Do you ever play these funky little logic puzzle things?

You might discover them when bored silly at the airport.

Nothing mysterious; they give you a set of system rules which

discipline you towards achieving a certain goal.

It's perhaps not the most exciting thing in entertainment today.

I don't know.

Maybe there's something more to this whole logic and reason deal

than just killing time while in transit?

Of course, we all naturally assume that we're being well-reasoned

in our decision making, right? In fact, it can be argued

that to some degree such associative, causal logic

is inherently inescapable, effectively wired into our brains

with respect to how we interpret and link our experiences.

Yet, it's that very issue of degree

that appears to be where the problems arise,

as all too often the foundational premises

upon which we frame our conclusions are indeed utterly faulty

or without proper evidence to be considered factual to begin with.

Needless to say, being logical within a cognitive framework of the illogical

only takes you so far.

And today, if you dig deep into the origins

and bases of perpetuation of our most cherished institutions,

from religion to politics, to economics, to the social order itself,

you might discover something called 'faith',

rather than reason.

And 'faith', by definition, is not a premise of logic.

Faith is belief without evidence

and, hence, contradictory to the entire process of understanding itself.

In 1961, engineer R. Buckminster Fuller

created a global simulation called 'The World Game'.

The idea was to "make the world work for 100% of humanity

in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation,

without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone."

It's a pretty simple and rational thought exercise,

a logic puzzle, if you will, on the most grand scale

which, even in basic gesture,

actually stands in stark contrast with the organizational frame of reference

our established society currently operates within.

In truth, all this train of thought suggests

is to take a broad design perspective to the Earth and human society,

using what we now know regarding scientific causality,

as opposed to the wheeling-and-dealing inherently elitist market anarchy

which moves the world by, arguably, a rigid superstitious faith

that the 'invisible hand' of the market knows all and sees all.

I ask you, what if we dare to view the Earth as a single puzzle board,

a problem to be solved

with our logic based around the Earth's natural rules set:

the known laws of physical science?

What if our goal was to maximize our economic efficiency,

to design out poverty, to design out national war,

to work structurally to create a clean energy abundance

and, hence, to work to facilitate a material success

for the whole of humanity, in harmony with nature itself?

What? What's that? Utopian, you say?

Too idealistic? Communist?

Well, I don't know about you,

but when I stumble around this planet we call home,

a system condition that demands one thing

to ensure the prosperity of the human family: adaptation,

I am at once impressed at our tremendous accomplishments as a species

and at once horrified at the ignorant failures,

mostly resulting from a refusal to see the Earth as one system design

and humanity as one family bound within.

As this season finale of Culture in Decline will argue,

humanity is being faced with a choice,

a fork in the road. It is my personal conviction

that the broad social decisions made [by] this generation

might very well be what makes or breaks our species in the long run.

And perhaps by the end of this episode, you, like me,

will feel the need to think about which path we should choose:

a culture in ascent, or a culture in decline?

From the creator of the Zeitgeist film trilogy

comes the worst reality show of all time:

the real one.

GMP Films presents

Culture in Decline

with your guide Peter Joseph

www.cultureindecline.com

[Electronic sounds]

Science fiction writers, scientists and so-called futurists of the world

have painted many pictures of what the future may hold.

Some are modest, positive or even utopian.

Some are dystopian, dark and oppressive. As far as the probable truth,

the best we can do is measure the trends and average out the projections,

with perhaps, of course, the most relevant trend

being the influence of science and technology.

Of course, technological progress has its culture lag, right?

However, today doesn't it seem like the gap

between our scientific advancement and our actual understanding

and consideration of that advancement is growing wider and wider?

Doesn't it seem a little bit obvious that

technological capacity is exceeding social maturity?

It's actually a frightening point, in truth,

as it's a cultural value issue.

Science and technology, put into the hands of forward-thinking developers,

who perhaps recognize the profound capacity to create an abundance,

stabilize our ecological influence

and become sustainable both environmentally and culturally,

tend to view the world very differently

than the more common market, nationalist, elitist mindset

which sees society through the filter of narrow self-interest and competition,

constantly reinforcing that gain at the expense of others

is a law of nature and, hence, a virtue to be praised and rewarded.

In this context, we might see how those same tools

will be used to make bigger weapons, more surveillance technology

and ever stronger physical and psychological prisons

for the vast majority of humanity,

to remain in servitude to a small group of people

and essentially the ownership class.

So, with that in mind, I present to you a thought exercise.

Using my fresh new time-machine here,

I'm going to be your guide on a trip to two possible futures.

First we'll visit a world that just may be, if the current social,

ecological and technical patterns persist as they are.

Then, we'll visit a possible future that very well could be,

if we as a species were willing to simply employ our vast potential

to forge a new, highly-efficient societal design with new practices:

a design which is not utopian or idealistic

but rather quite simple, practical and doable,

if we simply made the decision to change in accord

with the logic of our natural existence.

[Poof!]

[Ghostly voice] It's Culture in Decline's 'Tale of Two Worlds'.

New York City, 2110.

It's been a while since the fall of the US empire

and by extension, the general decline of much of the world.

The massive influence of US economic policy,

along with the corresponding materialistic, inefficient

and wasteful values born out of the consumption-based growth economy,

began to reach its physical limits in the mid-21st century.

Until that point, the race towards global industrialization

continued unabated, with the world still pining

for the so-called American dream,

not computing that if the entire world acted with the same waste patterns

as the US, we would have needed four more Earths' worth of resources,

just to keep it all going.

What happened?

Well, there were three nails in the coffin of societal collapse.

The synergy of these issues compounded each other into a vicious storm,

and by the time the Earth hit a population of 8 billion,

right before the Third World War,

global unemployment reached levels of 65%,

every government on earth was bankrupt to each other,

and the core hydrocarbon energy sources saw destabilizing scarcity.

And while China did win the war,

what resolution was achieved didn't last long.

The cancer and health epidemics alone in Asia and beyond

rose to catastrophic proportions,

with a third of the planet still uninhabitable today due to industrial pollution.

Today, the global population has fallen by 40%, due to scarcity and disease.

As far as the energy crisis,

the early 21st century made tremendous progress

in understanding renewable, sustainable energy systems.

We were learning on paper how to stop our use of inherently scarce

polluting energy stores in the earth,

realizing the almost unlimited abundance of our regenerative universe

and energy income that could provide for everyone many times over,

if we only moved fast enough to create the proper infrastructure.

Unfortunately, such a transition attempt

was met with great resistance by financial interests.

You see, there was this thing called the free market

which was far from free, in truth.

It was a war and elitist protection system,

and the bigger and more profitable an industry became,

the less financial incentive existed to alter it.

Money was the goal of this game, not sustainability or efficiency.

And the fact was, we needed to move fast

utilizing the remaining hydrocarbon resources

to create new sustainable energy infrastructure.

It was a race against global population increases and hence needs.

And sadly we failed, passing the point of no return

as once the true scarcity of our hydrocarbon resources became understood,

social destabilization and panic rapidly commenced to further barricade.

What little progress did take place

was rapidly destroyed thereafter by the water and energy wars.

At the same time, the world faced the largest unemployment rates in history.

Long considered a Luddite myth,

the exponential increase in machine automation in the 21st century

created a powerful acceleration of industrial productivity

at ever cheaper rates, displacing workers more rapidly

than technology could actually create new jobs.

Forward thinkers saw a great shift in the architecture of society.

Perhaps the ancient idea of earning a living

could be replaced with living a life.

We could see the new capacity to create an abundance

to meet the needs of every human being on Earth, 8 billion and beyond.

But sadly, this prospect met the same fate as our energy ambitions.

The corporations, locked into a manner of thought

which viewed mechanization as not a means for abundance,

but rather a means to save even more money in the process of reduction

set up a violent clash, not only a clash between workers and owners,

but ironically, a clash of system functions.

Capitalism was faced with its most grand contradiction,

where suddenly labor could exist with increasingly less human involvement;

and hence, the constant pursuit of cost efficiency for profit

inevitably meant that less money would be put into circulation through wages.

And so the system ran itself down into an ever-weakening slump.

Noticing this, the cry of some was to stop mechanization,

knowing the economy literally needed jobs by design.

Others performed activism to try and convince the world

that it was time to adapt, to simply give humanity what it needed,

to bypass the market.

Why should we invent more jobs to waste human life,

just to keep this system going?

Yet of course, they were bashed in the media,

dismissed as socialist upstarts and freedom-hating communists

trying to corrupt the supposed liberty

of what was nothing more than a religion: the all-seeing market.

And by the time the corporate-controlled governments

couldn't look the other way any longer,

the momentum of anger and dismay was too much.

The unions went on strike, and the cry for revolution exploded.

The Luddites blamed technology for the problems,

the businesses blamed government interference,

the counter-culture blamed idealized conspiracies

with few realizing that it was a system failure,

a natural evolution of our culture which demanded respect and adaptation.

And the third and perhaps most absurd of all social plagues

was the illusion of financial debt.

It's an interesting historical note that, for some reason,

the mafia-style organized-crime mode of the market

was never really accepted as a legitimate consequence,

when it was, in fact, a ruling ethos inherent in the competitive,

scarcity-driven nature of the system.

Centuries of denial can be found in the endless economic textbooks

of this now-failed model,

saying that if any such behavior did occur, it was an anomaly,

a corruption rather than a core characteristic expected of the system itself.

Within this propensity, a debt system emerged.

Whether structurally intended as a force of class warfare or not,