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Episode Summary:
In Revolution Now! Episode 41, Peter Joseph critiques society’s flawed perception of progress, focusing on the damaging effects of materialism and market-driven values. He discusses how the pursuit of wealth, fame, and status fosters psychological insecurity, selfishness, and apathy, as shown in research from Tim Kasser’s The High Price of Materialism. This materialistic culture, reinforced by social media, breeds a “soft sociopathology” in adults, leading to a society where personal gain outweighs empathy and social well-being.
Joseph also highlights how wealth correlates with antisocial behavior, noting that the rich, despite their privilege, tend to become more hierarchical and less community-oriented. This dynamic extends into governance, where business interests dominate, leaving issues like poverty and homelessness unaddressed. He critiques figures like Elon Musk and Bill Gates for prioritizing market growth and technological innovation over environmental sustainability, arguing that their views reflect a loyalty to the flawed market system rather than real-world solutions.
Joseph then shifts to the political system, emphasizing that public participation has minimal impact on policy due to the dominance of business interests. He warns of the rise of authoritarian populism as a reaction to inequality and environmental crises, stressing the need for systemic change while acknowledging the challenges posed by the deeply entrenched capitalist structure.
Transcript:
[InterReflections]
Truly positive economic metrics are the opposite of what was sought back then. Degrowth, so to speak, would be the goal. Doing more with less and needing less. People would go on TV to give an economic report and say something like “Great metrics for the economy this month. We reduced our use of energy and raw materials by another 3%, lowering sales once again with less need for human employment, increasing overall efficiency by a factor of two. We continue to be in homeostatic balance with the planet for yet another year, and humanity has more free time than ever. Here’s Tom with the weather.”
“Well, it’s clear skies across the hemispheres. The Amazon rainforest isn’t on fire. We aren’t clogging the atmosphere with co2 and we haven’t seen swarms of refugees cascading across continents in search of food for some time. And the fog of billionaire douche-baggery seems to have cleared a bit, we do expect some precipitation adding to our already abundant fresh water supply, further improving top soil while global abundance measures has everyone sitting pretty for the foreseeable future.”
“Yeah, you would never hear anything like that.”
Peter Joseph”:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 41. The opening audio was an excerpt from my 2020 film InterReflections comedically, highlighting the fact that the very nature of how we view economic progress is often the opposite of real world logic. Something we’re gonna touch upon in a few different context today where people myopically look at the world only through the lens of the incentives, procedures, rewards, and punishments of the economic system, as if that mode of operation mirrors physical, scientific reality.
And I’m not just referring to abstract metrics such as GDP, a longstanding implied measure of public health or standards of living, but also, for example, how the very concept of social progress itself, defining what success and accomplishment is, has grown increasingly perverted and detached from reality. Some may remember those studies done with children years ago about their aspirations, finding that a significant number of them simply want to be “rich, famous, and good looking” as their life goal.
A number of years back, a book was written called The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser and he explores the cultural neurosis of wealth, fame, and image, which are all really forms materialism when you think about it. The accomplishment of fame is really a kind of social commodity that vainly correlates to status in the same way financial success and conspicuous consumption does and that kind of value system, the reinforcement of that aspirational pursuit, naturally has deep psychological and sociological ramifications.
Kasser states, “Materialistic goals are associated with being less empathic and less cooperative and more manipulative and competitive. The more that people care about materialistic goals, the less they care about ecological sustainability and the more their lifestyles tend to have a damaging effect on the planet.” He further points out that if children value wealth, fame and image, they, as he states: “Face a greater risk of unhappiness including anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and problems with intimacy.”
And this has all, more or less, been validated as we’ve seen with the effect of social media on kids, such as using Instagram, because more often than not the aspirational images, loaded with materialistic and status oriented symbols, create pressure on children to strive and conform, as they adapt to their environment, which is what kids are programmed to do. I would further argue that this also begins to create the roots of what I refer to as the “soft sociopathology” of the majority we have today. It’s not difficult to see how those childhood impressions, which are virtually inescapable today, will lead to selfish apathetic status and wealth seeking adults who are neurotically plagued by this resulting psychological insecurity. And as an aside, truly secure people don’t need lots of things. They don’t need to be conspicuous in their consumption and they don’t need to be validated by the external through fame and status.
Put more abstractly, the more needs a person has, the more of a failure they actually are. You can’t have a value system based on infinite wants on a finite planet. Anyway, back on point. This also pairs well with the research that’s been done regarding the correlation of psychopaths to business success with some estimating up to 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic tendencies. Then you add the other studies that have been done that describe the correlation between increased material wealth and antisocial behavior, as was done notably years ago by UC Berkeley and you hence see this very clear pattern of sickness that is manifest.
And as an aside, the spectrum is very interesting: how income and wealth status and the state of inequality affects social psychology. While the lower classes through their fundamental lack of access and scarcity experience, will develop abberant behaviors to some degree in the form of say, street crime or domestic conflict or drug addiction or prohibitive economies and so on, at least the sense of human connection appears to still be stronger on average, as compared to the other side of the spectrum, dealing with the aberrancies of the highly wealthy, whom you would intuitively think, that due to their convenience, they would actually be more empathic, more supportive of community and more interested in giving back and so on, Due to the removal of that basic lack of scarcity and the personal freedom resulting from their wealth.
And yet, rather, they exhibit increasingly hierarchical and oppressive tendencies which manifests as a competition against the lower class rather than seeking more humane equilibrium. Hence the classic phrase, “class war.” There’s something about the psychological development where the wealthy begin to perceive everyone as a threat, in other words.
And once you extend this mess, this psychosocial mess to power systems and governance, which as we all know are dominated by wealthy business interests because money rules the world, the sickness of the state of the world starts to make a lot more sense. So that’s an extended example of such cultural consequences born from the sociological condition of a civilization deeply entrenched in the values and incentives of market capitalism. Another example is the nature of how problems are perceived and approached, guided not by workable, realistic direct social potentials, but again by the rigid exclusionary logic of markets.
A classic example of course is the structure’s inability to end abject poverty and homelessness. And the reason is simple: human agents that cannot engage markets are simply unrecognized, which as an aside speaks to the ableist nature of the system, aside from all the sexist and racist elements too. But the ableist nature is even more built in because anyone with a limitation or disability is not only disadvantaged by default in the competitive architecture, overt inability to engage basically just puts a nail in the coffin. In fact, I would go so far to say that in the truest sense of Laissez-faire market economics, allowing the disabled to simply wither away and die is really the structural expectation. It’s a function, in fact, if we choose to be completely objective about what the system actually does, not what our morals and values are, but what the system does. And what has been the propagandized, market-preserving approach to this problem? Economic growth, of course. That all we need to do is run the machines more and more, pushing more and more sales, which pushes more and more innovation and activity.
And I guess some new jobs will somewhere be created and somehow these disabled or poor or inaccessible people will find new engagement. I don’t know, it might work. And that reasoning really is enraging. The more you think about it. Might as well have a big Auschwitz sign that reads “Economic growth sets you free.” And so the billionaires will quadruple their wealth when economic growth happens, while a guy living in a cardboard box might get a used military tent; while a woman trying to support her family on minimum wage maybe will get a $1 raise.
And inevitably when the “lift all boats” growth cycle, that makes everyone believe that capitalism actually is a functional, sustainable system, finally collapses, leading to inevitable recession, as it always does eventually because nothing can grow forever, even in a system that pretends that it can, the poor are viscerally harmed while the rich lose a little bit of pocket change in proportion.
Now, as we continue this a little bit more abstract episode than usual, I wanna reiterate that I’m firmly convinced that human exposure to this kind of economic structure, over generational time, creates pathologies that are largely subconscious. Irrationalities that are largely subconscious as things are increasingly perceived only through the lens of market dynamics. And as a unique example of this, as a variation, I wanna speak briefly about a headline that Elon Musk made recently, saying: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to the civilization than global warming.” Now, I know Musk is a clown that exists very much for the spectacle and like most successful businessmen is fundamentally manipulative and a bullshit artist. That’s just by default what these people have to be to achieve the positions they have and hence you take it all with a grain of salt.
But this statement has a great deal built into it in terms of this delusion that markets are the defining reality and physical reality doesn’t even exist. In this, he is implicitly highlighting a “problem” (population decline) that only exists within the faulty unsustainable, contrived structure of market capitalism. Global warming or climate change is a physical science problem, unlike the contrived structure of market economics once again, which can easily be changed by us humans making decisions. In contrast to the fact that we cannot change the basic laws of nature as we understand them.
Big difference. He is making a comparison between a natural earthly reality and a completely manmade system putting priority on the manmade system over the natural science law reality. Which by the way speaks to just how fantastically ignorant he really is when it comes to science, even though he professes otherwise. This notion of population collapse due to low birth rates is a completely market system based conclusion.
It’s all about the market machine and nothing more, contrived and self-referential. It is true that within the confines of the rules of market economics, the board game structure, a system based on economic growth by default, levels of cyclical consumption, meaning repeat purchases and the creation of jobs and the distribution of purchasing power, must be maintained or increased in order to sideline job losses, degrowth, recession, depression and so on. And in this, the economy literally requires human reproduction as part of the growth equation because more people means more economic activity. And from the perspective of the system, the more the better. Because again, it is an infinite growth system. In systems theory parlance, this is referred to as a “reinforcing feedback loop,” a positive feedback loop, which has nothing to do with ‘positivity.’ It is a reinforcing structure. And the only thing a constant reinforcing feedback loop system can do is blow up.
And furthermore, if you’re thinking to yourself, well, this is hyperbolic, this can’t be right, we can’t have an entire economy that literally requires population growth. That’s clearly, intuitively insane. Well, the fact is this is old news and it’s been talked about in the scientific community, not the economic community. I direct your attention to a Forbes article called “The World Economy as a Pyramid Scheme. Steven Chu says.” Nobel laureate scientist Steven Chu points this out and even expresses how economists ignore this reality. He highlights some nuance of the problem such as funding retirement through new young people being born and so on, along with the fact that governments are always pushing for population expansion, even if it’s through immigration. But beyond that, it just makes perfect sense from an agent-model standpoint. If you remove someone from the equation, they can’t perform an activity to contribute to the growth.
It’s that simple. So going back to Elon Musk, what makes this even more amusing is that what he’s actually promoting, with this recognition of a needed system function input, is that it’s completely antithetical to sustainability. Something else which is kind of poet politically amusing, since he’s supposed to be for renewable energy and all of this. The more people on the planet, the less sustainable we become by mathematical force. And mind you, this isn’t about values, this isn’t about depopulation. This is about a mathematical fact: of a species existing on a finite planet inside of an ecosystem that requires homeostasis. And you can model this reality with any earthly species. What Musk is actually saying is that he respects the abstract market system more than natural reality, and regardless of the truth of the matter, because it’s actually not happening- we’re not seeing substantial population reduction whatsoever holistically…
But the very idea, the very logic, the very notion, the very acquiescence to the system, the artificial system- at the expense of the ecosystem of the environment-is shocking. The very thing that he’s suggesting is going to contribute to climate change, which is a real problem as opposed to the contrived structural problem that we have with the imposed market economy. In other words, it shows where his loyalty really lies as a rich, elitist businessman who would rather preserve a completely destructive economic system than attempt to actually improve the world. Now, just to be clear here, I can be a bit harsh at times because it’s very frustrating to see prominent people put forward propaganda that’s highly destructive. Elon is not an exception. There are plenty of other people like him, but he’s extremely influential and you have to pay attention to the statements of the intelligencia because the values and ideas the espouse do have an effect.
And as a brief aside since I’ve seen this counter and I wanna bring it up, I’ve actually read pro-market treatments that have the audacity to argue that population growth can actually be more sustainable because more people will come together with ideas to innovate technology and that technology can somehow further sustainable practices nullifying the environmental stress of the expanding species in the environment. Yes, that idea exists. This is one of those arguments against the “degrowth movement” and it’s truly disheartening, the kind of irrational mental gymnastics pro-market people will come up with, squirming to validate the way the system is. The completely stochastic notion that pumping more people into the world is gonna magically translate into innovations to increased sustainability. Nullifying the effects of increased population on the habitat, is so bizarre, I don’t even want to go into it. It almost sounds plausible through the lens of idiotic market perception.
I will say this though. Innovation. I have a serious problem with that word within this society. “Innovation to what end?” is the question that needs to be asked. Just constant arbitrary innovation through planned obsolescence, manipulative marketing, the establishment of yet another gadget to do something completely nominal for you; perverting expectations in our social nature where people want to feel in parallel to others; they want to feel relatable to others, so they begin to mirror the kinds of gadgets and behaviors and apparati they have, in the constant sort of keeping up with the Jones’ psychological phenomenon. It’s all sickness. Innovation in the current society is absolutely wasteful the majority of the time, and the idea of just rolling the dice and hoping some magical Einstein comes out of the woodwork by pumping more people into the system is complete insanity. And as a final note on this subject of the market lens polluting people’s sense of reality, we have Bill Gates.
Bill Gates was recently interviewed and basically he said that people really can’t be expected to stop eating meat or acting more sustainable, in effect, not wanting big houses and luxuries and so on, and that the core focus to solve climate change, all the public health problems, biodiversity laws and everything else – can only come from innovation in technology. Once again! Forget redesign, forget anything related to trying to alter the system to avoid these kinds of market externalities. Forget all of that. This is Bill Gates’s disposition, which of course is self-serving and self preserving in the same psychology as Elon Musk. I certainly believe in the potentials of science and technology and understand that it’s really scientific ingenuity, design and technology that underscores the standard of living we have. But the idea, once again, of just letting the system continue to output all of these problems and then working on technology to solve those problems, is fantastically lazy and of course, unworkable.
The best way to generalize the market economy is to think about a machine with an output pipe on each end. On one side it produces all the food and goods and things that help people live their lives better. On the other side, it produces exhaust and pollution and market externalities. What’s happened now is that the pollution side is accelerating faster than the output of good things on the other side. And to think we’re just gonna keep magically advancing technology fast enough to solve the problems constantly evolving out of this dysfunctional system is pure lunacy once again. And you know, a lot of people put Bill Gates on a pedestal just like Elon Musk. They see positive things that have been done by these guys. But when you look at their core ethic and their core understanding of this system, you realize it doesn’t matter what their contributions have been thus far because their fundamental analysis and understanding of things is so deeply flawed, their influence becomes nothing but toxic and destructive.
And I’ll say this before we move on, there are only two workable dispositions, one more workable than the other, and this is what you look for when you listen to people talking about solutions. First, there’s the most logical, which happens to be the most radical as promoted here. You have to transition outta this system into something different. The other disposition takes the position of extreme regulation, slapping a giant choke collar on the capitalist Rottweiler and trying to restrain its most base, violent tendencies. Rottweilers aren’t naturally violent, by the way, no dog is, but you get my analogy. When people communicate a regulatory need, what they’re saying is that they reject the fundamental structure of the system and they acknowledge it needs regulation. The reality of regulation actually working is another conversation and something that I believe, based on my own modeling and analysis, isn’t a solution because it’s too vulnerable and fleeting, if regulation can be applied at all, given the adversarial forces coming from the system on multiple levels, constantly trying to bring the system back to its most open, pure, Laissez-faire state.
But I will concede that in the most abstract terms, it’s technically possible you could create chains for this system and hold it down. Definitely possible, highly improbable. Now, beyond those two states, anyone arguing that the system has mechanisms to correct itself is completely delusional. You see these people all over the place, people that want to privatize actual regulatory institutions, have you heard that one from the libertarian community?” They actually believe you can create a for-profit company that will help regulate another for-profit company as if collusion wouldn’t almost immediately happen. Same for people that believe the growth element of our economy will magically create innovation to solve all the problems the growth economy has created. People like Richard Branson that talk about how the solution to the climate crisis will come from “entrepreneurs” using, again, the same system going back again to Bill Gates.
Those are the folks that really need to be shunned. They need to be pushed to the side. They are completely dragging everybody down, and unfortunately they are ubiquitous. And no surprise the figureheads that talk about this kind of crap the most are also the most wealthy, the most connected, and hence the pathology of self preservation for the system that rewarded them really comes forward, tragically. Hence a powerful, establishment level, countervailing feedback loop in favor of preserving the existing system.
All right, well, I think I’ve run that into the ground and what I’d like to do for the rest of the podcast is return to the iceberg model and expand the concept to talk about how certain patterns in society change. It’s very counterintuitive to think that something can work for an extended period of time, save 50, a hundred, 200 years, and then as environmental factors change, the system behavior changes or more accurately, the system endogenously has variables that went unexpressed because the environmental circumstance hadn’t arisen to allow the expression, and sorry, once again for the overly abstract explanation. Let me give an example. I believe there is a figure graphic in my book, The New Human Rights Movement that touches upon this particular issue, and it’s the fact that you started with an economy based on arduous creation, handcraft, where to make a shoe took forever and therefore people need things and it takes a long time to create things.
It is a demand driven reality. The idea of surplus, the idea of needing people to buy things in order to create jobs was a very distant awareness. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution, the rise of technology, the creation of the trend of ephemeralization and “more with less” that the tables turned, where suddenly the necessity for jobs required the creation of demand, not natural demand, The creation of demand as we see replete in the literature of that time where literally industry is commanding people to buy and consume, giving birth to the true consumer nature of the society we have today. So the pivot was the efficiency generated through technology and design. We don’t have a demand-driven economy today, in effect. We have an employment-driven economy. The need is to employ, not to meet demand because of the levels of surplus and abundance that has been created, relatively speaking of course.
So I hope that makes sense. The cyclical consumption nature, the growth nature of the market economy was always there, but it took the rise of technology to bring it out, showing its true colors. Now with that framework, understood, I’m gonna conclude the podcast with a far more complicated example. I mentioned the “iceberg model” earlier: events, patterns, structure, and then this thing called mental models, which we’re going to ignore for now. When you look at the news and you look at what’s happening in the world, you see events: Murders, robberies, forest fires, whatever. They repeat, which means there are patterns. When you have patterns, you have structure. And within all this, you can have changes to the patterns because the environment of the structure changes, generally. The change could be called an adaptation. It could be called an evolution, an emergence, whatever. As a crude example, let’s think about gun violence, particularly in the United States, which has a very unique set of properties that differentiates from other countries.
Gun violence as some kind of structural system expression, encompasses many, many complex factors, but typically we see it occurring in certain contexts. You’ll have a robbery with gun violence, you’ll have a domestic assault with gun violence, you’ll have another interpersonal dispute with gun violence, you’ll have gangland behavior with gun violence – you get the point. And so you can catalog a general collection of the kinds of gun violence that are happening. Then somewhere along the way, pegged mostly to the 1980s, a new trend emerged, which gave new context to gun violence, and that was mass shootings. From the going postal workplace mass shootings to a pattern of school shootings, largely initiated by Columbine, to what we’re seeing today with a vast spectrum of mass, largely indiscriminate shootings around the country in high consistency. So we have this emergence through time. The pattern has been modulated, in this case, creating more variance of a generalized phenomenon, meaning that of gun violence, which further means something that’s happened to modulate the structure, creating the patterns.
Needless to say, understanding emergence in sociological phenomena probably couldn’t get any more complex, but hopefully in terms of this generalized framework or model, it’s understandable. Which leads me to the main focus I wanna speak about in this context, and that is the evolution of the American political system, specifically the relevance of engagement. What is the true significance of your vote? What is the true capacity of the political institution in general? What are its potentials and limitations? Is the voting public actually represented in their interests? Is it worth voting at all? Those of us in the counterculture who’ve been reviewing political outcomes over the past century have, with good reason, concluded that it’s mostly an insult to cast your vote as the power structure usually does what it wants. The general public has been told that representative democracy is a mechanism by which social determination arises and anything is possible, right?
The reality of course is there’s a very narrow range of variance and potential. Generally, candidates that rise to the surface tend to conform to a very particular shared worldview, respecting established limits of debate, regardless of their party affiliation. And what we’ve ended up with in this supposed political pluralistic spectrum is actually a unified conservative political culture where so-called progressive or liberal candidates are really just slightly less conservative, but far from progressive. Put more cynically, instead of voting for candidates that want to spend $1 billion bombing some country of brown people, the more so-called progressive mainstream candidate will spend only half a billion dollars doing so. Instead of candidates that want to allow the rich to completely avoid taxation and redistribution, you get the so-called progressive candidate that pushes a negligible increase in taxation, just for the spectacle of it. And yes, I know it seems like more progressive thinkers are inching toward power, but that’s the way it’s always kind of seemed, isn’t it?
People say things like, “Well, Bernie Sanders almost became the democratic nominee and possibly president.” Well, it’s the “almost” part where the truth lies. Hopeful people tend to become very inspired by rhetoric, yet rhetoric and intention is really quite meaningless when witnessing what the system consistently does over long periods of time and why. Looking at social outcomes over time, the truth is in the reality only. Doesn’t matter what people say on a certain level. All that matters is what happens and the trends they’re in. And there’s a very spooky consistency with the fact that even with all the well meaning people out there constantly pushing and fighting and protesting and lobbying, creating nonprofits and so on and so on, hoping to improve conditions for society and the world – the end, conservative-minded result continues to go virtually unchanged in the long run. And I say spooky because when you look at it, it actually is kind of spooky.
There’s this complex confluence of forces coming from many directions, forging a multifaceted environmental influence that effectively politically assassinates or marginalizes anyone that inches too close to challenging the establishment. And the funny thing about Bernie Sanders, as an aside, when you think about it, he’s not even remotely radical. Just a run of the mill democratic socialist, literally suggesting things that FDR did. And even he, of course, was promptly obstructed. That noted, it’s also not speculation that the political machine has a mind of its own and disregards the popular will overall. As I’ve mentioned before, a detailed 2014 study conducted by Martin Gillens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, analyzing this situation, found that “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” They confirmed what we all know that the government has operated generally for the benefit of the wealthy, Wall Street and big business, which again shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone when you understand the role of the market system on political determination, as we’ve talked about before as well. Political power today cannot be separated from business power because business is the foundation of the social system. Hence the legality of lobbying or legalized bribery; rulings such as Citizens United, giving corporations free speech to influence politics with money, and so on and so on.
In this, the gravitation is very clear in regard to what actors the system favors and prioritizes. As I’ve said before, in a society where everything is organized around buying and selling, it is nothing but naive to think anything would be off limits from those dynamics, including politicians and policy. And so, this purchase-driven, hierarchy- preserving pseudo-democracy is not an anomaly. It is exactly what to expect. The natural gravitation, once again, and all self-proclaimed democracies suffer this fundamental problem to one degree or another. The United States, of course, being the greatest maturation of the sickness. Now, that understood, returning to my central point, it doesn’t mean the political system is without change. Like the Darwinian evolution of an organism, environmental conditions morph the entity, and in this you can loosely locate social inflection points that initiated or accelerated certain variations and trajectories. A notable inflection point in the US was the great depression and the consequential rise of Roosevelt’s New Deal, with widespread acceptance of strong regulatory measures to correct the imbalance problem inherent to market economics.
After World War II, numerous institutions were established to ease inequality through income redistribution, using price controls to make sure rents or food prices didn’t get high because of inflation, the establishment of labor unions and safety laws, consumer protection, and many, many other interventions. And it worked, even though it was a fleeting state, as I’ll discuss in a moment. For a few decades, a middle class was stabilized and you began to see a certain level of social equilibrium that had never been achieved before, directly a result of market regulation. In fact, at the root of the American Civil Rights Movement, in general, was the recognition of the necessity of these policies as well. As would be expected, African Americans seeking to end discrimination along with women seeking less economic subservience to men, along with other underclass issues — were all in favor, naturally, of regulating the system.
They felt and understood that the so-called free market worked against them, systemically. In fact, the systemic effects of Laissez-faire economics has always been a countervailing force in the activist interest of increased civil or human rights. Something few talk about, in fact. Very historically consistent if you wanted to preserve white, racist, male, sexist, hegemonic power domestically and internationally, free market capitalism has always been the way to go. It’s the perfect structure for self-regulating elitism. And just in case anyone listening is squirming to wanna say something about the horrors of Soviet communism, this is an internal system analysis. Communism or any other system is irrelevant. And just to reinforce this, understand it is not random that the more conservative people are, the more they tend to believe in the so-called freedom of markets. The ecosystem of belief shows powerful consistency between racism, white supremacy, female oppression, xenophobia, and a litany of other toxic social features – linked to the belief in free market capitalism.
And you see this right now if you pay attention. So coming back to our historical unfolding here. From the New Deal period on, this battle between economic interventionists – in the interest of increased egalitarianism and human rights – versus the Laissez-faire capitalists, which manifests the exact opposite — unfolded. For instance, the Cold War and the ideological western battle against communism was a constant domestic agitation used to thwart institutions and policies of market intervention because it was so easy for politicians and business leaders to create fear, making it seem like any kind of market regulation or intervention was just one step toward totalitarian communism. Propaganda of which still is also very much alive to this day. So crudely speaking, by the time of the Carter administration in the late 1970s, pressure from the business community began to finally succeed, dismantling much of the regulatory institutions and policies.
Which leads us now to the next major inflection point: the rise of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher. The introduction of Reaganomics, re-embracing the religion of unregulated markets with the idea that the market God must be trusted and interference with the market God being sacreligious, anti-freedom so on, took hold. The pro business striving for elitist freedom prevailed, preserving the power of the economic hierarchy as we moved from a Keynsian, demand side economic approach to a supply side Reaganomics approach, meaning consumption would now be fueled by giving money to the rich business owners or the “job creators,” eliminating their taxes and so on and so on. As we see trending still to this day. As opposed, of course, to caring about workers’ wages, benefits, prices in society, the cost of living overall and so on.
With the central focus, as touched upon earlier on, “economic growth” – as the savior, the ultimate problem solver lifting all boats. In again, opposition to social welfare programs and really anything that moved against the so-called free market. Deregulation, privatization, and so on. And it’s at this stage, which is really just a return to the more natural state of market capitalism where the homogenous nature of the American political duopoly really solidified. From Reagan to Bush to Clinton, to Bush Jr to Obama. You see very little relevant variation in their policies. Just a kind of superficial ping pong and theatrics with the fundamental philosophy of letting neoliberal, Laissez-faire economics run wild. With America also reinforcing its hegemony through those very dynamics. Again, just as free markets will always favor and preserve the rich reinforcing inequality and power hierarchy on the domestic level. So it does on the international level between nation states.
This is why, as an aside, the United States and its western so-called democratic allies continue to punish Cuba, this tiny little minuscule island that has no effect on anything directly. Cuba poses no direct threat to the United States on any viable level except for the fact that it continues what Noam Chomsky sarcastically calls “the disease,” being Cuba’s ongoing dedication to a more socialistic economic structure. Basically, the global capitalist mafia is belligerently intolerant of any attempt by anyone to do anything different. They can’t let the disease spread. Why? Because every country that doesn’t conform the neoliberal order is a country that cannot be controlled and exploited, for one. Along with the fact there is still a small chance regardless of the decline of Soviet communism and the fall of the USSR, that such menacing ideas against market capitalism philosophically just might take hold and put in jeopardy,
once again, the capitalist power order.
And such a risk, no matter how small, is simply unacceptable to the cult of leaders that have total faith in the neoliberal religion. Tangent aside and back on point. For the past 60 years, a different sense of democracy has emerged. And it’s interesting how today virtually half of all eligible voters take no action in the United States. According to the Knight Foundation’s “100 million project,” which has done detailed analysis on why people don’t vote, it found that 40% of those people that do not engage, state simply that they don’t have faith in it, and they see it as corrupt and a waste of time. I personally have historically been one of those people. But not anymore. And this is the nuanced point I’m getting at. The statistically consistent pattern over the past half century where the will of the American people have a near zero minuscule effect on public policy, dominated by a homogeneous, pro-business, neoliberal conservative order, where the difference between the two sides was nominal – has modulated now, but not in the way most might expect. The fundamental lack of efficacy of public participation in voting when it comes to challenging, progressively, the nature of society, remains the same: impotent. That is still a lost cause.
Instead, the manifest sickness of the hierarchical, oppressive business reality, which is authoritarian by nature, has fomented along with basic disenfranchisement and alienation through inequality, the rise of belligerent populism – an authoritarian populism that was very much in the shadows before and consequentially, the purpose of voting today only relates to trying to stop things from getting rapidly worse. I hope that distinction is clear. The rise of Trump is deeply symbolic of a new kind of extreme polarization that has dramatically altered what has been a consistently homogenous, neoliberal unfolding over the past half century. The consistent, longstanding “inverse totalitarianism” of a society essentially run by business, which has been the underpinning of all historical mainstream candidates in the modern period, has essentially adapted through a kind of expansion to now include a very vicious right wing populism. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s what you kind of expect in this sort of “late stage” capitalism, if you will, surrounded by environmental and inequality pressures where people don’t understand why things are getting so bad and hence they become more tribal as we have seen repeat in history historically.
So allow me to conclude this very tedious and extended podcast by saying, if you think it’s a pain in the ass now, trying to be an activist, fighting all of the disorder that keeps mounting, just wait until you have to fight people that are of a truly militant authoritarian nature and their constituencies in government. You can’t allow that to happen. There are three fundamental feedback loops that are all cycling at once right now, which combined as they’re all interrelated, can only make things much worse for all of us. That is the environmental crisis, the inequality crisis, which together will manifest in an authoritarian crisis. The first two of those features are well accelerated and at a great deal of damage has already been done and will continue to be done because of how reinforced those loops are. The third feature is emerging now and like the other two, you have to pay attention to it and you have to do what you can no matter on what scale to try and thwart it and reverse the tendency. System change is going to have to happen, but in the meantime, we have to keep patching all the holes on the boat in whatever way we possibly can.
I’m gonna leave it at that. I appreciate everybody listening. This program’s brought to you by my Patreon. I also did a update for Z4 on the Patreon and on social media for those that want to know where I am with that. Unfortunately, we’re a bit of a ways out. It’s been a difficult year, but I will keep everybody apprised. I appreciate the support and I intend to be back in two weeks to get more consistency with these podcasts. And I do have this ridiculously long 20,000 word article that I’m struggling to get proofed and that will be out soon as well. Take care out there.
