Episode 21
Transcript:
Peter Senge:
Well, it seems to me, there's one problem in the world and all the problems in the world arise out of this one problem. And the problem was interdependence. I often think it's important for us in this systems field. Just to remember that systems is just a word to say something which people have understood as long as people have understood anything. We do not live alone. We have never lived alone. We live in a world of extraordinary interdependence. This is a sensibility which defines in many ways native awareness. And by native I mean before the industrial revolution, of course, but really before the agricultural revolution. As many people who have reflected on the evolution of culture would probably say that was the first fundamental break. And of course it's embodied in almost all of our axial age religions, not all, but most of them sometimes very explicit because those religions had their roots in a time period very similar to the beginnings of organized agriculture.
During which time human beings go through this profound shift. There was no word for nature. Most native communities have no word for nature. You do not need a word for something that is you. Life is interdependence. There is no such thing as living separate. That we inherit that all species inherit. How many of us want to destroy species? You wake up in the morning and go, "Ah, what a beautiful day to destabilize the climate a bit more." Of course, we don't think that way. No one wants to produce the systemic outcomes that we consistently produce. And what I started to realize is that is, almost to me, the archetypal definition of systems intelligence, or let's just say, systems ignorance.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to the Revolution Now! Podcast episode 21, April 7th, 2021. For those new the focus of this podcast is on system change. The term or ism I generally use to embrace this change is called structuralism. Structuralism may be an ism, but it's not an ideology. It's a method, a method of analysis and worldview based on systems theory. And it's about observing and respecting the holistic inter-relational nature of sociological phenomenon, highlighting the structures that underscore system level behavior, and hence patterns of repeated events that we see all around us every day- system level outcomes. It poses the question, what are the levels of organization in society and how do they influence the unfolding of civilization systemically for better or for worse? And in this panarchy, meaning the synergy or link between systems at different scales of operation, there's a kind of hierarchy of influence, even though that word hierarchy isn't exactly the right idea.
What we find is some levels of organization, some layers will have more power than others. The example I commonly use is you have a system of a boat. This machine of a boat designed to transport someone across the ocean. It's a system; it's there to stay buoyant and operate as best it can until a larger order system influence such as an enormous storm comes in and smashes that boat removing its function. But we don't see these kinds of relationships properly. We understand laws of nature and the ecosystem and sustainability, at least more than ever, because of the crises that we're experiencing. But we don't think about this sociologically or at least very rarely do we. We tend not to recognize that no matter what we do on one level, another more powerful level of system organization can override such behaviors. And that is critically important to activism.
The importance of structuralism to activism is the recognition that there are structures that are influencing everything. And if you want to change things for the better, you must be aware of those structures and ultimately change those structures. The basic thesis here is that until we have a true understanding of our social system as it exists, -- getting to the root of negative social patterns by tracking systemic causes, while at the same time working to build far more sustainable systems; sustainable approaches, new structures that have to be introduced, through, of course, the same kind of scientific reasoning, the systemic reasoning -- unfortunately, the social and ecological declines we see accelerate today will only increase creating further imbalance and destabilization. Put more simply and in real world terms, we can’t have an economic system predominantly based on market trade.
It's run its course. It isn't salvageable today. From a system level analysis, there is no defense of it. Scientifically, irrespective of what you believe about society, human nature and the like, our system of economics does not hold up to the changing needs of our environment. We have hit a wall in regard to the range of adaptation the market economy can work with, and there's nowhere else to go. We are there. And either the system devolves into some kind of nastier version of itself, just to maintain itself, to preserve the basic structure, or we do a phase transition out of this thing, building on the good properties of the system, emerging into a new system. So if you're a human being that wishes to see future generations flourish, finding balance to the ecosystem; improving a condition of peace and justice and human rights equality, you can't possibly support any known version of capitalism.
Doesn't matter what blockchain does. It doesn't matter what the new legislation anticipates. It doesn't matter how much you tax the wealthy. The structure itself is simply antithetical to those values and goals. And that is the first thing that has to be admitted like drug addicts in an addiction rehab group. The first thing they have to admit is they have a problem and we have a serious problem on this planet. And just because solutions are not clear and obvious and simple to most, doesn't alter the existence of the problem. The question is not what is right and what is wrong, the question is always what works and what doesn't. We as a species, either conform to the laws of nature revealed to us through system science, or we die at the hands of those very same laws, it's that simple. And the root mechanism that will lead to our demise will not be some malicious group or conspiracy or criminal oppression or general social breakdown. It will be by way of a deeply toxic, outdated religious tradition, in fact. A system of economic organization that we Orwellianly call: the free market.
Now, subtle opening contemptuous rant aside. The opening audio excerpt was from a lecture by a system's theorist, Peter Senge. It was taken from a 2014 talk titled, Systems Thinking for a Better World. And while of course like most academic types, he's not explicit in criticizing the system-level flaws of trade based economics. The framework and groundedness of his overall analysis of things is actually very educational and thoughtful. At the end, you may have noticed he used this phrase "systems ignorance," and that is an excellent term. Needless to say, the framework of science itself is about understanding cause and effect. And it's no surprise that the more we learn, the more we realize there is to learn because of the emergent, nonlinear complexity of the natural world. And contemporary society with all of our claimed sophistication continues to fail miserably at attempting to understand this complexity: systems ignorance. As talked about at length before in this program, in other podcasts, whether it's hardwired into our brain or it's a cultural consequence, we in society appear to have a very difficult time understanding the nature of systems.
In fact, we tend to see the world in the same way we have structured it, as static hierarchies. We see a word we begin to reduce the word into more words; component parts, categorical reductionism. Our inference is primarily deductive, when just as much weight needs to be given to connectivity across all scales. When you look at our educational system, it's clear because of the fragmentation of it, we're not trained to really think about relationships. Imagine a photo of a sunset over a common house, we see the house, a car in the driveway, a tree, there's grass, there's flowers, there's a horizon, there's a little bit of moisture and dew in the air. We see those objects and that's how we would describe the picture. But we don't see the interrelationships of those things. Try this next time you walk down the street, look at the category of things that you see and make a willful attempt to draw relationships between those things, as opposed to just observing the things. It's a very unique exercise.
On that and as an aside, some may be familiar with David Bohm and his experimental idea of Rheomode. Peter Senge has actually spoken about this quite a bit. I think he was influenced by Bohm's work as well. Rheomode is an idea for a different kind of language, one based on the verb, not the noun. Bohm got the idea from the Blackfoot Indians. The Blackfoot language is very unique indeed with a large focus on action, verb and connection; holism. More of a process language, less focused on static nouns. A verb based language if you will. We're all generally confident that we can describe the world we see around us with the language and linguistic tools that we have; that we've inherited. And yet different languages actually have different inherent worldviews within them. The Blackfoot language, as a kind of verb based process language, has a completely different implication than, say, common English. In a way it's kind of a Marshall McLuhan, "medium is the message," observation. Which again relates back to this concept of structuralism, because the language structure we use actually has bias, implicit bias. There's a kind of emphasis in our language.
In the same way the structure of our economy has bias and implications built in regardless of how people use the tool of our economy. Which also speaks to an extremely ubiquitous myth in society, the idea that systems are neutral. People myopically conclude that, "Oh, we just have to change human behavior, be more moral and ethical. And the system outcomes will hence be different." Well, as Peter Senge stated in that opening, people don't want to harm others with the environment, but yet it keeps happening. And that's the disconnect. So there's this illusion, this myth. How many times have you heard people refer to our economy as neutral, and it's not neutral.
The market game is not decided by the players, it's decided by the rules and the structure. This is that ever common, weak, moral argument that's just everywhere out there. Arguing for improved social conditions based on human behavior. Markets are just fine. We have an ethical problem. The structure is biased. The structure is violent. The structure is criminal. The structure is incentivizing and creating the dynamics of all of these negative patterns. It's also creating positive patterns too. So let's not just dismiss the whole thing. The question is when you weigh them together, are we getting more positive than negative? Ah, not anymore, not anymore. Far more negative holistically is emerging than any of the positives we can claim at this time. And one final thing that just popped in my mind before we move on to the main content of this episode is the notion of hypocrisy.
And I don't mean in the context of ridicule. I get emails all day long accusing me of hypocrisy because I sell things in the system, a system I'm opposed to. Well, obviously it's not really hypocrisy when there's no other option. When you're trapped in the system you want to change, sadly, for survival, you need to utilize the same system. And obviously it's up to one's moral judgment, as subjective as it is sad to say, about how far you go in that degree of exploitation for your own self-interest, as the system demands, as literally every human being on the planet is operating.
But the hypocrisy, I think, creates an emotional stigma with people when they start to get closer and closer to the truth. Hence the activist industrial complex. Why are all of these scientists, and career activists, and sociologists, and systems theorists still not willing to confront the core structural flaw of our economy? When as far as I'm concerned, it's absolutely right in front of you. It's transparent, it's obvious, it's the elephant orgy in the living room. And the reason they don't is because of the hypocrisy they feel, because they're not willing to sacrifice their method of survival because they've probably achieved some level of sustainability finally for themselves and their family. It's completely anathema to the mind to engage that kind of thinking. And that is a deep emotional inhibition for lack of a better expression that continues to serve as a kind of feedback loop, preserving our current system as I'm going to talk about more so as we delve into again, the main subject today which is, Systems Based Activism.
However, before we jump into that, I did have an event planned as some may know, on March 28th, that had to be canceled the day of, I'm very sorry about that. And I was planning to rebook this for mid April, but things have changed in my life, in my domestic family life. Unfortunately I have an immediate family member that's in hospice; terminal, so it's been very difficult. And obviously that is priority needless to say. So I'm going to wait on creating the new event date because I don't want to cancel it again and we'll play it by ear for the moment. But in the meantime, what I'd like to start doing today is cover some of these ideas as best I can without the visual aids or the simulations that I was going to show in the event. So on my website, peterjoseph.info, you can see a synopsis and outline of the event and its current form though I think it's going to change by the time the event happens.
But there will be three basic areas of focus, understanding our current system of economics, understanding what an idealized system would be based on inference drawn from nature, and hence fundamental sustainability principles and public health principles, and third and the core purpose of this talk, how to transition from the current system into a new system. Now for clarity, let me better summarize those three issues, and then we'll focus a little bit more on the third for the rest of this podcast. Modeling market behavior. We have to create a representative market model as it's important for not only understanding the system dynamics, but to remove this lure and pollution of ideology and presupposition. This isn't about historical forms. It's not about Marxism or socialism or communism or whatever. It's not about some theory of human interaction, moral theory, laborers versus workers, class dynamics, or beyond. All it's about is understanding what the system is doing, what it does based on its structure, identifying the actors, the institutions, incentives, feedback loops, and the synergies that keep the pattern unfolding and contained.
It's also about discovering what the natural gravitation are, which is extremely important; that violate the neutrality I just talked about prior. One of the more interesting things about the way people think about the market economy today, is that they accept the good things, but they kind of dismiss the bad things as if the system somehow isn't creating those bad things just as consistently as the good things. In the words of famed cybernetician Stafford Beer, "The purpose of a system is what it does." Sounds like a silly statement, right? The purpose of a system is what it does. What the hell does that mean? Well, the observation is that people are biased and hence unable to really identify what a system does. Pretending certain negative things are actually the result of something else. Something interfering with the system. The classic argument of course, is the false duality between state power and business enterprise. The entire economic libertarian belief system is based around this duality, in fact.
We superficially perceive the institution of government as somehow antagonistic and separate from business. When the truth is government is an evolutionary outgrowth, an emergent outgrowth of the market economy and not the other way around. The very features of government are defined and set in motion by the practice of business, and the values of business, and the incentives of business. Do you ever stop to wonder why we call that dickhead at the top of the pyramid, the "president?" Government and business mirror the same hierarchies. And even more importantly, all governments in the world to one degree or another are influenced by money and groups with money, hence business interests by default, hence the free market once again. Government and business may appear to be antagonistic to each other, but really they are part of the same system and they have a negative - positive feedback relationship.
Anyway, back to my point about the negative outcomes specifically. This is where the term negative externality comes in, which I hope everyone is familiar with. Notice that concept of externality in the term. This term of course, has particular context related to costs which are externalized in common use. So an oil company does its business, creates pollution and it doesn't factor in the pollution and the cost to clean up that pollution or the negative medical costs of other people that are absorbing the pollution and so on and so on. It's not built into the sale price, so hence the cost becomes what we call externalized. It's external to the myopic market-based method of accounting. And I might be stretching things a little here, but I think it's odd that we have this word external so consistent in economic literature when it talks about these things. It has a deeper symbolic meaning is my point. As intuitively, no one really thinks that pollution is actually an output aspect of the system by design, so to speak.
When I say design, I don't necessarily mean intent. It feels unintended, a side effect. But those can only be subjective qualifications if we see such patterns consistently, right? I'll put it this way, if an objective alien came down to analyze what human society is doing in this social system, this economic system, the alien would only be able to conclude that we willfully and purposefully generate poverty. We willfully and purposefully generate vast socioeconomic inequality, and cultural elitism by extension. That we willfully and purposefully want to destroy our habitat and hence ourselves. That we willfully and purposefully want to pit human groups against others in conflict. We willfully and purposefully oppress, we pollute our environment and effectively we are willfully and purposefully suicidal as a civilization. That is what the objective alien would perceive, because it would watch what the system is actually doing, not what we think or want it to do.
So the purpose of the system is what it does. The patterns that you see repeating, the institutions that are reinforced, the culture that is created. Market capitalism is just as much about creating billionaires as it is about creating people in poverty. And again, as Peter Senge pointed out earlier, nobody wants to see others get hurt or the ecosystem decline. Nobody wants to see the structural violence or the systemic racism that is also economically consequential, in the longterm, as I've argued. And all the negatives so-called side effects we continue to see. But they are not side effects, if they create repeating patterns. They have to be seen as system functions. It seems strange to say something like the purpose of a combustion engine is not only to propel a car, but to release toxic exhaust damaging the ecosystem. It's odd and awkward to think about it that way. We associate purpose with the intent of the people behind the design of something. But those are all simply subjective ideas we're superimposing. Human intent isn't relevant to what the system is actually doing.
Moving on to the second goal of the talk. The goal is to model what an ideal economic system would look like. How do we arrive at a new structure? What is the reasoning? This approach will be from a technical and scientific perspective based around known principles of public health and earthly sustainability. Again, the logic will be completely independent from historical concepts. As far as socialism and communism, there's no purpose to using any of those old ideas or any of the old historical information unless they add to the model, to the inference of public health and sustainability protocols, so to speak. So this analysis will be abstracted in a kind of valueless way. Aside from the goals just mentioned, hence a chain of thought. We can't look at new proposals for the future, from the standpoint of what you and I may feel comfortable with superficially right now. We have to remind ourselves that the comforts we enjoy are temporary in the specificity of the tools used.
I was in an argument, not that long ago with a guy that said they didn't like public transit because they liked to drive their own car. The implication was, he objected to the idea of mass efficient transit with greater efficiency, savings of energy and beyond because of his self interest to want to drive a car; the pleasure that comes from that person to drive the car. And they're willing to not participate in a more efficient and sustainable system because of that interest. You hear this kind of argument all the time. People often don't even realize that they're saying it. They don't realize the stupidity of what they're saying or the indifference and apathy and selfishness of what they're actually saying, not to sound harsh. And I've come up with a term for this phenomenon and I call it, temporal value interference. Temporal value interference. It's kind of synonymous with "But I don't wanna!"
What if someone said they want to go back to riding horses and buggies? What about rickshaws? See, every culture and every generation is going to have certain patterns of behavior they latch onto and become identified with. They're comfortable with it. And we all know this, but it has to be stated. And I'm sorry, there's nothing more immature than reacting to new proposals for future organization, just because of your own selfish gravitations. You have to have some kind of consideration for the world you live in and the society you live in, needless to say. Another example of this very quickly is people's obsession with heavy animal agriculture today in terms of nutrition. We've seen a pretty tremendous increase in animal product production per capita over the past 50 years, hence a culture of such consumption.
And by the way, I'm not judging people that choose to eat meat or not. I want to point this out from a sustainability and public health standpoint. As there are plenty of reasons to think about a more sustainable food system with less reliance on animal agriculture, by design. But of course, you can't say that to someone because they get pissed off, they think you're trying to control them and tell them what to eat. And that reaction, of course, is very common. Hence, once again, the need to take a valueless approach to describing a new sustainable architecture focused on public health, not just the very top of economic organization, but also the institutions and subsystems that come out of it, such as food systems and healthcare systems and transport systems. All of those need massive revision simultaneously in concern with the total economic revision. In the end, the point here in this second part of the talk is to focus on a system that is actually in homeostatic balance with nature. All from an epidemiological, public health perspective.
We are solving for pollution. We're solving for disease. We're solving for living longer and being more healthy. We're increasing the sanctity of peace and mutual coexistence between groups. And as an aside, I think it's worth touching upon the fact that, our moral sensibility, our gravitation towards how the world should work is not going to come from our own belief system. What is the point of all this philosophical shit over the years: writings religion. It's all about telling people how to be, right? And yet we never think about how to be from a sustainability and public health standpoint. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the true root of philosophical orientation in our society - morality and ethics - can only be derived from these basic life ground, natural law principles. If you listen to the earth and you listen to the science that tells you how you are supposed to behave. And if you conflict with that, well, "fuck you." Ha ha. Sorry excuse me.
I'm in one of those super tired states where I just feel semi insane, so hopefully all of this makes some sense. But I think it's an important distinction to make when it comes to how we navigate our philosophical, moral and ethical understandings. Why can't we derive those beliefs from the natural order of the world as best we can understand it? Moving on and the third and final and most important section, which I'm not going to go into too much detail today because of the brevity of it, has to do with transition. So the first two sections set up the current system understanding, right? The model of market dynamics, market behavior, capitalism, as we know it. The second part talks about what an idealized structure would look like. And then we have to figure out how we move from structure A to structure B. Ultimately we look for leverage points.
We have to find a way to attack, so to speak, multiple angles of the systems strategically in a systemic approach. Not singular, you're not going after one thing. You're not demanding something. It's about activism that destabilizes through these leverage points. Taking with us those emergent properties that are good, good meaning that they have arisen because of human ingenuity in a context that is not necessarily system specific. And hence going back to my book, The New Human Rights Movement, there are those five transitions I talk about. I'm going to go far beyond those five transitions in the lecture, but it's important to point this out for the sake of consistency for this particular conversation. You have access, localization, open source, digitized network feedback, and automation. All five of those aspects have emerged as technological system phenomenon within the confines of the capitalist structure; within the incentive system. We have a natural logic with these kinds of approaches, and rather than dismiss them and rebuild them - we grab them.
They are our leverage points and we work to emphasize those systems, building new systems in a small scale, in a community network. And we work to build out and scale out as more people begin to participate in what is ultimately a process of demarketization, which is ultimately a process of starving the beast as it were. The most powerful thing you can do to this system is not to attack it, but to drain its energy. As many other systems theorists have talked about in many other contexts that don't relate to economics or social theory. Systems in nature do the very same thing. So we have to embrace that emergent property that we see in nature and devise strategies as an activist community to build on what we can and reincorporate as much as we can into the new paradigm. Now I'm not going to go any farther with all of that today because I'm running out of time.
But I hope that gives a little bit of an introduction. And I would like to leave you all with a quote by M.K Hubbert and it's from his work, Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture. "The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping and incompatible intellectual systems. The accumulated knowledge of the past four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy and the associated monetary culture, which has evolved from folk ways of prehistoric origin. The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from our pre-scientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.
Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems, during the last two centuries, have had one fundamental characteristic in common namely, exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings. And this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints. And according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest." All right, folks that does it for me today. I hope this was helpful and we will continue the next podcast talking about, out-system activism in the context of transition as I mentioned prior. This program is brought to you by Patreon and I really appreciate everybody and yeah, everybody stay safe out there talk to you soon.