Areas of Unfolding A Perfect Storm by Jason Lord

Welcome to our 4th annual ZDay event in Los Angeles.

My name is Jason Lord.

I volunteer to take part in awareness activism for The Zeitgeist Movement.

My personal involvement has been as a coordinator for the many chapters

that have sprung up in California over the past three years.

I'm honored to be here today and to do my best to communicate what the movement is

and the train of thought that we're putting forth.

I've entitled this presentation 'Areas of Unfolding - A Perfect Storm'.

The movement advocates the need to move out of a market economy

into a Resource-Based Economy.

We use this term for many reasons

and to this end, I will touch upon four major areas of unfolding

in regards to our socio-economic system,

describing what can be seen as the social imperative

to transform our civilization into one that is sustainable and equitable

for all the world's people.

As with our usual introductions, the term 'zeitgeist' can be defined as

the intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era.

The term 'movement' implies motion or change.

And thus, The Zeitgeist Movement is an organization which urges change

in the dominant social values of the time,

specifically the methods and values which would better serve

the well-being of everyone through scientific unfolding.

Our hope is that the direction we advocate becomes self-evident

as the components of what comprises human well-being

and social stability are considered.

So, in this regard, let's open with asking "What are the underlying dynamics

of conflicts and problems that we see in the world today?"

"What can we expect as our social integrity erodes?"

and "What else can we do that embodies the term 'sustainable'?"

To start, we are looking at a huge topic;

there is nothing simple about advocating a transition at a societal scale,

namely our modern industrialized society.

Over the ages, civilizations have developed as complex societies;

history shows a long transition of culture and values.

As complexity increases with the evolution of civilizations,

they become organized around cities; they use agriculture, use writing and mathematics,

and they hold the division of labor. They're centralized,

with people and resources constantly flowing from outlying areas

towards more densely populated hubs.

And as described by archeologist Joseph Tainter

"When seen in terms of complexity,

there have been 24 civilizations from this perspective

and all, except the current industrial civilization so far,

have collapsed."

Tainter describes the growth of civilization as a process

of investing societal resources

and the development of even greater complexity, in order to solve problems.

But complexity costs energy, and eventually a point is reached

where increasing investments become too costly and yield declining returns,

since available energy resources are finite.

And it's at this point where society begins to experience collapse.

It's this notion of collapse I'd like to put into perspective.

Think of collapse in terms of social systems shedding their complexity,

undergoing a contraction of economics

and exhibiting decentralization over time.

This perspective is more accurate, helpful and probably less scary

than imagining the single catastrophic event

some of the existing worldly literature would have you believe.

But it also opens avenues for reshaping the social landscape

that is not offered by the apocalyptic vision.

Our society is a dynamic and complex system,

and it's in this view that we find where the root cause of our problems lie.

Donella H. Meadows was a PhD in biophysics from Harvard

and a research fellow at MIT,

where she did much to bring the field of system dynamics into the public view.

I'd like to read an excerpt from one of her published works regarding systems.

"Hunger, poverty,

environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment,

chronic disease, drug addiction and war

persist, in spite of the analytical ability and the technical brilliance

that have been directed toward eradicating them.

No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist,

but they persist nonetheless.

That is because there are intrinsically system problems, undesirable behaviors

characteristic of the system structures that produce them.

They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame,

see the system as the source of its own problems,

and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it."

The problems we suffer in today's world are symptoms of a systems disorder.

The root cause of these negative outcomes

are rarely identified, in this way, by the public at large.

We have language for good and evil and even identify with such words,

but most of the public has no frame of reference for systems dysfunction,

and that's a problem. Without this frame of reference,

without language for understanding a root-cause systemic issue,

what do you think we fall back on? It will be whatever is in our frame of reference:

politics, religion, nationalism,

monetary-isms, the Democrats, the Liberals.

In a way, the purpose for the awareness of today's zeitgeist is exposed.

And with this cultural zeitgeist in mind,

we're operating a value set that is making for

a perfect storm of system failure on a global scale.

We do not want people to suffer. We do not want a decline back

into the existence of labor-intensive survival, and we don't have to.

But, as our socio-economic system experiences a loss of complexity,

here are the major areas of unfolding that pose our greatest challenge:

monetary economics, labor for income,

energy resources, environmental degradation.

Let's take a quick look at these areas, starting with economics.

When somebody identifies themselves as an economist

or a capitalist, I have to remember that such identity

presupposes the market system as a given by the structure of reality,

the same as the law of gravitation or thermodynamics.

At the same time, they often construe their asserted 'given' reality

as the natural order. Ironically,

this is done even when the given structure has to be imposed on a society

that has chosen to reject it,

such as one can find in the history of military coups or civil wars

plotted and financed by the CIA

and carried out through US military operations

over the last 50 years, to accomplish just such an end.

As the market economy has become the world's baseline,

the concept of constant growth continues to be ignored by the status quo.

The market economy requires constant growth

through perpetual consumption to maintain the labor for income game.

For many of us, we now understand

that infinite growth is a paradox in a finite environment.

Cyclical consumption is an underlying premise of the market model.

This means that a business owner or employer

pays an employee to perform work.

This work means the creation of a product or service

that can be sold to a consumer at a profit.

The money from this transaction then goes back to the employer

to pay the employee to continue their work.

And then the cycle begins again.

Of course, this buying and selling cycle

presupposes the need to purchase any good or service on an ongoing basis.

So in order to keep the structure from breaking down,

it must be perpetuated, regardless of the social cost.

Consumption, it's the new national pastime. Baseball, it's consumption,

the only true lasting American value that's left,

buying things, buying things,

people spending money they don't have on things they don't need,

money they don't have on things they don't need

so they can max out their credit cards and spend the rest of their lives

paying 18% interest on something that cost $12.50.

And they didn't like it when they got it home anyway:

not too bright, folks, not too bright.

Another important component is the issue of debt, along with consumption.

The more an economy expands, the greater the debt that is created,

and this sets up an inevitable system crisis,

for the money needed to pay the interest charged on the loans

does not exist in the economy outright.

Therefore, there is always more outstanding debt than money in existence.

And once the debt grows larger than a person or a company can afford,

the defaults begin, the loans stop, and the money supply begins to contract.

This particular scenario of debt overpowering and nullifying expansion,

along with the onset of austerity measures,

is unfolding, as we speak, with our European counterparts.

And to shed some light on our relationship to the astronomical amount

of US national debt that we've all been saddled with,

this is debt that you don't see and you don't feel directly, but since 1984

100% of the federal income tax that is taken out of your paycheck

goes to pay the interest on the national debt owed to the Central Bank

and nothing else.

When we can't afford the interest payments on our personal debts,

we know this is being broke, or going bankrupt.

And as we've seen, it's no different with nations,

and I find it insane that when this fictitious bubble pops,

we'll run around as if the world is ending,

while our available resources, our knowledge,

our production abilities and our skills are unchanged.

Another part of our economic unfolding is externalized cost.

This occurs when a company transfers some of its moral responsibilities

onto a community directly, or by degrading the environment.

For example, railroads, airlines transfer

cost of fuel and noise to a community through pollution output.

This is done even with other nations,

such as exporting US deforestation to Haiti.

As they over-exploit their natural wood resource

for import and consumption in the US, we have essentially externalized

the problem of deforestation to their country.

Many such costs become lost in analysis

because the true cost is non-quantifiable,

so in a sense, societies collapse as business realizes its profits.

Then there's labor and your ability to acquire purchasing power with it.

In a monetary system, your freedom is dependent upon your purchasing power.

Your purchasing power is dependent

on your ability to pull money from the money supply or income.

For the most part, we do this through jobs,

which is an exchange via differential advantage or exploitation,

which we call 'labor for income'.

This is affected by your social class

and by the displacement of labor through automation and outsourcing.

Another way to express this point is to pose the question

"What is your degree of advantage to be exploited or to exploit

in order to cover your cost of living?"

In this context, this is all just a game.

Now, before I move forward, the next part

has caused a lot of dialog in my email inbox,

and it has to do with this concept of employment, or jobs.

And I want to express in advance,

in a resource-based model there is no need to submit to employment,

as we do in our current reality.

There is no purpose for a job for money.

The point here is that employment is not work;

they are separate. Work is work,

employment is an economic variable pertaining to markets,

and in a resource-based model, your ability to contribute

is not tied to your ability to find employment.

There has been a long and growing trend in regards to employment,

through the needs of the system itself.

Companies undertake automation on the basis of cost efficiency

in order to remain competitive in the marketplace.

This translates to reduced labor costs,

but to another phenomenon as well, in regards to productivity.

In 2003, a study was done on the world's 20 largest economies,

ranging from a period of 1995 - 2002,

finding that 31 million manufacturing jobs were lost,

while production output increased by 30%.

This is a powerful observation,

not just in regards to job displacement by technological innovation;

it's the remarkable increase in efficiency that is also gained.

Here is a simplified chart that shows the relationship of

increasing productivity, coupled with decreasing employment.

This is a powerful phenomenon showing, among many things,

the benefits of our ability to automate.

And this is what makes the application of technology so powerful,

through the systems approach of a resource-based model.

It also becomes apparent how socially irresponsible

it is to perpetuate inefficiency and waste as we do now,