featuring the father of artificial intelligence, former MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, a very unique character who is now deceased, and the doc profiles his work, and ultimately his rejection of the utopian vision of artificial intelligence, and particularly the idea of merging humans with technology, transhumanism as it’s called, in order to live forever. Of course, the doc features Ray Kurzweil himself in opposition. At the end of the film, after Weizenbaum dies, his daughter reads a letter from him, where he talks about how the pursuit of living forever can only be flawed.

I tried to hunt down the segment of the film to quote his comments directly, and I was absolutely unable to find a transcript or even a version of the film anymore anywhere online, which is very strange, actually. It’s a very nice film. But anyway, I’m going to paraphrase what he said at the end because I remember fairly vividly. Weizenbaum points out that if humans do not die, society can not progress. No matter what transhumanism idealizes, the human mind is not wired to live forever. The very idea we would try to override that is an assault to cultural evolution. When people die, so do their outdated worldviews, so do they’re irrational biases, so do their racist tendencies, so do their strange loyalties that come from arcane and archaic dispositions, inevitably. That point is very interesting to think about from a systems science perspective on the cultural level once again.

Now, all of that touched upon, for the rest of the podcast, I’m going to return to the more focused subject started in the prior episode, dealing with systems change. As some may remember, I had to cancel a talk because of my familial situation, which I plan to postpone probably until June now. Honestly, I keep thinking of new things to add to this talk, so it’s probably a good thing I’m postponing it. I will let everybody know, and perhaps I can actually make this more of a live event to a degree given things in Los Angeles are opening up a little bit regarding COVID. But in the prior episode, we concluded with an outline of how to broadly think about systems change. We have to model the economy as it is to actually understand what market capitalism is doing and why as a structure.

Remember, it’s not just an economic system of trade. It’s also a consequential cultural system, as I’ve touched upon throughout podcast. Very often, system modelers of capitalism tend to fail to factor in the nature of power in the structure, which is just as critical to understand as the dynamics of trading and how inequality is generated and so on. Second, we have to infer the model of the new economy, one that’s actually sustainable, one that improves public health fundamentally with little to no socioeconomic inequality by design, one that is, of course, steady state, not based on patterns of growth and so on. Finally, the third attribute, we have to figure out how we’re going to move from this old system structure to the new paradigm, taking with us those attributes that are applicable to the new post-scarcity economic structure, while, of course, removing and overriding those attributes that serve no positive function.

This is the game, so to speak, in all of its grand complexity. In this game, we seek out leverage points. A leverage point is a place in a system where certain parts can be embraced and emphasized leading to larger order effects. Since complex adaptive systems are self-organizing, which they have to be, mind you, because they are so complex, we, as activists, have to find areas within the system to emphasize bringing those attributes to the surface, overriding the dominant system behaviors in time, creating new behaviors. This is what I’ve termed in the past as out-system activism. Out-system activism is about focusing on areas of change that challenged the basic essence or nature of the system itself, because they do exist within the structure. Believe it or not, all of the attributes that define what a new sustainable system may be exist in the current system, but in a really reduced and highly dismissed way.

We are seeing dematerialization. We are seeing a ephemeralization, distributed manufacturing, distributed ledger technologies, and of course, those five basically leverage point transitions that I talk about in my book, the new human rights movement, access, automation, localization, digitized network feedback, and open source. In-system activism in contrast, of course, is everything we do now. We vote for politicians that are actually owned by corporations. We protest in the streets to draw awareness to a problem. All the while, very few people protesting have any idea what they actually want to do with that awareness. We propose legal ideas, such as environmental regulation and attempt to fight back the natural flow of the market economy, invariably failing to modify it, of course. The very idea of regulation or management means something is off when it comes to a system.

As Stafford Beer also repeatedly states, “A viable system needs no controls.” I often parallel this thought with Jacque Fresco’s statement to Larry King many years ago, where he said, “An educated population needs no control.” As an aside, it’s actually quite fascinating to think about this cultural context from a system science perspective as well regarding education. In China, with its social credit system and literal re-education prison camps that have come to light recently, education becomes propaganda. In fact, most education in all societies on some level tend to have an element of self-preservation through propaganda. Recently, I posted on social media a clip by Jane Elliott. She’s famous for a study she did in her classrooms, she’s a teacher, where she divided up children and had them think that blue-eyed people were smarter than brown eyed people. You can look it up. It’s called the blue eyes/brown eyes exercise. Whoever uploaded this segment of her interview titled it All White People are Racist. All White People are Racist, how provocative. “What? Racist? I’m not racist.”

Of course, we’re so polarized and conflicted right now with group identity. So many people would see that and instantly be upset, not understanding the nuance of it all. Systemic racism is not a conscious unfolding. By the way, I did write an entire medium article on the subject of systemic racism if anyone wants to read that as well. But going back to Jane Elliott, in her video, she simply describes the fact that in American teachings, it is the white male that is always the hero, historically. If you literally think about it, if you’re a product of American educational system, that is what you see. It’s subtle in the propagation, but it’s dominant in general. So if a viable system needs no control or management, and hence an educated population needs no control or management, we are left with a deep burden to figure out where our alignments rest. If people respected the basic ideas of sustainability, well, they wouldn’t pollute. But it’s not them that pollutes, it’s the structure that incentivizes them to do so, and hence the pathology on the system level.

Anyway, I hope this podcast made some sense to you folks. By the way, YouTube has decided to monetize randomly the Revolution Now! channel. I intervened and turned on monetization for the channel myself to try and override it, only putting one ad at the very, very end of the podcast. So there should be nothing at the beginning and nothing in the middle. If you folks see that, please leave a comment in the comment section. Of course, this program is available on Spotify and through other networks through the revolutionnow.live website. I’m Peter Joseph, and this program is brought to you by Patreon. I will speak to everybody very soon. Be safe out there. Thank you.