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  • My name is Peter Joseph and I've been working for the past ten years in the hopes

  • to see some meaningful long-lasting change in this world;

  • a long ten years it's been.

  • In 2009 I helped start a nonprofit called The Zeitgeist Movement.

  • It's a global sustainability advocacy organization

  • and we specifically focus on economic change

  • because we feel it's the most important to set the stage

  • for more viable levels of change

  • politically, socially and so on.

  • And as expressed in great detail in my recent book

  • 'The New Human Rights Movement' published last year,

  • we as a species are faced with some

  • powerful social pathology,

  • (I'll let that word sink in)

  • a pathology driven in fact by our system

  • of economic survival.

  • A pathology if left unchecked, and uncountered,

  • will only exacerbate

  • wealth and income inequality and hence social instability,

  • it's gonna ruin our habitat through the drive for economic growth

  • and no doubt continue to undermine basic principles of equality,

  • justice and democracy.

  • And with this latter issue which is what brings me here today,

  • in the free and equal event 'United We Stand,'

  • what enables a truly democratic open free society?

  • where a population can actually reach rational consensus

  • on the direction it wishes to go,

  • allowing for political egalitarianism if you will,

  • intergroup respect, and the elimination of power-based oppression.

  • And if I was to frame the issue

  • I would do so in the following way.

  • Do we have a proper "precondition" for viable democracy,

  • not only in this country but on this planet?

  • Now what do I mean by that?

  • A precondition means something that comes before

  • in order for something else to follow in causality.

  • For example a legal precondition

  • to driving a car of course is to obtain a driver's license.

  • Medically a person can have a genetic precondition for a given disease,

  • and the same can be applied towards environmental exposures such as

  • smoking cigarettes is a precondition for lung cancer.

  • But the context here is sociological.

  • If we as a society are to strive for increased human rights,

  • social equality and egalitarian democratic principles,

  • can we conclude

  • that the most foundational and dominant institutions,

  • traditions, practices, root philosophies of our society,

  • can we conclude that they foster the proper precondition

  • to allow for more optimized democracy?

  • Are we planting seeds in lush nutrient-rich soil?

  • or are we planting seeds in arid, stone, nutrient-void soil

  • with little hope of growth?

  • To consider that, we're gonna go back in time,

  • Roughly 12,000 years ago the human species transitioned

  • from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies -

  • tribes foraging and hunting with no real agricultural skills -

  • to farm-cultivating settled societies.

  • This has been termed the Neolithic Revolution.

  • Before the Neolithic Revolution as corroborated by numerous anthropologists

  • studying both existing and historical hunter-gatherer societies,

  • social and economic life was actually very different.

  • Small bands or tribes operated without money or markets,

  • they were egalitarian, and they had no economic dominance hierarchy.

  • It also is well-established they had much less violence,

  • certainly no large-scale warfare.

  • And while modern culture would gawk

  • at the seemingly crude reality of hunter-gatherer life,

  • it has been well argued in fact that there was a kind of minimalistic affluence,

  • a happiness and simplicity.

  • If you don't know you're poor, well, maybe you're NOT poor.

  • A unique distinction because it challenges how we today think about

  • social success or even "progress" itself.

  • To highlight the contrast anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once stated

  • "To accept that hunter-gatherers are affluent is therefore to recognize

  • that the present condition of man's slaving to bridge the gap

  • between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means

  • is a tragedy of modern times.

  • Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed,

  • dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity.

  • Inadequacy of economic means

  • is first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples.

  • The market industrial system institutes scarcity

  • in a manner completely without parallel.

  • Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices,

  • and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending,

  • insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit calculable starting point

  • of all economic activity."

  • I'd like you to keep this notion of scarcity in mind

  • as it's a central understanding to our political economy

  • as I will discuss.

  • As far as survival,

  • hunter-gatherers mostly had a gift economy it was called,

  • where they shared with no direct expectation of reciprocation.

  • Think about that.

  • There are even modern stories of outsiders

  • having their first visit with these cultures

  • and they would be given things like handicrafts from the existing tribes,

  • and the Western cultures would feel the need to give something in return

  • as many in our market exchange culture would.

  • And this reciprocal behavior was actually considered offensive to the tribe

  • as they felt the exchange was a refusal of friendship.

  • British anthropologist Tim Ingold highlights the difference between

  • giving and exchange has to do with ...

  • a social perception, based around autonomous companionship,

  • versus involuntary obligation.

  • Autonomous companionship versus involuntary obligation.

  • He states

  • "Clearly both hunter-gatherers and agricultural cultivators depend on their environments.

  • But whereas for cultivators this dependency is framed within

  • a structure of reciprocal obligation,

  • for hunter-gatherers it rests on the recognition of personal autonomy.

  • The contrast is between relationships based on trust

  • and those based on domination."

  • I want to read that part again.

  • "The contrast is between relationships based on trust

  • and those based on domination."

  • This is a subtle the powerful distinction.

  • It's not only referring to the trust of each other,

  • but also the trust of the planet to provide.

  • So, in short,

  • there's a kind of trade-strategizing dominance

  • that we've become accustomed to in our day-to-day lives

  • since the Neolithic Revolution; a gaming process

  • that we have to engage for survival and we take for granted

  • and we don't really look at what it means, sociologically and psychologically.

  • And the result has been thousands of years of

  • in-group out-group antagonism,

  • elitism, stratification, and of course oppression.

  • And in the thoughtful words of neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky,

  • "Hunter-gatherers had thousands of wild sources of food to subsist on.

  • Agriculture changed all that,

  • generating an overwhelming reliance on a few dozen food sources.

  • Agriculture allowed for the stockpiling of surplus resources and thus, inevitably,

  • the unequal stockpiling of them,

  • stratification of society and the invention of classes.

  • Thus it has also allowed for the invention of poverty."

  • Since the Neolithic Revolution

  • we have had a process of economically driven cultural adaptation

  • built upon the survival requisites

  • of the relatively new, settled agrarian paradigm.

  • This evolution of post-Neolithic culture was self-guided

  • by systemic environmental pressures and survival inferences (what you do),

  • a kind of geographical determinism in fact,

  • common to the natural dynamics of the new mode of production: the new economy.

  • This gave birth to dominance-oriented incentives,

  • values and protections,

  • evolving of course patterns of conflict, hierarchy, elitism,

  • disproportionate allocation of physical social resources,

  • and hence the world you see today.

  • And to translate this into common terms,

  • in political economy as we would hear it

  • if we were going to college for political economy:

  • Thus you have the basis of property (ownership),

  • capital (means of production),

  • labor specialization (jobs),

  • regulation (government),

  • and protection (law, police, military).

  • In other words you have grounds for what is the ultimate mechanism of survival today -

  • something we again take for granted because we're so used to it -

  • the simple market system of economics.

  • And what I'm getting at here ...

  • is you can't understand anything that's happening in the world, especially politically,

  • without relating back to the incentives and procedures

  • of what creates survival in society: its economy.

  • And our economy today is explicitly based upon

  • the unnuanced assumption of scarcity

  • and is hence Darwinistic, Malthusian.

  • It inspires endless power antagonists between groups, fighting.

  • Not to mention, of course,

  • extreme and unnecessary deprivation and poverty for many.

  • Pick up any textbook,

  • introductory textbook on economics and you'll see it's very very clear the way

  • the entire world apparently is to be associated:

  • resources and means are scarce - end of story.

  • From that premise the architecture of not only the economy but society

  • has been derived.

  • In the book I call it the root socioeconomic orientation of our world,

  • and it justifies brute competition, narrow self-interest,

  • elitist hierarchy, inequality and oppression. It's that simple.

  • Now, that stated,

  • what can we learn about the nature of government within all of this?

  • Well first, we see that government actually proceeds

  • from the economic premise of a society,

  • not the other way around.

  • It is this preordained economic mode of society that decides

  • what government is to be, does, and where its loyalties rest.

  • If you examine historical variations of social systems,

  • say capitalism of course, communism as it existed, socialism,

  • feudalism, mercantilism and so on,

  • you'll realize that the governing architecture of those systems

  • serve to protect and perpetuate the prevailing economic

  • and class structures that ultimately define them.

  • Feudalism for example was a structure based upon land ownership,

  • labor and class interdependence,

  • going from the peasant to the king.

  • Capitalism in contrast is based upon dynamics of private property,

  • buying and selling, ownership,

  • and the mechanism of ownership and wealth translating of course

  • into power and control.

  • And to understand the specific nature of government today,

  • specifically in the United States -

  • the forbidden experiment of the world as far as I'm concerned -

  • a detailed 2014 study conducted by Professor Martin Gilens at Princeton

  • and Benjamin Page at Northwestern University concluded

  • "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule,

  • near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

  • The researchers concluded that lawmakers' policy actions tend to support - guess what -

  • the interests of the wealthy, Wall Street, and big business.

  • And what fascinates me, fascinates me,

  • is that many in America - most in America -

  • act like this is some kind of anomaly,

  • some kind of corrupt anomaly,

  • as though the US government and in effect, all governments in the world,

  • haven't always prioritized economic interests since inception:

  • business interests,

  • with a government constituency generally composed

  • of business powers.

  • People act as though the society

  • hasn't been set up in favor of the wealthy.

  • They act as though ...

  • elitist business freedom is some kind of corruption.

  • And that troubles me because it means that there's

  • a big mental block in the way people perceive reality.

  • People love to say things like

  • "Get money out of politics!"

  • without really thinking about the vast contradiction inherent.

  • While it may seem morally sound, it's actually quite silly in principle,

  • given how our world operates.

  • In a world where everything is for sale,

  • in a world where gaming through trade, trade-strategizing dominance once again,

  • is the most dominant mode of communication and action, the virtue,

  • why would government and policy be off-limits from this behavior?

  • In fact if we're to be consistent in society

  • it would actually be poor form to object at all frankly;

  • jokingly I think we should LET the Koch brothers buy and run America!

  • Why? because it would be consistent.

  • It would be the purest, most natural outcome in a system

  • for the billionaires to buy and run everything.

  • That is what the system is.

  • And you will never stop the force of financial and business power

  • as long as our society as a whole is based upon it.

  • So needless to say, when it comes to the nature of our social system,

  • as born from the geographical determinism of the Neolithic Revolution,

  • the very idea of any kind of effective democracy becomes increasingly illusory.

  • The system simply isn't designed to cater to the well-being and democratic control

  • of the general majority.

  • Rather it's designed to facilitate the affairs of business

  • and most of all the protection of big business which are naturally

  • the dominant interests in the revolving door of government as we know it.

  • Hence, President Trump of course.

  • He is not an outlier.

  • He is EXACTLY what this system suggests should run a nation:

  • a CEO, a businessman,

  • the president of the United States Corporation.

  • Put another way,

  • the social system is fundamentally fascist by nature.

  • And until we change the precondition of our economy

  • there's little reason to expect much improvement.

  • We can push the fascism back as we do here,

  • it's always gonna keep pushing forward,

  • and eventually based on the way things are going, it's gonna win.

  • This is a book by Robert Brady called 'Business as a System of Power.'

  • It was written in 1943 in the heat of the Second World War.

  • It is a comparative study of various nations including fascist Germany,

  • Japan, Italy and others.

  • It links the root structure and incentive of business

  • to the rise of fascist controls in the state.

  • And it's frightening, because today nothing's really changed when you look

  • at the structure, at the institutions and the mechanisms that are in play.

  • In the forward of this text,

  • another economist named Robert Lynd states the issue well in regard to America.

  • He says

  • (and this is a critical quote that really struck me when I read it)

  • "Thus political equality under the ballot was granted

  • on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption

  • that the people must refrain

  • from seeking the extension of that equality

  • to the economic sphere.

  • In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to capitalism

  • doomed genuinely popular control from the start.

  • And all down through our national life,

  • the continuance of the Union has depended upon

  • the unstated condition that the dominant member, capital,

  • continue to provide returns to all elements in democratic society

  • sufficient to disguise

  • the underlying conflict in interest."

  • (Sufficient to disguise the underlying conflict in interest!)

  • "The crisis within the economic relations of capitalism was bound

  • to precipitate a crisis in the democratic political system."

  • Sufficient to disguise! You know what that is?

  • That's the fact that everyone walks around with a cell phone that can make pancakes.

  • That's the fact that people have been bought off in this society by gadgets and

  • mindless property and associations to their identity

  • that really are quite trivial.

  • And just keep them in a place of subservience because they don't want to rock the boat.

  • All of that said, my goal here

  • was to plant these seeds of consideration

  • (because usually my talks are a lot longer than this)

  • and I honestly do not believe we are ever going to see

  • an optimization of democracy, as we all hope,

  • an optimization of democracy and equality,

  • until we understand the forces that move against it.

  • And it just so happens that the greatest force moving against it

  • is the absolute foundation of our social system

  • and the foundation of our survival as we know it.

  • Arbitrarily so; it can be changed, but this is where we are.

  • And that is a conversation I simply am not hearing these days.

  • Everyone's terrified to talk about the social system.

  • They don't want to be labeled, dismissed.

  • "How dare you say anything negative about our

  • beautiful market economy, and all it's done and all it's created?"

  • Well it's created a lot of positive things,

  • and it's created a whole lot of negative things,

  • and those negative things are gonna start outweighing the positive if they haven't already.

  • So I hope you can extend this discussion to your communities,

  • food for thought. Thank you very much.

  • [Applause]

My name is Peter Joseph and I've been working for the past ten years in the hopes

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ピーター・ジョセフ:「民主主義の前提条件?"ユナイテッド・ウィー・スタンド・フェスティバル2018、テキサス州2018年4月29日 (Peter Joseph : "A Democratic Precondition?" : United We Stand Festival 2018, Texas, April 29th 2018)

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