Original subtitles

In a decaying society, Art

if it is truthful, must also reflect decay.

And unless it wants to break faith with its social function

Art must show the world as changeable.

And help to change it.

-Ernst Fischer

Deadly riots over the government's

plan to avoid defaulting on its loans...

is that the unemployment keeps

rising and it has to keep rising

just because we have an excess supply of goods...

this is all borrowed money...

and that debt is owned by banks in other countries...

M-O-N-E-Y, in the form of a convenient personal loan...

... filter cigarette that delivers the taste...

45 malt liquor... Are You Hot?!...

is the US planning to bomb Iran?...

...America is sponsoring terror attacks in Iran...

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 would look at me and she would 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 that 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:

“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 - 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.

So you have to ask yourself

when you finally get the ultimate promotion

when you have 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 thrill wears off

- and it will wear off -

Then what?

How far do you have to walk down that road

before you see where it leads?

Surely you understand

it will never be enough.

So you have to ask yourself the question:

What matters?

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They're Hot!

They're Rich!

And They're Spoiled!

America's #1 Show is Back!

Gentle Machine Productions Presents

A Peter Joseph Film

When I was a young man

growing up in New York City

I refused to 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 once believed the earth was flat

but that doesn't make it so.'

I explained that America owed everything it has

to other cultures

and other nations

and that 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

where 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 the precious finite resources

are perpetually wasted and destroyed

in the name of profit 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.

[ZEITGEIST]

[ZEITGEIST: MOVING FORWARD]

[Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful

committed citizens can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

-Margaret Mead]

Part 1: Human Nature

So you're a scientist

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 over-simplifying view of

where influences are

influences how a cell deals with

an energy crisis up to

what makes us who we are on the most individualistic

levels of personality.

And what you've got is this complete false dichotomy

built around nature as deterministic

at the very bottom of all the causality.

Life is DNA and the code of codes

and the Holy Grail, and everything is driven by it....

At the other end is 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 that

it is virtually impossible to understand

how biology works

outside of the context of environment.

[It's Genetic]

One of the most crazy making

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

know modern biology, but for most people

out there, what it winds-up meaning is:

a deterministic view of life;

one rooted in biology and genetics;

genes equal things that cannot be changed;

genes equal things that are

inevitable and you might as well not

waste resources trying to fix;

might as well not put societal energies into trying

to improve because it's inevitable and it's unchangeable...

and that is sheer nonsense.

[Disease]

It is widely thought that conditions like

ADHD are genetically programmed

That conditions like schizophrenia are genetically programmed.

The truth is the opposite.

Nothing is genetically programmed.

There are very rare diseases

a small handful

extremely sparsely represented in the population

that are truly genetically determined.

Most complex conditions

might have a predisposition that has a genetic component

but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination.

The whole search for the source of diseases in the genome

was doomed to failure before anybody even thought of it

because most diseases are not genetically predetermined.

Heart disease, cancers, strokes

rheumatoid conditions, autoimmune conditions in general

mental health conditions, addictions...

none of them are 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 of them will get cancer.

[Behavior]

Genes are 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 and the kind of child rearing

affect gene expression

actually turning on or off different genes

to put you on a different 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 a child, the abuse actually

caused a 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

the epigenetic influence is what happens

environmentally to either activate or deactivate certain genes.

In New Zealand, there was a study

that was done in a town called Dunedin

in which a few thousand individuals

were studied from birth 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, children 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”.

A fancy technique where you can

take a specific gene out of a mouse

and that mouse and its descendants will not have that gene.

You have ”knocked out” that gene.

So there's this one gene that encodes

for a protein that has something to do

with learning and memory and with this fabulous demonstration-

you “knock out” that gene and you

have a mouse that doesn't learn as well.

“Oh! 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 a 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 'soap-boxing'

but run with the old

version of “It's genetic!”

and it's not that far from the history of eugenics

and things of that sort.

It's a widespread misconception

and it's a potentially fairly dangerous one.

One reason that the

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 is punish them - 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 Louis Menand

who wrote in the New Yorker

Very astutely, he said:

“it's all in 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 economic and political factors

that, in fact, underlie

many troublesome behaviors.

[Case Study: Addiction]

Addictions are usually

considered to be a drug-related issue

but looking at it 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 it up or promises to do so

but can't follow through

and when you understand that, you see that

there are many more addictions

than simply those related to drugs.

There's workaholism; addiction to shopping;

to the Internet; to video games...

There's the addiction to power. People that have power but they

want 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.

We are 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 downtown Eastside patients.

Yet, they are 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 is a respected member of

the board of several other corporations.

But, tobacco smoke related diseases

kill 5 ½ million people around the world every year.

In the United States they kill 400,000 people a year.

And these people are addicted to what? To profit.

To such a degree that they are addicted

that they are actually in denial

about the impact of their activities

which is typical for addicts, this denial.

And that's a respectable 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.

[The Myth]

There is a general myth that drugs, in themselves, are addictive.

In fact, the war on drugs is predicated on the

idea that if you interdict the source of

drugs you can deal with addiction that way.

Now, if you understand addiction in the broader sense

we see that nothing in itself is addictive.

No substance, no drug is by itself addictive

and no behavior is by itself addictive.

Many people can go shopping without becoming shopaholics.

Not everyone becomes a 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 makes for the full flowering of addiction.

In short, it's not the drug that's addictive

it's the question of the susceptibility of the individual

to being addicted to a particular substance or behavior.

[Environment]

If we wish to understand what

then makes some people susceptible

we actually have to look at the life experience.

The old idea, although it's old but it's still

broadly held, that addictions are due to some genetic cause

is 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 psychological needs

but also their very brains in certain ways.

And that process begins in utero.

[Prenatal]

It has been shown, for example

that if you stress mothers during pregnancy

their children are more likely to have

traits that predispose 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 the life experiences beginning in utero.

Environment does not begin at birth.

Environment begins as soon as you have an environment.

As soon as you are a fetus, you are subject to whatever

information is coming through mom's circulations.

Hormones, levels of nutrients...

A great landmark example of this is

something called the Dutch Hongerwinter.

In 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 was 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 and third trimester is when your body is

going about trying to learn about the environment:

How menacing of a place is it out there?

How plentiful? How much nutrients am I getting

by way of mom's circulation?

Be a fetus who was starving during that time and your body

programs forever after to be

really, really stingy with your sugar and fat and

what you do is you store every bit of it.

Be a Dutch Hunger Winter fetus and 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 human mothers. For example, in a British study

women who were abused in pregnancy

will have higher levels of

the stress hormone cortisol in their placenta at birth

and their children are more likely to have conditions that

predispose them to addictions by age 7 or 8.

So in utero stress already prepares the gun

for all kinds of mental health issues.

An Israeli study done on children

born to mothers who were pregnant

prior to the onset of the 1967 war...

These women, of course, were very stressed

and their offspring have a higher incidence of schizophrenia

than the average cohort.

So, there is plenty of evidence now that prenatal

effects have a huge impact on the developing human being.

[Infancy]

The point about human development and

specifically human 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 muster that much neurological coordination

balance, muscle strength, visual acuity

until a year and a half, two years of age.

That's because the brain development in the horse

happens in the safety of the womb

and in the human being, it 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, we walk on two legs. So, our pelvis narrows

to accommodate that. So now we

have a narrower pelvis, a larger head

Bingo! We have to be born prematurely.

And that means the brain development that in other animals

occurs in utero

in us, occurs after birth

and much of that under the impact of the environment.

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

and you put him in a dark room for five years

he will 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

circuit's present and active at birth

will atrophy and die and new ones will not develop.

[Memory]

There is a significant way in which

early experiences shape adult behavior

and even and especially early

experiences for which there is 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 facts

details, episodes, circumstances.

But the structure in the brain which is called the hippocampus

which encodes recall memory

doesn't even begin to develop fully until a year and a half

and it is not fully developed until much later.

Which is why hardly anybody has

any recall memory prior to 18 months.

But there is another kind of

memory which is called implicit memory

which is, in fact, an emotional memory

where the emotional impact and the interpretation the child makes

of those emotional experiences are ingrained in the brain

in the form of nerve circuits ready to fire

without specific recall.

So to 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 birth mother

because there's nothing there to recall with.

But the emotional memory of separation and rejection

is deeply embedded in their brains.

Hence, they are much more likely

to experience a sense of rejection

and a great emotional upset

when they perceive themselves as being rejected

by other people.

That's not unique to people who are

adopted but it is particularly strong in them

because of this function of implicit memory.

People who are addicted, given all the

research literature and in my experience

the hard-core addicts virtually were all

significantly abused as children

or suffered severe emotional loss.

Their emotional or implicit memories

are those of a world that's not safe

and not helpful; caregivers who were not to be trusted

and relationships that are not

safe enough to open up to vulnerability

and hence their responses tend

to be to keep themselves 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 is strictly a function of implicit memory

which sometimes has to do with incidents they don't even recall.

[Touch]

Infants who are born premature or often in incubators

and various types of gadgetry and

machinery for weeks and perhaps months,

it's now 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 who are never picked up will actually die.

That is how much of a fundamental

need being held is to human beings.

In our society, there is 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 is just the opposite of what the child needs

and these children might go back to sleep because they give up

and their brains just shut down as a

way of defending against the vulnerability

of being abandoned really by their parents

but their implicit memories will be

that of the world that doesn't give a damn.

[Childhood]

A lot of these differences are structured very early in life.

In a way, 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 have 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 early sensitivity isn't just an evolutionary mistake.

It exists again in many different species.

Even in seedlings there's an early adaptive process

to the kind of environment they are growing up in

but for humans, the adaptation is to the quality of social relations.

And so, early life:

how nurturing, 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?...

or 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 are in.

The great British child psychiatrist, DW Winnicott, 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 dramatic, 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 are not neglected

and they're not traumatized

but what should happen

the presence of the emotionally available nurturing parent

just is not available to them because of the

stresses in our society and the parenting environment.

The psychologist Allan Surer calls that "Proximal Abandonment"

when the parent is physically present

but emotionally absent.

I have spent...

roughly the last 40 years of my life

working with the most violent of 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 environment

or were the survivors of family members who had been killed

their closest family members, by other people.

The Buddha argued that everything depends on everything else.

He says 'the 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.

This has now 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 "bio psycho social" nature of human development

which says that the biology of human beings

depends very much on their interaction with

the social and psychological environment.

Specifically, the psychiatrist and researcher

Daniel Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA

has coined a 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 lifecycle.

It's particularly true when you are

dependent and helpless when your brain is developing

but it's true even in adults and even at the end of life.

[Culture]

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 predominately

off of foraging and 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;

in a world 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

of human history and that seems quite clear.

So where did we go wrong?

Violence is not universal.

It is not symmetrically distributed throughout the human race.

There is a huge variation in the amount of violence in different societies.

There are some societies that have virtually no violence.

There are others that destroy themselves.

Some of the Anabaptist religious

groups that are complete 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 Kibbutzim in Israel

the level of violence is so low that the criminal courts there

will often send violent offenders

people who have committed crimes

to live on the Kibbutzim 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

our metaphysical, our linguistic influences, etc.

our societies help 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

and different mindsets and I suspect

different brains coming along with that.

We, in America, are in one of the most individualistic of societies.

With capitalism being a system that allows you to go

higher and higher up a potential pyramid and

the deal is that 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...

A world in which you have few reciprocal partners

is a world with a lot less altruism.

[Human Nature]

So, this brings us to a total impossible juncture which is

to try to make sense in perspective science...

as to what that 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 off 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 are individualistic and that they're selfish.

The real 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 are 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

into people who are compassionate

and cooperative and who have empathy for other people.

So...

the opposite, that we often see in our

society is, in fact, a 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

and a different set of traits if they are 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 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 if things that shouldn't happen, do...

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?

[Part II: Social Pathology]

So, one might ask where did this all begin?

What we have today... really a world in a state of

cumulative collapse.

[The Market]

You get it started with John Locke.

And John Locke introduces property.

He has three provisos for just private right and property.

And the three provisos are:

There must be enough left over for others

and that you must not let it spoil

and that you, most of all, must mix your labor with it.

It seems justified- you mix your labor with the world

then you are entitled to the product

and as long as there's enough left over for others

and as long as it doesn't spoil

and you don't allow anything to go to waste then that's okay.

He spends a long time on this and his famous treatise of government

and it's since been the canonical text

for economic and political and legal understanding.

It is still the classic text that's studied.

Well - after he gives the provisos

and you're almost thinking at the time whether you

are for private property or not

he has given a very good 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 or erased-

but that's what happens.

So, now we have not

product and your property earned by your own labor-

oh no- money buys labor now.

There is no longer consideration

whether there is enough left over for others;

there is no longer consideration of whether it spoils

because he says money is like

silver and gold and gold can't spoil

and therefore money can't be responsible for waste...

which is ridiculous. We are not talking about money

and silver, we are talking about what its effects are.

It's one non sequitur after another.

Just the most startling

logical legerdemain 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...

Locke started with God made it all this way

this is God's right

and now we get also with Smith

saying 'it's not only God's...'

well, he's not actually saying this but

this is what's happening philosophically, in principle

he's saying that 'it is not only a question of private property...'

That's all now 'presupposed'- It's Given!

And that there's 'money investors that buy labor' – Given!

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 now.

And so he comes along and what his big idea is

and again it's just introduced in parentheses, in passing...

You know, when people put out goods for sale - the supply

and other people buy them - the demand and so forth

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 them into equilibrium.

So, now we have "God is actually imminent”.

He just didn't give the rights to property

and all its wherewithal and its "natural rights"

regarding what Locke said...

now we have the system itself as "God".

In fact, Smith says, when he talks

and you have to read the whole of the

Wealth of Nations' to find this quote.

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...

this is well before Darwin.

And so he called them the 'Race of Laborers'.

So you can see: there was inherent racism built-in here

there was an inherent life blindness to kill

innumerable children

and he thought: 'that's the Invisible Hand making supply

meet demand and demand meet supply.'

So, see how wise "God" is?

So you can see a lot of the really virulent

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

where 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 is a complete confusion

in economic doctrine

between those two sequences.

They think that the Money Sequence of Value

delivers the Life Sequence of Value

and that's why they say if more goods are sold

If GDP's rise and so forth...

there would be more enhanced well-being

and we could take the GDP as being our basic layer indicator

of social health...

Well, there you see the confusion.

It's talking about Money Sequences of Value

that is, all the receipts and all the revenues that are

derived from selling goods

and they're confusing that with life reproduction.

So, you have built right into this thing from the beginning

a complete conflation of the money

and life sequences of value.

So, we are dealing with a kind of structured delusion

which 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.

[Welcome to the Machine]

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 of 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% 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 US economy

if health care services increased more so...

perhaps to 3 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 is just no profit there.

There's an old saying-

Pass a law and create a business'.

Whether you are creating a business for a lawyer or whatever.

So, crime does create

business just like destruction creates

business in Haiti.

We have now roughly 2,000,000 people incarcerated

in this country (USA)

and of those many are in prisons run

by private corporations:

Corrections Corporation of America, Wackenhut

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 a 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?

Well... 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 use 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-reviewed 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.

Try to name any means of life that

isn't threatened and endangered...

You can'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 where insanity is

where you keep doing the same thing over and over again

even 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.

[The Anti-Economy]

There is 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

exists 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 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 breakdown,

fail and expire within a certain amount of time.

This is termed - “Planned obsolescence”.

Planned obsolesce is the backbone of the underlying market

strategy of every goods producing corporation in existence.

While 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, coltan, 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 into a phrase:

“Efficiency, Sustainability, and

Preservation are the enemies of our economic system” .

Likewise, just a physical goods need to be constantly

produced and reproduced

regardless of their environmental impact

the service industry operates with an equal rational.

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 are on the subject...

Crime and Terrorism in this system are good!

Well, at least economically...

for it is employing police

generating hi-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 can 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.

[Value System Disorder]

The American dream is based on

the 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 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 why do people continue to buy in this way

which is ultimately eco-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 boast about how they

get into the minds of infants

what they hear is already making them

conditioned to the brand.

Then you see, that's how

people have been such fools.

They have been taught to be fools.

It's a value system 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

4000$ on a handbag

that likely cost 10 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 we annually

exchange useless crap a few times a year.

And we might wonder why so many today have a

compulsion to shopping and acquisition

when it is clear that they have 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 1st 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.

[The “Economists”]

You know economists, in fact, are not economists at all.

They're propagandists of money value

and you will find that all of their

models basically get down to token

exchanges that are true to profit

of one side or both sides or whatever

but they are completely disconnected from the actually

existing world of reproduction.

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 were not charitable enough

to enable him, as an individual

to meet the electric bill.

HMMMMMM...

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 gonna need

a whole lot of infomercials, 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 very system Milton Friedman promotes.

Whether you are dealing with the philosophies of

Milton Friedman, F.A. Hyack

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

and any form of physical life supporting efficiency

is ruled out by default

and replaced by the singular notion that humans

seeking 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 they are doing is tracking the money sequences.

That's all it is, is tracking money sequences

presupposing everything that matters.

One: There is no life coordinates...

whoa... no life coordinates!

Two: That all the agents are

self-maximizing preferences seekers.

That is, they think of nothing other than themselves

and what they can get most for themselves.

That's the ruling notion of rationality:

self-maximizing choice

and the only thing that they are interested in self-maximizing

is money or commodities.

Well, where does social relations come in?

It doesn't, except 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 the fundamental issue is?

Oh, "need" isn't even in your lexicon.

You dissolve it into "wants"...

and what is a want? That means

money demand that wants to buy.

Well, if it's money demand that wants to buy

it has nothing to do with need

because maybe the person has no money demand

and desperately needs, 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?

Really, when one thinks of it

it's got to be the most bizarre

delusion in the history of human thought.

[Monetary System]

Now- so far we have focused on the market system.

But this system is actually only

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 that govern it.

One is fractional reserve banking

the 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 a Ponzi scheme.

Nothing grows forever.

It's not possible.

As a great psychologist James Hillman wrote

“The only thing that grows in the 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:

1: 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 2: 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 principal 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 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 a 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 to 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 corporations to have a pool of people

that have no financial mobility.

But hey - that same idea 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 hole 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 trade it.

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 explained 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.

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 to make trades they have no compunction about

no thought whatsoever as to how what they are doing

might affect their fellow human being.

So they breed these robots.

These people who have no souls

and since they don't even want to pay these people anymore-

they are now breeding robots – real robots –

real algorithmic traders.

Goldman Sachs in the high frequency trading scandal:

they put a computer next to the New York Stock Exchange.

This computer, this “co-located” computer, as they call it:

it front-runs all the trades on the exchange and

hits the exchange with volumes of orders

in ways that "scalp"

pennies and nickels away from the exchange.

It's like they're siphoning money all day long.

They went one quarter last year 30

or 60 straight days without a single down day

and made millions of dollars every single day?

That statistically impossible!

When I worked on Wall Street, the way it works is

everyone kicks upstairs to bribes.

The brokers bribe to the office manager

the office manager bribes to the regional sales manager.

The regional sales manager

bribes to the national sales manager.

It's a common understanding.

At Christmas, who gets the biggest bonus at Christmas

in an average broker job? 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 bribe the compliance officer

yeah, that's right, you are complying with the law!

So how has fraud become the system?

It's no longer a byproduct.

It is the system.

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 are essentially trading fraudulent claims

that there is absolutely no hope of ever paying back.

They are processing, generating and re-securitizing nothing.

If I write $20 billion on a cocktail napkin

and I sell it to J.P. Morgan and J.P. Morgan writes

$20 billion on a cocktail napkin

and we swap those two cocktail napkins at a bar

and we each pay ourselves a quarter of 1% in a fee

we make a lot of money for our Christmas bonus.

We each have on our books a $20 billion 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-

know 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, comically borrow

their money from banks to begin with.

We are now seeing attempts to bailout whole countries

by conglomerates of other countries

through the International banks.

But how do you bailout 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%

per person just to cover the interest in the near future.

Economists are now foreshadowing that within a few decades

60% 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 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, fucking stupid?!

Hey! Hey! Mars- my man.

Help a brother out, uh?

Grow up, kid.

Saturn! What's up man?

You remember that smokin' nebula I hooked you up with

a while back?

uh- listen Earth.

We're getting really tired of you.

You've been given everything and yet you waste it all.

You've 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.

You're on your own, pal.

Yeah, whatever.

[Public Health]

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 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 60 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 1 million dollars to spare and I put it into a CD

at 4% interest-

I will make 40,000 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 4% 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 Classism”.

Of course, historically, social stratification

has always been deemed unfair

but obviously accepted overall

as now 1% of the population owns 40% 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 are puzzled by the contrast

between the material success of our societies

- unprecedented levels of wealth -

and the many social failings.

If you look at the rates of

drug abuse or violence or self harm

amongst kids or mental illness

there is clearly something going deeply wrong

with our societies.

The data I have been describing

simply shows that intuition that people

have had for hundreds of years, that inequality is divisive

and socially corrosive.

But, 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 superiority and inferiority.

That kind of division...

Maybe going with the respect or disrespect

- people feeling looked down on at the bottom

which, by the way, is why violence is

more common in more unequal societies -

the trigger to violence is so often people feeling looked down

upon and disrespected.

If there is one principle I could emphasize

that is, the most important principle underlying

the prevention of violence

it would be “Equality”.

The single most significant factor

that affects the rate of violence

is the degree of equality versus the degree of inequality

in that society.

So, what we're looking at 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 are talking about

crime or health or mental illness or whatever.

One of the really disturbing findings out there in public health

is never ever make the mistake of being poor.

Or being born poor.

Your health pays for it in 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 gradient exists.

A simple obvious answer

which is, 'if you're 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 the

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- '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 and

socialized medicine.

Okay – next 'simple explanation':

Oh -on the average- the poorer you are

the more likely you are to smoke

and drink and all sorts of lifestyle risk factors.

Yeah, those contribute but careful studies have shown

that it explains maybe about a third of the variability.

So what's left?

What's left is having a ton to do

with the STRESS of poverty

So, the poorer you are, starting off being

the person who is one dollar of 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 in 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 Scores: 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 in 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 4-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, depletion and pollution...

the greatest purveyor of violence-

war - crime - poverty - animal abuse and inhumanity...

the greatest generator of social and personal neurosis...

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 Socio-Economic System itself

at its very foundation.

[Part 3: Project Earth ]

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 a 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 can could hurt us in the long run.

With that goal of “Maximum Sustainability” understood

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?

Hmmm... not a damn thing.

Okay then - what about religion?

Surely the great creator had to have left some blueprints somewhere...

Nope...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 ideas

proposed 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 is:

What do we need to survive?

The answer, of course, are Planetary Resources.

Whether it is the water we drink, the energy we use

or 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 fresh water 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 earthy 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 of 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 that 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 retroactions”

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 breakdown

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 that such multi-varied

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 & 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 bring 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 question 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 are we 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 and 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 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 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 no longer needed...

sort of how a library works today.

In fact, these centers could not only exist in

the community in 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 the 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 whole

in the most efficient and sustainable way

could be termed:

a “RESOURCE-BASED ECONOMY”.

The idea was defined in the 1970s by

Social Engineer- Jacque 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 of these things you are saying, Jacque...

could they be built with what we know today?

Or 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 for man:

there are no Negro problems or Polish problems

or Jewish problems or Greek problems

or women's problems – there are 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 this type of incompetency.

It was great - the free enterprise system -

about 35 years ago. That was the last of its usefulness.

Now, we have got to change our way of thinking or perish.

The horror movies of the future will be our society...

the way it didn't work

and politics...

would be part of a horror movie.

Well, lots of people today use the term 'cold science'

because it's analytical

and they don't even know what analytical means.

Science means: closer approximations

to 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 strengths

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 are 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 that 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 & 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, 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, warmth, love -

All those things are necessary

and 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's ground up

global, systems approach to extraction, production and distribution

is based upon on 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 would we go about designing an ideal city?

What shape should we make it?

Square? Trapezoid?

Well, given we are 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 lets include a nice open park

an entertainment/events area for cultural purposes and socializing

and educational and research facilities.

And since we are 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 the consider the core

infrastructure or intestines of the city organism.

These would be the water, goods

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 mailmen or garbage men.

It is built right in. We could even use

automated pneumatic tubes and similar technologies.

Same 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, transveyors 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 a car 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 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 is a glaring alternative -

the soilless mediums of hydroponics and aeroponics

which also reduce nutrient and water

requirements by up to 75 % of our current usage.

Food can now be organically grown on an industrial scale

in enclosed vertical farms.

Such as in 50 story 1 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 Belt 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 under utilized technologies.

But, of course, this begs the question:

how does this technology, and goods in

general, get created in the first place?

This bring 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'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 have been going up in the development

and use of technology in an exponential way.

So, definitely automation is going to continue. You cannot stop

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.

Like most engineers, I'm fascinated by biology because it is

so full of examples of extraordinary pieces of engineering.

What biology is - is the study of things that copy themselves.

As good a definition of life as we've got.

Again, as an engineer, I have always been

intrigued by the idea of machines copying themselves.

RepRap is a three-dimensional printer-

that's to say it is a printer that you plug into your 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

3-D printers have been around for about 30 years.

The big thing about RepRap is that it prints most of its own parts.

So, if you've got one, you could

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-

the so-called 3-D printing- when you directly build

3-D objects 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 jobs for a sector of the society

it also has issues and complications.

For example, construction is the most dangerous job that there is.

It is worse than mining and agriculture.

That has the highest level of fatality in almost every country.

Another issue is the waste.

An average home in the United States has 3 to 7 tons of waste.

So this is huge if we look at the impact of construction

and knowing about 40% 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 Autor 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, breaks, insurance, pensions

and they can work 24 hours a day, everyday.

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 seemed

to emerge to re-absorb the displaced workers.

Today, the service sector is the only real hub left

and currently employs over 80% of the American workforce

with most industrialized countries maintaining a similar proportion.

However, this sector now being

challenged increasingly by automated kiosks-

automated restaurants and even automated stores.

Economists today are finally

acknowledging what they had 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% 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...

for 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 cities technical operations.

The city is, in fact, one big automated machine.

It has sensors in all technical belts

to track the progress of architecture-

energy gathering, production, distribution and the like.

Now, would people be needed to oversee these

operations in the event of a malfunction and the like?

Most probably: yes.

But that number would decrease

over time as improvements continue.

However, as of today, maybe 3% 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

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 would 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 were 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 1%.

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.

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 100 times more distortion

than it does contribution.

Good morning class. 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 would like to go first?

Okay, how about you Sarah?

When I grow up I want to work at McDonald's like my mom!

Oh, family tradition, eh?

How about you, Linda?

When I grow up, I'm going to be a

prostitute on the streets of New York City!

Oh! glamour girl, huh?

Very ambitious.

How about you, Tommy?

When I grow up, I'm going to be a

rich, elitist businessman who works

on Wall Street and profits off of

the collapse of foreign economies.

Enterprising...

And great to see some multicultural interest!

[Victims of Culture]

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% almost immediately

for there is nothing to steal, embezzle, scam, or the like.

95% 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 5%?

the truly violent...

often seeming to some as being

violent for the sake of being violent...

are they just “evil” people?

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

anymore 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 in our

own attitudes and assumptions and values

that 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 bigots-

if they are brought up in an environment that advocates that

why do you blame the person for it?

They are 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 mis-information.

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.

They become 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 tortured Jews”.

No, he was brought up to torture Jews.

Once you accept the fact that people

have individual choices and they are 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 of our choices

by the culture we live in, by our parents

and by the values that dominate.

So, we're influenced- so there can't be “free” choices.

What's the greatest country in the world?' - the true answer:

I haven't been all over the world and I don't know

enough about different cultures to answer that question.'

I don't know anybody that speaks that way.

They say 'it's the good old USA!

the greatest country in the world!'

There is no survey... 'Have you been to India?' - 'No.'

Have you been to England?' - 'No.'

Have you been to France?' - 'No.'

Then what do you make your assumptions on?'

They can't answer- they get mad at you.

They say, 'God dammit! Who the hell

are you to tell me what to think?!'

You know... Don't forget: you're dealing with aberrated people.

They are not responsible for the answers;

they're victims of culture and that means

they have been influenced by their culture.

[Part 4: Rise]

When we consider a Resource-Based Economy

there are often a number of arguments that tend to come up with...

[EH!] (Interrupted)

[Eh! Hey!]

[Now hold on just a minute!]

[I know what this is. This is called Marxism, buddy.]

[Stalin killed 800 billion people because of ideas like this...]

[My father died in the Gulag!]

[Communist! Fascist!]

[You don't like America you should just leave!]

All right, everybody just calm down...

[Death to the New World Order!]

[Death to the New World Order!]

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.

[System Error]

[Backup Initiated - Restored]

But you know, I've said that sort of thing to people

in 'think tank' type situations

you know these Club of Rome types and so forth...

they say ”Marxist!”

What? Marxist? Where did that come from?

They just got this icon they hold onto-

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 Capitalist

I say I am none of the above. Why do you

think that those are the only options?

All of those political constructs

were created by writers who assumed

we lived on a planet of infinite resources.

Not one of those political philosophies even

contemplates that there might be a shortage of anything.

I believe that communism, socialism, free enterprise, fascism

are part of social evolution.

You can't take a giant step

from one culture to another-

there are in-between systems.

Before there's any “Ism”, we have a life ground

and the life ground is as I've just described

most easily as 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.”

[Beyond The Pale]

It's simply a matter of historical fact

that the dominant intellectual culture

of any particular society reflects the

interests 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 the society, again, which 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 the dominant group.

So, if you look across the board, the

ideas that pervade psychology and

sociology and history

and political economy and political science

fundamentally reflect 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're not a Republican, you must be a Democrat.

If you are not 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 in freedom!

Every time you hear the word freedom

being said anywhere or government 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 for people';

'Oh, this is 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, in a sense, we might call:

a Syntax. A governing syntax of understanding and of value.

So, it governs beneath their own recognition of it

so they might 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 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 and accountability.

In a market system, every politician, every legislation

and hence, every government is for sale.

And even with the 20 trillion dollar bank bailouts

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...

the 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

and 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 will have the illusion of meaningless choice.

Meaningless choice- that we go, like slaves and say

“Oh, I Voted.” The limits of debate in this country are established

before the debate even begins and everyone

else is marginalized and made to seem either

to be communist or some sort of disloyal person

-a “kook”- there's a word...

and now it's “conspiracy”. See- they 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”! Your 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 socio-economic 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 a 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 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 have 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've been

available if they could have afforded to pay for it.

That would be an example of Structural Violence.

Another example: in Africa and other areas-

I'll particularly focus 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 millions of people in the wealthy countries

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 are 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 wars 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.

[Beyond the Peak]

Oil is the foundation of

and is present throughout, the edifice of human civilization.

There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy –oil and natural gas–

in 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's oil. All plastic is oil.

There are 7 gallons of oil in every tire.

Oil is everywhere; it's ubiquitous. And it's only because

of oil that there are 7 billion people or

almost 7 billion people on this planet right now.

The arrival of this cheap and easy energy

which is equivalent, by the way, to

billions of slaves working around the clock

changed the world in such a radical way over the last century

and the population has gone up 10 times.

But, by 2050, 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 of finds.

Five years ago it was using four

barrels of oil for every barrel it finds.

A year from now it is going to be using

eight barrels of oil for every barrel of finds.

What's disturbing to me is the

lack of any real effort from governments worldwide

and industry leaders worldwide to do something different.

We have these, sort of, attempts to build more wind power

and to maybe do something with Tide...

we've got attempts to make our cars a little bit more efficient

but there's nothing which really looks like a

revolution coming along- these are 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 the economy improves and

recovers and the famous growth comes back

it will only be short-lived because

within a short period of time counted in months

rather than years it will hit the supply barrier again;

there will 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

area where there's no more ability to produce cheap energy.

We're at the peak- were on the down slope of oil production.

No way 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 early 2009 but then as you have a “recovery”

the price of oil starts to come back.

It's recently been hovering at about $80

a barrel and what we see is that at even at $80 a

barrel now, with the financial and economic collapse

people are having a hard time affording that.

World oil production right now is about 86 million barrels a day.

Over 10 years, you're looking at

roughly 14 million barrels a day having to be replaced.

There's nothing around which can come even

within 1% 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

a decade or so ago that a concerted effort

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 you

were dealing with a finite commodity...

how could you possibly have build 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 punchline of the whole thing is

that even with oil becoming 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 and jobs... exasperating 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 long and short term.

And the commitment needed to make it happen

can only occur at a severe financial loss.

Therefore, there is no monetary incentive and in this

system, if there is 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% 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% 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

at our current patterns of consumption, by 2030

we will need 2 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

where by 2030 there might be over

8 billion people on this planet.

Energy production alone would need to

increase 44% 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 the 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?

[The Beginning]

There is not going to be any recovery.

This is not some long depression

that we're some day going to pull out of.

I think the next phase that we are going to see after the

next round of economic collapses is massive civil unrest.

When unemployment checks stop being

paid because the states have no money left.

And when things get so bad that people lose confidence

in their elected 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 to no end.

We do all we can to avoid that condition.

It's 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've 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.

[Live from New York]

[Global Protests Shut Down World Economy]

[London-Live]

[China-Live]

[South Africa - Live]

[Spain - Live]

[Russian - Live]

[Canada - Live]

[Saudi Arabia - Live]

[Western Crime Rates Soar]

[UN Declares State of Global Emergency]

[Global Unemployment Hits 65%]

[Fears of World War Continue]

[Debt Collapse now causing food shortages]

[Take it Back]

[While no violence has been reported as

the unprecedented protests continue...

it appears that the equivalent of trillions of dollars

are being systematically withdrawn from bank accounts

across the world and in turn..

evidently now being dumped in

front of the world's central banks.]

[THIS IS YOUR WORLD]

[THIS IS OUR WORLD]

[THE REVOLUTION IS NOW]

[WWW.THEZEITGEISTMOVEMENT.COM]

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