Episode 44
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody, this is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now episode 44. Once again, I apologize for the gaps between episodes right now. Time is very tight with multiple projects. Predominantly work on the new Zeitgeist film. And it has been interesting to go back to that kind of style – haven’t gotten into that vibe so to speak, with the original series, in quite some time.
But from an activist standpoint, diversity of approach certainly has its place. For example, InterReflections, my last film was one approach, which was very experimental and ambitious. And then there's Culture in Decline, my low-budget public access satire that had its first season around 2013. And I'll talk more about that in a second. And then of course my academic book from 2017, The New Human Rights Movement, which on a certain level is my most defining work in terms of what I'm about. And believe it or not, in the mess of all of this, I am preparing to write two more texts.
One will be connected to the film release, talking about basically a parallel economy. And another, as I've talked about before, is more of an emotional work that speaks to the issue of not identifying with the dominant culture you are born into. And believe me, it's easy to feel alone out there when you derive your values from sustainability, altruism and equity, because the vast majority of people do not share those values. They might talk about it, but in terms of their actions, their loyalties- they do not support those values.
There's nothing to gain off of those values, in other words, in terms of the system we live in. But all of that said, I want to express my appreciation of the Patreon supporters that have had the patience with all of this because being prolific with this stuff is a bit challenging. So thank you again. And as touched upon in the prior episode, going back to Culture in Decline, I have a side project now called Yelling at the Wind and there are about three segments online. They are 15 to 30 minute mini-documentaries on various issues with the general attitude, which is consistent with the original first season of Culture in Decline. And ultimately, the difference here is that it talks more about contemporary things that are going on. For example, the first piece is about capitalism versus socialism.
The second piece is about the debt ceiling and the general debt phenomenon, as we saw here in the United States. And the last one I did had to do with a couple different ideas, but basically it focused on the activist industrial complex as I call it and touched upon some other elements, like the “shadow incentive” problem and so forth. In fact, it's probably a good idea I run those as podcasts because I know I have different audiences in different places. So I might eventually just stream those out there into the podcast network as well. And I have to admit, it's been satisfying to go back to that particular style.
Taking a more humorous tone and channeling your inner George Carlin does have a therapeutic effect. And yes, many out there when they hear me on social media or in these kinds of pieces, they think, “well, Peter is just cynical.” But really I'm working on multiple levels, including a kind of reverse psychology. We need more of a brute realism. People often ask me arbitrarily if I'm an optimist. You can only be an optimist if you see patterns moving toward positive change. You can't just arbitrarily declare yourself an optimist unless you're delusional. And just choose to view things a certain way, regardless of the information flowing to you.
And as an aside, I think many activists out there do a great disservice to their audience by trying to present the idea that somehow, through them, of course, we can achieve this massive change. And they just sort of say these things over and over again like it's just a matter of time. It's feel good manipulation via the activist industrial complex once again. It's great for selling t-shirts and getting interviews. Because most people out there do want to assume that things are moving in a positive direction - honestly without their involvement because everyone just doesn't know what to do and they're too stressed out or lazy. So it's a path of least resistance to follow people that tell you everything is gonna be okay. So I've been doing this for 16 years now, quite begrudgingly frankly, and I'm not going to bullshit anybody. I might not be always right, but I refuse to play any games. Can we change the world?
Of course, we can. however the general trajectory at this stage when you look at all the features; all the influences; all the feedback loops - to say any of that is positive, warranting optimism is completely absurd. And before we jump into the bulk of the podcast, I will just go ahead and comments as I have it on my notes here that the next segment of Culture in Declines Yelling at the Wind, which I hope to have out late next week, will be called Cult of Normality - kind of building on what I just said, discussing how it's important to remember that the real nail in the coffin of society are those people that basically pretend everything's okay. The “normals.” They go to their day jobs. They come back to their partners and their kids and they toy around with some hobby. They stare at the TV. They play on their phone, day in, day out, ultimately assuming that somehow society will just take care of itself.
Sure, they may vote, recycle, sign petitions and donate money to some charity or environmental group but that's not going to do it. And it is that basic lazy illusion that everything will be okay that's one of the most dominant problems we face. Those that sit on the sidelines thinking politics; voting with your dollar is going to make everything okay, is effectively a loss of potential. It's like a stadium with 50,000 seats and only 15 seats are being sat in. Obviously, if an informed, critical mass could truly galvanize, which was the original premise of The Zeitgeist Movement and many other grassroots organizations, the world could change quite rapidly, forcing the hands of power through influence, assuming of course the masses know what they want.
But that has yet to happen and there's many reasons to believe it will never happen, or at least it won't happen until it's so far down the line that the efficacy of the action will be impotent. And just to be clear, I will say that I get it, you know, I have friends and family that purposefully never, ever watch the news. Why? Because in part, it's a recipe for poor mental health. If you have any empathy or a sense of moral responsibility whatsoever, it's truly painful to helplessly watch the daily newsfeed unfold in the idiocy and negligence that we see. While similarly, as we've talked about before, survival in capitalism is difficult enough.
The system is so coercive it just forces submission and limits any distraction with people living paycheck to paycheck, locked into narrow considerations of survival, excluding time to even think about anything else. And I understand that and I'm sympathetic to that. As I've said many times, it's that coercion to keep people so fearful and just trying to survive on their own without the convenience to even pay attention to what's happening around them that helps keep this system very much in place - a powerful reinforcing mechanism amongst many powerful reinforcing mechanisms. In fact, at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tack on an interview I did with 4ZZZ news radio out of Brisbane, Australia.
And it was a good interview that was kind of rare because we touched upon things in a short span of time that really got to the heart of a lot of different issues. And the person that interviewed me really had done her research and that was very appreciated. And that aforementioned issue was talked about a bit so I will repeat it here at the end. Now, let's jump into the core of things here. In the last podcast, the problem of institutionalization was briefly broached at the end, something I've thought about a great deal over the past 15 years, given my work with various organizations, including TZM.
And first, semantically to make sure we're all in the same page here, institutions can be physical or intellectual, broadly speaking. And they can overlap as well, which is usually the case. Think of it as a graduated spectrum between general ideology, like a religion, and an identifiable group formation, like a club with members. And in the context of activism, on one side of the spectrum, you have individuals that share a basic interest or value system. They are independent and share similar viewpoints, such as being anti-war, or seeking environmental sustainability, or having an interest in social equality, and so on. Such individuals don't necessarily formally organize or meet. they just share a basic inference through cultural influence.
And as a brief aside, as I can't let this go, such ideological institutions of shared values, while simple to talk about categorically in abstraction, are really highly nuanced and complex. And today, as I think many know, it's actually a dangerous, dangerous fallback when engaging in debate or communication. Culture today has a serious problem differentiating between ideas which need to be addressed directly and group associations to those ideas, subjective or not. For instance, public debate today often gravitates toward the hatred of a perceived categorical group as opposed to an objective consideration of ideas on their own merit. You know the drill, some activist wants to, say, see environmental sustainability or an improvement of human rights.
What label do we give these people? Well, liberal, of course. And once that institutional ideological category is presented, the floodgates can open and many receiving such information, vulnerable to all other ideas or people ostensibly associated to this so-called liberalism, create associations that do not necessarily exist, and they base their judgments on those associations, not the idea or issue at hand. This is also how modern delusional conspiracy culture works. It's all about symbolic associations, but that's for another conversation. All of this stifles critical thought and ultimately serves as a kind of establishment preserving social control mechanism, whether self-inflicted or imposed, and of course it's deeply inhibiting on many other levels. In fact, it's perhaps one of the most utilized communicative strategies of politicians, whether they do it consciously or pathologically. How many times do we hear this argued dichotomy between, say, liberals and conservatives? Not any qualification of what could fall under the umbrella of the ideology of liberalism, which is a subjective thing in and of itself, and not what the historical qualification of what could fall under the umbrella of conservatism based on history and theory that's been written prior.
No, because that would require acknowledgement of specific ideas regardless of that umbrella classification. Instead, it’s simply turned into this group versus group dynamic as opposed to a belief system versus belief system dynamic, defined again by specific ideas that have to be taken point by point. And by the way, to be clear here, and tragic I even have to point this out, those are not the only two philosophies or institutional ideologies out there, even though it's pervasive and most people speak as if they are, meaning liberalism and conservatism. That is just another unfortunate, polarized false duality, which again destroys critical thought. Keeping the mind deeply impervious to new information or ideas. If I was to express an interest in, say, science and think about how science can be utilized for understanding the world and help decision-making in society regarding, say, public health, I would not be called a scientist or someone promoting a scientific philosophy.
No, I would be referred to as a liberal in this case because apparently to believe in science is a liberal phenomenon as labeled by the culture we have today. And once you have that umbrella, it pollutes everything. Moreover, in the American political debacle, these terms are then replaced by supposed representative parties, hence Democrats and Republicans. I can't tell you how many times I've been critical of some person or event or legislation, and inevitably someone will turn around and simply call me a Democrat and then proceed to dismiss the entire argument on that associated basis. Seems ridiculous, but if you look carefully, this is how most people think, making their social decisions based on a web of vague and myopic associations that really just help support cognitive bias in the end. And social control and all those things that come from that.
The mental schema of most people is completely deranged. They just categorize and label and link it to a group or a person or an event in history and dismiss it by association. That is 90% of contemporary political thought in the general public. Think about the term communism. The term has an historical, ideological, and group component to it, all of which are demonized by the majority of society today. So when someone brings up something like universal basic income or anything that deviates away from the norms of market dynamics, a subculture will simply interpret that idea as contextual to the ideology of communism and then tell you that if you get universal basic income it's just one step toward the worst of the worst historical outcomes associated to communism such as slavery and gulags.
Again, it seems absurd, but this is what you find in conservative ideology at the extremes. And not even at the extremes in fact, it's so commonplace. And by the way, when I say conservative, it moves across the entire spectrum of contemporary society. 99% of so-called Democrats are fundamentally conservative in fact in their philosophy and belief system. Now that caveat noted, recognition of institutional ideology does have its place, but with no need for group associations. That is the mental error once again.
Rather it's about recognizing belief systems in general. Once you're dealing with actual people, you have to be far more critical in terms of understanding motivations to avoid effectively intellectual bigotry by arbitrary label. Just like people judge somebody by the color of their skin and find reasons to dismiss them outright without getting to know them, the exact same thing happens in the political labeling we see. And of course, belief systems can be shared with a kind of averaged network of associations or schema in people's minds, hence the qualification of a particular culture itself. In some context, if somebody believes one thing, there's a probability they will believe something else similar to it. But that's just a heuristic. It's a general guide.
And if that's your stopping point of judging society and the world, then you have problems. Because what you're basically doing is stereotyping, right? You have to be far more critical before judging others or perceived groups, taking things point by point. And yes, it's also an issue of laziness by people that again just don't want to think.
Okay, that noted and back to the core subject of institutions in general, in this spectrum we began, we then move to the middle of this, where shared beliefs motivate individuals to then kind of loosely organize, in what we could perhaps call grass roots institutions. Common examples might be Black Lives Matter or extinction rebellion, or even the zeitgeist movement. Characteristics include figureheads or spokespeople, sometimes. They may have informal or formal chapters in a network, but things are generally decentralized. Any physical organization or reaction tends to be spontaneous, such as the reaction to a current event and so on.
And now finally thirdly, at the other extreme of this spectrum, we find the rigidly defined groups or clubs, if you will, such as legal nonprofits or NGOs, which have characteristics in common, such as a board of directors, they take tax deductible donations, they have physical offices, and so on. Groups such as Greenpeace or the ACLU or the NAACP. They are businesses in effect and most participants are formally networked and even stratified as such. Now, since I'm a tangent machine and I apologize if I'm distracting anybody here, but hopefully this is making some sense: Let's remember what the core theme of this podcast is. It is structuralist, meaning we are accounting for something politics really doesn't, and that is the force of the actual social system, which is ignored by contemporary politics, because it's assumed as given: the use of money, for example, is assumed as given.
When's the last time you heard someone talk about economics without talking about money? It's pre-supposed as if the social system we have today is an immutable law of nature. The structuralist perspective considers incentives and procedures that mold our behavior and institutions. With the conclusion promoted on this podcast, that we must change this structure before we can expect any true, relevant social change solving the magnitude of problems that we're seeing. As, of course, I have routinely run into the ground. The reason I bring this up again is because in this aforementioned spectrum, going from personal beliefs to formal physical institutions, everyone's doing basically in-system work.
Everyone is thinking along the traditional lines of the levers and pulleys within the current structure, within the current economic and consequential political structure, we find ourselves. Trapped in the machine with rare consideration given to questioning that machine or changing the machine itself. Hence the need for out-system activism as opposed to that in system activism once again. And out system activism is basically about reconstruction. It's about direct building and development within the system as opposed to just appeals to power because that's all anyone does. They just appeal to power. Everyone you listen to, that's an activist or purporting; with some kind of angle to wanna see change…
They're just yelling at power. “Hey power, hey listen to us power, ooh power, come on power.” I mean, we bullshit ourselves like, “oh, I'm gonna vote with my dollar. oh, I’m going to vote democratically.” None of that really works, obviously, empirically. Minor, negligible effect on corporations and the political establishment.
And of course, that kind of thinking isn't illogical. Obviously, power controls things, corporations own all the resources. The government is in control of this or that. They're the ones doing the legislation. But the truly tragic conclusion here, which I really wish I was wrong about, and maybe I am, which is why I also say, you know, continue doing normal political stuff in the traditional sense: boycotts or whatever, there's a place for that and it has worked in certain ways historically.
But today, with the crises that are upon us, with class inequality and the environment, we are reaching a point where the force of the system, as if it's a maturing consciousness, is increasingly unaffected by those pushes and pulls. The mechanisms are so reinforcing that the only thing you can really do to get out of a system of death, basically, a death march, is to figure out a way to abandon the entire thing and rebuild. And I'm not talking about communes, of course, or anything like that. Hence the necessity for out-system activism, and the beauty of where we are today versus, you know, 100 years ago, is that we do have the exponential increase in technology, ephemeralization.
We are reaching a point of democratization of industry, where it is conceivable that we can build a network that's off the grid of this system without having to get land or anything, at least not in the sense of a commune, and start to reconstruct an economy, simply giving the middle finger to everyone else. You know that constant dynamic against anything progressive where there's this threat and they say, "Oh, you're just trying to bring in communism once again," and all of that stuff, the perpetual noise, the fighting, the trolling, the political belittling, the accusations, all that stuff historically, the attacks. It doesn't matter anymore. If you give everyone the middle finger and say:
"Fuck you, we're gonna do something different. If you don't want to help out or try to solve these problems by building something new, well, continue on your own plight, continue on your own journey. We're doing something different. We don't give a shit what you think anymore. We don't need your approval. We're not doing anything illegal. We're done. We're out. If you do want to come around and join us, well, you are welcome. You are absolutely welcome, but we're not going to participate in your death cult anymore.”
Now is that going to immediately shut down the climate crisis that we're dealing with the hydrocarbon industry? Well, obviously not immediately. In time, the system would replace it if it was successful. But if you really look carefully at how activism has gone after these toxic industries, I ask you, what success have they really had? In fact, taking that example of the hydrocarbon industry, pretty much everyone's waiting for renewables to reach a point where it becomes more profitable for industry to transition into them. And that's pretty much the only way it's going to happen. The climate conferences don't do anything.
The wars are going to advance even more, and the energy requirements for those wars are going to get even stronger. All of the destabilization, all of the problems are going to require energy. And every push towards the necessity for more energy means more reliance on the existing established infrastructure, hence hydrocarbons. So that's one example of how, yeah, you know, critical mass could shut it all down if we had millions of people to literally sit in and block the entrances of all these companies.
But hey, you really think you're going to find people to do that? If that was going to happen, it would have happened already. In short, the numerous mechanisms that keep people divided and confused and angry and distracted on this planet; the cultural system itself in its divide and conquer nature, by system force, including the communication of elite groups and corporations and politics - guarantees people are not going to come together in the way that's required to actually impose the change to stop the poisonous industries out there.
Human psychology is far too compromised and I think it's getting worse, frankly. More fragmented, more disparate, more confused, more irrational. And you can probably blame the incentives and structure of social media for that increased fragmentation, that increased confusion; this constant stream of people's impulsive, stupid ass opinions, over and over flowing like a river, just flooding and saturating the general collective consciousness. Very little thoughtfulness, very little long-term thinking or comprehension of complex ideas, and of course it gravitates toward biased confirmation perpetually in the accelerating, amplified group dynamic that I talked about earlier where people can even think about ideas, they just think about associations to groups once again.
And on that, I'm now going to move on to the second section (this is going to be quite a long podcast today) which talks about group conformity and the research that's been done on it. Basically, reinforcing the fact that groups suck; groups are bad for your health. In general, there is the wisdom of crowds, obviously. There's a serial development of knowledge. If you're going to design something in an open source way, groups can be very effective, if organized properly. But that becomes secondary when we think about how group behavior manifests, whether direct and physical, or in the perception of people such as political ideology, social media clicks, and so forth. And to jump to the end here, when it comes to institutionalization, I think the future will be deinstitutionalized.
People will follow a train of thought, they will share a value system and an approach. That approach obviously will need consensus, such as the parallel economy I keep suggesting or hinting at, because I'm still working on this idea personally. I know others have as well, which is great, and a website will be built in all of that. But as long as people are institutionalized and the incentives are there and the group dynamics, the biosychosocial group dynamics exist as they have - groups do far more damage than they do good. In fact, as I ranted about just a moment ago, it's these very dynamics that prevent the galvanization that we all hope for in terms of appeals to power from that angle.
So let's step back now and think broadly about this chasm between independent thought, disciplined reasoning, and how it is perpetually compromised, at least as a general mass phenomenon, by the interplay of biological, psychological, and sociological forces within the group context.
Put a different way, let's start with a question.
Are we as a species driven by rational thought as the Enlightenment era has tried to convince us? Or are we more like automaton in-group conformists that, due to our social nature and hence the biopsychosocial forces that guide us, far more prone to seek group inclusion or validation… feeling the pressure not to deviate from the crowd or violate our sense of identity while of course simultaneously taking issue with any other perceived group that differs from us impulsively? In-group, out-group, dynamics once again. And this really gets to the heart of the communicative dilemma.
So let's start with the limbic system specifically the amygdala. The amygdala is basically the center for emotions, emotional behavior, and motivation, and basically the more emotional the circumstance, the more the amygdala fires. As related to social conformity, studies have shown that when folks are exposed to social cues that suggest the group they feel they belong to, which could be a subculture or just mainstream society, has a particular belief, the amygdala is activated. And this activation can influence those individuals to conform to the beliefs of that group, hence feelings of fear, anxiety or discomfort arise when one deviates from consensus. And for whatever evolutionary reason, it seems to be very consistent.
A conflict between feeling and intellect, where feeling can influence and override the intellect, as it often does, which I think we all can relate to. Not universal, of course. People can be emotionally educated to move past the discomfort. In fact, since we're talking about the brain, the prefrontal cortex has a role in that, as it can kick in, given its relationship to social cognition, using its decision-making and problem-solving to override the emotional stress. In fact, numerous studies have been done with people that have a damaged prefrontal cortex and all sorts of thoughtless, non-critical, conformist behaviors can rise. The ability to make choices, declines, and emotional pressures can override.
Which is also why in all of its complexity, we need to consider such things when we judge people because while people are partially conscious and partially responsible for their actions, there are many biological forces that influence behavior needless to say, and it's something the criminal justice systems of the world never, ever take into account. Some may remember in my 2017 book The New Human Rights Movement, I give the case of mass murderer Charles Whitman, who climbed a tower at the University of Texas if I remember correctly in 1966 and started shooting and killing people at random. And what was found in his autopsy was a tumor pushing against his amygdala.
Anyway, moving on, we also have hormones such as oxytocin. Oxytocin is involved in social bonding, trust and cooperation. Research has shown that oxytocin can increase social conformity by promoting feelings of affiliation and trust, hence reducing critical thought as well, promoting conformity. There is a 2019 study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience titled "Oxytocin Facilitates social learning by promoting conformity to trusted individuals." Which explores this phenomenon.
And they write, open quote, "A growing number of studies have consistently reported that oxytocin promotes conformity to the views of groups of in-group individuals. Most recently we have found that oxytocin can increase acceptance of social advice given by individual experts without influencing their perceived trustworthiness per se, but that increased conformity in this context is associated with how much an expert is initially trusted and liked." Appeal to authority bias confirmation right there.
So you can see how that kind of reaction, based on your social bond with a person you like, or trust, an authority, like a teacher, can inhibit critical thought, gravitating toward conformity once again. Similar for dopamine, dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in reward processing and motivation and studies have shown that it can increase the likelihood of social conformity by enhancing the perceived rewards of conforming to the group.
It has to do with pleasurable experiences. Addictions, for example, as most know are largely associated to the release of dopamine. And again, back to my book, I feature a researcher, neurobiologist named Vasily Glacharev, who writes that "the deviation of individual opinion from group behavior is interpreted by the nervous system as behavioral error or reward prediction error, which starts the process of behavioral change based on the dopaminergic mechanism of reinforcement learning." Hence, once again, our brains are somewhat trapped between rational thought and all of this to some degree evolutionary driven, impulsive counter-reaction to try to maintain cohesion with the group and prefer in-group conclusions. Another one is serotonin.
Serotonin, a neurotransmitter, involved in mood regulation, cognition, and notably social behavior, where studies suggest that it influences social conformity by modulating information processing and hence decision-making. In other words, it increases sensitivity where, through exposure to social stimuli, such as facial expressions or other social cues, the likelihood of an emotional conformity response increases in contrast to an intellectual one, hence, again, biased cognition, which could likely be attributed to behaviors such as ignoring worldviews that contradict one's own and so on. In fact, if you look at many of the social conformity studies that have been done, controlled studies that have been done with people to see their reaction, the combination of all of these influences - which there are plenty more this is just a very rough outline and I'm not an expert obviously but I have done a good deal of research on it because it's fascinating -
show that we are fighting forces against rational thought. This is what's happening under the hood such as with the ash conformity experiment which I've talked about before. I think you even mentioned in the last podcast but for the sake of clarity let's go through some of these in a little bit more detail. The Ash conformity experiment, probably one of the most widely cited studies on social conformity, happened where participants were asked to judge the length of a line on a card, and the Confederates, as they were called, meaning the actors, gave clearly incorrect answers, and despite the answers being obviously wrong, a significant proportion of those non-acting participants conformed and gave the same incorrect answer when asked.
Another famous one that comes from a different angle is the Milgram-Obedience experiment of the 1960s.
Stanley Milgram tested the extent to which people would obey an authority, even if it meant inflicting harm on others. The experiment proved that many participants were willing to administer what they believed were very painful electric shocks to strangers because they were simply instructed to do so by an authority, you know, the old "I was just following orders" thing. And since we mentioned social media earlier, there are lots of emerging studies now in regard to what social media has done, as a group phenomenon when it comes to, for example, the hardening of belief structures.
One phenomenon identified is called “social proof,” which is simply groupthink by way of making it seem like everyone agrees, which happens in those bubbles, those, you know, those echo chambers of social media where everyone's just constantly reinforcing everybody else's stupidity. And as an aside, we can't forget that the whole thing is addictive. The addictive elements of social media are well established and orchestrated, fueled by the algorithmic recommendations, massive dopamine hits with those buttons you push and your “likes” and all that crap. All that stuff can reinforce social conformity in many complex ways as well, or contribute to it, right?
And moving on in the same context, we have just simply culture itself. As I also talk about in my book, there is coherency in belief. Coherency in belief itself, as dictated by culture or a subculture that's identified. In other words, subcultures generate belief systems and there is coherency with many different areas of focus, such as the idea of a self-regulating market economy, where all people need to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's all up to you because it's your responsibility for your success and failure. And there's nothing else structural to interfere with that. I apologize again if I'm repeating myself. There's some common themes here, which I know I've stated in prior podcasts, but we're about 30 hours into this entire podcast series. So expect some repetition.
But if you believe that it's up to you and there's no inhibitions, then you are more likely, as studies have shown, to believe other similar notions, especially regarding free will, such as people's attitude toward crime. “Do the crime, do the time” as the old slogan goes. If you do believe you are the sole point of origin and other people are the sole point of origin of their behaviors and there's no structural or biological influences, or anything else, you will simply look at people as 100% responsible for everything that they do, which is scientifically untrue.
And all of this, of course, develops into that mental schema, the schema of belief, which promotes a kind of conformity-based balance and internal loyalty to the way you think, which again, culture is critical in developing. And speaking of that, let's not forget about the influence of economics itself, and the coercion of our system to go out and make money and preserve wealth.
As that, of course, triggers all sorts of different biological and genetic factors, hormonal factors, and so on, leading to group conformity, and it's pretty easy to understand. Perhaps the most fundamental being, not wanting to rock the boat or do anything that makes you look weird, because obviously because obviously you've got to get a job. You have to conform to the norms of society to be respected enough to fill these slave roles. Needless to say, you need to survive, so you gravitate towards what will allow that- financial gain- and conformity is perpetual in this horrible game.
Your values and ideas, or I should say, most people's values and ideas will always become secondary in the long run to your most fundamental survival. If you have to violate your own basic principles in order to eat, most of you will likely violate those principles to some degree. There's all sorts of ways you can talk yourself into things when you are economically stressed, such as people in poverty that shoplift or rob banks and so on. You can't look at people so-called criminal behavior without looking at economic forces of influence, at least when it comes to anything like property crime. And it manifests in great neuroses, too. It's not just simply, “oh, I'm hungry, I'm going to steal some bread.” The scarcity psychology, the scarcity mindset messes all of us up.
And as an aside, some may be familiar with this notion in the libertarian community called "voluntarism", which is a completely abstracted, ridiculous notion, because virtually all economic decisions are coercive decisions one way or another, because it's about survival and well-being. Voluntarism is debunked immediately by the fact that the whole system is a monopoly, you can't do anything outside of it. First of all, everyone is coerced to participate in trade. But beyond that, all sorts of rationalizations have to happen all the time that force people into economic transactions that they don't really want to do, but they have to. Do you think all those people going into menial jobs and McDonald's and whatnot are going to say, "Oh, I'm volunteering to go to this type of employer because I believe in it, and I'm going to be satisfied. I am voluntarily submitting to being a wage slave.” No.
And business conformity is unique too. Think about just- it may seem minimal or relevant, but just like the business suit. What's up with these people that dress up in a suit and tie to put on this pretension that they are a business person? Why the uniform? It's like a Catholic school uniform. Symbols, symbols of power, symbols of success, conforming to conspicuous consumption. People put on these costumes and they present themselves as filling a role, they show off their car and all of that stuff. It's all a dynamic of social communication and to a degree, conformity.
And I'm gonna stop there because I'm about to keel over. So much more can be said on this kind of issue. Here's the point though, if my tangents distracted any of you.
To whatever degree we are conscious and have free will, where we can make decisions, influence others, and try to advance the world, solve problems and all of that- there's a part of our biology; there's an influence of culture that stifles any new way of thinking and obviously social change. We are bound by our social nature to put it simply. And this is part of the structuralist revelation. It's not just the economic structure or the social system structure that inhibits us because of its forces. It's also our internal structure. It's the way we've evolved, it seems. This is just what the science tells us: we are far more prone to want to stick with the group and not change anything than we are to move against it and try to persevere.
And I think that synergy of influences is something to really consider when we try to be optimistic about the future and see the wheels turn towards positive ends, which is again why I think traditional activism is continually failing because of these complex social group dynamics. And to be clear, I'm not arguing some broad sense, “oh, this is our human nature, we can't possibly persevere.”
It's a specific nuance of our biology and our evolutionary psychology and culture combined. That's creating this effect. As Marshall McCluen said, "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." Which means people need to understand these things, which is a tall order in contemporary society, given all the reinforcing mechanisms that push people to not understand it. It's nasty. So what do we do? We change gears.
We recognize these things. We move towards independent thought, get away from groups. We want to see transition happen in a developmental way where people are acting independently based on a shared train of thought in a different mode of activism, developmental activism, which we'll talk more about in the future, where these perpetually stifling influences are pushed aside.
My name is Peter Joseph. If you care about this work, you can support me on my Patreon. I appreciate everybody listening and now I'm going to run the interview I mentioned at at the beginning. Take care out there, folks.
INTERVIEW
[AD]Hello, I'm Anita Diamond reporting for 4 Triple Z Brisbane Line News and Current Affairs program. And today I'm speaking with filmmaker author musician and activist Peter Joseph about his global non-profit sustainability advocacy group, the zeitgeist movement, and all things related to sustainability, the economy, human rights, and the way forward for human civilization. Welcome, Peter, and thank you so much for being here with us today.
[PJ]Absolutely, I appreciate you having me Anita.
[AD]Now for context, you were the director of the Zeitgeist Film Series, which is a three-part independent documentary film series, which to quote the Zeitgeist website seeks to describe who we are, how we relate, what we're doing, and what we should be doing, if we wish to live in a peaceful, humane, sustainable, and healthy global society. And I wanted to ask, can you explain then what the Zeitgeist movement is all about?
[PJ]I'll start with the film series just to be clear. The Zeitgeist film series began kind of inadvertently with an experimental performance art piece in 2007, which today is kind of the oddball of the entire series. It was created more as a sociological shock piece than a documentary, I did in my spare time. And believe it or not, it was never intended to be released to the public. But when it was inadvertently uploaded to the internet for whatever reason, as I did not promote it, it exploded and it captured the Zeitgeist, no pun intended.
And from there, I was like, well, I have some public attention now, even though it was inadvertent, and I certainly wasn't intending on being a filmmaker in reality, or even an activist to the degree that I am now. I decided I'm going to have to do something a little bit more important here. So I thought about what really concerns me when I look at the world and economics and sociology came to the surface.
So then the second film came along called "Zeitgeist Addendum” the sequel. It came out the next year. And it went into this territory, building the argument that if we're going to be concerned about anything right now in this planet, we really need to understand how things are working, particularly how our economy is working, how we are responding to it, you know, the sociology of this system, procedures, incentives, and ultimately the system dynamics, if you will, of what is going on in this machine.
So then the third of the series came out in 2011 called Zeitgeist Moving Forward, which continued this exploration, but it was Zeitgeist Addendum that inspired the Zeitgeist Movement. It was kind of an experimental thing to throw out there at the end of the film. And we started building chapter structures. And it all kind of peaked around 2013, 2014. We had about 1,000 chapters in 70 countries. There was a lot of activity. Thousands and thousands of events have been conducted with the movement, even though you won't hear much about it in mainstream dialogue. But it's been a unique ride as a kind of, well, disorganized grassroots but decentralized and extremely prolific organization.
So in short, the Zeitgeist Movement is a global sustainability advocacy organization, as general as that sounds. It takes a big picture of you realizing that without some pretty radical and fundamental economic changes to the way the world works, everything that activists are doing really isn't going to achieve much as we battle it out within the traditional political structures and whatnot. We have to think far more big picture and that is basically the educational imperative of the movement. Now I'll conclude that by saying if anyone wants to learn more about it, there's a book that was written called the Zeitgeist Movement Defined. It can be purchased in paperback, which is nonprofit, but you can also download the full PDF at the theZeitgeistMovement.com.
AD:Yes, thank you. That was very useful. And I'm sure there's a lot that we can talk about with the films, but I guess as you said, they were centered around what our current social political system is based on, which is monetary market economics. And I wondered why. Can you explain why you chose to center on this or what you see as the fundamental problems with the current economic system?
P:Well, as I briefly touched upon just a moment ago, simply the analysis of the market system is so critical- what we vaguely call capitalism. And within this, we realize the source of two of the most destabilizing forces we're experiencing today, which is socioeconomic inequality and environmental destruction. And the realization is that both of these outcomes are endogenous to the system, meaning they are built in outcomes. And as time has moved forward and as environmental conditions have changed, as civilization has progressed, particularly with population increases and rapid technological advances… it changes the temperament of society when you have complete different mechanisms, organizing.
For example, the rise of automation is challenging labor for income. What's gonna happen when robots replace people? How does capitalism deal with that? Can we still have capitalism and so forth? But more broadly, all these problems of inequality and environmental destabilization are getting worse. Anyone paying attention to the news today should see that and they ask why. And that's the radical revelation, is that it's coming from the actual system. It's not a moral or ethical issue. This system is creating behaviors and incentives.
And the traditional attempt, as I touched upon prior to counter these outcomes, is of course politics. This is where 99% of activists on one level are another are engaging, whether it's NPO's, or lobbying. And the prevailing assumption is that, well: we're going to find ways to use our government and our general interests to regulate these features. This is what's implied. This isn't what people will say. But this is what we're doing, actually. We're trying to regulate the endogenous features that are negative. We're trying to, say, have wealth redistributions to stop income inequality.
We're trying to, say, have stricter regulations for environmental laws and so forth. And we assume that's going to work. And what another unfortunate realization is, because believe me, I wish that did work - what's becoming increasingly clear is that these forces have become so powerful in this evolution that the traditional regulatory attempts are really no longer effective. And this is the new level that we are at in this adaptation as a civilization once again. The cultural and most specifically the power problems that are consequential to market economics are of such force that any attempt to move against it and correct these negative market externalities, as we'll talk about in a moment, quickly get countered.
They quickly get diffused by generally special interests that have something to gain; they want to hold onto their power and wealth. And on another side, you have a general propagandized culture. You have a lot of social fear out there. You know, people even to this day when they hear about somebody talking in criticism of capitalism, they say, "Oh, you mean you want socialism and communism?" Like this is the kind of polarity and ignorance for lack of better expression that we are faced with.
So as radical as it is, my perspective is we can't trust the political system to make the necessary interventions. And it's going to take a much stronger grassroots and organizational process to get people together to try and stop these negative trajectories. And I can say a lot more about all of that stuff. For example, to not go into too much detail, we live in a society based, excuse me, an economy based on infinite economic growth. It's not a decision to have economic growth. It's what the system requires. With a range of mechanisms, again, I'm not going to go into. How do you have a system of economic growth that is perpetual and infinite, that gains by using more and more of the Earth's resources, cycling through, buy and throw away, buy and throw away. How does that work on a finite planet?
At what point does that reach a point of no return, where we have destroyed and conquered everything and were left basically with the shell of a planet or the shell of a habitat? Obviously, the outcome will be our own destruction. So that's one mechanism to consider that can't exist. So that's part of the issue.
AD:Yeah, and there's just so many issues with it. I think one of the main sort of features, I think too of the current system, my understanding as well of your criticism of it, is that it's centered around debt. I guess for those who might not understand what debt is, can you explain that and how we have a system where essentially money is created out of debt?
PJ: Yeah. So the subject of debt is an enormous one. It goes back 5,000 years and has undergone a number of revisions in study, in anthropological study. But what we know is that debt and credit, which are basically the same thing, actually preceded the widespread use of money when it came to market or exchange behavior. Communities tracked their liabilities and you had reciprocal obligation. You had these ledgers, you had tally sticks and all these other early mechanisms. These were transaction methods.
There's also a bizarre religious component to it. There's a man named David Graeber who's done some excellent work on this. I recommend the book, "Debt, the First 5,000 Years." But I would summarize the issue by saying this: Amazingly and catastrophically, somehow we now have a system where money is literally created out of debt. And again, it links back to this early period. It evolved since to where we are today. “Why?” is actually quite perplexing? But this is where we are today in this very bizarre outcome. And for there to be money, there must be debt. I want everyone to think about this.
If you have a trillion dollars in existence, there must be a trillion dollars of debt. Someone might have the value of that money in their bank account. Someone else might have all the debt at a bank with their liability ledger. And that is truly outstanding. And it means that it's impossible for the world to ever be out of debt. Money to exist requires debt. You think about debt slavery historically. You know, debt slavery is, of course, something we think is long gone. By United Nations standards there's more slaves in the world today than any time in human history as far as absolute numbers. And historically speaking, even though I should say, there is plenty of debt slavery happening still today, but nothing like the abjection Egyptian debt slavery.
The difference today ultimately is that the perpetuation of this unresovable debt serves as a coercive force to get people to submit to reduced wages due to their desperation, effectively guaranteeing a cheaper labor force for the corporate architecture to exploit. So, instead of me having one slave owner, we are slaves to the entire system because it's the lower middle class as that hold the majority of the debt. They are the ones that make the money so to speak through their mortgages and their loans, then that money trickles up to the rich, and the billionaire class, and the ownership class, and we're stuck with the liability, hence we are great to exploit because we're all desperate.
And by the way, I'm not saying there's a conspiracy here. This is just what the system does and how it's evolved in the structure that we see. And again, it's truly mind-numbing when you think about it. That's one of the things I wanted to say about this. Yes, of course, the interest charges. Now, not only is it bad enough that you have perpetual debt, because there's for that to be money there has to be debt, but in the profit system, you know, you mark up a good, you put it on a shelf and it costs $3 to make, you charge $4 for it because you're going to make a profit. Well, the banking system does the same thing, but it makes the money.
So what does it do? It charges interest, which means that it wants more money back, but yet the system hasn't actually created that money. So literally, it's impossible to pay back the interest charges that are put into the system, creating even more downward pressure. So you can pay back the principal, but the outstanding interest is always floating around society. There are ways it goes away through collapses and jubilees and back room negotiations between governments and so on, but it's still a fundamental feature of the system. And that is particularly insidious. Not only for individuals in the lower class and such, but also poor countries. I mean, look at these structural adjustment policies done with the IMF and the World Bank.
These non-sovereign countries that don't make their own money, they're reliant on other central banks, and they're just you know, perpetually screwed for lack of a better word. And it's inevitable. It's like a game of musical chairs. It's inevitable that these countries will fail, just like it's inevitable that people will go bankrupt because of this very system.
AD: And for those who don't know, we are about $300 trillion in debt estimated globally. And I think we've touched on it here that basically it seems like the system somehow functions, but it seems also kind of counterintuitive for how it could function with this amount of debt in circulation. So I guess to just quickly summarize like, how is it possible that it is functioning? Is it because of those mechanisms you talked about where countries find ways of being able to sort of redistribute the money somehow and still have those interest rates? But how can it possibly function with that much money and debt?
PJ:As touched upon before, it's impossible for there to be equal or less debt in the system than there is money due to the use of interest charges particularly. There's about $80 trillion in actual currency, and then there's about $300 plus trillion in debt. And I think those numbers have changed because we've had contractions in the money supply globally. As far as how it's possible, that's a good question. And it's more of a time game. It's basically what's called the velocity of money. It masks the issue. Money is moving around. It's constantly changing hands so fast that it allows people in this pocket to resolve the debts here and there. Back and forth…we can resolve debt here…we move the debt basically around between people.
Not literally, but basically the debt is always there, but it keeps getting transferred. As long as you move it around fast enough, it gives the illusion and it buys you time. And of course, refinancing…so you know, eventually you're going to have to have a collapse. inevitable, whether it's a grand collapse or it's, or it is a domino effect that happens, which is usually the case. Most central banks are aware of this phenomenon. And it's unfortunate too, because at least back in the day, in the religious connotation of this, that debt Jubilee.
They actually realized intuitively that this is a problem, and they just forgave debt periodically. You very rarely see that anymore. You know, that used to be a thing. And frankly, if they want to preserve the system, if the banking system and governments want to preserve this system at all, they need to start doing that even though the whole system is completely unviable because that shouldn't happen obviously. There's no equilibrium there. It's insane.
AD:It is insane. I'll touch on that concept of the equilibrium later, but to go back to your criticism of the current system in terms of creating social division and classism. I know it's also got other problems such as ecological collapse and environmental damage and I wanted to ask, can you explain how competitive market dynamics work to create these features?
PJ: Sure. So competitive market dynamics are complex and they exist on many levels and areas in the system. They're interweave, there's different scales. For those familiar with, say, economic feedback relationships in system dynamics, it's like you pull a lever on one side of the machine and there's a chain reaction that triggers another lever and that moves through the system. Competitive dynamics have this chain reaction which affect again both sustainability issues for the environment which is probably the most critical of this and of course socioeconomic and equality issues, exacerbating both of them.
Basically we have an economic model that creates antagonism between everything. When two people apply for the same job their skill sets are competing against each other for that scarce employment. When business in a given sector produces the same general goods, seeking market share, they're competing against each other, and they tweak their goods with planned obsolescence and creating new little elements to make people feel more enticed to have their utility satisfied. And of course, what does that lead to? It leads to extreme waste, you know.
What would happen if these companies just collaborated? They took consensus, they had feedback from the community, and didn't just randomly output different good features, and actually, you know, engaged the public, you'd have exponentially less waste. Even more broadly, and perhaps most dangerously, nation-states are defined by their economic power, right? And there really hasn't been a war in history, if you really dig deep, that hasn't had some kind of core economic foundation. You know, we talk about religious wars and crusades. There was an enormous propertied interest and all of that stuff as well. You look at modern conflicts today, and most of them, if not all of them, at least the ones that are large enough, have some kind of strong economic motivation on one level or another, or they're rooted in such deprivation because of economic circumstances its erupts in some kind of tribal, horrible conflict.
And beyond that, if you look even deeper with the issue, in the nature of the system, because it's based on infinite growth and consumption once again, you realize that this system, capitalism, is actually at war with the habitat itself. It's at war with the very basis of our entire evolution and existence because it's so utterly incompatible. You even feel that. You look at conservative mindsets out there. They just want to disregard the environment. They disregard the news about anything related to what could infringe upon business freedom. Right? We want more growth.
I've even heard people say that things like climate change is just some kind of leftist conspiracy. You want to... This is ridiculous, of course. But some kind of leftist conspiracy to want to bring in a socialist government and remove the freedoms of the market. Seems ridiculous again but people think this way. It's not that far fetched for people in this culture to think that way that are acclimated into this kind of business cult mentality. So ultimately, there's nothing in the economic structure that supports sustainability. Let's be very clear about that. In fact, it supports the exact opposite by system force.
True efficiency, true sustainability, and true conservation, which are probably the most core values our species can have and methods to ensure generational sustainability is the opposite incentive structure, amazingly, to keep market capitalism functioning. Direct dichotomy. So we're at war with nature itself due to the very structure of the economy and needless to say, nature is going to win that battle in the end.
And one final point, the sociology is distorting too. I would frankly, personally, in many disagree, go so far to say that competition is just the general sickness when it comes to culture, such as people's obsession with group identity and sports. This cultural obsession people have with winning and beating others and their teams. It all feeds into this terrible destructive pattern. And there's nothing healthy about it as far as I'm concerned. Some will argue, you know, I mean, obviously people can enjoy sports, but it becomes different when you put it on a screen and you have your bread and circuses and you're basically the imitating business in this kind of recreation, and it feeds back into this kind of vile aggression to want to dominate people and conquer things and business and so on and so on.
And of course, if you ask traditional economists about the role of competition, what do they say? Pretty much the only thing they can say, they say, oh, this is what we need to generate innovation. However, it's never specified what this innovation is supposed to mean, right? Innovation to do what? Create more munitions? To innovate more single use throw away goods through planned obsolescence? To innovate people to be more addicted to social media or alcohol or drugs and the horrible persuasions of advertising which brainwash people on a daily basis?
This old idea that we compete for the sake of innovation and progress is probably the most frustrating because no one ever asked the question of innovation to one end. And what you find is that really innovation within capitalism is not innovation. It's just a wasteful form of seeking market share. Completely misguided, done for all the wrong reasons, the wrong incentives, people innovate for selfish profit-seeking reasons, first and foremost, rather than trying to innovate to solve problems. So not to mention how insulting is to think. humans can't innovate without competition. Think about how insulting it is. “Oh, you're never going to be incentivized to do something positive or creative. So we're going to have to force you through coercion and debt” and all these pressures that been manufactured so you can think of something new to sell basically to somebody else really, is what it is.
So it's not a valid defense for a competitive economy and I'll say this finally: competition should be the last resort of any civilized society, right? We're not primates in the wild fighting for fruit in a tree yet the very foundation of our economy assumes that we are. We literally take competition as the first step when really it should be the last resort.
AD: Thank you. And that's interesting because it ties into my next question of how the market economy actually behaves. And I think I remember listening to one of your podcasts and you gave an analogy of how it's a machine with an output pipe on each end. And on one side, it produces the food, goods, and things that help people, you know, live their lives better. And on the other side, it's got the exhaust and pollution and market externalities. And I would say that it sounds like these are the negative market externalities on the other side. I think it's a really good analogy. And I just wanted to ask if you can explain what negative market externalities are to people who don't understand and do you think that basically the bad side in this equation outweighs the good?
PJ: Oh, absolutely. That has been the unfortunate adaptation of this system as an evolution, as we've moved from very simplistic, you know, handcraft mechanisms of economy to the incredibly complex, advanced, digitalized world we see today, where people are actually losing understanding of what is even happening, and that's for another conversation. With the introduction of such complexity, we don't really even know what's going to happen economically. It's so insanely complicated what we've done with the network of markets, especially with the advent of AI, which you know businesses are going to throw into the mix as impulsively as possible if they think it can improve their bottom line.
We're going to have even more complexity. It's bad enough most economists today don't even predict. They can't predict anything. They claim they understand how the system works, but they can't predict anything. So that is the evolution today. We are absolutely destroying things far more rapidly than we can fix them through the same market mechanisms. So negative market externalities describe costs or outcomes that are not built into the price of a given good or service. A very simple example would be someone spending $5 a day to pack a cigarette smoking for many years.
And then one day, they get lung cancer, which has had a good probability for many people. And the costs of those, excuse me, those medical costs, obviously are not included in the money they spent on those cigarettes. So that's one example. A more common example that we hear in the public sphere has to do with the hydrocarbon industry, constantly polluting the world through leaks and spills and all sorts of public health and environmental effects downstream.
And yet, none of those costs are built into the original price of the hydrocarbon products that are made and sold. Hence, they are externalized costs in that sense. Interestingly, and this is, I think, very interesting, in fact: studies have been done that look at these downstream kind of natural capital, negative market externality effects of the most dominant industries in the world. The industries that we all have to share, the most dominant, you know, life supporting industries that keep infrastructure going and everything.
And these studies have concluded that when you account for these negative market externalities, none of these industries are actually profitable. And what that implies is that the entire capitalist business architecture globally is not even profitable in and of itself when it comes to accounting for what it's doing to the natural world externally in monetary terms. And that is quite the revelation because what it really means is that capitalism is a horrible business on its own terms. So if you take it on its own terms when you think about business efficiency and what defines a business success, and you see it in the profitability of this company against this company, but when you take the whole thing and you compare it against the real world, the real natural world, and you put a price tag of the natural world like capitalism likes to do, it actually fails on its own merits.
And I think that's a very important thing for people to think about. As far as that analogy of the machine producing goods on one side and pollution on the other, if you listen to people like Bill Gates, as a classic capitalist apologist, he loves to say technology is the solution. Well, we just got to keep innovating once again, and we're going to be able to solve climate change. We'll figure it out. We're not going to change the system. We're just going to find ways to fix it and intervene, of course, with the classic approach. And that's clearly not going to happen. It's like there's a tornado moving through a city, and behind the tornado is a real time construction crew. They're trying to constantly rebuild everything the tornadoe’s destroying. Until the tornado turns around and starts destroying everything again. And then they go and they rebuild it again assuming they can keep up with the tornado in real time. That is basically what we're doing right now in our attempt to solve the exponentially increasing problems that we are seeing particularly on the environmental front.
So, you know, needless to say, you can't solve a problem by simply trying to repair damage it creates. You have to get to the root. And I'll conclude by saying capitalism has reached a new level of adaptation once again, where it is now a little more than a vehicle of civilization's destruction. That is in system dynamics terms, the function at this point. Get rid of what people say, get rid of any theory, get rid of all the postulations of traditional economists over the years, and look at what it's doing.
The whole thing about system dynamics, when you take the perspective non-economic perspective, but a system analysis perspective that you find in natural science, you realize that the system can only be defined by what it does. And this is an important distinction, because if you can get into debates with economists, they say, well, this is what the system is supposed to do. We can kind of see how it does this. Step back, get rid of all that stuff, and look at what is actually happening. You know, a system can only be to find what it actually does. And the purpose of the system now is basically to kill us off.
And we are allowing that to happen because we're not understanding the actual dynamics. We have a whole global population of people that more or less mean well, and they're producing outcomes. We are all collectively producing outcomes, destructive outcomes that none of us even intend, right? That's profound. And that defies our sense of intuition. And it explains a lot. So you have to take a very objective look through the lens of system dynamics to really understand what's going on. And at the end of this, I'll recommend some books that people can read to look into that.
AD: And this ties into that. So, you know, a lot of people say that the reason we have the wealth and income gaps and the poor, you know, living in the conditions that they are between each other and they attribute it to greed. And that is just a natural part of being a human that we have greed. And it kind of sounds like what you're pointing at here is that this isn't just because people are built this way. because the system has geared us towards being like this and even people with the best meaning intentions end up playing into it because it's part of the nature of how the system works. So, I guess if you can ask, yeah, is this the main reason? Could you say, greed is an attributing factor or not?
PJ: That's a subjective concept. And I'd say all of this works on multiple levels. First you have this sort of neoclassical economic theory that some may be familiar with of so-called rational agents. and we're all supposed to be rational and formed agents. And one of the modus operandi of us, when it comes to market trade, in our pursuit of utility, is we seek to self maximize they call it. We're self maximizing rational agents. And basically what this means is that if you're going to be a smart competitive agent, you take advantage of every opportunity you can to the highest extreme you can within legal bounds, at least to whatever degree we can measure, then to extract the most out of every single transaction. For example, people complain in the US about the pharmaceutical industry and the drug prices.
And they often will use that word greed when they see these markups, when they see billionaire CEOs and the incredible profit of these companies that are basically making money off of sick people, right? Yet, the business community is doing exactly what it's expected of them, including the pharmaceutical industry. To meet the interest of their shareholders, not to mention just the basic ethic once again, self-maximization, which is a competitive function. If somebody with diabetes is willing to pay four or five times the amount for that drug, which if their life depends on it, they certainly will. And you can get away with it without too much public upheaval. You will work to get away with it, morality aside. That is business acumen. And that is what makes billionaires. So there's that.
But more generally, since the social system… globally there's different variations, but there really isn't a universal social support structure. Everything is entrenched in fear. Everyone is insecure, 'cause you don't know what's gonna happen. Someone loses their job, they're living paycheck to paycheck. And that translates once again into that kind of so-called greedy behavior, because you wanna maximize once again for the sake of your future security. If you have the opportunity to strategically exploit for more money, you can rationalize that by saying, “Well, I'm not sure how much money I'm gonna have in the future 10 years from now, so I better push for as much as I can now. I'm gonna really mark up my house, or I'm gonna do something manipulative just within the bounds of my moral threshold, even though it's wrong and deceitful. But hey, this is what the game is and so on.”
It's easy to rationalize those things. If you have children, you know, you could do the exact same thing. “Well, I might have a million dollars in the bank, but my kids, you know, they live in this society. I wanna make sure they are taking care of it. I love my kids and my grandkids. So I need $10 million more to take care of them.”
So there's that. It's an ongoing rationalization process. And then you have the cultural or social status problem where people see financial accomplishment and material possessions as a form of communication to show others they are valuable, they're successful, they're worthy, they work hard, they're accomplished. So nobody buys like a 50 room mansion or a 50 million dollar yacht because they just wanna ride around alone in it and have no one look at it. It's a kind of conspicuous consumption, Ultimately for the sake of social status and acclaim, a form again of social communication, a deeply distorted and neurotic sickness to be sure.
I mean, think about it, who's more confident in this scenario? A person living minimally that doesn't require much material possession to be happy. They're social, they have family, they have good bonds, they're loved, they feel loved, they express love, or the person with such insecurity, obviously, they have to have multimillion dollar mansions and wealth and ridiculous, high priced cars? Naturally the more secure person, the more confident person, the more stable and the more healthy person is the one that chooses minimalism, which of course aligns with nature as well. That's another thing about that as an aside, you can't have that kind of value system on a finite planet with an expanding species. The idea you can just infinitely have as much as you want. The fact that anyone even has to point that out, blows my mind, where do people think they are in this “infinite material wants” reality? And I've actually had debates with people that argue that people naturally have infinite wants. Well, if that's the case, then we should just kill ourselves right now, 'cause there's no way you can sustain a species if that's the value system, but obviously that's untrue.
So, while I understand once again, this word greed, as we've touched upon, greed is really just an empty word denoting insecurity, along with the fundamental business acumen incentive of self-maximization in the competitive arena at every turn.
AD: And I think a lot of apologists for the way the system works and even though it sounds dysfunctional is they come up with the concept of equilibrium theory, which I think we sort of briefly touched on before. Can you explain what that means in terms of market economics or if it's possible to have a self regulating market as some other proponents of this model say.
PJ: That's an excellent question. I really get to the heart of this whole debate and dilemma around markets and what has really become a kind of religion. The answer, of course, is no. The great myth in this endless academic and, again, somewhat religious debate that this system of markets is magical. It's like the universe. It's the spheres. Everything's in order. We don't have to do anything. It's viable. It self regulates. And as we all are probably familiar with somewhere our college or high school studies, the great Adam Smith, who we will touch upon a little bit later, put forward this vague notion of the invisible hand. And that little kernel seed really took root and grew into this horrible maligned forest where there's this ongoing pursuit.
Basically, it's a utopian pursuit of some kind of perfect economic science. It's these economists that really want to believe they're physicists. They want to believe they're dealing with something of true, natural origin and they can see the dynamics and it's built into nature, “not our creation. This is nature.” And the idea would be, of course, that we don't need any intervention or regulation, as if the free market can be really free and therefore through trade and competition and supply and demand, everything will work out for everyone and that's all we have to do. And if we're doing anything wrong, it's intervention itself.
We can't let government come in and mess up our perfect sphere utopian economic thing. So it's interesting because as present as this mythology is, if you actually read micro-economics, it actually look at what's happened over the past, say, 50 years, no one actually argues this is the case. The myth has grown so large and there are certainly schools that support it. In fact, it's dominant in these schools, but deep down they're really all in denial of what mathematicians and truly objective market economists have figured out that it does not self-regulate. You have to intervene. Again, the debates go back and forth. It's probably the ultimate debate. It's probably the one that comes with the most in my own general communication with people on social media and beyond. They say, "No, no, no. The reason you have all this unemployment, the reason you know… it's the Fed intervening, it's all the state subsidies."
They not only do they understand the dynamics, they're just tacitly, not even tacitly, they're openly rejecting the idea that there are any endogenous flaws to the system. And the best you'll get is from someone like Warren Buffett, they'll say, "Well, we need a little bit of regulation, but not too much, you can't have too much because that's going to, again, interfere with their religion, because if they don't have that market self-regulation, what do they have? They have a disparate, dysfunctional system that basically is unviable and therefore the whole philosophy of their existence and their foundation and their wealth is destroyed. Intervention is heretical and we see this again all major economic schools even to this day and yeah I would just reinforce the fact that it's kind of a religious denialism.
This utopian ideal that if the market's free everything will be great. Again, going back to system science there's something called viability. I've used this word a few times. To define that a viable system is something that doesn't require any administration. One of the very early mechanics in the steam engine in the industrial revolution and they had a steam engine which was very unstable so they created what's called a Watts governor. It's a thing that they put on the steam engine that regulates the flow of steam so when the engine goes too fast the governor modulates based on the feedback from what's happened in the engine and it centers it out kind of like a thermostat in your house.
The core principle of viability in any system whether in nature or in a social system meaning man made is if you have to constantly interfere with it - the more you interfere with it, the more you administer it, the more you intervene in it, the less viable it is. It's like it's not made for that purpose, in other words. And as I implied earlier, this system is not made for human survival. It's not. It has functions like that that have been somewhat reliable over the course of early history. But this system is a destructive system that's there to kill all of us. Now, not really being facetious here.
This is what the system is doing, whether we choose to accept it or not, because it's that unviable. The only thing we can do to stop it from killing us is constantly trying to figure out how to intervene and stopping this and new regulations here. And of course, what happens with that, you have the sickness of the special interest cult, basically the true high priests that believe in the system so much that are so rewarded by it in the high billionaire business ownership class, and they have all their tentacles into government so they can counteract that and sabotage intervention and any attempt to make balance when they want to, which is precisely what's happening, which once again is why I have no faith in the (political) system as we see it.
You can't separate now the power of money from the system. People complain about money in politics. This is a big theme here in the United States. Well, what point is that a contradiction? If you can go out and buy donuts and buy insurance policies and buy a house, why can't you buy policy? It's a complete contradiction to think that money is not going to…
In fact, if you want to be consistent in the system, yeah, you use money to pay for and buy everything. You use competitive dynamics to pay and buy and do everything, influence everything. Pretty much that's what's happening. Granted, we stop it a little bit and we have to because it's going to kill us. But you see my point that it's one integrated system as an aside? So today we have an economic system that is so incredibly unviable that if you just let the machine run on its own without any corrective intervention, like a car, it's just going to continue running right off the road and crash into a tree gesturally speaking.
AD: And so when we just touched there about economists like Adam Smith, so they came up with a very strong model for saying that this is how capitalism works and a lot of people describe them as having these great models that are very useful and this is why we have capitalism functioning the way it does. But I would ask: are their models impractical and just more theoretical and probably didn't really work in practice? Or do you think that it's just the nature of how we've got to this point now that it's kind of capitalism has grown on its own to become this machine of its own?
PJ: Yeah, the the kernel seed was always there in the in the very advent of trade. As abstract and strange as it may sound to people unfamiliar with this kind of thinking: trade is the problem. It's all based around these dynamics of trade. The moment you have a trading society, everything we see - the property relationships, because you have to have property with trade - you have a self-evident generation of what the model or the system is going to be. But going back to Adam Smith particularly, he didn't really have a quote of model, just to be really accurate here. When we talk about a model, it's literally basically math.
It says, we're going to define the properties of this system. We're going to model it. And we're going to run equations and we can actually simulate this. That's what economic modelists, (modelists is that a word?) - that's what economic model people do. Adam Smith didn't really do that. Well, Adam Smith did, and he was quite brilliant, is give a kind of presumed foundation for it. He had certain principle he took from John Locke. He re-incorporated them and said, "Well, here's the philosophy of this system. Here's the way we think it's going to work. Here are the attributes that we can identify."
Adam Smith, followed by David Ricardo and some others in what's called the Classical School of economy. Karl Marx, believe or not, was a classical economist too, because they actually believed in value relationships based on labor and resources which were thrown out the window when the modern school came along called neoclassical which reduced everything down to simply what people are willing to pay for. They call it utility. Utilitarian theory says the only thing that gives something value is what you decide it does. And there's some value to that but it's also an extreme deviation from anything that you could link to the natural world.
At least Adam Smith recognized that labor produces things. There are natural resources, and there has to be value placed upon that. The new school, the neoclassicals rejected all that. Labor has no value than what's perceived. And of course, the earth is literally an abstraction. There's no value whatsoever. I mean, clearly, intuitively, these people know they have to get resources, they know it's scarce, but the models put forward do not account for that whatsoever. To his credit by comparison, I'll say, Adam Smith was actually probably smarter than most of the economists we have today because he at least had that attribute. And he also said that you can't have full self-regulation, and that's the biggest part of this. He recognized that wages… people in this neoclassical school, they think that wages and what CEOs make are determined by market dynamics as if there's a push and pull -self-regulation.
“Oh, you just punch all this into a computer, and here's what this CEO is going to be paid because of their industry” and they assume these dynamics, but it's not. Wages are set by social custom. People have to decide - that's why you have a minimum wage. You know, in least governments figured that out intuitively. You can't not have minimum wage because if you let the system do what it does, it would never be able to balance out what people get paid at a minimum. You'd have people making 10 cents an hour today. You literally would if you didn't have those wage elements because of the pressures and competitive nature of the system.
So to his credit, once again, he at least had those fundamental foresights that you need a mixed economy, so to speak. Granted, I don't think there's value to that because the economy itself is so powerful, the root of survival being what it is. It has overridden our ability to create that mixed reality where there's balance because intervention is sabotaged perpetually. So Adam Smith, you know, he gets a lot of flak because of the introduction of the invisible hand and he really did set in motion a pretty nasty chain reaction with that.
But if you read him, he really was on the side of the worker and the average person, he loathed the rich. Like if Adam Smith knew people like Warren Buffett existed that literally has made billions of dollars just by gambling because that's all Warren Buffett does. He doesn't create anything. He just gambles. And he's considered like this pioneer of capitalist success. Adam Smith would puke in his soup. He would be horrified by the fact that we have this Wall Street adaptation that has nothing to do with creation.
AD: A good distinction to make. I don't think people would know that. I even I didn't really. So I guess if the current economic system is flawed by the things we have discussed, is there any alternative? I know this is a big question and many do think that communism or socialism is the only alternative and I know that you don't necessarily advocate for those systems specifically and for me I even think that it's sad that that's the only the alternatives that people know of. So that's why I would like to ask if there is any alternative that you would like to propose.
PJ: Well, of course, stepping back, let's be clear on this common misconception. Communism or socialism, they're not systems. They have no features of a system that are self-defining. They are simply administered… or they were or could be administered bureaucracies… with no shared structure. When one country imposes so-called socialistic practices and another country does the same, most likely, and as is often the case, they're very, very different in how they're organized and how power is distributed and how information flows work and so on. And there's certainly no feedback relationship that even is comparable to what markets do.
So markets are, in fact, a system, a very dysfunctional one that leads a certain direction that is not what people want, but they don't understand it. Socialism and communism are not systems. They're just ideas, basically. They're basically reactions to capitalism that say, “well, you know, we should have of some kind of democratic economy.”
And of course, I agree with that. In principle, in the most fundamental notion of socialism, meaning public ownership with the means of production, that is a viable concept. I mean, we have democracy throughout the world. Everyone clamors for some kind of general participation, decision-making, except they stop right of the economy. The economy in capitalism is the only thing that's purely dictatorial. There's no involvement. It's just private enterprise dictatorships. So just make sure people understand that these are not systems.
As far as actual solutions. It's interesting people bring that up 'cause people just sort of feel confused and all they really have to do is look to nature. What are other organisms doing? What are the defining characteristics of species that have been around for millennia? It's about balance, it's about dynamic equilibrium. We have to first come up with some kind of central tenants, right? So principles of sustainability. At a minimum, you can be contrasting of what we're doing now. So for example, instead of an economy based on consumption and growth, and infinitely so, where it's best for the economy to purchase and throw away and buy and consume and keep that going, keep the machine going, of cyclical consumption. So people have jobs.
Well, clearly that is not in line with nature because we're just eradicating our resources. So we want to have dynamic equilibrium. We don't want to cut down a forest that can't be regenerated in the same amount of time. And once you start thinking that way, and that kind of train of thought, the fundamental parameters of a sustainable economy become self-evident in their principles. And then, in terms of building a system, those feedback relationships become inherent, and then you're reliant upon what you can do with the given state of technology and resources.
Really, it's just an issue of looking at what's happening with sustainable species and the most fundamental sustainability protocols that are required. We have existed like that in the past. You go back to hunter-gatherer societies. They exist off of nature. They didn't have the ability to interfere yet. So what did they do? They hunted and they gathered. And they lived off of natural regeneration. They couldn't grow things at that point. And so they had to find that balance. And they felt a good conservatism. They felt in one with nature in many ways. When you look at the writings of indigenous cultures that are still kind of around from that period of time that live in the Amazon and so forth, and carried over into other, you know, first-world peoples as well.
So those philosophies are there, but it's just become deeply distorted. I have absolutely no doubt that we can rebuild a sustainable model and people will be much happier inside of it, how we get there of course as a completely different conversation.
AD: And I was going to actually ask that. So if we could find an alternative that was based on sustainability, cooperation and human need as being the key values, what would be required to bring such a thing into reality? I think would you say that value systems and cultural behaviors need to also shift alongside this? Yes, which brings up a very complicated situation, the question of which comes first, the system change or value change, and it's one of those really difficult things to talk about, especially given the ignorance and the way people think about themselves, because most people assume as does the criminal justice system and everything else that we are the singular point of all of our actions and all of our beliefs that lead to those actions and so forth.
There's this fundamental ignorance there, and it pollutes people's sense of ego and it pollutes their sense of identity to think that they are somehow out of control. And of course none of us are really in control. We're all in this cycle of influence, because of our culture, because of our biology, because of all the daily pressures, because of our traumas. I mean, there's so many things that navigate behavior, but you know, that's a deeper conversation. But in terms of systems, obviously, if you're in an environment and it has certain incentives, and it's survival incentives, you're going to acclimate to those behaviors because that's just what you do as a surviving organism. And if those incentives are good and positive and social and communal and oriented and about good public health and respecting people, then we will evolve in that way.
If it's not like we have today, well, where you're cutthroat, where you're competitive, where you actually, you know, most people they thrive on abuse of others, whether they know it or not. When you take advantage of a situation financially, you're basically abusing somebody, you know, taking away something of their sustenance and sustainability. But we don't see it that way. Look at Donald Trump. He's the perfect amalgamation of that kind of competitive neuroses where he thrives on the idea of beating others. And that's unfortunately the dominant value structure that we see across the world. So what comes first? You know, obviously it has to all kind of happen simultaneously. Education's important. You know, the arts and film, the music and media, things that have all been a part of, media festivals and stuff in the past.
I see the power in that. But over the years I've realized that we have to start building new environments. You see the little pockets, you know, from the even minimalist things like Burning Man, to certain small pockets of communities like the Kibbutzim in Israel, to, you know, even indigenous relationships. There's certain push and pull where people are kind of realizing they need to, you know, identify with nature and be respectful of each other and realize we all share the earth and all that fun stuff. But of course the system doesn't reward it. So as I'm going to talk about in my new film and in future works; as I've talked about on my podcast, I'm really working hard to come up with a preliminary infrastructure that can be scaled out, that gets people off the grid, first in a very minimalistic way, and then hopefully again being scaled out where people can start to co-exist with the existing system, but live in a different system as far as their practices and values.
It's a very tricky thing to do. I don't believe in communes and things like that. I think that's more escapist. We have to do something that's inclusive, that lures people in. It's nothing new. It's the build it and they will come phenomenon. Or you know, a Buckminister talked about, you know, you have to really start to recreate, not complain. Easier said than done, obviously. Especially when you're trying to create something that's not just say, you know, a minimal practice, like a tool library or a time bank, you know, something semi-off the grid as far as capitalist values and so on. Got to be integrated. It has to be efficient. It's something we all need to start putting our heads together and thinking about. And unfortunately, very few people are doing that, which is something we can talk about in a moment as well.
AD: Yeah, I think it's incredible to think that we could do this if we all just actually worked actively together. And I guess that does tie into my point that do you think that identitarianism, if I can call it that, like the idea of group thing, coinciding with just a majority simply because you identify with that group… do you think that sort of thinking gets in the way of creating the real social environmental and systemic change that we talked about and we so desperately need.
PJ: Absolutely. It's probably one of my biggest grievances when I look at patterns of culture. Group identity and social conformity, probably the greatest inhibition when it comes to change or any kind of awakening, so to speak, breaking people out of their patterns. People are deeply locked into their tribes. I think a lot of the most extreme, you know, subcultures are basically locked into a social relation rather than anything else. You look at people that believe the earth is flat, this rather adorable subculture. They're actually really just doing it for the community involvement, I think, deep down. I don't think they really care if the earth is flat or not. They just love what it does in their sense of superiority and their sense of feeling they know something somebody else does. And they get together in the little conferences.
So it's really unfortunate and you can just look to religion, of course, to see the same kind of pattern. People just refuse to move beyond what they think their identity is because it destroys who they are. If they really believe these things over their lifetime, then they need someone contradicts it. And most people can't handle that kind of emotional pain. I'll say that in general, we like to think were rational people, but most people are not really rational. They just think in relationship to how their thoughts are perceived by others. You probably are familiar with the Ash conformity experiment, but they put up these lines and they ask a one test subject in a controlled setting where everyone else is actors to say which line is longer. The other actors are giving incorrect answers. And then once they get to the final real subject, he more often not will agree with the others, even though it's completely obvious in his own eyes that the line is not what they're saying it is.
So we have to contend with that. That's probably one of the biggest inhibitions. And I don't know the answer. It's a kind of evolutionary baggage, I think. I think early on in our species, the need for really serious group identity served the function of the species, but at this point in time, as again, the complex social arrangement, the adaptive system that we are as a species, it's perverted, and now we're stuck with this baggage, and it's probably epigenetically related to us on some level, but really, I think it's mostly culturally reinforced. Let me think about it. If you go against the grain, there's many repercussions to that, you could lose your job, especially on the internet. I mean, the internet doesn't forget. So if you do something to make yourself look foolish or you don't want to rock the boat, you know you're going to be exposed for whatever you're expressing and that has a lot of unfortunate repercussions and people of course are very intolerant. I mean look at cancel culture and all that kind of stuff. People are terrified of rocking the boat probably more than ever because they're fear of what's going to happen in retribution from the general social environment.
Like racism is a group dynamic. It has its origins in economics. I wish more people understood that. Dr. Martin Luther King talked about a great deal because he never took the position that racism was just you know some kind of genetic disposition or fear of someone that doesn't look like you. Those patterns actually aren't out there. They're not universal anyway. There might be something to be said for running the something you've never seen before but that's not prevalent in terms of why racism persists. Racism, especially like in American culture is an outcome of Economic scarcity and the abuse of one culture that was brought into another culture and then suddenly they fight for resources and jobs. Racism became a legal thing.
It was legally decreed. Race comes from a Legal distinction that said “well this person's black and you're white.” Therefore here's the divide and all the things we see now to this day that are so perverted and deeply entrenched and they don't even realize the source of it. They don't realize it's rooted in economic fear. So yeah, it's just another example of this outcome of group dynamics. But I will say the competitive nature of our economy and the way we've organized it is at the root of pretty much all the division that we see and it's truly tragic.
AD: Yeah, definitely is. And I wanted to ask, so do you think there are any groups that are maybe currently tackling economic problems, environmental decline or systemic issues in this way? And are they doing it successfully if they are, is it even possible to, under the current system?
PJ: Well, yeah, it depends on the level of engagement and what your measurement is. I would never put down anyone or any group seeking a better world regardless of what they're doing but we can qualify the efficacy of their actions, especially if they're not really rooted in understanding the structure of this system. If you're trying to shut down pollution industries and you're successful at doing that for a little while, well, that's contributing to something, even though another one's just gonna pop right up because the system is producing these things.
All of the agents, so to speak, are all temporal. They're fleeting. They're just cancerous growth that will keep coming back because the cancer itself has not been treated. I have friends, for example, in Greenpeace and whatnot. And I often ask: so if you're understanding the environmental problem and you realize that there are systemic problems and so on, why doesn't Greenpeace with all of its resources and millions of dollars try to build a kind of creative design think tank? That's really what needs to happen. There's no institution out there that I'm aware of aside from just kind of theoretical ones like the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
They touch upon things, but they're not really holistically systemically oriented. I'm really not aware of one, frankly, at least one that's active. It's easy to theorize this stuff, but as far as people that are actually working to get to the bottom of this and building new systems and communicating the information that's most important that all of this is endogenous. That we can't keep throwing patches on things and holding up signs… you know, protesting has its effect, but it's all temporal. Again, the true disease is underlying it. So yeah, it's disappointing. There are groups doing many good things but I don't know of any particular group really that is doing what needs to be done in terms of economic redesign.
AD: So that sounds to me if anyone's listening that there's a need for this. And there's definitely a gap here. And I would hope that maybe we can start gathering people who want to do something about this and see that there is a systemic problem. So I guess finally, are there any resources or websites that you'd like to share where people can go to learn more about these sorts of topics that we've talked about today?
PJ: I think the most important lens to learn about all this stuff is through, again, system dynamics. It sounds like a very abstract academic concept. It began in the early 20th century with the man named J. Forrester, and he started to realize that there are these feedback processes that are existing in nature. And if you begin to understand those processes, you have a far more efficient understanding of what's actually happening and the problems therein and how they control them if need be. And of course, the outcomes, you know, more representative to causality.
So system science, system dynamics… there's also cybernetics, which is a subfield of that. Stafford Beer, a big influence of mine. He did all sorts of wonderful things in his time. So I recommend people looking into that as a foundation to understand what's happening in the world. Without that foundation, I don't think people can really understand it. It's basically understanding scientific causality, but there is a vocabulary that's been established by people that's very, very helpful in how we model the world. I mean, think about it. We're all modeling the world. That's basically what our brains do. You look at a cat, we see the cat, but really it's our mind has a model of a cat that says, "Well, that's a cat because of the features that I identify."
And most people look at the world with the wrong model. They haven't been taught the right model or how to even think about models. So they see the world through mostly a political lens and unfortunately mostly through a group dynamic lens. Everyone blames other groups. I mean, that's pretty much the whole political system is. That's what the entire conspiracy culture is. It's all about blaming other people and blaming dark forces and blaming, you know, this CEO here, this hidden philanthropist here or whatnot. So systems thinking really gets the bottom of that. And ultimately to realize that we are causal, we are a cause and effect in all of this. And if you can get rid of the hubris of your own sense of ego and identity and realize you're part of something and you're influenced by it, it's a very profound and even a spiritual revelation to show the interconnectedness.
But I would recommend Donella Meadows as a preliminary person to research. Anyone can find her books on systems thinking. I think she has a beginner's guide to it. She also helped write a book that you might be familiar with in the 1970s called "Limits to Growth," which was a MIT-generated book about what would happen many decades down the line. If basically capitalism, business as usual, was allowed to continue to grow in the way that it does endogenously. And what we're seeing today with environmental collapse and all these other features were basically predicted by these folks in the 70s. So that's an excellent book to get as well to realize that you can assume what's going to happen in the future once you see this. And all of my seemingly dark comments about this system designed to kill us actually don't sound as ridiculous when you start to understand it and look objectively at the system itself.
And of course, my website's Peter Joseph.info. And I did write a book called The New Human Rights Movement if anyone cares to check that out as well. So.
AD: And I will be sharing all of the resources that you just talked about on our website. So to anyone listening, just head over to the 4 Triple Z website and you'll be able to get those resources there. And lastly, I'd just like to mention that Peter Joseph's latest film InterReflections will be screening at no cost on Saturday 11th of March, at 3.30 p.m. in the Brisbane Square Library by the Brisbane Movement Sustainability Group. So be sure to check that out. It's an incredible film. And lastly, thank you so much, Peter. This is an incredible interview. Really enjoyed speaking with you.
PJ:Oh, thank you Anita. And I didn't realize you were showing InterReflections. I appreciate that.