Episode Summary:
In this episode, Peter Joseph addresses the release of the Integral White Paper, as the core focus, and critiques the pervasive vagueness of alternative economic discourse, arguing that terms like socialism, communism, and Marxism function as empty abstractions that obscure real systems analysis and ultimately reinforce capitalism. He outlines why market price mechanisms fail as tools of economic calculation, ecological balance, and democratic coordination, and introduces Integral as a technically grounded, cybernetic, post-market transition system built around five core subsystems designed to enable cooperation, sustainability, and post-scarcity conditions. The episode also explores human compatibility with collaborative systems, challenges myths about “human nature,” and emphasizes the necessity of structural change over ideological debate. Joseph concludes by warning of accelerating authoritarianism in the United States as a product of capitalist power dynamics, stressing that without transforming underlying economic structures, political regression and ecological collapse will continue unabated.

YOUTUBE
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/3L8OzfB6r1VbOfeAeinnSw
Podbean: https://revolutionnow.podbean.com/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolution-now/id1530637420

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

This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now episode 58.

It’s been a minute and I apologize for the delay.

I do really want to get these podcasts going at a much more rapid pace, ideally every two weeks at shorter lengths, but it’s just been one hurdle after another.

Once I get my film finally done, it’ll be much easier.

Along with the Integral website, which I’ve been developing behind the scenes now, speaking of which, the Integral White Paper is now finally out.

It can be downloaded at integralcollective.io.

It is a large document, roughly 350 pages. Dense, technical, the purpose being to lay out how a post-market, post-scarcity-focused, democratic, cooperative economic system can be built and operated and scaled as not only a new socioeconomic system, but as a transition system.

I’m looking forward to feedback on that. This is a working document meant to be stress test, and while indeed detailed, it is still very preliminary.

As an aside, I am going to produce a more publicly accessible text eventually on Integral, a traditional book, the challenge being to explain the system dynamics of Integral with something more relatable to the average person.

Some may remember the New Human Rights Movement, which I published back in 2017, largely diagnostic focusing on system failures inherent to markets, systemic failures, I should say. Everything toward imbalance on all relevant levels, ecologically, socially, psychologically.

And while that work did introduce some foundational theory for change in its final chapter and in some of the appendices, this future book will go far deeper as a continuation.

For example, the economic calculation discussion in the New Human Rights Movement was very broad, intentionally so, just planting seeds, while in integral materials, that same issue is addressed in far more concrete operational terms.

And as mentioned, over the next few months, website development is going to be a major focus. I think the initial attempt will be to show simulations of the system first, along with instructional elements, educational elements, to try to get people to have a feel of it, kind of a user feel of it. This will be the phase one communications project, if you will.

Now, as far as today’s podcast, I do have some notes regarding the lovely state of the world as the US goes full imperial Nazi. And I’m going to address those dark concerns at the end of the podcast, I think, to keep some form.

So let’s begin.

Before I jump into the integral stuff, I want to come back to a subject I’ve talked about before regarding the problem of poorly defined alternative economic theory.

I’ve already gotten some feedback on the complexity of the integral paper, and while complexity for complexity’s sake is never good and pretentious, I would hope it is obvious that if we are serious about system change, being detailed and specific is obviously critical.

It seems silly to even say that, but hear me out.

The casualness of so much of the conversation that has underpinned the post-capitalist and post-scarcity community has been an unspoken problem.

What we do not need are more superficial proposals rooted in abstraction, stats on how we can achieve abundance, new city system designs, or colorful descriptions of a new good-feeling world while simultaneously expressing no means to get there or understanding of how the system dynamics of that system are to work.

For example, you often hear people describe something like, say, a circular economy. This is common with normal environmentalist talk. They talk about reuse, cycling, closed loops, minimal waste. And yes, that is all conceptually sound. Needs a starting point, but such description is not interaction. They don’t express this potential.

It doesn’t tell you how decisions are made, how conflicts are resolved, how priorities are set, how constraints are created, or how complexity is processed when real human variety enters the system.

And when proposed alternatives remain abstracted or aspirational, they don’t just fail to materialize into true utility. They actively condition people to accept a weak framework of discussion and association that appears sufficient when it really is not.

And this placates and slows progress while generally confusing everything.

And again, you may say to yourself, “Well, we all know this. Peter, I’m sure most of you do.” It sounds utterly needless to say. But the problem is deeper and more widespread and nuanced than most realize rooted once again in extreme systems illiteracy going back centuries.

And the result of this lapse is highly regressive. So poor in fact that people might as well say nothing at all. In fact, I would prefer they did. Say nothing at all.

And I think the best example of course in this flawed discourse concerns those three infamous yet functionally meaningless terms, communism, socialism, and Marxism.

These three terms could be flushed down the toilet tomorrow and it would make no difference to social progress. In fact, it would deeply improve clarity if they could be deleted from the consciousness of global society.

And my objection here isn’t rooted in wanting to ignore the academic or historical observations or philosophical ponderances associated to Marx or related theorists. All that’s fine. Rather, it’s rooted in the fact that those terms give no viable inference and do how a non-capitalist economy is actually organized, and yet people pretend that they do.

That’s what I mean about this vague conditioning. As I’ve written about many times when it comes to how these symbols and what they seemingly represent are really just reactionary when it comes to solutions. And yet people continue to talk about them as if they describe a defined method of socioeconomic organization.

Just take a glance around you in modern economic debate, not only in pop culture, such as on social media or talk shows, but also with major academic institutions and figures, expressing repeatedly this ridiculous lexicon. Notably of course, the classic false duality of capitalism versus socialism.

On one side, you have these self-professed socialists holding up their quotes by Karl Marx repeating slogans, equating Marx’s detailed analysis of capitalism, which was 95% of what Marx talked about, with the assumed rise of some revolutionary yet undefined model of socioeconomic organization, while on the other side proponents of capitalism endlessly ran to why this socialism has not and can never work saturated and abstracted, belligerent, empirically void propaganda that has germinated for probably 200 years.

Hence, a view that also presupposes a recognizable system called socialism, which once again doesn’t actually exist as a structure in the real world.

And the only meaningful outcome of it all is the preservation of market capitalism.

I’ll say that again. If you are a self-professed socialist, Marxist, or communist, railing against the woes of capitalism in the promotion of an assumed new model ready to be applied or has already existed, the only thing you’re doing is reinforcing the stability of market capitalism.

Why? Because there is no model. And the whole thing becomes a kind of cultural scarecrow, an anti-capitalist rorschach, a—

Outside of course, for such terms being used merely as a heuristic, common-minded people may use to profess certain shared familiarities related to critiques of capitalism.

If people wish to sit around a fire with corn cob pipes in pontificate agreeing with the various ponderings of Karl Marx, one could heuristically call that a Marxist conversation. But beyond that, no such thing as a Marxist conception of non-capitalist alternative system.

Aside from the few contrarian statements he made, which basically inverted the capitalist construct, forging this very loose idea of so-called socialism, or more ideally, communism as some later stage. And those reactionary elements do not define a system model, nor do they plant the seeds for one in any defining way.

Communism, socialism, and Marxism are not systems of organization or management. They are generalized vague philosophical frameworks with endless interpretations and no consistent operational mechanics between them.

They are belief constructs, and belief constructs are not measurable systems of dynamic coordination.

And that’s again what I mean by systems literacy. You can call them systems if you want, just as you can call a “rock a system.” But when it comes to the actual operation of something, a structured process that can be identified and replicated, they’re not systems at all.

Meaning, it is baseless to say something like “socialist results in XYZ” from any observational standpoint.

Now, can loose forms of belief inform a social systems design? Sure, sure they can. But that’s not sufficient to take on a definition.

In the same way environmental concern and the interest in sustainability may also inform social policy institutions, economic incentives, even social structure to agree. But environmentalism isn’t a social system.

Environmentalism, just like socialism, is a generalized position toward a general goal and implies nothing in regard to how such goals are to be achieved once again.

Can you imagine someone saying something ridiculous like environmentalism doesn’t work? Well, that is precisely the same as when people say socialism doesn’t work.

In fact, it’s even worse with the term socialism because the term environmentalism, environmentalism actually has a specific body of referent. Environmentalism is clearly about making sure some kind of consideration is occurring for the environment, reducing waste and pollution and so on.

When people hear the word environmentalism, most immediately grasp what is being referenced. That is not the case with the term socialism to run this into the ground even more.

If you ask 20 people on the street what socialism means, you will likely receive 20 different answers.

And I’ll go even further in this rant to say that in this context, appeals to a true or correct definition of socialism is also completely irrelevant. The utility of any shared term depends on the existence of a grounded, shared referent. Without that, the term cannot be useful.

And of course, the exact same goes for this idea of Marxism.

Claims such as Marxism killed 100 million people in the 20th century—completely, logically incoherent.

The proposition treats Marxism as a singular causal agent, capable of directly producing such outcomes. It is not. Marxism is not a concrete actor, institution, not a policy framework or decision-making system. It cannot act, choose, implement, or kill.

If we want to be annoyingly technical from the standpoint of predicate logic, the error is even more basic. A vast multivariable set of historical processes involving states, leaders, institutions, material conditions, wars, famines, and other power-related structures are being collapsed into a single predicate attached to an abstract, semantically unstable term.

It is classic category error once again that flattens causality into absurdity.

The subject term cannot support the predicate being assigned to it, and what makes this especially damaging is that the self-identified Marxists will respond to such a thing by attempting to defend against the claim itself on its own terms rather than rejecting it outright as absurd.

I mean, I guess they have to if they’re calling themselves Marxist.

And in doing so, they tacitly accept the false linguistic nonsense logical framing, conceding legitimacy to an idiotic proposition that should never enter analysis in the first place.

It’s like if I call you a jerk and instead of dismissing the obvious insult, you give into it and you say something like, “Well, but, you know, jerks, they’ve done a lot of good things for the world, haven’t they?”

And this is what I mean when I say such discourse folds back into reinforcing market capitalism.

The language itself is rigged and it’s something people need to think about: the tyranny of words, the tyranny of syntax. People think in language.

To say Marxism killed 100 million people or socialism or whatever is just like saying leftism as even greater generality killed 100 million people, which I’ve actually heard people say out there. That’s how bad this kind of framing is.

Unspecific abstractions posing as explanations. And whether invoked by opponents or defensively engaged by proponents, the result is the same once again: a propagandistic lexicon that replaces analysis with ideological bullshit, shutting down serious examination of real historical mechanisms and reality itself.

Did Lenin organize the Soviet Union according to any detailed system? Any detailed system designed, dictated by Marx?

Did Marx and Engels extract from dialectical historical materialism a technical architecture for governance, coordination, production, distribution? Was there an objective mechanism that converted Marx’s descriptive account of capitalism and its speculative historical trajectory into an operational model for a post-capitalist society?

The answer in all cases is no.

Marx didn’t specify structures. Decision-making protocols. He didn’t specify feedback mechanisms, didn’t specify allocation methods or governance processes from which a functional social system could be derived.

His work consisted primarily of philosophical critique, historical analysis, and very broad theoreticals—trends he saw—primarily related, if not exclusively related, to market capitalism.

No technical prescriptions for a new societal organization were firmly established at all. A few ponderances here in the Communist Manifesto, but nothing truly structural.

And you know, you have to ask: did anti-Marx propaganda really rise due to fear of a new system outright? Or was it more about trying to get people to just reject his analysis of capitalism, his damning analysis of capitalism as a whole, which became very, very popular even during his time?

Those two ideas are linked. The latter seems more probable to me, in fact.

So someone comes along and says, “Oh, that surplus theory of value exploitation by which owners extract more value from workers than they’re paid for it to ensure profit for the owners.” That seems really structurally true. They say that to somebody.

And the other person says, “Yeah, well, that’s Marxism,” and Marxism killed 100 million people in the 20th century, so who cares?

It’s a crude hack, a crude trick, but it’s clearly worked to a degree, to defuse any initiative, and protect the assumed integrity of capitalism.

But back to my point: attributing the structure and behavior of the Soviet state to Marxist writings is simply untenable, regardless of how frequently its leaders cite him or claim lineage.

And this includes superficial characteristics associated such as nationalization of industries. There’s another truly belligerent one.

Nationalized sectors exist across many countries that are unambiguously capitalist overall in the modern day and historically. Are they just secret socialist societies in disguise because they have some nationalization?

As a case study, consider Venezuela in early January, 2026, this month. The U.S. Executive Branch kidnapped the self-proclaimed socialist president, Nicholas Maduro.

Since the time of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela has been condemned as socialist by the West, of course, in a familiar derisive fashion that applies to any state that effectively resists imperial alignment.

And while the dominant party is indeed the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the PSUV, does that label make Venezuela instantly socialist? Of course not.

It is ideological advertising, born from an anti-imperialist posture, rooted in what they call Bolivarianism, which is just another referential political philosophy—generally anti-imperial, generally anti-capitalist, generally anti-the United States, historical perspective—and this is really no different in form than the term Marxism.

Be that as it may, what is actually under the hood of Venezuela that supposedly makes it socialist?

The country has rampant private enterprise alongside state intervention and redistribution, yes? There are price controls and regulatory interventions, atypical of a country like the United States, I suppose. But once again, regulation is not representative of a systemic economic transition.

Venezuela also has a very significant income and wealth gap due to the same mechanisms you see in the United States, which is interesting considering Western propaganda that insists that the outcome of socialism is that everyone is equally poor.

So why does the West condemn Venezuela as an archetypal, evil socialist state? The real answer is nationalization. And even that is selective.

If nationalization is the defining feature of socialism, then Norway is just as socialist as Venezuela, since it also maintains state ownership of its oil sector—which is the real concern of Western power in Venezuela.

For decades, the United States has strangled Venezuela through sanctions and economic warfare.

In the early 2000s, the US backed a major coup attempt against Chavez, in which the military kidnapped him, flew him out of the country, and installed a hand-picked replacement president. That coup did fail because the Venezuelan military reversed course in the middle of the entire thing in response to mass public demand that wanted Chavez back.

With Maduro, the U.S. finished the job, exploiting the instability its own sanctions produced. And did people express relief when Maduro was removed? Some did, yes.

But that relief exists largely because they do not understand the long-term dynamics at play.

This is Colonial De-Stabilization 101. You strangle a country you want to control, or has resources you want. Flood it with ideological propaganda. Wait for the population to internalize the narrative, absorbing the destabilization you’ve created, and then you use that—the satisfaction—to justify regime change.

And Venezuela is just one of numerous demonized socialist states because of their nationalization opening the door for imperial conquest after this destabilization process commences.

I wrote a sub-stack on this particular point anyone wants to read it, it’s called “Capitalism’s Crowbar.” Okay, back on point.

This all brings me back to the inference of what a system is and what a system is not.

No coherent social system can be constructed solely on the basis of what it rejects.

A rejection of capitalist forms by itself provides no positive architecture for organization. It provides things you don’t want to do, but tells you no way how to do them.

Imagine hypothetically handing 10 newly formed nation states the complete works of Marx and asking them to derive from them a functional socialist socio-economic system. The result would be 10 fundamentally different systems, I can assure you, sharing only one vague commonality: an attempt to distinguish itself in some way from market capitalism and the states that promote it and embrace it. That’s literally it.

Now contrast that to what markets are and do.

Market economics, institutionalized capitalism once again, is a measurable structure of feedback processes driven by mass trade, property rights, monetary exchange, and competitive incentives.

It produces predictable and endogenous outcomes. You can model it, you can analyze it, you can observe its reoccurring pathologies, you can predict its outcomes.

It is recursive. You can start with the seed of it small and watch it self-organize and scale rooted in an inferential logic like a toxic, sick organism growing.

You could start a market economy on two separate island populations that I’ve never met and the system will evolve in generally the same way in both areas just as it has across the world and the variations that we see.

This thing, socialism on the other hand, is not even in the same reality as the system dynamics of market economics. It is just a vague, reinterpretive theory.

No nation in history, whether accused of being socialist or self-proclaimed as such, has ever presented a consistent model.

And just to be clear, this has nothing to do with appealing to some true Marx intention argument, which I despise as well. You know, people that say, but that’s not really what Marx intended as if they could know, as if it even matters.

In fact, since by Marx’s own admission, he didn’t even profess to know how it would culminate into a new social system, implicitly.

The Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, North Korea, they could all label their social systems however they want. The labels themselves are analytically meaningless. It’s all advertising once again.

What matters is how systems actually function. And when examined operationally, none of those societies function in the same way at all, except again in the very loose sense that they define themselves in opposition to classical market capitalism.

What existed were historically contingent power structures improvising governance under specific political, cultural, and material conditions.

In the specific case of the Soviet Union, many theorists have rightfully argued that its economy actually retained the most core features associated with capitalism. The USSR employed commodity production, wage labor, price systems, monetary accounting, and yes, surplus extraction.

Production was oriented toward exchange values rather than direct use value optimization, and economic activity was mediated through abstract accounting units rather than direct material planning alone.

In this sense, the system preserved arguably key dynamics that appear across all capitalist economies, albeit under heavy state control, the variation.

Now, I’m not saying you could simply reduce the USSR down to what we commonly generalize as a market economy. The USSR certainly lacked competitive markets, traditional price discovery, and profit-seeking firms operating under those competitive pressures.

And for these reasons, many economists would classify the Soviet system as an administrative command economy rather than a market-based one.

Yet the idea that holds up as a dividing line that separates two distinctions is extremely dubious, for both descriptions capture partial qualitative truths, which underscores the inadequacy of rigid ideological labels.

Why not just consider the actual detailed dynamics of these countries and their systems, rather than rapidly stereotyping and generalizing them, trying to create binaries and differentiation when really you should be looking towards similarities?

If you’re going to talk about the flaws of the USSR, you have hundreds of variables to consider in terms of its effectiveness or not.

I would argue that the lowest common denominator that meaningfully defines capitalism from a systems perspective is the use of generalized market mediated exchange as the primary coordination mechanism, which the USSR essentially had.

And once such market logic remains operative, variations in ownership structure, means of production, or intervention does not by themselves constitute a fundamentally different system, as stated before.

This is also why common definitions such as socialism as public ownership of the means of production collapse under scrutiny as well.

What does public ownership mean in operational terms? Are decisions made by what processes? Are resources allocated how? Are priorities set how? Are errors corrected? Are incentives structured?

Without specifying such mechanisms, the phrase has no explanatory meaning. There’s nothing inside of it.

Moreover, the concept is referential. It is intelligible only in contrast to capitalism’s private ownership model, revealing its derivative nature.

Turning to my core point: the mere political perception of difference between two states does not establish that they constitute fundamentally different economic systems.

One may emphasize private ownership of production assets, while another may emphasize state ownership, but this alone does not answer the essential question: what makes these two arrangements structurally heterogeneously different systems rather than variations within the same systemic logic?

At what point does a variation in governance or ownership cross a threshold and become a different system altogether?

No one answers that question in this absurd, long-running debate.

Even if one accepts the traditional dichotomy on its own terms, capitalism versus socialism, why is ownership of the means of production treated as the decisive dividing line in definition? Who decided that?

In both cases, people still sell their labor, receive income, purchase goods, and participate in commodity exchange. These continuities indicate that the underlying coordination logic remains largely intact, despite differences in administrative form.

So seen this way, the conventional debate over capitalism versus socialism collapses into a confusion of surface distinctions mistaken for systemic transformation.

And I know I am hideously running this into the ground, but I really can’t help myself.

Socialism, communism, and Marxism did not kill 100 million people in the 20th century. What repeatedly produced mass death was authoritarianism.

That word we can understand: highly centralized power structures, insulated from accountability, operating under conditions of coercion and repression.

Authoritarian systems have emerged under all banners, including explicitly pro-market and neoliberal ones.

The historical record is unambiguous on this point. Numerous right-wing, market-oriented dictatorships in the 20th century engaged in widespread repression and mass violence.

The Pinochet regime in Chile, something I feature in my new film, implemented under the guidance of neoliberal economic doctrine with the literal help of freedom advocate Milton Friedman, stands as a clear singular example of authoritarian governance paired with market fundamentalism.

And that broad list of all those examples is very, very, very long.

And also, I want to make sure this point is clear.

The distinction of the term socialism or communism by a self-identified state or what have you is really just a form of branding.

Nazi Germany’s national socialism is a great example: a deliberate act of political branding, not as an expression of socialist organization by whatever theory.

You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve gone through this diatribe, and people say things like, well, Nazi Germany was just another example of the violent failures of socialism.

Why? Because the word is there? That’s pretty much all they have.

Hitler explicitly opposed the socialists and Marxists. And his use of the label, I think it’s even documented in some of the writings, served only to consolidate power, to bring people under the wing.

Same with contemporary use of the term communist and party names, like in the case of China.

Once again, it all functions primarily as symbolic continuity and ideological signaling. This ostensible differentiation makes people feel like something’s different, rather than serving as an actual description of an alternative non-capitalistic socioeconomic system.

And back to the broad semantic emptiness of it all, another variation on this madness becomes even more apparent when we turn to the endless incremental variance used in everyday political language.

That term, socialization, socialized medicine—at first glance, socialized medicine may appear to be a concrete application of the word socialism in an operational sense in and of itself.

This clearly doesn’t really mold with any of the Marxist stuff, but you know, you say everyone knows what you’re saying when you say this stuff, but they don’t take it to the length of all this other category of nonsense.

Socialized medicine, the standard definition describing a healthcare system which the state funds, or administers medical services through taxation typically, while employing maybe healthcare professionals themselves, but usually contracting private enterprise providers.

Stripped of any ideological framing, this arrangement is straightforward: people work, they pay taxes, those taxes are pooled funds together, and they’re used to distribute healthcare services or access to them across the society.

From a systems perspective, this is not a rejection of market economics, but merely a variation within it.

The act of exchange has not disappeared, it has been displaced. Individuals are still paying for their healthcare, just not through direct point of service transactions, but through a collective payment mechanism mediated by the state.

In this sense, so-called socialized medicine is simply a kind of procedural variation of market coordination.

Labor is compensated, resources are allocated, costs are managed, and efficiency constraints remain like anything else. The underlying market logic persists.

And viewed this way, the United States already operates a wide array of socialized systems: education, fire protection, transport infrastructure, policing and courts, the postal service, water and sewer systems, portions of energy and utilities.

In fact, disaster response, public research and innovation, of course, and even the monetary system itself functions through a kind of collective state orchestration and collective funding.

Yet, none of these are cited as evidence that the United States is a socialist society.

In fact, we can conjure all sorts of variations that just based on that pattern make the U.S. more socialist than anything, especially when it bales out the rich over and over again upon every major economic crisis.

It is absolutely true that the US maintains socialism for the rich and free market brutality for the poor on average.

So at what point exactly, once again, does a country cross from capitalism into socialism when so much of its essential infrastructure behavior is already socialized?

There’s no coherent answer because the question itself is faulty. The language is rigged.

What is being called socialization here is not a system change, but a variation in business process and governance structure related.

And then the question becomes, well, why is anyone doing this?

Well, it’s not ideological, I can assure you. It’s pragmatic. It’s practical.

Why?

Because it is empirically proven that unconstrained competitive market dynamics are too unstable or misaligned with broad social needs to reliably provide certain needed services well.

And without such regulatory intervention, these functions either fail fail outright or generate outcomes that undermine social stability, which no one can tolerate. At least not to the degree that allows it to persist without riots in the street.

Market capitalism does not merely produce undesirable externalities in so many domains, it fails to function even on its own stated terms as well.

The fact that large portions of modern society depend on non-market or quasi-market coordination is not an anomaly, it is a structural necessity because markets suck.

In fact, if it wasn’t for this perpetual socialization, market capitalism probably would have been overthrown long ago.

It is the regulatory socialist intervention that has literally saved the perceived integrity of market capitalism. It is literally propping it up everywhere around you, even though people refuse to acknowledge it if they’re part of the cult.

Speaking personally, if I didn’t have healthcare insurance subsidized by the state due to my income, I would not have health insurance at all. It’s that simple.

The United States medical establishment is a classic case study in the failure of markets because of the competitive element primarily. It’s as bloated and corrupt as possible, with extreme prices for everything essentially picked out of thin air because of the competitive dynamics inherent.

And suddenly you go to the hospital and you get an aspirin and it’s 20 bucks for the pill.

I had an issue with my wrist a while back, went to physical therapy and the therapist asked if I wanted a simple little foam brace that they throw together in five minutes by curving a piece of plastic foam and water and then wrapping around your hand and applying some Velcro.

The labor time on that item was five minutes and the material costs could not have been more than five dollars if that.

A couple weeks later, I got a bill from the hospital for about $200, which is what I had to pay on my behalf because my insurance company simply couldn’t cover the full amount, you know, the piece of plastic and Velcro made in five minutes, which was $650.

Anyone that thinks markets are being efficient or delusional, and this is a classic example, markets always move to the exploitative cost extreme to the degree it can get away with. That’s how it calculates itself primarily. Always.

Nothing is really priced based on resource use or labor value. Everything is priced on the calculation that maximizes what the public will endure, especially with things like health care.

If you get cancer and might die in six months, you’re not going to be caring what the cost is. You’ll spend 70 grand for some three month treatment, which is just the first of many rounds. People are going to go into extreme debt just to do it. It’s their lives at stake.

It is so insidious and parasitic.

And since the cult religion of the market clan says in its commandments, thou shalt not interfere with market prices. They are the word of God.

The only thing the state can then do is to subsidize, which is exactly what they do, if they don’t want riots effectively in the street, or run the risk of being condemned as an evil socialist state.

In the end, what is remarkable is not the prevalence of these so-called socializations or interventions, but the effectiveness of the propaganda and obscuring their necessity and normalizing the myth of market self-regulation and self-sufficiency when the market is not self-sufficient at all.

I will conclude this section with the following clarification.

If one insists on preserving a binary in all of this, you know, capitalism versus socialism, the only term that meaningful encompasses what are commonly labeled socialism, communism, is simply anti-capitalist. It’s just anti-capitalist thought to whatever relative degree.

That is the only category broad enough to accommodate the vast internal variations across historical cases without falsely implying the existence of some coherent alternative social model shared amongst all of the self-described socialist societies or the societies that are being derisively condemned as socialist societies.

And what this obscures, which is never, ever stated explicitly, at least very rarely, is the counterclaim that underlies the true nature of the discourse: that any society not rooted in market economics or capitalism will fail.

You see, directly expressed, that claim sounds extreme, dogmatic and unscientific. It would be comparable to asserting that the rotary telephone represented the peak of communication technology, or that the automobile is the final and ultimate form of transportation.

Such absolutism is intuitively absurd when applied to any other domain of human development.

So instead, the claim that nothing will work but market capitalism is smuggled in indirectly through these referential categorical condemnations that don’t exist.

Socialism never works. Central planning never works. Collectivism never works.

These phrases differ in wording, but converge on the exact same unexamined assertion. Each is simply a displaced version of the statement that nothing but markets can function as a viable organizing system.

Psychological sleight of hand, right? By condemning a vague abstraction rather than defending an explicit claim.

Put another way, whether people recognize it or not, every instance of the phrase, it doesn’t matter who says it or what they believe, every instance you hear of the phrase “socialism doesn’t work” reduces, decoded, to the claim that capitalism is the only possible functional system—an assumption that painfully circulates through public discourse today.

And hence the consequence is that any proposal for economic reform or alternative coordination can be dismissed in advance. That’s the beauty of this propaganda. Simply by associating it with one of these ideologically loaded, semantically empty terms.

Rejected not because it’s been evaluated and found in a wanton, but because it has been rhetorically categorized as something that has supposedly already failed.

Okay.

Now, the reason I ran that into the ground so severely is because I don’t ever want to talk about that subject again.

I’ve written about it in numerous sub-stacks, but please try your best to get people to snap out of this trance.

I can’t go a week without someone bringing up this crap to me.

Aren’t you just talking about what Mark talked about? Isn’t this just the moneyless society? No, yeah, ah.

Now, onto the white paper.

I’m going to be talking about a lot of integral stuff throughout for future podcasts. In fact, that’s literally all I’m going to be talking about because I don’t like talking about anything else.

I’m so tired of talking about what I just talked about. I’m so tired of talking about the problems.

So this is going to be what probably reduces my audience for this already dwindling podcast because we’re going to talk about technical solutions almost throughout.

I’m always going to have to deviate to other theoretical things as I can help myself to some effect, but this is the new focus and I’m very energized for that because I feel like me. You’re tired of dealing with theory and problems.

So we’re going to begin with the white paper now.

The abstract.

The paper begins with a simple abstract, a brief summary that introduces the project and highlights the five core subsystems that define integral.

Part one is the introduction. This is where the problems integral is designed to address appear and the principles that guide its structure.

Now, from an academic perspective, I could have spent some time in this section on assessing the empirical basis of the model as is often common with papers of this nature.

And originally I had about, I don’t know, a dozen, I think about 13 appendices for the paper. Case studies, historical examples, legal issues related to taxation stuff, and of course, empirical arguments.

I also had a big section on centigrity, which I think I’ll talk about a little bit later.

But I cited including all those appendices was excessive, the document was too big as it were.

So I’m actually going to translate those into some sub-stack articles, commentary on these podcasts and so forth.

But I will say a few things today about this empirical basis because it is kind of important, meaning how the models’ parts are based on preexisting evidence, experimentation, and real-world data.

Integral is an a priori model rooted in synthesis. It is based on deductions that combine existing validated components, integrating them into a novel yet to be tested fully framework.

In other words, it is an inferential experimental composite rooted in an array of proven non-experimental forms and approaches.

The broad framework is cybernetics between more than a century of work in cybernetics systems theory and operations research is called.

We can also embrace this whole body of thinking as applied to modern distribution logistic systems that we see every day.

As extensions of these dynamics, the technical components of Integral are not speculative by that comparison is my point. They are dense and complex with the need for a lot of refinement, but they are not speculative.

What’s different here is how such logistical processes, systems processes run through technical infrastructures and networks are integrated and what they are focused on, what they’re used for.

Second point, integral on the level of minimal recursive scale is really just gonna be a glorified mutual aid network to start.

And there’s an entire parallel history of countermarket cooperative practices that people tend to forget about.

Time banks, tool libraries, mutual credit systems, commons-based resource management, which also could be extended into things like open source software development and other collaborative expressions.

We have many function examples of non-market coordination and fragments that have proven to work at small scale with the question being how can we put it together and how can we scale it, which is part of what Integral seeks to resolve through, in fact, the incorporation of cybernetic application.

The trick being if you can create the proper recursive seed of an organization, this minimal network to start, you increase users and complexity simultaneously, naturally, organically, you don’t need to fundamentally change the system.

The system needs to be designed to scale in its kernel seed, which has all the properties outward to create much more potential and capacity increasing complexity.

That is part of the challenge of this project in its initial stage of development and the entire model.

Third, the subsystem modules discussed in the white paper extensively with code and mathematics, I think there’s about 45 of them in total across all five systems.

Five systems, they all have pre-existing analogs or simpler versions in operations today.

In other words, they’re not pulled out of thin air.

They’re not just theoretical, “Oh, let’s just come up with a way to do this.” They’re ambitious, but they’re not theoretically pulled out of thin air. They just need to be developed properly and integrated once again.

There are a series of charts in each module section that actually shows some of this parallel coordination that already empirically exists.

The CDS, the collaborative design system for example, is indeed a very complex inferential design and programming task as it deals with filtering, collective human decision making, reducing or compressing variety, digesting it to arrive at viable working group consensus.

True democracy in the fact.

And each of the modules of that relate to pre-existing work that has been done, as you can read, with a litany of direct democracy data filtering tech that already exists.

I’ve experimented with a couple of them and hope that something can be harvested, so to speak, from them.

But I think it’s better to do a ground up programming and not just sort of plug in these existing systems ’cause they’re just simply too crude or they’re not focused in the same way.

But it shows the trajectory. It shows the pre-existence of this way of thinking and preliminary tools that can be built upon in the same respect.

And fourth, a fourth common empirical concern is human compatibility with a fully collaborative system.

This is silly for me to even address at this stage, but it comes up a lot in the armchair human nature debate.

I talked about this in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, covering what’s called social dominance theory.

You know, the persistent assumption, especially amongst market fundamentalists or warmongering people as well, that humans are somehow incapable of sustaining collaboration and will introduce dominance, hierarchy, conflict and competition regardless.

Mainstream social dominance theory attributes this assumed tendency to the introduction of surplus into society. At least some of them attribute this as bizarrely abstract as that sounds.

It’s just a shot from the hip attempt at environmental trigger.

Meaning it’s the environmental stimulus that triggers the innate human reaction to suddenly grab everything at once and forge hierarchy.

I’m oversimplifying it, but frankly, if you read these treatments, that’s essentially what they’re saying.

And such assumptions do not hold up to any thoroughly analyzed historical or contemporary evidence.

It’s been long, long debunked by numerous other theorists, not to mention the condition to even test such a theory doesn’t exist in a legitimate form, making it effectively unfalsifiable.

And what I mean by that is it’s such a ridiculous assumption that to try to create a controlled study, it’s almost impossible. It’s too complicated.

The fact is, across cultures and across time, humans have repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to organize cooperatively when surrounded by an environment that supports it.

That you can observe.

What’s far more unusual is the level of social alienation, anxiety, and hyper competition we see normalized today.

Hunter-Gatherist Society proves that, which was 99.9% of our history.

Anyone who thinks we are programmed to be a mutably hierarchical ignores the fact that the structure of market capitalism systematically suppresses all cooperative behavior on that level and produces hierarchy by structural form.

Why don’t things go a different way? Because cooperation interferes with the competitive nature of markets. It is not rewarded and therefore it doesn’t prevail.

This also leads to a classic systems literacy and perception. People look around them and they say, “Well, this is just how people have been behaving for as long as I can remember, for as long as I read in my history books. Therefore, it’s human nature. It just must be the way it is.”

And yet despite, despite our dark social condition, despite that amplification of competition and hierarchy, people still volunteer and help in massive numbers every day. They still share resources. They still form support networks based on collaboration. They still look for meaning outside of transactional exchange.

Pockets of society constantly move against what their best interests are for short-term survival in this way. It’s not the norm, but it happens.

Because people realize the inherent meaning. They feel it. They gravitate towards it. They They intuitively understand the emptiness of the kind of structure we endure overall, even though, you know, people can only go so far due to these structural incentives.

I’m astounded that people are as caring as they are, frankly, as critical as I am.

I mean, most of society does embrace a soft sociopathology, and I definitely think the majority is deeply flawed, but it’s those that are not the majority that show you the hope that you move past it to whatever degree they can get away with without basically going straight into poverty or being abused.

Which tells you something that the desire for collaboration isn’t really needing to be invented. It’s not a value position that we have to create. It’s something that needs to be enabled.

It needs to be amplified. It needs to be reinforced. It needs to be a rewarded condition. And the moment you do that, I think people will snap right out of it.

On that, I also find it fascinating, which I think I touched upon before, that all All of the values and practices we are conditioned to engage as these ruthless cutthroat competitive organisms trying to eke out a living in scarcity and climb the social ladder, these ideas are rarely presented to children.

Have you noticed this?

Why? Because most parents on some level intuitively know how psychotic it all is.

A parent tucks his kid in and says, “Now listen, their son, when you go to school tomorrow, remember, your classmates aren’t friends, they’re your rivals. If someone falls behind, don’t help them, it’s better for you. If someone shares their lunch with you, take it and sell it to another kid at a mark-up. Remember, son, never help anyone unless there’s something in it for you, and make sure you extract maximum value at all times.”

No, while the parent will go to work and engage negotiation and look at his co-workers and competition and exactly that way they’re not going to try and teach their kids that they understand that.

But again, most parents are quick to correct hyper ruthless behavior for a little while. And then eventually the kid gets malformed inevitably.

But moving on to the next part of the paper, it then identifies some foundational goals that any viable economic system must meet if it’s going to function.

I’ll cover a few of them here.

The first is true economic democracy.

I find it fascinating that the entire world, one degree or another, has inched toward the conclusion that society should be a non-elitist affair.

We’ve advanced through a minority inclusion, women’s rights, creed rights, ostensibly equal law protection, and a general celebration of of the basic notion of democracy itself.

In matter out crude, meaning the overall society does inch towards fairness and inclusion as a general trend.

Yet, market propaganda has conditioned most people that true economic fairness and democratic inclusion as such is to be off limits.

That’s just a bunch of libcomic talk, right?

Yet the fact is we’ve been moving in this general direction as a civilization on multiple levels, at least in terms of an ethical drive with illegal basis being established.

Overall, things are regressing a bit now, but you know what I’m saying?

And yet it all stops at the doorstep of the economy, right?

Now when most people hear the word democracy, as we talked about in the last podcast, they naturally think of voting one person when vote representative democracy. Or in rare cases, what’s called direct democracy.

Whether representative or direct, both of these ideas share the same flaw. They collapse complex, nuanced human perspectives and accrued mostly binary choices.

Yes or no, this candidate or that one, this policy or not.

There’s almost no meaningful process of how issues are raised, refined, evaluated, or resolved.

Put another way, our contrived scarcity-based, competitive, market-oriented world consists of the masses running in circles, moving money around day-to-day, fighting to survive, attempting to take care of their family and have some sense of meaning.

And every now and again, they look up at the knobs of the machine they are cogs in, and they attempt to grab at and turn those knobs in a desperate effort to better regulate the machine that enslaves them.

That’s effectively what democracy is in the world today.

It isn’t just the sloppiness of the entire thing or the lack of nuance. It’s not just about failing to manage proper complexity to a proper end.

It’s worth pointing out that this actively produces the group-oriented polarization that further pollutes our social condition and is today absolutely ubiquitous.

People become reduced to walking votes, in other words, not thinking and calculating organisms. Their identity becomes attached to sides.

In fact, this parallels the capitalism versus socialism categorization we just talked about. In this case, it’s the endless left versus right nonsense, party versus party nonsense, this political theater that is everywhere.

You blame the group, not the idea, right? The illusion that one’s interests are being represented by a group or figurehead or a symbol.

And the more people utilize such categorical generalizations, the more they believe in them and the more others believe in them and the nasty feedback loop accelerates.

Yet, if we really want to think about this in more technical terms, the real influence runs top down, not bottom up or side to side.

Elite interests define the party agenda as the population becomes molded, forming a duality-based framework of social control.

That’s where it is.

That is the result of the party-envoting structure is my point. Not the only source of course, but that’s what it’s constantly reinforcing day in and day out.

The crudeness of the system continues the polarization.

If you espouse left and right categorization, what you are really doing is buttressing the establishment once again in the same way if you espouse yourself as a socialist, all you are doing in the end is giving more power to capitalism.

For the same reason, and it’s not a coincidence that capitalism is also the economic foundation of the modern political establishment as well.

Two angles supporting pillars of the establishment.

Just another fraudulent associative lexicon.

There is no left and there is no right.

There is power and there is less power.

There is top of the hierarchy moving down toward the bottom.

There is rich and there is poor.

There is the normative establishment and people who support it.

What is happening in the dynamics of the system.

And then there are vatsuas of people that do not agree and do not like those dynamics of that establishment to whatever degree.

When you see the White House press conferences from the executive branch and they are constantly condemning things such as the radical left or the extreme left, the whole framing is just another con job that obscures people’s general intent to move out of the status quo seeing the problems.

In whatever way, making it seem like it’s just an agitating, detached, invading ideological group, right?

If you can collapse mass-complex opposing perception into a mere ideological group, boom, you have your weapon to stifle social change.

Suddenly millions of conservative, no-change-wanting people can go out on social media or wherever and dismiss anyone with any grievances, no matter how nuanced as simply being part of that pesky violent leftist cult.

Now, I’m sorry to drift back into this territory, but it’s really hard to overstate just how powerful this stuff is when it comes to forging a kind of toxic homeostasis that keeps the sick societal order in place.

The mechanisms of social control. Not by force of direct power coercion, but because of a massive percentage of people that embody this kind of blinded archaic binary intellectual bigotry and ultimately brainwashing.

It’s maddening.

So what was my original point? Let’s see if I can remember.

Ah yes.

The very structure of the political party system, the one person, one vote identity, breeds this false group antagonism which sidelines true reasoning in favor of pointless group versus group condemnation.

And obviously integral wants to get rid of all of that.

It approaches democracy from a completely different angle, and there is no political party, there are no political parties, there are no group identities, there are only individuals engaging.

And I can’t begin to describe how powerful that perception is, and what that actually does downstream.

Instead of asking how people can vote on prepackaged options on behalf of a group, it asks how human variety itself can be processed into collective intent.

Consensus reached.

How diverse perspectives can be mapped, clustered, filtered, and integrated without forcing some outcome that really doesn’t represent a tangible compression of the entire thing, or a digestion I should say.

At its core, the CDS is a system for a strategic variety attenuation.

In any real community, people hold a wide range of perspectives, priorities, and limitations.

A functional system doesn’t ignore that variety, and it doesn’t collapse it into binaries.

It organizes it properly and strategically.

One side note to say about the power of this, if we can get it together, is it’s not just about economics.

Integrals presented as a parallel economic system, a transitional system, because that’s the point of focus that we really have to have.

That’s the core area of concern.

But the CDS in this kind of process can be applied to any form of collective decision making, which brings us to the second foundational concept to highlight: true economic calculation.

For generations now, Orthodox economists have insisted that price signals are the essentially only mechanism capable of coordinating complex economic activity.

Market price is treated as a kind of all-knowing intelligence, the invisible hand of the market translated into little transient numbers that you stick on things.

This idea is not just wrong, it’s preposterous.

Prices do not encode real information about scarcity, efficiency, ecological impact, or long-term validity.

They encode strategic advantage, as I talked about earlier.

They reflect what one can pay, who can manipulate, who can externalize costs, and who holds power at any given moment.

Consider an intuitive hypothetical.

You’re teaching a class, perhaps elementary school, and you ask students how anything is produced in an economy, in real world physical terms.

What would they naturally say?

They would start with the organization of materials, what goes into making something, where those materials come from, whether they are finite, whether one material is more efficient or appropriate to use in a certain way than another.

And then you ask about production and say what consequences production may have.

The kids will intuitively recognize potential for pollution, waste, ecosystem damage, and so on.

Then with these fundamental awarenesses, setting aside money, labor, wages, and all those other peripheral and abstracted aspects often linked to markets alone, the question becomes obvious.

How do we account and guide resource use if the goal is to do things sustainably efficient? Durable goods with little waste optimization.

The answer, which is completely obvious, is the direct accounting of related parameters.

Real scarcity metrics, real efficiency comparisons.

And the more you begin to think that way, the more you see that price signals reveal themselves as completely absurd and what they profess to do.

And the absurdity becomes even more clear when you consider the holy grail of defense, a sacred doctrine of market logic in economics 101: the supply and demand equation, supply and demand, and general equilibrium.

In the market view, supply is reduced to what exists after production, regardless of ecological cost. Demand is reduced to purchasing power, not actual human need.

Now, let’s stop right there for a moment.

Nearly a billion people on this planet suffer from inadequate nutrition, yet they exert no influence on the demand curves because they lack money.

Their needs are economically invisible.

That fact alone exposes both the moral bankruptcy and the myopic nature of the price system.

This system value is not determined by human necessity, ecological constraint, or long-term viability, but by the ability to pay in the present moment.

Scarcity is not measured in physical terms either, but manufactured through access.

Efficiency is not defined by optimal resource use, but by degree of profit extraction.

And system success is not fulfillment of human and ecological needs, but the maximization of monetary throughput GDP.

A system built on such signals cannot rationally coordinate a complex finite world. It can only react to itself internally.

Prices fluctuate not in response to what should be produced, but to what can be sold.

Production expands not where it’s needed, where it’s profitable.

Harm persists not because it is unknown, but because it is externalized. Unaccounted form.

This is why appeals to market information theory collapse under scrutiny.

Information must correspond to reality. Prices do not.

And when a coordinating signal is disconnected from physical truth, the system cannot optimize.

It does not and cannot do it.

It drifts, overshoots, and ultimately destabilizes.

Just as we see with crises emerging all over the world today with all life support systems continuing to be in decline and inequality continuing to grow.

Those two elements are related to the deficiency of the price mechanism.

And when we review the ideas of high priests of this nonsense, Mises, Hayak, Friedman, and others in the free market crowd who defend this economic calculation problem, which has its myopic roots in attacking socialism, of course, but it’s a broader implication, we see that their perspective is constrained to a very, very specific narrow information problem.

Which is simply how to coordinate varied human preferences, diverse demand by people with money to acquire goods and services they demand.

And not only is that not sufficient, if we’re going to talk about economic calculation in general, the assumption as noted, the assumption price is the only mechanism possible to have such supply meet demand, even in this narrow market sense of the use of the idea, is also technically absurd.

Take, for example, major logistical operations today that use near real-time tracking of inventories, through put consumption rates and delivery times.

Large-scale logistics systems can already match supply to demand using direct measurement, forecasting models, sensor data, and algorithmic coordination with minimal reliance on price signals at the operational level.

This is what we see every day.

Warehouse is replenished based on stock levels and projected usage, not fluctuating prices.

Power grids balance load through real-time demand sensing and control systems, not by waiting for prices to spike or decline.

Airline schedule capacity is based on traffic modeling and demand forecasts long before ticket prices adjust.

In each case, supply meets demand because the system is monitoring actual conditions and responding directly to them.

The notion that only price can efficiently align supply and demand ignores the vast array of non-price coordination mechanisms already in use across monitored economies in the realm essentially of cybernetics.

Even within a strictly market oriented framing, supply and demand do not require prices to communicate is my point. They require information about quantities, demand, timing, capacity, constraints.

There are many ways that metrics can be digested to arrive at value signals that are far more optimized than the arbitrary and crude nature and slow nature of prices.

Hence, the insistence that prices are uniquely capable of performing this function the only way is not an empirical conclusion but a theoretical dogma.

It persists because it protects an ideological commitment to markets as the sole imaginable form of economic coordination.

And by the way, I encourage people to read my sub-stack articles on this subject as well, economic calculation beyond markets and the myth of market intelligence, which leads directly to the third foundational requirements, ecological balance.

At the most basic level, ecological balance is the essence of what an economy is supposed to achieve on the system level.

If the system cannot balance, it is not an economy. No matter how many iPhones or cans of cheese spray move across society.

The various systems integrity is defined by this balance, for if it is out of balance, it means the system is going to self-destruct at some point.

It can’t be sustained. It’s on borrowed time, right?

That’s how we live the world today.

People say, “Oh, capitalism is giving us all this stuff.” Yeah, it’s doing it completely borrowed time. None of the patterns that we are using are sustainable.

The word economy, of course, comes from management of a household in Greek, stewardship, preservation, viability over time, and yet modern market economics operates in direct opposition to this principle.

Growth is treated as success and waste basically treated as collateral damage, right? And all of it is justified by the need to sustain employment and to sustain profit.

That is essentially the focus incentive of the system level architecture.

If you’ve managed your own household in this way, encouraging endless consumption so we can justify more production and consumption, it would be hilarious.

Can you imagine?

This is what you should say to your free market friends.

Hey, Timmy, make sure you eat six bowls of Cheerios today. We need to spend money faster so I can work more hours.

Why is that, Dad?

Well, because that’s what the economy is.

Yet this is literally the logic that is normalized on the system level.

In complete contradiction to common sense, it baffles the mind.

Cybernetically, viable systems cannot maintain contradictory objectives across scales and expect to survive.

In other words, you cannot prioritize stability and sufficiency at the household level being economical, seeking to reduce waste, while simultaneously demanding perpetual expansion at the system level, encouraging waste and turnover without collapse being the unresolved, which again is exactly where we’re headed.

So of course, Integral removes this contradiction entirely, making all scales work in the same way.

The same logic that governs responsible household management, sufficiency, efficiency, resilience is scaled upward through true recursive coordination.

Moving on.

Next, next we have the very important trajectory of the system toward post-scarcity.

Post-scarcity, while still fairly fringe as an idea in pop culture, is perhaps still one of the most abused concepts in contemporary economic discourse, presented as some magical future where everything is abundant and free without effort or any constraint, right?

I’m not saying everyone thinks about it this way, but many generally seem to, least they’re generally confused to some degree in this way.

I’ve talked about this before once again so I apologize for the repetition but I think we should touch upon it with respect to integral.

Post-scarcity is not infinite abundance.

It is a relative elimination of scarcity pressure through technical efficiency optimization waste reduction.

It is the economic trend towards zero marginal cost, meaning constantly lowering access costs by lowering the need for labor and materials, particularly in key sectors where domains always pushing to do more with less.

In other words, key sector of domains, you want to have food free, energy free, water, all that stuff.

You want to get the, you want to prioritize your interest in post-scarcity from the ground up with the most core things that people need, then you move further on into luxuries and so forth.

All about what Buckminster Fuller called a a femoralization as a trend, it is a strategic intended trajectory, not a fixed state.

A fixed state literally just isn’t possible.

And integral approaches post-scarcity in two ways.

First, by building waste reduction and optimization directly into design logic, not as an afterthought as we have today.

It has to be a built-in structural gravitation.

Second, and this is a little bit more obscure as I’ve talked about before, you cannot achieve viable abundance in a society that is addicted to infinite wants and excess.

It’s incompatible with sustainability, in fact.

What we see today—obscene consumption, status-seeking through material expression, plutonomic indulgence—it’s not success. It’s pathology.

Not only insecurity expressed through the need to express accumulation, but as a consequence of the market systems basis and growth and cyclical consumption, market stability requires once again a culture of constantly dissatisfied people.

I hope that’s clear.

We are all going to die and what does that mean our time here alive on Earth is the most precious thing imaginable. It is the ultimate scarcity.

It is what needs to be made in the most abundance abundance.

And would people prefer to live a life in a cubicle at an insurance company working 40 hours a week, which ends up being like a third of your waking life dedicated to a job that has no real meaning and probably shouldn’t exist anyway, as the old Fight Club quote holds how the things you own actually own you?

And for what, going into debt for a thousand dollar pair of sunglasses?

See that point, it isn’t just having a minimalistic value system for the sake of it, there’s again no other logic when it comes to human sustainability.

There is a reason behind minimalism.

It’s not just a preference.

The less we use, the less we extract, the less we engage on the industrial level, the better off we will be in the long run given we are on a finite planet.

The sickness of growth and what goes along with it is just insanity.

Some people like Elon Musk have completely perverted things with nonsensical conclusions, such as claiming that the more people we have on the planet, the more we reproduce, the greater our prospects for human ingenuity, invention, and problem solving, and the futuristability of civilization.

It’s one of the most absurd arguments in this fear-mongering, torward population collapse.

It’s the strangest thing. It makes no sense at all.

Please understand, and forgive this tangent, the more people the earth has quantitatively speaking, the more stress is placed on its life support systems, all things being equal.

To argue that we are to compulsively further stress on an already strained ecosystem by adding more people under the assumption that this population increase will somehow generate enough compounded human ingenuity to offset that stress is pure insanity conjecture.

It’s like saying overloaded a sinking boat will somehow inspire passengers to invent a better hole before the water reaches their knees.

We have a long list of things that are on pace to wiping out the species at this stage, and fertility rates are not one of them.

Did you know that there are dozens of countries out there today that are incentivizing reproduction, trying to increase their populations?

Why?

Well, it’s not because they celebrate the joy of life.

No, not at all.

It’s about their economies.

The push for population increase is just another example of the cold condition of the market transferring the logic of the market into other human domains, namely the need for infinite growth in general, hence population.

Elon Musk pathologically views the increase of population as exactly the same as the logic of increasing GDP.

A declining population will create de-growth, at de-growth he stabilizes and reduces the power of a country.

We live in a global human Ponzi scheme because of market capitalism, literally due to the growth-seeking nature of the system.

The only way to keep the system itself from faltering is to constantly produce new humans to be cogs in the machine of economic growth.

Think about that for a while. It’s quite disturbing.

Anyway, back on point.

Integral does not cater to any of this, and it does so by first removing the systemic source of cyclical consumption while orienting itself by nature of how it evolves to reward simplicity and balance.

While also once again, constantly optimizing economic efficiency at every step systematically, with the end goal of making more and more things essentially free post-scarcity, a trend which we know works even in the market system condition in fact, but only in narrow pockets and randomly distributed.

It is not the natural force, despite statements like people Ray Kurzweil or Peter Diamandis or Jeremy Rifkin, who say market forces will naturally move consumer goods and services to zero marginal cost and effective way on its own.

That is not at all what the market does in function.

Moving toward cheaper goods is a limited side effect, not a function.

The incentive of the system is literally the exact opposite, which is why any smartphone you buy from here on out is going to get more and more expensive.

The new models doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s the way the scam is run.

And as another side, speaking of scams, I think most have become familiar with the subscription economy now, which just makes you want to blow your brains out as another adaptation.

This is very common with software, but mark my words, it’s going to grow. Where rather than buying things, everyone just has hundreds of subscriptions, bleeding them dry month by month.

Back on point.

So these four highlighted concepts, which I’m muddling through here—democratic coordination, real calculation, ecological balance and post-scarcity—are some of the core foundations of the integral system and should be inherent to any sane economy in fact.

Moving on now to section 2 of the white paper.

This section starts with a deliberately simple human-scale analogy of the general system process.

I was hesitant to do something like this because I know some people will read into it a little too literally, but I still think it’s useful as an analogy.

Nothing futuristic in other words.

The goal of the community is straightforward: to remain sustainable over time while equitably providing for everyone’s basic needs, advancing efficiency towards post-scarcity.

And I’m not going to walk through it as it’s obvious enough, and I carry the example forward intermixed with some of the more technical stuff that’s introduced to try to give a sense of linkage.

Hopefully it’s effective, but bear in mind it’s just an analogy.

It’s not real history. Some people assume this is real history.

The true historical trajectory moves from simple hunter-gatherers into the Neolithic era and the rise of agriculture, settlements, animal domestication, tool applications and so forth.

One can debate what mechanisms set us on the trajectory we find ourselves today.

But I generally think it had to do with labor specialization more than anything else.

But I do not think market trade was inevitable.

It happened. And it was highly probable, I’ll say that.

And once it started, there was no turning back.

The way power just rapidly came into being in the imposition of hierarchy, but again, I don’t think it had have occurred that way, but that’s for another conversation.

All right, on to section three.

This outlines what Integral is designed to solve.

And I’ll focus only one of these here as it’s a little bit of overlap with section one.

And of course, everyone can read this stuff.

It’s out there for free at integralcollective.io.

But I want to talk a bit about transition once again.

Transition matters so much more than people realize, as I talked about a few podcasts back.

Not only is integral not designed to replace everything overnight, its gradual development is a strength, not a weakness.

The system grows domain by domain, region by region, starting with simple economic problems to solve, expanding the more complex ones once again.

And in doing so, the total system is to reduce dependency on markets organically, making them increasingly less needed.

This process also allows for a cultural transition, which is also critical, as I’ve talked about before, and few tend to entertain properly.

There is no shortcut when it comes to getting people to understand and relate to such a new approach.

If you were to drop an advanced integral system upon some city today, it would likely be rejected.

Integrals revolution is evolution and it does not wait for some epic social collapse.

It doesn’t seek to seize power.

It recognizes that we have to be incremental if we expect people to get comfortable with new ways of doing things, as of course we refine the system over time learning from mistakes as stated before.

Integrals rooted in cybernetic recursion, and if we can fix the most inevitable problems, the most inevitable errors early in its development, it will make the more advanced stages in the expansion that much easier.

You need that kind of learning system.

There’s a humanity, there’s a humility to the system that says, okay, we’re gonna start this.

We know the principles of what we’re doing.

We are not arrogant enough to assume that this is it, that this is just gonna be set in stone from here on out.

Nothing works that way, especially on the level of social development.

So we get the kernel seeds together, we get the initial systems.

We start running these small node communities to see how they work, which brings us now finally to section five of the paper, finally, the heart of the system itself.

This is where the five core subsystems are introduced.

These subsystems are inspired, particularly by Stafford Beer’s viable system model, as mentioned before, but it is distributed differently. It’s not exactly the same.

The first is the collaborative design system, as I’ve already mentioned, the CDS.

The CDS is how democracy arises, priorities are set, and collective intent is formed without hierarchy or the theatrics and primitiveness or polarization of political parties and voting on issues, representatives, and so forth.

The second system, if you will, even though these numbers are arbitrary, is the open access design system.

This is where production logic lives.

It builds on existing open source practices, extending them beyond software and to physical goods and services.

Designs are shared, forked in design, improved, merged, but functioned in a purely collaborative developmental ecosystem.

Community needs a bridge, transportation solution, a vertical farm.

The design work happens openly and collaboratively within a node.

Improvements compound as everything is shared across all nodes, everything knowledge accumulates without enclosure.

In cruder terms, this is just open source software programming that we’ve already seen brought to a material level, removing the need for private companies on the level of product development.

That’s what the OAD essentially is.

It is the design process of private industry that we are replacing.

And this system alone, if we were to just detach it from everything else, really is just revolutionary.

And it’s just nothing new.

There are people that have attempted to bring in material design into the open source software community.

There are open access CAD systems alike that they’re not widespread and they’re not utilized or talked about.

They’re certainly not implemented.

Maybe in the bowels of other private companies because they have means of production and so forth.

But beyond that, little experimentation has been put forward as far as I know, you know, in terms of community driven 3D printing houses or things like that.

The incredible nature of you put a lot together, you’re looking at exponential efficiency increase.

If everyone came together and just designed everything together, if someone forks out something and builds something that’s completely dysfunctional, it’s going to be figured out by community review.

If a part of it is successful, we can find ways to merge that fork.

As again, you see encoding an open source design.

If you put all the nodes together and you’re everyone sharing everything, and finally, you have, like, say, a million people all thinking about this community design sharing it, I can’t even begin to describe how powerful that open source quality will be, envious to private corporations.

There’s just no route for private organizations to do that.

They proprietize everything.

Anyway, we’ve talked about all this.

That system in and of itself, even if that was all that was done, could exponentially improve things.

Not to mention the system is based in sustainability principles.

You can’t just arbitrarily create things.

You have to actually relate it to the larger equation of how it affects the ecosystem and the internal design processes as we talked about before.

Moving on.

The third system is the integral time credit system, ITCs.

And this is perhaps the most contentious and sensitive of all five systems when trying to relay it.

The design and feedback processes that go in in and out of the IT system are extremely important and will be the most difficult to develop.

I can tell you right now, even though I think the framework is there, I will talk about the subsystem modules of the ITC system in the next podcast, which is basically the integrates the outcome of economic calculation for both dynamically assigning value to labor and assigning value to goods and services that come out of the COS, which I’m going to talk about in a second, the co-op system.

Let me say a few things up front about where we are with the ITC development.

ITCs are not transferable, they’re not speculative, they’re not accumulative, and they are not stores of value.

They do not circulate, they’re not money by any general definition.

They are created when contributions are made, and they are extinguished when goods and services are accessed.

They function as a metabolic accounting process, a one-directional record of contribution and fulfillment linked to the person that has done the labor.

What remains after the process is all of this stuff would be happening and a dynamic information ecology is economic data, information about production, throughput, capacity, bottlenecks, labor demand, and so on.

Information that’s to to optimize the calculation process as it advances.

So ITCs are not just units of reciprocity.

The goods and services produced within the integral are given ITC values as an outcome of dynamic calculation.

The ITC value of different forms of labor are also given dynamic values once again.

The metrics that determine those categories of values and the diversity within them arise from feedback data that comes from the quantification of the design process and the homeostatic balance requirements and other factors as such, including raw materials, the pollution responsibility, the circular reuse metrics and other factors, which basically would see in the modern world as a market externality, things that are secondary, things that people believe should be morally assumed, that companies should be thinking to do this because of their moral responsibility, but we all know they don’t do that.

It has to be built in once again.

And again, people will hear this and they’ll say, well, that’s just sanity, the complex.

That’s impossible.

You can’t do that kind of complex material calculation.

Yes, you can.

It is certainly possible and absolutely required.

The trick is to start small and simple and scale the factors as you go.

As far as labor value, well, arguably more subjective, the factors related can also be dynamically quantified based on core needs such as urgency and the type of labor, prioritizing life support over luxury producing labor, for example, as well.

Building out a democratically forged model, a dynamic process that builds into what the IOTC hour values will be for any given form of labor.

Enabling incentives as well.

For example, if there is an emergency need for some kind of production, say a food system goes down, repairs on that system will raise labor values perhaps to encourage priority.

This is the train of thought.

Now a lot can be said about the ITC system and it’s covered in the paper to quite an extent even though a lot more development is required.

Please look at that section and give it some thought.

I’ve gotten some good feedback on the paper so far but I need to probably upload it to some place that enables more articulate structured feedback.

I’ve been looking into that.

I found some kind of peer review sites that do that.

If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know.

We also should do things like agent-based modeling of this kind of thing for deeper research.

But I am confident that the bare bones principles are what are expressed in the paper of the ITCs and how calculation floats around it is workable indeed.

You know, time banks in the lowest common denominator in the most primitive sense have been workable for nearly 200 years.

What the ITC structure is it just expands the variables.

It’s a needed update to a very primitive system.

We need more sophisticated parameters to account for increased variety.

We don’t have to start off the ITC system and integral in a small node by having varied labor roles in terms of the ITC credit valuation.

To use one hour just like a traditional time bank.

And then you begin to build the model as you go and so forth.

The fourth subsystem is the COS.

And it focuses on cooperative organization and provisioning, how actual projects get done in physical terms.

The COS also provides critical data to the ITC system because the labor and resource metrics that go into a given items production directly translates into value parameters once again.

In other words, the labor and resource theory of value becomes operational through the information the COS provides as things unfold.

What it’s calculating to get things done in its pursuit of efficiency.

Now, the COS initiated co-ops, which could be anything, a tool library, a sharing network, a repair facility, transportation hub, you’ll notice I’m using common mutual aid language here.

I’m doing that deliberately.

But they are recursive subsystems of the regional node.

I think this is an important general technical point.

Just as the node is autonomous yet coherent system within the regional node network globally, the co-ops are production nodes within a single regional node.

While they operate with different areas of focus, they are still using the same processes.

In other words, all scales use the same basic processes with different points of focus.

You have a mesoscale, a micro scale, and a macro scale.

And it’s important to also point out that co-ops are internal.

They do not provide provisions for non-integral folks.

Not because we’re elitist, but because that’s not what the system is.

You can’t violate the system that way.

This is not like so-called socialist co-ops in the world today that will equalize the benefit of the company for the workers, right?

Yet they still compete in the open market as an institution.

That’s a failed model.

It might help the workers, but that doesn’t go anywhere.

Socialization in the form of traditional market cooperatives simply displaced the problem, not resolved it.

It would be great to see socialized co-ops, worker owned cooperatives, make more initiative to try to build out their network in the same thought process as integral.

And maybe there could be some fusion at some point.

But it’d be great to see them do that, where they start to absorb more and more industries.

But you notice they don’t.

They just sort of give up and say, “Oh, we’re just gonna compete in the system like everybody else.”

But at least we’re all getting paid a little bit better.

So integral remains internal.

It develops things internally and it distributes things internally.

With the exception being certain interface situations that I’m not gonna further today, I’ve talked about these in prior podcasts.

Except to say very simply that resources have to come from somewhere, obviously.

Sometimes they can be internally sourced, and sometimes they have to be acquired from the external legacy economy, the market.

I believe I use the term interface cooperatives a while back, probably not the best term, but to give a simple distinction for what I’m referring to here, take the example of a ride share network.

People in the integral community are still living in the general world.

Their cars are owned in the same way everyone else owns their car through the legacy economy.

Therefore, there’s no need to acquire more cars in a general circumstance, meaning that the resources are internally sourced to create the Integral Ride Share Network.

Now, more complex would be a repair facility.

Certain specific tools may be needed.

The easiest thing to do is to simply have a collective fundraiser within the node, organize transparently.

You could get fairly secure with it if you had a nonprofit for your node.

You have your own bank account.

Not gonna go into all that at this point either.

But you get the tools, you internalize them, they’re part of the operations, integrals, internal operations.

So you see where I’m going with this.

Obviously, if you’re gonna do something really technically complex, it might require more interfacing.

But the goal is to try and get as much internalized as you can over time.

And I don’t wanna jump too far ahead in terms of the paper, which I’m definitely not gonna get that much farther with today as I’m exhausted and this is gonna be an epic podcast as it is.

But remember, it’s part of a global network.

Nodes that develop are going to have different specificities or have different areas of focus.

And if the network can mediate, if they can share labor, if the network can share resources, boom.

Just like they share designs, you start to have more support.

It starts to build.

It starts to web.

So suddenly something you’d have to get from the legacy economy, you can actually start to acquire from a node that has that surplus or what have you.

Anyway, I’m gonna move on to system five now, even though much more could be said on that as well.

And this is the feedback and review system, the FRS.

The cybernetic core that allows the system to adapt and improve over time.

Metrics of the system are transparent.

Failures become informative, not punished.

There’s nothing that goes out of business.

That’s another one of my favorite ridiculous concepts market theory, the idea that competition weeds out businesses and businesses fail, and that’s a good thing.

How is that not a wasteful thing?

It’s completely wasteful.

About 50% of all businesses fail within five years.

They give out all that time and energy and resource, and yeah, I’m sure they did something, but then they collapse.

No, that’s not efficient economic practice.

Integrals institutions not only do not fail, they can’t fail.

They can only evolve and improve or make themselves obsolete.

The very concept of an economic institution being a failure is just a rude, twisted, sick idea when you think about what an economic institution is supposed to be.

We treat the very nature of our survival as a sick game in market capitalism.

And hence, the FRS is what binds the integrity of the entire system, constantly re-optimizing as things move forward.

Think of it as a unified system of medical machines that monitor your body.

If your blood pressure rises or your blood sugar gets too low, your kidneys start to form badly or your oxygen levels decline, the system keeps track and figures out how to make adjustments, keeping things improved and optimized.

And ideally, continuing not only to save your health, but improve your health.

Now, I apologize for being a little sloppy in this podcast today.

I just put a lot on the docket.

But let’s just jump to where we kind of go from here.

I would love to see live or at least online conferences working with thinkers and developers on this.

In fact, maybe we can put together one fairly soon.

People that come into these conferences aren’t there to debate markets or anything.

They’ve decided what we need to do and it is a developers conference.

It is an entirely forward thinking.

If you have nothing to contribute to the conversation, then you shouldn’t be there unless you just want to be generally in support and watch what is happening.

I would love to see that kind of physical conference happen and we’ll see what we can do to get the first one of those going.

I do plan on doing some kind of tour for my film, even though I really can’t afford it and it’s an enormous risk, but my reasoning for that, because I don’t really care about a film.

The film is just a tool to get this kind of project going, is so I can do some public talks and engagements on an integral.

All that said, to conclude this episode as I stated at the beginning, and shift gears really quickly, take a moment to address the accelerating authoritarian rise within the United States under the leadership of despot Donald Trump, the most consequential, dangerous president the country has ever seen.

It’s truly shocking how things have escalated with this ridiculous lunatic.

From the recent US overthrow of the president of Venezuela for essentially oil profits.

You notice they didn’t really change much of the Venezuelan administration and all the decries of this oppressive dictatorship.

Now they just symbolic removed a guy and said, “You better do this for us and we’re going to take your oil profits.”

Agitating more imperial domination, continuing to the global south and of course the Greenland destruction of NATO, the world order is being turned upside down by a general alliance of imperialist lunatics flying the flag of capitalism, but also spearheaded by a very unique lunatic known as Donald Trump that people need to stop underestimating.

We have federal military forces in the street now, no reason for that.

You had immigration.

Everything was working with immigration for years, building up to the new paradigm where now they’re a massed Gestapo-type of Nazi-looking agents essentially there to terrorize, because that’s the only thing they could possibly be used for.

Shocking. It’s a fascist trend growing on multiple levels, and a kind of global imperialism that we’ve never seen. And I don’t see any reason for it to slow.

It’s really insane how the entire culture has just kind of looked the other way, or it gets whitewashed.

It’s like when you watch these comedy shows, right? These late-night shows—Saturday Night Live, or The Daily Show, or Colbert, or whatever his name is.

These shows, all they do in their pretension to make it seem like they’re in opposition to Trump, is actually whitewash and legitimize it by turning it into a comedy spectacle.

This is an aside. I’m all for satire and things like that, but it depends on what you’re actually dealing with.

If you take the straight notification of the U.S. government and the imperial world order domination angle that’s happening, and you turn that into comedy routines, it doesn’t matter how dark your comedy is—you are sanctifying it.

This is very serious, dark shit, and it’s leading the Western world into a rapid regression.

Because I don’t see forces that are trying to actually stop it anywhere. I see rhetoric.

So I want to step back a second, because I can’t help but do this annoying systems thing.

I don’t cover current events on this podcast unless they’re highly extreme.

Why?

Because most are less relevant than the pattern of events and structure that creates them.

Remember the iceberg model. We’ve talked about this at length on another podcast.

Events. Patterns. Structure. Mental models.

Simple, straightforward systems thinking model.

People see it as linear, but it’s not.

It’s layers of influence against one another, especially the feedback loop between mental models and structure.

On one level, mental models give rise to understanding structure, right? You have to have a lens, allowing it to be recognized and interpreted.

For example, how an already weak pseudo-democratic condition can slide into abject fascism quite quickly.

For structure to exist as a usable concept, it must be perceived.

At the same time, structure—just as it produces patterns and events—also produces mental models.

The structures around us forge the worldviews we come to understand generally, and we impose and act upon those worldviews, for better or for worse.

I’m not saying everyone thinks the same way, but there is a general trend due to the cultural conditioning.

This forms a circular process of collective self-awareness.

In other words, one can rightly argue that the prevailing average perception of a population helps generate the structures that in turn create recurring patterns of events.

Yet how humans see the world is also a direct consequence of the structural conditions in which they live.

I hope that’s clear.

This is the heart of systems thinking on the level of culture.

And one way or another, the way people see the world is fundamentally a consequence of the structures they are born into.

This is the dominant initiating amplifying force of the feedback loop.

For example, a society organized around market competition, hierarchical authority, and enforced scarcity will, over time, produce mental models that interpret those conditions as natural, as inevitable, as morally necessary.

Competition becomes equated with human nature once again.

Hierarchy becomes synonymous with order.

Scarcity becomes a justification for exclusion and oppression, and so on and so on.

These beliefs do not emerge spontaneously or through abstract reasoning.

They are learned through daily participation in the structure itself—through work, debt, education, media, law, and whatever.

The structure rewards compliance and punishes deviation.

And in doing so, it trains perception.

People internalize the logic required to survive within the system and mistake that logic for objective reality.

And as this internalization spreads across generations, the structure no longer needs to justify itself.

It just becomes invisible—like that old Marshall McLuhan quote about the fish in the water.

And the point is this.

If we want to change the pattern of events, we must first develop a mental model capable of accurately diagnosing the structure producing those patterns, and then work to transform that structure itself.

Addressing events alone is like treating tumors without confronting the cancer that generates them.

Without understanding and dismantling the underlying condition, the symptoms simply reappear in new forms over and over again.

And this is why I don’t cover topical problems on this program.

I’m not a news commentator.

And frankly, I think the act of reporting on things is really just a waste of time without some type of insight as I’ve just described.

Because it’s the point of just constantly watching the feed of the disaster of society without some kind of reflection about how to actually change it.

We can talk endlessly about the decline of the ecosystem, the metrics that show all life-support systems are in decline.

We can talk endlessly about the extreme wealth inequality and how it’s affecting the world.

We could talk endlessly, as most do, about whatever new level of abomination or act of corruption we see in the political arena, and so on.

And that talk achieves absolutely nothing but to generate content and entertainment.

Without a viable structural diagnosis, it’s all essentially pointless.

Now, that said, let’s return to this rise of authoritarianism.

As we all know, the nature of a nation’s leadership is, to a large degree, an extension of the core incentives and structure of the society itself.

In the case of market culture—market economic sense, capitalism, meaning markets folding into a more relatively pure form as capitalism is—the power that rises reflects the hierarchical forces markets naturally generate.

This is driven primarily by the system’s endogenous tendency to produce economic inequality, which inevitably translates into inequality of power.

In other words, those figures who accumulate disproportionate influence are not anomalies.

They emerge from structural preconditions that favor essentially oligarchy, for lack of a better term.

And yes, I understand it’s hardly controversial to point this stuff out.

It is visible in how elections are run, how candidates are selected, the degree to which candidates are funded, who they’re funded by, the role of lobbying, and so on.

However, there is a persistent myth within parts of the semi-conscious progressive community that pushes this observation to a fatalistic extreme.

A kind of predetermination.

Claims such as: all parties are the same. Everyone is equally beholden to the same interests. It’s just more of the same. Trump’s just another puppet, just like all the others.

Why are we so focused on this new example of more of the same?

Such rhetoric generally has its place, and there have been periods when political homogenization has been so sterile, so pronounced in its uniformity, that this sentiment certainly carried truth.

I have certainly said my piece about the pointlessness of voting historically.

Countless studies have shown that in representative democracies across the world, especially in the United States, the will of the average person is rarely reflected in political outcomes.

The party system is indeed a single unifying constituency at its core, with mild variation—usually in areas of culture or optics more than grounded life-concerned issues, such as war, the ecosystem, public health, and so on.

But that reality does not mean power and capitalist pseudo-democracy is unified.

Power still competes with itself at the top, particularly under conditions of rising extremism.

Elite factions clash, fracture, and maneuver, and depending on which personalities and coalitions gain ascendancy, conditions can always get worse.

Always.

The real battle has never been between caricatured propaganda terms like “the Left,” but rather, in the current zeitgeist, between degrees of conservatism.

Degrees—meaning traditional conservative power as we’ve known it, and increasingly extreme conservative authoritarian factions.

This includes Project 2025, the persistence of Christian nationalism, all sorts of insane racist ideologies that claim white Americans are now the oppressed class.

Some may remember Trump recently said this about the civil rights movement—that it turned white people into the most oppressed class.

It includes movements seeking to roll back civil liberties, dismiss any kind of ecological protection as an obstacle to economic growth, and treat any critique of market ideology and the condition of power itself as “heretical.”

Often coupled, of course, with a renewed era of what we might call “McCarthyism,” where if you’re not for capitalism you’re basically a communist, and a communist is associated with a terrorist, and you should be deported.

That kind of rhetoric has already been moving forward in the executive branch.

So that’s the real battlefield.

For many decades now, the struggle has been between a conservative majority that maintains the status quo and a far more dangerous extremist minority inching forward, trying to make it that much more fascistic, eroding democratic norms in the pursuit of power and control.

And it’s basically, in my view—even though it’s not explicit, even though it’s not total, even though it’s not single-sourced—this is the culture of market capitalism emerging in its most refined stage: abject fascism.

It’s a kind of cycle.

It’s a kind of cycle.

And what has happened now in the US is the extreme faction has not only gained control, they’ve fortified it.

It’s terrifying.

The executive branch is the only real power center now in the United States, buttressed by a Supreme Court of predominantly religious fanatics, and a Congress that is too cowardice to do anything against it, or is too ill-equipped. Not to mention a fractured public that is way too confused and polarized and preoccupied and hateful and divided to do anything but run in circles, which is exactly the condition of every historical fascist rise, by the way.

So to be clear on this, Ramley and Trump is not the root for problems.

That would be silly to say. There’s always a deeper structural system causality. There’s always a cultural causality. Lots of overlapping, intersecting factors.

But he is a rare and extreme embodiment of just about everything wrong at the heart of our social system, for one, and carrying forward all the auxiliary associations that go with that in the exploitative white nationalist, generally racist, sexist, patriarchal worldview that all coincides with the history of capitalism, as everyone knows.

So in that embodiment, this is the most dangerous character I have ever seen.

And increasingly so as his impunity gets solidified every day.

To say one more thing about structure, he is like the walking caricature of the system.

A worldview mediated through transaction, and not just transaction but power over transaction.

There’s no concept of reciprocity without liability or mutual obligation.

Action creates debt, leverage, and loyalty.

Trump embraces the market’s most stripped-down competitive ethic, one without boundaries or constraints.

For him, the game board has no fixed rules.

The rules are whatever can be imposed through manipulation and domination, coercion.

Winning is the only sacred principle, along with perpetual power domination, and the objective is always to reshape everything in favor of future advantage, which is what fascism is as well.

Democracy, in this sense, becomes fundamentally incompatible with what is really a business logic through which Trump understands the world.

A corporation is a hierarchy.

Power flows downward.

The boss dictates, does not negotiate.

The boss does not sit there and democratically hang out with his employees to figure out what to do.

They’ll entertain meetings, but there’s no actual democratic process.

There might be conversation.

That’s the way Trump sees it.

He was the CEO of the Corporation of the United States in explicit terms.

And he also embodies the emotional immaturity cultivated by market culture, expressly through the obsession with status and luxury and gold-plated shit.

And where we find ourselves today is clearly a parallel of all the preconditions that existed before World War II and Nazi Germany.

I don’t see how anyone can deny that.

You can go down a checklist and see this.

The difference is the strange, bizarre cultural reinforcement that doesn’t come from a place of militant nationalism.

It’s more of a clown-circus consumerist nationalism.

And so to bring this back to my general point, you have the terrible system dynamics, which we have to understand and transform in an effort to reduce the likelihood of these kinds of people rising again.

Because if you had a system like Integral, if you had a system based on collaboration, the probability of these types of psychopaths coming to the surface and gaining power—no, it’s not going to happen.

The system wouldn’t even allow it.

These people would either change, or they would be weeded out and demoted into whatever area they can operate without any kind of detrimental force.

So that’s the precondition issue, which is why something like Integral exists in the context of avoiding this type of psychotic power development.

Second, there are the specific extreme personality and group expressions, developments that emerge from those toxic conditions, and it’s Trump and the entire MAGA movement.

And to be clear, none of this is partisan.

Citing MAGA, or criticizing MAGA, doesn’t mean you’re going for Democrats or any other political faction or any other person.

That binary itself, again, is a product of propaganda, as we’ve already addressed.

Recognizing the danger posed by a specific person or group does not mean the opposing party identity is the solution.

It might be a temporary alleviation, but that’s not a solution.

And anyone who still thinks in those terms remains trapped in the false duality I wrote about on Substack, in fact, called The Left Doesn’t Exist.

I do recommend people read that.

And all that understood, as I sit here talking about theoretical stuff and this complexity, and building out a new, hopefully revolutionary socioeconomic model that’s desperately needed—critically important to creating a proper precondition for environmental sustainability and equity and power and balance, which is what Integral is all about, because they all go together—that is not enough to ignore the condition we face ourselves immediately.

Which means, quite simply, that everyone needs to be prepared for a far more aggressive response if conditions continue to accelerate as they are.

All the theory, reason, and logic in the world is not going to matter if there is a boot on our neck.

Where anyone that moves against the system, just like they were rounded up years ago into totalitarian regimes, suffers the same fate.

I warned countless so-called progressives over and over again before the election while they indulged in this false binary equivalency between parties and their soapbox that, “Oh, Trump is just another example. I don’t know why you guys are freaking out about this. It’s just more of the corrupt same. Look at Biden. Look at Biden.”

And I said over and over again, you guys don’t understand what you’re looking at.

This dude is going to make our attempt at general social progress almost impossible if he gets what he has continually stated he wants, implied or directly.

This degenerate lunatic is going to make things so much more difficult for anything to change.

He’s already ruined any kind of environmental administration.

Environmentalism has been collapsed.

Climate change—full throttle, pedal to the floor hydrocarbon production, removing the EPA.

They don’t even report on health risks of the EPA anymore.

It’s been completely disassembled on the environmental front.

And it will be completely disassembled on the democratic front.

And it will be completely disassembled on any hope for any kind of economic equality as well, which of course is the farthest extreme because that feeds right into the power imbalance that fascism wants.

Equality is the antithesis, of course, of this kind of value structure.

All of this is to say that we are at a regression stage, and I don’t know what the most immediate proximal solution is.

We have to continue building the new system, but everyone keep in mind that you might just have to really fight in a way that most of us don’t want to.

All right. That does it for me.

Everyone take care out there and be safe.

Talk to you soon.