Episode 47
[ Zeitgeist | Requiem Trailer ]
“When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit. which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance.
We've learned to fly the air like birds. We've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we have learned to walk the earthas brothers and sisters.”
“Folks, we're in trouble.”
“The whole system stinks. The whole idea of greed and profit and the exploitation of other people.
It stinks.”
“Money operates on one value system. It defines value by price.”
“You see, no one notices what the true function of the system is. It is masked by propaganda and myth.”
“So far as poverty is concerned, there has never in history been a more effective machine
for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system in the free market.”
“Do we have a health care system? No we don't. We have a sickness and disability care system.”
“Is curing patients of cancer and disease a sustainable business model? Asks analysts at investment bank Goldman Sachs in an April 10th report.”
“See the dominant functions of a system are often not what they seem. People think the market is there to feed and clothe them. No, the primary function of this economy is to exploit scarcity and increase consumption.”
“Hidden camera footage shows how Amazon, the largest retailer in the world, systematically
destroys billions of dollars worth of goods every year.”
“And it's funny, people talk about green capitalism as if it could ever be a thing.”
“How to say no. That's the subject under discussion.”
“And I suddenly realized, looking at that, that that means that every fundamental capacity
that has enabled our species to survive. We've defined by our economic system as worthless-
our ability to care for each other, to come to each other's rescue, to stand up for its right to oppose what's wrong.”
“Actively, or is it a sub-conscious thing?”
“I just think as part of capitalism, is to promote racism.”
“All of those fundamental capacities that we as a species need in order to survive,
we've defined by our economic system as worthless. Now is there another way? Of course there is. The question is, can we overcome the force of the system before it kills us?
Because that is exactly what it's going to do in the end.”
[Peter]
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 9400 and 47.
The opening audio was from the trailer for the Zeitgeist documentary titled Zeitgeist Requiem, which will be theatrically premiered on March 15 of next year. I've given the title Requiem to emphasize, of course, this trajectory that we should all understand by now and feel. You don't have to be a doomsday cynic to see what's in store if you can follow trends.
Anyone positive about the future accounting for any of the major trends are lying to themselves, quite simply. Or fundamentally misunderstanding the information they're perceiving. And I know people like to be positive and think positive and don't like to hear that kind of stuff because again it's interpreted as cynical, but really it's objective.
What do the trends show? All life support systems continue to be in decline with no symptom of alleviation. And obviously we can change those trends, so it's not like just talking about things getting worse, but the longer things go on as they are, the worse things become, and in many respects, the harder it will be to change, mainly because of the element of fear that will arise.
In other words, more stress means more irrationality, more groupism. Some of course argue such stress will lead to further change or an interest in change, but usually that happens too late. Rather people are going to congeal and become more tribal.
This new work will focus on the endogenous system dynamics of the society around us and the systems it's ingrained in, the core economic system fundamentally, and offer active solutions, participatory solutions, not just theory. Using once again the lens of system science applied to economics and of course sustainability and sustainability is the ultimate word.
Sustainability is not just about the ecosystem and the environment, It's also about human relations. Can we not have war, for example, which endangers everyone because of nuclear weapons.
So the goal beyond educational analysis, which is inherent to a documentary work, is to ultimately work towards a kind of parallel economy program that people can institute in their communities. A program design that has the ability to expand into a new, viable economic and social system, which of course has been touched upon throughout this podcast series, but it's time to move from hypothesis and theory to action.
Now, I apologize if I repeat myself a little bit here for those that have listened for a while, as this is still kind of the first phase of the entire podcast, believe it or not, which is lecture based and just data oriented, train of thought oriented, as opposed to opening the door to general conversations like traditional podcasts, which will diffuse focus a bit.
Not because people out there aren't doing lots of positive things in general and have good ethics and values and they contribute, but because the focus here is very specific. It's about understanding the system flaws and how to get out of it: revolution now. And people that actually think that way appear to be extremely rare.
This podcast and community focuses on structuralism once again, and how our societal system of organization affects our lives mechanistically, endogenously, both culturally and procedurally, leading predominately to predictable outcomes that are far more negative than positive. So it's about system change, not system administration.
Pretty much everyone you hear out there in the so-called progressive media inevitably talk about ideal policy or institutions, or simply ways of behaving, you know, in the moral respect. And through those behavioral changes in regulation, somehow things will get better, but it's a misconception. The system is stronger than the regulatory apparatus or the institutions.
And, as dangerous and as conflicting as it is for me to say, the system is stronger than you are because it's about your survival. One of the most annoying things I've heard people repeatedly say in conversation about system change, they say, "Well, we, the people, are the system, we just change our behavior. We can do it."
And they say that as if there's no huge, massive gravitation of sociological force, keeping people locked into behaviors, values and procedures that again support the system they want to change. And they're not informed enough to know what those even are.
There are so many reinforcing and stabilizing loops that keep the system in play, and they are so subconscious, they are so multi-tiered and complex. And therefore it's not just changing your behavior in some kind of moral adaptation that will gradually change the system for the better.
You have to get rid of the system; knock it down, it has to be destroyed. In other words, while our behaviors and loyalties and actions and incentives may define the system, all of those things have actually come from the system. We are a product of our environment. We have had multiple generations, constant operant conditioning. On again, so many levels consciously and subconsciously that we are truly powerless to overcome the system with a kind of internal revolution. The thing has to be overthrown for us to break out and realize who we actually are, so to speak.
And that is a really hard pill for people to swallow. We are taught to believe in a kind of incremental politics toward change with the naive assumption that we can just gradually move toward a given sustainable way, a given, sustainable end, but that's not how it works. There's a magnetism.
So I bring that up because the pool of people, disappointingly that we can speak with about true system change, is shockingly small. In fact, even the historical radicals that promote socialism or communism or whatever, these folks are still out there and they'll make a lot of good points because there is a system analysis there going all the way back to Marx.
But the specificity is lost. It stops there with these vague definitions of what socialism even means, or what it even means to have the public responsible for the means of production, etc.
As I wrote in the substack article a while back, socialism is an empty term. It doesn't exist. It's pointless to bring it up. It's a terrible binary concept that people have used as a fallback for an attempt at a solution with self-proclaimed righteous socialists, and attempt at blaming anything that goes wrong in the world on socialism and communism and a command economy and everything else, which is one of the strongest forms of propaganda.
Anyone that emphasizes their relationship with socialism today, even if they have the absolute best intentions, are ultimately walking instruments of propaganda. It's against them.
In the same way, you don't need to call yourself an atheist if you don't subscribe to some kind of traditional, theistic belief with religion. You don't need to call yourself a socialist because you disagree with the horrible system of capitalism.
So I know I yell at the wind with all that stuff because no one seems to care. They think I'm just being semantic. Maybe I'll bring on a bunch of socialists on the podcast so I can try to talk them out of why they use this identity label as opposed to just moving forward and thinking scientifically in terms of systems because that's what this is about.
Similarly, some may remember I had a conversation with presidential candidate and author Marianne Williamson on her podcast a while back, and our talk, which was productive for listeners, I think, centered around this debate of political incrementalism once again, with my argument being that the collective gravitation of the system, because of its incentives, procedures, and hence structure once again, always fights back.
It fights back on the sociological level, if you will. I know that's difficult to process. People have a hard time at that. It's convoluted to think that way. Meaning the issue of to what degree humans can express their will against a social structure that demands certain kinds of behaviors and practices in order for people to basically survive…
Remember that statement by I think it was Donella Meadows that we have a whole society which is producing outcomes that no one actually intends. We're certainly not interested in seeing ourselves expire as a species. We don't enjoy, usually, at least most people, hurting others, even though we rationalize exploiting other people's suffering and taking advantage of people because that is part of the capitalist market ethic of competition, which also feeds into social status as derived from the system as well, because if you're doing well and someone else is doing poorly, you have a reference there to make yourself feel better about yourself.
As dark as that is- I mean, the entire status orientation of our society is based on power and wealth and basically you striving over people suffering. It's class psychology, if you will- the consequence of stratification and drawing your status from where you are on the ladder.
And, be that as it may neurosis aside, it's still very subconscious, and most people out there do not intend to destroy the species or hurt others. And yet that is exactly what is happening. And the question becomes why? And the answer, of course, is because the structure has functions that we adhere to without understanding that those system level functions have a completely different agenda, if you will. We are merely part of a chain of causality within the structure. And that's why I always differentiate between in-system and out-system activism.
The only way you can create new outcomes of a more humane and sustainable nature is to find a way to reject the system itself, which is why this parallel economy project I keep talking about through a cybernetic approach makes the most sense.
It ideally allows a way to overcome the system from the inside. The transitional goal is to forge new institutions and sub-structures and engagements and of course value systems - within the system - in order to shatter it from the inside out, which is indeed not the same as political incrementalism, or more broadly, the institution of policy and regulation, which people like Marianne Williamson promote, even though she's aware of the fact that the system has tendencies that move against us as I talked about with her. But as usual, it still really didn't land.
And I admit, it's a very difficult notion philosophically because you have to see yourself in a different way than what your consciousness is registering every day of your life, and what society tells you about your role, which is that you are in control of your own behavior and your own success and failures and so on and so on, regardless of the influences around you. Regardless of the cultural schema you have consciously or subconsciously adopted.
The total fabric of what most call and engage as activism, including the democratic process itself, is void of this causal recognition of structural influence on the sociological level and it sabotages everything.
Once again, you have to view yourself as a throughput rather than a singular point of novel volition, and you have to hold that cognitive dissonance. We have to accept the contradiction. We have to accept that there are larger order forces controlling our behavior that we are not conscious of. And hence what sociology teaches us, the point of the medium of the field, noticing particularly population level patterns that find correlation to conditions, right?
When you see, for example, statistical consistency of a certain percentage of the population under a certain condition or precondition, behaving in a certain way, you're likely witnessing a pattern of behavior that is not some outcome of a bunch of people operating with free will as if you could get to each one of them, as if you could change the moral values and incentives of everyone in that group, without addressing the structure- things would be fine.
No.
The structure will intervene. The structure is forever conditioning in a kind of therapeutic modulation. The structure will reorient. The structure will dominate over time. The structure will always win. If this kind of arcane, free will volition, individual morality framework is all you're working with, as is again common to politics as we know it, including the emphasis on the regulatory approach, the interventionist approach.
Okay. I think I've run all that into the ground for now. But it is worth revisiting because it's at the very core of the reasoning for social system change itself. If the cogs and wheels inherent to the system did not allow for the complete transformation of the system by some mechanistic, logical force, then obviously that's not a viable route to change.
It's like people who say you just need to vote with your dollar in your purchases in order to regulate what businesses do, as if the scope of that action or others like it even comes remotely close to what's required.
And I would expand that manner of thinking to the entire regulatory apparatus once again. We have all these great people in the general conversation out there claiming they're against the system. But when you ask them about the solution, even if they understand certain system aspects about how it's inherently structurally wrong, they still say we need better policy.
It's that age-old myth of regulatory policy assumed to change the behavior of a system, and that you can hold that contradiction of the system through force. And such policy suggestions are legion. Even in peer review, I've seen some of these things.
And the punchline of the whole thing is we can theorize anything. You could also say that about the post-scarcity community. Anything can be theorized. I could solve all world poverty in theory on a single sheet of legal paper tomorrow just by listing an incremental policy change process.
It's easy and it's pointless. If one's not accounting for the inhibiting feedback that you get from the system itself collectively, that will always work to nullify, erode and destroy those policies because they move against the true system functions, the very identity of the system itself.
All right, enough of that. I'm moving on.
Ah, yes, of course. So the elephant in the living room, at least on some level, which has certainly gotten under my skin recently, as we're all aware of what happened in Israel on October 7th, the horrible terrorist attack by Hamas that killed over a thousand people with hundreds kidnapped, leading to, at least in the snapshot of all of this, the now roughly four weeks of extreme and indiscriminate Israeli bombing and attacks against Gaza killing well over 10,000 people, while making the vast majority of 2.3 million people homeless; a total event that comes, of course, under the shadow of long-standing tensions between Israel and Palestine, which, as objective observers will express, cannot be detached in causality, at least on some level, from the occupation, imprisonment, and ongoing land expropriation that has been going on for decades, which can be rightfully generalized as the Israeli colonization of Palestine, including apartheid.
Now before anyone gets mad at me for that declaratory statement, because I know this is an ongoing shitstorm out there, as if I'm taking sides, we are going to step back and look at all this through the lens of system dynamics, not group loyalty, not moral outrage, and certainly not biased nationalist media or arcane religion.
The polarization of debate is extreme, how people quickly take sides. Not to mention the propagandized protectionist walls, which are always built on half-truths. Where if you criticize Israel, you must not think the state should even exist. Or, of course, you're anti-Semitic.
And before we get into anything more, it's important to remind ourselves in this mess of group identity that there's no such thing as a Jewish person in and of itself. In the same way, there's no such thing as a Christian person. In the same way, there's no such thing as an Italian person. In the same way, there's no such thing as an Arab person.
From a racial standpoint, there is only the human race in absolute biology, and that's 100% clear. From the nationalist standpoint, we're dealing with completely arbitrary lines humans have been drawing for eons, and they are only there to preserve the economy of land, owning land, using land, ownership, territory. That's all nationalism represents.
Then you have ethnicity, which is just as arbitrary as race because customs and cultures that develop should naturally and willfully and acceptively bleed over into everyone and welcome everyone.
Why not? Just because I have a particular tradition that I enjoy or my family might enjoy or my regional community might enjoy doesn't mean somehow it defines me and excludes others.
What is up with this bizarre neuroses that we have to slap a label on anything that we associate to or that we like or that we practice or that we do?
And the Divisionary Labeling is not just race, ethnicity, nationalism, and all of that. It's built into our language, it seems. You know, I can't just be someone that plays music. I have to be a musician. I can't just be a person that likes to make art and maybe promote socially conscious themes through film. No, I'm a documentary filmmaker.
And as innocuous as all of that sounds, it has its relevance, I think, in the syntax of thought, something that David Bohm would talk about and how our language works, where he promoted Rheomode, I believe it was called, influenced by the Blackfeet Indian culture, how their language worked around verbs as opposed to nouns. And it's fascinating to think about. And I don't know the answer to that. Maybe we are wired in a divisionary way because of the structure of the way we think, I don't know.
And, of course, to be clear, there's a very different level of relevance when it comes to tribal distinctions, such as religion, race, ethnicity, and nationalism.
Filmmakers don't gather together and talk about their historical oppression and form their own nation somewhere. Actors might have unions and look out for each other within the scope of the structure of business, but again, it's not the same thing.
As we're dealing with labels related to vocation, as opposed to just cultural labels where people decide, "I am this," regardless of what they actually do.
Let's remember, we all come from mitochondrial Eve as the mother of all humanity, and whatever genetic differences we have pale in comparison to our core unifying similarities.
The only reason some people have darker skin or exaggerated features is because of regional exposures over generational time. Does that make them a group? No. Just because you're born in the same region with similar exposures to other people, exposure to culture and religion, somehow that makes you unified and of course separate from others by extension.
It's like that old Bill Hicks routine about being an American. People say, "Are you proud to be an American Bill?" And I would say, "I don't know. My parents fucked here. I didn't have much control over it." Why would any of us be proud of something we have no control over and were born into?
Before I go into the system dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I'm going to be a little more academic with, as opposed to this ranting, I would like to jump into this issue of group identity a little bit more. One of my favorite George Carlin quotes goes, "I love people as I meet them one by one. People are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot, they begin to change, they sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group." And that's a nuance of the problem.
I think I did a group dynamics identity thing many podcasts ago, and we talked about the madness of crowds in part. The loss of critical thinking then happens when people identify with groups, and it's well established. People do not think clearly when they're involved in groups.
Something happens to the limbic system particularly, which could be applied to people in a crowd at a soccer riot to the cascade of ideological nonsense on social media where these bubbles occur, and people jump into their biased confirmation group, joining and reinforcing the bandwagon in a very non-independently minded way. We see this stuff everywhere.
And evolutionary scientists have argued that there are various roles for human survival when it comes to group identity or group behavior, and in the bowels of primitive human, I'm sure there are elements of evolutionary fitness there. And yet here we are now in the modern era with a bunch of national identities, a bunch of religious identities and cultural identities, all rigidly labeled and divided in a world, unfortunately due to market economics once again, defined by competition as if this is a jungle and we have no other option, overflowing, of course, with nuclear weapons.
See the problem? Hence, like many things in system evolution, what might serve a positive function at one point in time may no longer serve that function. I think group identity is one of those problems. It's dangerous.
You know, I've never understood why people who appreciate a practice or a religion or a culture or a cuisine or whatever find some gravitation to associate that activity with their identity and then put on a little button that says, "Hey, I'm this." Which of course, when you say that, it means, "Guess what, I am not that, however." Division.
Maybe I like some scriptures and philosophy, or even I believe in some things in the Old Testament or the New Testament. Maybe I think Jesus was a nice guy. Or I like Muhammad. Maybe he said some good things, or I like reading the Torah. Or maybe I like going and listening to some indigenous American music performances. After I eat a big plate of Italian pasta.
Why can't things be a mixture? What is wrong with us?
You know, one of the interesting things about growing up in a deep musical environment is the beauty of music, especially in the realm of percussion, is its fusion; its contemporary. It's always an incorporation of different styles, and at some point, everything becomes novel.
While from an academic perspective, you could say, "Well, this pattern has its origin in East India or this composition technique started in the Russian tradition of Shostakovich or whatever, it doesn't matter, it's academic. Nobody's trying to own it, in other words. No one's saying, "Oh, I'm gonna restrict my compositional style to this heritage that I've absorbed." Rather, the musical goal was the opposite. It's incorporation, it's fusion, it's learning, and expansion.
Then there's something to be learned from that, I think, metaphorically. The faster we can destroy the lines through fusion, the better we become. And make no mistake, this isn't about homogeneity. Difference is vast and accepted. We want difference. We want variety, but we think about it all wrong.
Now abstraction aside and thinking more specific to this group identity neuroses, think about how fascinated it is that you'll have kind of rich, Western, privileged, person-born in America, say, in metropolitan Florida.
They've lived there their entire life. They've never experienced racism or bigotry in their comfortable life. And yet because someone told them they were this label, they get up in arms about something happening across the world because “their people” are under attack. And yet they've never been to that location.
They've never experienced the plight. And in fact, the entire ethnic and racial foundation of it is completely and utterly empty. It's just the familial traditional association that someone decided along the way and said, "Hey, oh, you're that. You're that now. Which means that you have to think about other people like you all around the world. If anything happens to them, it means it's happening to you.”
Well, that would be beautiful if that was humanity as a whole, wouldn't it?
But no, rather you have somebody with the same baseball cap in effect, living across the world that you've never met and you have no real association to whatsoever. But because they share the same baseball cap and somebody with a different baseball cap is beating them up, suddenly you have to jump in and protect your baseball cap related people!
And my broad point is very simple. All group identity is bigotry. It doesn't take a PhD philosopher to figure that out. There's no such thing as positive stereotyping, right?
Remember that old cliche of Asian people that are good at math? Is it not biased because you say they're good at something? Obviously it is. If universities thought that they would impulsively enroll Asian people by default, perhaps discriminated against others, etc, etc, etc.
All group identity is bigotry. As Jiddu Krishnamurti would say, this kind of division is pure violence. Just a bunch of hats and t-shirts, folks, hats, t-shirts, and buttons.
Now, all that aside and moving on, let's now walk through some of the causal attributes and history of this long-term conflict between Israel and Palestine. And we can start once again with this simple framework of the iceberg model, right? As is consistent with this podcast, I rarely talk about current events in detail because most of them repeat categorically, and it's that pattern of repetition that is actually most relevant.
In other words, we can talk about the details of any particular event, say in the news such as an act of violence somewhere, perhaps a mass shooting, and we can analyze the specifics of the event, which may give us some information to understand causality, but when we step back in this example and realize that the United States has had over 600 indiscriminate or semi-indiscriminate mass shootings this year alone, we then recognize a clear pattern, a public health pattern in this case, and that pattern indicates structure, and the structure is the organization producing the system dynamics leading to the pattern of events.
Hence the start of the iceberg model from the top down, moving from events to patterns to structure, all resting on the foundation of a mental model or models. Mental models being how we define the structural pattern and events because we need a model or models to recognize all those things to put them together, right?
So to be unnecessarily explanatory, here a model is something that exists in our mind that represents the external world. When we look at a horse, which we probably saw in a book somewhere in our childhood and said the picture of a horse and said, "Horse”, we associate the name, we remember the physical characteristics that define it, and hence everything that we see in reality is coming from us on a certain level of course.
We are imposing our understanding, which is a whole can of worms in and of itself. Therefore, an event is something that we experience in a given point in time that stands out from the normal flow of life, if you will.
And we typically think about events in the short term, relatively, but you could refer to something quite large or vast as an event. I guess you could say the Neolithic Revolution was an event, even though that's a bit of a stretch intuitively. And that speaks to the heart of the complexity we have to deal with when we try to define our models clearly for the sake of understanding and expressing to other people.
When it comes to structure, this becomes even more complicated because it's about figuring out the components, the component causality, producing the pattern of events.
We have to decide what a pattern is and then we have to figure out the pattern. Simplistically, the pattern being a repetition of categorically similar events once again. And then we get to structure and trying to put all these components together, and invariably we have to reduce the complexity.
We can't account for everything. You could call this a variety reduction in cybernetics. In the real world, basically everything is connected to everything infinitely in a completely unified manner. So you have to reduce the complexity. You have to limit the variety, which means you have to bring out the dominant attributes of causality. Those things have to be decided upon after analysis.
And as the history and development of system dynamics shows us, people tend to gravitate towards simplified, heuristic, and reductionist points of causality. Some theorists refer to this as a Newtonian worldview.
For in the void of Newtonian physics, everything has kind of a clockwork kind of appeal. The action of parts define the whole in a linear way, but the real world doesn't exist in a vacuum, and you have to move away from analyzing parts of a system to focus more on how those parts relate and overlap, generating larger order systems, and then realizing everything is overlapping in this giant lateral and hierarchical mess.
It's daunting when you really start to think this way. Things are not linear in reality.
Hence the concept of feedback. Everything is constantly in flux, which, as an aside, just to point this out, because I think people misunderstand larger order approaches to social organization using computers and they use words like “technocracy” and so forth.
The only reason you use a computer to try and understand things like an economic system and whatnot is because you recognize the complexity and the computer is the only tool we have that can possibly understand it. Our brains cannot match the complex amount of variety that exists in any real world situation. Computers help us model this.
Just wanted to to point that out because this sort of weird technocratic fear of computer domination is still out there. And it's very obvious to point out, but it's also a stigma.
Remember Salvador Andes Chile and Project Cybersson and these headlines that came out “Chile run by a computer“ with this technocratic bias that seemed like the whole society was being determined by a computer.
Well, what are we even talking about with that kind of thing? You have to have complex calculation to deal with complex society. As we should all be figuring it out by now, human, manual politics can't understand it.
It's just cartoonish to see these economists and policymakers make these grand decisions trying to influence major things that at the root have such complexity that they can't even come close to matching the variety to make the proper decision.
Anyway, back on point.
With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we see all sorts of conflict-oriented events of many types which obviously show a long-term pattern and indicate some kind of structure.
What we have to do is model that structure and input what we think are the most dominant causal components, looking at the dynamics they are generating. While this is very academic to point out, if you take a close look at how the media and most people respond to this particular crisis, it's almost always singular reductionism.
Those that support Israel often fall back on, say, anti-Semitism and frame the situation as if there are external forces that demand the nation of Israel not exist or even Jews themselves. And all of that sentiment of real or assumed oppression.
On the other side, those that are sympathetic to what's happening in Palestine will often reduce it down to simply this occupation that’s been going on for 75 years, that has manifested reactionary violence, such as the horrible attack on October 7th by Hamas.
And while there may be truth to both of those views, obviously it's more complicated.
One thing to point out of front, as I've touched upon earlier in this episode, is that systems produce outcomes that no one intends. And I think much can be said about conclusions people draw about this conflict, such as in regard to the behavior of Israel terms like genocide, apartheid, or even occupation.
On one level, genocide, apartheid- these words have very distinct definitions. Historically, there's been very clear intent. From African apartheid to the Nazi Holocaust genocide, there is an obviousness, there's a deliberateness.
The problem with the Israeli context is that the condition of occupation along with the outcome of genocide or the characteristics of apartheid appear consequential to a structural pattern that makes those issues inexplicit.
Not in the ongoing outcome as you observe and actually look at what's happening, but in the defense, you see, the outcome always gives everything away regardless of what people say.
As an aside, going back to the broad context of capitalism, this is why we know today, if you're objectively paying attention, that capitalism is a self-destructing cancer system that will continue to lead to human harm and environmental decline because we can model it better, but even more so, we can empirically see over long periods of time what the system is actually doing, statistically.
It reveals itself by its actual actions, by its consequences.
And it doesn't matter what people or economists say, the system is supposed to do, or how their incentives, obviously are different and whatnot and whatnot. We can see what happens, as Stafford Beer would say, “a system is defined by what it actually does.” That's more profound of a statement than most people realize.
And I think the same observation has to be put forward when looking at the completely asymmetrical power imbalance between Israel and Palestine and the publicly accepted illegal occupation and illegal settlements, which are really not in dispute in the textbook context, recognized by the United Nations and so on.
And yet admission to these very features does not exist on the part of the Israeli government. Are they simply playing a semantic game? Are they conning everyone? Or is the complexity as such that the people in power actually believe that what they're doing is reasonable because of the model they use to look at the scenario?
Regardless of the fact that there's wide consensus that the outcome of all of these dynamics does hint at genocide, apartheid, occupation, war crimes, and so on.
Put more crudely, it doesn't matter what the Israeli government says in this context, it's what's happening.
Once again, I think we often forget that human intent can be very different from the outcomes created, bringing us back to the critical importance of understanding the structures behind things.
Now, that aside, the first thing to do here to make a list of what we feel are the dominant causal components or parts. And I'm going to present five broad categories.
The first is religion. The second is economics. The third is racism. The fourth is politics. And the fifth is justice.
As far as religion, we have a whole mess to deal with, needless to say. I would expand or bifurcate religion into group identity and belief system. We can reference religious texts where self-identified groups feel that God has defined them, along with associating say, a plot of land to them, as we see in the Old Testament. We can expand that to recognize the discord of the group dynamic itself, manifesting elitism or lack of inclusion, which can then carry over into belief structures about what God respects and intends, such as the narrative related to end times and revelations that invoke Israel and Jews and so on.
At the same time, we can think about the dynamics of the interpretation of Islam, which some would say is a religion of peace, while of course we can find very dark statements in sacred texts that clearly indicate otherwise in terms of intolerance. And all this, of course, creates levels of potential animosity, as one self-identified group may perceive the other self-identified group as a threat, or not respecting their existence, and so on and so on, as a mixture of group identity and religious belief system.
Likewise, we could also look at the development of Israel with the manifestation of Zionism, which scholars rightfully see as a kind of perversion of Judaism, even though there's much debate, the argument basically being that Zionism combines territorialism with religious doctrine, reinforcing a claim to the land, which suggests land expansion, territorialism, the right to this or that, and so on.
Now given such things, which go on and on, there's enormous richness to this religious foundation, can we qualify it simplistically and say that this could be the cause of everything?
Well, one thing that throws a wrench into that, which is worth observing, is that prior to the establishment of Israel in the 20th century, Muslims, Jews, and Christians got along a whole lot better in that region, which is well documented.
Not a utopia, mind you. But you can go back and see photos of camaraderie, Muslims babysitting the children of Christians, or Jews, and so on. There was an element of working together despite their differences, a relatively fair degree of peaceful coexistence, with the real agitation striking the region upon the establishment of Israel, and then the Zionist Foundation, and then all the other overtones related to religion, justifying territorial dominance, and so on and so on.
And if that's true, and that for the past 75 years there's been a deep inflammation since the establishment of Israel, then we have to look deeper in our causality, because with all the problems of traditional Judaism or traditional Islam and so forth, in terms of compatibility, it doesn't appear to be the core problem because the pattern existed prior with decent coexistence, at least in that relatively long, modern era period before the establishment of Israel.
Which brings us to economics. So what defines an economic context?
Economics is simply about how people survive, right? And this includes land, and the resources associated with that land. It also includes the mechanisms that lead a person or a society to actually survive.
But in the economic context, you can't help but arrive at the term ‘colonization’ in the behavior of Israel, because the pattern is extremely consistent throughout human history. For example, the British settlers did not come over to the Americas for tourism. They settled so they could dominate the resources and, of course, committed mass murder against the Native Americans, so they could create a new economic survival foundation for themselves in the new land.
Hence, when you observe the historical expansion of the region by Israel, we already have a clear model of the pattern of colonization, hence the legion of encroaching illegal settlements, particularly in the West Bank. Once again, the intent or stated reasoning doesn't apply as much as watching the actual and empirical unfolding. It is textbook colonial expansion deviating from the original agreement of the establishment of the state of Israel in the mid-20th century.
In fact, another cliche characteristic of all of this, as we've seen through history, is the use of wars to further encroachment. So a war commences between Israel and Palestine. Israel takes more land and takes more land. The intentions of which become obvious because Gaza literally can't fight back.
There's no army or air force or tanks or navy or anything. In fact, I hate to say it, but what we're seeing right now seems to fit that pattern very, very well because as some might have read recently, the Israeli ministry or whatever they term themselves did propose literally moving everyone out of Gaza into Egypt to basically eliminate the Gaza people, not necessarily through murder, but by forced displacement.
That's exactly what they said.
Israel has also talked about infrastructure that they might like that would need to go through Palestine and Gaza to benefit the people of Israel. Hence, once again, this economic component.
And then we have the military industrial complex.
Israel is backed by the United States quite clearly, and under the hood of all of that That is a legion of lobbyists in Washington that represent major weapons manufacturers that make billions of dollars a year off of killing people around the world.
There is little doubt that US-driven lobbying pressure want to keep conflicts going and they of course justify it. They don't say they just want to go out there and make money by killing people. No, of course, it's mentally rationalized, like people that see dollar signs mentally rationalize all sorts of horrible actions.
In fact, to emphasize that of all the pathology under the surface in the 20th century, because there have been so many wars clearly for economic gain on some level that the observation should not be that frowned upon as cynical.
Going around taking resources while buttressing the economy of the warring nations corporations as "Smedley Butler" - famed general "Smedley Butler" would talk about - in his famous essay or booklet "War is a Racket" where he literally refers to himself as a “gangster for capitalism”, taking over countries, taking over resources, installing US corporations, or protecting US corporations, and so on and so on.
And within all that, of course, is the massive trillion-dollar industry of weapon sales that is a large driver of profitability and GDP for US multinational corporations. The shadow incentive as I've always called it.
So there's that - powerful, multifaceted, complex economic forces at work as well.
Now the third on my list is perhaps even more complicated sociologically, racism, racism and bigotry.
Once again, while overt bigotry is fairly easy to spot, you don't actually need to be publicly racist or a KKK member or whatnot to contribute to ends that harm a group systemically in basically the same outcome of oppression, discrimination, and so on.
For example, American segregation obviously pretended it wasn't racist, remember? “Separate but equal,” they said, as if that was even possible. Even if the politicians that came up with the slogan weren't fundamentally racist which I'm sure some of them were, the systemic discrimination would prove the point in time, which is very similar once again to the kind of pseudo-apartheid phenomenon of Israel over Palestine.
Furthermore, because religion is a group distinction, along with the fabrication of racial distinctions that unfortunately people believe about themselves, xenophobia, races and bigotry and other things exist as an undercurrent.
Most people probably wouldn't even admit that they have a knee jerk bias against somebody of a seemingly different categorical nature, meaning race or ethnicity and whatnot. But I really believe, for example, that the reason there has been so much outcry in the affluent Western world when Russia invaded Ukraine was the fact that Western societies saw themselves more so in Ukraine than they do in the people of Palestine. The poor, brown people of Palestine just seem of lower value to the Western world identity in contrast to the relatively affluent white people of Ukraine.
So it's deeply entrenched, which speaks to a fundamental classist phenomenon that the economic value of poor people is just that - low, hence low human value. Perhaps if some country was utilizing Palestine to produce a very high demand needed global good, there would be larger grounds to intervene to help them. Remember, through the lens of market capitalism price is everything. Price is the value system. That is what is deeply implied with the system. If you have no economic value by whatever measure, you have no human value. In the same way, in fact, that we have organizations in the United States that try to keep poverty programs and halfway houses and homeless shelters out of their neighborhood because they associate those people, those poor people, with crime.
It's a multi-generational pattern of association. If you see a bunch of dark-skinned people that are committing crime in your neighborhood, not because they are dark-skinned, but because they are poor and desperate, you start to associate the image of those people with offensive behavior. And that stereotyping, of course, can be applied to the “terrorist” distinction and the association of Arabs and so on and so on.
And you see that dehumanizing behavior in the context of Israel versus Palestine as well.
And moving on, the fourth on my list was politics. Why does the United States favor Israel so much? Giving it all this money every year, fortifying its security? Is it because they feel bad for the Jewish people and want to see them flourish? Because they want to avoid another Holocaust or something like that? Obviously no, that's not the case whatsoever. It's just a front because the United States sees Israel as its own geostrategic satellite, basically another state of the United States, serving as kind of a military base, if need be. It allows for a position of influence and control on an economic level and the political level, hence the term geostrategic.
In other words, this is one more attribute and extension of the American Empire and the global system of power it has created.
And finally, to wrap this up, you have the issue of justice or retribution. The fifth in my list, which is more of a psychological-sociological pattern. The tit for tat. The “they did this to us.” “So we're going to do this to them,” or “we expect them to do this to us” because “we did this to them,” and so on the feedback loop goes.
For example, as I think we've all heard at some point, when referencing the October 7th terrorist attack in Israel, people were invoking the Holocaust, saying things like “this is the greatest crime against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” I'm sorry, but that is a completely and utterly manipulative invocation.
That is preposterous. In the same way as describing it as Israel's 9/11, which of course implies and invokes this idea of a massive retributive response. If you think that way, then suddenly the wiping out of now 10,000 Palestinians and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza where the vast majority are homeless and will take years and years to rebuild, assuming they'll even be allowed to - that now becomes justified with this justice sensibility.
And a sub issue of that has to do with the aesthetic. For example, if a sniper shoots somebody dead execution style, we say that's awful, etc. But if somebody is rather kidnapped and tortured in all sorts of horrible ways - then killed, the barbarism takes on a life of its own. September 11th was a classic example of this. It was such a theatrical event, a Hollywood-level spectacle of flying airplanes into buildings and then everything collapsing.
As opposed to, say, if somebody poisoned the water supply in New York City, killing a couple thousand people, do you think the same kind of military reaction would have been supported in the same way as it was with the visceral-ness? I don't think so. It's an emotional response, not a rational one. In the Israeli case, the media did grab onto the horrors that commenced, and there was proven exaggeration regarding babies being beheaded and all of this stuff.
And you can't help but feel that the public relations of Israel really wanted to breed this; really wanted to show the horror of this both rightfully, because it was horrible, but also on the level of finding a way to use this excuse of barbarism to justify anything they wanted to do. And that stuff works. Do I differentiate between barbarism and a sniper shot? Well, yes, obviously. But in the framework of history, you look back on it and statistically it doesn't have as much relevance. It's simply human suffering and death.
But at the time, we are so emotionally tied to these events, as humans, we feel the suffering. We don't feel the visceral-ness of the structural death that's happening constantly, and I've talked about this in my book as well, you know, one of the biggest causes of death on the planet earth is really poverty, but no one's going after poverty like they go after a pocket of terrorists that mutilate children or something.
And yet in the long run we're dealing with matters of degree, and while we want to fight barbarism and all of that to whatever degree, there is a neurosis there. There is an aesthetic there, and that aesthetic can be manipulated and turned into propaganda once again.
And I know people know this stuff, and I'm probably preaching to the choir, but it's important to sort of lay this stuff out every now and again because it's easy to get lost. And again, in such an emotionally polarized situation with Israel and Palestine, the truth is in objectiveness, needless to say.
There is no justification for what's happening in Gaza - zero. It doesn't even matter what happened in Israel from the standpoint of this incredible disproportionate and utterly inhumane, genocidal response, do they actually think they're going to destroy every single person that has animosity against the state of Israel, that's willing to act with violence against it, under the umbrella of Hamas, especially after the extreme agony they're causing now?
There's no peace in the future of their behavior unless; unless they have a different agenda. And that agenda is not to weed out Hamas, kill the terrorists, and restore Palestine with some new allowed government. No. This is a war of attrition to ruin the Gaza people's capacity to live there in total, with the hopeful ideal in their mind, the Israeli government, to move them all out or have them suffer to a point where the land can finally be taken all the way over so Israel can make it all the way to the ocean and Gaza doesn't exist anymore.
Forget what everybody says and just look at the pattern. Look at the pattern in the West Bank. Look at what's happened for 75 years. Look at what's been stated behind the scenes by the extremity of the government of Netanyahu and so on. This is simply about wiping Gaza off the map.
My name is Peter Joseph. This is Revolution Now! I appreciate everybody listening. If anyone's interested in getting tickets to the screening of the new film in Los Angeles, the premiere on March 15th, they are not available yet. But if you go to the trailer, which I will link in the bio of this podcast, there is a sign up. In fact, I'll put the sign up there as well, where you can register to be notified when tickets do go on sale. And obviously anyone's been supporting me through donation or Patreon, are annotated and will be contacted first and I'll probably give great discounts. It's not going to even be a remotely expensive ticket.
And there will be a talk after the screening, which I will detail in a lecture form, this new program. So lots of developments. This has been a pretty long podcast today. I usually only do half an hour, but because I'm so backed up and I haven't done it a while, I wanted to put forward a little bit more, but I'll be back in two weeks for a normal 30-minute episode. All right, everybody. You take care out there. Bye-bye.