Episode 10
TRANSCRIPT
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now!, November 18th, 2020, episode number 10. Program notes, the release date for each podcast in the future is now going to be Wednesdays, as opposed to Tuesdays, starting with this episode. Before I forget, next week, I'd like to do a question and answer, so if you want to ask a question, please go to the SubReddit or send me a message via email or through social media. The SubReddit can be found at revolutionnow.live. Now, I'm sitting here looking at a bunch of notes, some of which relate to the semi-public talk I have planned for mid to late January.
The date has not been set, but the goal is to formally introduce some activists and transitional ideas as generally based on the last chapter of my book, The New Human Rights Movement, but going into more detail with very specific proposals and programs. A very daunting thought process, I have to admit, but as I said before, I have very little faith in a collective movement anymore when it comes to all of the pluralism and people just stretching in multiple directions at once in the activist community, not only domestically here in America or the Western world, but also across the entire planet. There's got to be something new in terms of approach that's both pragmatic and ambitious. I will say that in a way, unlike other periods, there appears to be more political consciousness out there. Things aren't as passive as they used to be.
Maybe I'm wrong on that analysis, but that's just the way I see it around me. I haven't done a statistical analysis of such things, but more people seem to be speaking about political and social issues such as inequality and ecological decline, more so than they used to be, which might, of course, just be a force, the fact that these issues can't be ignored anymore, but you see it in the media, you see it in advertising, you see it in the gesture of society now. A lot of value-based platitudes around sustainability thinking, but yet of course, attempts at solutions continued to do virtually nothing, and that's because the vocabulary and frameworks people operate in are just fundamentally wrong, as this program, Revolution Now! will consistently address. In the last chapter of my book, The New Human Rights Movement, I lay out some very basic transitions that need to occur with necessary ambiguity, but ultimately, it's about finding ways to approach those five transitions I mentioned, transitions that are going to have to occur internally to start, as opposed to some kind of grand, macro shift, which again appears very improbable. In fact, I'm very fearful of a macro shift moment in society because most likely, it would go the wrong direction.
Can you imagine if we've finally achieved like a great strike that people have spoken about, and everyone has stopped the world, and then the question is, "Okay. Now, what?"? Is anyone out there able to propose what the, "Now what?," circumstance should be? I don't see it, and I'm not pretending to be that person, mind you, but I think the train of thought that is required to arrive at that kind of arrangement, that kind of conclusion is so vastly misunderstood and so confused that we're just in a lot of trouble, but I will say that a big part of such an initial step of this viable approach to the future of activism and the future design of society has to be a value shift. If you've wondered why the past two podcasts focused on morality, this is partly why.
Sociologically, we are faced with a chicken and egg problem, if you will. If we conclude that the orientations, incentives, and procedural dynamics of our social system produces aberrancy and human discord, and a lack of sustainability as a structural force, molding behavior, how do we mold a new identity and value system from within that matrix? Obviously, it has to go beyond simple, rational reasoning and information. People have to be involved in some way to make it part of who they are. An environment has to be created where people experience a new way of being, valuing that experience and the principles and moral and ethics behind it.
As has been well-established through cognitive neuroscience and anthropology and evolution, we do have great human plasticity, which allows for different dominant behaviors. The problem is the question of how humans can develop more ideal values and sustain them for the good of each other and the planet when the current society we endure rewards and perpetuates the exact opposite values and behaviors that are required. I look forward to presenting information in this talk once I have this together sufficiently. Beyond that, as an aside, I do apologize for the delay in my next medium article on the subject of non-evidence-based belief, conspiracy culture, and our ever-emerging post-truth reality, but I'm going to get there. It's also been a mesmerizing subject, looking at tens of millions of people right now that for no reason, deny the election loss of Donald Trump, tens of millions of people that are willing to just give in to this belief system with no evidence, and it goes to show the power of narrative and of this general cultural cultish tendency we seem to have when it comes to group identity and beyond, as has been talked about before.
By the way, I don't point that out from a political position regarding the election itself. It's just daunting to see how vulnerable human perception really is right now for whatever reason, and people will gravitate towards non-evidence-based conclusions all the time as a matter of social identity and comfort, and it's truly frightening where that can lead to if left unchecked, a subject I'm not going to go into in this particular podcast, but I have touched upon before. Finally, before we jump into the subject of the podcast today, which is post-scarcity, a very confused idea, often conflated with utopian thinking and our absolutest polarized tendency to think and attribute with no nuance, I'd like to talk about the media real quickly, as someone asked me recently if I was going to cover more topical issues on the show. Actually, I prefer not to have topical issues, not only to create a kind of timeless quality to the program, but to avoid the cyclical triviality, as I call it. Cyclical triviality, meaning that it's better to look at the broad view of the kinds of problems that emerge rather than get lost or obsessed with any particular instance.
In other words, humans just keep producing the same problems over, and over, and over again categorically because of the incentives, procedures, and dynamics of the economic system we have. Of course, I'm not saying every piece of news is a systemic consequence of our social system, but the most notable kinds of news, particularly troubling news very much is. Did you miss the report about some bank that has been laundering money and engaging gross corporate malfeasance? What about that article about that politician who was in bed with those corporate guys, influencing political policy? What about that terrible crime that happened downtown where that woman was mugged and all of her jewelry was stolen?
Then, there was that terrible domestic abuse report last week about that father that beat his wife to a pulp? Did you miss that story and all the others? Well, don't worry, many more repeat stories are on the way as a system level outcome. If you take a statistical view and categorize phenomenon, there's much more information to be found in the periodic consistency and general tenor of such events versus scrutinizing any individual one, particularly those instances that can be linked to low socioeconomic status and other forms of economic precondition. My point here is there's a big difference between the spectacle of the news and the statistical or social value of what is being reported.
Why should I care much about the corruption of one politician when I see it as a statistically consistent phenomenon, where politicians are routinely going to be exposed in this way because it's part of their system level behavior? It's fascinating this sort of dichotomy between information and entertainment, when you consider the evolution of news media going from getting a single newspaper at your door with maybe an hour-long evening broadcast to today with this society of the spectacle that we have, where we have 24-hour news and numerous 24-hour news networks. Entertainment and information have converged, and the end goal ultimately is business success, not education or informational success. This is all process of the slow commercialization of literally everything in our world, which gets worse and worse every single year. Again, as trite as it is, if you look at the rise of Trump, what you really see is the rise of a pre-existing brand involved in a kind of narrative. Here's a TV game show host, a business leader, public figure hero in some people's minds, and it doesn't matter what his policies are, or were, or could be.
It's about the narrative. It's about the story, and in his case, it's the story of an outsider that's going to crusade against the swamp and all of that noise that was put forward to lure in alienated people. That's the scariest part, is that the news becomes yet another storytelling system, highly modulated by an entertainment-based, keep-your-attention context. They hype things, of course, not because they're trying to be manipulative, but because they want you to keep paying attention to them so they can get more advertising revenue. I'm sure most are familiar with Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing of Consent, where they outline a series of intersecting influences that make sure the mainstream supports mainstream values, and ultimately mainstream governmental conclusions on average.
It's not a conspiracy, it's just the way the dynamics work. In fact, I've been searching for a word or a term, which probably exists, but I can't find it, that embraces the fact that the majority of the conspiratorial angling we assume in society is not actually conspiratorial at all, but rather, people collectively engaging in their own self-interest, and the outcome of that engagement of people shared self-interest results in perceived conspiratorial frameworks. As George Carlin once stated, "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." The broader point I'm trying to make here is that there is a dark rationalization process where people can sort of marginalize their ethics or get far more subjective than they normally would, because in the end, their survival is in question, or their group's survival is in question. It allows one to justify unethical, short-term actions by ignoring long-term outcomes.
The kind of immediate mental blinkering happens, where people can set in motion deeply destructive patterns without any true intention of those patterns being destructive, at least not in any severity in their own rationalization process. On this, and as an aside, I'm always amused by social commentary and pop media, and someone sent me a clip from Ryan Murphy's TV show, American Horror Story from a season called Apocalypse. In the scene, there are two characters in the process of routing nuclear missiles to deliberately destroy civilization because in their view, civilization is too corrupt to exist. The character says, "People suck. They are selfish and short-sighted."
"All anyone cares about is immediate gratification, and that's how everything happens. One shitty, self-serving act at a time, and you multiply one bad impulse by seven billion people, you get global warming. You get mass extinction and you definitely get genocide." In that joke is a unique information. Obviously, of course, in Hollywood, it's a long-standing cliche.
Hollywood loves the theme of a completely corrupted human nature. It's consistent in so many films. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen one that didn't have that theme when it comes to the future. It's always post-apocalyptic about the future and so on, so the assumption of an irredeemable selfish human mind is always good fodder for entertainment, which of course, in reality is not the truth at all, as we've been proven to be organisms designed to adapt to social circumstances. We adapt to the incentives and procedures we need to survive in a given context.
There is no evidence to suggest that we are universally more selfish than we are giving or more competitive than we are collaborative. It comes down to what the social system requires. It comes down to what the survival circumstance requires, but obviously, that narrative of the ever-corrupted human nature is ever-dominant out there. In fact, that's probably why most people, when you ask them if they believe in humankind's survival, they'll probably say no, because of this endless propaganda that we, humans are just selfish, competitive beasts. Years ago, I did an interview with anthropologist and neuroscientist, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, and he stated with respect to human nature, and I'm paraphrasing, "It appears our nature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature."
The point he's trying to make about human plasticity is the fact that nothing is particularly inevitable when it comes to the various potential of the human being based on circumstance, and that includes education. We are semi-conscious. We can think about our actions, but if you find yourself in a social circumstance where you have to favor a short-term gain for whatever reason, such as our current economic mode prescribes, I mean, the entire society we live in is based on short-term gain at the cost of long-term destruction. We're just kicking the can down the road on every level of crisis that we face right now because everyone is far too fearful of their immediate security, people living paycheck to paycheck, CEOs seek bonuses before they leave, and so on. That's why I like this Ryan Murphy script quote.
It highlights that short-term impulse that we marginalize. Most people consider themselves to be ethical in their decisions, and yet faced with particular circumstances, that shitty self-serving act, as they say in the line, no matter how subtle keeps a collective trajectory towards destruction, that shitty decision multiplied by seven billion people, everyone just doing a little bit of corruption here and there, the CEO that authorizes one more pollution dump before he can get his bonus and retire, the politician that takes one more little bribe to allow that mass drilling expedition in the Arctic to search for oil and to destroy the environment, that auto mechanic that's a little late on his home payment so he has to tell you your carburetor is a little messed up, even though it's got a couple more years on it, but he can rationalize it in his mind that since, "Well, they're going to have to replace it eventually. They might as well pay for it now so I can pay my bill. What's the harm?" Then, one day, seven billion people just wake up in confusion at the fact that they've completely destroyed their environment and the stability of their society, even though it was never intended by anyone, nor did people see their actions as legitimately negligent, the slow motion rationalization process of myopic self-interest due to the incentives of our social system.
As people continue the neuroses as well and their disgusting climb for wealth, and status, and notoriety, and inevitably, everyone is just stepping on each other's throats and moving at a rapid trajectory to destroy the environment, and yet no one sees themselves doing it because everything is masked and cloaked by denialistic nonsense in our mind, all justified by a scarcity-based social system that forces social inequality, and competitive dynamics, and a scarcity mindset across the entire population. You can see why I'm fascinated by this idea of collective behavior that people think is just as moral as can be that leads to deeply destructive and unethical outcomes as a social result. Now, I have definitely done my due diligence with tangents here. I do want to say one more thing about the news subject, coming back to that, and that is to remind everybody the old Marshall McLuhan statement, "The medium is the message," which was coined in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The concept of, "The medium is the message," expresses how the very communicative infrastructure utilized changes the way information is understood.
How you perceive a message on a radio is different from how you perceive it on a television. How you perceive news on social media, of course is wildly different than how you would perceive it reading a newspaper, but when you dig deep into this idea of medium, you realize that the entire economic system is also a medium. We can look at the design and creation of goods and services, and the labor system in a way as a form of communication, and certain mechanisms of organization, means of production are going to create different outcomes, so organization itself and the incentives and procedures inside of it constitute an environment that is unique to itself, and so the industrial system of entertainment, hence news media, the internet and beyond are all entrenched in a commercial medium, where all incentives invariably move toward profitability and business sustainability, as opposed to the promotion of truth, honesty, problem solving, and beyond. There's like a magnetism in the medium of our social architecture that keeps pushing and pulling people in certain incentivized ways. The medium of our economy absorbs the sub-medium of news media and entertainment, distorting it greatly.
All this is to say that the color of our world is deeply entrenched in the medium of commerciality. I don't know if Marshall McLuhan ever extended his concept of medium in this way, but it seems like a logical extension. This is nothing I haven't talked about before, of course, but I liked the idea of framing it this way. Imagine if the medium of our economy change to something far more holistically oriented in design, egalitarian, sustainable, without the motivation for overt self-interest, how would that change affect all the other sub-mediums from entertainment, news to just about anything? Frankly, it's hard to imagine, and that speaks to culture.
What if we had a society that wasn't designed around every human being, trying to sell every human being something, which is what we have today in our state of artificial scarcity, which leads me to the next section of this podcast, finally. Let's talk about scarcity. Scarcity is generally defined as a state where supply cannot meet demand. While simply in conception, scarcity is actually quite difficult to quantify in real life because it's relative. In other words, what variables define scarcity and relate to its quality are far more complex than people assume.
I'm sure we've all seen the economics 101 line that defends the basis of the entire market economy. In fact, with the singular proposition, resources and means are scarce. That is the mantra of neoclassical economics. While we may understand in principle that we have a finite amount of physical resources on the planet, of course, how and why those resources are processed, allocated, and used is really what decides the state of earthly scarcity, particularly the economic relationship of how scarcity changes in its qualitative state because of efficiency. Yet, the market economy is completely explicit and unnuanced in its perception and general philosophy when it comes to scarcity.
All the market assumes is that scarcity is universal, and hence all engagement should be equal in that understanding. Of course, through the classic mechanism of supply and demand, price values adjust accordingly based on how much of something is existing versus how much demand there is, et cetera, et cetera. Simple enough in this general idea, as I think most understand, but it's that very assumption of simplicity that's the problem that masks the truth, because scarcity is not just some abstracted state of the human condition where, "Oh, things are scarce, and let's just operate in one mode," nor is the market economy is management of scarcity to be perceived as efficient on any level in real life. Professor of Science and Civilization at Oxford University, [Steven 00:22:14] Rayner, states the following in regard to competing narratives regarding scarcity.
"Scarcity is a key term in contemporary human development discourse. It is deeply embedded in two competing narratives. In one of these, the limits to growth narrative of a finite world in which a recklessly expanding human population is rapidly depleting resources on which it depends. The idea of scarcity represents the explicit boundary conditions of discourse and policy. In the other narrative, scarcity serves a more technical role in defining neoclassical economics as the science of resource allocation, which places markets at the center of ever-expanding economic growth. In both cases, in both narratives, the idea of scarcity is seldom interrogated. To do so is intellectually dangerous. It is to question the underlying worldviews upon which each of these narratives and the policies that flow from depend."
In effect, scarcity has become politicized, used to justify the state of the world and all of its poverty and deprivation, coupled with the fact that it is effectively weaponized for the sake of personal and group gain as a profit strategy. In the words of sociologist, Lyla Mehta, "For too long has scarcity been used by powerful actors in compelling ways as a political strategy, either to maintain the status quo, prevent redistributing limited resources, or to legitimize certain solutions and interventions. This has contributed to reproducing inequalities and hindering social justice. This process must now be rolled back." What does it mean to actually manage scarcity?
First, you have to throw out the entire market structure, if you want to think about how a viable civilization would viably manage scarcity on a finite planet practically and efficiently. Economy in Greek means "economia", which means management of a household. Under the umbrella of management rests a litany of dynamic economic processes that get little attention in the world today. True economic management has to start with design, and of course, to design something means you have to have goals, such as longevity of goods produced, such as sustainability and so on. Both on a micro level and a macro level, you have to have design attributes that contribute to improved efficiency, and when it comes to efficiency, it doesn't take much analysis to understand what proper management means, since economic management of global society, even though wildly complex is still principally the same as to how you would manage your own home, how you would manage your own resources, food and so on in your own household.
You take inventory of what you have, you strategically utilize your resources, seeking efficiency in utilization, of course, and if you were in a closed economy like a household and you wanted to actually create something in a literal economic fashion, what would your gravitation be? Obviously, you would want to have sustainability and durability. You don't want to have to make another one of these things. You want it to last, and you want it to be usable again in the event it does fail, hence you would want a circular economy. You would want zero waste.
All of this is just basic fundamental intuition, and hence a growth economy, like we have with capitalism, makes zero sense. None at all. It makes zero sense to have an economy based on consumption, as we've all talked about. There should be no incentive for people to have jobs unless there's legitimate demand for those jobs. Not a total structure that's literally predicated on making sure, commanding people, keep circulating money through labor and purchases.
In fact, efficiency in a true economy when it comes to labor would be defined by the least amount needed. That would be optimization. Instead of job numbers on the news, talking about how we had a great improvement and there's more jobs today, the exact opposite metric would be the better quality, would be the better result. The reduction of goods being produced would mean efficiency. The reduction of required labor to meet demand would mean more efficiency.
Again, this is basic common sense stuff that I think any 10-year old could come up with, with respect to economic management of any kind of household. It's also important to state that when it comes to management itself, how you have to go about it, we have to step back from a system science perspective and realize that a truly high integrity system of any kind requires the least amount of management. As has been talked about before, a viable system needs no control. The management aspect of dealing with any kind of system is corrective, and a truly viable system doesn't need to be corrected in theory, which of course, needless to say is in stark contrast to the outrageous amount of governmental management required legally today in a vast bureaucracy to try and counter all of the inefficiencies of the socioeconomic system. Every law on the books that deals with money and business is just another expression of how inefficient the system is.
More laws, more inefficiency is inherent. Similarly, it's important to recognize that management of scarcity, through design or direct management, always requires a holistic approach, because obviously everything is connected. As a general rule of systems efficiency, the more integrated the design, the better it will be. Integration is a critical design variable. Think about your cellphone and the capabilities you find in a modern smartphone, in contrast to many years ago, where you'd have to have separate devices to play audio and video, a separate camera and so on and so on.
Another example is transport infrastructure. Yes, everyone can have a car, and there's street infrastructure, so everyone drives around, but is that really the most efficient we can do when it comes to getting people where they need to go with the least amount of material needs and the least amount of pollution and so on? The use of cars today results in more fatalities, lower public health, more stress, more pollution, more time wasted and so on, in contrast to a fully integrated transport system like you see in the subway of New York City and beyond. Optimized mass transport integration is holistically more efficient than sparse cars that drive around singularly. All of this is to say that management of a finite planet with finite resources, a fundamentally scarce condition, though with great variability as to how that affects humankind because of our use of efficiency would be an economic system that is extremely different from what we are doing right now.
It would be an economic system that is basically the opposite if you want to truly manage scarcity in the hope to create a post-scarcity abundance, which is what I'm going to have to push forward to the next podcast due to time. I apologize for the imbalance of this particular podcast. I actually wanted to get much more into post-scarcity and its history, but I'm going to push that forward, as I said, and we'll also do a Q&A next time, so revolutionnow.live. This program is supported by Patreon, and my name is Peter Joseph, Peterjoseph.info, and I will talk to everybody next week. Thanks again.