Zeitgeist - Moving Forward | World Society | Documentary | Socioeconomics

deadly riots over the government's plan to avoid defaulting on its loans is that the unemployment keeps rising and it has to keep driving just because this is all borrowed money debt is only by banks in other countries I can't filter cigarette that delivers The Taste malt liquor is sponsor I first learned it from my grandmother now my grandmother was a wonderful person she taught me how to play the game Monopoly she understood that the name of the game is to acquire she would accumulate everything she could and eventually she became the master of the board and then she would always say the same thing to me she'd look at me and she'd say one day you'll learn to play the game one summer I played Monopoly almost every day all day long and that summer I learned to play the game I came to understand the only way to win is to make a total commitment to acquisition I came to understand that money and possessions that's the way that you keep score and by the end of that summer I was more ruthless than my grandmother I was ready to bend the rules if I had to to win that game and I sat down with her to play that Fall I took everything she had I watched her give her last dollar and quit in utter defeat and then she had one more thing to teach me then she said [Music] now it all goes back in the box all those houses and hotels all the railroads and utility companies all that property and all that wonderful money now it all goes back in the box none of it was really yours you got all heated up about it for a while but it was around a long time before you sat down at the board and it will be here after you're gone players come and players go houses and cars titles and clothes even your body because the fact is that everything I clutch and consume and hoard is going to go back in the box and I'm going to lose it all you have to ask yourself when you finally get the ultimate promotion when you've made the ultimate purchase when you buy the ultimate home when you have stored up Financial Security and climbed the ladder of success to the highest rung you can possibly climb it and the throwers off and it will wear off then what how far do you have to walk down that road before you see where it leads [Music] surely you understand it'll never be enough [Music] so you have to ask yourself the question what matters foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] laughs [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] growing up in New York City I refused the pledge allegiance to the flag of course I was sent to the principal's office and he asked me why don't you want to pledge allegiance everybody does I said everybody wants to live here it was flag but that doesn't make itself I explained that America owed everything it has to other cultures and other nations and then I would rather pledge allegiance to the Earth and everyone on it needless to say it wasn't long before I left school entirely and I set up a lab in my bedroom there I began to learn about science and nature I realized then that the universe is governed by laws and that the human being along with Society itself was not exempt from these laws then came the crash of 1929 which began what we now call the Great Depression I found it difficult to understand why Millions were out of work homeless starving while all the factories were sitting there the resources were unchanged it was then that I realized that the rules of the economic game were inherently invalid shortly after came World War II were various Nations took turns systematically destroying each other I later calculated that all the destruction and wasted resources spent on that war could have easily provided for every human need on the planet since that time I have watched Humanity set the stage for its own Extinction I have watched as a precious finite resources of habitually wasted and destroyed in the name of prophet and free markets I have watched the social values of society be reduced into a base artificiality of materialism and Mindless consumption and I have watched as the monetary Powers control the political structure of supposedly free societies I'm 94 years old now and I'm afraid my disposition is the same as it was 75 years ago this shit's got to go [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] IST and somewhere along the way hammered into your head is the inevitable nature versus nurture and that's at least up there with Coke versus Pepsi or Greeks versus Trojans so nature versus nurture this by now utterly oversimplifying view of where influences are influences on how a cell deals with an energy crisis up to what makes us who we are and the most individualistic levels of Personality um and what you've got is this complete false dichotomy built around nature as deterministic at the very bottom of all the causality of life as DNA and the code of codes and the Holy Grail and everything's driven by it and at the other end a much more social science perspective which is we are social organisms and biology is for slime molds humans are free of biology and obviously both views are nonsense what you see instead is it is virtually impossible to understand how biology Works outside the context of environment foreign yet widespread and potentially dangerous Notions is oh that behavior is genetic now what does that mean it means all sorts of subtle stuff if you sort of know Modern Biology but for most people out there what it winds up meaning is ah a deterministic view of Life One rooted in biology and genetics genes equal things that can't be changed genes equal things that are inevitable and that you might as well not waste resources trying to fix might as well not put societal energies into try to improve because it's inevitable it's unchangeable and that is sheer nonsense [Music] it is widely thought that conditions like ADHD are genetically programmed conditions like schizophrenia are genetically programmed the tooth is the opposite nothing is genetically programmed they're very rare diseases I mean a small handful extremely sparsely represented in the population that are truly genetically determined most complex conditions might have a predisposition that a genetic component but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination the whole search for the source of diseases in the genome I was doomed to failure before anybody even thought of it because most diseases are not genetically predetermined heart disease cancer Strokes rheumatoid conditions autoimmune conditions in general mental health conditions addictions these are none of them genetically determined breast cancer for example out of 100 women with breast cancer only seven will carry the breast cancer genes 93 do not and out of 100 women who do have the genes not all don't get cancer [Music] not just things that make us behave in a particular way regardless of our environment genes give us different ways of responding to our environment and in fact it looks as if some of the Early Childhood influences of the kind of child rearing affects gene expression actually turning on and off different genes to put you on a different development developmental track which may suit the kind of world you've got to deal with so for example a study done in Montreal with suicide victims looked at autopsies of the brains of these people and it turned out that if a suicide victim these are usually young adults had been abused as children the abuse actually caused the genetic change in the brain that was absent in the brains of people who had not been abused that's an epigenetic effect Epi means on top of so that so that the epigenetic influence is what happens and environmentally to either activate or deactivate certain genes in New Zealand there's a study that was done in a town called Dunedin in which uh a few thousand individuals were studied from birth up to their into their 20s what they found was that they could identify a genetic mutation an abnormal Gene which did have some relation to the predisposition to commit violence but only if the individual had also been subjected to severe child abuse in other words a child with this abnormal Gene would be no more likely to be violent than anybody else and in fact they actually had a lower rate of violence than people with normal genes as long as they weren't abused as children great additional example of the ways in which genes are not be all end-all fancy technique where you can take a specific Gene out of a mouse that Mouse and this descendants will not have that Gene you have knocked out that Gene so there's this one gene that codes for a protein that has something to do with learning and memory and this fabulous demonstration knock out that Gene and you have a mouse that doesn't learn as well ooh a genetic basis for intelligence what was much less appreciated in that Landmark study that got picked up by the media left and right is take those genetically impaired mice and raise them in a much more enriched stimulating environment than your normal mice in a lab cage and they completely overcame that deficit so when one says in the Contemporary sense that oh this behavior is genetic to the extent that that's even a valid sort of phrase to use what you're saying is there is a genetic contribution to how this organism responds to environment genes May influence the Readiness with which an organism will deal with a certain environmental challenge you know that's not the version most people have in their minds and not to be too soapboxing but run with the old sort of version of its genetic and it's not that far from a history of eugenics and things of that sort to widespread misconception and some potentially fairly dangerous one one reason that the sort of biological explanation for violence one reason that hypothesis is potentially dangerous it's not just misleading it can really do harm is because if you believe that you could very easily say well there's nothing we can do to change the predisposition people have to becoming violent all we can do if somebody becomes violent is punish them you know lock them up or execute them but we don't need to worry about changing the social environment or the social preconditions that may lead people to become violent because that's irrelevant the genetic argument allows us the luxury of ignoring past and present historical and social factors and in the words of a Louis Manas you wrote In The New Yorker very astudely said it's on the genes an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous Nation on Earth it can't be the system there must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere which is a good way of putting it so the genetic argument is simply a cop-out which allows us to ignore the social and the economic and political factors that in fact underlie many Troublesome behaviors [Music] addictions are usually considered to be a drug related issue but looking at more broadly I Define addiction as any Behavior that is associated with craving with temporary relief and with long-term negative consequences along with an impairment of control over it so that the person wishes to give her give it up or promises to do so but can't follow through and when you understand that then you can see that there are many more addictions than simply those related to drugs there's workaholism there's addition to shopping to the internet to video games there's the addiction to power people that have power but they want more and more and more nothing is ever enough for them acquisition corporations that must own more and more the addiction to oil or at least to the wealth and to the products made accessible To Us by oil look at the negative consequences on the environment uh we're destroying the very Earth that we inhabit for the sake of that addiction now these addictions are far more devastating in their social consequences than the cocaine or heroin habits of my down to any side patients yet they're rewarded and considered to be respectable the Tobacco Company executive that shows a higher profit will get a much bigger reward he doesn't face any negative consequences legally or otherwise in fact he's a respected member of the board of several other corporations but tobacco smoke related diseases kill five and a half million people around the world every year in the United States they killed 400 000 people a year and these people are addicted to what to profit to such a degree are they addicted that they're actually in denial about the impact of their activities which is typical for addicts as denial and that's irrespectable one it's respectable to be addicted to profit no matter what the cost so what is acceptable and what is respectable is a highly arbitrary phenomenon in our society and it seems like the greater the harm the more respectable the addiction [Music] General myth that drugs in themselves are addictive effective war and drugs is predicated on the idea that if you interdict the sources of drugs you can deal with a dictionary now um if you understand Addiction in a brighter sense we see that nothing in itself is addictive no substance no drug is it by itself addictive and no behaviors by itself addictive many people can go shopping without becoming shopaholics not everybody comes to food addict not everyone who drinks a glass of wine becomes an alcoholic so the real issue is what makes people susceptible because it's the combination of a susceptible individual and the potentially addictive substance or behavior that actually then makes for the for full flowering of addiction in short it's not the drug that's addictive it's the question of the susceptibility individual to being addicted to particular substance or behavior if you wish to understand what that makes us some people susceptible we actually have to look at their life experience the old idea although it's old but it's still broadly held that addictions are due to some genetic cause it's simply scientifically untenable what the case is actually is that certain life experiences make people susceptible life experiences that not only shape the person's personality and and psychological needs but also their very brains in certain ways and that process begins in utero [Music] it's been shown for example that if you stressed mothers during pregnancy their children are more likely have traits that be disposed them to addictions and that's because development is shaped by the psychological and social environment so the biology of human beings is very much affected by and programmed by their life experiences beginning In Utero environment does not begin at Birth environment begins as soon as you have an environment as soon as you repeat us you are subject to whatever information is coming through mom's circulations hormones levels of nutrients great Landmark example of this something called The Dutch hunger winter 1944 Nazis occupying Holland for a bunch of reasons they decide to take all the food and divert it to Germany for three months everybody there is starving tens of thousands of people starve to death what the Dutch hunger winter effect is if you were a second or third trimester fetus during the starvation your body learned something very unique during that time as it turns out second third trimester something that your body is going about trying to learn about the environment is well how menacing of a place is it out there how plentiful how how much nutrients am I getting by way of Mom's circulation be a fetus who is starving during that time and your body programs Forever After to be really really really stingy with your sugar and fat and and what you do is you store every bit of it be a Dutch hunger winter fetus at half a century later everything else being equal you are more likely to have high blood pressure obesity or metabolic syndrome that is environment coming in a very unexpected place you can stress animals in the laboratory when they're pregnant and their offspring will be more likely to use cocaine and alcohol as adults you can stress the human mothers for example in a British study women who are abused in pregnancy will have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their placenta at Birth and their children are more likely of conditions that predisposal to addictions by age seven or eight so you need to stress are already prepares they're gone for all kinds of mental health issues Israeli study done prior on children born to mothers who were pregnant prior to the onset of the 1967 war these women of course are very stressed and their offspring have a higher incidence of schizophrenia than the average Accord so there's plenty of evidence now that prenatal effects have a huge impact on the developing human being the point about human development and specifically specifically in brain development is that it occurs mostly under the impact of the environment and mostly after birth now if you compare us to a horse which can run on the first day of life we see that we are very undeveloped we can't develop we can't uh Muster that much neurological coordination balance muscle strength visual Acuity until a year and a half two years and that's because the brain development that in the horse happens in the safety of the womb in a human being has to happen after birth and that has to do with simple evolutionary logic as the head gets larger which is what makes us into human beings the burgeoning of the forebrain is what creates the human species actually at the same time I walk on two legs so our pelvis Narrows to come at that so now we have a narrower pelvis a larger head Bingo we have to be born prematurely and that means that the brain development that in other animals occurs in euro in US occurs after birth and much of that under the impact of the environment and the concept of neural Darwinism simply means that the circuits that get the appropriate input from the environment will develop optimally and the ones that don't will either not develop optimally or perhaps not at all if you take a child with perfectly good eyes at Birth you put in the dark room for five years he'll be blind thereafter for the rest of his life because the circuits of vision require light waves for their development and without that even the rudimentary circuits present and active at Birth will atrophy and die and humans will not develop there's a significant way in which early experiences shape adult Behavior and even and especially early experiences for which there's no recall memory it turns out that there are two kinds of memory there is explicit memory which is recall this is when you can call back fact details episodes circumstances but the structure in the brain which is called the hippocampus which encodes vehicle memory it doesn't even begin to develop fully until a year and a half and it's not fully developed or much later which is why hardly anybody has any vehicle memory prior to 18 months but there's another kind of memory which is called the implicit memory which is in fact an emotional memory where the emotional impact and the interpretation that the child makes of those emotional experiences is ingrained in the brain in the form of nerve circuits ready to fire without specific recall so give you a clear example people who are adopted have a lifelong sense of rejection very often they can't recall the adoption they can't recall the separation of the earth mother but there's nothing there to recall with but the emotional memory of separation and rejection is deeply embedded in their brains hence they're much more likely to experience a sense of rejection and a great emotional upset when they perceive themselves as being rejected than other people that's not unique to people who are adopted but it's particularly strong in them because of this function of implicit memory people who are addicted given that they according to all the research literature certainly in my experience the hardcore addicts are virtually were all significantly abuse these children or suffered severe emotional loss their emotional or implicit memories are those of a world that's not safe and not not helpful caregivers or not to be trusted and relationships that are not safe enough to open up to vulnerably and has their responses tend to be to keep them stuff separate from really intimate relationships not to trust caregivers doctors and other people who are trying to help them and generally see the world as an unsafe place and that's strictly a function of implicit memory which sometimes has to do with incidents they don't even recall [Music] infants were born premature are often in incubators and in various types of gadgetry and machinery for weeks and perhaps months it's not known that if these children are touched and stroked on the back for just 10 minutes a day that promotes their brain development so human touch is essential for development and in fact infants were never picked up will actually die that's how much of a fundamental need being held is to human beings in our society there's an unfortunate tendency to tell parents not to pick up their kids not to hold them not to pick up babies who are crying for fear of spoiling them or to encourage them to sleep through the night you don't pick them up which which is just the opposite of what the child needs and these children might go back to sleep because they give up and everything's just shut down in the way of defending against the vulnerability of being abandoned really by their parents but their implicit memories will be that of a world that doesn't give a damn a lot of these differences are structured very early in life in a way the if you like the parental experience of adversity how tough life is or how easy it is is passed on to children whether through maternal depression or parents being bad tempered with their kids because they've had a hard day or just being too tired at the end of the day and these have very powerful effects programming children's development which we know a lot about now but that's early sensitivity isn't just an evolutionary mistake it exists again in many different species even seedlings as an early adaptive process to the kind of environment they're growing up in but for humans the adaptation is to the quality of social relations and so early life how nurturing or how much conflict how much attention you get is a taster of the kind of world you may be growing up in are you growing up in a world where you have to fight for what you can get watch your back fend for yourself learn not to trust others why are you growing up in a society where you depend on reciprocity mutuality cooperation where empathy is important where your security depends on good relations with other people and that needs a very different emotional and cognitive development and that's what the early sensitivity is about and parenting is almost quite unconsciously a system for passing on that experience to Children of the kind of world they're in the Great British child psychiatrist DW unicott said that fundamentally two things can go wrong in childhood one is when things happen that shouldn't happen and then things that should happen but don't in the first category is the traumatic and abusive and abandonment experiences of my downtown Eastside patients and of many addicts that's what shouldn't happen but did but then there is the non-stressed attuned non-distracted attention of the parent that every child needs that very often children don't get they're not abused they're not neglected and and they're not traumatized but what should happen the presence of the emotionally available nurturing brand to which it is not available to them because of the stresses in our society and the parenting environment and the psychologists Alan Shore calls that proximal abandonment when the present the parent is physically present but emotionally absent I have spent uh oh roughly the last 40 years of my life working with the most violent people our society produces murderers rapists and so on in an attempt to understand what causes this violence I discovered that the most violent of the criminals in our prisons had themselves been victims of a degree of child abuse that was beyond the scale of what I ever thought of applying the term child abuse to I had no idea of the depth of the depravity with which children in our society are all too often treated the most violent people I saw were themselves the survivors of their own attempted murder often at the hands of their parents or other people in their social impairment or were the survivors of family members have been killed their closest family members by other people the Buddha argued that everything depends on everything else he says that one contains the many and the many contains the one that you can't understand anything in isolation from its environment the leaf contains the sun the sky and the Earth obviously uh this has not been shown to be true of course all around and specifically when it comes to human development the modern scientific term for it is the biopsychosocial nature of human development which says that the biology of human beings depends very much on their interaction with the social and psychological environment and specifically the psychiatrist and researcher Daniel Siegel at the University of California Los Angeles UCLA has coined the phrase interpersonal neurobiology which means to say that the way that our nervous system functions depends very much on our personal relationships in the first place with the parenting caregivers and in the second place with other important attachment figures in our lives and in the third place with our entire culture so that you can't separate the neurological functioning of a human being from the environment in which he or she grew up in and continues to exist in and this is true throughout the life cycle it's particularly true when you're dependent and helpless and your brain is developing but it's too even in adults and even at the end of life [Music] human beings have lived in almost every kind of society from the most egalitarian hunting and Gathering societies seem to have been very egalitarian for instance based on food sharing gift exchange small bands of people living predominantly off of foraging but a little bit of hunting predominantly among people you have at the least known your entire life if not surrounded by third cousins or closer in a world in which there is a great deal of fluidity between different groups and World in which there is not a whole lot in terms of material culture this is how humans have spent most of their hominid history and no surprise that makes for a very different world one of the things you get as a result of that is far less violence organized group violence is not something that occurred at that time it seems quite clear so where did we go wrong violence is not uh Universal it's not symmetrically distributed throughout the human race there is a huge variation in the amount of violence and differences there are some societies that have virtually no violence there are others that destroy themselves some of the anabaptist religious groups that are complete and strict pacifists like the Amish the Mennonites the Hutterites among some of these groups the Hutterites there are no recorded cases of homicide during our major Wars like World War II where people were being drafted they would refuse to serve in the military they would go to prison rather than serve in the military in the kobutsu in Israel the level upon us is so low that the criminal courts there will often send violent offenders people have committed crimes to live on the cubism in order to learn how to live a non-violent life because that's the way people live there so we are amply shaped by Society our Societies in the broader sense including our theological or metaphysical or linguistic influences Etc our societies helped shape us as to whether or not we think life is basically about sin or about beauty whether the afterlife will carry a price for how we live our lives or if it's irrelevant in a broad sort of way different large societies could be termed as individualistic or collectivist and you get very different people in different mindsets and I suspect different brains coming along with that we in America are in one of the most individualistic of societies and capitalism being a system that allows you to go higher and higher up a a potential pyramid and the deal is it comes with fewer and fewer safety nets by definition the more stratified a society is the fewer people you have as peers the fewer people with whom you have symmetrical reciprocal relationships and instead all you have are differing spots and endless hierarchies and a world in which you have few reciprocal Partners as a world with a lot less altruism foreign possible juncture which is to try to make sense in perspective science as to what the nature is of human nature you know on a certain level the nature of our nature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature we come up with more social variability than any species out there more systems of belief of styles of family structures of ways of raising children the capacity for variety that we have is extraordinary in a society which is predicated on competition and really very often the ruthless exploitation of one human being by another the profiteering of other people's problems and very often the creation of problems for the purpose of profiteering the ruling ideology will very often justify that behavior by appeals to some fundamental and unalterable Human Nature so the myth in our society is that people are competitive by nature and that they're individualistic and that they're selfish the real uh reality is quite the opposite we have certain human needs the only way that you can talk about human nature concretely is by recognizing that there's certain human needs we have a human need for companionship and for close contact to be loved to be attached to to be accepted to be seen to be received for who we are if those needs are met we develop and two people who are compassionate and cooperative and and to have empathy for other people so the opposite that we often see in our society is in fact the Distortion of human nature precisely because so few people have their needs met so yes you can talk about human nature but only in the sense of basic human needs that are instinctively evoked or I should say certain human needs that lead to certain traits if they are met in a different set of traits if they're denied so when we recognize the fact that the human organism which has a great deal of adaptive flexibility allowing us to survive in many different conditions is also rigidly programmed for certain and environmental requirements or human needs a social imperative begins to emerge just as our bodies require physical nutrients the human brain demands positive forms of environmental stimulus at all stages of development while also needing to be protected from other negative forms of stimulus and if things that should happen do not or things that shouldn't happen due it is now apparent that the door can be opened for not only a Cascade of mental and physical diseases but many detrimental human behaviors as well so as we turn our perspective now outward and take account for the State of Affairs today we must ask the question is the condition we have created in the modern world actually supporting our health is the Bedrock of our socioeconomic system acting as a positive force for human and Social Development and progress or is the foundational gravitation of our society actually going against the core evolutionary requirements needed to create and maintain our personal and social well-being thank you so one might ask where did this all begin what we have today really a world in a state of accumulative collapse you get it started with John Locke and John Locke introduces property and has Street Provisions for just private right and property and the three provisos are that there must be enough left over for others and that she must not let it spoil and that you most of all must mix your labor with it seems Justified she makes your labor with the world then you're entitled to the product and as long as there's enough left over for others and as long as it doesn't spoil you don't allow anything to go to waste that's okay well he spends a long time of his famous Treatise of government and it's since been the canonical text for economic and political and legal understanding is still at the classic Texas study well what he did is it after he gives the provisos and you're almost thinking at the time whether you're for private property or not he's given a very a very good and plausible and Powerful defense of private property here well he drops them he drops them like that right in one sentence he says well once the introduction of money came in by men's tacit consent then it became and he doesn't say all the provisos are canceled erased but that's what happens so now we have not product in your property earned by your own labor oh no money buys labor now there's no longer a consideration of whether there's enough left over for others there's no longer a consideration of whether it spoils because he says well money's like silver and gold and gold can't spoil therefore monies can't be responsible for Waste which is ridiculous we're not talking about money and silver we're talking about what its effects are it's one non-sequitur after another just the most uh startling logical Ledger domain that he gets away with here but it fits the interests of capital owners then Adam Smith comes along and what he adds is the religion to this lock started with God made it all this way this is God's right and now we get also with Smith coming along he says it's not only God's I mean he's not saying this but this is what's happening philosophically being principle he's saying it's not only a question of private property that's all now presupposed is given and that there's money investors that buy labor given that there's no limit to how much they can buy of other men's labor how much they can accumulate how much inequality that's all given them and so he comes along and what his big idea is and again it's just introduced them in parenthesis on on Passau you know when people put out the goods for sale and others you know the supply and other people buy them with the demand and so forth how do you how do we have Supply equaling demand or demand equaling Supply how can they come into equilibrium and that is one of the central Notions of Economics is how do they come into equilibrium and he says it's the Invisible Hand of the market that brings him into equilibrium so now we have God is actually imminent he just didn't give the rights to property and how uh you know all it's wherewithal and uh its natural rights of doing all the lock said now we have the system itself as God in fact Smith says when he talks and you'll never find this quote again I have to read the whole of the inquiry into The Wealth of Nations he says the scantiness of subsistence sets limits to the reproduction of the poor and that nature can deal with this in no other way than elimination of their children so he anticipated evolutionary theory in the worst sense I applied this as well before Darwin and so he he called them the race of laborers so you can see there was inherent racism built in here there was an inherent acceptance life blindness to kill in innumerable children and he thought well that's the Invisible Hand making Supply meet demanded the man-made Supply so see what how wise God is so you can see a lot of the really very this life destructive Eco genocidal things that are going on now have in a way a thought Gene back in Smith too when we reflect on the original concept of the so-called free market capitalist system as initiated by early economic philosophers such as Adam Smith we see that the original intent of a market was based around real tangible life-supporting goods for trade Adam Smith Never fathomed that the most profitable economic sector on the planet would eventually be in the arena of financial trading or so-called investment or money itself is simply gained by the movement of other money in an arbitrary game which holds zero productive Merit to society yet regardless of Smith's intent the door for such seemingly anomalous advents was left wide open by one fundamental tenet of this Theory money is treated as a commodity in and of itself today in every economy of the world regardless of the social system they claim money is pursued for the sake of money and nothing else the underlying idea which was mysteriously qualified by Adam Smith with his religious Declaration of the Invisible Hand is that the narrow self-interested pursuit of this fictional commodity will somehow magically manifest human and social well-being and progress the reality is that the monetary incentive interest or what some have termed the money sequence of value has now completely decoupled from the foundational life interest which could be termed the life sequence of value what has happened is that there's a complete confusion in economic Doctrine between those two sequences they think that the money sequence of value delivers the life sequence of value that and that's why they say if more goods are sold if gdps rise and so forth therefore there'd be more well-being enhanced well-being we take the GDP to be our basically our indicator of social health well there you see the confusion is talking about money sequences the value that is all the receipts all the revenues that are derived from selling goods and they're confusing that with life reproduction so that you have built right into this thing from the beginning is a complete conflation of the money and life sequences of value so we're dealing with a kind of structured delusion that becomes more and more deadly as the money sequence decouples from producing anything at all so it's a system disorder and the system disorder seems to be fatal in society today you seldom hear anyone speak of the progress of their country or Society in terms of their physical well-being state of Happiness trust or social stability rather the measures are presented to us through economic abstractions we have the gross domestic product the Consumer Price Index the value of the stock market rates of inflation and so on but does this tell us anything of real value as to the quality of people's lives no all these measures have to do with the money sequence itself and nothing more for example the gross domestic product of a country is a measure of the value of goods and services sold this measure is claimed to correlate to the standard of living of a country's people in the United States Health Care accounted for over 17 percent of GDP in 2009 amounting to over 2.5 trillion spent hence creating a positive effect on this economic measure and based on this logic it would be even better for the U.S economy if Health Care Services increased more so perhaps to three trillion dollars or 5 trillion since that would create more growth more jobs and hence boasted by economists as a rise in their country's standard of living but wait a minute what do Health Care Services actually represent well sick and dying people that's right the more unhealthy people there are in America the better the economy now that is not an exaggeration or a cynical perspective in fact if we step back far enough you will realize that the GDP not only doesn't reflect real public or social health on any tangible level it is in fact mostly a measure of industrial inefficiency and social degradation and the more you see it rise the worse things are becoming with respect to personal social and environmental integrity you have to create problems to create profit there is no profit under the current Paradigm in Saving Lives putting balance on this planet having Justice and peace or anything else there's just no profit there is an old saying pass a law create a business whether you're creating a business for a lawyer or whatever so you know crime does create business just like destruction creates it creates business in Haiti we have now roughly two million people in incarcerated in this country and of those many of them are in prisons run by private corporations Corrections Corporation of America wackenhout who trade their stock on Wall Street based upon how many people are in jail now that's sickness but that is a reflection of what this economic Paradigm calls for so what exactly does this economic Paradigm call for what is it that keeps our economic system going consumption or more accurately cyclical consumption when we break down the foundation of classic market economics we are left with a pattern of monetary exchange that simply cannot be allowed to stop or even substantially slowed if the society as we know it is to remain operational there are three main actors on the economic stage the employee the employer and the consumer the employee sells labor to the employer for income the employer sells its Production Services and hence Goods to the consumer for income and the consumer of course is simply another role of the employer and employee spending back into the system to enable the cyclical consumption to continue in other words the global market system is based on the assumption that there will always be enough product demand in society to move enough money around at a rate which can keep the consumption process going and the faster the rate of consumption the more so-called economic growth is assumed and so the machine goes but hold on I thought an economy was meant to I don't know economize doesn't the very term have to do with preservation and efficiency and a reduction of waste so how does our system which demands consumption and the more the better efficiently preserve or economize at all it doesn't the intent of the market system is in fact the exact opposite of what a real economy is supposed to do which is efficiently and conservatively Orient the materials for production and distribution of life-supporting goods we live on a finite planet with finite resources where for example the oil we utilize took millions of years to develop where the minerals we used took billions of years to develop so having a system that deliberately promotes the acceleration of consumption for the sake of so-called economic growth is pure ecocidal insanity absence of waste that's what efficiency is absence of waste this system is more wasteful than all the other existing systems in the history of the planet every level of Life organization and life system is in a state of Crisis and Challenge and Decay or collapse no peer review journal in the last 30 years will tell you anything different that is that every life system is in Decline as well as social programs as well as our water access and try to name any means of life that isn't threatened and in danger you can there isn't there really isn't one and that's very very despairing but we haven't even figured out the causal mechanism we don't want to face the causal mechanism we just want to go on you know that's what insanity is where you keep doing the same thing over and over again though it clearly doesn't work so you're really dealing with not an economic system but I would go so far as to say an anti-economic system [Music] there's an old saying that the competitive market model seeks to create the best possible Goods at the lowest possible prices this statement is essentially the incentive concept which justifies Market competition based on the assumption that the result is the production of higher quality Goods if I was going to build myself a table from scratch I would naturally build it out of the best most durable materials possible Right with the intent for it to last as long as possible why would I want to make something poor knowing I would have to eventually do it again and expend more materials and more energy well as rational as that may seem in the physical world when it comes to the market world it is not only explicitly irrational it is not even an option it is technically impossible to produce the best of anything if a company is to maintain a Competitive Edge and hence remain affordable to the consumer literally everything created and set for sale in the global economy is immediately inferior the moment it is produced for it is a mathematical impossibility to make the most scientifically Advanced efficient and strategically sustainable products this is due to the fact that the market system requires that cost efficiency or the need to reduce expenses exist at every stage of production from the cost of Labor to the cost of materials and packaging and so on this competitive strategy of course is to make sure the public buys their goods rather than from a competing producer which is doing the exact same thing to also make their goods both competitive and affordable this immutably wasteful consequence of the system could be termed intrinsic obsolescence however this is only one part of a larger problem a fundamental governing principle of market economics one that you will not find in any textbook by the way is the following nothing produced can be allowed to maintain a lifespan longer than what can be endured in order to continue cyclical consumption in other words it is critical that stuff break down fail and expire within a certain amount of time this is termed planned obsolescence planned obsolescence is the backbone of the underlying Market strategy of every Goods producing Corporation in existence while a very few of course would admit to such a strategy outright what they do is mask it within the intrinsic obsolescence phenomenon just discussed while often ignoring or even suppressing new advents in technology which might create a more sustainable durable good so if it wasn't wasteful enough that the system inherently cannot allow the most durable and efficient Goods to be produced planned obsolescence deliberately recognizes that the longer any good is in operation the worse it is for sustaining cyclical consumption and hence the market system itself in other words product sustainability is actually inverse to economic growth and hence there is a direct reinforced incentive to make sure life spans are short of Any Given good produced and in fact the system cannot operate any other way one glance at the Sea of landfills now spreading across the world show the obsolescence reality there are now billions of cheaply made cell phones computers and other technology each full of precious difficult to mine materials such as gold Colt and copper now rotting in vast piles usually due to the mere malfunction or obsolescence of small parts which in a conservative Society could likely be fixed or updated and the life of the good extended unfortunately as efficient as that may seem in our physical reality living on a finite planet with finite resources it is explicitly inefficient with respect to the market to put it into a phrase efficiency sustainability and preservation are the enemies of our economic system likewise just as physical Goods need to be constantly produced and reproduced regardless of their environmental impact the service industry operates with an equal rationale the fact is there is no monetary benefit to resolving any problems which are currently being serviced at the end of the day the last thing the medical establishment really wants is the curing of diseases such as cancer which would eliminate countless jobs and trillions in Revenue and since we're on the subject crime and terrorism in this system are good well at least economically Ford is employing police generating high-value commodities for security not to mention the value of Prisons that are privately owned for-profit and how about war the War Industry in America is a huge driver of GDP one of the most profitable Industries producing weapons of death and destruction the favorite game of this industry is to blow things up and then go and rebuild them for profit we saw this with the windfall billion dollar contracts made from the Iraq War the bottom line is that socially negative attributes of society have become positively rewarded Ventures for industry and any interest in problem resolution or environmental sustainability and conservation is intrinsically counter to economic sustainability and this is why every time you see the GDP rise in any country you are witnessing an increase in necessity whether real or contrived and by definition a necessity is rooted in inefficiency hence increased necessity means increased inefficiency [Music] the American dream is based on rampant consumerism it is based upon the fact that mainstream media and especially commercial advertising all corporations who need this infinite growth have convinced us or brainwashed most people in America and hence the world that we have to have X number of material possessions and the possibility of gaining infinitely more material possessions in order to be happy that's just not true so how why do people continue to to buy in this way which is ultimately equal genocidal in its systemic effects cumulatively and it just is classical operant conditioning you simply put inputs of conditioning into the organism and you have outputs of desired behaviors or goals or objectives and it has all the resources of technology and they post about how they get into the minds of infants what they hear is already making them conditioned to the brand then you see well that's how people have been such fools in a way they've been taught to be fools it's a value system a disorder you know if there is any Testament to the plasticity of the human mind if there is any proof to how malleable human thought is and how easily conditioned and guided people can become based on the nature of their environmental stimulus and what it reinforces the world of commercial advertising is the proof you have to stand in awe at the level of brainwashing where these programmed robots known as consumers wander the landscape only to walk into a store and spend say four thousand dollars on a handbag that likely costs ten dollars to make in a sweatshop overseas only for the brand status it supposedly represents in the culture or perhaps the ancient communal Traditions which increase trust and cohesiveness in society which have now been hijacked by acquisitive materialistic values where now annually we exchange useless crap a few times a year and we might wonder why so many today have a compulsion to shopping in acquisition when it is clear that they have been conditioned from childhood to expect material Goods as a sign of their status with friends and family the fact is the foundation of any society are the values that support its operation and our society as it exists can only operate if our values support the conspicuous consumption it requires to continue the market system 75 years ago consumption in America and much of the first world was half of what we see today per person today's new consumer culture has been manufactured and imposed due to the very real need for higher and higher levels of consumption and this is why most corporations now spend more money on Advertising than the actual process of product creation itself they work diligently to create a false need for you to fill and it happens to work you know economists in fact not economists at all they're propagandists of money value and you'll find that all their models basically get down to token exchanges that are to the profit of one side or both sides or whatever but they're completely disconnected from the actually existing world of reproduction and in Ohio an old man failed to pay his electric bill you may be familiar with the case and the electric company turned off the electricity and he died the reason they turned it off was because it wouldn't have been profitable for them to keep it on because he didn't pay his bill do you believe that was right the responsibility really lies not on the electric company for turning it off but on those of this man's neighbors and friends and Associates who are not charitable enough to enable him as an individual to meet the electric bill hmm did I hear that right did he just say the death of a man caused by not having money was the responsibility of other people or in effect charity well then I guess we're going to need a whole lot of infomercials a little miserable coin slot donations for Bodega counters and a bunch of pickle jars for the billion people now starving to death on this planet because of the various system Milton Friedman promotes whether you are dealing with the philosophies of Milton Friedman f.a Hayek John Maynard Keynes Ludwig von mises or any other major Market Economist the basis of rationale rarely leaves the money sequence it is like a religion consumption analysis stabilization policies deficit spending aggregate demand it exists as a never-ending self-referring self-rationalizing circle of discourse where Universal human need natural resources or any form of physical life-supporting efficiency is ruled out by default and replaced by the singular notion that humans seek an advantage over each other for money alone motivated by their own narrow self-interest will magically create a sustainable healthy balanced Society there is no life coordinate in this whole Theory this whole Doctrine what are they doing what are they doing what they're doing is tracking money sequences that's all it is is tracking money sequences presupposing everything that matters one that there's no life coordinates wow no life coordinates two that all the agents are self-maximizing preference Seekers that is they think of nothing other than themselves and what they can get most for themselves that that note that seduction that's the ruling notion of rationality self-maximizing choice and and the only thing that there's interested in self-maximizing is money or commodities well where does social relations come in it doesn't accept in the exchange to self-maximize where do our natural resources come in they don't except to exploit where does the family come in as being able to survive it doesn't they have to have money in order to purchase any good well shouldn't an economy deal somewhere with human need isn't that what to fundamental issue is to satisfy our human needs oh need isn't even in your Lexicon uh you dissolve into wants and what does it want that means money demand that wants to buy well if it's funny when a man to Monster by it's got nothing to do with me because it may be the person has no money to man and desperately needs to say water supply or it may be money demand wants a gold toilet seat well where does it all go to the gold toilet seat and you call this economics like it's reading when one thinks of it it's got to be the most bizarre uh delusion in the history of human thought foreign we have focused on the market system but this system is actually only one half of the global economic Paradigm the other half is the monetary system while the market system deals with the interaction of people gaming for profit across the spectrum of Labor production and distribution the monetary system is an underlying set of policies set by financial institutions which create conditions for the market system among other things it includes terms we often hear such as interest rates loans debt the money supply inflation Etc and while you might want to pull your hair out listening to the gibberish coming from the monetary economists modest preemptive actions can obviate the need of more drastic actions at a later date the nature and effect of this system is actually quite simple our economy has or the global economy has three basic things the governor one is fractional Reserve banking but Banks printing money out of nothing it's also based upon compound interest when you borrow money you have to pay back more than you borrowed which means that you in effect create money out of thin air again which has to be serviced by creating still more money we live in an infinite growth Paradigm the economic Paradigm we live in now is is a Ponzi scheme it's nothing grows forever it's not possible as a great uh psychologist James Hillman wrote the only thing that grows in a human body after a certain age is cancer it's not just the amount of money that has to keep growing it's the amount of consumers consumers to borrow money at interest to generate more money and obviously that's not possible on a finite planet people are basically vehicles to just create money which must create more money to keep the whole thing from falling apart which is what's happening right now there are really only two things anyone needs to know about the monetary system one all money is created out of debt money is monetized debt whether it materialized from treasury Bonds home loan contracts or credit cards in other words if all outstanding debt was to be repaid right now there would not be one dollar in circulation and two interest is charged on virtually all loans made and the money needed to pay back this interest does not exist in the money supply outright only the principal is created by the loans and the principle is the money supply so if all this debt was to be repaid right now Not only would there not be one dollar left in circulation there would also be a gigantic amount of money owed that is literally impossible to pay back for it does not exist the consequence of all of this is that two things are inevitable inflation and bankruptcy as far as inflation this can be seen as an historical Trend in virtually every country today and easily tied to its cause which is the Perpetual increase of the money supply which is required to cover the interest charges and keep the system going as far as bankruptcy it comes in the form of debt collapse this collapse will inevitably occur with a person a business or a country and typically happens when the interest payments are no longer possible to make but there is a bright side of all of this well at least in terms of the market system because debt creates pressure debt creates wage slaves a person in debt is much more likely to take a low wage than a person who isn't hence becoming a cheap commodity so it's great for the corporations to have a pool of people that have no Financial Mobility but hey that same train of thought also goes for entire countries the World Bank and the international monetary fund which mostly serve as proxies for transnational corporate interests give gigantic loans to troubled countries at very high interest rates and then once the countries are deeply in the whole and can't pay austerity measures are applied the corporations swoop in set up sweatshops and take their natural resources now that's market efficiency but wait there's more you see there's this unique hybrid of the monetary and market system called the stock market which rather than you know actually produce anything real they just buy and sell money itself and when it comes to debt you know what they do that's right they traded they actually buy and sell debt for profit from credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations for Consumer Debt to complex derivative schemes used to mask the debt of entire countries such as the collusion of Investment Bank Goldman Sachs and Greece which nearly collapsed the entire European economy so when it comes to the stock market and Wall Street we have an entirely new level of insanity born out of the money sequence of value all you need to know about markets was written in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago it was called lessons of the brain damaged investor and in this editorial they explain why people with slight brain damage do better as investors than people with normal brain functionality why because the slightly brain damaged person has no empathy and that's the key if you don't have any empathy you do well as an investor and so Wall Street breeds people who have no empathy to go in there and to make decisions and make trades that they have no compunction about and no thought whatsoever as that what they're doing might affect their fellow human being so they breed these robots these these people have no souls and since they don't even want to pay these people anymore they're now breeding robots real robots real algorithmic Traders uh Goldman Sachs and the high frequency trading Scandal they put a computer next to the change the New York Stock Exchange this computer this code located computer as they call it it front runs all the trades on the exchange and it hits the exchanges with volumes of orders in ways that Scout pennies and nickels away from the exchange it's just it's like they're siphoning money all day long they want one quarter last year 30 or 60 straight days without a single down day and made millions of dollars every single day is that because well that's statistically impossible when I worked on Wall Street the way it works is everyone kicks upstairs the bribes the Brokers bribe to the office manager the office manager bribes to the regional sales manager the regional sales manager bribes of the national sales manager it's a common understanding at Christmas who gets the biggest bonus at Christmas in an average brokerage office the compliance officer the compliance officer sits there all day long he's supposed to be making sure you don't violate any of the margin rules and you're complying with the law of course yeah to the extent that you can broad the compliance officer yeah that's right you are complying with the law so how does fraud has become the system it's no longer a byproduct it is the system you know it's like that old Woody Allen joke he says Doctor my brother thinks he's a chicken and the doctor says take a pill and that should cure the problem and he says no doctor you don't understand we need the eggs Okay so the trading of fraudulent claims back and forth between Banks to generate fees to generate bonuses has become the GDP producing growth engine of the United States economy even though they're essentially trading fraudulent claims that there's absolutely no hope of ever paying back they're processing and generating and re-securitizing nothing if I write 20 billion dollars on a cocktail napkin and I sell to JP Morgan while JP Morgan writes 20 billion dollars on a cocktail napkin and we swapped those two cocktail napkins at a bar and we each pay ourselves a quarter of one percent in the fee and we make a lot of money for our Christmas bonus we each have on our books the 20 billion dollar cocktail napkin which has no real value until such time as the system is no longer able to absorb bogus cocktail napkins in which case we go to the government to get bailed out and because of Wall Street and the global stock market there are now conservatively about 700 trillion dollars of outstanding fraudulent claims known as derivatives still waiting to collapse a value amounting to over 10 times the gross domestic product of the entire planet and while we have seen the bailouts of Corporations and banks by governments which of course comedically borrowed their money from Banks to begin with we are now seeing attempts to bail out whole countries by a conglomerates of other countries through the International Banks but how do you bail out a planet there is no country out there that isn't now saturated in debt the Cascade of sovereign debt defaults we have seen can only be the beginning when the math is taken into account it has been estimated in the United States alone that income tax would need to be raised to 65 percent per person just to cover the interest in the near future economists are now foreshadowing that within a few decades 60 percent of the countries on the planet will be bankrupt but hold on let me get this straight the world is going bankrupt whatever the hell that means because of this idea called debt which doesn't even exist in the physical reality it's only part of a game that we've invented and yet the well-being of billions of people is now being compromised extreme layoffs tent cities accelerating poverty austerity measures imposed schools shutting down child hunger and other levels of familial deprivation all because of this elaborate fiction what are we [ __ ] stupid hey hey Marge my man help a brother out huh grow up kids [Music] Saturn what's up man you remember that smoking nebula I hooked you up with a while back uh listen ice we're getting really tired of you you've been given everything and yet you waste it all yeah you got plenty of resources and you know it why don't you grow up and learn some responsibility for Christ's sake you're making your mother miserable [Music] you're on your own pal yeah whatever [Music] now all of this considered from the waste machine known as the market system to the debt machine known as the monetary system hence creating the monetary Market Paradigm which defines the global economy today there is one consequence that runs through the entire machine inequality whether it is the market system which creates a natural gravitation towards Monopoly and power consolidation while also generating pockets of wealthy industries that Tower over others regardless of utility such as the fact that top hedge fund managers on Wall Street now take home over 300 million dollars a year for contributing literally nothing while a scientist looking for a cure for a disease trying to help Humanity might make sixty thousand dollars a year if they're lucky or whether it is the monetary system which has class division built right into its structure for example if I have one million dollars to spare and I put it into a CD at four percent interest I will make forty thousand dollars a year no social contribution no nothing however if I'm a lower class person and have to take loans to buy my car or home I am paying in interest which in abstraction is going to pay that millionaire with the four percent CD this stealing from the poor to pay the rich is a foundational built-in aspect of the monetary system and it could be labeled structural classes of course historically social stratification has always been deemed unfair but obviously accepted overall as now one percent of the population owns 40 percent of the planet's wealth but material fairness aside there is something else going on underneath the surface of inequality causing an incredible deterioration in public health as a whole well I think people often uh puzzled by the contrast between the material success of our societies unprecedented levels of wealth and the many social failings I mean you know if you look at the the rates of um drug abuse or violence or self-harm amongst kids or mental illness there's clearly something going deeply wrong with our societies what the data that I've been describing does is simply shows that intuition that we people have had for hundreds of years that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive that that intuition is truer than I think we ever imagined there are very powerful psychological and social effects of inequality more to do I suppose with feelings of in of superiority and inferiority that kind of division and and maybe going with the sort of respect disrespect people feeling looked down on at the bottom which by the way is why violence is more common in more unequal societies it's the trigger to violence is so often people feeling looked down on and disrespected if there is one principle I can emphasize that is the most important principle underlying the prevention of violence it would be equality single most significant factor that affects the rate of violence is the degree of equality versus the degree of inequality in that Society that is a sort of General Social dysfunction it's not just one or two things that go wrong as inequality increases it seems to be everything whether we're talking about crime or health or mental illness or whatever one of the really disturbing findings out in public health there is never ever make the mistake of being poor or being born poor your health pays for an endless sorts of ways something known as the health socioeconomic gradient As you move down from the highest strata in society in terms of socioeconomic status every step down Health gets worse for umpteen different diseases life expectancy gets worse infant mortality rate everything you could look at so a huge issue has been why is it that this grading exists totally simple obvious answer which is if you were chronically sick you're not going to be very productive so Health causes Drive socioeconomic differences not that in the slightest on the very simple level that you could look at socioeconomic status of a 10 year old and that's going to predict something about their health decades later so that's the direction of causality next one what's it about oh it's perfectly obvious poor people can't afford to go to the doctor it's Healthcare access it's got nothing to do with that because you see these same gradients in countries with universal health care socialized medicine okay next simple explanation oh on the average the poorer you are the more likely you are to smoke to drink to all sorts of Lifestyle risk factor stuff yeah those contribute but careful Studies have shown that explains maybe about a third of the variability so what's left and what's left is having a ton to do with the stress of poverty so the poorer you are starting off being you know the person who's one dollar income behind Bill Gates the poorer you are in this country on the average the worse your health is this tells us something really important the health connection with poverty it's not about being poor it's about feeling poor increasingly we recognize that chronic stress is an important influence on health but the most important sources of stress are the quality of social relations and if there is anything that lowers the quality of social relations it is the socioeconomic stratification of society what science has now shown is that regardless of material wealth the stress of Simply living in a stratified Society leads to a vast spectrum of public health problems and the greater the inequality the worse they become life expectancy longer and more equal countries drug abuse Less in more equal countries mental illness Less in more equal countries Social Capital meaning the ability of people to trust each other naturally greater in more equal countries educational schools higher in more equal countries homicide rates Less in more equal countries crime and rates of imprisonment Less in more equal countries it goes on and on infant mortality obesity teen birth rate less and more equal countries and perhaps most interesting Innovation greater in more equal countries which challenges the age-old notion that a competitive stratified Society is somehow more creative and inventive moreover a study done in the UK called the Whitehall study confirmed that there is a social distribution of disease as you go from the top of the socioeconomic ladder to the bottom for example it was found that the lowest rungs of the hierarchy had a four-fold increase of heart disease-based mortality compared to the highest rungs and this pattern exists irrespective of Access to Health Care hence the worse a person's relative financial status the worse their health is going to be on average this phenomenon is rooted in what could be termed psychosocial stress and it is at the foundation of the greatest social distortions plaguing our society today its cause the monetary market system make no mistake the greatest destroyer of ecology the greatest source of waste and depletion and pollution the greatest purveyor of violence War crime poverty animal abuse and inhumanity the greatest generator is social and personal neuroses mental disorders depression anxiety not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health Global sustainability and progress on this planet is not some corrupt government or legislation not some Rogue Corporation or banking cartel not some flaw of human nature and not some secret hidden cabal that controls the world it is in fact the socioeconomic system itself at its very Foundation foreign [Music] let's imagine for a moment we had the option to redesign human civilization from the ground up what if hypothetically speaking we discovered an exact replica of the planet Earth and the only difference between this new planet and our current one is that human evolution had not occurred it was an open palette no countries no cities no pollution no Republicans just to pristine open environment so what would we do well first we need a goal right and it's safe to say that goal would be to survive and not to just survive but to do so in an optimized healthy prosperous way most people indeed desire to live and they would prefer to do so without suffering therefore the basis of this civilization needs to be as supportive and hence sustainable for human life as possible taking into account the material needs of all the world's people while trying to remove anything that could hurt us in the long run that goal of say maximum sustainability understood the next question regards our method what kind of approach do we take well let's see last I checked politics was the method of social operation on Earth so what do the doctrines of the Republicans liberals conservatives or socialists have to say about societal design hmm not a damn thing okay then what about religion surely the great Creator had to have left some blueprints somewhere no nothing I can find okay then so what's left it appears something called science science is unique in that its methods demand not only that the ideas proposed to be tested and replicated but everything science comes up with is also inherently falsifiable in other words unlike religion and politics science has no ego and everything it suggests accepts the possibility of being proven wrong eventually it holds on to nothing and evolves constantly well that sounds natural enough to me so then based on the current state of scientific knowledge in the early 21st century along with our goal of Maximum sustainability for the human population how do we begin the actual process of construction well the first question to ask what do we need to survive the answer of course are planetary resources whether it is the water we drink the energy we use the raw materials we utilize to create tools and shelter the planet hosts an inventory of resources many of which are demanded for our survival so given that reality it then becomes critical to figure out what we have and where it is this means we need to conduct a survey we simply locate and identify every physical resource on the planet we can along with the amount available at each location from the deposits of copper to the most potent locations for wind farms to produce energy to the Natural freshwater Springs to an assessment of the amount of fish in the ocean to the most Prime arable land for food cultivation Etc but since we humans are going to be consuming these resources over time we then realize that not only do we need to locate and identify we also need to track we need to make sure we don't run out of any of this stuff that would be bad and this means not only tracking our rates of use but the rates of Earthly regeneration as well such as how long it takes for say a tree to grow or a spring to replenish this is called dynamic equilibrium in other words if we use up trees faster than they can be grown back we have a serious problem for it is unsustainable so then how do we track this inventory especially when we recognize that all of this stuff is scattered everywhere we have large mineral mines in what we call Africa energy concentrations in the Middle East huge tidal power possibilities on the Atlantic coast of North America the largest supply of fresh water in Brazil Etc well once again good old science has a suggestion it's called systems theory systems theory recognizes that the fabric of the natural world from human biology to the Earthly biosphere to the gravitational pull of the solar system itself is one huge synergistically connected system fully interlinked just as human cells connect to form our organs and the organs connect to form our bodies and since our bodies cannot live without the Earthly resources of food air and water we are intrinsically connected to the Earth and so on so as nature suggests we take all of this inventory and tracking data and create a system to manage it a global resource management system in fact to account for every relevant resource on the planet there is simply no logical alternative if our goal as a species is survival in the long run we have to keep track as a whole that understood we can now consider production how do we use all this stuff what will our process of production be and what do we need to consider to make sure it is as optimized as possible to maximize our sustainability well the first thing that jumps right out at us is the fact that we need to constantly try and preserve the planet's resources are essentially finite so it is important that we be strategic strategic preservation is key the second thing we recognize is that some resources are really not as good as others in their performance in fact some of this stuff when put into use has a terrible effect on the environment which invariably hinders our own health for example oil and fossil fuels no matter how you cut it release some pretty destructive agents into the environment therefore it is critical we do our best to use such things only when we really have to if at all fortunately for us we see a ton of solar wind tidal wave heat differential and geothermal possibilities for energy production so we can strategize objectively about what we use and where to avoid what could be called negative retro actions or anything that results from production or use that damages the environment and hence ourselves we will call this strategic safety to couple in with our strategic preservation but production strategies do not stop there we are going to need an efficiency strategy for the actual mechanics of production itself and what we find is that there are roughly three specific protocols we must adhere to one every good we produce must be designed to last as long as possible naturally the more things break down the more resources we are going to need to replace them and the more waste produced two when things do break down or are no longer usable for whatever reason it is critical that we Harvest or recycle as much as we possibly can so the production design must take this into account directly at the very earliest stages three quickly evolving Technologies such as Electronics which are subject to the fastest rates of technological obsolescence would need to be designed to foreshadow and accommodate physical updates the last thing we want to do is throw away an entire computer system just because it has only one broken part or is outdated so we simply design the components to be easily updated part by part standardized and universally interchangeable foreshadowed by the current trend of technological change and when we realize that the mechanisms of strategic preservation strategic safety and strategic efficiency are purely technical considerations devoid of any human opinion or bias we simply program these strategies into a computer which can weigh and calculate all the relevant variables allowing us to always arrive at the absolute best method for sustainable production based on current understandings and while that might sound complex all it is is a glorified calculator not to mention such multivariate decision-making and monitoring systems are already used across the world today for isolated purposes it is simply a process of scaling it out so now we not only have our resource management system but also a production management system both of which are easily computer automated to maximize efficiency preservation and safety the informational reality is that the human mind or even a group of humans cannot track what needs to be tracked it must be done by computers and it can be and this brings us to the next level distribution what sustainability strategies make sense here well since we know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line and since energy is required to power transport machines the less transport distance the more efficient producing Goods in one continent and shipping them over to another only makes sense if the goods in questions simply cannot be produced in the Target area otherwise it is nothing but wasteful we must localize production so distribution is simple fast and requires the least amount of energy we'll call this the proximity strategy which simply means we reduce the travel of goods as much as possible whether raw materials or finished consumer products of course it might also be important to know what goods we are transporting and why and This falls under the category of demand and demand is simply what people need to be healthy and to have a high quality of life the spectrum of material human needs range from core life-supporting Necessities such as food Clean Water Shelter to Social and recreational Goods which allow for relaxation and personal social enjoyment both important factors in human and social health overall so very simply we take another survey people describe their needs demand is assessed and production begins based on that demand and since the level of demand of different Goods will naturally fluctuate and change around different regions we need to create a demand distribution tracking system So to avoid overruns and shortages of course this idea is old news it is used in every major store chain today to make sure they keep up with their inventory only this time we are tracking on a global scale but wait a minute we really can't fully understand demand if we don't account for the actual usage of the good itself is it logical and sustainable for every single human to say have one of everything made regardless of their usage no that would be simply wasteful and inefficient if a person has a need for a good but that need is only for say 45 minutes a day on average it would be much more efficient if that good was made available to them and to others when needed many forget that it isn't the good that they want it is the purpose of that good when we realize that the good itself is only as important as its utility we see that external restriction or what we might call today ownership is extremely wasteful and environmentally illogical in a fundamental economic sense so we need to devise a strategy called strategic access this would be the foundation of our demand distribution tracking system which makes sure we can meet the demand of the population's needs for Access of whatever they need when they need it and as far as physically obtaining the goods centralized and Regional access centers all make sense for the most part placed in close proximity to the population and a person would simply come in take the item use it and when finished return it when it is no longer needed sort of how a library works today in fact these centers could not only exist in the community and the way we see local stores today but specialized access centers would exist in specific areas where often certain goods are utilized saving more energy with less repeat transport and once this demand tracking system is in order it is tied into our production management system and of course into our resource management system hence creating a unified dynamically updating global economic management machine that simply makes sure we remain sustainable starting with securing the Integrity of our finite resources moving to make sure we only create the best most strategic Goods possible while Distributing everything in the most intelligent and efficient way and the unique result of this preservation-based approach which is intuitively counter to many is that this logical ground up empirical process of preservation and efficiency which can only Define true human sustainability on this planet would likely enable something never before seen in human history access abundance not just for a percentage of the global population but the entire civilization this economic model as was just generalized this responsible systems approach to Total Earth resource management and processes designed again to do nothing less than take care of humanity as a whole in the most efficient and sustainable way could be termed a resource-based economy the idea was defined in the 1970s by structural engineer Jacques Fresco he understood back then that Society was on a collision course with nature and itself unsustainable on every level and if things didn't change we would destroy ourselves one way or another are all these things you're saying Jacques could they be built with what we know today or are some of these things are you guessing based on what we know today no all of these things can be built with what we know today it would take 10 years to change the surface of the Earth to rebuild the world into a second Garden of Eden the choice lies with you the stupidity of a nuclear arms race the development of weapons trying to solve your problems politically by electing this political party or that political party that all politics is immersed in corruption let me say it again communism socialism fascism the Democrats the Liberals we want to absorb human beings all organizations that believe in a better life of man there are no negro problems or polish problems or Jewish problems or Greek problems or women's problems they're human problems I'm not afraid of anybody I don't work for anyone no one can discharge me I have no boss I am afraid to live in the society we live in today our society cannot be maintained by by this type of incompetency it was great the free enterprise system about 35 years ago that was the last of its usefulness now we've got to change our way of thinking or perish the horror movies of the future of the our society the way it didn't work and politics would be part of a horror movie lots of people today use the term cold science because they're analytical and they don't even know what analytical means science means closer approximations of the way the world really works so it's telling the truth is what it is a scientist doesn't try to get along with people they tell them what their findings are they have to question all things and if some scientist comes up with an experiment that shows certain materials have certain strength other scientists have to be able to duplicate that experiment and come up with the same results even if a scientist feels that an airplane wing due to mathematics or calculations can hold up a given amount of weight they still pile sandbags on it to see when it breaks and they say you know my calculations are right or they're not correct I love that system because it's free of bias and free of thinking that math can solve all the problems you have to put your math to test also I think that every system that can be put to test should be put to test and they're all decisions should be based upon research a resource-based economy is simply the scientific method applied to social concern an approach utterly absent in the world today Society is a technical invention and the most efficient methods of optimized human health physical production distribution City infrastructure and the like reside in the field of science and technology not politics or monetary economics it operates in the same systematic way as say an airplane and there is no Republican or liberal way to build an airplane likewise nature itself is the physical referent we use to prove our science and it is a set system emerging only from our increased understanding of it in fact it has no regard for what you subjectively think or believe to be true rather it gives you an option you can learn and fall in line with its natural laws and conduct yourself accordingly invariably creating good health and sustainability or you can go against the current to no avail it doesn't matter how much you believe you can just stand up right now and walk on the wall next to you the law of gravity will not allow it if you do not eat you will die if you are not touched as an infant you will die as harsh as it may sound nature is a dictatorship and we can either listen to it and come in harmony with it or suffer the inevitable adverse consequences so a resource-based economy is nothing more than a set of proven life-supporting understandings where all decisions are based upon optimized human and environmental sustainability it takes into account the empirical life ground which every human being shares as a need regardless again of their political or religious philosophy there is no cultural relativism to this approach it isn't a matter of opinion human needs are human needs and having access to the necessities of life such as clean air nutritious food and clean water along with a positively reinforcing stable nurturing and non-violent environment is demanded for our mental and physical health our evolutionary Fitness and hence the species survival itself a resource-based economy would be based upon available resources you can't just bring a lot of people to an island or build a city of 50 000 people without having access to the necessities of life so when I use the term a comprehensive systems approach I'm talking about doing an inventory of the area first and determining what that area can supply not just architectural approach not just design approach but design must be based on all of the requirements to enhance human life and that's what I mean by an integrated way of thinking food clothing shelter warms love all those things are necessary if you deprive people of any of them you have a lesser human being less capable of functioning as previously outlined a resource-based economy is ground-up Global Systems approach to extraction production and distribution is based upon a set of true economic mechanisms or strategies which guarantee efficiency and sustainability in every area of the economy so continuing this train of thought regarding logical design what is next in our equation where does all this materialize cities the Advent of the city is a defining feature of modern civilization its role is to enable efficient access to the necessities of life along with increased social support and Community interaction so how we go about designing an ideal city what shape should we make it Square trapezoid well given we're going to be moving around the thing we might as well make it as equidistant as possible for ease hence the circle what should the city contain well naturally we need a residential area a Goods production area a power generation area an agricultural area but we also need nurturing as human beings hence culture nature Recreation and education so let's include a nice open Park an entertainment events area for cultural purposes and socializing and educational and research facilities and since we're working with a circle it seems rational to place these functions in belts based on the amount of land required for each goal along with ease of access very good now let's get down to specifics first we need to consider the core infrastructure or intestines of the city organism these would be the water good waste and energy transport channels just as we have water and sewage systems under our cities today we would extend this channeling concept to integrate waste recycling and delivery itself no more mailman or garbage men it is built right in we could even use automated pneumatic tubes and similar Technologies Sam goes for transport it needs to be integrated and strategically designed to reduce or even remove the need for wasteful independent automobiles electric trams conveyors transveres and maglevs which can take you virtually anywhere in the city even up and down along with connecting you to other cities as well and of course in the event an automobile is required it is automated by satellite for safety and integrity in fact this automation technology is in working order right now automobile accidents kill about 1.2 million people every single year injuring about 50 million this is absurd and doesn't have to occur between efficient City design and automated driverless cars this death toll can be virtually eliminated agriculture today through our haphazard cost cutting industrial methods using pesticides excessive fertilizers and other means we have successfully destroyed much of the arable land on this planet not to mention also extensively poisoning our bodies in fact industrial and agricultural chemical toxins now show up in virtually every human being tested including infants fortunately there's a glaring alternative the soilless mediums of Hydroponics and aeroponics which also reduce nutrient and water requirements by up to 75 percent of our current usage food can now be organically grown on an industrial scale in enclosed vertical Farms such as in 50-story one acre plots virtually eliminating the need for pesticides and hydrocarbons in general this is the future of industrial food cultivation efficient clean and abundant so such Advanced systems would be in part what comprise our agricultural belt producing all the food required for the entire City's population with no need to import anything from the outside saving time waste and energy and speaking of energy the energy build would work in a systems approach to extract electricity from our abundant renewable mediums specifically wind solar geothermal and heat differentials and if near water potentials tidal and wave power to avoid intermittency and make sure a positive net energy return occurs these mediums would operate in an integrated system powering each other when needed while storing excessive energy to large super capacitors under the ground so nothing can go to waste and not only does the city power itself particular structures will also power independently and generate electricity through photovoltaic paints structural pressure transducers the thermocouple effect and other current but underutilized Technologies but of course this begs the question how does this technology and goods in general get created in the first place this brings us to production the industrial belt apart from having hospitals and the like would be the Hub of factory production completely localized overall it would of course obtain raw materials by way of the global resource management system just discussed with Demand Being generated by the population of the city itself as far as the mechanics of production we need to discuss a new powerful phenomenon which was sparked very recently in human history and is on Pace to changing everything it's called mechanization or the automation of Labor well if you look around you you'll notice that almost everything that we use today is built automatically your shoes your clothes your home appliances your car and so on they are all built by machines in an automatic way can we say that the society has not been influenced by these major technological advancements of course not these systems really dictate new structures and new needs and they make a lot of other things obsolete so we've been going up in the development and use of technology in an exponential way so definitely automation is going to continue you cannot stop the technologies that just make sense labor automation through technology is at the bottom of every major social transformation in human history from the Agricultural Revolution and the invention of the plow to the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the powered machine to the information age we live in now through essentially the invention of advanced electronics and computers and with regard to Advanced production methods today mechanization is now evolving on its own moving away from the traditional method of assembling component parts into a configuration into an advanced method of creating entire products in one single process but like most Engineers I'm fascinated by biology because it's so full of examples of extraordinary pieces of engineering and absolutely what biology is is the study of things that copy themselves across go to definition of life as we've got again as an engineer I've always been intrigued by the idea of machines that will cover themselves red wrap is a three-dimensional printer that's to say it's a printer that you plug into a computer and instead of making two-dimensional sheets of paper with patterns on it makes real physical three-dimensional objects now there's nothing new about that 3D printers have been around for about 30 Years big thing about reprap is that it prints most of its own parts so if you've got one you can make another one and give it to a friend as well as being able to print lots of useful things from the simple printing of basic household goods in your home to the printing of an entire automobile body in one swoop Advanced automated 3D printing now has the potential to transform virtually every field of production including home construction Contour crafting is actually a fabrication technology so-called 3D printing when you directly build a 3D object from a computer model using Contour crafting it will be possible to build a 2000 square foot home entirely by the machine in one day the reason that people are interested in automating construction is that it really brings a lot of benefits for example construction is pretty labor intensive and although it provides job for a sector of the society but also has issues and complications for example construction is the most dangerous job that there is it is worse than Mining and agriculture it has got the highest level of fatality almost in every country another issue is the waste an average home United States has three to seven tons of waste so this is huge if we look at the impact of construction and knowing that about 40 percent of all materials in the world are used in construction so a big waste of energy and resources and big damage to the environment as well making homes using Hammers and nails and wood with the state of our technology today is really absurd and will go the way of our labor class in regards to Manufacturing in the United States recently there was a study by Economist David attour of MIT that states that our middle class is Obsolete and being replaced by automation quite simply mechanization is more productive efficient and sustainable than human labor in virtually every sector of the economy today machines do not need vacations brakes Insurance pensions and they can work 24 hours a day every day the output potential and accuracy compared to human labor is unmatched the bottom line repetitive human labor is becoming obsolete and impractical across the world and the unemployment you see around you today is fundamentally the result of this evolution of efficiency in technology for years Market economists have dismissed this growing pattern which could be called technological unemployment because of the fact that new sectors always seem to emerge to reabsorb the displaced workers today the service sector is the only real Hub left and currently employs over 80 percent of the American Workforce with most industrialized countries maintaining a similar proportion however this sector is now being challenged increasingly by automated kiosks automated restaurants and even automated stores economists today are finally acknowledging what they have been denying for years not only is technological unemployment exasperating the current labor crisis we see across the world due to the global economic downturn but the more the recession deepens the faster the industries are mechanizing the catch which is not realized is that the faster they mechanize to save money the more they displace people the more they reduce public purchasing power this means that while the corporation can produce everything more cheaply fewer and fewer people will actually have money to buy anything regardless of how cheap they become the bottom line is that the labor for income game is slowly coming to an end in fact if you take a moment to reflect on the jobs which are in existence today which automation could take over right now if applied 75 percent of the global Workforce could be replaced by mechanization tomorrow and this is why in a resource-based economy there is no monetary market system no money at all so there is no need a resource-based economy recognizes the efficiency of mechanization and accepts it for what it offers it doesn't fight it like we do today why because it is irresponsible not to given any interest in efficiency and sustainability and this brings us back to our city system in the center is the central dome which not only houses the educational facilities and Transportation Hub it also hosts the Mainframe that runs the city's technical operations the city is in fact one big Automated machine it has sensors in all technical belts to track the progress of Agriculture energy Gathering production distribution and the light now would people be needed to oversee these operations in the event of a malfunction or the like most probably yes but that number would decrease over time as improvements continue however as of today maybe three percent of the city population would be needed for this job when you break it down and I can assure you that in an economic system which is actually designed to take care of you and secure your well-being without you having to submit to a private dictatorship on a daily basis usually to a job that is either technically unnecessary or socially pointless while often struggling with debt that doesn't exist just to make ends meet I guarantee you people will volunteer their time left and right to maintain and improve A system that actually takes care of them and coupled with this issue of incentive comes the common assumption that if there isn't some external pressure for one to work for a living people will just sit around do nothing and turn into fat lazy blobs this is nonsense the labor system we have today is in fact the generator of laziness not a resolver of it if you think back to when you're a child full of life interested in new things to understand likely creating and exploring But as time went on the system pushed you into the focus of figuring out how to make money and from Early Education to study at a university you are narrowed only to emerge as a creature which serves as a cog in a wheel in a model that sends all the fruits to the upper one percent scientific Studies have now shown that people are in fact not motivated by monetary reward when it comes to Ingenuity and creation the creation itself is the reward money in fact appears only to serve as an incentive for repetitive mundane actions a role we have just now shown can be replaced by machine so when it comes to Innovation the actual use of the human mind the monetary incentive has proven to be a hindrance interfering and detracting from creative thought and this might explain why Nikola Tesla the Wright brothers and other inventors who contributed massively to our current world never showed a monetary incentive to do so money is in fact a false incentive and causes a hundred times more Distortion than it does contribution [Music] please settle down the first thing I would like to do is go around the room and ask what everyone would like to be when they grow up who'd like to go first okay how about you Sarah when I grow up I want to work in McDonald's like my mom oh family tradition eh how about you Linda when I grow up I'm gonna be a prostitute on the streets of New York City oh glamor girl huh very ambitious how about you Tommy when I grow up I'm gonna be a rich elitist business fan who works on Wall Street and profits off of the collapse of foreign economies enterprising and great to see some Multicultural interest [Music] as stated before a resource-based economy applies the scientific method to social concern and this isn't limited to Simply technical efficiency it also has the consideration of human and social well-being directly and what comprises it what good is a social system if in the end it doesn't produce happiness and peaceful coexistence so it is important to point out that with the removal of the money system and the necessities of life provided we would see a global reduction in crime by about 95 percent almost immediately for there is nothing to steal embezzle scam or the like 95 percent of all people in prisons today are there due to some monetary related crime or drug abuse and drug abuse is a disorder not a crime so what about the other five percent the truly violent often seeming to some as being violent for the sake of being violent are they just evil people the the reason that I frankly think it's a waste of time to engage in moral value judgments about people's violence is because it doesn't Advance by one iota our understanding of either the causes or the prevention of the violent Behavior people sometimes ask if I believe in forgiving criminals my answer to that is no I don't believe in forgiveness any more than I believe in condemnation it's only if we as a society can take the same attitude of treating violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine rather than as a moral evil it's only when we make that change and our own attitudes and assumptions and values though we will actually succeed in reducing the level of violence rather than stimulating it which is what we do now the more Justice you seek the more hurt you become because there's no such thing as Justice there is whatever there is out there that's it in other words if people are conditioned to be racist and bigots if they're brought up in an environment that Advocates that why do you blame the person for IT they're a victim of a subculture therefore they have to be helped the point is we have to redesign the environment that produces aberrant Behavior that's the problem not putting a person in jail that's why judges lawyers Freedom of Choice such concepts are dangerous because it gives you misinformation that the person is bad or that person is a serial killer serial killers are made just like soldiers become serial killers with a machine gun that become the killing machines but nobody looks at them as murderers or assassins because that's natural so we blame people we say well this guy was a Nazi he taught the Jews no he was brought up to torture Jews once you accept the fact that people have individual choices and they're free to make those choices free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all all of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in by our parents and by the values that dominate so we're influenced so they can't be free choices what's the greatest country in the world the two answer I haven't been all over the world and I don't know I will know enough about different cultures to answer that question I don't know anybody that speaks that way as I good old USA the greatest country alone there's no survey have you been to India no you've been to England though I've been to France no uh what do you make your assumptions on they can't answer they get mad at you as well God damn it who the hell are you to tell me what to say yeah don't forget you're dealing with aberrated people they're not responsible for their answers they're victims of culture that means they've been influenced by their culture foreign [Music] there are often a number of arguments that tend to come up with regards to the efficiency hey hey um now hold on just a minute yes I know what this is this is called Marxism buddy Stalin killed 800 billion people because of ideas like this my father died [Music] and as the irrationality of the audience grew shocked and Confused suddenly the narrator suffered a fatal heart attack and the seemingly communist propaganda film was no more foreign [Music] to people in Think Tank type of situations and you know these Club of Rome types and so forth where did that come from they just they got this icon they hold on to it's their Holy Grail and it's such an easy one you know people ask if I'm a socialist or a communist or a capitalist and I say I'm none of the above and why do you think why do you think that those are the only options all of those political constructs were created by writers who assumed that we lived on a planet of infinite resources not a one of those political philosophies even con contemplates that there might be a shortage of anything I believe that communism socialism free enterprise fascism are part of social Evolution that you can't take a giant step from one culture to another but they're in between systems before there's any ISM we've got a life ground and the life ground is as I just described most easily that's all the conditions required to take your next breath and that involves the air you breathe the water you get the safety you have the education you can access all these things that we share and use and that no life in any culture can do without so we've got to reset down to the life ground and the life ground is no longer any ISM it's life value analysis it's simply a matter of historical fact that the dominant intellectual culture of any particular society reflects the interest of the dominant group in that Society in a slave owning Society the beliefs about human beings and human rights and so on will reflect the needs of the slave owners in a society which again is based on the power of certain people to control and profit from the lives and work of millions of others the dominant intellectual culture will reflect the needs of of the dominant group and so that if you look across the board the ideas that pervade psychology and sociology and history and political economy and political science fundamentally reflects certain Elite interests and the academics who question that too much tend to get shunted to the side or to be seen as sort of radicals the dominant values of a culture tend to support and perpetuate what is rewarded by that culture and in a society where success and status is measured by material wealth not social contribution it is easy to see why the state of the world is what it is today we are dealing with a value system disorder completely denatured where the priority of personal and social health have become secondary to the detrimental Notions of artificial wealth and Limitless growth and like a virus this disorder now permeates every facet of government news media entertainment and even Academia and built into its structure are mechanisms of protection from anything that might interfere Disciples of the monetary Market religion the self-appointed Guardians of the status quo constantly seek out ways to avoid any form of thought which might interfere with their beliefs the most common of which are projected dualities if you are not a republican you must be a Democrat if you are not a Christian you might be a Satanist and if you feel Society can be greatly improved to consider perhaps I don't know taking care of everyone you're just a utopianist and the most Insidious of them all if you are not for the free market you must be against Freedom itself I'm a Believer believer in Freedom every time you hear the word Freedom being said anywhere or government's interference said anywhere it means decoded blocking maximization of turning money into more money for private money possessors that's it every other thing they'll say oh we need more Commodities from people all this uh Freedom against tyranny and so forth every time you see it you can decode it down to that and I think you'll find a one-to-one correlation with every time they use it and this is the sense in which we might call it's a syntax a governing syntax of understanding and of value so that it governs beneath their own recognition of it so they may not say oh I didn't mean that at all but in fact that's what they do just like you may speak a grammar and you have rules of grammar you follow without recognizing what the rules are and so what we have is what I call the ruling value syntax that underlies this so every time they use these words government interference lack of Freedom or Freedom or progress or development you can decode them all to come back to mean that of course when you hear the word Freedom it tends to be in the same sentence with something called democracy it's fascinating how people today seem to believe that they actually have a relevant influence on what their government does forgetting that the very nature of our system offers everything for sale the only vote that counts is the monetary vote and it doesn't matter how much any activist yells about ethics or accountability in a market system every politician every legislation and hence every government is for sale and even with the 20 trillion dollar Bank bailout starting in 2007 an amount of money which could have changed say the global energy infrastructure to fully renewable methods instead going to a series of Institutions that literally do nothing to help Society institutions that could be removed tomorrow with no recourse blind conditioning that politics and politicians exist for the public well-being still continues the fact is politics is a business no different than any other in a market system than they care about their self-interest before anything else I don't really honestly deep down believe in political action I think the system contracts and expands as it wants to it accommodates these changes I think the Civil Rights Movement was an accommodation on the part of those who own the country I think they see where their self-interest lies they see a certain amount of Freedom seems good an illusion of Liberty give these people a voting day every year so that they'll have the illusion of meaningless Choice meaningless choice that we go like slaves and say John I voted the limits of debate in this country are established before the debate even begins and everyone else is marginalized they're made to seem either to be Communists or with some sort of disloyal person a kook there's a word and now it's conspiracy see they've made that something that should not be even entertained for a minute that powerful people might get together and have a plan doesn't happen you're a kook you're a conspiracy buff and of all the mechanisms of Defense of this system there are two that repeatedly come up the first is this idea that the system has been the cause of the material progress we have seen on this planet well no there are basically two root causes which have created The increased so-called wealth and population growth we see today one the exponential advancement of production technology hence scientific ingenuity and two the initial discovery of abundant hydrocarbon energy which is currently the foundation of the entire socioeconomic system the free market capitalist monetary market system whatever you want to call it has done nothing but ride the wave of these advents with the distorted incentive system and a haphazard grossly unequal method of utilizing and distributing those fruits the second defense is a belligerent social bias generated from years of propaganda which sees any other social system as a route to so-called tyranny with various name droppings of Stalin Mao Hitler and the death tolls they generated well as despotic as these men might have been along with the societal approaches they perpetuated when it comes to the Game of Death when it comes to the systematic daily mass murder of human beings nothing in history compares to what we have today famines throughout at least the last century of our history have not been caused by a lack of food they've been caused by relative poverty the economic resources were so inequitably distributed that the poor simply didn't have enough money with which to buy the food that would have been available if they could have afforded to pay for it that would be an example of structural violence another example in Africa and some other areas but I'll particularly focused on Africa tens of millions of people are dying of AIDS why are they dying it's not because we don't know how to treat AIDS we have you know millions of people in the in the wealthy countries are getting along remarkably well because they have the medicines that will treat it the people in Africa who are dying of AIDS are not dying because of the HIV virus they're dying because they don't have the money with which to pay for the drugs that would keep them alive Gandhi saw this he said the deadliest form of violence is poverty and that's absolutely right poverty kills far more people than all the war is in history more people than all the murderers in history more than all the suicides in history not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together structural violence is also the main cause of Behavioral violence [Music] oil is the foundation of and that is present throughout the edifice of human civilization there are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy oil and natural gas and every calorie of food you and I eat in the industrialized World fertilizers are made from natural gas pesticides are made from oil you drive oil-powered machines to plant plow irrigate Harvest transport package you wrap the food in plastic that soil all plastic is oil there are seven gallons of oil in every Tire oil is everywhere it's ubiquitous and it's only because of oil that there are seven billion people or almost 7 billion people on this planet right now the arrival of this cheap easy energy which is equivalent by the way to billions of slaves working around the club to change the world in such a radical way over the last century and the population has gone up 10 times but by 2050 the oil supply is able to support less than half the present world's population in their present way of life so the scale of adjustment to live differently is just enormous The World Is Now using six barrels of oil for every barrel it finds five years ago it was using four barrels of oil for every barrel it finds a year from now it's going to be using eight barrels of oil for every barrel it finds what's disturbing to me is the lack of any real efforts from governments worldwide or industry leaders worldwide to do something different I mean we have these sort of attempts to build more wind power and to maybe do something with Thai we've got attempts to make our cars a little bit more um efficient but there's nothing which really looks like a Revolution coming along there's a all pretty minor and that I think is pretty frightening and the governments who are driven by these economists who don't really appreciate what we're talking about are trying to stimulate consumerism to restore past prosperity in the hope that they can restore the past they're printing yet more money lacking any collateral at all so if if the economy improves and recovers and growth famous growth comes back it'll only be short-lived because within a short period of time counted in months rather than Years it'll hit the supply barrier again there'll be another price shock and a deeper recession so I think we go into a series of vicious circles so you have the economic growth going up price spike everything shuts down that's where we are now then it starts to come up again but what we have now is this is this area where there's there's no more ability to produce cheap energy we're at the peak we're on the downslope of oil production nowhere you're going to get any more out of the ground any faster which means that things shut down the price of oil drops which it did in the early 2009 but then as you have an erzot so-called recovery the price of oil starts to come back it's recently been hovering around eighty dollars a barrel and what we see is that eighty dollars a barrel now with the economic and financial collapse people are having a hard time affording that we're alone production right now is about 86 million barrels a day over 10 years you're looking at roughly 40 million barrels a day having to be replaced there's nothing around which can come even within a one percent of meeting that sort of demand if we don't do something pretty quickly there's going to be a huge energy deficiency I think the big mistake is in not recognizing um a decade or so ago that an effort a concerted airport needed to be made to develop these sustainable forms of energy I think that's something our grandchildren will look back on with total disbelief you people knew that you were dealing with a finite commodity how could you possibly have built your economy around something which was going to disappear for the first time in human history the species is now faced with the depletion of a core resource Central to our current system of survival and the punch line of the whole thing is that even with oil becoming more and more scarce the economic system will still blindly push its cancerous growth model so people can go out and buy more oil-powered cars to generate GDP in jobs exacerbating the decline are there solutions to replace the edifice of the hydrocarbon economy of course but the path needed to accomplish these changes will not manifest through the market system protocols required since new Solutions can only be implemented through the profit mechanism people are not investing in renewable energies because there is no money in it in both a long and short term and the commitment needed to make it happen can only occur at a severe Financial loss hence there is no monetary incentive and in this system if there's no monetary incentive things do not happen and on top of it all peak oil is just one of many surfacing consequences of the environmental social train wreck gaining speed today other declines include fresh water the very fabric of our existence which is currently showing shortages for 2.8 billion people and those shortages are on Pace to reach 4 billion by 2030. food production the destruction of arable crop land from which 99.7 percent of all human food comes from today is occurring up to 40 times faster than it is being replenished and over the last 40 years 30 percent of the arable land has become unproductive not to mention that hydrocarbons are the backbone of Agriculture today and as it declines so will the food supply as far as resources in general and our current patterns of consumption by 2030 we will need two planets to continue our rates not to mention the continual destruction of Life supporting biodiversity causing Extinction spasms and environmental destabilization across the globe and with all of these declines we have the near exponential population growth whereby 2030 there might be over 8 billion people on this planet energy production alone would need to increase 44 percent by 2030 to meet such demand and again since money is the only initiator of action are we to expect that any country on the planet is going to be able to afford the massive changes needed to revolutionize agriculture water processing energy production and the like when the global debt pyramid scheme is slowly shutting the entire world down not to mention the fact that the unemployment you currently see is going to become normality due to the nature of technological unemployment the jobs are not coming back and finally a broad social perspective from 1970 to 2010 poverty on this planet doubled due to this system and given our current state do you honestly think we will see anything less than more doubling more suffering and more mass starvation there is not going to be any recovery this is not some long depression that we're sudden someday gonna pull out of I think the next phase we're going to see after the next round of economic collapse is massive civil unrest when employment checks stop being paid because the states have no money left and when things get so bad that people lose confidence and they're evicted leaders they will demand change if we don't kill each other in the process or destroy the environment I'm just afraid that we might get to the point of no return and that bothers me no end we do all we can to avoid that condition clear that we're on the verge of a great transition in human life that what we face now is this fundamental change of the life we've known over the last century there has to be a link between the economy and the resources of this planet the resources being of course all animal and plant life the health of the oceans and everything else this is a monetary Paradigm that will not let go until it's killed the last human being the in-group will do all it can to stay in power and that's what you got to keep in mind they'll use the Army and Navy and lies or whatever they have to use to keep in power they're not about to give it up because they don't know of any other system that will perpetuate their kind [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] take a straight and stronger course to the corner of your life [Music] just remember that the goal is for us all the capture [Music] squares [Music] with love and care for yourself [Applause] time this time and time with your time and its news is captured for the queen to use [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Moconomy

Views: 941,309

Keywords: documentary, Zeitgeist - Moving Forward, Peter Joseph, Economics, documentaries, best documentary, Robert Sapolsky, Human Survival, Gabor Maté, full documentaries, free documentaries, economy, finance, business, zeitgeist movement, peter joseph zeitgeist, socioeconomics, global issues today, global issues poverty, documentary history, documentary now, Economy Documentary, Survivalism, youtube documentary, zeitgeist documentary, poverty documentary, poverty, poverty causes and effects

Id: mboDCYyFxW0

Length: 161min 31sec (9691 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023