Episode Summary:
In Episode 55 of Revolution Now! (which runs approximately two hours), Peter Joseph explores ten false ideas/narratives that contribute to the modern erosion of civil and human rights. He then reviews the abstract for a forthcoming white paper on the Integral Parallel Economy activist project. Finally, he is joined by Lee Camp, who discusses his new show and the troubling state of global affairs.
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Transcript:

PETER:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody.

This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now episode 55.

JFK SPEECH, 1963:

“This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama.

That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro.

In short, every American order had the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated.

But this is not the case.

The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the state in which he is born as about one half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby, born in the same place on the same day.

One third is much chance of completing college.

One third is much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning ten thousand dollars a year.

A life expectancy, which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.

This is not a sectional issue.

Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every state of the union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety.”

PETER:

This speech by John F. Kennedy from 1963 marks an inflection point in the U.S. civil rights movement and in many ways the global human rights movement.

A example of needed intervention on the part of the federal government where two black students required military escort to be admitted into a stubbornly all white school in Alabama.

I bring this up because it relates to a modern yet regressive tendency where conservative culture has decided that regardless of any of the history and its relevance, everything today in terms of group relations ‘are just fine,’ and ‘there is no need for any such intervention to exist ever again.’

In fact, this conservative mentality will often express that not only is policy intervention not needed to try and level the playing field and protect human rights, it is offensive in and of itself.

So what I’m going to do today is first address a list of about 10 intersecting points of belief that individually and in concert are part of a toxic mental schema out there, serving to perpetuate harm against poor and marginalized communities.

There is a reason why I call my prior book “The New Human Rights Movement,” even though it’s about economics, because at the heart of all of this activism, it comes down to public health, including the health of societal relations.

After that on the program today, I’ll then touch upon a white paper I’m going to produce in regard to the integral project and it’s about 9,000 words now and I’m hoping to have this paper give more definitive understanding beyond what has been covered in prior talks but naturally it is still a general description and not technically defined in an absolute sense but But my next goal is to release an extensive book type text to explain how the system works on the truly technical level, along with how anyone in the world can begin to create a node, hopefully expanding to a global network.

I plan to release these core materials upon Zeitgeist Requiem going online, along with a simulation website that will eventually transform into the actual utility.

I wanna make sure that when people see the new film, they know they can immediately engage something relevant on some level, right?

And then for the third and final part of the program, we’re gonna conclude with an interview with my old friend Lee Camp, a brilliant comedian and activist who has started a new version of an older concept called redacted tonight, but now called unredacted tonight.

We’ll be chatting about his work, his new show, while assessing the total absurdity of things happening right now around us in the living satire.

We are now entrenched in dark satire.

But before we get into all of that, I want to take a moment to recognize what is occurring in the US today, as it advances the most totalitarian platform in its history yet.

A pattern we can expect to continue, not just in the US but around the world.

The rise of the Trump era marks the rise of a new kind of business run ethos, if you will, saturated dominance and competition.

This dominance extends beyond agitating other nations in pursuit of trade advantage or geostrategic power, but increasingly its competitive dominance turned inward against the general public, the two ultimate enemies of the state, parallel power, and the public itself that does not go along with the interests of the state.

As everyone knows, this podcast is dedicated to the importance of structure in society and the need to seek out and address the root denominator of causality, our economic system, a system that is not only environmentally unsustainable but also serves as a deeply entrenched system of hegemonic power.

This system of power has usually been checked to degree by balancing forces within even a weak democracy.

But today, the tide is rapidly shifting.

The sociological outcome of the Trump trance, and mind you, Trump is indeed merely a symptom of a much larger pattern – is a culmination that embodies the worst potential path of power in the 21st century and even if he leaves tomorrow the momentum of this pattern will persist with a trajectory that will be difficult to stop.

From the current deportations of immigrants ignoring any kind of due process, parading them through vicious prisons in other countries, to rhetoric it’s acceptable to deport American citizens now without due process if they’re deemed a problem.

We are beginning to see a revival of an old-school pattern of state-led public domination.

It echoes for sure Nazi Germany and its history, Stalinist Russia as well, and mirrors human rights nightmare locales in a contemporary sense like North Korea or Saudi Arabia, where one who moves against the values, practices and loyalties of the regime feels the wrath and time.

It’s bad enough that now the pursuit of environmental homeostasis is virtually being outlawed by this administration in the interest of promoting endless hydrocarbon energy sales and infinite consumption.

It’s bad enough, as predicted, that basic social safety nets and wealth redistribution measures are being eroded.

It’s bad enough that hierarchical business values, where power flows from the top and submission from the bottom, are reshaping the entire structure of government, treating it explicitly as a business rather than an institution responsible for public well-being.

With, of course, democracy itself considered an agitation.

But now there is an added feature to promote fear in the basic population, to get you to know that your very life could be shut down by forces of power, on command, if you choose to move against the establishment.

The critical media is being slowly silenced.

Universities forced to be complacent without allowing protests, for example.

While the general public is groomed to embrace the value system of some kind of harsh possible rhetoric consequence for perceived transgressions for others; people being groomed into wanting this horror that is on the horizon.

This is not a subtle issue or one of interpretation.

This is a trajectory which the path is paved through a kind of cartoonish, seemingly passive gesturing that everyone just chalks up to being merely “tough talk” by politicians and nothing more.

“It’s just rhetoric.”

It’s bad enough that there are people in this country that support what’s happening within the executive branch, but there’s also a group of people that are so docile towards the effects, seeing it as just another phase, constantly making “what about” comparisons to other prior administrations as if none of this is new.

Actually, it is quite new in the elevation of the problem.

If you pay attention to the trajectory, there is a very dark cloud that has not even come into position yet.

And you may think in a couple of years, you can just vote out this broad tendency.

Well, think again, all the voting laws are being changed in the same way voting mechanisms are strategically manipulated in other nations to only give the illusion of effect.

The United States is the canary in the coal mine of a broader Western shift now, moving rapidly toward increasingly fascistic degrees of control.

I can’t predict the future, but I will tell you that everything going on is going to get much more difficult when it comes to any kind of activist initiative.

We are witnessing the greatest regression in US history.

The next few years are not going to be pretty, mark my words.

Okay, and that said, let’s now jump into a subject very much part of this regression, something I call the “veneer of reason,” by which ignorant mentalities, along with highly manipulative forces, promote bogus, poorly thought-out social concepts in the realm of equality and equity, ultimately contributing to increased social harm, preserving the damaging status quo.

I’m sure everybody remembers the US doctrine of “separate but equal” long ago.

So in 1896, plus E versus Ferguson, the US Supreme Court effectively codified racial segregation by suggesting that you could separate human beings based on race and still somehow it will all be equal.

Segregated schools, buses, water fountains, etc.

This is one of the many transitional stages after the abject slavery period.

And to many, it likely sounded plausible at the time, even though it is a contradiction in terms which made itself well apparent.

And while most today would never promote this old idea, understanding the history, the notion of “separate but equal” serves as a classic example of the use of reductive moral language and framing in service of ultimately inhumane ends.

And the more modern examples I’m going to list now can be thought of in precisely the same way.

They are oppressive slogan mechanisms masquerading as morally tangible, infecting the minds of many in the conservative movement.

So #1: the myth of meritocracy.

Meritocracy means people come into positions or roles on the basis of their demonstrated abilities are merit, right?

The old “If you work hard, you can succeed and success is just about effort and talent and the best rise to the top.”

And we all know this is a half truth at best, but it sounds plausible to some reinforcing the idea that modern socio-economic dynamics are, in fact, a level “playing field”, a mythology that, among other things, conveniently ignores the deeply entrenched structures of institutional racism, sexism, class hierarchy pressures, and so forth.

It dismisses the imbalanced structural landscape people are forced to navigate.

And while cultural trajectories are problematic enough, I will reiterate that there is no such thing as a meritocracy inside a market-based society, as the system produces constant feedback loops that reinforce advantage to those already ahead, fostering a cascade of downstream inequalities.

And part of the intellectual problem here is people simply aren’t trained to think in this kind of way: in a systems framework.

They think anecdotally, right?

So if a person grows up in poverty and manages to become a that anecdote gets elevated and from there people say, “See, anyone can make it. You just have to work hard!” The exception used to define the rule.

And if people buy into that, they don’t blame the system for anything, for their own suffering.

They don’t see it.

They blame themselves, transforming injustice into personal failure.

#2. Next we have these anti-DEI anti-affirmative action slogans and ideas.

Part of the basic democratic process has been generating institutional awareness that the economic system is in fact inherently rigged against some groups.

The objection of course is that this kind of thing is discriminatory in and of itself.

From the very moment such interventionist ideas were created to try and overcome direct and systemic oppression of minorities, this narrative has been there.

Let’s hear from the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in 1982 on the subject:

Wilkinson (KKK):

[clip] “We believe in the white race, we believe that at this point in time that white Americans are being treated as second-class citizens, that the federal laws, the civil rights laws have created a dual system of justice in this country. A set of federal laws that protects the interests of minorities and local and state laws.

Host: “But grand and imperial wizard…If I may interrupt, if I might be so bold as to interrupt the Imperial Wizard.” [clip]

And again, the defending stories are always anecdotal and speculative.

Someone complains that their kid didn’t get into college and then they see a minority there and think that’s why.

Same for some job opportunity.

It is simply the very idea that is opposed, not understanding its necessity, which can only be understood through a systems lens once again.

And I can’t believe I feel the need to say this, but let it be known that there has never been a study to show that the perceived victim in this narrative, ultimately the white male, has been overridden in his advantage.

The white male in the United States and across much of the world is still dramatically advantaged on every level of analysis, on average, from pay scales to higher education, to job opportunities, to political opportunities, and so forth.

It is cartoonish for any white male to sit there and talk about their own oppression as a general idea across society.

Framing the tools designed to correct injustice, recasting them as injustice itself erases the actual history of oppression that led to these tools being needed in the first place.

It cloaks long overdue remediation in the language of unfairness.

I will also add that such tools are actually very minimally effective anyway, but it is the best we have from the perspective of policymakers who are not going to go any farther in terms of true measures to create equity and equality.

So, these interventions against the system is all they’re willing to do pathetically enough, but they are still needed.

Not to mention on a deeper level recognition of such reality, which this process attempts to correct constantly reminds everyone about the true history of the United States and the world.

And as I will talk about more so in a moment, that very reality is destabilizing to establishment power.

They want everybody to forget.

#3. The myth of market purity.

I have run this into the ground many times, but this remains the most pernicious myth of all, the belief in unregulated free markets as somehow fair, natural or self-correcting.

It is perhaps the most foundational glue that holds the entire regressive world view together.

The empirical record, the structural logic, and even the mathematics of how markets work debunk all libertarian assumptions on the issue, and to promote faith in self-regulating markets means, by extension, to support damaging social inequalities.

And the most notably punished in this system are, of course, minorities snowballing the economically rooted oppression, generation after generation.

As of 2023 in the United States, the top 1% holds over 30% of all wealth.

The median white household holds eight times the wealth of the median black household, and five times that of the median Latino household.

Black Americans make up 13% of the population but hold only 3% of the nation’s wealth.

A result of generations of compounded exclusion, redlining, segregated education, suppressed wages and so forth.

Driven again by an economic system that thrives, thrives on imbalance.

Consider home ownership. White Americans are at 72.7%

7 percent, Black Americans, 44%

That’s a big one when it comes to this generational wealth development as this current system facilitates.

Same pattern with gender.

Women still earn 82 cents on the dollar compared to men, women of color, far less.

Women are more likely to work low wage jobs.

Women also happen to perform over 75% of all unpaid care work, labor of the market doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone value.

Also as mentioned in other podcasts, the work of physicists and mathematicians like Bruce Boghosian building on decades of investigations using agent-based modeling has demonstrated that even in a hypothetical society where everyone starts equal and plays literally fair, the market still tends toward oligarchy and consolidation of wealth and hence power.

In other words, it’s not just extrinsic forces, such as capital accumulation and layers of strategy because someone has more wealth.

It’s actually intrinsic to the very act of mass trade itself, the imbalance-creating forces.

And unless you introduce external redistributive forces, regulation, taxation, policy correction, etc., wealth concentration will continue until, in effect, one person in society has all the wealth.

That’s what the math shows. It’s a perpetually reinforcing feedback loop of exponentially increasing inequality built into market economics.

So when people fight against regulation and intervention in the name of market purity, they are not defending freedom.

They are defending a system that protects privilege and inequity.

Moving on to #4:, revisionist history and cultural erasure.

This is the age-old power drive to rewrite history and control narratives for if a population is allowed to understand what has actually happened, specifically in this case -what the system is produced and who holds the cards over time – faith in institutions may be eroded or questioned.

Take the classic example of Christopher Columbus celebrated in public education as a hero, when in fact his role was one of genocide, slavery and systemic terror.

And to this day, there is a battle to preserve the former perspective dismissing the latter.

In 2023, over 1600 books were banned from public libraries and schools in the US.

Most of these texts dealt with race, LGBTQ equality, identity, gender theory, and historical injustices.

A campaign of historical sanitizing, masquerading, of course, as moral concern from current efforts to defund entire academic departments to the criminalization of so-called “critical race theory” in public schools.

It’s all a systematic effort to protect the power structure and power culture by eliminating historical relationships.

On February 14th, 2025, a “dear colleague” letter coming from Trump’s likely to be removed Department of Education read:

“Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon systemic and structural racism and advances discriminatory policies and practices.

Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them, particularly during the last four years under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion,

DEI, smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.”

And when you read these kinds of statements, you often notice that any issue raised on the issue of race or the like is then deemed as some kind of deliberate attempt at contrived division itself, as if to address racism in and of itself is overtly divisive, which is a pretty clever form of manipulative propaganda if you think about it.

I do think, as an aside, given how damaged society is, there are people that go to far at times and see racial discrimination where there is none, in a given instance, which could also be politicized, such as the endless false claims of anti-Semitism coming from the State of Israel as it continues its ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.

But that kind of manipulation does not overshadow the truth of bigotry on this planet. In fact, let’s go further in the context of revisionist absurdity.

Pete Hegseth of the U.S. Department of Defense is on record for attending a church pastored by someone named Doug Wilson- a man who has publicly described American slavery as a virtual paradise for the slaves.

He wrote, and I quote:
“Slavery produced in the south a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the war or since. There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.” He continues, Painting slavery as lovely, he says, “Slave life was to the slaves a life of plenty of simple pleasures of food, clothes, clothes, and medical care.”

Amazing.

I assume everyone remembers 1984, where Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and his job was to falsify records, rewrite history, and erase inconvenient facts from public memory.

But that was top-down overt dictatorship. The reality we face today is far more diffused.

It’s not one ministry. It’s a network of decentralized white washing interference.

Books aren’t just banned by the state. They’re pulled by school boards pressured by parent organizations that are funded by think tanks. University departments aren’t just defunded arbitrarily.

They are delegitimized in public discourse, undermined through political agitation, and attacked through legislative censorship.

It’s a socio-cultural political machine of whitewashing history.

As Chomsky, of course, detailed in Manufacturing Consent, liberal democracies don’t need overt suppression to maintain ideological dominance.

They rely on control through framing, through omission, through media filters, through the institutional narrowing of acceptable discourse, and so on.

The result is a society where the foundational oppression and rights violations of the past are whitewashed once again, where slavery becomes discovery, where patriarchy becomes tradition, and where systemic inequality becomes individual failure, et cetera.

Let’s continue.

#5: free speech absolutism as a shield for hate.

This is a sensitive one. I know there’s a lot to be said about the need to preserve free speech in the general sense, especially on the political level.

But today, the demand for free speech has become a kind of rhetorical shield; not to defend principal dissent, but increasingly to justify cruelty, disinformation, political manipulation, and hate under the guise of neutrality.

Elon Musk did not take over Twitter to open the conversation up in good faith.

He took over Twitter to release the legion of factless, biased ideological belligerents with views that he actually likes personally because their values support his position of wealth and power and ultimately discrimination.

What has happened today, especially on social media platforms, is a cynical appropriation of democratic free expression, serving to preserve oppressive and unsustainable perspectives and motives.

And sure, I get the general counter argument where people say, “But is it not subjective, Peter?

who is anyone to decide what is right and wrong?”

Well, that’s exactly the kind of reductive, moral relativism people that promote hateful, elitist, oppressive speech, and hence actions put forward.

The subject has to be thought about far more deeply.

From a systems perspective, we can recognize empirically and formally that speech does not necessarily self-balance or self-regulate toward the truth.

In the same fantasy put forward with the “invisible hand” of the market to create economic balance.

I state this again, not in support of any kind of overt censorship, but as a matter of historical fact that must be dealt with and not denied.

The system of free speech, as we are thought to think about it, is incomplete as a concept in most people’s minds.

In the same way, people, again, do not understand the endogenous nature of market economics and the imbalance inherent to the structure that overlaps.

Only in this case, the environmental structure for speech is a confluence of factors that have to be viewed holistically to understand what the total system is doing when it comes to human communication in the world today.

Just look at Twitter or X as Elon Musk took it over, for example, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the use of slurs against black users increased by over 200%; anti-Semitic posts surged by more than 60%;

homophobic rhetoric skyrocketed, hate speech became not just more visible, but more engaged with due to the profit-driven dynamics of platform algorithms.

A separate study by Montclair State University confirmed that hate speech surged, particularly targeting marginalized groups, of course, and former X employees have since revealed what many have suspected.

That inflammatory content is privileged by design.

Why?

Because rage equals clicks.

Controversy equals revenue.

Social harm monetized at scale.

Now, say what you will about the general idea of free speech long before the internet, but this so-called free speech on social media is, in part, an incredibly destructive force, as it is combining with profit-seeking algorithms and of course an infinite number of bots that fill in the gaps to create momentum.

As an aside, if you want to do anything to stop the dangerous data pollution on the internet, these social media companies need to ban all of these bots.

Today, these bots are using natural language models, becoming indecipherable from normal human communication.

And the ramifications of that cannot be overemphasized in terms of destructive potential through aggressive astroturfing, misinformation, and all sorts of other strategies to guide public opinion.

And most people are not that aware today and are vulnerable to all of this being unable or unwilling to move against the perceived group consensus, as well, at times.

You remember the Ash conformity experiments, the 1950s.

Social media is both polarizing and conformity producing.

Another study from 2005 called “neurobiological correlates of social conformity” linked biological processes to group conformity as well.

You know, when you see something on social media and all the comments are biased in the same way? Such influence can change how people perceive, and it does.

This is also why some scientific journals have removed comment sections, because they noticed how influenced people were by the comments alone, as opposed to the evidence-based info in the actual article.

In the end, in the current climate, it will be this obsession with free speech, absolutism that will facilitate the rise of true fascism in the United States and beyond due to how toxic the underlying systems of communication are.

In Myanmar, for example, Facebook’s unregulated platform played a critical role in fueling genocide against a minority there.

Hate speech was viral and unchecked. And that’s just one example.

I mean, in the US, it gave rise, of course, to QAnon.

And if you think about it, I really don’t think the rise of Donald Trump would have happened if it wasn’t for these very underlying structures and mechanisms and the bias they yield over public opinion – remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

At the current rate, social media may prove to be the most powerful brainwashing system the world has ever seen, even though we can all understand its positivity centralizing potentials as well.

But once again, you can blame the market economy for sabotaging yet another possibly positive advancement for society, turning it into a weapon.

In a 2018 MIT study, it found that falsehoods on social media are 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. And they reach users six times faster.

Not just because people can be stupid, but because our neuropsychology appears hardwired to react to sensationalism.

I’m always hesitant to use terms like human nature, but we do have shared, average reactions.

And again, they are often weaponized.

And of course, children, needless to say, are deeply vulnerable. People in formative stages of identity development.

And then you just grow a society where normalized bigotry and factless thinking metastasize before the cognitive tools of discernment are even fully formed in the human being.

So, to be clear here, I am not putting forward an argument for authoritarian control or preemptive censorship in the realm of free speech.

That is a false binary used to shut down this legitimate critique, which brings us now to #6, which pairs in well with this, the “both sides fallacy.”

This is very much tied to the myth of absolute free speech, the belief that every social view must be framed as a symmetrical debate between sides.

And on the surface, this sounds democratic, but in practice it functions as a Trojan horse for legitimizing nonsense, hate, and deeply regressive worldviews.

While it is true in the realm of science that things are falsifiable, meaning there will always be change to our understanding, and sometimes dramatically so, it does not remove the fact that truth as a general utility does in fact exist.

Not all ideas deserve equal weight at a given stage of intellectual evolution.

Not every viewpoint is worthy of a platform.

And when we pretend otherwise, we’re not protecting free inquiry at all.

Rather, we are abandoning basic standards that make meaningful dialogue possible opening the door for regression.

As philosopher Carl Popper famously articulated in his “Paradox of Tolerance,” “If a society extends tolerance to those who are actively intolerant, the intolerant will eventually destroy that society’s capacity to be tolerant at all.”

We have to decide as a civilization what kind of world we want to embrace.

If we want a world based on highly probable truth, defined by scientific rigor and evidence, along with a world that is sustainable, meaning the ecosystem is balanced; with society not constantly fighting with itself, then the values become very clear.

Views promoting environmental and sustainability are dangerous and destabilizing.

Views promoting racism, bigotry, sexism, and intergroup contempt is destabilizing.

People promoting superstition over scientific rigor is indeed destructive and destabilizing.

Destabilizing to the very basic goals of our very survival.

And of course tolerance is important in general.

But if you are platforming a Nazi today on the same stage as a human rights advocate, it doesn’t even matter what they talk about.

You are giving credence to the Nazi who holds intolerant and abjectly regressive perspectives, destabilizing perspectives, by making it seem like each opinion can be considered equal.

A healthy pluralistic society isn’t just a place where everyone speaks.

It’s a place where ideas are weighed, tested, and judged.

Some perspectives elevate societies, others drag them into regression.

Just as we no longer give equal platform to say flat earth theorists in science classrooms, we must stop giving equal credibility to those who would deny the humanity or dignity of others in the public sphere.

As we see constantly today in the Human Rights saga, Podcasts…its just disgusting the kind of dialogue that should have gone away a long time ago.

Fairness does not mean treating every idea as equal it means treating every person with equal dignity and rejecting the ideas that seek to take that dignity away.

On to #7: “Colorblindness as a virtue.” Another seemingly well-meaning but deeply harmful idea often framed as moral progress is the notion that we should just not see race anymore.

It echoes, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s dream of judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

And while noble and principle, this vision doesn’t reflect our current reality. And pretending it does is damaging and helps facilitate ongoing marginalization and oppression.

Sociologist Eduardo Benilla Silva critiques this colorblind racism, which downplays racial hierarchy by simply ignoring it. And in most cases today, when we fail to see race, we fail to address the disparities tied to it.

In a society where race influences life expectancy, wealth, incarceration rates, education levels, and health care and beyond, neutrality just doesn’t work.

It’s denialism. There are, once again, massive structural disadvantages, not due to individual failings, but systemic ones.

That said, nuance is always essential.

Critiquing colorblindness doesn’t mean that one reduces every interaction to identity politics as if it’s ubiquitous and inescapable in every inch of our lives.

There is a distinction between recognizing systemic injustice and stereotyping.

For instance, it’s true that black communities have endured housing discrimination, but it’s wrong to assume every black individual is a victim in every context.

Overgeneralization leads to attribution error, assuming bias where there may be none, and that is also destabilizing.

Sure, once again, there is a tendency for some people to look for reasons to be angry, where in fact, there is none directly, as mentioned before, which is also one of the side effects of maintaining any sort of group identity at all, as I’ve often talked about.

Because all group identity is indeed dangerous in and of itself, but we are stuck with these fabricated relationships because of the real world reality of the history of group oppression: what we have created that continues.

Ideally, one day we may not see color or all sorts of other categorical groups, but until race, another group identifiers no longer shape people’s lives, choosing not to see it is not progress, it is just regression, disguised as virtue.

#8: the false victimhood narrative.

Another narrative put forward to marginalize is that we live in a woke, victimhood culture, casting those speaking out against injustice as fragile, weak, attention-seeking, or grievance addicted.

By pathologizing calls for justice as emotional manipulation or petty, the real issues can be mocked and ignored.

It’s a silencing tactic and a highly effective one and not new, long used to discredit social resistance.

Martin Luther King Jr. again, it was, you know, who was kind of unpopular in his time.

In a 1966 Gallup poll, 63%, viewed him as unfavorable.

And why?

Because he exposed the lie that racial equality had already been achieved.

And he was accused of stirring up trouble and being divisive to the nation once again.

In fact, the pattern goes back further than that.

Suffragists were dismissed as a hysterical LGBTQ+ activist during the AIDS crisis were painted as manipulators seeking special treatment.

You know, “you’re not brave or principled or just plain the victim.”

“You are woke!” which is now a slur applied to anyone challenging dominant norms.

And the backlash isn’t just cultural now, it’s increasingly legislative, which is terrifying.

As social psychology shows, perceived loss of privilege often feels like oppression.

Studies have shown that many white Americans now believe anti-white bias is a bigger problem than anti-black bias, despite all evidence to the contrary, once again.

And ironically, of course, those decrying victimhood in this way often indulge in it themselves, claiming they’re being canceled, silenced, repressed for “telling the truth.”

Moving on.

Next we have the classic (#9) law and order claim.

We hear this manipulative rhetoric all the time today, suggesting basic justice and stability, while in practice it serves as a coded call for racialized policing and violent maintenance of inequality on many levels.

And to be clear, when I use the word justice, I’m talking about impartial fairness in general, both in direct treatment and in the very structure of society, a just society, right?

Now, this law and order phrase likely gave momentum with Richard Nixon in around 1968, I believe, framed as a response to crime.

It was a calculated appeal to white voters, resentful of civil rights gains.

His “southern strategy,” as it was called, painted civil rights activism and black political expression as essentially threats.

Years later, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman admitted: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing those heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

And it went on from there.

Under Ronald Reagan, the war on drugs intensified this tactic, despite similar drug use across races.

Black Americans were disproportionately targeted.

Policies like the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine revealed the racial agenda.

Then Bill Clinton comes along with his 1994 crime bill, which expanded prisons and imposed harsh sentencing laws.

And you had Hillary Clinton’s “super predator” remark, further demonizing black youth.

The phrase “law and order” had fully evolved into a bipartisan mechanism of systemic control.

George Floyd’s murder in 2020, what did we hear? the call for law and order again.

Returned with force, Trump labeling protesters as thugs.

He deployed federal troops on civilians and declared himself the “president of law and order.”

It reframes protests as chaos and suppression as peacekeeping.

And finally, the last one for today.

#10, charity over justice.

This is a little bit different, but just as effective.

This is a seductive myth that upholds modern inequality.

It glorifies charity as a substitute for balance.

Private benevolence serving to obscure and sustain systemic exploitation and harm.

During the Gilded Age, tycoons like Carnegie and Rockefeller built fortunes and then used portions of their wealth to fund public institutions, casting themselves as benevolent heroes, walking symbols of the supposedly egalitarian system of capitalism.

In truth, preserving the unjust wealth and power structures.

Carnegie’s gospel of wealth as it was called, promoted giving, but only on the wealthy’s terms.

This paternalism persisted, where tax deductible donations double as PR, while inequality simply deepens over time.

Today’s billionaire philanthropists: Gates, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, they’re praised for their giving, while their companies, of course, profit from tax avoidance, worker exploitation, and monopolistic control.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the 25 richest Americans paid an effective tax rate just 3.4% – lower than most workers.

Meanwhile, they’re charitable foundations, let them steer public priorities in private ways, dictatorially, all while claiming some kind of moral leadership. Bill Gates loved to say this kind of stuff.

Hence, they are fundamentally anti-democratic, and the behavior recently of Elon Musk should prove all of that as well.

In the end, charity is seen as proof that inequality is a tolerable thing, and we just have to rely on the rich to be generous.

It shifts focus from systemic failure to elite benevolence, casting the poor not as citizens with rights, but as passive recipients of goodwill.

Now all of that said, these ten items are just but a few of other intersecting ideas and narratives that pollute people’s ability to see and think clearly, not recognizing the class war con game that surrounds them.

Okay, enough of that. What we’re going to do now is move on and talk a little bit about this paper I’m hoping to release soon, outlining the Integral project I keep talking about.

In my 17 or so years of activism, largely in the grassroots social movement sphere, combined with ongoing education in system science, particularly aware of where the limits are in the spectrum of traditional activism.

This project is what I have concluded is the best chance for long-term advancement, not relying on appeals to power – but building.

So I’m going to walk through the opening summation of this paper explaining as I go.

“The following presents a comprehensive theoretical and technical blueprint for a federated, post-monetary cooperative economy that replaces market-based exchange, profit-driven production, and hierarchical governance with a cybernetically coordinated, commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design.”

Okay, “federated.”

This simply means joined together with autonomy maintained in each node.

“Post-monetary.”

Of course, this is a connection point to the existing system, which is important because this is a transitional system, not just an imposed final stage construct, even though obviously a fully realized non-monetary stage is embedded within.

And “cooperative,” of course, is self-evident, but still radical, as it should be understood as an active function, not just some kind of intangible value structure.

Just as competition is a regulatory mechanism in the market today, as is cooperation in Integral.

As touched upon in a prior episode, the transitional nature of this isn’t just technical but cultural, something that’s rarely addressed in the post-scarcity community.

Without the needed value change away from competitive sensibilities, which takes time, it’s hard to expect this type of thing to expand.

Economic transformation must include cultural transformation at the same time.

This is explicit in the way things get done in this idea, and competition has no technical place whatsoever.

It’s not rewarded, there’s no incentive, but that doesn’t mean competition can’t still interfere in other ways, psychologically, as a reverberation of the market system.

But I think the more people engage the new system, the more it erodes that old primitive conditioning in the same way, early hunter-gatherer society is used to reject people’s behavior that implied dominance, such as a feeling of superiority or some kind of competitive win.

You can read about this work in the writings of Christopher Boehm and Marshall Salins, David Graber as well realizing our variability long before in fact the creation of markets.

And it proves that we are not inherently competitive by nature.

Once again, these early societies had regulatory processes in their culture, if you will, termed “reverse dominance hierarchy” to shut down people who leaned into such immature, elitist, and destabilizing views.

But in the case of integral, once again, regulation is not an issue of group expression, but rather exists in the codified structure.

That says ‘the only way this idea will be successful is if everyone is collaborative’ and there’s no other option for the system to organize.

And if such conditioning is indeed successful, I think it will also contribute to the reduction of all sorts of other destructive competitive tendencies we see in the world today.

As the sickness of competition is certainly not restricted only to the economic sphere, but it is indeed invigorated by it.

I mean, you can’t go two feet today without running into somebody with an incredible ego disorder out there, based on insecurity, ultimately, acting competitive.

Again, as I talked about with Alfie Kohn in the last podcast, it’s like a public health disaster when it comes to people’s competitive insecurity.

As next, it reads, “That replaces market-based exchange, profit-driven production, and hierarchical governance with a cybernetically coordinated, commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design.”

“Cybernetically coordinated commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design.”

The notion of “cybernetic” means based on built-in feedback structures for control, as integrated as technically possible, and like most things, this will be an ongoing development because there will always be something new to influence such processes, needless to say.

But the approach itself is straightforward.

Through the open-source process by which these systems come to be, hence the democratic nature of it, the organizational intention is to eliminate the need for third-party intervention or management as much as possible.

It’s a difficult subject if people aren’t familiar with this.

It needs a lot more elaboration, but this is at the heart of the cybernetic concept, which is about proper self-regulation.

In the same way, actually, early political anarchists would crudely theorize an ideal governance system without coercive force, such as police and prisons.

So, it’s economic democracy, and it starts with collaborative engineering of the regulating component systems.

Now, as far as the notion of a “commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design,” this has different levels of application.

Sharing is key, and hence the commons.

All design structures are open for contribution guided by sustainability and efficiency parameters, while labor reciprocity exists in a mutual aid structure, as will be talked about next.

Next sentence, “Anchored in a time credit mechanism that functions not as a currency, but as a non-transferable reputation-based ledger of contribution. the system enables individuals to access the fruits of collective production across a distributed network of autonomous cooperatives.”

So, there is no currency, and the concept of exchange or barter is not coherent here.

Now superficially, some may look at labor reciprocity or the existence of time credits, as common to time bank systems historically, as a kind of barter, but that’s simply a familiar lens.

While this time credit subsystem is indeed a variation of time banks and mutual credit or aid systems that have existed in the past, the context changes within a federated commons.

Rather, it is a record of contribution that incentivizes reciprocity.

The value of contribution is not derived from what others are willing to give in return, but how the cooperative or federation values and integrates that work into the whole.

Community stewardship, not transactional entitlement.

Everyone is contributing to the same positive end, which by nature of thatultimately includes individual ends.

Let’s not forget that old, annoying, propagandized idea of having to choose between your own self-interest and social interest.

That false duality needs to be exposed and everyone needs to realize that it’s all one interest fully intertwined by nature of existence.

It’s an issue of technical fact.

It doesn’t matter how well to do, some wealthy person is, as they walk down the street, someone alienated by that inequality may decide to shoot and kill them.

If there’s anything epidemiological study has proven, it’s that social stability is directly tied to equity and fairness.

A lesson a society unfortunately continues to learn the hard way.

Hence, this non-transferable reputation-based ledger of contribution is grounded in the reality that we all contribute to not only our own well-being, but to public well-being, and the system is designed in exactly that way.

“Enabling individuals to access the fruits of collective production across a distributed network of autonomous cooperatives.”

The cooperatives that will be discussed are the second most important part of the structure.

Tangible means of production.

Just as the regional nodes of integral operate independently, yet federated, so does the network of cooperatives within a node.

In the world today, different kinds of cooperatives already exist.

Worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and so on.

There’s lots of variations.

And what I’m proposing here is you have another variation where notably the only people to access what the cooperative produces are people within the Integral network itself, while collectively that network of co-ops can also be thought about as a single entity with many organs.

So you have a co-op commons, a unification.

Integration with the reputation-based ledger of contribution to this commons translates labor into reciprocal support for the total network, even though it’s easy to consider variations of circumstance such as more simple peer-to-peer, person-to-person approaches, which work as well.

But I think you get the idea.

And while the outputs of the cooperatives are reciprocal to labor contribution through this time credit system, it is important to note that if the system works as intended, such credit becomes less required over time.

For the system is also designed, as I talked about in the prior podcast, to move forward post-scarcity.

And I’m going to talk about this a little bit more so in a moment as well.

By which the more efficient Integral becomes doing more with less, the more reciprocal gains exist for the least amount of labor, making things free eventually.

Moving on:

“Each cooperative, be it in food, housing, manufacturing, or education, operates according to local governance, while remaining interoperable with the broader network through shared protocols, open source design, and efficiency constraints.”

So, each cooperative is autonomous, but connected with the rest of the broader network, sharing processes, particularly an open source design system, which is a very important component.

This is an open access AI assisted crowd source design CAD type platform that has among other things built in what we could term “efficiency constraints” to ensure design optimization, which includes critically, critically – environmental constraints. Analysis tools for sustainability, which I will talk about more so in a moment.

This crowdsource approach is a focal point of how things get created in a technical and truly democratic sense, allowing consensus to be reached coming from the actual source of demand, not a company boardroom or central planning body.

And as these designs reach consensus and are culminated, they go into a public repository, building a universal catalog of them with the specifics of how they are to be made and so forth.

And, of course, the ability to continue adding to evolve that design at any time, building on itself.

And I have to say the power of this concept cannot be overstated in terms of exponential advancement, potential exponential advancement as related to post scarcity.

Think about it. The corporate world today operates based on restriction, inhibiting, constantly, the flow of information.

This is inherent to the very nature of market economics with little deviation.

And if you end that, moving the other direction, without competition, allowing ideas to freely flow, the power of advancement of ideas will be far more rapid and efficient.

And that said, more practically, when a design is needed by the community, it is freely available to utilize for the relevant cooperative.

In some cases, it might require a new cooperative to be established, depending on the nature of the use.

And, of course, this all sounds extremely complex I’m sure, but the trick is to simply start simple and scale as you go.

Now one more important aspect of this worth expanding upon is the use of AI feedback subsystems to guide design optimization within the interface.

I think of them as filters, and it’s perhaps the most technically complex of the programming, but it’s actually commonly done today in the context of modern IT organization for stability.

It’s just a different application.

And one thing that’s interesting as the years have gone by, this kind of thinking, you know, researching these ideas about dynamic feedback driven self-diagnosing system filters that guide the design activity…it was just so foreign as an idea with the kind of self regulatory subprograms required.

But today, the advancement potential is staring us right in the face in the form of AI, from neural networks to coding.

Generative AI language models, especially in the coding space, has raised the technical capacity greatly, and we can build these regulatory models now. And in time, they will start to probably even build themselves, based on the objective goals presented to them.

This is the trend, and it’s also the beauty of a true focus on technical efficiency and sustainability, as it’s all really a calculation process.

And a given design becomes self-evident as you move toward optimization.

The problem really is attenuating the variety properly in the vast complexity of it all, which is what these systems are going to help do.

And again, you start simple, but as the system grows, you start to incorporate more and more things, such as feedback from the environment in regard to scarcity levels of raw materials and so on, contributing to that general, universal calculation.

I hope that makes sense.

The broad goal, of course, is homeostasis for the ecosystem at large and balance between all the general components.

Okay, moving on.

“labor valuation is dynamically weighted through feedback, reflecting real-time demand, skill specificity, and sustainability priorities.”

Okay, coming back to the issue of labor.

In the world today, there are different kinds of mutual credit and aid systems from traditional time banks which technically and philosophically embrace a one hour equals one hour framework, regardless of the type of work, to more complex variation, such as LETS that functions more like a barter structure with exchange negotiation occurring between parties like in markets, meaning how many credit units are required for a given good or service.

People negotiate. And neither of these ideas are appropriate for what we need.

We need more flexibility than a time bank, but we don’t want any characteristics of monetary exchange, such as competitive, subjective negotiation or the time credit being transferable outside of the system and so forth.

And again, it is also important, this is all framed correctly.

Integral credits, if you want to call them, that are not spent.

They represent reciprocal contribution to the commons, gaining benefits of the entire network as a universal collaboration.

In the early stages, I think a one-to-one, hour-to-hour basis is workable as in a traditional time bank, given the very minimal nature of what’s being done, but as things expand and more complexity is introduced, the building of a weighted system of collaboration, where different tasks have different values, depending on various factors, dynamically adjust based on feedback in a self-regulatory manner.

This I think is a good strategy and quite feasible and practical.

Notice this isn’t about trade competition and exploitation.

There is no surplus value in this system.

Rewards for labor do not increase individual advantage or wealth in the market sense, but rather balance complexity that is realized across the network itself.

For example: Changing labor demand. Imagine in a community or node, there is a needed demand for some specific type of service. It’s scarce for some reason.

Well, in a price-based market, through a sloppy, nonlinear and highly delayed process, increased labor demand often equates to a higher financial award for that labor, supply and demand.

This type of weight is automatic and dynamic in the Integral system based on feedback from direct engagement.

Hence, a method to dynamically change the time-value credit of different forms of labor based on what the totality of the system is doing.

Human action and needs. That’s a big subject, of course, and will be explained more so in the paper. But let’s move on.

“Meanwhile, interface mechanisms serve as transitional, legal, and economic buffers, enabling the acquisition of resources from the existing market system without allowing market logic to re-enter the internal network.”

Okay.

Interface mechanisms.

So we understand the Integral cooperative.

A community wants to create, say, a vertical farm, participants start with crowdsource design reaching consensus.

Then the challenge is to figure out how to bring it to physical reality.

The most intuitive route, if physical resources are not adequately available in the network, is to simply crowd fund from the emerging node community, emerging in the sense that they’re all stuck in the market system to some degree.

And once raised, land and production resources can be acquired from the external market.

But other ideas can be employed as well, such as grant seeking.

Or in rare cases, perhaps a public interface cooperative that fund raises to the external, but only for that one-time thing.

You know what I mean? Just a short-term purpose of raising funds in the event one of the co-ops of a given node has something to offer the broader community.

But beyond that, everything stays internal. Many variations can be considered, but they all lead to the same goal, simply getting the required fiat money needed to acquire things a node it can’t do without to persevere.

And once that money is used to gain needed materials, acquired tools, resources, and land get absorbed into the general community trust, a transformation.

For example, the creation of a shared tool repository, which all co-ops have access to and so forth, you know, tool libraries.

Let’s continue.

Next:
”A distributed technical backbone built on hollow chain supports modular applications for tracking labor, cooperative design governance and sustainability screening, enabling both transparency and scalability.”

Now this could change as the decentralized IT space moves very quickly these days.

But as of now, Holochain appears to be the best solution.

Holochain is a peer-to-peer application network that’s scalable, secure, and decentralized without relying on central servers or global consensus, as is the case with blockchains that enforce a single ledger through often energy-intensive consensus mechanisms.

Holochain gives each user their own tamper-proof record or source chain while data is coordinated through a distributed hash table and validated.

In other words, it’s an agent-centric approach that’s scalable and appears more efficient and adaptable.

As of now, there’s a beta version at 0.2.6 with lots of developer tools.

And I’m sure there are plenty of opinions by folks out there that embrace these peer-to-peer type development communities, and I’m certainly open to opinions.

There might be something far better out there on the horizon than I’m simply not aware of yet I am a generalist but I do my best.

But at this stage it’s the principle that matters.

And naturally in the initial stages there’s nothing wrong with a traditional centralized network for program websites.

But over time for lots of obvious reasons such as security, transparency and information integrity – it all needs to move to a more advanced decentralized infrastructure.

Next, moving on.

“This document also addresses key transitional challenges, legal compliance, hybrid business integration, education, and the construction of a parallel political movement to protect and normalize post-monetary infrastructure.”

Okay, let’s start with Education.

Now you might ask, what does education have to do with any of this, really?

Well, if feedback can inform things like values for labor reciprocity, hence labor demand, so it can with skill demand, which precedes labor.

Naturally, the first stage of any kind of labor skill development starts with education.

This is likely a more distant ambition of the system, but it’s worth the thought exercise here at the moment, where a larger order awareness of societal needs is fostered by network feedback, incentivizing youth to learn skills that are more useful to the Integral ecosystem and hence general social good.

You know, we never think of education in a truly comprehensive way in modern society, though it is inherent that one goal of any educational system is, of course, to produce social contributors through skill specialization and so forth.

The problem, of course, is today the driver of interest tends to be money, not contribution or even personal interest, and hence the whole thing is skewed at the root.

It’s not difficult to imagine an Integral cooperative established for public education based around the same time credit system, but instead incentivizing students to seek advanced education for the needs of the society – and using time credits to incentivize them.

Put another way, deficiency found in the system where something needs to get done, but there’s a lack of labor to do it: the system feeds back and establishes credits to be granted to those in reciprocation to help education toward that goal.

And again, this is a more advanced idea, but it’s worth thinking about, especially by comparison to everything in the modern day where advanced education is one of the greatest financial burdens out there at least in the United States. Where in reality, so to speak, people should be rewarded to go to school directly, not punished.

It’s one of the more catastrophic failures of the modern world.

Okay, and next, we have “hybrid business integration.”

This is another more advanced stage concept.

So we’ve already discussed the ground up development of cooperatives, allowing, for example, a 3D printing house co-op to take designs from the open access design system and convert them into tools or furniture, etc.

I hope this part of the network is clear. It’s very straightforward.

Now what about existing establishments, money-based restaurants or local shops?

Well one idea is to establish ways to interface with such willing capitalist institutions, in the interest to pull them in incentivizing them to morph their structure in favor of integral.

The leverage point is to have partial payment for labor or partial sales for customers to use the Integral time credits, along with other merger points such as a co-op, maybe providing some material support to the business once again.

As stated before, the goal of the co-ops is to be 100% off the grid from the market, to whatever degree, and I know this may seem like a contradiction.

However, this interfacing is strategic, and it’s about absorption; about getting that older market establishment to morph into integral, which is advantageous in a few ways, needless to say.

As I said in the last podcast, it is the transitional factors that will determine the outcome more than any idealized model goal.

When we view the world today, we see all these commercial institutions.

Instead of seeing them as something to override or replace, we try to see them as becoming repurposed.

And part of Integral is to carve a path to do that.

And this hybrid idea, which may sound far-fetched, is not unheard of.

In Sardinia, there is a complementary currency called the Sardex, which was started in the early 2000s as a kind of closed network exchange method, encouraging more local activity.

Existing businesses and consumers would use the Sardex in parallel to normal currency.

Nothing radical about it, but it did create a kind of hybrid system that emphasizes the local community, which is exactly what Integral does.

The same incentive exists for Integral, which I think existing businesses will embrace.

This hybrid potential, I think, is very strong, once sustainability aspects of the system are more understood by the public. Most people today you’ll find shrug their shoulders when it comes to how to be actively sustainable in their lives, beyond throwing things into a recycling bin.

Integral gives them a system level solution, at least in part.

I think it will be an attractive aspect once understood once again.

In the same way people go to package free shops or whatever kind of so-called conscious consumption many fashionably pursue.

So many people out there want to find a deeper way to be more sustainable in their daily lives.

And while it may take time for integral to really establish itself in a notable way, the principles will be very attractive to a lot of people in the sustainability movements out there.

So much so that I would even anticipate major existing environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace to rapidly support it.

There’s really no other option out there.

It is time people realize that they cannot affect the world with contrary individual actions alone, such as buying products from seemingly moral sources and processes.

There is no such thing in the market system.

And finally, at the end of that sentence, it says:  

“And the construction of a parallel political movement to protect and normalize post-monetary infrastructure.”

This isn’t about acquiescing to the toxic political system, but understanding the need to influence public opinion and in effect lobby for this social transition protecting what is being done.

I will add that even if part of society moved into this kind of system, it would still be proportionally helpful in increasing public health and environmental sustainability.

And as these communities form, so does political identity. This identity is ideally global.

Political parties could be established regionally in the name of Integral showing solidarity even if they have no perceived significant impact on elections occurring.

It is the presence that is important. In the same way, third-party candidates can change the tone or focus of mainstream outcomes, even though they are never elected or they are marginalized or perceived to have no effect.

Hope that makes sense. This kind of political cloud is going to be important to preserve this system as it expands, essentially justifying it and getting the public to support its sustainability protocols, which is its biggest strength.

Okay:

“In rejecting both capitalism and state socialism, the model synthesizes principles from systems theory, commons governance, and open-source collaboration to propose a third economic form, one that is non-exploitative, self-organizing, and materially sufficient.”

This summation is to simply emphasize the historical and conceptual differences in this decentralized, fundamentally horizontal approach.

A system rooted in an active democratic process that doesn’t merely vote on some particular thing in society, but rather through integrative participation that gets to the heart of cybernetic feedback once again.

It works on different levels, including collaboratively designing the very self-regulatory mechanisms that govern the society itself: the infrastructure underneath the systems, if you will.

Such is completely different from everything major world powers have done thus far, and very much outside of the awareness of the average person, still locked into a capitalism versus socialism false duality.

The only semi-workable example I can think of that attempted something like this was Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn in Chile.

And I will add that while Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model not talked about explicitly in the description of this paper as of yet, it is implicit because the logic behind that thinking is very effective.

And finally,:

“Emphasizing recursive organization, participatory democracy, and ecological accountability, this document offers a path beyond market scarcity and bureaucratic centrism toward a post-capitalist civilization grounded in cooperation, sustainability, and cybernetic coordination.”

And I think I’ve covered most of this.

“Recursive” nature allows for coherence and scaling.

“Participatory democracy” is rooted in the process of engagement itself, not exactly voting, even though, in, say, the realm of a co-op, management may still use older consensus processes, as we see with board members of a nonprofit today.

And the notion of “moving past market scarcity” is again important because, As I talked about in the prior podcast, the system doesn’t exploit scarcity and is rooted in technical efficiency, not market efficiency.

And this means the system will naturally gravitate toward post-scarcity, constantly doing more with less, if it is allowed to.

And over time, what will happen with the cooperatives is access to the fruits of the network will increasingly require less labor and hence ultimately become free over time.

Now, I hope by the time of the next podcast release, which I’m trying to make more frequent and shorter, this paper will officially be out there for critical analysis.

And I will note that I’ve gotten some criticism about all of this by people assuming I’m some island trying to do my own thing, and that’s not the case.

I’m simply following through with my own work with the best and most thorough approach I personally can before I open the floodgates of everyone else’s opinions.

So, I’m gonna leave it at that for now.

And it is my great pleasure now to welcome to the show my good friend Lee Camp, a comedian and activist who has continued to be on the cutting edge of a medium that many take for granted today in terms of communicative power, the ability to put forward relevant social commentary and progressive thought, while, as I always say, sneaking behind the ego of people through the use of art.

Lee and I go back about 15 years, I think.

And I believe it was the first interaction was on my show, Culture In Decline.

No, I take that back actually.

The first interaction was the inaugural Zeitgeist Media Festival that you were kind to participate in, which is still a great routine.

Numerous comedy albums, you have numerous books, and your recent project now, the weekly program, Unredacted Tonight, built on your prior show I think you have an RT for quite a few years.

Lee, I really appreciate you coming on, man.

How are you doing?

CAMP:
Thanks a lot, Peter.

It’s always good to speak to you.

And, you know, we’re a couple of old dogs still doing this stuff.

PETER:
I know, right.

And you know, I was reviewing, you know, your extensive body of work.

And it brought me back to that thing you did in my old 2012 show, Culture in Decline.

I now vintage segment, as many people refer to it, on advertising and the disgusting blight it is on our collective consciousness.

I often dream of a world without advertising, which we can only imagine the utopian air that would bring to us, ’cause people don’t seem to realize that, you know, advertising is not just in the ads we see, it’s built into the culture.

People have become walking advertisements.

It’s fully entrenched.

And before we go into the nitty gritty of today, I wanna run that segment called, “advertisements are assholes.”

LEE, [ADS ARE ASSHOLES] CLIP:

“Over an 80 year lifespan, we watch 15 and a half years of television on average.

15 and a half years of having our brains liquefied and sodomized, zombified, and then glorifying products and nonsense, and that screws with us, because advertisements are assholes.

They’re assholes.

Imagine if an advertisement were just a regular guy walking up to you on the street, just going, hey, hey you, hey, hey, if you wore these jeans, then the hot girls would really do you.

I mean like hot girls, not that ugly broad you call a girlfriend.

And by the way, could you mention to her that she needs to lose a little weight and do something about her hair?

And she could do it too if she would just use these diet pills and this hair gel.

And by the way, both of you guys should probably be smoking these cigarettes and drinking this beer.

Then you’d be really cool.

Although your teeth are looking a little yellow, but we can fix that if you would just use this tooth whitening shit.

And then the hot girls would really do you.

And by the way, are you happy with your penis size?

If you are, that’s cool.

A lot of guys that are happy with fun size?

Is that what you call that?

Fun size? A lot of girls like that.

I mean, I haven’t met any, but I bet there are some.

But if you change your mind, all you’d have to do is take a couple of these babies and soon you would have to call up guys to help you carry your junk around like a train on a wedding dress.

But how are you gonna call your junk carriers with that crappy phone you got there?

You should be using this phone with the swipey bullshit technology that makes other people feel like they’re better than you just by owning this phone and they are: They are better than you.

Oh my God, all this stuff you need and don’t have is making me anxious.

Is it making you anxious?

Is it?

Is it?

Is it?

Are you anxious now?

Are you?

Are you?

Are you?

Well then all you have to do is take a couple of these and in two weeks time you would feel better than anything.

Plus, bonus side effect, these pills also make your ass hair shiny and more manageable with extra bounce.

Anyway, I gotta go because your girlfriend just decided she looks pretty good in a vintage dress and I gotta turn that around quick before she stops taking the Ambien Prozac cocktail I gave her and then she’ll stop shopping continuously in order to fill the void created by self-hatred created by me…..

Would you hang out with that guy?” [end clip]

PETER:

And no, I wouldn’t want to hang out with that guy either, but I’m really glad you’re still in this fight.

Even though we all appear to be failing miserably, as most of the world seems to have decided that caring for the ecosystem and ultimately each other is now firmly out of fashion.

But before we go into the nightmare of existence, that is normality today, let’s start with a little reflection on your own background and decision to go the direction you did with your art and activism.

Tell us about how you came to be.

LEE:

Oh man, I started… I was not political as a young man even through college.

I just wanted to be a comedian.

I started starting writing comedy when I was 12 and didn’t perform at all and in any way.

No, not an actor, nothing.

And then at 17, 18, I really became obsessed with stand-up, started going on stage as much as I could.

Finished college in Virginia and immediately moved to New York City and spent many years slogging away in the comedy clubs, performing every night, you know, probably three sets, 10 minutes each, and then also touring the country, performing at colleges, which was how I made my living for those first several years.

But about, you know, 24, 25, 26, I start waking up politically, you know, reading some of the important books that really got me to think outside of the Overton window that the mainstream media feeds us, you know, Chomsky and Chris Hedges and watching different things and, you know, reading your stuff, watching your videos.

All of this stuff helped to make me think outside of it.

And I then wanted to have these thoughts, these truths, these important realizations as part of my comedy.

And to me, was far more interesting to do comedy about that than to do comedy about airline seats.

That’s where I’ve thrust myself ever since.

Now, there’s moments where you could go, “Wow, that was a great choice” because some people were really into that kind of comedy.

” But all in all, I’d say 90% of the doors that might open for a young comedian or a comedian that’s been working at it for years and years, are going to be closed if you’re anti-capitalist, if you’re making fun of corporations in a real way, a real deep way, as opposed to The Daily Show, you know, the quip about Walmart here or there.

But if you’re really going at corporate America and the US Empire on a daily basis, then you’re not really sought after by almost any entity.

And then I got very lucky that there was a network, RT America, that wanted me to create a comedy show.

I was given something that is unheard of on the American landscape, which was I essentially had full creative control.

I wrote all my own words.

I mean, there is no comedy TV show that doesn’t have a team of writers writing everything.

I wrote all my stuff.

No one ever told me to say anything or not to say anything.

They didn’t care about advertisers.

They didn’t barely have any advertisers.

So I really was just free to do what I had always been doing, except I was on a television network.

And that went for eight years, “Redacted Tonight.”

And then it’s been three years since it was shut down by US sanctions.

And now I have just brought it back.

We were on the third episode, a new version that’s completely independent, it’s just me creating it, funding it, everything.

It’s called “Unredacted Tonight.”

PETER:

I think there was either a New York Times article something that came out about you years ago, basically implied you were some mouthpiece of the Kremlin, right?

LEE:

Yep, full, and I did a response about all the mistruths and half-truths, and just it really is an interesting inside look at the propaganda in the New York Times, even done against a comedian.

And I also think it was more than just the New York Times happened to do an article.

It was actually part of a concerted campaign to make sure that I was defined as a propagandist when people would Google me, search me out my Wikipedia page because the New York Times piece and an NPR hit piece on me both come out within a couple months of each other.

And of course, that’s going to be at the top of all the Google searches.

So that’s who you become to most people who don’t know better.

PETER:

Yeah, I know that world very well.

LEE:

Yeah, yeah, I’m sure.

PETER:

And you make a great point in terms of the role of these comedians in society that we have today in the sense of social function and the chasm that exists between real innovators, those who can be credited with actually changing and inspiring people to think differently.

And again, that modern swath of pop culture, commentary comedians who seem to be kind of making things worse by way of almost placating and trivializing in their mockery.

It’s a unique phenomenon.

Like many years ago, major figures in comedy and entertainment generally stayed away from political and social issues, which was kind of bad, but it was different: the Johnny Carson era.

And while today, it’s almost like a prerequisite for these talk shows and comedians to focus on politics in their flimsy way, especially in the Trump reality TV show and I feel it’s completely backfired from the standpoint of enlightenment.

I mean, some politician or some billionaire does something truly horrible that the public should be absolutely angry and outraged by.

And then the mainstream comedy industrial complex picks it up and outputs its mockery.

And once that happens, it’s like a whitewash.

The seriousness of the issue becomes secondary in this strange sociological unfolding.

It’s very bizarre.

I think in part, we can talk a little bit about the rise of Donald Trump, but I think there’s a twisted element of the public that’s become so indoctrinated into this drama that they kind of wanted him back just for the drama, just to keep the “second season” going, you know?

LEE:

And on top of that, CNN’s numbers cratered after Trump left office.

It was down by like 40%.

So there’s got to be … even CNN that pretends to be kind of anti-Trump.

They gotta be rooting for Trump to be back in office for the reality show to get going again.

But yeah, to talk about the late night shows you’re referencing, they really just do serve to push everybody back inside the Overton window.

I mean, they’re never gonna question capitalism.

They’re never gonna question the US empire writ large.

It’s all about, as Chris Hedges phrased it, it’s all about the foibles of the leaders.

It’s about Biden tripping over some stairs as opposed to the actual mud we’re walking around in all day long of capitalism or market economics.

It’s never really gonna get to that deep level.

And it’s not that I don’t mention these rulers, these ruling elite, I do, but I try and bring a lot of it back to that, that those deeper issues and make people think in a slightly deeper way.

I think the biggest and maybe grandest example of this was there was a massive -and it’s the only time this ever happened -massive march on Washington or performance in Washington, you might remember, the Daily Show in Colbert had rallies in DC, I think it was 2012, maybe 2012, 2013, and they attracted something like a million people.

And the Daily Show never done anything like this; Colbert reported never done anything like this.

A million young people who are largely waking up to what’s going on in their world a little bit here and there.

And I watched parts of that thinking like, God, this is their chance.

They have a million people in DC ready to be turned on to create some kind of change.

And literally Jon Stewart’s finale of the whole thing when he sums it all up and tells everybody what they should believe.

The sum of it all was we should be a little nicer to each other and everything should meet in the middle.

And, you know, the Republicans and Democrats are the two sides of things and just meet in the middle and then we can all go on about our day.

It was, it could not have been any more defined as “just be nice and go home.”

PETER:

That’s the ultimate placating thing, isn’t it?

That’s what everyone falls back on.

They refuse to address structure.

They don’t think about power.

They don’t think about the hierarchy.

think about it in terms of some kind of – it’s the easy way out – some kind of, oh, we just need better aptitude in our ethics and morality and everything will be fine.

I’m so enraged by that disposition.

It’s much of what I talk about because without referencing the structure and the incentives of our society and looking at, for example, at the wealth attained by such people as Jon Stewart, you know that affects their psychology.

These are the same people that say things like, “oh, we don’t want equality of outcome, we want equality of opportunity” as if there’s even such a fucking thing in a society as slanted as we have today.

They’re always trying to create basically a defense of their own wealth.

And that’s what I think we see happen to a lot of people as they go up that ladder from people like Stewart and even Joe Rogan.

You see the twistedness start to occur; and they just become increasingly detached from, again, the structural relationship.

And they won’t criticize it because that means they are also part of it because they’re accepting what they have achieved or what they think they’ve achieved.

LEE:

You and I have both been on Joe Rogan in the past back when he had a little more sanity to him.

And now he’s become like a like brand laundering for billionaires.

Literally Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, it couldn’t be any farther from what, you know, at least some of his stuff was five and ten years ago.

PETER:

Yeah, I always source it back to those studies in USC Berkeley.

There’s been dozens, if not hundreds of studies internationally, of what happens to people when they get more wealth and power, mainly more wealth.

You’ve probably read some of that stuff.

LEE:

Yeah.

PETER:

It’s pretty incredible.

And it’s very consistent.

You begin to see it.

Like, look at that Jeff Bezos article he put out in Washington Post, shutting down basically opinions, any what critical of the establishment and capitalism, saying that “this is about liberty now.”

I mean, straight out of like a Hyak, Friedman propaganda manual, that this is about liberty and free markets.

That’s what we’re gonna focus on in our opinion section of the Washington Post.

And that is exactly what you’d expect from a billionaire.

In fact, Elon Musk is pretty much the archetype of every single value distortion you can come up with.

But in terms of the fact that what he’s doing is dismantling the ultimate arch enemy of capitalism, which is the state, and we could go on a long tangent about how capitalism creates the nature of the state, how you have to regulate market capitalism.

But the boogeyman has always been, “oh, it’s the state, it’s government.”

I mean, we literally have a whole, whole politic; the people in power, particularly now, they don’t even believe in their position ’cause they hate government.

They all are in the cult of market capitalism.

But before we jump into too many tangents, ’cause I got my little order here, you did some really great stuff in your new show.

You pointed out some things I think are worth, worth exploring here a bit more.

Let’s turn things to the enlightening spectacle of Gaza and something you spoke of in regard to the Hannibal Directive.

LEE:

– Yeah, I’ve been covering all of the lies coming out of Israel for the past, you know, whatever it is, 17, 18 months.

It really is just crazy. But there are things that have been admitted by Israel that are not… by Israel, by Israel media that are not admitted in Western media.

They’re not admitted in US media.

For example, to this day, we’ll hear New York Times, CNN, Fox News, all of them say, anytime they cover anything in Gaza, they say, “This started October 7, 2023 when Hamas broke into Israel and killed 1200 Israelis on that day.”

Now, of course, it didn’t actually start that day, but that’s not the point.

The 1200 number has been repeated again, and again, “they killed 1200 Israelis!” And yet it has been admitted by Israel, Israeli reports, UN reports, Yoav Gallant, the Defense Minister with now war crimes charges against him, but he’s no longer the Defense Minister, but he was on October 7th.

It has been admitted by all those that the Hannibal Directive was used.

The Hannibal Directive is Israel’s stance or directive that is sometimes used where when soldiers or people are being taken hostage, they decide to just kill everyone, kill the hostages, kill the people taking them, kill the bystanders, anyone.

And that was fully in effect on October 7th.

We know that Israel killed hundreds of people.

And this explains how you can actually look up images of the piles, hundreds of blown up cars.

Hamas had guns for the most part, almost exclusively, had guns.

These blown up cars were not blown up by Hamas.

They were blown up by Israel, which is also in a recent report admitted to spending thousands, ((expending, I guess) thousands of, uh, shells from IDF helicopters, uh, hundreds of massive bombs were dropped on October 7th.

So we will never know how many of the 1200 Israelis were killed by the IDF and by Israel, but it was lots.

It was a lot of them.

And they’re also televised interviews of some of the tank gunners that drove into kibbutzes and were told to fire on civilian structures.

Just go ahead and fire tank rounds at civilian structures.

And these are admitted on camera because they’re kind of proud of their behavior on October 7th.

But it is absolutely nothing like the truth that we are getting.

You know, there’s just so much about it that has been lies.

All the baby stuff has been debunked.

You know, exactly two children were killed on October 7th by all accounts that have been actually verified.

So this whole, you know, “40-headed babies” is all just, it’s all just garbage.

And it is amazing that Israel, you know, has succeeded in largely putting forward all of this propaganda in order to try to justify what is, by dictionary definition, a genocide.

And you know, people go, “if it’s a genocide (people who are not very bright) go, if it’s a genocide, why are there still Gazans alive?”

Genocide does not mean that every single person was killed.

The Holocaust was a genocide.

It doesn’t mean every Jew is now dead.

A genocide is an attempt to kill a large – or a portion – of a group of people.

And this is, that is what they’ve done in Gaza.

It’s just, it’s just dictionary definition.

And of course, we, there are UN reports on this.

There’s ICC charges against Netanyahu and Galant.

But you know, it continues, they continue to put forward this ridiculous narrative.

And the U.S. continues to fund an arm it.

And now right now we’re supporting a famine, even if bombs aren’t dropping on Gaza at the moment, we’re supporting just straight up famine as Israel cuts off all the aid.
PETER:
Yeah, and the electricity.

And I think it was today or yesterday, one of the representatives of Israel said they were planning to move out 5,000 Palestinians a day.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this.

It’s one of those comments they make under the surface.

It’s the ethnic cleansing – at a minimum – obviously the genocide being there as well.

But and then of course Trump coming in, describing his “Gazan Riviera.”

It’s almost like a satire.

It’s hard to believe that, especially when you look at the media, that this narrative has still retained its strength of the victimhood of Israel and that they have done no wrong.

It’s all self-defense.

The enormous pressure and push back against these major universities that have had pro-Palestinian protests, and yet they’re somehow deemed “anti-Semitic.”

They’re trying to cut funding for these institutions to stop basically pro-Palestinian protests.

It’s like a whole machine.

Incredible.

Absolutely incredible.

And there’s been no repercussions.

The impunity is just astounding.

LEE:

Yeah, and I’m glad you mentioned, you know, the fact that anyone who questions Israel’s narrative is called anti-Semitic.

I’m Jewish by birth, atheist by choice, but it actually allows for more anti-Semitism to follow Israel’s position, which dilutes what the term means and uses it as a weapon to basically say you can never question Israel’s behaviors.

So now when people say anti-Semitism, no one knows what they mean.

Do you mean that you simply said that there shouldn’t be a genocide in Gaza?

Do you mean you actually are perpetrating real anti-Semitism?

So people don’t think about the fact that not only is Israel just wrong, that this stuff is not anti-Semitism, but it actually dilutes what the word should mean and what we should actually be opposed to in our society.

PETER:

Absolutely, completely disrespectful to those that have suffered true anti-Semitism.

The idea that, for example, legislation has been put forward in Congress to basically attribute pro-Palestinian anything or any kind of opposition to Israel and the boycotts and whatnot – as anti-Semitism – once again, it shows the incredible power that they’re trying to put forward in this extremely successful propaganda campaign.

So, oh, a hostage is rescued from Palestine.

Israeli hostage gets rescued.

It’s headline news.

No one says anything about the trauma of the Palestinians or the thousands of Palestinians being tortured and sexually abused and in Israeli prisons or any of the families that get their actual people back in Palestine that had been incarcerated and tortured and whatnot.

None of it.

The double sidedness, the double standard is just outrageous.

Like I can’t think of any modern or even a historical example for that matter.

It’s like a, it’s like a trance that the whole world has been pushed into.

LEE:

– And I’m glad you mentioned the hostages because one of the things I keep coming back to is that Israelis taken by Hamas in the Gaza are called hostages.

The hostages held by Israel are called prisoners if they’re ever mentioned at all.

There were 5,000 Palestinian hostages prior to October 7th that Israel was holding.

Now it’s more like 10,000 or maybe even more hostages that Israel is holding.

So you end up in this scenario where a lot of Americans, when they go, “oh, they came to a ceasefire deal, Hamas is returning  15 hostages and Israel’s releasing 600 women and children that they were holding…”

And most Americans go, what women and children?

Like, who are they releasing?

Like they’ve literally never heard that Israel has thousands of hostages.

PETER:

indiscriminately captured, absolutely insane.

The other thing, as an aside, in that one debate between Trump and Biden and Trump refers to Biden as a Palestinian, or something to that effect.

Do you remember that?

LEE:

Yeah, pro-Palestinian.

PETER:

Well, he didn’t say pro, he said something to the effect: basically Biden was a Palestinian.

[clip: Trump]

“And you should let ‘em go and finish the job.

He doesn’t want to do it.

He’s become like a Palestinian, but they don’t like him because he’s a very bad Palestinian.

He’s a weak one.”

[end clip]”

Peter:

Which goes to show what they’ve done is conflated the very term Palestinian with terrorist, basically, with Hamas, as if every Palestinian person is in favor of just indiscriminate killing and whatnot.

And it’s just, again, another level of the outrageous propaganda and this incredibly successful colonial venture.

And the public outrage disappoints me probably more than anything else.

I just can’t believe the United Nations or just any breathing human being is not completely offended by what’s happening on this planet in the 21st century.

This kind of stuff should have been out of fashion by like the 18th century, but here we are once again.

Now the other thing you bring up in your show, which was, I thought really excellent ’cause I always like the harp on this myth of free market economics is China’s economic efficiency and their ability to produce like a $1,200 electric car, which would be just incredible to have in the United States and other countries that are not respectively banning it through tariffs and whatnot.

Would you mind describing a little bit of that segment that you put forward?

Because that was very educational.

LEE:

Yeah, it was kind of just a segment on a variety of things that where China is lapping the United States.

One of the ones that people probably have heard the most about is that the AI model Deep-Seek comes out and it’s apparently largely better than ChatGPT and OpenAI, but ChatGPT and OpenAI made theirs with something like $500 million, but they’ve also invested billions more to continue it.

And meanwhile, China made this with $6 million: DeepSeek was made.

And furthermore, it’s open source, which means anyone in the world can use it and add to it and make it better, whereas open AI is not actually open source.

So that’s one example, the EV, the electronic vehicles; even US propaganda outlets like the Atlantic have said that China has the best electric cars that are the most affordable, the ease of use, battery life, all of those things.

Most of them are the best in China and yet the US has made it nearly impossible to get these electric vehicles, which is not so-called open markets at all.

It’s just building up walls.

And so really what America becomes is just “we can’t beat the things being made in other countries, but we can sure as hell slap them out of the hands of Americans and try and make sure most Americans don’t even know these things exist.”

Oh yeah, they put forward a bill.

Congress did to make it illegal to download deep-seek with an up to a year in prison and like a million dollar fine or something like that.

It’s just like laughable.

PETER:

really is.

LEE:
 Well, the last thing I was gonna say is then the larger infrastructure achievements of China, which have been just truly incredible, it has a lot to do with the fact that, you know, some of what the way China behaves is outside of the market system in terms of, they are literally just decide they’re doing things to facilitate life for their citizens, and they’ll do it long term.

The US never does anything long term.

It’s how much money can be made next quarter, maybe one year from now, whereas China will have a 10-year plan to put highways into, you know, to bend and in other areas.

So it’s just a completely different way of thinking about things.

The U.S. never, like I can’t even think of the last time the U.S. had a 10-year plan for something that was not supposed to be highly profitable.

PETER:

Which brings us to the capitalist cult, ultimately.

You have the idea of technical efficiency and market efficiency, which I’ve written about: the US being at the peak of this religious sect of belief in markets, which of course is full of contradiction and whatnot, hence tariffs and all of that, because it’s not really about markets.

It’s an obsession with competition.

It’s the sickness of competition at the root, which is why no one can buy the $1,200 EV and so forth.

But in the US, because of the inequalities that are generated, which moves into the centers of power, such as Elon Musk and all these characters, as we see perfectly exemplified in the new Trump executive branch, there’s too much benefit there.

And it also alludes to the fact that if you really want efficiency in society, capitalism is the worst thing you can possibly have in its most primal root nature, because free markets are essentially a kind of chaos system; a micro-competitive nightmare, right?

Of a bunch of singular hierarchical elements at war with each other.

We don’t like “state capitalism” because it’s more of a monopoly.

But what we have instead is a bunch of little monopolies that are constantly fighting each other.

And you can’t think of anything more fucking inefficient than that because nothing’s working together.

And China, – say what you want about China’s human rights violations and everything else and it’s social oppression.

There’s always that level.

And the US has its vast swaths of that in a different way, but China’s doing something that’s actually mature, which is literally taking structure into account.

Say “we can do these things efficiently.”

We can work together in a harness, true technical efficiency, and make things cheaper, which is what you really hope the efficiency of markets do.

They get better and better at certain things, and everything gets cheaper.

Like the iPhone today, or whatever cell phone should really be a fraction of what its original cost was.

But no, in the competitive mindset, they can’t do that as obviously is the need constant consumption, which is no level of the system as you know.

But no, and that’s, you know, state capitalism, of course is gonna be better than any kind of open free market utopian capitalism.

And China proves that case.

And it’s incredible to see that evidence, but yet as you point out, most in America – they’re oblivious to that.

They think Tesla is the peak of all-thing electric car.

And they’re not even aware.

LEE:

And you talk about this, you know, endless competition.

But if you look like internally, not that there’s no competition, but if you look like internally at Apple, how do they design their stuff?

Well, they have groups of engineers working together and sharing ideas.

PETER:

Right.

LEE:

Like internally, they understand that’s the way to build the best device, whereas externally, it’s no, no, no, we need to patent everything and make sure no one can ever get anywhere near anything we’ve ever come up with, even to the point that, you know, Amazon and Apple patent like the curvature on the edge of the phone.

So it’s very different inside the corporation versus outside.

PETER:

Yeah, it really is.

There was a major cybernetic efficiency expert in the 1960s that finally got most corporations in the US to realize they couldn’t have this myth of internal competition, you know, everyone’s battling for bonuses?

And some companies still sort of have that angle, but most of them learn their lesson because in management science, you just don’t do that.

And what’s the logic there?

You’ve expand it out?

Well, maybe we should have a society where all industries or sectors or the entire economy actually fucking work together ’cause you’re gonna have the most optimized form of efficiency, competition destroys all of that.

That kind of religious dedication to this mythology, which when I say the market economics cult, that’s what I define it as.

It’s the irrational commitment to unproven assumptions.

And that’s what seems to be just as prevalent today as it was in the peak of this mythology going back again to the 1950s and 60s with Milton Friedman and FA Hayek.

And in the current manifestation of this, and it’s kind of ebb and flow between, well, we need regulation, well, we need some kind of safeguards against inequality: We need some kind of safety net for society.

We are in that different flow now where the cult has taken over once again and it’s amplifying these fake values and practices.

And now the dismantling of just about everything is happening in the United States, which people should be extremely terrified by.

People can be horrified by Donald Trump and his personality, but what he represents is an archetype of just what this system is.

It’s competitive values, it’s selfishness, and all of the practices that go along with that.

And I’m not sure what the repercussions are going to be as people like Musk come in and just willy-nilly disassemble all of these regulatory institutions, but it’s not going to be good because the only real role of the state, if you’re going to agree with this society in terms of using market capitalism, is you have to have the safeguard state.

That’s the entire point, is to counter the negative market externalities that cannot be solved by market economics alone, hence pollution and run-away inequality.

And that’s what we’re seeing disassembled.

And the repercussions of that are going to be fucking dramatic.

LEE:

And many of these things were instituted under FDR, both because there was enough worker, you know, enough unionization and enough worker power to force the ruling elite to accept some of these things like social security and Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and weekends and things like that.

And the other thing was that was also forced through during a time when there was this big battle between capitalism and communism around the world.

And the capitalists realized that if the communist countries were going to have things like social security and stuff like that, that they needed to offer something so that it wasn’t just 50% of the society living on a sidewalk.

And now all those little safeguards meant to allow capitalism to keep going are being shredded.

PETER:

And to wrap this conversation, Lee, activism is the art of communication and developing new theories, trying to develop new structures and new ways of living, at least in the form of activism for true social change.

I don’t necessarily believe anymore, even though I will say we have to do whatever we can but in terms of using democracy as we know it, it’s become so utterly corrupted by the procedures that are inherent to it by the way the media comes into play:

What is your opinion on all this in terms of how we can try to get some type of relevant change moving forward?

LEE:

Yeah, I agree.

I also have gotten, you know, out of disheartened, disheartened is probably a lighter term than is required with, you know, our democracy on the federal level it’s completely rigged by money, it’s just gone.

And so I don’t tell people not to vote because you can have some impact on lower level issues, some state stuff, some ballot initiative.

So it’s not don’t vote, but it should be less than 1% of what you discuss if you actually want to create real change.

You should not be discussing who you’re going to vote for, 99% of your time.

And it’s not that I think that a lot of these marches are so-called protests are meaningless.

But as the amazing Eleanor Goldfield calls them, many of them are parades.

They’re not protests.

A parade goes in, you know, it has an allotted amount of time that has been signed off on by the police.

And you go there and you hold up your signs and then it’s time to go home and everyone goes home.

It’s a lovely parade.

And I think it can have some impact in terms of waking up like younger people that have never even thought about these issues or, hell, older people have never thought about these issues, but it can create some awareness.

It does not change anything about the way the ruling elite are behaving the way the society is behaving.

So I think it really comes down to in terms of protest, it comes down to what is going to interrupt business as usual.

That is the only thing we’ve ever seen have a true impact on how the systems function is whether business as usual is being interrupted.

And that gives leverage to the people, to the workers, to the actual mass movements, as opposed to the tiny, tiny number of ruling elite that control the systems.

And then outside of that, I’d say it has to do with, you know, you talk about this creating the new systems and coming up with what those would look like and then creating small versions of those.

That’s a lot of the change we’ve seen through humanity has been in that way.

It started as a small different way of doing something that was done by only a few people and then it spread and it grew to the point that it became the dominant system.

So to me, those are the things that create change as opposed to parades.

PETER:

Absolutely, which I think parade would be synonymous with catharsis, right?

Because it’s like, oh, let’s just yell and scream and wave our flags or our banners.

And then we feel like we’ve done something, right?

And you go back and get drunk.

Or as I think it was Frank Zappa once said, “or you might get a blowjob from a woman in a dirty blanket.”

That was as one of his crudest lines ever, but it was really excellent when someone asked Zappa what he thought about the ’60s revolution.

He’s like, what revolution?

[ZAPPA CLIP]

“I mean, by and large, by and large, there was nothing that even resembled a revolution.

There’s a lot of people talking about it.

Well, and they like to get together in large numbers and hold signs and march around and talk about it.

And then after the demonstration, they would either be beaten up and have to get the blood off their head or they’d get a blow job from a girl in a smelly blanket.”

PETER:

Ridiculous, but you got a love Zappa for his opinions.

And I really appreciate your time today, Lee.

anything else so you want to you want to talk about? And or please of course give out your website and your show and everything you’re doing now and give a summation.

LEE:

Well I brought this along because you were going to ask about the power of comedy.

PETER:

Oh right.

LEE:

There’s a brilliant book I just want to read like one minute of it. But a brilliant book about the Palestinian people called the Perfect Victims by Muhammad el-Kurd and he talks about the power of comedy or humor.

And you know, he’s referring, he refers to people like in Gaza in the West Bank and you know, a man walks by and says to the IDF soldier that is, you know who thrust himself into his life.

And he says, “How many times have I told you not to park your tank in my driveway?”

He says “here, the man has created for himself a realm in which the mighty Merkava is but a boring nuisance, a bureaucratic measure like doing your taxes. In this realm, the soldier’s domination does not permeate the psyche.
His rifle is but a toy gun. The tear gas in the air is just someone’s nauseating perfume. Irreverence is a dignifying act of refusal for those confined by siege or incarceration can be emancipated in the mind. To dig a tunnel, one must first imagine it before clawing at the floor. Irreverence builds an alternative reality where the occupation is not impenetrable and the occupier is not indelible. Here the symbolic meaning of military barriers does not extend beyond the tangibility of their cement. For the speaker irreverence is not just a rhetorical strategy, but a form of self-preservation and defiance, a stubborn rejection of psychological subjugation.”

And it goes on, but I love the idea of the stubborn rejection of psychological subjugation.

And I think when we are in these dark times, and you and I over these many years have seen many people like this, a tendency to burn out.

Like they may be amazing activists, amazing protesters, amazing speakers for a couple of years, and then they’re kind of done with it. And I think you have to have the techniques to keep going.

And one of them that I think is very powerful is humor, is comedy.

And then the other reason that I do it with my new show “Unredacted Tonight” and all my other stuff is because it’s a way to get people who would not normally listen to these ideas to listen longer.

Like you said, we’re so split up, we’re so fractured in the society and so many people will turn something off the moment they think it’s not of team red or team blue or whichever team they claim they are.

And humor tends to get people to listen a little bit longer about these ideas and about these truths.

And that is why I have always felt comedy is powerful.

Peter

Absolutely.

I think it was even Kelly Carlin, a mutual friend of ours who said that you were carrying the torch, I believe, of her father (George), which I thought was a really kind thing to say.

Always inspired when I watch your stuff and I encourage everybody to do so as well.

So where can I find your stuff, buddy?

LEE:

Unredacted Tonight is the new show.

It premieres every Thursday night, but you can watch it anytime.

And the best place to give you, I’m on YouTube, I’m on Rumble, all that stuff, but the best place is linktree.

com/lecamp, L-E-E-C-A-M-P, linktree.

com/leacamp has all my stuff.

PETER:

Awesome, I’ll put that link in the description of the video as well.

Well, all right, brother.

LEE:
Thanks a lot Peter.

PETER:

Keep fighting, I appreciate it, we’ll talk to you soon.