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?
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-