This man wants to change the economy as we know it
to solve the ills of society.
I think he really might be onto something.
Patriot - Navy Seal - Wrestler Independent Governor - Truth Seeker - Crusader - President?
Jesse Ventura Off the Grid
He's a filmmaker, musician activist, author, and most importantly
the founder of the worldwide Zeitgeist Movement
to promote global sustainability.
Peter is an advocate of a free media
and distributes all of his films independently,
along with his half-hour web series ‘Culture in Decline.’
Peter’s focus these days
is on getting the masses to move away
from a market-based economy to a resource-based economy.
Welcome real-life vigilante Peter Joseph.
Peter, thanks for joining me on Off The Grid.
- It's my pleasure Jesse, thanks for having me.
- Peter, I guess the first thing to do:
Explain to us in layman's terms
what a resource-based economy is.
- Sure, sure.
A resource-based economy wants to create a sustainable culture,
and to do that you've got to create sustainable parameters:
things that actually support public health directly,
not through the movement of money. Things that actually support
sustainability and equilibrium with our habitat;
again something you won't be able to do with money.
In short, you manage the world's resources directly
without a market system, something we could not do by the way
many, many centuries ago.
With the new evolution of science and technology, we can actually replace
all the mechanisms of the market economy with a much more efficient system,
ensuring sustainability and good public health,
and also of course alleviating all the negative problems associated
with the market system, which is war, which is abuse,
inhumanity, exploitation;
obvious extreme unsustainable practices that we’re feeling severely
with the pollution problems and everything else that's happening.
So in short, it's a way of managing the world's resources and achieving
the highest level of public health technically possible.
- Along those lines, what are the arguments for moving away
from a money-based economy to resource-based, layman's terms.
Why should people support this?
- Well I think the word “system”
is something that people don't learn enough about when they're in school.
Let's think about the legal structure.
We assume that there is a “free will” that overrides all of our decisions, right?
Where people that are born in poverty, even though they may have no options,
we assume when they commit a crime
that they do so on their own free will, with no external pressures
and no type of coercion. This is called localized thinking.
Localized thinking is what dominates both the legal system and the economy.
Free-market economics says “Well you know,
you're free to exchange! If you exchange money for something
that must mean that you want that," and it eliminates everything
that actually coerces people into behavior.
And this is the big revelation, so
the market system right now is a massive coercive soft slavery system.
It is merely an extension of the
abject slave systems of the past that
deeply exploited anyone they could find, really.
It was never really race-based; it simply had to do with any manner of
political arrangement to justify exploitation of people for the benefit of others.
So this warring system that's emerged
has existed because we assume that we are actually independently oriented,
when we’re actually oriented in a system structure.
And this is profound, because once you have a system structure
you immediately have to remove yourself as an individual actor,
and ask yourself: what forces are happening on you
to motivate you for a particular end?
Modern sociological science for example has made it very clear
that we are NOT free will organisms. We have massive influences
that happen around us that coerce us literally into certain behaviors,
into certain propensities. So when you take that worldview you realize that
you can’t have a market system because it promotes the exact opposite behaviors
that you want in a sustainable and humane society. Specifically,
we’ll divide it into two extremes. You have
ecological sustainability, and then you have social sustainability.
Ecological sustainability is something that we
literally can’t have based on the system structure of market economics,
because we live in a consumption world, right?
Everyone wants to buy and sell and buy and sell.
It doesn't matter how long a TV lasts; it's the turnover that matters.
And in a world that, you know, has a finite resource amount
and has all these pollution problems,
we are not incentivized structurally by the system to want sustainability.
In fact if we really wanted to achieve efficiency and sustainability and conservation
we would see a dramatic loss in GDP across the world.
So there's no structure for it in the system.
And then there's the social stability, the humanity factor.
We’re seeing protests all across the world because of imbalance,
inequity I should say,
the big One percent Occupy Movement, anti-One percent Occupy Movement –
all of these things have been fomenting for years because the system, once again,
supports massive class inequality. I mean think about it:
the US Congress just went forward with a $250 billion dollar tax cut
for the 0.2 percent of Americans - roughly 600 families -
got a $250 - roughly - billion tax cut
because this is what the system creates!
So you can't fight it with really ethics at this point,
you can’t really fight with politics to a certain degree
(which we can talk about more so)
because all the factors once again
are pushing this incentive structure towards certain behaviors,
and unless we change the system,
then we're not going to really change anything;
we’re just going to keep running in circles.
- Well Peter I've got to ask the tough question:
How can this new economy be implemented realistically
when you look at our country today,
and 64% of the people in the last election
wouldn't even come out to vote?
It serves the establishment that people don't vote.
- It serves the establishment that people are riddled with debt and apathetic.
I don't look at the powers that be - the elite -
as some evil class that just happened to be there.
It's a natural outgrowth of this system that
you will inevitably have this power consolidation problem regardless,
if you maintain a system like this. So
to answer your question, we have to educate man!
That's why the Zeitgeist Movement is trying to get
this word out there as fast as possible,
and to do so before the big ecological crisis hits. By about 2030,
whether people are apathetic or not, they're going to have a serious sting
with the complete loss of biodiversity, the pollution problem,
the massive trends of social destabilization,
the incredible debt problem: by about 2020 all countries will essentially
be bankrupt to each other. The system right now is all pushing
towards 2030 as the ultimate negative ...
perfect storm if you will, and this is why we have to do it.
And I will say this though. We're gonna change one way or another.
The question is, how much suffering has to occur
before the society actually wakes up?
- How do you battle this Peter, when I give you this.
How about the religious people out there,
who put their trust in God? “Well, God gave us this planet.
God gave us the planet to use it.
God will take care of us in the end.”
How do you answer that when you look at the United States as being
the country that has the most people that believe angels exist?
- The pressures that are emerging - if someone really believes that there's
a god overlooking them and they’re going to take care of them -
well it's not going to be very justifiable
once the negative trends really start to materialize on this planet.
And we have never by the way had Jesse, on this planet,
even though we've had all these wars, we have never had a serious
resource crisis yet.
And we are on the verge about three or four of them
if we keep trends the way they are.
- Peter another question. - Sure.
- How would the world benefit by moving to this type of economy?
What would be the biggest benefit for the world to move
to the type of economy you're talking about?
- All life support systems right now on this planet are in decline.
So apart from the reversal of all of that,
if you have a people living in a world where
you have access- so this is the term that’s used as opposed to property.
In an access society where everyone can get their needs met -
which is something we can do, it’s scientifically proven -
we can literally create what's called a post-scarcity society,
where not only 9 billion people coming but twice that amount
can have a higher standard of living than 99% of the world has ever known.
This is not a conjecture. It's proven based on the trends
of science right now, and something called ephemeralization
which I won't go into too much but basically we're able to do
more and more and more, with less and less and less resources,
and it's incredible. Imagine being born into a society of low stress
where you didn't have to actually worry about that paycheck
and submitting to labor, and being essentially a corporate slave,
which is what 99.9% of the world is today:
funneling the majority of that money up to this one percent class
that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Public health would improve dramatically, and if you really think about it,
that's all that matters. All that matters to us
is to have really good public health, when you really think about it.
- Well I'll tell you Peter, you’re one intelligent guy and
I hope that people do listen to you
and I hope they get your films and pay attention.
- Thank you.
- We've got a couple of questions from
some of your people out there. Would you like to take a couple questions?
- Oh. Yeah, absolutely.
- Okay. From Twitter, we've got the Devil’s Advocate who asks
“Who is going to rule your one-world resource-based economy?
Who would be in charge?”
- This structure is not based on a hierarchy whatsoever.
It's based on parallel societies where everything is localized.
Gandhi, believe it or not, had this vision in his time. He said
we don't need hierarchy, whether it's communism or socialism or capitalism.
We need to create dense systems of societies
that localize all their production: everything from food-...
Globalization right now is insane. We import strawberries from Ecuador,
spending billions of dollars in fuel and polluting the environment
to move food around that we can easily grow in California ourselves.
This is what globalization has done.
It’s one of the most wasteful things we’ve ever come up with.
There's no overarching committee, it's not a dictatorship.
It's actually more democratic-... Again,
there's a book anyone can get called ‘The Zeitgeist Movement Defined,’
you can read it for free online. It goes into the absolute detail
about how we do economic calculation, the entire structure of it,
and it is as egalitarian and democratic as you could possibly get,
but still respecting natural law science.
- Okay. From Facebook, Nathan Feeny wants to know
“If we automated 90% of all human labor,
how would society be motivated to volunteer and work the remaining 10%?”
- When you automate the majority of things where monotonous labor is gone,
it frees people to actually do what they’re interested in.
Again, it's as though people wake up and they need to get a dollar
dangled in front of their face or they won't get out of bed.
This is the propaganda; it's absolute nonsense.
If you had a city like Los Angeles and this type of economy was employed,
using high-tech automation, sustainability principles,
roughly 5% of the entire population of Los Angeles would be required.
I say “required” meaning that
to make sure that the accounting for the machines and the structures
and everything is working fluidly, and if you divide
all the entire population by that 5% you're looking at somebody
“working” (and again I to use this in the term we know today) -
"working" maybe one hour a week!
So it's a completely different value system. I mean, you don't go home
and ... fight for minor chores, you know,
because you want to take care of your environment.
We're trying to have people take care of the world
and I think people will want to do that!
- So Peter, what you're telling me
is that I could work one hour a week and play golf the rest of the time?
- If you really wanted to (Jesse chuckling) but I guarantee you most people,
most people would really want to do something that would be thoughtful.
Again, I know that you might-... people would like to think it's all vacation
and there probably could be a great deal of that, but our human drive
comes from helping and community. And when you really break people down,
you get rid of all the pressures, that's what people will do!
If you took simply the people that volunteer for poverty,
and put them in the position of maintaining this society,
you'd already have a 20-to-1 correlation.
So you already have the people that are willing to do it.
- Finally, last question. Terry Zimmerman asks
“What do we do right now to transition from the current debt slavery
and social financial constraints?
Some people are optimistic, yet still have no idea
how to get off the carrot-on-a-stick hamster wheel
of working full throttle in neutral gear.”
- You can take all the major industrial facets of society
and begin to use existing taxation funds,
and convert those industries
into free institutions of high technology. For example in Los Angeles
we could put in automated farm systems all across the coast.
And it would produce all of the food required to feed everyone.
I've done this analysis; it can be done. No need to import anything
as far as the main produce for basic nutrition.
And you do that, you set it up, you automate it with advanced means
and you make it all free. And then you go to the next sector: energy.
You make it all free. You go step-by-step.
And of course as you might imagine, if anyone attempted to do that,
the big corporate establishment would flip out, because ...
you're affecting the entire flow of money and labor.
So what you do to compensate for that is you provide
universal minimum guaranteed income, and you balance the two.
So everyone in society gets a basic income
so they can support themselves with everything else they have to buy,
while other resources continually are able to be provided free.
Does that make sense? You just gradually do it, and eventually
you’ll end up with this system. Now that's easier said than done
but that's as far as I think we can go right now.
- I look at it this way Peter. If we're going to get this done,
I guess I need to become the president at 2016 and bring you on board.
- Hey (laughs) I’d be right there, I’d be right there.
- No, I mean seriously, it would require something that wild to happen.
- Probably, it probably would.
Again that's a very long conversation, I have that conversation a lot, but ...
- Well Peter I want to thank you for joining me on Off the Grid today,
I mean this is a concept that I had no idea of, but it's very interesting
and I look forward to seeing a resource-based economy go into effect
maybe- do you think it could happen in my lifetime? I'm 63.
- I really hope this change can happen within the next few decades
in some pockets of the world.
And once one country decides to really push forward,
a chain reaction I think will commence.
- So it will be like gay marriage?
- (Laughs) Maybe!
- You know, once it gets going and people realize that no one gets harmed
by gay marriage, then it will happen?
- (Laughs) I hope it could be that fluid, yeah.
- OK, well Peter thank you again for joining me Off the Grid
and I look forward to watching you.
We’ll keep in touch and I'll do what I can.
What do you think vigilant viewers?
Think we should move away from the market economy model
towards a resource-based model?
Sound off on ora.tv/OffTheGrid
and tell me what you think of Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist Movement.
Jesse Ventura, Off The Grid ora.tv/OffTheGrid