Episode 30
Transcript:
Stafford Beer:
I'm trying to display the problem that we face in thinking about institutions. The culture doesn't accept that it is possible to make general scientific statements about them. Therefore, it's extremely difficult for individuals, however well intentioned, to admit that there are laws, let's call them, that govern institutional behavior regardless of the institution. People know that there's a science of physics.
You won't be burned at the stake for saying that the earth moves around the sun, or even be disbarred by physicists for proposing a theory in which it's mathematically convenient to display the earth as the center of the universe after all. That's because people in general and physicists in particular can handle such propositions with ease. But people do not know that there is a science of effective organization, and you are likely to be disbarred by those who run institutions for proposing any theory at all.
For what these people say is that their own institution is unique and that therefore an apple growing company bears no resemblance to accompany manufacturing water glasses or to an airline flying airplanes. The consequences are bizarre. Our institutions are failing because they are disobeying laws of effective organization which their administrators don't know about, to which indeed their cultural mind is closed because they contend that there exists and can exist no science competent to discover those laws.
Therefore, they remain satisfied with a bunch of organizational precepts which are equivalent to the precept in physics that base metal can be transmuted into gold by incantation and with much the same effect. Therefore, they also look at the tools which might well be used to make the institutions work properly in a completely wrong light. The main tools I have in mind are the electronic computer, telecommunications, and the techniques of cybernetics.
Now, if we seriously want to think about the transmutation of elements in physics, we will recognize that we have atom crackers, that they will be required and that they must be mobilized. We shunt use the atom crackers to crack walnuts and go on with the in incantations. But in running institutions, we disregard our tools because we don't recognize what they really are. So we use computers to process data as if data had a right to be processed and as if process data were necessarily digestible and nutritious to the institution and carry on with the in connotations like so many latter day alchemists.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph. Welcome to Revolution Now!, episode 30, October 13th, 2021. Please excuse the delay in this upload. I've been rather sick and I've had a whole bunch of things come out of nowhere that have derailed me, but here I am now. The opening audio was from the second chapter of a work by cybernetician and systems theorist Stafford Beer called Designing Freedom written in the early 1970s, discussing the misunderstood endogenous nature behind our institutional systems and the importance of understanding such universal system characteristics.
Coupled with the fact that technology today in contrast being utilized for its true potential remain subservient to an inferior form of enclosed organization, reducing our ability to use science and technology more effectively to solve problems in society and improve conditions. As Russell Ackoff stated sampled a number of podcasts back, we have become really good at pursuing the wrong ends.
We have become deeply proficient generating tremendous expertise at accomplishing the wrong things. Take the oil industry once again, which today is still dominating, not only financial investment, but technological initiative in the energy industry, hence all that money, resources, energy and intellect that has reinforced the hydrocarbon industry virtually voiding, at least in the present moment, the logic of historical peak oil, meaning irreversible decline in supply, is no doubt a case study in how we can do all the right things to meet the wrong end.
I have no doubt, putting animal agriculture aside, that the world could be carbon neutral now if the same resources and intellectual investment went into networked renewable energy methods and redesign in contrast to what has gone into preserving the power and economic energy establishment centered around hydrocarbons. I have no doubt. Which speaks to the institutional pressures and loyalties and competitive nature of our society once again.
In fact, as an aside in our ever innovative world, we really should look at all broad, major technological advancements with great scrutiny because with every increase in efficiency or capacity, rests a double-edged sword, a negative counterpart consequential to the destructive incentives of our current social system. For example, in abstraction, I have no objection to say the pursuit of artificial intelligence.
It could be extremely beneficial to us. It could afford us say a system of evaluation and design that could change everything economically. In fact, as I've argued in the context of the future economy many times in lectures and writings, AI is a necessary middle ground for objective decision making. We see aspects of this already mainly in proprietary systems, CAD systems, and some open source mediums like GitHub and beyond.
But imagine you're in an open access design program shared by hundreds, if not thousands of people all working on the same design concept, let's say a smartphone. This is the future, mind you, a smart future of course. So there's no such thing as a company or a corporation. Design, production, integration, distribution, and recycling are all done by economic democracy. And the question becomes, how do you contend with the complexity of seeking efficiency in design? Why is say Bill's smartphone design better than Stacy's?
Or better yet, what if Bill's design actually would work better by application of something that Stacy included in their design? So who decides this? Well, you could bang it out in a massive boardroom with everybody arguing their point, but when you're dealing with technological design, opinions become immediately reduced. An AI algorithm is where this would be centered logically. AI analysis based on true efficiency principles that can solve for what is an economic democracy.
And of course, that begs the question, well, who's going to design the algorithm? Is there some elite group that's going to produce these intelligence programs to navigate and monitor and regulate what we're doing? Actually, that could be just as open source as anything else just as Linux created by thousands of contributions with the purpose of function to weed out what is best at any given time to meet a given end.
So can the creation of the code of economic management sector by sector, and integrated into a totality, which would be true economic management, which is the only way you can manage a household. It is preposterous to think that you can live on this planet without a constant sense of inventory and feedback between all aspects of our survival, hence our economic reliance on the habitat. Anyway, I don't want to go too far down that road in this podcast, but it is detailed in my books.
And there is a lecture I put out years ago called Economic Calculation in a natural law resource based economy, which was done in Berlin a number of years back, and touches upon this same manner of thinking. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that regardless of the benefits possible, in the current system, there's great reason to fear AI because it's going to be used for the wrong reasons and with extremely destructive potentials.
We live in a society predicated on war, competition and artificial intelligence rest assured will be used to kill people in war, organize against free speech and protest movements, and of course, will revolutionize surveillance. It already has, but it will continue to do so in both advertising and the general intelligence communities, not to mention shenanigans on social media and so on and so on. It's the similar manner of thinking that was pointed out by systems theorist, Donella Meadows, the author of Limits to Growth from the 1970s, which was produced out of MIT.
And she made a point long ago that the worst thing that could happen in our current system are efficiency advancements that can only serve to speed up the process of environmental and social destruction. Say infinite clean energy, it would seem like a utopian breakthrough to have unlimited, infinite, clean energy. But within the context of our current consumer, scarcity leveraging, cyclical consumption paradigm, it's pretty much the worst thing that could happen to us as it will simply create even more destructive lack of restraint when it comes to our inability to be sustainable.
Unless of course, that same energy can magically generate new finite resources out of thin air, making them infinite along with the energy. The only thing increased energy efficiency will do is enable us to use up our resources faster, resource overshoot, consequential levels of pollution related to industry and so forth. Think about the industrial revolutions. We are upon the fourth industrial revolution, if you will. Automated networks are coming to fruition.
It seems like a good thing that Amazon can distribute goods as outrageously efficient as it can technically, but the more technological efficiency, just as with the mechanization applied and the second industrial revolution, all it does is create more incentive for people to buy and consume because that's what the system requires, constant cyclical consumption and economic growth. We could have solved the economic problem long ago with a minimalistic sense of existence.
I can't remember if I commented on this prior, but if you wanted to live in the same middle class lifestyle one did in America in the 1950s, you could do so today only working about two hours a day. Think about the relativity of that. We know that Keeping Up With the Joneses never ends, we know the hedonic treadmill. We know that it doesn't really matter after a certain point how much money or wealth or material possessions you have. It doesn't equate to happiness. So where do you draw all these lines?
Would you rather work 50, 60 hours a week to have the next fancy camera iPhone or some nice bag for status? Or would you actually like free time to actually do things creatively, constructively with your community or your family? If I could snap my fingers right now and have a minimalistic existence where I could focus on creative things that I enjoy along with social improvement and community, I would give up most every material thing I have to be able to reduce my need to submit to the system for basic survival down to like two hours a day.
Far more luxurious for me to have time rather than wealth. We have to accept the fact that de-growth is going to happen whether we like it or not. It will come by force of pressure, or it will come by force of our collective will to become sustainable yet again. And in that, you better achieve a new sense of minimalism. If you're aspiring for more and more and eyeing that bigger house or that nicer car or that new whatever, you are psychologically being set up for destruction.
Anyway, all of that is an aside. Going back to Stafford Beer, we have to understand the nature of sustainable systems. Holistically, systems in nature have certain propensities, notably non-linear feedback processes of often great complexity that either conform to dominant larger order environments to which the system is always vulnerable, hence the need for adaptation or the system is destroyed by the larger order environment. Which is what we're seeing right now when it comes to the existence of market capitalism.
It can't adapt. It has maladapted to preserve itself on behalf of its own structure spearheaded by the rich elite and the cultural brainwashing of all those self-appointed guardians of the system's status quo, protecting the elite system of power that is simply consequential to the economic mode and hence where we are today. Let's now return to what we started last podcast, finally, regarding arguments against capitalism, including core market mythology and propaganda that continues to confuse and misinform the majority.
I've divided the following into two subsections. First, let's think about what an argument even is and how one goes about proving apparent statement's effect. It's not just the typical proposition structure that has to be contended with, of course, but also the interpersonal nature of communication itself. You're always going to find a schema that people organize their minds around, their mental model, and whether you're talking to someone singularly or a group, it's something that has to be kept in mind.
Needless to say, each one of us is groomed culturally into patterns of belief and such belief patterns tend to overlap, sharing certain properties. And those properties can create predictability in how you perceive someone's general world view. This is why unfortunately, we resort to polarized categorical distinctions to summarize say political perspectives such as conservative versus progressive or left versus right and so on.
Very generally, you can expect that if somebody believes one thing, there is a greater or lesser chance or probability of them believing something else that shares some kind of characteristic. For example, if you believe that everyone gets what they work for, that the poor deserve to be poor, the rich deserve to be rich, which implies a kind of value neutral view of our economic system, and by extension political system, there are very high odds that you will likely also agree with the traditional nature of the punitive prison system and the violence that occurs.
So just as people get what they work for. You must also be completely responsible for your actions without any nuance. It's easy to say that. It's easy to understand : do the crime, do the time. All this is to say that it's no surprise that people that have highly punitive and unsympathetic attitudes toward so-called criminals are probably conservative advocates of free market economics simultaneously. Not always, but these are shared characteristics you can expect.
Secondly, we'll address popular myths and repeated statements apologists and defenders of the system commonly use. I have broken these into a general range of categories such as appeal to nature fallacies, free will and morality, fallacious comparisons, and so forth. All right. So let's jump into this. What does it mean to develop, define, and argue an issue?
Well, it's definitely not the scope of this podcast going to the ever complex epistemological and philosophical nature of a reason, proposition logic, or the psychological hindrances, cognitive disturbances we all face as human beings consciously or subconsciously in protection of our own sense of reality and hence identity. However, ontologically at a minimum, it's critical to recognize the basic fact that what we call truth simply is the closest approximation we have based on some kind of accepted consensus.
Not just consensus based on the declaration of opinions or experts or institutions, but consensus by corroboration through different ways of thinking about and confirming the same conclusion. For example, most agree with the proposition: the earth is round. How do we know? Well, first, there's the most obvious, simple, visual, experiential observation our satellites and other vehicles around the earth have documented showing the curvature of the sphere. So there's that. But maybe that's not enough.
Maybe there's some kind of optical illusion or conspiracy or something that's happening there. So what about say inferential analysis? Well, Eratosthenes, a Greek in the third century BCE did measurements of shadows over time in different locations and was able to not only conclude that the earth was round, but was also able to measure the very size of the Earth's surface with a very high agree of accuracy 2000 years ago. It's a simple measurement test that can be done by anyone today in fact.
And then you have abstracted practical sensory experience, which also creates corroboration from the emergence of ships on the horizon that appear to rise to the shape of the shadow of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse, to how different star constellations change a perspective depending on where you are on the planet because of the curvature and so forth.
Then what about a more mathematical purely technical corroboration? Well, the physics that we experience on earth that can be measured are bound by dynamics linked to its spherical nature, not to mention the gravitational interaction from other forms such as the moon, which can also be measured. And of course, if you have a large enough gyroscope that can sense the movement of the earth and the degree of drift that occurs due to the fact that it is indeed round moving on its axis, you also get corroboration that the earth is indeed spherical.
Now, obviously I'm not here to prove to you the earth is round, I'm framing this as a structural approach to how to corroborate information in order to achieve the highest approximation of truth you can based on the evidence. However, it is interesting to point out that we are faced with mentalities and psychological hurdles that do not accept any of this for reasons that simply are not reasonable.
And that speaks to the fact that we have a political identity and belief system problem in society, needless to say, just look at religion. And some people you're just never, ever going to get through to. And it's only going to be through the swarm of mass change that those folks are taken along with us. Now, more specifically here in terms of trying to assess and understand complex adaptive systems, one of the most difficult structural arrays to analyze because of the complexity inherent, it becomes even more important to define multi-level cooperation.
As such, the study of society requires more flexibility in analysis than simpler areas of focus due to the dynamic complexity of all the non-linear feedback. Understanding mass human behavior is like understanding the behavior of weather patterns. You can forecast system level outcomes and general to predict what's going to happen, as I've commented on numerous times with respect to, for example, the unsustainable ecological trajectories we see today due to the economic system structure.
But it's still going to be probabilistic. For instance, in regard to public health such as disease, epidemics, mental health issues, aptitude, educational mobility, et cetera, we can look at known correlations and generally see what kind of changes can be made to the social system to accentuate or attenuate respective outcomes. In the same way, we can diagnose disease in the human body and generally find ways to treat them.
But disease is complex. What may work for one person might not work for another person in terms of treatment, same, of course, for causality as some carcinogens will cause cancer in one person but not affect another person the same way. Now, more broadly and back on track here, what has really assisted technical understanding in the past 50 years has been computer modeling.
Of all the utility we have come to appreciate in the realm of computing, our ability to model nature in an effort to better understand it in all fields from medical, to physics, to mathematics, to the environmental has been deeply beneficial. In fact, the entire science of systems, system dynamics was born from computer engineering applied to the field of electricity.
Systems engineers such as Jay Forrester, who I have quoted before, credit electrical engineering in the mid-20th century assisted by computerization as the beginning of better understanding sociological phenomenon in a kind of consilience, if you will. Meaning the understanding of one thing and one seemingly separate discipline applied to understanding another thing, creating improved understanding in the other discipline.
And going back to the broad focus of system science and the endogenous nature of it, that is a critical observation. It is nothing but revelatory to realize that all systems that function in nature have certain shared properties, and our manmade system have to mirror those same properties. Moreover, it is also worth mentioning that this development by extension coincides with a larger pattern of achieving exponential development in many areas because of the application of computers as calculator tools in concert with the trend of increased computational power through Moore's law.
This is a mild aside, but it's worth pointing out. Once we reduce any field into information technology, meaning something that can be input and calculated by a computer, the potential for exponential advancement arises. People like Ray Kurzweil and the singularity folks have talked about this for years and they often exaggerate the potential, but it's fine as the theory holds when you look at the trends of technological and scientific development.
It's not uniform, but it's definitely happening. All right. Enough tangents. Let's jump right into this. The ultimate question here is why is market capitalism unworkable? Why is it untenable as a system? And the simple answer is it's unsustainable. The system is unsustainable from a systems science perspective. That is the singular proposition that answers the question clearly and simply. It's not a moral objection once again.
It isn't about the relativity of economic inequality, notions of human rights, and other common debate angles we hear today along with historical figures like Karl Marx, Veblen and others. Even contemporary so-called socialists today tend to look at this from a worker's rights or an inter group or interpersonal relationship standpoint. And the problem is the subjectivity. It's very hard to debate along a moral continuum because everything becomes relative to one degree or another. You know the drill.
You talk about poverty and someone chimes in and says, "Oh, but the poor are far better off than they were X number of years ago." As if improved conditions somehow nullifies the condition itself. It's like saying abject slaves instead of sleeping on a wood floor, get a one inch mattress instead. Does that improve suddenly make everything better? No, obviously not. And what I'm trying to say is that it's not about right and wrong.
It's about what works and what doesn't based on the most fundamental goals of civilization, which is to survive, have some kind of harmony between people. So things are stable, there isn't war, along with generational sustainability, where new humans can be brought into society and future without worry that they're going to suffer and die because of the negligent behavior of generations prior. Capitalism may arguably be an amoral system, but the true reality is the system simply doesn't function as it needs to.
It doesn't work. And every year conditions get worse because of the environmental changes that the market economy has no capacity adapt to. Not only can't it adapt based on its internal structure in the most technical sense such as the fact that the system is founded on labor for income. And without that, the system is no longer defined as it is. But also the fact that the system produces cultural pockets of power that have no incentive to change. This isn't an anomaly.
It's the defacto blame game where people look to say so-called corrupt attributes or crony attributes of the system of government, of the oligarchs of business and how all major policy decisions are done by lobbyists. And they say, "Oh, well, we just got to get more moral people in there, right? Get those immoral, unethical people out of there and we'll be just fine." But that's not how it works, as I'm going to touch upon later.
You could wipe out everyone that's perpetuating problems for their own narrow self-interest in greed or whatever right now, and another group will come right in behind them and replace them in exactly the same way. Why? Because that's what the system produces on the cultural level without variation as is empirically obvious. Anyway, back on point. So how do we defend this proposition that capitalism is an unsustainable system?
First, we need to have a shared sense of what the word capitalism means in terms of its defining structure along with what a shared definition of sustainability means. As has been discussed in this podcast numerous times, and I'm sorry for a great deal of repetition in this particular episode, but the central flaws built into the structure of the system are, one, it requires cyclical consumption. Two, it requires growth.
And three, it requires labor and resource exploitation with zero chance of homeostatic balance, particularly with the ecosystem. And from those three basic requirements, and there's more, but those are all that need to be mentioned, two categories of problems are produced. One, vast socioeconomic inequality, which is destabilizing, and two, environmental decline, which is no doubt destabilizing. The latter issue in fact, environmental decline, is less vague in its ramifications than socioeconomic inequality.
And in fact, you could remove the socioeconomic inequality variable and it still wouldn't matter as obviously if we destroy the atmosphere, biodiversity, water, and land, we cannot survive as a species. We spent eons across evolutionary time evolving to work with the earth as it exists and we are destroying the very conditions we evolved out of. And socioeconomic inequality will be a natural outgrowth of that very development as well, everything else aside.
Now, when it comes to analysis of any propositional statement of fact, I would basically argue that there are two forms and one mechanism, at least reductionistly speaking. Empirical evidence, formal evidence, and the mechanism of inference, both deductive and inductive. Empirical evidence of course means repeated observed phenomenon and controlled live tests in the natural world while formal means mathematical or theoretical, where you build models often with computers to test dynamics as touched upon earlier.
With inference, of course, being the guesswork, if you will, involved to try to figure things out as you go along where you combine your existing understandings of the world with new information in the hope to flesh out relevant conclusions. In other words, inference is the internal process of both formal and empirical research.
And it doesn't take a influential genius to see that a society based on cyclical consumption that requires growth and exploits disproportionately resources and labor with no capacity for homeostasis, both in terms of income and wealth or replenishing the natural world, which is simply seen as an inventory to exploit- It doesn't take much creative inference to see that there are deep structural problems here even before you move into testing through empirical or formal methods.
A longstanding example of formal analysis that has been validated both inferentially and empirically because it mirrors what's happening in the natural world, goes back to the 1970s with Donella Meadows and the Limits to Growth book that has been, again, replicated many times. And today there's no shortage of trend analysis to show that we're off track on almost every single level.
And if you think from a socioeconomic perspective in terms of inequality, that as the ecological walls close in, people are just going to become more conscious and nicer to each other. Well, empirically speaking, that's probably not what you should expect. The more stress we find ourselves as a civilization, the more we ping our lower brain reactionary, fearful tendencies, the more cruel our society will become as the ecological decline continues.
So back on point, you start with the proposition that capitalism is an unsustainable system. And if you commit yourself to that from a sustainability standpoint and don't let people derail you with all this other noise I'm going to talk about here in a moment, you might be able to get your point across. All right. Finally. Let's jump into the mythology. Number one, "capitalism mirrors human nature. It's natural to us." This is your basic failed intuitive response growing up generation after generation in a scarcity based exploitative, dominance, rewarding, competitive economic structure.
The relevance of long and short term survival conditions show not only by comparing hunter gatherer civilizations to contemporary agricultural or market based societies, explicitly reveal two very different cultures of behavior, which immediately empirically contradicts the assumption, but also by comparing primate analogs when you think about conditions of bonobos versus chimpanzees, which mirror the same human phenomenon, our closest ancestors, mind you.
Which shows that in both cases, if you have lush and abundant conditions, you produce a more amiable, affectionate, and stable, and pro-social culture. If you have desert, restricted, strained, stressful conditions, you produce a more violent, a more dominance oriented culture. Realizing that human nature or even primate nature, or perhaps even nature itself is an adaptive process by which we as humans are actually extremely versatile. Are we competitive?
We certainly can be as a response to environmental pressures. We are just as collaborative as we are competitive, and we will respond based on what the social system, where the condition is rewarding or punishing. Corollary to this is the statement that humans are just greedy and we just want more and more. We're insatiable by nature. End of story. Completely untrue if you look at different historical cultures in different environments.
Even after the agricultural revolution, some indigenous cultures learned to respect the land and take care of the ecosystem intuitively. Tribes that absolutely reject consumer values and a propertied material lifestyle. It's certainly not the norm in modern society to see non-inquisitive, minimalist, non-consumerist, or non-materialist mentalities out there. The culture we have created mirrors the economic system.
And as I said before, if people really were that oppressive and greedy and insatiable, what you're saying is that humans are designed to self-destruct and there's nothing that evolution has ever produced that does that. We have become denatured by our economic system and it's pushing us off of a cliff. Our culture has distorted itself by being constantly reinforced to perpetuate a truly damaging economic system. It's just that simple. It's not human nature for people to be greedy.
It's human nature for people to adapt to what works, being vulnerable to the social psychology that best rewards them. And if you have a value system of status and you put people on a pedestal for having more than others, which is exactly what we do in society, not to mention the reward of power. Naturally, you're going to have a statistical distribution of people that are far more aberrated in this way than others, but at the same time, the tendency is still dominant throughout the whole of culture.
Furthermore, this pattern has led to a philosophical view of what we could call Malthusian, something that I framed in my film work, InterReflections. As an aside, I strongly believe and under the surface of the dominant philosophy of government and of course, military activity is a view of the world where there's simply enough to go around.
Regardless. It justifies two or three people having more wealth than the bottom half of the planet by saying this is a consequence of human nature and not a structurally corrupt economic system. And then you combine the Malthusian disposition with the bastardized concept of social Darwinism, survival of competitive. And you begin to realize why apathy and a fundamental lack of concern is prominent out there built into modern philosophy, in fact.
All enlightenment philosophers tended to resolve down to a fundamentally brutish perspective of the human condition because of their generational experience. Yet another influential, intuitive failure where you perceive something superficially. And to extend one more part of this, this concept also seeks to reinforce social stratification and hierarchy saying that is also human nature. Unlike folks, such as Jordan B.
Peterson, who attribute human hierarchy to evolutionary psychology rooted in deeply stretched ideas like serotonin in lobsters and other absurd things that aren't worth describing, but does fit a pro establishment narrative to keep things the same, which is precisely what these kinds of defenses are- there is no question that the structure of society divides people into economic classes by force of system dynamics in and of itself.
It doesn't matter what the psychological gravitations may or may not be, or your brain chemistry or whatever. Socioeconomic hierarchy is an absolute outcome of the structure of market capitalism. And remember, egalitarian society, non-hierarchical society existed for 99.9% of human history and still does exist in remote regions of the Amazon and so forth.
We also see internally extremely collaborative patterns in society that prove the potential, even though sadly, they're framed within competitive environments often such as with the military. Numerous empirical controlled social studies, game theory stuff, has also shown that we generally favor fairness, not elevation. You see it in the general shame that people carry around with them if they are wealthy, at least on a certain level.
Go up to some rich person and ask them how much money they make or how much their net worth is, and they will probably think twice before answering you because they're actually embarrassed by admitting it. And they tend to want to hide that except for the flaunting attribute, which is more abstract and that kind Veblenesque "theory of the leisure class" kind of thing. Anyway, in the end, hierarchy is a very dubious word when it comes to how we organize society.
Everyone has different skills and talents, and it's really the job of a properly constructed economic and social system to harness that and bring out the best in people, networking, to even out discrepancies here and there, or weaknesses here and there, compensating for shortcomings, hence the term equity, which is different from equality. And the cruelty because of this fallacious thinking is really unfortunate. Differential skills or lack thereof should not be a deciding factor in somebody's wellbeing.
That is not tenable as a disposition because of the great variants on multiple scales and levels that we as human beings embrace. As far as I'm concerned, humans are allergic to socioeconomic inequality because we respond to the condition actually very toxically on multiple levels from mental health disorders, to physical decline, to stress and so forth. As again, talked about by people like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and The Spirit Level and beyond.
So to round this question back out, competition, hierarchy, conceptions of greed, even though greed is really a highly relative, subjective notion in and of itself. I don't even like to use that word, but it is out there in the lexicon associated to all of this. It's convenient to think all of this is an immutable part of our shared evolutionary psychology or human nature, when the fact is it's actually a response to conditions for our own self-interest of course. Moving on. Number two: "hey buddy, you get what you work for.
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work hard and you'll reap the reward. Only the lazy become poor." We all know this one. First, broadly, there's absolutely no evidence formally or empirically that people get what they fucking work for as if it occurs in some vacuum. All inference on the subject gets reduced down into a microcosm of people's dedication to a given end as if that's the only variable.
Obviously, if you put two people in a room and they are working on something and somebody is not as much interested in the idea or doesn't have the same skillset, they don't do as good of a job as the other person who is very interested and motivated and has proper skills focusing intently, and they produce something superior on that side. Oh, the basic logic must be that they shouldn't get the fruits of anything equally because that person was dedicated more so and had more talent, and that person on the other side did not.
That is simply a myopic snapshot that ignores all other subtext. First of all, nobody gets what they work for in the broadest sense of the idea. Everything in civilization is a serial multi-generational development. If you're working on a laptop right now, it's not because of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
There have been literally endless minds since the dawn of intellectual development that have dealt with the properties and dynamics and the creativity that relate to computers as they've formed over many, many years, long predating electricity in fact. In the purest sense of the idea, if you want to get what you work for, you pretty much have to take everything you have, throw it out and build it all from scratch with your bare hands and not have any tools or any prior education.
We are a collective organism that is creating new information and new ideas and eventually technological developments as a singular unit, and there's no escaping that. You'll have a few geniuses here and there that elevate rapidly like Nikola Tesla or Albert Einstein, but it's still a process serial development. And ultimately, we all deserve the benefits of everything we as a whole society have created. There's no other logic otherwise.
Beyond that, because of the nature of socioeconomic inequality and the levels of oppression inherent to stratification, it is preposterous to say that people have equal opportunity and you can't get what you work for if you don't have equal opportunity. Between inheritance, between the clear and present gender and race loyalties so to speak, as they've evolved, giving beneficial preference to certain pockets of society, as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, we all know the drill on this.
There is no such thing as equal opportunity in capitalism. And hence, there's no such thing as you getting what you work for because the conditions are not equal. There's no level playing field. So it's this idea of taking a very narrow, hyper reductionist idea that people should have good ethics and be dedicated and be diligent, and then expanding that fundamentally simple notion to the whole of society defending the vast inequality and suffering because of that tiny little microcosm.
And I think I'm going to have to stop there. I'm really still kind of under the weather. I am on number three now out of 13. I'll probably add some more. I think I got at least 6,000 words of notes here. So we will pick up next time. I really appreciate everybody listening. This program is brought to you by my Patreon. I'm still working on this lecture, but I'm keeping it on hold with some technical developments because I'm not just outputting a talk.
This is actually a program I'm creating to try and get things in a point of transition, a new microcosm of society in parallel with the existing one. It's something that I really hoped other people would come up with because it is destroying my brain. Anyway, I guess we don't choose our paths in life, right? All right, folks. Take care out there. Be safe.