For my next guest we bring you a completely different perspective on the economy.
Peter Joseph is a filmmaker and founder of the Zeitgeist Movement
which is a sustainable advocacy organization. The movement believes that
social issues such as poverty, corruption, pollution and war
are all a result of an outdated and inefficient social structure.
They advocate for a new socio-economic model:
a natural law resource based economy.
I sat down with Peter earlier this week to talk about his ideas,
and I started off by asking him to explain
what he thinks is wrong with our current banking system.Take a look!
— Starting with the banking system and the financial sector, which
I would say is a carcinogenic adaptation of the underlying premise of capitalism,
the system itself isn't designed to cater to what we would term
technical sustainability or social stability.
In other words, you have something called market efficiency, which as we all know
has to do with the movement of money, the acquisition of efficiency for profit attainment,
the need to have economic growth to keep people employed,
all of these attributes require servicing and in truth require technical inefficiency.
So, the more we improve society, the more we have technology
that can be used for extended periods,
the more we adapt our technology, the more we're able to create sustainable products,
the more we able to solve problems in other words,
the less fuel there is to drive market efficiency and keep the economy going.
The market economy was basically
created in the sort a sixteenth-century handicraft premise.
Adam Smith, for example, never would have fathomed that we would have
the largest industry in the world today being the financial sector,
and people trading and gambling, and having a gambling casino economy that we have today
with equities and futures and currencies.
This is a carcinogenic adaptation of the underlying premise
of seeking the widget gain, as it were from economics 101.
So it's completely outdated in other words,
and it's not gonna handle the problems we have today with
a billion people starving, three billion in poverty,
the huge water stress that is rising, the energy crisis in demand,
we'll have another billion people on this planet in another 15 years.
These stressors will not be resolved by a system
that actually wants inefficiency to keep it going.
— Right! Now can you explain to our viewers what The Zeitgeist Movement is.
— The Zeitgeist Movement is a global sustainability advocacy organization
and, in short, we get to the root of what is underlined,
most of the social problems that we see in the world today,
from the conflict and social instability that we see on a daily basis
to again the core ecological crises that we also see amalgamating and continuing,
and what we find is that the route premise of the social model is at fault.
Now I wanna make one distinction because
when you talk about or criticize capitalism, people are very quick to point fingers.
Capitalism did not start in the 16th century even though it was formalized as such.
The premise of capitalism, the premise of the market itself
is this fear of scarcity
and the necessity to compete and gain advantage over others because of that fear,
and this has amalgamated into this complex system that we have today
that is literally decoupled from itself, where people are out trading and gaining
without any regard for what actually is relevant to social progress.
So the movement sees this, and we also see that we have immense
problem solving capacities and technological solutions out there
that are going unused because they are simply too efficient
to be applicable to keep market circulation going.
So we recommend what I term a "Natural Law Resource-Based Economy"
and this idea simply says that we need to use the scientific method,
we need to get down to the root of what actually creates life-support,
creates public health, ensures security for the environment,
ensures social and ecological sustainability,
and to do so we need to install a completely different social system
that actually has that interest in mind,
and that is an elaborate conversation that
we can go into at length but I must stop right there.
— And I do wanna go into it at length at some point, but thank you for sound biting it for us.
But my question is... — Sure!
— What happens when economic growth slows today as compared to what would happen
when economic growth slows in this more sustainable society that you envision
... Zeitgeist Movement?
— Well that's a very interesting idea because
you're premising economic growth in the market context.
There would be no economic growth in the same theoretical understanding
in a Resource-Based Economy.
Economic growth is basically defined as the acceleration of money moving
through consumers and producers and laborers,
and it's money that circulates, and this is what keeps growth going and keeps people employed,
and of course, employment is the ultimate foundation of an economy.
If people aren't employed then they don't get purchasing power
they can't buy into the system they can't keep this highly contrived cycle going.
In a new model, in a socially sustainable model based on the scientific method
we don't have economic growth, you have actual tangible production to meet human needs,
and you use the highly optimized
sustainability and efficiency protocols, you could call them, that we have derived from nature
that says: okay you shouldn't overuse this resource because it's scarce, we should use
a high propensity resources that have a good abundance rather than deplete
say, rare earth metals for arbitrary purposes such as cheap cell phones that you can buy for 99 cents,
that end up in a landfill and are never recycled because they're not designed to.
So, economic growth is a contrivance of thought coming from the monetary economy
and I can't even think of a way it would exist in a new system,
other than the concept of simply producing to meet human needs
in an access type of society rather than a propertied society;
which is another point that we can touch upon as well. So I hope that makes sense.
It's a market contrivance, economic growth.
It does but my follow up to that is:
How would a non-monetary society be more sustainable?
— Because it would be based on actual technical premises of sustainability:
things that we don't do in the monetary system because market needs turnover,
market needs inefficiency.
Again, if you want to have a very robust market economy
you need immense amounts of things to service. I give you an example: Cancer.
If we resolved cancer, if we're able to actually go after the lifestyle factors
the genetic propensities and stop this massive growth of cancer
which is continuing on the planet, there would be billions if not trillions of dollars
and millions of jobs lost tomorrow if this actual resolution was put forward.
So if you if you can extrapolate axiomatically that example
to what it would mean to make a car that lasts a hundred years, imagine for example
if we had advanced housing structures
that had advanced production of produce in our own homes,
and we also had 3D printing machines that were based on nanotechnology
that can produce the basic housewares,
basically capital goods becoming consumer goods, in other words.
What would that mean if we each of us could go, say, a month
without buying anything? The entire economy would collapse.
So the system is not predicated on saving, conservation
or anything that you can, in a classical sense, would deem sustainable,
and I'll add one more thing to that because I think it is adjacent to it,
and that's the idea social sustainability.
This system produces conflict. Its core driving mechanism is imbalance.
I mean, it's hard to use the word exploitation because everyone thinks you're Marxist.
But it's very, very true, if you're going to do cost efficiency,
which is the core driver of saving money in this type of economy,
meaning that if I start a business, I need necessarily to maintain competition,
to pay my laborers the least amount I possibly can
so I can stay afloat and be competitive,
outsourcing to Third World labor or what have you,
this is inherently destabilizing, because you're creating immense wealth gaps,
and again it's this carcinogenic incentive system that's where we are today
with one the largest wealth gaps in human history
and it's only going to get worse, I'm sorry to say,
especially when the stressors of the environmental crises really hit.
The wealthy are going to continue to compound their greed -
greed is based on fear - continue to secure their positions
and you're gonna continue to see larger and larger wealth divides
until, of course, as history has proven, you end up with probably a revolution of sorts
which we are seeing periodically around the world right now for similar economic reasons.