Episode 37
Transcript:
Noam Chomsky:
What's happening is quite ugly, and I think the criticisms are mostly accurate, but they're beside the point, there's a background that we have to think about. It's fashionable now in the United States, in Britain, to condemn Putin as some sort of distorted mind. There's an article in Psychology Today analyzing his brain, asking why he's so arrogant, irritable, rat faced man, as he's described by Timothy Garton Ash, and so on. This is all very reminiscent of the early 1950s. At that time, the US had overwhelming power and it was able to use the United Nations as a battering ram against its enemy, the Soviet Union, so Russia was, of course, vetoing, lots of resolutions condemning it. But the fact is, whatever you think about Putin, okay, irritable, rat faced men with Asperger's, whatever you like, the Russians have a case, and you have to understand the case.
When Gorbachev vigorously protested that, he was informed by the United States that it was only a verbal commitment, it wasn't on paper. The unstated implication is if you're naive enough to think you can make a gentleman's agreement with us, that's your problem. Under Clinton, [they] moved right up to Russia's borders, Russia surrounded by US offensive weapons, sometimes they're called defense, but they're all offensive weapons. And no Russian leader, no matter who it is, could tolerate Ukraine right at the geo strategic center of Russian concerns, joining a hostile military alliance. I mean, we can imagine, for example, how the US would've reacted, say during the cold war, if the Warsaw pact had extended to Latin America and Mexico and Canada were now planning to join the Warsaw pact. Of course that's academic because the first step would've led to a violent US response and wouldn't have gone any further.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody, this is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 37. As per the Noam Chomsky opening, I'd like to spend the first part of this program, addressing the war in Ukraine and war in general as a consistent social pattern. And then we'll talk about something called the iceberg model, as it pertains to sociology and some nuances therein. However, before we get into it, note that recent prior episodes have been dealing with capitalist myths and propaganda, and I'm going to be returning to all of that next podcast, finally. In fact, I was thinking about consolidating some of this stuff into a new website that could serve as a repository, so to speak, of these kinds of responses. It might save us all some time as these same assumptions and questions and biases and confusions come up over and over and over again out there.
And please note for all you kind Patreon supporters out there, that my energy right now is being concentrated toward the new film, Zeitgeist IV, so things are going to be a little bit sparse otherwise. And I'm really trying to keep costs down for the new film, to a point where I can release it for free immediately, as with the rest of the Zeitgeist series. InterReflections, my prior film, wasn't initially released for free, a very complicated and expensive project, but it is now online for free in about a dozen languages. And thank you for all those that have helped donate or contributed to those languages. And note that ever every single thing I've done in media production, with the exception of the book, The New Human Rights Movement, which went through a professional publisher, is indeed free online.
And for those curious about future program development, especially those that keep complaining that they want to see action rather than just more education. Keep in mind that the majority of people out there still are unaware of why a transition to a new economic structure is required. Hence, building new participatory transitional systems is only going to be as effective as people motivated to use them. And while there is much to be said about how we can incentivize and scale out a transition into effectively a resource based economy, a critical issue no doubt, is people understanding the nature of the problem itself. That said, on the other side of the equation, one could argue that systems could be designed that appeal to different levels of interest, pulling them into such systems without them really knowing what they're contributing to overall. This is an incentive strategy that I have given a great deal of thought to as well. Part of the reason I postponed my large lecture project called, On The Future Of Civilization, I want to get all of this right.
I'd rather produce less in high quality, than just outputting constant things for the sake of outputting. And what I mean by incentive strategy is how do we appeal to people's moral sensibilities, for example, along with their own self-interest obviously, guiding them into new patterns of behavior, organically, behavior and eventually values that support the new system that we need. Today, for example, many are clearly upset and aware of the ecological crisis, even though they might not understand the root cause. So hence rather than appeal to the broad macro technical reality of the capitalist economy being foundationally unsustainable and unredeemable, you try to find a micro level of persuasion that doesn't require that larger degree of understanding and hence motivation. Anyway, all interesting things to think about in our collective work.
So as I speak, the world remains rightfully horrified over the preemptive war of aggression launched by the Russian government against Ukraine, rightfully angry at Vladimir Putin or as George W. Bush would say, "Vladmyr!." The dominant Western disposition fueled by the media is the view that Putin is an insane, Hitlerian psychopath who has initiated a completely unprovoked act in the interest to further his machismo goal to reclaim the glory of the former Soviet Union, to which he feels Ukraine must be part. And as this narrative goes, once he takes Ukraine, he's never going to stop, if not fought back, of course, going country to country, taking over everything he can because, you know, he hates democracy and freedom, and therefore the battle here really is freedom versus totalitarianism, East versus West, democracy versus autocracy, and the entire world is at stake, vulnerable to this ruthless imperial dictator.
And while that is the dominant mainstream take, naturally we get to see a little bit of nuance, such as people bringing up NATO and other aspects historically, even though mostly dismissed in the Western narrative. Okay, so what does Putin himself have to say? Should we believe anything he has to say? The immediate defense he has put forward in his own speeches, is that the nation of Ukraine has to be demilitarized and denazified. And of course, like a good father, he wants to protect all the self-proclaimed Russian separatist regions in Eastern Ukraine, which have been in dispute for quite some time. He's also talked about weapons of mass destruction and other things of that nature, but this is the general publicly stated excuse. Now, the first thing to point out here, which is obvious, is that in war time, all public communications are angled and weaponized, just as the guns and bombs are. Him talking about Nazis, clearly a cheap ploy, regardless of the right wing elements that do exist in Ukraine and in parts of the government, but it's really just a value- a virtue signal to the general population and the world.
You know, that big Trumpian type rally he had recently, with the giant banner that reads, "For a world without Nazism," it's classic low brow appeal. In the exact same way, the United States used the September 11th attacks and the banner of fighting terrorism in order to invade Iraq and Afghanistan for its own war of aggression, obviously highlighting the vast hypocrisy of the United States to have any objection to what Russia is doing, but that's for another conversation. However, I will say, for the sake of understanding these general dynamics, these power dynamics between major and nations, it doesn't take a biased mind to look over the past 75 years to see that the US has been a poster child for colonial geo strategy, wars of aggression and constant political interference, singularly, or in concert with NATO.
This is why the United States is indeed the prevailing empire on this planet, with hundreds of military bases stretched across the world, and disproportional influence over almost all international institutions, which of course, are consequentially neoliberal. And of course, much could be said about neoliberalism as the emerging economic and political religion that the West has cultivated and worked to impose across the world, in the interest to homogenize things, to allow for more open markets, which really means to allow for more companies to go in and rape and plunder but that's for another conversation. Moving on, I think the core term to understand when it comes to what's happening with Ukraine, Russia and the United States, is a vassal relationship. This, of course, is an old term dating back to feudalism, but in the modern context, basically you're dealing with government loyalty to a larger, more dominant nation. And this is simply how the United States and all prior colonial empires have organized to one degree or another, and hence, you'll indeed find this characteristic with China and Russia, but to a lesser degree.
Vassal nations serve two roles, they are geo strategic pawns in balance of power politics, and they are centers for economic advantage and exploitation. At the core of the vassal state is the leadership in question. In contrary to mythology that makes the United States appear like it's a defender of freedom and democracy and human rights across the world, which has been one of its core excuses for many, many interventions. The reality is the United States has tolerated the worst human rights dictatorial abuses in its vassals as long as that leadership continues to support US interests. And of course, regime change is usually a consequence of people not playing ball with the bully, so government overthrows have been a routine characteristic of this vassalization of various countries. For example, the history of oil rich countries in the Middle East, notably starting with the overthrow of Mossadegh and Iran on behalf of oil interests and the CIA in 1953, installing literally a monarchy dictator, aligning Iran's economic trade interests with the United States and other Western allies, such as Britain.
And there are countless other examples in Latin America and the Middle East, of this kind of behavior, it's a standard play. But if you're supporting dictatorial people for your own economic and geo strategic interests, sometimes things come to head, because supporting, backing and installing dictators has a shelf life, because sometimes the general populations finally rise up in their own oppression, and then the US has to save face. It turns around, demonizes the person or the government at large, and boom, ferments regime change and the cycle continues. And I point this out for two reasons, first to eliminate the pending nonsense that the United States actually cares about populations when it comes to any of this stuff, proven not by my opinion mind you, just look at the empirical history. And secondly, I'm trying to frame this to better understand the Ukraine, Russia relationship, through the lens of vassal subservience effectively and inherent loyalty when it comes to geo strategic territorial balance of power stuff.
In this context, let's now step back and consider the 2014 US backed overthrow of the pro Russian leader Yanukovych, and his pro Russian government. This was a thought out win for United States geo strategic and economic advantage, helping to install a pro Western leader in contrast, after the overthrow, which mind you, did have a popular uprising, which was exploited in the favor of the United States. Keep in mind here as I give you this grand picture, that I'm not denying sovereign rights in this discussion, I'm not denying the will of people, but all of that is just part of the chess game. It's all part of the angling when it comes to these big macro geo strategic interests. So in this chess game, Putin starts losing his vassal state to effectively the United states, so what does Putin do? He rapidly annexes Crimea, while recognizing the separatist regions in Eastern Ukraine as Russian, allowing him to have some stake in that country in an attempt to fight the westernization of it and preserving simultaneously critical trade routes, and as some speculate, hold on to untapped hydrocarbon resources around Crimea.
Again, it fits the model, the economic attribute and the geo strategic balance of power territorial aspect. So 2014 was basically the starting point of a new narrative against Russia and Putin, rarely allowing for the big picture stuff to be discussed in Western media, which goes to show the reactionary attribute of all of this, as opposed to just saying, "Oh, look at that dictator trying to annex other lands of sovereign nations, how dare he." There is a larger order context, and to understand this, obviously you go back to the fall of Soviet Union and there was a gentleman's agreement, as Chomsky put it, or a promise that was made, that said NATO would not expand its territory any more eastward. Because remember, NATO was formed literally to fight the Soviet Union explicitly. The Warsaw pact, of course, was the counter alliance that Russia had, and eventually dissolved after the fall of the USSR.
But no, NATO did not dissolve, rather it kept expanding, leading up to the modern day where NATO has expanded to well over a dozen countries, almost blocking Russia entirely in on its Western front. And this long term history simply can't be rejected, because for many, many years, Russia and Putin have been objecting to this trend very publicly. Is that objection mere propaganda? Does he not actually believe that NATOs a threat? Is it just some smokescreen rhetoric set in motion to mask the true intent of his long term Hitlerian ambitions? Obviously not. Broadly, the most stunning thing about the Russian Ukrainian war, is that it has been completely predictable, not only because of Putin and Russian comments, constituency comments, but it has been analyzed and scrutinized, and given predictions by numerous geo strategic economic strategists from all over the world for decades. You don't have to believe anything Putin says, just look at those that have thought about the fundamental consequences from multiple angles, and you will see massive corroboration on the concern of NATO's encroachment.
Most notably in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, NATO publicly announced that Ukraine and Georgia will become members. They didn't give any details, but it was publicly stated. And of course, Russia immediately responded strongly, with Russia's deputy foreign minister saying, "Georgia, Ukraine membership to the alliance is a huge strategic mistake and will have serious consequences for Pan European security." And less than a year later, Russia ramped up aggression against Georgia with a short war. Coincidence? And hence, you could see within this framework, how Russia would become even more concerned after the US backed overthrow of the pro Russian president of Ukraine in 2014, further foreshadowing Ukraine's potential admittance into the enemy alliance. Now, before we go any further, let's frame it differently. Most people today implanted with the idea of national sovereignty, where each nation is autonomous and self guiding with no coercion from other forces, really don't seem to grasp this old world view, balance of power view, territorial politics.
Why should Russia or the United States have any say in the self-determination of Ukraine? Unfortunately, that idealism is naive, which also explains why when all of this started, leading up to the current war, the conversation was almost entirely between Putin and Biden, or the larger Western power and the larger Eastern power, almost like Ukraine was some child of divorced parents. But there is a school of thought out there that doesn't see NATO as an issue, and they see Russia and Putin as being just paranoid and how NATO expansion is just a general alliance with no real threat whatsoever. Let's take that view for a moment, even though it's utterly preposterous, because even if there are years and years of peace between these alliances and opposing nations, if you look closely what's happening in the world, we are being slowly driven into increased crisis environmentally, and at some point, these alliances may be activated for those reasons.
As I've always said, we haven't really experienced a true war on this planet, a war driven by actual resource scarcity in the extreme, such as say, pending water wars, since by most projections, we are faced with deep potential water scarcity in the near future. And just like you might put some extra security around your house if you notice crime levels rising and scarcity emerging in your neighborhood, unemployment or whatever, creating desperation, well, national security becomes a similar circumstance. So it's not to be dismissed, but let's just dismiss it anyway for the sake of argument. What if the whole thing is just a paranoid delusion of someone like Putin, which by the way, isn't far from the general PR campaign coming from the West.
And my point here is that it doesn't matter what the reality is, it only matters what people think. It's like a bear that has cubs in a cave that you stumble into, the bear sees you, and immediately likely gets violent or aggressive because it thinks you might threaten it's cubs, it doesn't know any better, even though you have no interest to threaten anything. Do you try to gesture and explain to the bear that you're not there to hurt them? Or do you get the hell out of there, respecting the complexity and the lack of comprehension between entities? Obviously the latter. And this is the same basic for framework of what we're dealing with between tribes, so to speak. And it's particularly critical in this scenario because we're dealing with tribes with nuclear weapons. And yet, while lip service is given to deescalation, at the end of the day, the approach of the West has ultimately been to arrogantly dismiss any security claims of Russia, willfully not listening to Russia's concerns, and I mean outright.
It's unfortunate that there's a range of leadership on this planet, actually the majority of the leadership on this planet, that is utterly insane. And while we can acknowledge the lunacy, it doesn't make that lunacy go away. You have to meet people on their own terms as best you can, especially in the balance of power issue we're dealing with, where massive catastrophic war could be on the table. And yet the United States has done the opposite, the United States NATO alliance has rather thrown shit right in the face of Putin and Russia for years, a hubris that is truly incredible in that kind of exceptionalism of the West. There has been virtually no attempt to bridge interests with Russia and create a pattern of shared respect and peace. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the same kind of patterns have been in play that were existing prior to the fall of the Soviet Union.
And here's where some healthy speculation is in order, it seems clear that the NeoCon position of needing an enemy, is still very much in play. The fall of the USSR should have been a new beginning, it really wasn't. It's almost as if it didn't even happen, when it comes to America's geopolitical disposition. What have we changed? Russia phobia, the broad anti communist echoes, anti-socialist value systems promulgated by the belligerent conservative elements of the United States and the West, the echo of red scare stuff. All of this really has just been subdued, it hasn't been eradicated. I don't think the West, particularly the military concerns of the United States, want peace at all. There's certainly nothing in their actual actions that reflect it, rhetoric aside, and the whole situation really needs to be looked at as a long term provocation. When you hear President Biden referred to Putin as a war criminal or calling for his removal or regime change, this is not a step toward deescalation.
When you look at the behavior of NATO overall, with its military personnel extremely aware of what they've been doing year after year, dangling the potential of Ukraine and Georgia becoming part of NATO in 2008, and of course, the US backed coup in 2014, shifting the balance of power towards the West in Ukraine. This is all antagonism and provocation. The territorialism interest is equal on both sides and both sides are at fault, but the US has been holding the cards in this scenario for a very long time. In fact, I would go so far to say that it's really been a trap of sorts, that Russia has fallen into. The current horrific unnecessary war in Ukraine, mind you, is really a micro event born from the context of the larger macro geo strategic war that has been going on for decades, instigated by the US NATO alliance. I mean, what do you think these people do at the bowels of Pentagon all day?
Weapons are made to be used, they have to be used because the cyclical consumption requires it as well. So if you just hold on to these weapons, there's not going to be much of an industry left for the arms people. I'm also convinced that when you look at the behavior of the West and the incredible layer of sanctions, that we should know deep down, really don't deter military action, but rather serve in the long term to strangle Russia overall, to further weaken it for future Western dominance, not to mention plant the seeds for regime change, which Western sanctions are always the first step. The big picture has to be respected, the bear in the cave needs to be respected on its own terms, regardless of how primitive and brutish that bear is, at least to a degree. And as far as what Putin's actually doing, he's not going to be able to occupy 40 million people, this isn't Iraq.
So really what it looks like, especially given the civilian death toll and the bombing of apartment buildings, is that this is a general attempt to destabilize Ukraine and to more or less ruin and wreck it and make it as dysfunctional as possible. And it's also worth noting that a lot of this stuff is finally coming to the surface, the obviousness of the geopolitical war and even Zelensky has conceded publicly, at least apparently, that he will not join NATO, that the country will not join NATO. And in addition to that, I think what you're going to find is that in order to stop this war, Eastern territory has to be given up a little bit more so. That is, of course, if the United States and its allies are allowing Putin an exit strategy, which is one of those basic things in this type of geo strategic reality, that needs to be considered, give the guy an out because he's eventually going to realize he needs it. That, of course, assumes the United States wants him to exit this.
And my biggest worry ultimately, since we're already in this world war dynamic with allies versus allies, we are supplying, we being the West, and the United States are supplying munitions, and even people, even though NATO forces aren't technically firing at Russian forces, it's very, very comparable. But the big worry is that something's going to happen and build on this superficial moral outcry, a legitimate moral outcry, obviously, but not an outcry that has any utility. And the more that people become outraged by this or that event or humanitarian crisis or death toll, the more it's going to give fodder to this idea of regime change or anything of that nature, where NATO involvement is demanded by population. And that is a frightening prospect because there's absolutely no way, if that line gets crossed, we will be coming back from it without a great deal of destruction and loss of life.
Now, a whole lot more was outlined here to talk about the origins of this kind of large scale military behavior, conflict itself, how it roots back to the neolithic revolution, things I've touched upon throughout this entire podcast series, but I wanted to hone in on it, but it's going to be a lot to cover. And since I've already developed another section that I am going to jump into now, on the iceberg model, I think it's best we shift gears entirely and I'll be coming back to the subject of war, likely in the next episode. So we're going to go back to some more preliminary stuff in the context of general systems theory. For those familiar with this podcast, current events are really rarely discussed in detail, and I've made an exception with the prior discussion on the war in Ukraine, because from a structuralist standpoint, meaning the interest to understand root causes, reoccurring major events are really just variations on a theme.
Much problem solving attempted today focuses on individual events rather than what creates them. So a guy robs a bank, he gets arrested, he gets thrown in jail. Is that the solution to the problem of property crime in general? Of course not, rather one needs to understand the roots of the phenomenon itself because the individual act of property crime is just an event. The event being an outcome of deeper dynamics. This is your classic sociological iceberg model, the iceberg model for those who may not be familiar, I don't believe I've mentioned this formally, it's a very common systems thinking tool with many contextual variations, mind you. So I'm just going to present the most rounded one. So for those listening, let's generate a word picture. The very basic model from top to bottom in causal linkage, goes from events, down to patterns, down to structure or structures, and then down to something called mental models, which I'm going to talk about more so in a moment.
So rather than considering only the specifics of a given event, you look for underlying patterns surrounding its recurrence, events become organized by categories. So more concisely, event repetition indicates pattern, patterns indicate underlying structure, with structure being of course, a nest of active system dynamics. And personally, as a brief example, I think the most intriguing category today regarding this kind of approach, at least in terms of broad negative social behavior, is the reality of mass shootings. I've brought this up before because I find it fascinating, aside from being horrific, of course. In fact, I did a whole scene based on it in my film InterReflections. So we see the repetition of the events with a hundred mass shootings this year alone in the United States, hence the pattern, with the ultimate question becoming, what dynamics are occurring to form the structure that's giving birth to the pattern of events?
So you go through a differential diagnosis, trying to account for whatever might be a factor. Why is this pattern most prevalent in the United States? Is there a relationship to gun culture or how many guns we have? Does it have anything to do with socioeconomic inequality? What about America's cutthroat individualism and hyper competitive capitalist culture? How does religion come into play? What about ethnicity, demographic, gender? Hence such correlations can be analyzed, assessed to form a structural understanding of what we would call a precondition for that kind of sociological behavior. And of course, I'm just talking about framework here, I'm not going to attempt to answer that question today. But again, it's just fascinating to think about the mostly American white male going to berserk, going "postal" as it originally started in the '80s, willing to kill everything around them, sparsely, and then oftentimes just killing themselves.
And needless to say, the proper perspective of this phenomenon is epidemiological, not moral. I can't reiterate that enough. You who have symptoms, they indicate an underlying disease, and then you have the underlying cause of that disease. And unfortunately, when it comes to human behavior, once again, people shy away from this kind of thinking for many reasons. One being it challenges people's various sense of identity and free will, it makes people feel like they've lost their sense of autonomy or volition. How do you reconcile the great paradox of your sense of autonomy versus your long and short term conditioning? Not to mention the impulses inherent to our biology, in that bio psychosocial synergy model, hence the required compassion that we all really need to have towards ourselves and others. In fact, if you think about it, we are recognizing this, but it's only in certain kinds of pockets, otherwise, why would people engage in say corrective therapy, psychiatry, psycho analysis?
While drugs may be introduced in those environments to help people break their patterns of thought; SSRIs and so forth, the real work is self-analysis, to understand what the hell happened to you or what the hell happened in your environment, to recognize reactions within you, and then from that consciousness, you can work against those things. So society generally accepts this kind of thinking, but broadly rejects it overall, hence, the entire legal judicial punitive construct that we see across the world. Rather, the entire system is based upon revenge, something we call justice. If true sociological and psychological considerations and even biological considerations, of course, within that mix- if they were all taken into account, logic would demand that problem solving would have to be related to something deeper than just an evaluation of the act itself. Once again, the event itself.
So going back to the iceberg model, it's worth using this as a tool to generalize a systems approach in these kinds of conversations: events, pattern, structure. Now what about mental model, the fourth and lowest linkage in this framework? Events, patterns and structures are only events, patterns, and structures because of the framework of mental organization applied. How you organize what we observe, how you define those observations, inevitably comes from a model of perception, mental schema. Hence not everyone may agree on what is an event or a pattern or a structure. So what we see and how we cognitively organize things is obviously extremely important, more important than probably anything, since after that point, everything can become suspect if the foundation of our observation is wrong. It's also critical obviously, in communication, how do we find common ground in shared perception, but really more importantly, how do we know at all that our perception has anything to do with reality?
Well, today, the closest approximation to reality we have, in terms of analysis with proven efficacy in our ability to manifest say, technological ability, medical treatment, predict natural phenomenon, fend off disease, is of course, science. I know we're in needless to say territory, but it's worth revisiting, as while we generally perceive the laws of nature as detached from us, which of course they are, but in reality, it's just another model of organization in our minds. For example, Isaac Newton's model of gravity, clearly did very well in its predictive capacity in explaining natural phenomena, but it was still incorrect as a model in many ways, and Albert Einstein swooped in and improved it. So it's always worth grounding ourselves a little bit, to remember that what we are seeing and experiencing and understanding, is in many ways, coming from us as a projection.
There are other kinds of foundational models obviously, superstition, religion, astrology, someone could say that a hurricane is an event that come from God's anger at human civilization, and the structure is the duality of good and evil in people's moral capacity and so on. However, I'm digressing slightly and being a little bit more general than necessary here. Back to the more specific mental model concept as it relates to sociology in the iceberg model. It appears the general school of thought in the iceberg model, implies that mental models, hence people's behavior, are the ones creating the structure and the structure creates the pattern and the pattern creates the events. And it comes back to a bad intuition that is ubiquitous out there, a general school of thought rooted in blind intuition that basically discounts cultural and sociological factors in terms of structure, seeing institutions and dynamics in society as an outcome only of individuals collective behavior.
And the conclusion made is a view of the world as an aggregate collection of individual free will actions. And in the context of activism, the resolution is that, well, if you change your behavior and you change the way people are thinking, it will naturally change the structure. And I don't mean through revolutionary means, I mean, by the general unfolding of different behaviors, through different values and incentives or whatnot. In other words, institutions will change if people just change, as if we are, individually and collectively, the fundamental star starting point. And the glaring problem with this perspective is it ignores our vulnerability to conditioning coming from culture and the incentives of society in a feedback loop. Most notably ignoring the survival requisites that are dictated by the prevailing economic tradition, capitalism. So what we have is a feedback loop coming from the external, with its rewards and punishments and related group values, input back into the individuals at the bottom of the iceberg model, effectively calibrating a view of the world and hence mental model because of that ongoing feedback.
And once again, this has been talked about before on this show, so I apologize if this sounds redundant, but you might notice I'm coming at this from a different angle once again. For example, our economic system is explicitly rooted in exploiting scarcity, rewarding dominance, and hence fundamentally emphasizing competition, in fact, not emphasizing it, demanding it. If you do not maintain a fundamentally competitive ethic as required by the system structure, not required by human nature or an expression of it, and not due to prerequisites of reality at large in the physical world, which has great abundance, but built directly into the structure, which is explicit, you will be less likely to succeed in your survival. The more ruthless and exploitative people are, the more successful they generally are. Success, of course, defined by wealth and power, characteristics inherent to the market economy structure, not true success of invention or helping people or solving problems.
So what happens over time? Well, being the adaptive organisms we are, our very brains become reinforced, they become wired to view the world through that kind of scarcity dominance oriented lens. The structure is influencing the mental model. And because of that feedback impression, which is extremely visceral because we're dealing with our very survival, people's very understanding of the world around them becomes polluted by the structure. And hence again, the mental models they've formed become an extension of that structure and not the other way around, hence people effectively grow to serve that structure. And I apologize for the convoluted nature of this, but it goes back to system dynamics and how there's no linear reality really. Yeah, the events result because of pattern, because of structure, but it's not enough to say structure comes from mental model, unless you acknowledge the fact that that mental model is a result of structure.
And it's very unfortunate when it comes to trying to be positive about the future as an aside, because it's easy to become cynical once you really begin to understand that feedback loop. How do we change a system that has everyone basically by the balls when it comes to their general survival, living in the short term, ultimately? Yeah, you'll get a few heroes here and there that break the mold and rise to the surface, the Martin Luther Kings and so on, but it's very rare statistically. And in this case, the exceptions prove the rule. It's like a giant magnet that's pulling people and very rarely are people able to escape the field of pull.
So the stress and requirements of the system keep people locked into a particular worldview, removing their motivation to do anything but keep participating in that system for their short term survival. I mean, look at the climate change reality, most people agree that something has to be done, but they're not willing to actually rock the boat because A, they don't really understand the cause, and B, even if they did, they would have such massive cognitive dissonance that they would probably gravitate towards preserving the structure versus changing it, simply because of the short term reward pattern. This is the most fundamental problem, which is really the point here and why I bring this up in the way that I have, hence the continued cycle of short term survival at the expense of long term destruction, and all you have to do is look at the world right now.
And that is precisely what the diagnosis is on the psychological and hence sociological level. It's a mental illness, a kind of addiction, compulsion, or neurosis or something, it's a crazy blinkered reality where people know they have to do something, but they're so locked in they just don't, at least on average. So returning to what was touched upon earlier, this chicken and egg thing, well, do we build the new system and hope they come or do we continue educating? Obviously both issues are critically important, particularly education focused on structural change and why, and of course, building systems that have incentives that reinforce the new structure in contradiction or contrast to the old one, and recognizing that the old one is so powerfully reinforced. So reinforced in fact, and as the current reality we see today with our paralyzed position as a civilization, locked into old patterns of behavior and old world views effectively perpetuating the structure once again, embodying basically an enslavement to the structure-
...very, very easy to be cynical, but I'll say this, even though the odds are against this kind of change before increased catastrophe, it doesn't change the principled motivation, and with that understanding of just how powerful the structure's influence on people's mental models are, we can begin to calibrate our activism in that way. And maybe, just maybe learning how to explain that to people, will get them to realize that the general political activist tradition that we pander to year after year across the globe, attempting to use democracy to create relevant change, is utterly compromised, powerfully compromised by the influence of the structure through feedback on people's mental model. And I'm going to leave it at that for today. I hope everyone's doing well out there. This program is brought to you by my Patreon. I will be back very soon to further discuss issues related to war specifically, and continue the prior series regarding capitalist myths and propaganda. Thanks everybody, talk soon.