Episode 31
Transcript:
Ted Turner:
... But are you a socialist?
Carl Sagan:
I'm not sure what a socialist is, but I believe that the government has a responsibility to care for the people. I'm talking about making people self-reliant. Making people able to take care of themselves. There're countries which are perfectly able to do that. The United States is an extremely rich country, it's perfectly able to do that. It chooses not to, it chooses to have homeless people.
We are 19th in the world in infant mortality. 18 other countries save the lives of their babies better than we, how come? They just spend more money on it. They care about their babies more than we care about ours. I think it's a disgrace. This country has vast wealth. You just look at something like Star Wars. The money spent on Star Wars, they already spent $20 billion on it. They will spend a trillion dollars on Star Wars.
Think of what that money could be used for. To educate, to help, to bring people up to a sense of self-confidence, to improve, not just the happiness of people in America, but their economic standing. We are using money for the wrong stuff.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, Episode 31, October 27th, 2021. The opening audio featured the late scientist, Carl Sagan being interviewed by media mogul, Ted Turner in 1989. Starting with the cliche assumption still common today, that when one takes a scientific or public health perspective on society, what society is doing economically, more often than not, it simply gets thrown into a box called "socialism," as if that is the only possible category or context when one challenges the nature of our economic system and its consequences.
As an aside, Carl Sagan was a super kind and cordial person and had a very soft manner in communication and debate, always seeking out people's basic relatable rationality. To date, I don't really think there has been anyone like him as an educator. And he was one of a few genuine souls out there that really deserves the notoriety that he achieved. And like to many, he was a great influence on myself.
And generally, this is one of those, do as I say, not as I do things, satirically speaking, as it's best to try and mirror that gentleness in our own communication and encourage others to do so as well when possible, as difficult as that is given the dire seriousness of our present predicament. It presents a unique emotional dilemma, in fact. How kind can we be when challenged with, or are currently enduring, harm?
It's difficult today, to look at the defenses of those that continue to believe and perpetuate the current economic system, without seeing them as effectively agents of social destruction and violence. Because that is a dominant outcome on the system level, because of the aggregate behavior of the masses within the structure. I'm not just referring to being upset with people, such as ruthless oil executives, or Wall Street lobbyists, or the plastics industry. I'm referring to normal people and the systemic process they're a part of knowingly or not.
Compassion is an extremely important thing, but it's difficult when you're faced with say, a company and people within it that are working to put toxic cancer causing chemicals in food, water and in the atmosphere for example. Go back to the tobacco industry's rise and fall and the countless deaths that occurred because of the propaganda and a lack of transparency, as the industry knew very well that their product caused sickness, resulting in the harm and death of millions.
Can you honestly look in the face of one of those employees, or executives back then, knowing very well that their product was cancerous and not feel outrage and anger? Even though, even though, we all understand that they're just playing the same capitalist game like everyone else. A more contemporary example, is today's hydrocarbon industry once again, and the revelations that the industry knew great damage was being caused through pollution long ago, as leaked documents show.
Given that air pollution today, is one of the leading causes of systemic death on this planet, climate change aside, which itself is inching into apocalyptic territory already, it's very hard to see agents of such industries as actual human beings. Given how they have lied to the public, leading once again to countless deaths, not to mention future deaths. And then, you step back even farther, and you look at the nature of the entire system. And how the tobacco industry and the hydrocarbon industry and numerous other industries behave in these ways because of a mentality and gaming logic reinforced and inherent to the economic system itself.
And hence, how can you look at average people that for whatever reason, advocate the current paradigm as not equally culpable in the systemic harm and death that we continue to see on the system level. Yes. Ignorance definitely prevails. Again, we're producing as a collective society, outcomes that no one really intends, but yet many people choose to simply not realize. They choose to be apathetic about and say, "Oh, that's just business and that's the way it is." So it's a complex cognitive dissonance.
Those that advocate the market model of economics, are advocating destruction, violence and destabilization, whether they know it or not. And I hate to frame it this way, but we're dealing with a culture war. On one side, you have people that have become educated and understand what sustainable principles are in this life, along with public health awareness. And they see the need for system level change. And then you have people that are simply satisfied for whatever reason, usually because they've been rewarded by the system and they see no reason to rock the boat in their own myopic, narcissistic, short-term perspective.
Hence, the psychology of the rich. Along with the hyper propagandized that live in very poor circumstances, but have been conditioned to believe that anything other than this system, is actually totalitarian slavery or whatever. Which, by the way, and you can use this in your arguments, doesn't matter at all. You can have fear about whatever the future may hold, if we change the system sure. And that's viable. Everyone should have their concerns and measure accordingly. But the system still has to change, because it's completely unsustainable as argued before.
So excuse the broad tangent, but all of this is to kind of highlight the emotional dilemma. And I think even people like Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi and other highly devoted peaceful people, would discover a far more hostile disposition, if they were alive today. Obviously, violence doesn't solve anything, but violence is right around the corner as the ecological walls close in, if we don't do something. The social structure itself and the agents that participate in it, which is all of us to one degree, is a violent structure.
And as I've said before, I both long and fear for the day the public begins to understand what structural violence is and what it's doing to them, what it's doing to the vast majority, particularly in the lower class. So to be emotionally triggered by all this is natural. It means you're not a sociopath if you're actually angry. In the end, we don't need high hostile rhetoric, we need hostile action. We need hostile action from the standpoint of systems design. We need hostile creation. A creation and design initiative that says, "Fuck you, we're building out of this systemic nightmare and will no longer participate in this immoral and ecoocidal system."
Now, ran to side, the opening Sagan quote also highlights the "livingry versus weaponry" concept, put forward by R. Buckminster Fuller, pointing out that the United States, along with other dominant nations, often spend more on war than they do on life support. This is almost cliche to talk about today, at least in the U.S. as it's become a pop culture awareness, finally. And it is true. The U.S. could end poverty at a minimum, but they choose not to.
They prioritize war, along with the fact that directly ending poverty, goes against the most basic foundation of the free market religion. Because the market god, is supposed to decide who gets what, who lives or dies. But that's an aside for now. The U.S. interest in war, is both a show of force to preserve hegemony, along with serving deep economic interests for a national GDP and commercial industry overall. The military industrial complex, is a deeply relevant sector of the United States economy tied to all sorts of downstream industries.
And no doubt the U.S. is the worst in this disproportional allocation, which is to be expected believe it or not, given the nation's position as the most dominant colonialist power on earth today, the current global military and economic empire. And if it wasn't the U.S. in this position, I hate to say, it would be another nation. By force not of human nature or something, but by force of the economic architecture and the national class divide that inevitably forms, as it does domestically in the same way.
Likewise, just as the system carves out sociological conditions such as inner city poverty, creating statistically predictable tendencies of people in such conditions, cultural, technological, social and economic adaptation over the course of the past 200 years, has molded the U.S.'s highly tyrannical international empire. So as Carl Sagan said, "We choose to have poverty and homelessness." Yes, but those decisions are more of a sociocultural philosophy. A philosophy tempered by the U.S.'s orthodox free market neoliberal bias, both inside government and the industries behind it of course, but also inside the general population, as weird as that is.
Normal, poor people that think anything handed to them, is socialism and immoral and they need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and so on and so on. Slaves that truly think they're supposed to be slaves. So rather than look at the U.S. as some anomaly, it's important to remember that the U.S. along with all nations, is a result of a series of global chain reactions. This is why the U.S. is different than say, the Scandinavian countries, both in culture and governmental philosophy. And why it is so difficult to simply superimpose one country's policies, say upon the United States, even though a lot of politicians in the progressive community talk that way.
Bernie Sanders is a classic case in point. He says, "Oh, other nations in Europe have this, this and this. Why can't we?" But the answer as to why, is actually more complicated than he alludes to. So the core observation here, is that the United States cannot be understood without its global evolutionary context. I know I'm running this into the ground. I've said this before, but I noticed that no one really gets this. Hence, why a kind of progressive, conception of policy changes in the U.S. to mirror, say the Nordic countries, which is technically possible on paper. Of course, it could happen. Still has so much resistance forming a deep improbability of certain things occurring.
This is a complex and unique argument I often get, as I discuss the structural nature of the market economy, pointing out the flaws because invariably someone says, "Well, in this country, they're still capitalists, but they have overcome this, this and this. They have universal healthcare, they have free transport or whatever. So why can't we?" There's no such thing as Scandinavian capitalism or European capitalism or Chinese capitalism or American capitalism. There was only the global spectrum of capitalism, with subtle variations on the same theme, appearing along that unified spectrum.
And even more broadly when this debate does arise, if you really look at the kind of variants it's actually quite nominal. I know plenty of people in so-called socialized medicine countries, that have a terrible time, because the same forces are still present. It's just a little bit easier in the long run, as opposed to what we see in the ruthless United States. The most highly individualistic country on the face of the earth. So there's that.
And finally, we have Sagan's statement at the very end. "We are using money for the wrong stuff." Which of course, is absolutely true, but that presupposes money is the only tool as if it is a point of origin. As if it mirrors something real. Obviously, Sagan understood these nuances, but it's important to point this out. Money is not representative of anything real, nor is its creation proportional to anything real. It is just a randomized process of loans, debt, repayments and allocate through trade. A gold standard never truly mattered. Cryptocurrency certainly will never matter. Yet, people are conditioned to think that there is a fixed amount of money and that fixed amount is somehow related to actual resources. It isn't.
It's almost like when the U.S. government says, "We don't have the money to do this." You imagine some inventory of resources to be used for infrastructure or whatnot. And we don't have that inventory to do it technically, as mirrored by the money. That is the illusion that's created. Is it not? And of course, that's completely farcical. The idea that there's not enough money to do something, which is absurd because it's all fake. Fiat money is fake. Cryptocurrency is fake, even gold as a conception of a backing, is arbitrary as can be. All nonsensically relative to itself and through tradition, gives the illusion that somehow this is a viable or mathematical or a scientific process I should say.
In the end, it's not how much money something costs. It's the question of resources and energy to make it happen. The scarcity of money, imitates the artificial scarcity built into market economics. So we may be using money for the wrong stuff as Sagan said, but that framework is wrong as it presupposes money reflects earthly limits. And it does not. More could be said on that subject, especially when we get into thinking about a post scarcity, post capitalist society and the rationale for removing money. And what it represents in terms of its context in market behavior and the necessity for that.
It's not just some kind of arbitrary thing like, "Oh, we're going to create an abundance and remove money." No, you have to get rid of the money market phenomenon, if you expect anything to resemble post scarcity or post capitalism. And finally, before we move on, before I forget, I do need to make one clarification of something that was brought up last episode, as I was contacted with some confusion. It's regarding comment on research about how, if people wanted to have the same material standard of living as a 1950s middle class person, they would only need to work 11 hours a week today, if the economy as a whole, was adjusted to account for efficiency increases upon the industrial revolution and thereafter, without introducing new wants or expenditures.
This was a concept that economist John Maynard Keynes even talked about, that I also mentioned in prior episodes, in his paper from the 1930s, called Economic Possibilities For Our Children. And Keynes watched the fruits of science and technology emerge through mechanization and networked organization, increasing efficiency, forming the logical idea, that this power of mass production increases efficiency, which reduces cost, which could allow people to have a standard of living of a certain level. And that standard would get cheaper over time, due to the increased efficiency.
This of course, absolutely happens, but we sabotage that by introducing new wants. In other words, if society adjusted itself properly upon the efficiency increases of the industrial revolution, avoiding the detrimental drive for economic growth and cyclical consumption, which of course cannot be avoided without system change, without the removal of capitalism as repeatedly argued, we could have in principle reduced the cost of goods, reduced the work week, raised hourly wages and so on and so on. Approaching zero marginal cost, lowering the standard of living down- a middle class standard of living an acceptable standard of living- to 11 hours a week of work required.
Just remember, the system has modulated culture for the sake of its own preservation. Because this type of system has no use for free time or efficiency or surplus or anything of the like. And it's all very tragic when you reflect on it. So I hope that clarification helps. And now let's get back to the mythology and propaganda list that we started last time. I have condensed this down to 11 items now with some overlap. The first two were discussed in the prior episode. And those myths were number one, "capitalism mirrors human nature." And we debunk the fallacy that capitalism does, so as if the market structure somehow mirrors our evolutionary psychology, which is just preposterous.
Along with number two the, "you get what you work for." As if that myopic perception of dedication and striving, is the only factor in people becoming successful, rich or failing and being poor. In fact, there're all sorts of words and delusions built into the system self-referentially. People say, "Oh, but you earned that money. Oh, Elon Musk just earned 36 billion yesterday." No, he didn't earn a fucking thing. Same as this idea of just work itself. "Oh, but I worked towards this. This is my work." Or the ideas of course, the arrogance of the individual idea. "Well, this was my idea. I patented it."
There's this whole litany, a lexicon of nonsensical words and representative ideas, that are so internally referential, that when people learn this vocabulary and grow up in this horrible environment, they actually think those concepts are real. And they actually imitate real life, but they don't. It's just a monopoly board. And you're looking at the little cards and the internal definitions on the game board. And it has nothing to do with the reality around you.
And the tragedy of course, is that once the market god is conceived of in these abstractions, everyone thinks there's some moral atrocity when anyone challenges it. "Oh, how dare the state tax somebody. You're taking away people's hard earned money. That's theft." No, actually the earning part was theft to begin with, because it's not actually based in reality because no single person is the point of origin for anything, from an economic developmental standpoint.
So all that said, let's now move on to number three. "The market is neutral." This is the argument that the system is whatever we want it to be. The idea that the problem is how the market is used as a tool. We need more ethics and morality as they say, as if the market is defined by human behavior and our actions create the structure. I ran into this idea again recently, when I spoke with Marianne Williamson, former presidential candidate and author. And it really speaks to the heart of sociological ignorance, along with ignorance of system dynamics.
As repeated since the very beginning of this podcast series, this is about structuralism. This is the observation that the structures around you, influence who you are and what you are doing and why. And even if you are completely and utterly aware of the structure, you're still bound by it. You can't escape it on your own. At least, at least if you want to have any connection to normative society, not living in a jungle somewhere in a tree house foraging for food.
So I'm going to approach this myth from four angles. First and most obviously, the structure of market economics is just that, a structure. It's a game board. Each human being has certain incentives and must possess a particular gaming mentality. From the very simple foundation that you're born on this planet and you have to earn a right to life, by forcing participation in the system. It clearly indicates that there's a game board that is clearly set up and you have no true influence on those rules broadly speaking.
When it comes to nuances of behavior, such as the outcry against so-called unethical or greedy or inhumane behavior on the part of agents, we tend to see people lobbying for policy changes, to help regulate the system, legally. And this also gives the illusion that change is possible on a fundamental level. And that is the second myth to note. The most prevalent criticism towards socially, consistent, negative behaviors, is that people are just immoral and unethical. The bad seeds.
But the immorality is actually not some kind of subjective decision from a broad perspective. It is system rewarded. When you really drill down, the entire system is fundamentally immoral, because there's always a requirement to angle for advantage. When you walk into a job interview, you're there to get as much money as you possibly can out of the person interviewing you. While the interviewer is there to pay you the least amount possible, because that is the business game. That is the structure.
From there, when you see CEOs get 50 million bonuses or whatnot, while they're menial workers barely survive a minimum wage, what your real dealing with there, is a matter of degree. And sure, you can try and lobby government and create policy to counter those extremes, but they're still just extremes. The fundamental ethic and principle and necessity of the market structure and its need for strategic exploitation and hence, a fundamental disregard of both the planet and workers, is still built in.
And the third thing to mention, is the fact that over generational time, the system has created a certain value system disorder and culture of people, that have grown to appreciate the gaming and strategic advantage aspects. They have been groomed. They go home from their jobs and they turn on sports and they get even more reinforced in exactly the same manner. It's all about winners and losers.
And so we've generated a culture, generally of course, not everyone thinks this way, that is really a consequence of the structure. Once again, proving a lack of neutrality. And finally forth. As has been and run into the ground already, the system is fundamentally predicated on cyclical consumption and economic growth and labor and resource exploitation. Once again, these are not passive characteristics, they're not subjective. They're molded into the system and they're immutable as long as the system exists, because they're networked together, in a feedback loop relationship.
You change any of those attributes and you change the way the entire machine functions systemically and hence, the structure changes and you would not have something called capitalism, if any of those changes were made. So to summarize this myth that basically prays upon an untenable view of human volition or free will, a failed intuition. It's much easier to look at the world and say in our ego, in our individual identity and hence behaviors, that we're creating it and we can change it.
As opposed to realizing that you're vulnerable to customs and traditions and resulting established structures, that actually have more power than you do as an individual in the context of survival. So the structure is not neutral. No structure is neutral by definition. And we see this kind of thinking replete in the activist community overall, as they pine for the miracle legislation, which will always be fought back by system agents and so on and so forth.
But even in the deeply progressive realm, such as the post scarcity or de-growth movement, we also see this. Singularity folks like Ray Kurzwell, Diamandis and even Rifkin. They seem to believe that you can kind of evolve out of the system in some way or utilize capitalism or create a "conscious capitalism" and we will achieve post scarcity, abundance and beyond. And that is simply a denial of the fundamental structure. The structure can't recognize abundance.
If abundance exists, there's nothing to exploit. There's nothing to create a job, for only inefficiency does that. As I said before, technical efficiency is the opposite of market efficiency. This is not an opinion, it is a structural reality. That is what the machine is doing. And as far as broad behavior, let me just lay it out, that the more caring and environmentally concerned and socially concerned you are, the faster your business will fail because of the competitive network dynamic, that exists broadly.
And if you try to legislate that in, it's only a matter of time before that legislation falters and is removed by another administration that is more loyal to the market religion. It's the ocean current that you're trying to push back. The current will win in the end, even if it takes years to erode and erode some kind of seemingly strong concrete barrier. So it's all very unfortunate. Climate change movements, anti-pollution movements, civil and human rights movements, seem to believe that you can kind of work within this system, if they're not radicalized enough of course, as we all are here. And while improvements can be made, they will likely temporal and they will have deep limitations.
And I'm afraid I'm going to stop a little bit early this episode, because the next question has a very long answer as per my notes. And I want to comment that I'm very aware that people are very sick as I am, of both listening to a diagnosis of the system and talking about it. But it is incredibly important, since we still have a tremendous naivety and ignorance about what this system structure is and what it does.
At the same time. I recognize the fact that probably none of this matters, until something is presented to the population that shows an alternative, which is something I continue to bang my head against. And the long delayed lecture and what will be featured in Zeitgeist four. And of course, when I continue interreflections, albeit abstractly. All of this is leading toward the design revolution and the components they're in. So thank you very much for listening. My name is Peter Joseph. This is Revolution Now. It's brought to you by my patron. And I'll talk at all of you folks very soon. Thank you.