The Zeitgeist Movement / Peter Joseph on "Boom and Bust", March 6th 2014

Huge thanks to Erin at Boom and Bust!

Original upload:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiKOsQosWt0&feature=youtu.be&t=14m30s

"Erin brings you Peter Joseph, a filmmaker and founder of the Zeitgeist Movement. Joseph also believes that our current system is unsustainable, and he explains how the Zeitgeist Movement's approach can improve the economy and society. "

Join TZM's mailing list:
http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/

Read "The Zeitgeist Movement Defined" Book:
http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/orientation

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are all a result of an outdated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.