Episode 43
Media:
As we continue on this Occupy Wall Street protest, we're joined by one of the organizers, David Graeber.
David Graeber:
The idea is that all of the political parties have basically bankrupted themselves. They're all essentially bought and sold by the financial elite that's created this crisis. There's no possibility of them actually coming up with a solution. And essentially you have to start over. People have to go into their public squares, meet each other, start talking to each other and start brainstorming ideas. The system is not gonna save us. We're going to have to save ourselves and start rebuilding society as we'd like to see it. If you look at who showed up, it was mostly young people and most of them were people who'd gone through the educational system, who were deeply in debt and found it completely impossible to get jobs. I mean, these people have felt they did the right thing. They did exactly what they were supposed to. The system has completely failed them, and they're not going to be saved by the people in charge. If there's gonna be any kind of society like worth living in, we're going to have to create it ourselves.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now! Episode 43. First I want to apologize for the time gap. Since the last podcast, I've been traveling for the new zeitgeist film, trying to get it together for a proper release this year, having to be really strategic with my time and limited budget. While I appreciate all my Patreon subscribers out there, when it comes to large projects like this, it doesn't make much of a dent with the high cost of production ultimately falling on me. But I'm a seasoned one man army when it comes to this stuff. So I do cut costs by basically overworking myself doing just about everything but such is life. In terms of content for the new film. Unlike prior films or literary works, more consideration is going to be given to tangible participatory solutions, developing ideally a scalable system or program to get people off the grid of our unsustainable economy, forging something new.
And on that, I actually recently gave a formal lecture presentation at a systems change conference in Europe. And the 40 minute video of that has been released, it's called a Viable Society. For those interested in looking it up on YouTube or beyond. The presentation gives a very preliminary sense of ideas and theory that may be workable. And later in the podcast, I'm gonna talk about some of those ideas along with some other related activist issues such as the problem with institutionalization, which might sound counterintuitive. We need institutions, right? Well, in the 14 years of watching the Zeitgeist movement, I've learned a lot. And one of its greatest problems is its institutional nature, a problem shared by pretty much every other activist organization on the planet as well. In the end, we need to drive ideas, not groups, not people, not organizations, not figureheads, certainly not leaders.
And while that may be fairly easy to understand, being for ideas, not groups or people, we're actually faced with a very serious social psychology problem in the way people relate things together. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. And finally, I want to announce I do have a small side project that I have initiated in the hope of preserving some kind of sanity through humor, and necessary cathartic ridicule, in the form of a Culture in Decline subseries I'm calling "yelling at the wind," which is being uploaded to a new Culture in Decline YouTube channel that can be found through the Culture in Decline website. And while I know I've promised to bring forward a second season, full season, of Culture and Decline, the old web series from 2013, unfortunately time and budget restraints won't allow that right now. So this is a good compromise to keep that kind of gesture going.
And it's a little bit easier to do than more formal talks. The first episode of "yelling at the wind" called capitalism vs blah blah up. And I have another one on my desk talking about the debt ceiling spectacle that we see in the United States where both parties pretend that somehow they're restrained and how much they can actually borrow. This ridiculous game is played out almost every year pretending that the United States government or any government that has its own central bank that makes its own money actually behaves like a normal household economy. You know, being frugal and all of that. That's not how it works. Whether the United States government is 30 trillion in debt or 300 trillion in debt, it makes absolutely no difference except for side effects like inflation. But I won't go on that tangent here. Now, program notes aside, let's return to podcast proper and go back to that opening audio, which sets the stage for the core focus of today's program.
As noted, it was an interview with the late anthropologist, David Graeber from 2011 upon the start of Occupy Wall Street, which he was instrumental. And critically, he gestures the need to sidestep appeals to power as this core political mechanism for societal change, instead advocating a grassroots rebuilding. Hence, as implied, a focus on social infrastructure redesign, particularly in the context of economics along with a kind of activism and organization required to build it. And while very generic in his description, it speaks to a deeply complicated and troubling revelation. Are what the majority of activists doing today, particularly when it comes to economic problems, increasingly futile? Not the ideas per se, but the avenues by which they hope to see change emerge. Is the assumption that appeals to power through democratic means, or even autocratic appeals, including protests, will have the required effect to reverse, say catastrophic environmental decline or alleviation of the ongoing inhumane and destabilizing socioeconomic inequality or inequity that is ubiquitous across this planet?
And I personally tend to find, when I bring up this kind of questioning, I'm looked at like a cynic. It appears folks just assume that since we're all people, right, being people waddling around the planet, one group can educate or influence another. And if that new idea or direction is rational and evidence-based, others will logically adapt and will slowly begin this process of galvanization and evolution, step by step in our culture, and hence, society, as the intelligence species we are, moving into more sustainable and just behaviors, right? Well, unfortunately, as we all know, that is not how the sociological condition works. As talked about before, people appear far more influenced by group inclusion dynamics and survival related stress, as opposed to rational thought. It's complicated. It isn't to say progress isn't made over time, such as the fact that there are less theists out there than there used to be, along with less people that believe in goblins or witches or the earth being flat and so forth.
But look at how many people still do basically believe in that stuff at the same time. There appears to be an extremely long lag time between the establishment of scientific consensus on a particular issue. And that consensus filtering and affecting general society. Loyalty to group and identity really gets in the way as we see from things like the Ash Conformity experiments and other psychological and sociological studies, there's a strong tendency for people to side with the majority, especially if they have an identity with it, regardless of what the truth might be. One glance at the cult of Donald Trump should show you the power of this kind of persuasion. Reality becomes secondary to ideology and once again, group identity. And by the way, this is bothering me since I brought up scientific consensus: There is good reason to be skeptical of a team of people that claim consensus about a particular idea, especially in the modern day. As if what I'm talking about in terms of group identity and so forth wasn't bad enough.
We live in a society where everyone is constantly lying to each other for their own vested interests. The social system magnifies our need to be skeptical and ultimately creates cynicism, and it's just another layer of disorder that we have to deal with. But that doesn't mean mean, of course scientific truths don't exist and boy, do I long for a day when we don't have to worry about people's dishonesty for their own self-preservation, in a society that isn't based on competition and scarcity exploitation. Every decade we get new revelations about some company that has lied through their teeth, employed fake scientific research and so forth, such as say Exxon and the recent hydrocarbon scandal, which of course goes back years because these companies knew what they were doing. They knew the dangers and the effects, but they hid it. They not only hid it, they actually appealed to the opposite conclusion, muddying the waters and so forth.
So it's a true tragedy of modern life in market capitalism. Nobody can trust each other. And if you do outright trust people, then you're probably gonna be taken for a ride. And again, if it wasn't bad enough that we have these other tendencies to worry about, the simple trust factor and what little social capital we have today also creates fringe pockets of delusion. People that are so cynical; they are so turned off by their experience; they are so locked in to narratives that are born from this, like uber conspiratorial, fringe narratives and so forth, that it becomes that much more difficult. They are dug in and it snowballs and it becomes more difficult over generational time to try and change people's erroneous assumptions about causality in life. So anyway, that aside, let's turn back to this general notion of majority influence. One example of this which isn't talked about enough, is the effect of poll numbers released to the public.
Researchers have found a bandwagon effect where people's opinions will be persuaded by the perception of others. It's complex, you know, just as you have a football team where somebody is loyal to that team and roots for them over and over, regardless -- on the other side of the equation, you have people that simply want to win. They want to be on the winning side. And it's no surprise that modern politics is literally presented as a game imitating sports like football. It's toxic across the board. You have people that are group loyal that they don't deviate regardless of how horrible their candidates are. And then you have people that want to be on the winning side to win the game by association, which explains why modern politics really has nothing to do, when it comes to argument and debate, with policy. Just very, very generalized ideologies and then obsessions with people and groups. You never ever hear on the debate stage, anything of any real relevance, just this kind of pinging back and forth with notable talking points related to the parties such as abortion or immigration and so forth.
And then attacking each other for their character or some other association, which of course has nothing to do with relevant policy once again. And as another brief aside, it's really quite disturbing when you realize that modern politics functions like a TV show and the people that participate in it are half conscious of what they're doing. As long as people have something to argue about, like Biden and Trump having classified documents or what's on Hunter Biden's laptop, or Donald Trump having sex with a porn star. None of these things have anything to do with relevant social policy, but yet this gossip culture, this gossip politics, is at the very top. The media fuels it by nature of the spectacle of it, meaning the media knows they make more advertising money off showing things that people want to gossip about, that are sensationalized. And basically what you have is this grooming and conditioning of the general public to think that these conversations are of the most relevance.
And it's really spooky as a feedback loop. I have to admit. To this day, every major news station in the West, particularly in America, of course, is obsessed with Donald Trump. They just talk about everything he does all the time because there's an audience for it, evidently, cuz it's a train wreck spectacle. People watch it like a Netflix show. And yet if you really want to get rid of the Trump element, the first thing the media has to do is stop paying attention to him. Man, I'm a tangent machine today. So where were we? Ah, yes, we're talking about the problems with the assumption of democratic influence or any kind of public influence that appeals to power within the capitalist system and the failures therein, including all the cultural feedback loops. For example, today there is an overriding narrative that supports a mythology. The mythology that markets are the only thing we have to preserve freedom.
And of course, in a polarized way, associated to antagonistic elements perceived as a threat to this freedom through markets such as Soviet communism, which creates a boogeyman enemy. Hence the unfortunate cliche that persists to this day where anyone that criticizes market economics must be a socialist in favor of communism, socialism, central planning, gulags and whatnot. So that story of course is pervasive and inhibiting. But I think what most dominantly keeps the general public locked in subservience to this economic system is the familiarity, the routine, the basic reward and punishment incentives people experience day in and day out. As briefly touched upon before, the stress of the system forces loyalty to it out of a basic desperation. It would be different if we woke up and the basic necessities of life had been organized collectively by society. So no one starves, everyone has food, clean water, a roof over their head and basic necessities, but we don't have that.
Instead, everyone has to submit to market labor and the exploitation and preservation of scarcity and those safeguards that are there, welfare, minimum wage and so forth, are constantly being eroded because of the ideological value system that's also pervasive as touched upon before. And hence everyone's in a kind of paycheck to paycheck stress and rocking the boat can be very detrimental. So the kind of mass appeal to move against this kind of system is daunting to think about because everyone's just so locked in. And not just for necessity's purpose, but also from a kind of psychological exhaustion. There's an old George Carlin joke I've referenced before from one of his books, and he says, "Some people ask what is and ask why. Some people ask what isn't and ask why not. And some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that shit."
The general public is so inhibited by the system dynamics and the pressures and the stress, not to mention the manipulation of the system where people will actually put others down as freeloaders when they get something they "didn't work for." All those people that were complaining recently when they were attempting to remove some student loan debt but "oh, but I paid off my debt, that's not fair that other people will get a free ride. How come I didn't get that?" And you have that push and pull too, which I've talked about before. It's all very perverse in this nasty feedback, value distortion that is ubiquitous. So all of that interfering noise is constantly cycling. But ultimately, and more direct to the larger question here of why traditional activism and politics cannot be solely relied upon for relevant social change is of course the condition of power and how that power is created and preserved by the system.
This should be more than obvious to everyone paying attention, but it's worth outlining. For instance, it's no surprise that people like Elon Musk or other extremely wealthy people with consequential influence, gravitate toward conservative politics. They do so because it's the most protective of their current state of wealth and power. It should be no surprise that the predominant view of social welfare programs, food stamps, minimum wage levels and everything else that can assist those that are perpetually left behind, is that of "failure." The failure of the individual. It's nothing but antagonistic to the dominant market supporting belief system to consider anything like taking care of inhabitants directly, as a system function, as opposed to the near zero sum game nightmare of market competition, in a completely contrived, unnecessary fashion, that endogenously moves wealth and power to a statistical minority at the expense of the majority and the ecosystem.
And what I'm getting at is those on average in positions of power are already value corrupted by the system's incentives. They are no longer able to see things the way a normal person would see them. Remember those UC Berkeley studies? There is indeed a fundamental pathology on average that is experienced by those in power and they will move against anything that contradicts the nature of the system, including interest in egalitarianism sustainability and so forth. And of course, as an aside, you don't have to be rich to subscribe to this cult as we see across the world in poor pockets, in trailer parks of America and beyond: a litany of poor people that are literally abused by the system every single day. But they've bought the propaganda hook, line and sinker and feel that anything that isn't this system must be against "freedom." And whatever delusion they've come up with. Obedient slaves, assuming the ideology of the rich should be the ideology of the poor so they can eventually get rich, right?
And while that links back to the cultural stuff we talked about earlier, still, the real force is coming from the political and business elite that are actually in direct control. And this isn't an Us vs Them thing, these people are just as much a victim of culture and society as anybody else. They just had the misfortune, so to speak, to be given wealth and hence power. And then the pathology blooms from there. And as I talked about in the lecture I mentioned earlier, what we're basically experiencing is a loop that is constantly removing the ability to regulate the attributes of the system that is destabilizing society. And in the presentation, I refer to this as "intervention sabotage." When you combine the cultural problem and the operant conditioning problem along with the problem of the inherently corrupted nature of those in power due to their inevitable loyalty to the system that gave them that power and wealth, you're faced with a very, very serious multifaceted barrier.
A problem that has gotten in fact worse over time and it negates the power of most activists without them even understanding it. And this power problem in government, you know, occurs one way or another, whether it's the United States' pseudo democracy or Saudi Arabia, a theocratic dictatorship. Democracy doesn't really mean anything here. They're both gonna protect the system in the same way. Therefore, while protesting, public lobbying and maybe even starting another political party could have an effect, it's just improbable. Yes, education awareness, that's all good stuff too. But you have to account for the extremely complex, overwhelming forces that are keeping this system in place, fighting back such interference from multiple angles, kind of like an immune system, a negative immune system, of course, a diseased immune system that doesn't want to get better. So if we're actually serious about trying to change the world, we have to move beyond, at least partly, from appeals to people in power or from the notion that we just need better people in those positions and so on and so on.
And this includes protest movements. In fact, I would generally divide activism into three categories, social protest and development. Social movements like TZM or Black Lives Matter, are awareness and value changing movements. They are educational movements overall. But this seems to be the way people think change should occur. And 99.9% of activists are part of a social movement orientation trying to, you know, spread awareness and to have galvanization to show force, even though it's not about policy per se. Protest movements are basically a kind of social movement activism, but they're targeted and timely, such as a war starting and people piling in to protest to end that particular war. Development movements, on the other hand, while they may have social or protest attributes by default are instead ultimately focused on changing behaviors, not through education or theory, but through networked action; developmental action that does something to create.
And I know I'm a broken record with this and I know this is nothing new as a concept as Buckminster Fuller would say years ago, but if we understand this then why isn't there more creation? The future movements of the world are not gonna have much of an effect if they are not development oriented, especially when it comes to economic problems and the social problems related to that. And just to be clear here, I'm not dismissing or downplaying the power of non-violent resistance, the protest and social movement work done by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And others. The issue is context. It's also worth appreciating the complexity in assumed effect of traditional movements, taking into account the environment and timing of those events and how they basically work as one force, in effect. It's the classic problem of overgeneralizing causality. For instance, while Dr. King is seen as a critical figure who fought back segregation policies, helped voting rights, and beyond - the environment or the activist ecosystem he and his group operated in, was also moving in the general same direction, but from different angles.
For example, state power at that time in the US was concerned about more so-called militant factions of the civil rights movement, such as the Black Panther Party, and began to acquiesce to Dr. King really because of his overtly non-violent disposition, in contrast. But the perception of violent threat still existed in the ecosystem regardless, creating pressure, directing government attention to King moreso and hence his cause. And by the way, that's not just conjecture, that's literally what President Linton Johnson stated. At the same time, the Vietnam War and US allies brought uncomfortable attention to the overt oppression of black society in the US, showing hypocrisy in the US' supposed high moral ground and stated purpose of that war, or even the bringer of freedom throughout the world and so forth, effectively polluting the US' stature in the international community. So there was that pressure, pressure toward helping black America as well, among others. That noted, continuing this example with Dr. King, once he moved past voting right interests and anti segregation work, once those accomplishments were achieved, he then shifted his focus to the economy.
Before his assassination he was working on an economic bill of rights, as he called it, and the Poor People's Campaign, which is really something we're all fighting for to this day, in effect, some 50 years later - hence the new context and new barriers. In fact, if you look carefully, you'll notice very, very little progress on the economic front showing just how formidable the self-preserving feedback forces are in this context. In the US, there literally hasn't been any economic reforms to improve conditions, relevant economic reforms - since the New Deal of the 1930s. And as we all know, those policies are continually attacked year after year, if not already eroded in some areas. Why? Because intervention goes against the free market religion, it's heresy and the whole world, in effect, is blindly dedicated to this dangerous cult mentality.
Things have not only not gotten better, they've in fact gotten worse as inequality has skyrocketed and so forth. As discussed before, it's all about economic growth now. Forget solving problems directly. Let's just run the economic machine as hard as possible to create constant growth. And some of those boats might get a little bit of water underneath them and raise them slightly above the poverty line in certain areas. And that's the best you can hope for. That is literally what the entire world is doing right now to try and solve things like poverty. That's it. And it makes sense because that is part of the system as opposed to moving against it, which is what intervention does. And as far as public and governmental reaction, the same basic games are still being played. Remember when the media and government tried to paint MLK as a communist. King literally had to defend himself in front of a Congressional panel because he was deemed a communist sympathizer because of his demand for more economic fairness in society.
And again, just to reinforce this point, why is economic change different? Why is it such a touchy issue? It's because if you change the economic nature of society, you change the power dynamics in the hierarchy because they go hand in hand, once again. The exploiting ownership class loses leverage, for example, against the exploited underclass, when any safeguards regarding public health concerns are installed because it reduces the pressure of people to submit to their slave owners. And that's just one angle of it, but the power system is the reason why. I mean, there's all sorts of supplemental ideological problems and things that people put forward, but at the end of the day, the capitalist economy is a power structure. So in the end, in regard to the broader subject of traditional non-development activism, anything short today of an unprecedented critical mass, literally stopping government and industry demanding specific sustainability changes in how the economy works and how income and wealth is distributed. Anything less than the most high magnitude effect with pivotal organization and demands, is simply gonna be shuffled to the side and dismissed, just like MLK's Poor People's Campaign has been pushed to the side for half a century with literally zero progress, at least here in the United States when it comes to this issue.
And maybe I'm a cynic, but given how chaotic and fractured things are now, I won't be waiting around for such a critical mass of civil disobedience to emerge, even though I will certainly advocate it and I would certainly join such a thing if it was ever to magically happen. There are going to be many more "Occupy" type spasms out there, especially in the context of climate change as we see right now. But if history is any guide, they will only cause attention, some education and awareness - but little more. Hence, if we're gonna take economic change seriously, we have to be development oriented, not just protest or educational and so forth. Now, looking at the time, and because my ramblings have sucked up more than I intended in terms of the outline of this particular episode, I'm gonna stop here and return to the subject of institutionalization and build on some of the points that were made in the lecture video, "A viable society" that was aforementioned, which I do encourage people to watch.
It gets very vague at the end, but it's a good introduction to what I'm thinking can be useful as a developmental project to get us off the grid of this system. The damage has been done. There's only so much we can do in terms of fighting back the oil industry and so forth, which of course I advocate. But without developing a parallel replacement system, even in its kernel seed stage, all the complaining we can do and appeals to power are not going to accomplish much of anything. Not impossible. But once again, if history is a guide, it's a lot more complex than people seem to understand. We're trying to change the very order of society and that is very different than say, voting rights or any of the basic human and civil rights concepts that have been put forward as activist oriented. So in the meantime, I encourage people to watch that video, which I'll put a link in the description in the YouTube version of this podcast, and I'll put it in the actual description itself for propagation through the podcast networks. And yeah, we will go from there next time. I appreciate everyone's support, my Patreon subscribers and so forth. Take care out there and I'll talk to you soon.