I'm Peter Joseph and I founded a

non-profit a long time ago called The Zeitgeist Movement

and it's an organization that still has numerous chapters,

hundreds of chapters in 60 countries and we've done about a

thousand public awareness events since its inception.

And beyond that social experiments working in the hope

to unify the world in a common direction,

desperately needed of course due to the ecological crisis and

the social instability that we're seeing emerge.

I also produce educational and socially conscious activist media

including these two books.

I wish I'd brought some books actually but I couldn't

get the weight in my luggage or I would have given you all some.

The 'Zeitgeist Movement Defined' was the original text,

kind of a joint effort but mostly written by myself, produced in 2013.

It's the root thesis of The Zeitgeist Movement

and it advocates in pretty extended technical detail what

we do and what we promote.

The second book, 'The New Human Rights Movement',

was published by BenBella earlier this year

and it takes a more social justice approach

and a public health approach if you will,

focusing on what really underscores a stable, healthy and peaceful society

including the active reduction of intergroup conflict,

oppression, bigotry, racism, xenophobia and so on,

something that this country and the world is

starting to see a resurgence of.

Today's talk will be more or less a derivative of this book,

specifically in regard to the history, structure and nature of modern political economy.

Again since I refuse to repeat my talks,

and you can go on and see about 20 or 30 hours of my lectures online,

I apologize if this moves quickly for those that are new.

But if anything is unclear - this will be about 45 minutes or so

and I'm definitely always into questions - so make some notes

if anything jumps out at you.

So to jump to the work's conclusion for the sake of clarity

the bottom line is that without the removal

of socioeconomic inequality -

meaning the various levels of inequity we see both domestically

and internationally as linked to economic roots -

there's a serious need for concern about what the future holds.

Unannounced to most, there's a strong public health argument

against the existence of economic stratification and class.

And by extension this means that there is a strong public health argument

against the mechanisms of our society that create

this destructive imbalance,

namely the market system of economics:

a system that is also leading to the destruction of our habitat

due to its archaic basis in cyclical consumption,

perpetuating a built-in incentive to create waste,

inspire more purchases to create more jobs ...

And when you step back and take all this in,

you realize that an economy powered by consumerism,

which is what it is, is in fact not an economy at all.

A real economy by definition is about

the strategic and efficient use of materials and means to preserve sustainability

in the process of meeting human needs.

Yet our system does the opposite:

not only inspiring vast wealth imbalance,

limiting in fact the well-being of 60% of the human population today,

in the context of relative and absolute poverty,

but also in the sense that the entire system is really backwards

in terms of extended sustainability and effectively earthly economic goals;

a complete omission from all economic textbooks.

And it's worth pointing out that this seed of unsustainability really wasn't

easily to recognize centuries ago,

as the process and means of production was quite manual and arduous.

But since the Industrial Revolution

and the introduction of mechanization and increased efficiency -

increased production I should say because it's not really efficient, it's just

the more of production that we're able to increase -

the tables have turned.

What was once an agrarian economy that worked to meet

core needs of a scarce society, generating jobs to facilitate those needs,

has transformed into an economy that has become so productive

that our sense of social inclusion

must now be manipulated

by marketing and advertising,

producing a neurotic, insatiable and materialistic culture

seeking to buy, own and accumulate

simply for the sake of buying, owning and accumulating.

And without that value system, the economy wouldn't work today.

So coming back to my broad point here,

the current state of evolution of the market economy

not only requires an insecure, immature and selfish population,

it also requires that nothing really work too well, for too long:

planned obsolescence.

For true preservation, efficiency and sustainability

is really the enemy of market economics.

It's the enemy of the foundation of our society

and the result as we see

is enormous amounts of waste, pollution and resource overshoot.

And it's interesting today with all the talk

about ecological degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss and so on,

very rarely do people speak of the most important consequence of this:

we're not destroying the earth,

we're destroying our future capacity to coexist peacefully

and productively as a growing species.

We're setting the stage for new forms of unnecessary scarcity and limitation.

And this is and will continue to translate

into more extreme degrees of socioeconomic inequality,

reducing public health,

and this increased socioeconomic inequality as social science has long confirmed,

will fuel further social fragmentation,

conflict and disorder, both domestically and internationally.

I apologize if this idea is new to some of you here

as it is something I have written and talked about a great deal in the past,

linking socioeconomic inequality and economics

to increased violence, heart disease, mental health disorders,

child abuse, loss of lifespan and so on.

But I encourage you to look into this largely ignored public health issue

because it's the most critical one, and no one's really talking about it.

The central message of this talk -

as rambley as it's going to be due to the limitations I had in creating it -

is that our economy poses many serious problems,

not only as an instrument of human manipulation in terms of politics that we see,

but as a structural phenomenon

in its root core foundational logic.

Or more bluntly, the real problem -

in stark contradiction to our prevailing

entrepreneurial romanticism and free-market mythology -

is the very nature of business itself:

the inherent dynamics and incentives that are immutable

to the logic of engaging and winning in competitive trade

is the binding destructive force

that while creating the world we see, with some material positives of course,

is also simultaneously destroying it

at a far more rapid rate, in the context of sustainability

and a loss of democracy, as I will discuss.

And with all the debate today about party systems and corruption and

lobbying and war and so on, you will notice,

with the exception of say conversations about democratic socialism

or other more - more or less - passive

still ultimately pro-market socioeconomic adjustments

the political landscape shows very little real reflection

on what the structure of our economy is actually doing.

Even worse,

those rare few who do approach in a critical and thoughtful way

are quickly dismissed by myopic and emotional impulsive reactions

and symbolic irrationality.

In fact I would have to argue that the greatest failure in the world today

is that of creativity, and an expanded sense of possibility.

People are afraid of things they can't see of course

or don't understand or haven't learned about -

a kind of indoctrination and laziness continues to limit the debate

of what our future could be,

locked into bogus identity politics, isms,

unnuanced childish distractions of left and right,

alt right, centric,

capitalist, socialist, communist,

and a host of other unnuanced labels

that serve only to keep people thinking categorically,

ignorant, polarized, and easily manipulated.

The power of language and the associative symbolic myopic nature

of political discourse now blinds us,

and it's time we snap out of it

and expand our sense of possibility.

Brings me to part one - Structuralism: Culture and Biology.

Again I've spoken a great deal about things like structuralism in the past

and this will be more of an overview of it.

And if you want to look into this concept as I will go through a bit,

I encourage it.

But the details by which I'm gonna go through this will be relatively advanced.

I'm going to expand the context of structuralism

from the influence of culture, environment and social system

to include how those inputs interact with our biology,

given the biopsychosocial nature of the organisms that we are.

While there is ongoing debate about time scales of biological evolution,

specifically with respect to the human brain and behavioral variability,

it's safe to say that if you took a newborn child from say 25,000 years ago,

and raised him or her today,

the characteristics of that child, and eventually adult,

would be indiscernible from the average person born in the present day.

Likewise it is a fact that we modern humans can trace our genetic lineage

to a woman from East Africa commonly termed 'Mitochondrial Eve'

who lived roughly 150,000 years ago.

Hence we are all African, we have all been set in motion so to speak,

with the same basic genetic makeup.

And while there have certainly been selective genetic changes in groups

such as the development of different skin colors and

physical features due to exposure to different areas of the planet,

the idea that any groups of humans on this planet are genetically superior or inferior,

or perhaps having developed novel cultural behaviors driven by genetics

is completely unfounded.

And what this means

is that the vast array of human behavior we have seen historically on the cultural level,

from the routine human sacrifice of the Aztecs

to the polygamy of Mormonism

to the end of cannibalism of the Amazonian Yanomami tribe,

to many other examples, can only be

linked to the influence of environment

and the social institutions and traditions

of a given society and period.

This is not to discount the role of biology,

evolutionary psychology, or in effect what is,

again the biopsychosocial synergy of our existence.

This isn't about behaviorism, in lieu of say BF Skinner.

The nature of our brains and our genetics have an integral role

in all outcomes of behavior on some level.

But they are not actively deterministic influences

when it comes to the phenomenon of culture.

Sorry to drill this in:

pop society loves to separate nature, nurture,

or more accurately genetics and environment.

Yet biological evolution is also a kind of molding

of our genetic makeup through natural selection,

which basically started with a single-cell organism some 3.5 billion years ago.

The complexity of your form, who you are physically,

is really an environmental outcome,

and with this kind of genetic play-doh that's

been utilized since the single-celled organism.

And it's evolved through environmental interactions

into the complex organisms we are today, driven by environment.

Now the reason I bring all this up is because

one outstanding myth that leads to a set of other myths

we have in support of the way the world is,

is that "society reflects our immutable human nature,"

as if in the long term our nature can be called "fixed."

It's a legitimizing establishment-preserving myth,

for if society is a reflection of our immutable human nature, well guess what -

there's no reason to attempt to change society.

We see this worldview throughout recorded history

to one degree or another especially in the realm of political economy and philosophy.

In fact I am unaware of any historically recognized political or economic theorist

that didn't propagate the false notion that humanity's

apparent brute, selfish and competitive nature

was simply an immutable law of our existence

and something to be dealt with.

For example Thomas Hobbes, considered the father of political philosophy,

famously proposed that humanity's state was one "of war,"