the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement

and author of the new book which I have here

'The New Human Rights Movement.'

Peter, it's so great to talk to you.

I really enjoyed going through most of the book

over the last week or 10 days or so,

and I think to get our audience into

what you're tackling in this particular book,

I'm sort of left with the idea of

looking at individual problems

from a structuralist perspective

or a broader perspective than we otherwise might.

Is that a good way to assess the general idea of this book?

Yes, that's a pretty good encapsulation.

And when you started writing this book,

tell me how you approached the problem.

Was it that, in your time researching individual topics,

you decided hey, there's a broader issue or a broader perspective

we can look at? Did it come in the opposite direction?

Did you enter with one particular issue, like for example

poverty or hunger, both of which you address in the book?

I would say the motivation to approach it this way is

taking a good hard look at what we've done as activists throughout time.

The activist community tends to be

far more localized in their views,

they separate themselves into different schools so to speak,

you have the ecological activists, the social activists and so on.

And after spending a lot of years as an activist myself

looking at the world's problems,

I realized that there was a strong lapse of any kind of social psychology,

anything that related to sociology itself,

denying effectively the long-standing social science,

the biological science, the psychological science,

the sociological science, the ecological influences

and that synergy that really defines us as human beings

and ultimately defines the state of the world.

So I'm trying to take a social science perspective with this book,

and I think if people understand it -

and that is why its called 'The New Human Rights Movement.'

Obviously this subject could,

given the context of structuralism as I call it,

you could apply it to a lot of different things,

but I wanted to hone in on activism for the 21st century.

So that's the motivation, to get people on board with more of a

social psychology perspective of what needs to happen,

to understand yourself and the predicament of the world

and how to change it.

Maybe to give our audience an example

of one issue that you tackle in the book

we could talk a little bit about poverty, and

I think we all can probably imagine

the people we know, who approach poverty from you know:

"This is sort of the way things are,

despite our system, poverty is an inevitability.

It's always there, it's always going to be there."

And you take a different approach

which is: poverty is an optional and also direct result

of the systems that we've chosen.

So, can we start with the conversation around poverty

and how you approach it?

Yeah, it's disheartening to see

how passive people have become about

both domestic and international poverty.

Poverty is, in the words of Gandhi, "the worst form of violence."

Systemically speaking, it leads to so many different

detrimental outcomes, whether you're dealing with mental health,

whether you're dealing with interpersonal relationships,

whether you're dealing with physical health.

And if you look closely poverty and its encapsulating system,

overarching system reference which you call socioeconomic inequality

(which is what I address throughout the book a lot),

poverty is an externality of our system,

an externality of market capitalism,

it's an externality of the economy.

Within that particular context,

it's a great starting point because I think everyone

has experienced poverty on some basic level, whether

vicariously, watching the Global South

and the complete destitution that still exists there today

as an issue of post-colonialism which is

something to point out as well. I mean,

I don't want to get too spirally here

but I think it's important to point out that people have this great mythology

about where poverty came from and people say

"Well, we've just left people behind in capitalism" and so on.

The people in the Global South, in Africa, Latin America, Asia and so on that

are still in destitute third world poverty,

are not there because they've been left behind,

they're there because over the course of time they've effectively been robbed.

And that's something that isn't given enough gravity of course

in the intellectual circles as to why these things exist,

which makes you kind of upset when you hear people talk about

how we've advanced poverty on this planet without

talking about the fact that the reason poverty exists

is because of the social system's incentives

at the same time, over the long term.

But to be more specific to your question, poverty is both

a cause and an effect in terms of epidemiology.

In social science research, people refer to poverty as

a "root" of something, for example,

families in poverty are known to

create children that have lower IQs.

The brain function doesn't develop as well.

There's reductions in the amygdala and the hippocampus.

Literally, you're creating brain damage

through the synergy of poverty and deprivation, that's just one example.

But it's also known as an effect too.

That's why it's addressed in the book as such.

I refer to it as a negative externality. For those familiar with economics,

an externality is something that happens

outside of the purview, the reference point

of what economics recognizes.

So pollution is a negative externality for example, as is poverty.

And that's a pretty radical thing for me to say because

as you've pointed out, most people have not perceived it that way.

But when you look at the amount of wealth on this planet,

in material terms - I'm not just talking about money -

but even if you look at the money, it's pretty staggering, you know.

We all know about the inequality statistics, I won't go into that.

Poverty could easily be resolved both through financial means

and through efficient use of resources with modern methods.

But we don't do it

because of the way the economic structure is organized,

its incentives, its procedural dynamics you could say.

And that is, of course, a big subject in the book,

and I really hope people will begin to understand moreso that

poverty is really just a form of violence

coming down from our social system, doesn't need to exist

and we should work to change it.

And Peter, some people will hear what we've talked about so far

and they'll say, listen, you're criticizing the capitalist system,

and you know, some people are poor in capitalism

but if you're alluding to communism, EVERYbody's poor in communism.

How does someone like you,

who has such a nuanced and detailed knowledge of these issues,

start to break through those sort of

knee-jerk reactions from some

who would no doubt have that reaction when hearing what you've outlined so far?

What's the best path in to a productive conversation

with someone who reacts that way?

I think the first step is to start to expose the mythology the Western world

has ascribed to when it comes to historical communism.

Historical communism as practiced in the Soviet Union

was a particular niche,

a particular kind of central planning, a particular kind of authoritarianism.

And when people say this, they automatically

create a false duality between capitalism and then this other supposed

ideal of what communism is or was or was supposed to be.

And what it is or was or was supposed to be in terms of

communism or socialism or Marxism -

any of those terms that people want to throw out -

it's extremely counterproductive because there's very little

critical analysis or historical understanding of what actually happened

with those social systems or social approaches,

not to mention the grand ambiguity.

To even talk about what socialism means today is to

define it about ten dozen different ways, as I think you know.

So, I step back from that and I try to take a

train of thought perspective as opposed to a polarized one.

Just because something isn't market capitalism

doesn't necessarily mean it's communism,

so you start from that position.

And then you start to outline what it is in society

that's actually created the advancement.

And I wouldn't say things like economic growth

because that's a contrivance of market capitalism,

but what has actually improved people's lives?

What are the mechanisms that have led to higher standards of living,

to reduced child mortality,

to the current alleviation of poverty that's been slowly,

slowly getting a little bit better over the course of the past 60, 70 years?

And the answer to that is the application of design efficiency and technology.

And, as I get to the end of this book,

I hone in on those specific points that have actually underscored

the benefit of our economic efficiency:

benefited of us, in our public health and so on.

And I isolate those from the market,

and I want to encourage people to develop a new system

that harnesses those issues, harnesses

the amazing efficiency we've achieved

as human beings, as intelligent thinkers,

as opposed to this archaic system that is lost

in what's called the Malthusian period.

It's lost in this Malthusian, Machiavellian highly scarcity-driven world.

So I apologize, I've deviated a bit from your question.

When people approach me with the communist duality,

I pretty much just have to stop them and begin a long explanation that

what they're referencing is a false duality to begin with,

and that if you really want to get down to it, here's the train of thought.

Here are the attributes that have defined our society and made it better.

Why can't we simply amplify these attributes

without any of these ideological stigmas and interference?

And sadly enough, stigmas and labels and interference has been

a great way to dismiss a lot of these ideas over time,

so it's unfortunately a current that we have to

walk against still in the 21st century.

Let's pause there with Peter Joseph,

founder of The Zeitgeist Movement, author of the new book

'The New Human Rights Movement'

and we'll pick it up in part two with the concept of scarcity

which you've spoken about a lot and is interesting to me

so we'll follow up there.

We're continuing our conversation today with Peter Joseph,

founder of The Zeitgeist Movement, also author of the new book

'The New Human Rights Movement.'

We started getting into, Peter, this concept of scarcity.

And I want to talk about that in the context of market capitalism.

In many more micro ways you point out in the book,

for example with food production and hunger,

that the concept of scarcity and lack of resources to meet the needs

is essentially a contrived result

of how we've decided to allocate resources.

And you point out in great detail in the appendix to the book,

how not only food production and hunger could be solved

with current resources and technology,

but so could clean water and energy.

Let's maybe start and focus on food production and hunger.

Would you call this a decision that has been made effectively

by global society not to solve the problem of hunger?

Well that would inch into a kind of a conspiratorial view

which I don't subscribe to with any of this.

What I think it is, it's a cultural unfolding that goes back

hundreds of years, to before the late 18th century

and the start of the Industrial Revolution,

what some people call the Great Divergence.

Scarcity has been with society in a very visceral way

since the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago when

we emerged from hunter gatherer tribes that

had a fairly abundant amount of resources