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  • Alright, I’m Ben McLeish and as Harvey Milk would say,

  • "I'm here to change your mind."

  • Who here... hands up whoever, at this point, can understand and agrees

  • with what our movement is about

  • and who would describe themselves as on board?

  • It's the guy's who came a long way, isn't it?

  • Who would say that maybe in principle they understand the ideas,

  • they understand the logic behind it, but maybe

  • they have some questions and they are not quite sure...

  • There's a kind of a nagging feeling. They're not quite there yet.

  • That's good; that's healthy.

  • And who here thinks it's an Utopianist cult

  • with plans for world domination?

  • We kind of covered that one already, but yeah, it's not that.

  • Here are some common objections and responses to a Resource-Based Economy.

  • First off, it’s not a Utopia,

  • as Tom said. There's no such things as Utopia.

  • We aren’t under the illusion that we can create a perfect world.

  • There is no such thing asperfectin a practical world.

  • What we are proposing, however, is a whole lot better than what we have now.

  • There will always be problems, but a global, emergent system

  • where innovation, change and development is put center-stage,

  • rather than being hamstrung by the profit mechanisms

  • and interests of established power structures of any kind,

  • is going to be more able to meet and solve these problems

  • than our current so-calledestablishedsocieties.

  • This is not communism, or socialism

  • or any of the "isms" out there.

  • Quite apart from the fact that no two people here

  • will agree what "communism" is,

  • since it is a high order abstraction with no real life referents,

  • and with multiple, varied, real-worldversions,”

  • even the most boiled-down version of Karl Marx's philosophy

  • was still based on money, differential advantage,

  • profit, earnings, various degrees of qualities of life and thus,

  • social stratification was built into its foundations.

  • Communism also pre-supposes property.

  • Property, if you remember, is an outgrowth of scarcity.

  • Because there may not be enough to go round,

  • you need toownthings to deter their use by others,

  • to reserve, essentially, or guarantee

  • the things you need and are now conditioned to want.

  • Communism also didn’t have access

  • to the technologies to create abundance,

  • or certainly didn't envision or strive for a world of deliberate abundance,

  • and didn’t imagine a world where all labor was automated,

  • all necessities were supplied free of charge,

  • and where the structure of society is a global, integrated system.

  • Marx never considered a global economy based on resources.

  • It's just a monetary system with slightly more or less government control

  • coupled with varying degrees of romanticism of labor

  • or the labor class, which ironically, they then want to get rid of.

  • The fundamentals are the same as any other monetary system.

  • What we propose and advocate lies outside

  • the logical referent of this box of monetary-ism.

  • The box itself, we feel, is structurally unsound.

  • "Well, if it’s not communism, it sounds like a commune!"

  • Well, again, a commune is defined

  • by the deliberate artificial separation that we are trying to get past.

  • We cannot simply separate ourselves from society and build a Resource-Based Economy.

  • The logic of living according to planetary resources and total efficiency

  • cannot be anything other than a global, all-encompassing operation:

  • one system.

  • The logic of efficiency demands it;

  • multiple societies attempting to operate separately

  • would require duplication of effort, resources and waste,

  • as we see in the current system.

  • It would also create competition, which would ultimately create war,

  • as we fight for resources, space and so on.

  • And you know what else? Everything that divides us

  • whether be race, religion, or national identity,

  • political affiliations, social classes, are false divisions

  • invented or promoted by our respective societies

  • to get you to buy in and not defect from

  • that country or society you happen to be in.

  • Why? It's about maintaining a group economy.

  • Stability in the face of scarcity, real or artificial.

  • Even geographic boundaries, which are at least based in spatial reality,

  • are fading fast as we improve transport technologies.

  • We are, and always have been, one global human race.

  • We must live as such to ensure our survival

  • at the maximum quality of life possible.

  • Climbing into a forest, shedding all the benefits of technology

  • and its advances, and reviving esoteric English witchcraft religions

  • isn't going to do anything except devolve us, and only temporarily,

  • before necessity forces that separatist society back into

  • long-term contact with other human civilizations.

  • There really isn’t anywhere left in the world for people

  • to be able to do that anyway.

  • Life on this planet tends towards complexity and sophistication.

  • Communes are artificial, isolated, unsustainable and achieve nothing

  • but to stave off large-scale social interactions for brief periods,

  • mostly due to protest or divisionary beliefs based on inherited notions.

  • Perhaps you think that competition

  • would be a better ideology to base society on...

  • That competition somehow speeds up innovation, makes pricing fair

  • provides choice and so on, and it's generally a good thing.

  • But the concept of the Resource-Based Economy

  • is based on the same logic as the human body,

  • as Jacque said on that video.

  • Were your brain to decide tomorrow that it is the most important organ

  • in the body, and demanded more of the resources, oxygen

  • than the liver, or the left lung is more important than the right

  • and demanded most of the resources itself, you'd rot away in a month.

  • Animals live in harmony with their surroundings, not in competition with them.

  • Nature has examples of competition within it,

  • but in areas where food and resources are abundant for animals,

  • you find they don’t fight over food. Nature is symbiotic.

  • We must become symbiotic too. To be in competition

  • with each other and attempting todominatenature

  • or each other, is to ensure our own demise.

  • Nature, however, will carry on just fine without us.

  • One I hear quite a lot of the time, and it's a fair question, is

  • "What would I do in a Resource-Based Economy?"

  • Where there's no traditional work or money, what would I do?

  • It's a valid question, as we can only presume to imagine

  • a massive void of inertia where once a 9 to 5 stood in its place.

  • Oddly, I am actually asked this by friends of mine who work in the arts,

  • or who have expensive, time-consuming or unusual hobbies.

  • Or cab drivers who are amateur scientists.

  • Why do you work in the arts? Why do you have hobbies?

  • Why do you do favors for others? Why do you give to charity?

  • Why did you come here tonight? Why do you do all of these things?

  • You did all of these things absent the desire

  • to make money, especially if you work in the arts.

  • How much more could you do without the monetary restrictions you have now,

  • and which you work in spite of?

  • In low-power countries where people walk for hours to get water,

  • one could imagine them thinking, "Well if I could just turn on a tap

  • and get the water instantly and not spend 4 or 5 hours a day

  • getting the water, what would I do with the spare time?"

  • That's the same kind of logic that people can't seem to make that jump.

  • It’s a little bit like being in a cell all of your life,

  • a 5 by 5 foot cell.

  • Offering a prisoner a way out of his cell, they then turn to you

  • and say, “Well, what do I do now?”

  • A related point: what about motivation to do anything

  • if you aren’t essentially forced by economic pressures, as we are now?

  • What will motivate us?

  • Your motivation to recycle is not profit driven, in fact,

  • it's quite the opposite; it costs you money and time,

  • when you only factor in the drive to the bottle bank.

  • Or Nikola Tesla... His motivation to create free energy

  • the world over was certainly not profit-driven.

  • In fact, JP Morgan, his backer, had to shut it down

  • because of the impact it would have on the ability

  • to profit from this. And what about this?

  • The world has written a continually growing, emergent encyclopedia

  • of 15 million articles in 272 languages in 9 years.

  • Money has nothing to do with it, except for when they run out of it,

  • periodically, and have to ask you for more, by those wonderful banner ads

  • that we're subjected to.

  • Imagine what Wikipedia would look like if they didn't have

  • monetary restrictions to deal with; if money were literally no object.

  • Imagine what the world would look like if money were no object.

  • We already have the motivation, and it's more than money.

  • What we are suggesting is a world where this is placed center-stage.

  • Let's stick with the Wikipedia example. Who runs the societal infrastructure

  • in a Resource-Based Economy? And could they take it over?

  • Two big ones I get a lot, and they're valid questions as well,

  • because people are worried about being dominated, although is quite ironic

  • we live in this system now where we clearly are dominated,

  • and we're kind of worried that we would be.

  • I find that really bizarre, but it's okay.

  • It feels a little cynical today to think that might be true.

  • At its core, a Resource-Based Economy's systems, very much like Wikipedia,

  • would need very few people to service any parts of the system

  • that are not already self-repairing.

  • Essentially, systems-maintenance.

  • Are those people more powerful than those who live and thrive

  • on the system without a direct linking to those kind of interfaces?

  • Could they take it over? Well, are the individuals

  • who run Wikipedia powerful? Could they "take over" Wikipedia?

  • There's nothing to gain by attempting to own or control Wikipedia.

  • It's a social system, run in spite of the profit mechanisms and power.

  • What benefits us all, including those who maintain aspects of the infrastructure,

  • would only hinder everyone, including those maintainers,

  • were it compromised.

  • The question of peopletaking over” a society seems rather a moot point.

  • Right now we live in the kind of society that can be taken over, and is

  • regularly taken over by corporate interests,

  • political powers and groups of wealthy people.

  • It is this precise mechanism of dominance that is absent

  • from a Resource-Based Economy in the same way it is absent from Wikipedia

  • or any similar non-monetary resource.

  • Here's a good one.

  • Who makes the decisions in a Resource-Based Economy?

  • This question actually needs to be rephrased. It’s not: "who makes

  • the decisions", butHow are the decisions arrived at?”

  • The running of society is a technical process.

  • There are very few things that need to bedecidedby human opinion.

  • Technical processes aren’t even decided by you now.

  • Did you vote on the structural attributes of a bridge?

  • Do you vote on which materials are used to construct houses?

  • Do you vote on the internal mechanisms or designs of an MRI machine?

  • No, because most of us, certainly me, don’t have the knowledge necessary

  • to make large decisions like this.

  • We already arrive at these decisions based on the best available information

  • we have at the time.

  • So what about, you know, lazy people?

  • If I am busy in a contributory role, or not over-consuming,

  • won’t others simply sit around, live off the fat of the land

  • that the economy is now producing at no cost to the individual?

  • First off, why is it that when people talk to me about lazy people,

  • lazy people are always other people?

  • I find that quite interesting.

  • And if you do know a lazy person, when did they become lazy?

  • Was it on their 20th birthday? Were they lazy as a child?

  • Who here has toddlers who have chronic laziness?

  • Who here remembers the day they became lazy?

  • No, it happened over time, didn’t it? Slow, creeping laziness set in.

  • You get home tired from work, you crack open a beer,

  • you slam on the box and sink into the couch.

  • Laziness is an effectual by-product of our society.

  • Either we are spent from our jobs, demotivated by the treadmill lives

  • so many of us are made to lead, conditioned by advertising

  • to sit and consume, or by social inflexibility

  • to be able to go out and do the things you want to do.

  • In a world of far greater personal freedom, these tendencies

  • towards laziness would drop off hugely.

  • Even if they did not, a system of technologically-enabled abundance

  • would not suffer from lazy behaviours the way it does presently.

  • The Pixar film "WALL*E" imagined a world in which

  • all the jobs had been replaced,

  • but people were still hapless, over-indulgent consumers.

  • Note that in the film they actually left the Earth to be massively inefficient

  • and non-productive in space.

  • The people had not changed in themselves,

  • the society behavioral mechanisms had not changed.

  • As technology does take over more and more of our jobs,

  • so we must adapt to new tasks, and not simply

  • to replace the old tasks with a complete void.

  • It's a change that we are advocating.

  • Coupled with the updating of technology is the updating of our behaviour;

  • the abandoning of the over-consumptive, passive behaviors

  • so excellently satirized by "WALL*E."

  • So, if it's not lazy people, what about dangerous people?

  • Bad people?

  • Well, here's something you may have heard before: there is no such thing

  • as a bad or evil person, per se.

  • Quite apart from the fact those two terms, bad and evil,

  • are thoroughly empty terms that could mean anything.

  • We are the products of our surroundings. People who commit crimes

  • against the rest of humanity, whether it’s violence, theft

  • corporate crime, are the products of a sick society

  • whose mechanisms either encourage, necessitate or reward those actions.

  • If you don’t believe this, why is it that some countries

  • have much higher crime rates than others?

  • Are there morebad peopleon that landmass?

  • Surely if it's human nature were to blame,

  • we’d have identical crime figures all across the world.

  • We don’t because the situations, the environmental influences,

  • are different in each location.

  • Everything from the wealth gap, pollution levels

  • positive or negative media influences

  • right through to the weather, influences our behavior.

  • It is the ultimate litmus test of society’s soundness.

  • Higher crime rates are symptoms of the flaws of the system.

  • Yet, right now we react to crime, not by looking

  • at the aberrant behavior as a symptom of our social mechanisms,

  • but by blaming the individual and locking them up,

  • creating more laws and ultimately creating a less flexible

  • and more oppressive society, which then, in turn, feeds the crime rate.

  • In turn, the oppressive illiberal society produces

  • more crime and a higher prison population.

  • Criminals and ex-cons are precluded from successful lives after jail.

  • No-one wants to employ a criminal.

  • They also seem most likely not to have been given a decent education

  • to begin with, or be able to get one afterwards.

  • Violent crimes are more prevalent in societies with greater inequality.

  • This slide comes from the Equality Trust who are just south of the river.

  • It shows the clear correlation between inequality and homicides.

  • Remove the underlying cause, inequality

  • and the incidences of crime decrease as well.

  • Stressed family environments, relationship breakdown, school shootings,

  • gang violence, bank robberies, fraud;

  • which of these cannot be traced back to social stratification

  • based on income, greed or spending power,

  • or the ability to gain differential advantage over others?

  • If you remove the mechanisms that essentially encourage aberrant behavior

  • and reward aberrant human interactions, the behaviors themselves will go away.

  • As yet, we have not implemented a system which ever does this.

  • Mental health issues, for the most part, stem from monetary issues as well.

  • Mental illness can almost always be stemmed back to the environmental

  • and economical societal inequality.

  • This slide shows the correlation of mental illness with income inequality.

  • It illustrates this point more than amply. Greater inequality

  • facilitated by the narrow self-interest, the internal logic

  • of a monetary system and the differential advantage and competition,

  • directly negatively affects everyone in the population,

  • including rich people.

  • Based on 30 years of research by the Equality trust,

  • if the UK were more equal, we'd be better off as a population.

  • For example, the evidence suggests that if we halved inequality

  • there would be: half the murder rates,

  • mental illness would reduce by two thirds, obesity would halve,

  • imprisonment would reduce by 80%,

  • teen births would reduce by 80%, levels of trust

  • would increase by 85%.

  • Imagine how little crime there would be

  • if we put true equality into practice in this country.

  • And were there a global equality and partnership, can you imagine

  • how quickly war would disappear?

  • So what about the law?

  • Legal restrictions are present in our society to limit problems

  • that we've not been able to solve through technological means.

  • We have drink-driving laws because our cars will crash

  • if were drunk behind the wheel.

  • But if we build cars that can’t crash into each other

  • via GPS guidance systems, and with pendulums

  • built into the base that correct a swerving motion,

  • drink driving laws become irrelevant. You can get really hammered

  • go out and drive.

  • It is technologically more than possible. We already

  • fly to the moon by remote control.

  • But we don't do it because it istoo expensive.”

  • A society structured around resources, equality and efficiency will mean

  • the automatic redundancy of laws pertaining to finance and money,

  • property, crime and socially offensive behaviors.

  • Having a lot of laws is not the sign of a well-adjusted society.

  • It is a demonstration of the flaws that society has.

  • Laws attempt to patch up the inabilities

  • to function correctly within that society.

  • Perhaps... And you're not going to like this one.

  • Perhaps you think that we can solve our problems with politics.

  • We are not a political movement. We will not stand for election

  • in both senses of that, I'm afraid. Why is that?

  • Michael Ruppert said it best when he said that politics is economics by other means.

  • Politics is simply another power outgrowth. To be elected,

  • or even run for election, requires a large amount of money to canvas support.

  • Once you are beholden to large corporate donors,

  • it is literally impossible to fulfill real change in a society,

  • since the wishes of your backers need to be fulfilled first.

  • Those wishes are always to produce favorable laws and fiscal policies

  • that will benefit those very donors and corporations,

  • the promise of which was their sole reason for backing your party in the first place.

  • Why do politicians break promises? Is it because they arebad people”?

  • No they aren't.

  • Politicians are not here to change things. How could they be?

  • They are raised, conditioned, promoted

  • and admitted by the current established societal notions.

  • They are not technical experts.

  • How could they solve society's problems, which are technical?

  • Most of them come from a legal background, which is semantic manipulation

  • and nothing else. They aren't qualified to make changes.

  • This man is an economist by trade.

  • Given that he is absolutely indoctrinated into a monetary system,

  • how is he going to bring about the change

  • that he promises? The same is with every other politician.

  • We cannot achieve lasting, real and meaningful change through politics.

  • We need to move beyond politics.

  • The simple fact is that politicians are not there to enact real change

  • to the underlying root causes of society.

  • Constrained by relatively short voting cycles and financial pressures,

  • even the best, the most worthy and honest "leaders"

  • have to operate within the system.

  • It's time to take the next step in our social evolution.

  • It is time to evolve along the only path that is relevant,

  • one rooted in the real world, one that is truly possible.

  • We have outgrown the needs for the mechanisms to manage scarcity.

  • We have outgrown scarcity, itself.

  • We have outgrown the need for war, poverty and profit at all cost.

  • It's time to ditch the false divisionary notions based on belief,

  • opinion, hearsay, surmise, and any and all inherited assumptions.

  • Human beings are amazing. On this tiny pale blue dot

  • we have come from the simplest of organic life, against all odds,

  • to our present state of sophistication and consciousness.

  • We have put to task our ingenuity and our creativity

  • to produce astonishing results.

  • It's only money now that is holding us back.

  • We must not let our own failings to continue our evolution destroy

  • the most valuable thing we have: ourselves.

  • You don’t join us by voting for us. You don’t join us by canvassing for support.

  • You don’t join us by signing up for a mailing list.

  • And you don’t join us by buying a book, or a T-shirt, or a DVD.

  • As mentioned before, any and all information we disseminate

  • is offered completely free of charge.

  • And you certainly don’t join us by giving us donations.

  • We won’t accept them. You join us up here, in your head.

  • You join us by realizing the logical limitations of our current lifestyle

  • and calling for a new global model.

  • We all join by breaking down the barriers

  • we have imposed on ourselves or have imposed on us,

  • to rejoin the other members of the human race

  • waiting on every other side. Thank you.

  • [applause]

Alright, I’m Ben McLeish and as Harvey Milk would say,

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