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Episode Summary:
In Revolution Now! Episode 40, Peter Joseph opens by referencing a 1964 speech by Mario Savio, reflecting on the effectiveness of protest movements today compared to the past. He argues that while social issues like sexism, racism, and inequality have persisted, little true systemic change has occurred, despite moments of progress. He critiques capitalism’s defenders who claim that poverty reduction justifies the system, comparing it to improving conditions in slavery while ignoring the system’s flaws.

Joseph discusses the complex nature of free speech, contrasting the absolutist perspective with a more nuanced understanding of how speech impacts society, especially in a commercial environment controlled by corporate entities. He warns of the dangers of unchecked speech, emphasizing that speech is action, which can lead to harmful consequences if left unregulated. He also critiques the free speech idealists who believe truth will rise naturally in an open forum, calling it a myth in today’s complex, insecure, and competitive society.

Joseph touches on the psychological and social tendencies that drive people to believe in misinformation, linking it to social inclusion, survival instincts, and the pressures of capitalist competition. He expresses concern over rising institutional alienation, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the decline in trust toward institutions, especially regarding events like the COVID-19 pandemic.

He concludes by warning about the dangers of private enterprise censorship, highlighting the risk of a “slippery slope” that could lead to further suppression of revolutionary ideas and genuine calls for systemic change.

Transcript:
Mario Savio:
It’s been said that, you know, we’ve been revolutionaries and all this sort of thing. In a way that’s true. We’ve gone back to a traditional view of the university as a community of scholars of faculty and students with complete honesty who bring the hard light of free inquiry to bear upon important matters in the sciences, but also in the social sciences. The question of just, you know, what ought to be, not just what is. We’re asking that there be no, no restrictions on the content of speech. Save those provided by the courts. And people can say things within that area of freedom, which are not responsible. So, you know, we’ve finally gotten into a position where we have to consider being responsible because you know, now we have the freedom within which to be responsible. I’m confident that the students and the faculty will exercise their freedom with the same responsibility they’ve shown in winning their freedom.

Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now. Episode 40. The opening excerpt was from a speech by Mario Savio from 1964. Savio was a figurehead of the free speech movement at the university of California around that time – an historically influential student protest with thousands involved and through galvanization and civil disobedience, they were able to get the university to remove some existing restrictions on political speech and activity at that time. Certainly one of many footnotes in the civil or human rights trials of the 1960s, which of course is famous for its revolutionary rhetoric. At least in the west. Even though there was a global aspect. But it’s interesting to reflect upon because it gives us information about what we can expect today when it comes to similar expression and behavior ; what’s changed and what hasn’t; are protest movements really effective anymore?

Such things are worth considering by comparison. Of course, the rights issues that we are experiencing now are not that much different than before. At least categorically, the problems still exist, but at different degrees of severity. Sexism is alive and well, racism is alive and well. Xenophobia is alive and well. The war machine certainly goes on unabated despite the Vietnam war protests. And of course the environmental crisis and the inequality crisis that underscores everything has only gotten worse. There may have been some improvements in certain areas, but the fundamental problems still very much remain. In fact, it reminds me of an old interview with musician, Frank Zappa. I think it was from the eighties and Zappa was asked by the reporter about the revolution of the 1960s. And his response was simple. “There was no revolution.” People certainly talked about revolution and they certainly behaved in anticipation, but nothing of a revolutionary nature was actually achieved. As much as people wanna romanticize that period as some kind of grand social awakening highlighting the positive attributes of the civil rights movement and so on, keep in mind things getting a little bit better is certainly not to be construed as revolution.

In fact, more broadly. I think that’s one of the more frustrating things that we hear about today. When folks try to justify existing institutions. People who say things like “market capitalism has reduced poverty over the past 200 years and therefore it’s acceptable.” To whatever degree poverty reduction has been achieved, which has been talked about as well on this podcast in the past regarding capitalist myths and propaganda. Remember just because things have improved, doesn’t justify the nature of the system. It’s like saying abject slavery is fine because a plantation upgrades sleeping quarters to foam cots, as opposed to concrete floors. This kind of self comparison rhetoric is actually a large part of the cultural defense propagated by the capitalist priesthood for a very long time. You know, the drill, oh, “no other social system has produced the standards of living that capitalism has!”

Well, think about the absurdity of that common statement. What other social systems do we have to compare with? Soviet communism, which was arguably just extreme state capitalism? It’s like reading a book and declaring it’s the best book ever written. And then when asked what other books you’ve read, you can only refer to one other in a world of countless books. And in fact, that’s one of the things I really like about the brief excerpt with Mario Savio. It’s not just about what is, but about “what ought to be.” And that is the line of thinking required here. The only comparisons we can make in qualifying our economic mode in terms of public health and sustainability is by analyzing pragmatically what could be through structural reorganization. Simple inference. We do have those skills and that is the revelatory worldview, if you will. So anyway, going back to Frank Zappa’s comments, whether he thought about it this way or not, the real revolution is system level change, obviously, as opposed to policy change.

It’s what you think about when you encounter any problem seeking resolution. Is the problem we seek to correct going to occur through policy or is structural change required? And obviously contemporary politics only deals with policy. And as I think I’ve run into the ground over the past 39 episodes, the problems we are experiencing that desperately need resolution are almost exclusively rooted in structure, not fleeting policy. And the tragic thing is the more people focus on policy as we are doing, meaning the political establishment, the more we waste precious time and worse things continue to become making it that much more difficult, eventually approaching a point of no return. And by the way, I have a 20,000 word article I’ve been working on, which will eventually be part of a new book and it overlaps with zeitgeist four, but this article will be published independently on my medium account and it’s very extensive to try and highlight the various feedback processes that are continuing to make things worse and worse, both economically, politically, socially & culturally.

Counterintuitively, what we’re seeing is that the worst things become the worst the social psychology becomes, meaning the way people think about problem solving. You would think intuitively that as things get worse, minds will expand and people will begin to find the right path, but that’s actually not what suggested by these models. As things get worse, it’s actually triggering even more reinforcement for things to get even more worse because of the cultural situation overall. So anyway, I’ll keep everybody apprised of that essay. But going back to Frank Zappa very briefly, once again, given we’re gonna be talking about speech, communication, so-called “free speech” as the dominant subject – some may remember his testimony before a congressional committee on the subject of censorship in labeling music with explicit lyrics or content.

In the 1980s this was one of the major social distractions via the Christian conservative political sphere. And they wanted to put little stickers that are still there today on music media so parents would know if their kids are listening to something corrosive. And a funny footnote in that history is that the labeling actually backfired because the popular albums became the ones with the parental advisory explicit lyric stickers. The taboo was more enticing to youth. If your album didn’t have that label, it wasn’t cool. Literally the entire drama of trying to label this music in this sort of moral assumption, actually backfired to the extent that those albums became the most popular and the most selling with the most exposure. And overall, it’s fascinating to think about how things have changed as far as the severity of speech as what was once considered controversial and taboo is actually quite commonplace today, which is a general trajectory in the realm of expression, going back hundreds of years, sort of like those early sitcoms where the husband and wife would sleep in two different beds because the idea of them being together was too explicit.

Some may remember the group Twisted Sister with lead singer Dee Snider, and he was brought to defend their work in front of those congressional hearings as well, which is quite hilarious. But even more, if you are aware of what this content was, it’s basically cartoon music with slapstick lyrics and for it to be considered socially offensive is truly bizarre in hindsight. Anyway, if you wanna amuse yourself, I do encourage watching that early congressional testimony in the context of this evolution of free speech in the United States, specifically highlighting the reality that there is a deeply irrational Christian moral conservative undertone that still plagues this country to this day, the United States, as we also saw with the overturning of Roe versus Wade and the right to abortion. And as an aside, you know, I really try to be sympathetic to culture and understand the complexity of sociological developments through time, such as the persistence of theistic religion and all of the atrocities associated to it.

I don’t like the kind of militant atheist rhetoric you often see out there. People that are so derisive and dismissive and ultimately hurt others’ feelings, which doesn’t help anything. So the strategy to communicate, you know, rational revelation around the religious issue is tough. But as George Carlin once said, to paraphrase, “if it wasn’t for the businessmen and the priests. Who knows how beautiful the world might have been.” Anyway, back on point here, let’s now jump more specifically into the subject’s of speech, communication, plurality and the overall outcomes of the ideological and information battle we are dealing with today in tandem with a rapid rise of private industry censorship. The dominant speech controls today, at least in so-called Western democracies is less governmental and more private enterprise. The commercial environment, which is composed of private dictatorships; unaccountable private dictatorships, driven by elite boards, which more often than not view things through the lens of favoring corporate sponsorship and advertisers – are the gatekeepers.

Now they are the ones deciding the degree of speech you can have today upon the rise and dominance of the internet. And it’s an interesting adaptation. Traditionally, the notion of free speech was generally contextual to political expression, right? Hence its inclusion in the US constitution, for example, which was put there to allow criticism of public officials and policy without political retribution. But as the economic system has evolved in its influence over general social life, the government context has been increasingly usurped. It really just kind of hides the real power now, which is commercial corporate interest through lobbying and other levels of economic influence. Put another way you not only have the micro influence of social media companies, for example, that can pretty much remove anyone they want. You also have the broader lobbying power of, say, huge corporations like Google and the influence they pose over government.

This is the classic “inverse totalitarianism” that’s been discussed by many theorists in the past where the corporate foundation, the business foundation of society becomes so powerful, it controls the government from the bottom up, which is precisely what’s happened in the United States and most Western democracies and by variation affects the entire world. And it doesn’t take much creativity to speculate on how much worse things can become. All it takes is to associate hate speech, which is the current theme now to anything related to so-called social revolution. The equivocations are already being built right now, amplified and accentuated by the extremism that we are seeing in pockets of society, creating new precedents. At some point, mark, my words anti-capitalism or people that seek new economic organization and new social architecture for the better in the pursuit of public health and sustainability – they will be equated to extremists, quite similar to the anti communist McCarthyism era that we experienced many decades ago, but different in the adaptation because it’s no longer just a political kind of ruse.

This will be interpreted as hate speech. It will be associated to the extreme fringe such as Alex Jones’s conspiracy culture. But the active point of origin will not come from government. It will come from private enterprise because they have the most to lose, even though by extension, the government is comprised of essentially the same people. Now that’s stated let’s step back and consider the contextual range of the free speech debate in general. As noted from a legal standpoint, the historical drive toward free speech focused, mainly on speech related to political ideas. This view is most consistent with the work of Mario Savio. Once again, he references the legal system or the courts, and then he focuses on responsible speech and naturally this implies limits and rationally so. For organizational purposes, we could call this the “middle ground” perspective. It’s the most common sense perspective, in fact, even though it’s more complicated than it appears on the surface, like everything. Another established and accepted aspect of this would have to do with dishonest speech or the libel and defamation laws that we know of, which are particularly important in this society, because reputation is directly related to commercial success.

So if someone publishes a bunch of lies about you or say your business, it could harm your survival. And hence you have to counter that by condemning that speech for your own self-preservation. So that’s the middle ground. Now, if we move away from that, on one extreme, we find the free speech absolutists. Absolutists remove context, and declare that all speech should be allowed regardless of its effects. Even if the speech is hate filled, promoting Nazi-ism or genocide or whatever. Anything goes. While on the other extreme, we find those righteous groups and institutions that seek to limit speech in certain contexts, approaching fascistic conditions where someone simply speaking out against something might even end up in jail. As we see commonly in theocratic societies with strict blasphemy laws and so forth. So those three aspects in mind, let’s now think about the most minimalistic of this, the purest or absolutist perspective.

And on that before I go any further, I know that there are gonna be comments on this podcast, impulsive comments by folks who believe in the absolutist perspective. And they will see my criticism by default as anti-free speech as if no nuance can possibly exist. This has become more prevalent once again, in the social media climate we have today. And I deeply encourage listeners to remember that just because there are problems with an idealized condition, doesn’t change the basic disposition in support of free speech as a critical avenue toward human progress and the pursuit of truth. This is another reason why systems science is so important in attempting to deal with the complexity of reality, because there’s nothing simple about any of this. Free speech absolutists need to understand that speech is action and actions born from speech can lead to detrimental outcomes most people do not wish to see and observing that fact does not necessarily mean you support draconian regulators to silence and censored people.

That is a completely separate conversation, which we will address later. The focus here is observational, begging the question, “how does truth rise to the surface in a total free for all of speech?” Conversely, “what are the dynamics that allow falsehoods to maintain momentum as well?” Why, for example, do billions of people on this planet still believe in an invisible man that lives in the sky when every single measure of common sense and scientific analysis shows no evidence for such a belief whatsoever. And as this common in the doctrine of free speech absolutists, what you find is an idealized assumption of self-regulation – that the battle of ideas will ultimately be won through intelligent debate, evidence and rational persuasion. If everyone is freely expressing their ideas, no matter how right or wrong or honest or dishonest, it’s simply a matter of time before the self regulatory nature of logic and reason brings the truth to the surface, nullifying the rest.

And I’m sorry to say that is a myth. It is a myth that is more prevalent than ever in fact, given the structural nature of social media and the way information now flows on the internet. Just as the market economy can not properly self regulate, even though the high priests of the market religion are convinced that it could, there is no evidence to show the human beings in all of our emotional and social complexity inevitably arrive at the best approximation of reality at any given time and hearing that I think most would conclude that the first problem is education. In the words of Jaqcue Fresco “an educated population needs no controls.” Since the Enlightenment, the idea has been that eventually humanity will develop a commonly shared belief structure, creating a foundation by which the species can trust and build, creating unity through common sense in that way.

Wouldn’t it be incredible if the merit of science was fully digested and people were educated to draw their sense of reality from its revelations in a strict manner, along with of course, developing analytical skills, critical thinking skills and intelligent skepticism by which two different people could encounter the same problem and likely arrive at the same solution because of the shared worldview and shared methodology that both of them are utilizing. Unfortunately, the dumbing down of America and the world, combined with the notable influence of religious faith, once again, along with a number of other issues I’m going to touch upon in a moment, has contributed to persistently producing cultures where evidence, reason and complex thought is deeply lacking and frighteningly so. In fact, the very notion of free speech absolutism speaks to the heart of this very problem, as it’s just another contrived, polarized duality, rooted in ignorance of real life system dynamics. Absolutism, while I certainly relate to the gesture reflects ignorance,

first of all, for no other reason than nothing in nature works that way. This drive towards simplicity in trying to understand the world, given most people don’t have the tools to deal with the complexity, is a central driver of bad decisions and irrational beliefs. You see it everywhere in modern conversation and debate. It’s the lure of contemporary politics. Simple ideas, simple words, simple conclusions. It’s so much easier to control a population if you give them a vocabulary that’s so small and narrow, they can’t think their way out of it. Hence the rise of Donald Trump, but it’s not just Trump or people like him. The entire political establishment is based on that kind of communicative minimalism and effectively manipulation. And when you combine that tendency towards superficial simplicity with our social nature and the bio psychosocial fact that humans gravitate towards group inclusion, generating identities that need to then be protected, a powerful incentive arises as well to prefer narratives about reality that serve one’s self-interest; one’s comforts and identity, as opposed to the cold pursuit of objective truth.

So that’s the second problem to note and a great deal of psychological and sociological study has been put forward to show just how easy it is for people to alter their beliefs or confabulate their memories or reject truth in favor of their identity and survival – as linked to group preservation. The group could be a family. The group could be a religion, a business, a political party, what have you. Remember the Solomon Ash conformity experiment of the 1950s. It shows that in this minimal constraint, consistently people would choose the wrong answer to an obvious question if they felt they would be more inclusive to the group, they were surrounded by. And thirdly, when you add the layer of insecurity, which is built directly into our economic mode, the capitalist economic mode, premised in scarcity, it further reinforces self-preservation as opposed to objective acceptance of new possibly conflicting information. Because survival on this planet today is built around the contrived dynamics of competitive trade, which is born from, again, the “root socioeconomic orientation”

I talk about in my book, the new human rights movement, which is based on scarcity, dominance and exploitation in a zero sum game of winning money — we see an even deeper gravitation towards self preservation by whatever means necessary, as opposed to welcoming new truths. If preserving self-interest requires lies and the insecurity felt is strong enough, the lies will be treated as truth. And oftentimes pathologically. Hence once again, the entire Donald Trump phenomenon with the stolen election and tens of millions of people that still follow him, which have created an identity with that Trump establishment largely reinforced by many, many generations of political confusion and alienation. And of course, a lack of education and a lack of critical thought; a kind of stunted population of credulous children, in effect embracing everything I’ve just mentioned: a lack of education; this bio psychosocial gravitation towards social inclusion, seeking acceptance; along with experiencing a social precondition that constantly fosters insecurity, where people can justify being outright dishonest in their free speech for the sake of their own survival and prosperity.

Now, once you have that mindset, mind you, it doesn’t matter if you really are suffering because people that get really rich based on lies, they use the same logic. That’s why greed doesn’t really exist. Greed is just fear that has been taken to a new level of irrationality with people that always are more insecure about something new in their material environment. But it’s still rooted in social fear. And given all this, I have to tell you, if you really think about it, I’m actually shocked that people are as honest as they are in this kind of climate and with these kinds of, of dynamics. I will go so far to say, of course, as long as we have the commercial society we do in this scarcity and competitive game for wealth and power, you can rest assured truth will always be a secondary concern and free speech will be endlessly polluted by manipulative language and dishonesty in favor of self-preservation and gain.

Just look at the way people respond if they’re proven wrong, you know. We don’t reward people being proven wrong in this society. We punish them and the internet has made that much worse because once something’s on the internet, it never goes away. And then you look at “cancel culture” and all of this bizarre kind of intolerance- everything reinforces, for the sake of one’s career and identity and public perception, for someone to be completely full of shit. And most people that are successful in this society, I’m sorry to say are completely and utterly full of shit. So many reinforcing loops, motivating people to pick and choose their reality. The reality that serves them best. And back to the broken record of this podcast, you want to help any of this, get rid of the social foundation; get rid of the economy that’s constantly forcing competition and insecurity.

So to conclude this episode, which really just scratches the surface of an enormously complicated subject, I wanna make sure everyone understands that the very thing that people covet as sacrosanct, the holy grail of human rights progress and liberty – open free speech – could very well be the exact force that pushes civilization off of the cliff for good, with the creation of false consensus. All it takes is a certain degree of fear, ignorance, and a degree of brainwashing to generate stubbornness in favor of personal and group self preservation, by which lies are seen as more productive than the recognition or communication of truth. And it’s already happening. Religion aside, look at the polls regarding climate change and the overall environmental crisis. Representative democracy itself appears to be on its way out in the United States, moving towards structures like Russia and China. I mean, look back at the insanity around COVID and the staggering lack of faith in the general medical establishment.

There are plenty of things to talk about in terms of the draconian nature of what happened during COVID, it’s political use and so on and so on. Of course, the profiteering of the pharmaceutical companies, but of course that’s utterly to be expected. But the majority of the suspicion that underscored that event in conspiracy culture had nothing to do with such critical thought issues. We’re seeing institutional alienation occur in society and across the world in general, that has never occurred before and in the wrong direction. There’s plenty of reason to be agitated and alienated and upset about our institutions, but the people that are most predominant right now are completely absurd in what they’re actually angry about. People are locked into their internet bubbles seeking bias confirmation, and ignoring anything that contradicts their worldviews because they can – and on and on and on a world of delusion builds. That stated there is one more thing I wanted to talk about very briefly coming back to the concept of censorship itself, as we have seen recently on social media with the removal of people for various reasons, and that is the slippery slope.

There is a quality argument that regardless of how bad things become with people’s speech; regardless of how hateful and destructive their speech might be – to Institute policies that police speech and remove and ban people on social media, sets up a slippery slope that can create levels of abuse that eventually override the harm done from the negative speech itself. That is the most important balance to consider, helplessly really. The true solution here has nothing to do with going one direction or another in this regard, because the true solution is sociologically rooted primarily in the things that I mentioned earlier: preconditions. A fundamentally fearful and insecure society due to the nature of our competitive scarcity driven economy, along with our social nature, which gravitates towards external acceptance, coupled with a staggering lack of critical thought and requisite education. And until we change these sociological pre-conditions and dynamics were pretty much screwed.

Of course you could legislate and try to create some kind of efficient bureaucracy to give public consensus and commentary on what these private dictatorships are doing. It is absurd to have a bunch of random yahoos getting an alert from somebody that reported your post. And then that person has your social media life in their very hands, subjectively. A far more rigid process of evaluation and a transparent process of evaluation should be out there by legal decree. But once again, that’s all just policy and policy will always be compromised by larger order structural forces. So that does it for me today. I apologize I could not end this podcast on a more uplifting note, but the mess of communication occurring, what incentivizes it and the biological issues related do not paint positive picture, especially as the walls continue to close in environmentally creating increased stress. And as I said earlier, the more this stress increases, the higher probability irrationality will also increase.

My name is Peter Joseph, and this is Revolution Now!, If you wish to support this effort, you can through my Patreon. I do apologize that my output is low right now, but as I’ve stated, I’m working on multiple projects and just try to keep my health up. That’s become like a, almost a part-time job just to try to not feel like crap all the time here as I’ve gotten older. But anyway, I’m gonna be sending out an email soon with updates on Z, four other developments, and yeah, try to stay sane out there. Folks, talk to you later.