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Episode Summary:
In this episode of Revolution Now!, Peter Joseph continues discussing the need for a value-neutral, apolitical approach to solving societal problems. He critiques the ineffective nature of current activism, arguing that chaotic, unfocused efforts often hinder progress. Peter highlights how systemic issues, like socioeconomic inequality and environmental degradation, cannot be resolved through moral appeals or individual behavior change alone, but require structural economic reform. He also delves into the historical shift from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to hierarchical agricultural ones, emphasizing how culture is shaped by economic conditions rather than inherent human nature.

Transcript:
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, and good morning everybody, depending on where you are in the world and welcome to Revolution Now. My name is Peter Joseph, and this is episode number four, September 22nd, 2020.

What I would like to do today is continue the conversation started in the prior episode having to do with this train of thought I keep speaking of and why a value neutral, apolitical, ground up approach to reasoning a better future is superior to what we are seeing today otherwise. As some may notice, political discourse today is largely a group versus group affair with great categorical confusion and association. Humanity is lost in these isms, and we pit this ism oriented group against this ism oriented group with great vagueness and lack of productivity. Great vagueness and proposals facilitated by very poor communication as well. Very unspecific language, expression muddled, and conjecture, hyperbole, platitudinal woes, expectations, demands. I find that most people really have no idea what they want, or even what they’re even saying when it comes to activism.

There’s an old Krishnamurti quote, where he says, quote, “He who plunges into action without considering the problem, thinking that he is reforming the world, it is he who is creating greater confusion and misery.” Unquote. And as awkward and disheartening as it may be to point out the idea that anything should go in the activist community, let’s just keep doing anything and everything, let’s flail in all directions at once, unstrategically, unfocused as a whole. At some point that behavior becomes more of an interference in the March for progress than a path. If there’s any hope for the future, given trajectories right now, there has to be a shared foundation in both understanding and direction. It’s needless to say in a way, but I have to say it since the degree of confusion, diffusion the impotence of activism today, it’s it’s insufferable to me. Why? Because people are not understanding the need for an objective, epidemiological, social and public health science approach to understanding the problems we face. And as the Krishnamurti quote points out, there can be no focused outcome as a result. We can’t expect chaos to produce order. So it’s not trying to be mean, or cruel, or dismissive, but in a certain way activists have become noisemakers by force of ignorance. And they’re actually harming efforts towards change rather than helping.

Take for example, the recent protests, the riots in the U.S. due to police brutality and racial injustice. And even with all that energy, attention, destruction, inconvenience, the demands manifest from this unprecedented insurrection in the U.S., protests that are still going on to this day, many months later in fact. There really hasn’t been any progress and nor will there be. Why? Because as I wrote and talked about in prior podcasts and in the respective Medium article on the subject of systemic racism that was posted, a better understanding of the root of the problem has to materialize with the characteristics of that root problem defined and addressed directly. As concluded in that Medium article, you will not see a reduction in race based or any other form of group antagonism until economic change occurs, particularly the reduction of socioeconomic inequality and the economic features that pit human against human by force of the system itself.

This is the sociological precondition that I keep referring to. The same goes for the environmental crisis with countless activists and NGO groups yelling at the top of their lungs for decades and decades about corporate and personal responsibility. Just recently, an article in Scientific American referencing yet another UN target program seeking to stop biodiversity loss was released. And this new report shows exactly what everyone should be expecting. All regulatory attempts to stop the destruction of the habitat are not working. They state, and I quote, “The steps that have been achieved are not enough to stem the tide of biodiversity loss. Between 1970 and 2016 the average size of wildlife populations declined by an astounding 68%, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s 2020 living planet report. If the trajectory remains unchanged, biodiversity will continue to decline until 2050 and beyond because of unsustainable production and consumption of natural resources, population growth, and other ongoing trends.” Unquote.

Now this is amusing to me in a dark way because I’ve talked about this UN biodiversity program before. Years ago, even included it in discussion in my book, The New Human Rights Movement. You go back to 2002 we see the exact same pattern. In 2002 192 countries gathered at the convention on biological diversity, making a public commitment to significantly reduce the loss of biodiversity and increase habitat preservation by then the target date of 2010. So they came back eight years later in 2010 with their results stating and I quote, “None of the 21 sub targets, a company and the overall target of significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 can be said definitively to have been achieved globally. There has been insufficient integration of biodiversity issues into broader policies, strategies, and programs, and the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss have not been addressed significantly. Actions to promote the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity receive a tiny fraction of funding compared to activities aimed at promoting infrastructure and industrial developments.” I’m going to read that again, to highlight the naivety. “Actions to promote the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity receive a tiny fraction of funding compared to activities aimed at promoting infrastructure and industrial developments.”

Well, of course, can you believe that someone sat there with a sane state of mind and wrote that sentence without seeing the glaring problem contained within it? There is no system level incentive to preserve anything in the consumption-based business infinite growth structure of our economy. Yes, everyone feels the long-term incentive to stop destroying the habitat in one sense. They feel that, but the long-term incentive can’t compete with the short-term gains required and the competitive nature of the market economy itself. In fact, it is simply preposterous that these folks gather decade after decade with complete meta-magical thinking that some kind of conservative ethic in business in the industrialized world is going to be rewarded at any time.

Yes, we need more efficiency and green energy and so on. We need other changes to the mechanism of modern industrial society, but no amount of adjustment is going to counter the destructive reality that the very economy itself has no vocabulary for sustainability, conservation, or true technological efficiency. As stated before those attributes literally threaten the integrity of the mechanisms of the market economy. A system that must thrive on scarcity and group fragmentation and antagonism, exploitation, even if one company did decide to slash its outputs pollution and other factors taking a highly conservative sustainability oriented approach, increasing their technological efficiency, being habitat aware, respecting the science and so on, they would in almost all cases lose market share and hence lose their businesses or their businesses will suffer greatly as the other producers, their competitors who don’t really give as much of a shit, not making any adjustments, continue to cut corners, be wasteful and all the strategic advantages that give them an edge in their business.

A socially conscious business will be a defunct business in the current climate. It will be out of business because there are too many competitors that will not care enough in the short term. And of course, as an aside, you could try to legislate this with the state as regulatory agencies continue to do, but as I stated in the prior podcast, if you have state power ruled effectively by lobbyists coming from corporations, which is the case in the entire world to one degree or another, then you are always going to be vulnerable to that short term, profit seeking incentive getting the advantage versus any long-term hope. And all this applies, of course, to all the other things that we try to fight in society.

The same goes for the global attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions, like the biodiversity issue, just talked about the global programs and dominant activism orgs trying to stop climate destabilization operate in the same basic delusion. The 1997 Kyoto protocol, the 2015 COP 21 with 40,000 participants representing 200 countries and not a damn thing has improved since. It is bad enough the conferences have no binding agreements when they come together, you know, wasting resources just to get there, and fly, and sit there and spin their thumbs for days on end. There’s no binding agreement, which means it’s all based on promises to curb emissions, but you don’t hear them talk about the very nature of our economy and the incentives that underlie it structurally. They’ll say things about the need to have de-growth and stuff like that, as you hear lots of activists say, but once again, it’s not taken to its logical place within the structure to ask if these things can actually be achieved within.

And inevitably I get emails and messages from people that mean well, but they’re not thinking clearly. And they seem to think that the economy, the structure of our economy, has no orientation built in, and that it’s just people’s individual and collective actions that are driving the forces. The implication being that if you just make everyone ethical, and educated, and moral, their economic behavior will change and the woes of the world will resolve and you don’t need structural change. And that is of course the greatest and most dangerous myth out there.

The great moral myth, the myth that declares all actions as a consequence of personal attitudes and values. And hence the only thing to change is people’s sensibilities or ethics. While people can, of course, no doubt have an effect to modulate their behavior based on what they think is right. It’s simply not going to make much of a difference within a structure that incentivizes the opposite outcomes on the whole. In other words, the market economy is not neutral, it is wired a certain way with certain incentives and dynamics. And if we were to truly change the aspects creating these negative outcomes, if you were to apply the reasoning of what mechanisms have to be removed or altered, basically you would void the entire market capitalist institution. It would cease to exist if proper changes were made. I hope that makes sense.

Summarily, the market favors short-term gain at the cost of long-term destruction. A true economy is about economizing economia is the word in Greek about taking care of your household. Think about how you live your life domestically, perhaps with your family. Do you incentivize your family or kids to go to the cabinet or refrigerator and consume everything as fast as humanly possible so you can go out and buy more? No, you don’t want to waste anything. You want to be economical. Likewise, do you pit your son and daughter against each other to battle it out for their dinner meal in some kind of competitive game where they have to earn their survival? No, that would be caustic and destabilizing ultimately. In fact, this is why you can’t refer to the market-based economy as an economy at all. It is an anti-economy by all measures. Just because a system can take resources from the earth, process it and create something, and then distribute it around the planet to the population doesn’t mean it’s an economy. Without, economizing within the economy to reduce waste technically, something there is no vocabulary for once again in the current system, there is not an economy.

So I hope all this is clear. I think I’ve run this into the ground, but it can’t be overstated. No incentive exists built into the structure that will allow for the kind of radically different sustainable outcomes everyone is clamoring for. And this also includes human exploitation and bigotry. Do you honestly think that in a world where everyone is structurally deemed a labor machine to be priced and hence exploited for differential gain as a product, hence the surplus value known as profit in the Marxian sense extracted, do you honestly think people will ever develop a morality to see each other as equals in this life when that is the governing dynamic of human relations from the economic sphere? The economic sphere being the absolute root of our survival and social system, behavior we all are forced to engage in by coercion of the structure of the economy. No, that would be meta-magical thinking once again.
So all that said, let’s now continue with the prior podcast discussion on this train of thought I speak of considering how things have evolved. And we’re going to step way back to the neolithic revolution.

So 12,000 years ago, we transitioned from nomadic hunter gatherer societies, tribes foraging and hunting without agricultural skills, to farm cultivated settled societies. Before the advent of agriculture, and for well over 99% of our existence, homo sapiens lived as hunter gatherers, very few of which remain today. Now I don’t want to spend too much time on the subject of cultural differences between groups that have been documented, but I do want to recommend a good book. It’s called Cooperation and Competition among primitive peoples by Margaret Mead, with some other contributing researchers. This book chronicles about 13, if I remember correctly, indigenous isolated groups, many of which were hunter gatherers, trying to better understand their differences and why. It was published in the 1930s, and it was in the early 20th century when most of this analysis was able to take place, because as stated, a lot of these cultures no longer exist for reasons that should be obvious.

Overall, the book states that the variability among these different cultures could only mean, and this is a quote, “Being cooperative, competitive, and individualistic is the result of the culture they live in. And as a habit, a taken for granted daily activity, learned from parents and other members of the society.” Unquote. Now as we are all probably familiar, it has been a common rebuttal by so-called mainstream experts that our human nature is that of war and conflict. And even if we had the most ideal social conditions, we would still be brute, cruel beings pining for hierarchy and dominance. This of course is nonsense. Sadly propagated by mainstream Western philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbs, considered the father of political philosophy years ago, who famously proposed that humanity’s natural state was “one of war”. Implying in fact, that a dictatorial sovereign power to hierarchically oversee society and keep control was actually required for social stability.

This also relates to something called social dominance theory that I talk about as well in my book. Charles Darwin then came along with his theory of evolution and the infamous survival of the fittest notion was quickly bastardized to mean survival of the dominant. Haphazardly now called social Darwinism, furthering intellectual speculation that dominance and inequality must not only be a fact of life, but being aggressive and winning also means you are doing a just service to the natural order itself. This has been an ongoing pattern with no shortage of Steven Pinker types, trying to convince us ultimately that the nature of the world we see is the only kind we are capable of. I’m not arguing that Pinker and others explicitly state this, but it’s the implication that underlies their work. So the point here is that there’s lots of anthropological evidence with these early societies that lived very, very differently, coupled with discoveries and cognitive neuroscience that shows we humans have a wide range of variability potential. Human variability is an incredible subject. In fact, I should do an entire podcast on the science of human variability in the future. It’s kind of the framework by which we can gauge to what extreme or another humans are capable of being consistent in their behavior.

And a final quote I’ll mention on this issue is by anthropologists Douglas P. Fry, who wrote a monumental work, War Peace and Human Nature, The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views. And in this he summarizes the issue with respect to the myth of universal war stating, and I quote, “The grand conclusion from archeological, nomadic foragers studies, primatology, and evolutionary theory as applied to fresh to aggression is that in humans war is recent, not ancient and more as a capacity, not an evolved adaptation. In short war was rare to nonexistent under the conditions in which our species evolved, but obviously prevalent in more recent times that are dramatically different ecological and cultural circumstances.” Unquote. So that’s another good book to check out if you want to investigate these anthropological studies more so.

So moving on, the different characteristics and social behavior between hunter gatherer societies and modern settled societies are quite informative. Apart from being generally egalitarian with no real dominance hierarchy, their subsistence level created a kind of affluence in fact, where scarcity was not an overarching sociological pressure. Many had gift economies, which is very interesting as they gave without an interest in reciprocation, which is fascinating and completely different from the way most people behave today.

There are even stories of outsiders given handicrafts from existing tribes, only to feel the need to give something in return, as most in modern culture do. Yet this reciprocal behavior was considered offensive by the tribe as they felt the exchange, the transaction, was a refusal of friendship. British anthropologist Tim Ingold talks about this in his work. And he highlights the difference between giving and exchange. And it has to do with a social perception based around autonomous companionship versus involuntary obligation.

He states, and I quote, “Clearly both hunter gatherers and agricultural cultivators depend on their environments. But whereas for cultivators, this dependency is framed within a structure of reciprocal obligation. For hunter gatherers it rests on the recognition of personal autonomy. The contrast is between relationships based on trust and those based on domination.” Again, think about that for a second. It’s such a great contrast. We live in this reality where if someone does something for us or does something for someone else, they expect something in return almost in a pathological way. I mean, next time you do something for somebody, a favor for someone, listen to that little voice in your mind that’s been culturally oriented that says, “Ah, this person now owes me.”

Moving on the neolithic revolution set in motion a chain reaction moving society toward very different social structures and ultimately values. The central mechanism of this change was the increased dependence on geographical features required for economic success in the new paradigm. The new paradigm of agriculture and settlement. And this concept of geographical determinism is interesting to investigate. Certain societal characteristics of a particular culture are historically shaped by geographical conditions as strange as that may sound. In fact, that idea falls under the umbrella of another term, cultural anthropology, where broad socio environmental conditions experienced over long periods of time create unique cultural trajectories.

For example, anthropologist Robert Texter wrote an interesting work called A Cross-Cultural Summary, and it discusses how cultures spawned from resource scarce desert regions are more prone to monotheism, conflict stratification, male dominance and female oppression, while cultures originating from lush abundant rainforest regions tend to be prone to polytheism, egalitarianism, fewer sexual taboos, improved women’s rights, less conflict and so on. These are of course, broad averaged, very long-term observations with exceptions. But the consistency is nevertheless striking and fascinating. We even find unique corroboration with non-human primates that exhibit this kind of broad geographically determined influence. Anthropologists have compared chimpanzees, for example, to Bonobos, two species of ape that are the closest living genetic relatives to human beings, scientists have found that due to their different environments each ape culture has dramatically different social behaviors.

Bonobo troops living in lush, abundant rainforests with females and alpha roles generally speaking, there’s some debate about that, have very little conflict relative to chimpanzees. In contrast, chimpanzee troops living in raw resource scarce dry desert landscapes with males ultimately in the alpha role have consistent conflict with in and out of the troop. Yet these two species are genetically pretty much identical with the determinism of their cultural behaviors coming from the environment they live in. Now it should be pointed out that such primate analogs are never really declaratory in and of themselves, humans or not chimps or Bonobos even though they’re the closest genetic line. Nevertheless, the correlations do have merit and given our evolutionary relationship. Needless to say it’s all complex, but I would argue that there is no greater influence on culture than the means of production, how people survive economically.

And what you see with the economic and hence cultural trajectory from the neolithic revolution is the molding of everything we see as common today when it comes to human relations, particularly the feature of socioeconomic inequality. Now to clarify the term economic inequality leads to other forms of inequality as a consequence. For example, a poor family isn’t just poor. They have a range of negative outcomes due to a lack of means, such as inequities in health, social nobility, political power, general freedom, higher probabilities for incarceration, discrimination and so on. Hence the consequential term socioeconomic inequality, which means the range of public health outcomes consequential to a lack of economic means.

And make no mistake, the dawn of socioeconomic inequality came from the neolithic revolution. The move to agricultural economies, which included the development of regional settlements, hence you have the development of protection, military security, all of this coincides with the invention of property, simultaneously of course, which was not really a concept at all in hunter gatherer reality. And from property, you have ownership and restriction. Likewise, you have market behavior emerging as settled societies see merit and specialization of labor and then trade between specialized parties. This leads to trade between groups eventually, and ultimately competitive trade for resources since the emerging conception of life was that of brute scarcity once the neolithic revolution and its attributes took hold. Not because things are actually scarce, but because the market oriented power systems that evolved where Kings and Monarchs would just own everything while everyone else toiled in subservience became the civil dynamic. It became the model of social stratification, a civilization reduced to class.

Now I’ve blasted through quite a bit here. So let me try and encapsulate all this more summarily. To put this overall development concisely, since the neolithic revolution we’ve had a process of economically driven cultural adaptation built around the survival requisites of that relatively new settled agrarian paradigm. This evolution of post neolithic culture was self guided by systemic environmental pressures and survival inferences common to the natural dynamics of this new mode of production. This gave birth to dominance oriented incentives, values and protections, evolving patterns of conflict, hierarchy, and disproportional allocation of physical and social resources.
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Over time these incentives values and protections became accepted as just the way it is and what most consider normality today has been the result. This is how we got here. And what you don’t see in this equation is some overarching human nature compulsion that so many people have fallen back to assume as talked about earlier.

There is a theory that was put forward that I do talk about and debunk in my book called social dominance theory, which was put forward by some psychologists, sociologists awhile back. Mainly a psychological perspective because their assumption is that the move towards dominance and hierarchy in society is a natural occurrence in our evolutionary psychology and the feature that creates that has to do with surplus of goods. Their argument is that because a surplus was introduced upon the neolithic revolution, meaning instead of hunting and gathering and consuming in real time, I’m sure people saved some things. But generally speaking, if you’re a nomadic hunter gatherer you’re living day to day. But once you have a surplus and you can hoard and stockpile things, the assumption, the very vague and undefendable assumption they put forward is that people just clicked something in their brain and they want to have social dominance and start to conquer people out of some uncontrollable evolutionary impulse.

I’m not going to go through the absurdity of this pro establishment claim and all the things that they just sort of assume. But I will conclude this podcast with a rebuke by Turner and Reynolds in the British Journal of Social Psychology. And this rebuke not only deals with social dominance theory, but the very underlying idea that our evolutionary psychology is just going to take control of our behavior and there’s nothing we can do about it, and it has nothing to do with the environment, and this is the way it is, we are predestined to be certain ways. They state, I quote, “Social dominance theory is both reductionist and philosophically idealist in that it seeks to derive all political ideologies, intergroup relations, and indeed the whole social structure from one psychological drive. Abstracted, reified, and distorted to stand for some hardwired original sin of biology, the beast within. Whereas, in fact, the intergroup attitudes are not prior, but follow from social structure. They follow from the beliefs, theories, and ideologies which groups developed to make sense of their place in the social structure and the nature of their relationships with other groups, social dominance orientation is a product of social life rather than an underlying cause.” Unquote.

And to clarify that last line where they say social dominance orientation, social dominance orientation is that beast within which social dominance theory entertains as causal.

Okay. So I’ve done a lot of this day, I think I moved a little fast, but you know, there’s always so much to talk about and there’s only so much you can really practically put forward in an audio only podcast. A lot of this stuff would help with visual aides and so on, but I’m not going to go that route as of yet. I do want people to offer their suggestions for content, ask questions, possible guests when I finally get to that point, on the subreddit that’s been created. If you’re not familiar with that, you can go to revolutionnow.live and then click through. Please join the community and I’ll be back next week. All right everybody, take care out there.