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Episode Summary:
In this episode of Revolution Now!, Peter Joseph discusses the concept of social integrity, exploring how humanity’s interaction with nature and our social structures influences our survival. He critiques the rise of conspiracy culture, scientific illiteracy, and the divisive influence of figures like Donald Trump. Peter emphasizes the need for a scientific, apolitical approach to solving societal issues, rejecting traditional political and moral frameworks. He also touches on unsustainable economic practices and their ecological impacts, advocating for systemic changes to foster a sustainable, socially integrated future.

Transcript:
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. Depending on where you are in the world, this is Peter Joseph, and welcome to a Revolution Now, September 15th, 2020. This is the third episode. And what I’d like to do today is talk about the structure of social integrity. What is social integrity? How do we decide what has integrity and what does not? As I think most are aware, we are in a highly polarized and identity oriented crisis, not only in America, but the world when it comes to how people think about social change, if they want change at all. The apolitical position I have always taken is that we are dealing with the train of thought, a process of inference surrounding two different systems. The first is the system of nature, our habitat, and our need to abide by the rules of nature, needless to say. The natural laws of our habitat have to be respected and built into the institutions and the value systems of the human being.

Which is the second system, of course, what are we? How have we evolved? What do we need? How is our health determined by our environment or the nature of our social relations? How do we behave in certain structures versus other structures? These are the two interfacing systems, so to speak, nature and us, which of course we’re part of nature. But unlike all the other species on this planet, we have been blessed or cursed with a kind of consciousness that allows us to behave in ways that are fundamentally unnatural. Unnatural meaning they’re not sustainable. And there is no doubt, a subculture of people that have persisted with this kind of Malthusian, Darwinistic, animalistic perspective of the human condition that conclude that the kind of world we see is the only kind we’re capable of.

And if that’s true, it is safe to say at this time, looking at all trajectories for humanity, that we are just going to die off. If the argument is that we are just this way, then this way is going to lead to our own demise, at our own hand, as should be absolutely apparent to everyone right now, looking at the rise of authoritarianism in the world, the complete ecological collapse in the world and the outrageous socioeconomic inequality, which fuels all sorts of group versus group antagonism. I would also add that in complete contrast to the fact that we have this incredible educational resource on the internet. Well, what is the internet. People are more fractured and confused than ever as far as I’m concerned. You have this rogue belligerent conspiracy culture, and they’ve created bubbles in social media. And they only really believe what their bias will confirm. We are seeing staggering levels of scientific illiteracy and the demagoguery of people being lured to leadership, promoting these very deficiencies in perception and understanding, hence the Trump Administration, hence QAnon.

Literally the rise of this bubbled closed off community of people that are so ultimately confused that they are going to be electing people into Congress that believe in things like QAnon and other just fantastically belligerent baseless stuff. It’s like a post truth era out there. Critical thought means you rationally question, what you see around you. Critical thought is not the blanket rejection of phenomenon you see around you because you hold some kind of bias that everything that happens has to be orchestrated or rigged. This is what sociopathic minds like Alex Jones have done to a very large swath of humanity. There is no question that there is a conspiratorial unfolding throughout history because of the competitive nature of our society. And it does get dark and it is perverse and it has existed. And that’s part of the problem of the cult of anti-conspiracy, this sort of pseudo skeptic community that blanketly rejects anything that just sounds like it would be too far fetched to be real.

That is the other extreme, which really is just a kind of pseudo skeptic propaganda to associate certain things to other things. And then to blanketly dismiss everything as if it’s all equal. For example, if years ago, people talked about the surveillance society, something George Orwell talked about a great deal prophetically, and you were to speak about the fact that there was loose evidence to show, not to mention legal loopholes, to allow there to be total mass surveillance of the American or global population to an effect. And you were to go through this kind of seemingly paranoid assumption, people would dismiss you and say you were crazy. You’re a conspiracy theorist. Well, what happened when Edward Snowden came out and proved the exact thing. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to Edward Snowden as a conspiracy theorist.

Anyway, enough of that tangent, you can expect a Medium article on the subject of conspiracy culture soon as I think it’s a very important thing to address. It is a sickness in modern society. Speaking of that, a few program notes. As promised, there is a Medium article published now that sources the first two podcast episodes, and more with respect to systemic racism in the USA. You can find the article by going to the podcast site revolutionnow.live and linking through. And it’s worth noting that this podcast, the Medium articles, my intend to write a new book, upcoming second season of Culture in Decline and a number of other things, things I haven’t even mentioned. In fact, as I had a lot of activist ideas that are sitting on the sidelines, I don’t quite want to announce yet due to the complexity of them. But all of this is being supported through my Patreon account. Something I avoided for over a decade. I really have never been comfortable with any of this, but this is what the times demand. The release of InterReflections comes October 6th.

Speaking of which it had really destroyed me financially and physically to a degree as this project took years. This is a labor of love film. A lot of people are not going to like this movie. But I think it’s very strong in many ways, even if it’s experimental. And I think an audience will sort of be built after the fact. This film has to create its audience. So October 6th for InterReflections, please keep that in mind. You can also see the new trailer that was just posted a few days ago. Now to conclude this introduction, I have to say something about the upcoming U.S. Election, which has strong ramifications, not only for the United States, but also the world.

Now, those familiar with my history might be surprised at this because I have never been a advocate of electoral democracy in the structure that we have today. Why? Because the two parties that dominate U.S. politics, the Republicans, the Democrats really are one. They are a business party. And the limits of debate when it comes to economic adjustment are firmly locked. These parties are not going to allow for any kind of structural shift. Both parties completely accept the business acumen inherent to their political existence. Being paid off by lobbyists. It is normality for there to be a revolving door between industry and politics. And by the way, that’s the only way it can be in this kind of society. My mantra has continually been, there was no social change without economic change.

And while the Democrats are the soft right wing at this point, and yes, you have people within that are clamoring about the need to stop pollution and climate destabilization and to get off fossil fuels and to do all of these fundamentally progressive things, what you’re going to find generally is that it’s just all talk. And the very few people within the party that are in power that actually try to do these kinds of things like Bernie Sanders or AOC and beyond, they will be strategically stifled by the true source of power. And that is the business group of owners that basically fund and run the government from behind the scenes. Nothing profound here, this is all out in the open. If people will simply look closely at what this institution is. Now, all of that said, sympathetic to the people that hate this two party system so much, and the Neoliberal establishment, the 2020 election is not about that, when it comes to the presidency.

This is about dealing with an extremely unstable and unpredictable outlier that poses far too much potential harm personally, as an individual mind, then the collective ill will or ignorance or bias of the Republican and Democratic establishment. Donald J. Trump needs to be understood for what he is, which is very simple. He is a sociopath that has been groomed from the earliest stages of his life to be a capitalist hawk, to be a con artist, because as much as many don’t like to hear this, that is what a good business person is. A con artist by nature. Their goal is to persuade you, hence the entire industry of marketing and advertising and the clear negative sociological ramifications that institution has on the whole. So here you have the evolution of a super sick human being born from this culture. And through all sorts of chaotic mechanisms, he has made it to the highest position of governmental power. And if he stays, it is going to be catastrophic because of what he has set up around him. The cultural division in America will get far worse.

The ecological decline will get substantially worse because absolutely no laws are being respected on the books as far as environmental protections under his Administration. There will be nothing to address inequality. The social support programs will continue to be eroded, including social security. And you’re going to see a fundamental dismantling, not of the Obama Administration, but of the FDR Administration, those critical social safeguard policies and programs that work to fight against the inherent destruction coming from the capitalist economy. All of this is to say that this is not the time for progressive politics. This is about eliminating a cancer that is growing and spreading. The cause of the cancer is still there mind you, but this tumor known as Donald J. Trump is so huge and so toxic it has to be cut out and then we can continue from there.

Now, all of that said, let’s now talk about this train of thought, this manner of thinking that arrives at the framework of a new society, based on what we understand about public health science and environmental science. Those two systems I spoke of earlier. And the first thing I would like to say, which it’s sad that I have to say it at all is that this has nothing to do with political identity, with existing historical forms or anything else you can come up with, historical or contrived to try and box in this way of thinking. Science doesn’t have a box. Science continues to evolve and adapt, it changes, new information comes in. It’s a living organism. And yet most people are just locked into a dogmatic kind of categorization where they just throw ideas they hear into some preordained box in their mind, and then they judge the box. That is the opposite of critical thought, needless to say.

So the classic example, as we all know, someone presents ideas that are not capitalistic or in support of free market dynamics, the brain of most people says, well, the only thing I know otherwise is socialism or communism. So the ideas are thrown right into there, regardless of the fact, whether they’ve any association at all, but that’s all people know. The polarized association. And then what do they do? They go back into history and they think about all the self-proclaimed socialist and communist institutions that they know of. And then they take all the negative features of those. And they superimpose that as well. Therefore, making a decision about something without actually even analyzing what was being said. All you have to do is engage in a general debate on socioeconomic issues on any social media platform and you will see this type of thinking and presentation, ubiquitously.

Intellectual integrity stands on its own, and it really doesn’t matter what your comfort zone is. It doesn’t matter what mine is. If we share the collective goal to be sustainable as a species, meaning your kids or grandkids or your friends’ kids don’t grow up to be on fire as the world continues its decay or fighting in wars because the nations can no longer get along, due to scarcity that’s been manifest through extremely poor economic management. If you want to see us persevere, there are certain loyalties you have to have in terms of respecting certain dynamics. You have to respect the ecology and what’s required to maintain that ecology needless to say. In this, the conclusions arrived at through an analysis of what will best improve public health and create social stability and ecological stability, it doesn’t matter what you think or what you feel.

It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks and feels. Your emotional inhibitions, the lifestyle that you think you want, the lifestyle that you have, what you’re familiar with, you can throw all that out the window because it doesn’t matter. And if it does matter to you, then you’re just being dogmatic. And you’re literally inhibiting the survival of the species by your value system. People need to develop a vulnerability to understand that their way of life in their comfort zones have to be negotiable if we expect to pull out of all of this. People need to start recognizing the cultural sickness around them. For example, people living in mansions and driving Ferraris. These are antisocial and unacceptable patterns because it promotes a non minimalistic reality.

It promotes an excessiveness feeding once again that infinite growth delusion and that idea that your success is tied to having more and more. And all of that noise that has been talked about endlessly by a lot of different people. But let’s put it in the context of what is sustainable. What is a sustainable culture? That’s the question. What is it that has to exist in the minds of the majority to keep us on the right track, having integrity as a civilization, respecting our ecosystem and each other. And when it comes right down to it, folks, the things that make all of us happy are fundamentally social. Someone doesn’t paint a picture just for themselves, or write a song or write a book. Someone doesn’t get up in the morning and think about how they look just because they want to approve their look. As much as we like to deny the influence of the social reality upon us and bask in our individualism and volition and self-identity, the truth is we have to be socially incorporated.

Because everything we think and know and believe and feel comes from the social condition over the course of our life. I find that very few people give enough thought to understanding that who they think they are is a social consequence, literally. And this is in stark contrast to the current dominant incentives of our society, which emphasizes competition and winning and exploitation, angling, getting one over on somebody. Again, just look at the cancerous tumor in the White House and his personality. He is literally the embodiment of all of those incentives and he thinks it makes them happy and superior. And yet, if you look at social study on the determinants of happiness, the determinants of satisfaction in human society, even with all the pollution and culture, most people actually feel best when they help others. When they feel of use of service to others.

So it’s really about giving not taking. And this is going to be one of the greatest cultural revolutions. I have a Culture in Decline episode in my mind where it’s in a different world. And people are like a game show. And the whole point of the game show is to outdo somebody else in their altruism. To outdo somebody else in the effort to help another, which I think would be a pretty cute skit. Anyway, back on point, needless to say, there’s no political ideology that needs to be associated with sustainability principles and public health science. Furthermore, as strange as this may sound to some, there also is no need for a philosophical orientation that deals with morality, ethics and the debate of what is right and what is wrong in the traditional moral sense of those words. Because the issue at hand here is about what works and what doesn’t.

It may seem trivial to say that, but if you look back at prior movements that have challenged the capitalist order, you’ll find that their arguments generally revolve around an assumption of philosophical morality. Even Karl Marx, who is largely misunderstood and attributed to all sorts of things that have nothing to do with him. But if you take his actual work and you read it, you realize that the very root of it all is a moral argument. He saw the workers as more important than the owners and they were being abused by the class scenario between the workers and owners. That is a moral objection. It’s not a scientific objection. It’s not objection that says, “This isn’t going to work or be sustainable.” Now please don’t attack me because I just generalized the writings of Karl Marx to a degree. He also talked systemic functions and a lot of very detailed analysis that I think was very scientific, but at the same time, his moral appeal, his appeal to the public to get things going was just that. It was a moral appeal.

And while I certainly agree, people’s sense of feeling morally abused and morally outraged could be very inspiring, it’s still a distraction from the fact that this kind of economy, this kind of social system we have today is simply not sustainable. Then that’s the angle that I choose to focus on. The system doesn’t work and it will continue to dysfunction even more as time moves forward because of the looming market externalities that are closing the walls in, towards the center. And on that note, let’s actually step back a second. Let’s think about the transitions that have happened over the course of time with this kind of economy. The first transition, and probably the most critical one is how we went from the very low impact industry, hundreds of years ago, people making shoes and tables and furniture by hand and so on, up through the Industrial Revolution, the Hydrocarbon economy, the Automation capacity that we have now where this incredibly robust productive industry can produce pretty much anything in terms of production capacity.

In other words, you’ll obviously have resource limitations on this planet, but in terms of the means of production and how efficient it’s become, it’s far more advanced than we were many centuries prior, needless to say. And the point to make here is that we went from a kind of imposed limitation that forced us to be conservative and to be minimalistic and to not have heavy footprints on the environment, to the current circumstance. Where again, it’s the exact same model, it’s the exact same incentives. It’s the exact same basic structure. But because we can produce that much more, it basically inspires companies to want to do just that, produce more and sell more. And when you couple that with the lack of incentive, to pay people higher wages and to sell things cheaper, unless that move to sell things cheaper is to be competitive against another producer, which is not the same thing as selling things cheaper based on what it actually costs to produce it.

We are now living in contrast to before, a completely unsustainable trajectory with endless amounts of goods being put out into the market, coupled with the fact that demand has to be created now through marketing and advertising, to get people to keep up this level of consumption in order to preserve jobs. As I document extensively in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, the Industrial Revolution sounded the alarm, and you actually have CEO’s on the books, writing articles, talking about how people have to start consuming and they have to start throwing away their old things. And if you want to beat the communists and fulfill the American Dream, have high employment, everyone needs to be consuming buy throw away, buy throw away. This was the ethic that was molded during that period of time through many different avenues.

In other words, it wasn’t just a natural cultural adaptation, millions and millions of dollars through programs and advertising was spent to get a consumption ethic going in the United States, which again, spread around the world as globalization increased as did the American Empire post-World War II. If you’re completely unfamiliar with that and you think that our culture has just been natural in terms of this kind of behavior, I strongly suggest you familiarize yourself with that history. But I’ve deviated a little bit from my point here. So let me just reiterate this because I think it’s a little complicated. So you went from low impact industry to really high unsustainable industry to feed an economy based on infinite growth and keep jobs going. It could have gone another way in principle. Think about this for a second, instead of the need to consume more, what if they drop the workweek to say three days? What if they lower the number of hours someone needs to work?

They increased their wages and pay. They lowered the price of goods, creating a completely new environment where there was no pressure for this maximized cyclical consumption. And of course this isn’t a foreign notion, even Keynesian Economic Theory in his writings, talked about this of eventually reaching a level of efficiency in production where people don’t need to work as much because it’s so much easier to produce. So why didn’t it happen? Well, you only have to look to the incentives of the system and its foundation once again. It’s important to understand that at the basis of market economics is the orientation of scarcity. And it’s not the idea of efficient use of resources to limit the amount of natural scarcity we would see in the environment. Because that’s not the way it works. The economy looks at the earth as just an inventory. And its as sloppy as humanly possible, when it creates goods to produce. It’s governed by the laws of money and market incentives, not natural laws or technical efficiency, as I’ve written about before as well.

You have market efficiency, which is garbage and you have technical efficiency, which is science based. So in these incentives, in this economy, based on scarcity, the interest to lower wages, why would any company do that if it can maximize output with cheaper costs in production. That’s not incentivized whatsoever in the short term, lowering the price of goods. Well, if I can build something and then find a way to make it more efficient and I’m selling them for 10 bucks and I have no strong competition, why would I lower it anymore if I can still maintain my market share? Lowering it anymore has no advantage if you’re already competitively leading against some other producer. In other words, the fundamental game of markets inhibited this very notion. And we are now on the absolutely wrong trajectory. I mean, people work more than ever now. It’s very paradoxical. And ultimately you have to look at it as a kind of class war, whether intended or not, because it’s really about maximizing the profits of the owners of industrial society and exploiting the workers. And that is a fundamental dynamic undeniably.

So as long as that incentive is there, you’ll never see that kind of change. And of course, by extension, the ecological crisis is not going to resolve within this kind of structure either for obvious reasons. And all those people out there right now that are talking about Degrowth. Well, good, I’m glad this conversation is there. I’m glad that people realize the growth economy is completely and utterly unnatural. But if you think you’re going to degrow in this kind of gaming structure, if you think that some kind of policy is going to persevere, where industry is going to slow down and become more technically efficient and so on and so forth, you’re going to be living in a constant state of rude awakening. Because it’s not going to work within the bounds of the market economy.

Why? Because it has to be done by policy since the system is fundamentally antagonistic towards that kind of value ethic. It has to be done by policy imposed by state power. And guess what? State power is run by lobbyists and corporations. And even if you did successfully pass critical statutes that forced companies and corporations, energy companies, and so on to abide by certain rules, it would just be a matter of time before some other political constituent came into power to reverse that. Why? Because you’re going against the grain. It’s like a giant river. Look at the market economy as a giant river with extensive power, just pushing water. And state legislation, trying to alter the natural current of this river. It’s like a person standing in the river with a big piece of cardboard trying to hold this river back. And eventually the river is going to win.

The solution you drain the goddamn river. And that is I’m sorry to say, what’s going to have to happen if we expect to get on the right track as a species. You can’t have this kind of system. You have to reorganize the economy from the ground up. Now, going back to the broad notion of this train of thought, that is apolitical, that has nothing to do with any ism. It is about a logical inference. It is about realizing that the current system we have is dysfunctional. And this is just one example. This evolution from minimalistic to hyper productive, from conservative by nature to insanely unsustainable, evolving, where we could have changed our society. People could have worked less. We could have engineered in a way that would reduce our footprint while meeting responsibly people’s needs, creating more free time so people can have a social life, which by the way, is the most important part of life.

That is where people get their value from. It’s touched upon before. It’s about being in community, not how much you own and so on. So the perversion is deep. It’s deep in culture. We are ruining ourselves by the incessant drive to produce. Every human being on the planet is trying to sell everyone else something. And that ridiculousness has to stop. All we are really doing is destroying the environment and human psychology. This myth of advancing the standard of living. If you’re in destitute poverty, not meeting your nutritional needs, yeah, obviously an improvement in standard of living is required. But when you look at Western society and people that already have so much, and yet they still think they need more, what you’re witnessing is a sickness in the culture.

Go to Costa Rica or areas of Mexico and Latin America and find villages that are off the beaten path that haven’t been polluted by television or even the internet. And you’re going to find people with really high happiness indexes in many areas where they have very little, but their needs are met, vibrant social communities and so on. They may be so below the poverty line, as far as we’re concerned, but in reality, they are affluent. They have abundance because it’s in the mind. There is no end to you wanting more and more. And the more you get, the more you’re going to want. And that’s the fundamental pattern and the sickness that we see. And all of that sick social psychology has been manifest from the nature of the structure of our society.

And no, it’s not just greedy human nature. The cultural variability that we see on earth, both historically and present defeats the notion that human beings are by nature insatiable, infinite want organisms. We are social beings and the goods and the mediums that we use economically becomes social currency. They become part of our social network, so to speak. I, for example, was the last person to get a cell phone years and years ago. It wasn’t that I was a Luddite, it just wasn’t of interest to me to have that kind of communicative connection on my body at all times. Why did I eventually do it? Because of social pressure. Because you miss out. In the same way that Apple is so desperate to keep selling you shit. They have to put up billboards now that show the photos from their phones. As if people should care.

But what happens is someone will take a photo with these special cameras and they’ll send it to their friend. And the friend will be like, “Oh, I can’t take that photo. I can’t contribute to this social environment because I don’t have the same tool that my friend has.” And that is where the disease spreads. And it spreads like wildfire across the civilization. Suddenly you have idiots lining up at the Apple store, waiting for a good, that could easily be produced in abundance. That is not scarce. And they’re going to pay twice the amount to get on the ground floor, waiting in line for hours, so on and so on and so on. What a tragedy of culture we endure. And on that note, I will continue this conversation next week. I always come into these podcasts with my outlines thinking I can get through all this stuff.

And of course I only get through a fraction of it, but this general conversation about what really defines a train of thought that is sustainable and so on will always be an undercurrent of this podcast. And just so you know how things are going to unfold in the near term, it will be from this discussion that I will eventually start talking about activism more specifically. All right, everybody, I really appreciate it. Be safe out there and I’ll talk to you later.