[Explosion] The first bomb explodes.

Breaking news from Canada. Police say

they've broken up an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attack

that was aimed to disrupt a major North American transportation route.

A sharp new warning of all-out war.

For the first time, the mysterious and secretive nation

has threatened a preemptive nuclear strike against the US.

In Europe, Spain is also feeling the economic pinch.

One in four are now currently unemployed in that country,

and the EU expects that number to climb even higher.

China and neighboring countries are mobilizing resources

to fight off a new strain of bird flu.

Hospitals in a race against time to contain nightmare super bacteria

before it spreads from the hospital out into the world.

Jesus, you scared me!

But hey, I guess that's OK, right?

If you watch the news these days,

there seems to be a lot to be concerned about.

Nuclear war, terrorism, mass shootings, city bombings,

corporate fraud, bird flu, bank failures, unemployment,

contamination, gangs, general crime

and depending on your temperament and conditioning,

perhaps you've already armed yourself to the teeth

and are watching this show from an underground bunker somewhere

waiting for the end of civilization itself.

Whatever the concern, the idea of protection or security from such woes

is ever-pervasive today.

Prisons, police, insurance, warranties, protection agencies,

military and domestic armament, airport groping, government surveillance, etc.

reveal a culture of fear, if you will, on many levels,

not to mention that the modern trends

of such security risks are certainly fascinating.

For example, before the 1980s, the thought of someone

going into their workplace and wiping out a couple of people

was a relatively remote concept.

Today we repeatedly see these acts of seemingly random violence,

not only in businesses but in schools, churches, movie theaters,

malls, sporting events and other common institutions.

As unfortunate as this dark reality of our human capacity is,

it's perhaps not as unfortunate

as the archaic methods we as a civilization have concocted

in our attempt to counter such problems.

For instance, in the wake of growing US gun violence,

the National Rifle Association will tell you that the problem

is a lack of armed security at every turn,

and if only we'd just arm everybody like the Wild West,

problems of social violence would subside.

While at the other extreme, folks will tell you that the problem is rather

due to an ease of access: it's too simple to get weaponry,

and the removal of this easy access is now the correct path.

However, do either of these address the real issue,

the source of the behavioral problem at hand?

Where is the national discussion about, say, motivation

and the sociological condition itself to which these acts erupt?

I point this out because in a technological age

where people can now print automatic weapons in secret,

with home 3D printers paving the way for an eventual nanotech revolution

that will enable the public to create powerful weapons at home,

bypassing commercial regulation itself,

perhaps we need to rethink our sense of causality here.

For unless you intend to outlaw scientific progress itself,

regulation isn't going to amount to a damn thing in the long run.

Likewise, come to think of it, maybe we also need to step back

and reframe what a viable threat to our safety really is

and how it measures up to other threats.

On April 15, 2013,

bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon in the United States

killing 3 people, gaining global attention

almost like it was another 9/11.

Yet in Iraq, on the exact same Monday,

bombs exploded killing 20 times as many people,

yet no one in the mainstream media seemed to care much about that.

You see, if you pay attention, you might notice

that the true quantifiable magnitude of a threat

or the actual toll of violence

really doesn't mean much in the establishment perception.

It's the idea, the context, the political spectacle that matters.

This might explain why America has spent almost five trillion dollars

on so-called terrorism, when US citizens today

(and statistically always) have been more likely to die of a peanut allergy

or in the bathtub than in a terrorist attack.

As the following episode will argue, the security/fear industry

stretching from the ever-exploitative news media to the military-industrial complex,

to the criminal justice system, not only exploits sociological distortion

birthed out of the very fabric of our deprivation, scarcity-driven social order,

it now appears to be accelerating in a vicious cycle.

I don't know about you, but given all of this

I'm beginning to suspect that maybe, just maybe

the very foundation of our socioeconomic system is in play here,

no longer existing as a functional mode for human progress on this planet,

but rather as a conduit for a culture in decline.

Prison: from the dark dungeons of the Middle Ages

to our modern industrial mass incarceration correctional facilities,

the prison system is a signature edifice of society today.

The United States, the land of the free,

now has the highest inmate population in the world,

incarcerating over 2.3 million in fact.

The US has locked up more people than any other country on the planet,

boastfully housing 25% of the entire world's prison population,

with an 800% increase in incarceration in the past 30 years alone.

Based partly on the need to remove active threats from society,

coupled with an ever-bleak undertone of retribution and revenge,

the punitive, negative reinforcement tradition common to our justice system

is now being challenged by some very basic realizations in the human sciences.

We often forget that when it comes to human conduct,

true behavioral causality has historically been ignored,

with the focus rather on spooky superstitious forces

such as good and evil.

As convenient as such ambiguous metaphysical assumptions are,

modern social science now places so-called criminal or anti-social acts

in the context of public health, with real solutions

resting in the arena of preventive medicine, not mere punishment.

Of course, as with most rational perspectives in the world today,

this view is rather agitating, for it shatters the glorified free will,

morally empirical traditional assumptions

our entire criminal justice system is built upon.

However, let's put that aside for now,

and point out the fact that, while most naturally do fear prison,

its effect as a deterrent is actually quite weak.

Considering US trends, we see a massive increase in incarceration over time,

so with this basic observation the punitive threat of prison

clearly isn't working statistically.

Likewise, prison is supposed to be some form of rehabilitation center, right?

So does this system work to reform human behavior,

taking in so-called criminals and outputting mentally healthy,

law-abiding citizens?

No. In the United States two thirds of prisoners released

re-offend within three years, often with a more serious and violent offense.

Dr James Gilligan, former director of

the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School

actually refers to prisons as 'graduate schools for crime and violence'.

So given all of this, perhaps we need to step back a bit,

shake off the shackles of common perception and ask ourselves

what other roles the judicial and prison systems really have.

For if incarceration isn't statistically working as deterrent,

and those who get out of prison are more often worse

than they were when they went in, something is clearly wrong.

What else is going on here?

While the justification of incarceration is certainly viable

with respect to true social threats,

no different than the medical need to quarantine somebody

who is a threat to society because of a contagious disease,

the evolution of the prison tradition reveals some very dark truths.

The best way to think about it is from a historical perspective,

considering race conflict, class conflict

in the context of economic and political expedience.

The first thing to understand is that political power, like economic power,

is sourced in its social inefficiency.

In other words, politicians need something to fight, and to a certain degree,

the more problems a society has, the more the citizens tend to feel the need

to give up their power to government control,

with the most proven effective type of problem being fear,

usually fear of some perceived identifiable external group.

Of course, this idea has been acknowledged for years,

such as by political theorist Karl Schmitt

in his 'The Concept of the Political', saying that

political unity is achieved by defining a common enemy.

Nothing new. The Nazis did this with the Jewish culture.

The early US did this with the Native American culture and so on.

In short, the trick is to push the idea that some subculture,

usually in the minority, is the true source of all of society's woes,

generating mass resentment and thereby ignoring

more accurate yet politically inconvenient realities.

And while direct racism and discrimination

are certainly alive and well in the world today,

the more elusive yet relevant bias is actually economic.

The greatest threat to any political establishment is...

What do you mean? This? This is a platform. It's three-dimensional.