Name: Peter Joseph and Thom Hartmann: "Can We Design Our Way Out Of Civilizational Crisis?"
Uploaded: 2018-11-29T07:58:48.000Z
Duration: 12 min 8 s
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As runaway global warming continues to accelerate

along with the gap between the rich and poor,

there's a sense among many that our civilization is in crisis.

What could be causing this crisis and how do we

are at the heart of social critic and activist Peter Joseph's new book

'The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression.'

Peter is also a filmmaker and the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement.

He joins us now from our Los Angeles studios.

- Thank you Thom, I appreciate you having me.

what kind of questions are you trying to answer in this book?

- I guess the core activist questions of why the world is the way it is,

why we've been banging our heads against civil and human rights

why we end up with 48 million slaves still in the world today

by UN standards - more slaves at any time in human history -

and while we're on a collision course with nature

which nobody seems to be actively trying to really detour.

We have little policy adjustments here and there,

but are we really going to see an end to this negative trajectory

that we've been seeing on multiple levels?

- So why do we have these situations Peter?

At the heart of it all it comes to our economy.

We have an economic system that was birthed in the Malthusian period.

the Neolithic Revolution up until the Industrial Revolution

So you go back about 12,000 years ago and

we had a kind of geographical determinism if your people are familiar with

cultural anthropology, it's a very unique field.

we developed capital and the means of production,

regulation and government, law enforcement,

and eventually we gave birth to what we know today as the market system of economics,

which has been fluid throughout this entire period of time.

We call capitalism today something separate as though

Adam Smith invented this in the Enlightenment

but really it's just another kind of variation on the same theme

based upon competition between parties and groups,

And as we found out in the 21st century and the mid-20th century

starting this trajectory, we are now in complete ecological crisis

because our entire economy is based on consumption.

So long story short, we have an economic mode that's entirely outdated.

And I really appreciate your introduction where you mentioned the word design,

because at the heart of our progress as a civilization is design.

it's our ability to do more and more with less and less and less.

Efficiency and design, that's the true wealth:

in order to make an amiable culture that isn't constantly at war with itself,

where it gets what it needs, it doesn't exist in deprivation and so on,

and that's what the book attempts to arc through.

So I walk through the history of economics, I walk through

general activist community, the libertarian community,

the false dualities between the state and government need to be moved past.

There's a great deal of mythology; people talk about

crony capitalism as though that's kind of a real thing,

when in truth the whole system is foundationally corrupt!

It's foundationally opposition-against-opposition type of structure

Those two things put together is a completely caustic reality,

and until we override this system and start to design out all of these problems,

focusing and amplifying what has actually improved our lives,

we're not going to get very far as a civilization,

Peter Farb was probably one of the most brilliant cultural anthropologists

certainly in my lifetime. He's passed away now

but his book 'Man's Rise to Civilization,' which

chronicled 34 first contacts with Native American groups back in the 1600s,

points out that with one exception, one single exception,

none of those societies were organized the way that you're describing.

In fact in all of those societies, the people with the greatest,

the most highly elevated position, had the lowest amount of power.

The Potlatch society: that you gained status by giving things away

- People who acquired more and more and more were viewed as mentally ill

- And there's theories about how those evolved

but how do we get from here to there, if that's desirable?

- Well I'm glad you brought that up, that there are pockets of civilization that have lived differently.

Native American cultures, aboriginal cultures,

that have basically been weeded out over time unfortunately due to

the power system that we know as capitalism.

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Peter Joseph and Thom Hartmann: "Can We Design Our Way Out Of Civilizational Crisis?"

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