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