I've entitled this "Social Pathology." I decided to use the metaphor of disease to describe
the current state of social affairs and the trends it foreshadows and perpetuates. I was
first introduced to this idea of relating social state to a cellular state by a man
named John McMurtry, who wrote a book called "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism." The rationale
is pretty simple. Just as human beings have to deal with pathogens invading and harming
their life system, so too does the social system we all share. Of course, these societal
diseases are not generated by ways of physical germs or the like. Rather, they come in the
form of presupposed principles of preference; cultural "memes" that transfer from one to
another based on values, and hence, belief systems. These "memes" or patterns of perspective
and behavior are what eventually result from or comprise the cultural manifestations around
us, such as the ideas of democracy, republicans, democrats, the american dream, etc. In chapter
one we will examine the symptoms, and hence diagnose the current stage of disease we are
in. Then in chapter two we will establish a prognosis, meaning what can we expect from
the future as the current pathogenic patterns continue. And finally, in chapter three, we
will discuss treatment for our current state of sickness, and this is where the concept,
of course, of a resource-based economy will be initially examined. However, as an introduction
to this, I am first going to describe what I call the "invisible prison". This is the
closed, intellectual feedback system, if you will, that consistently slows or even stops
new socially altering concepts from coming to fruition, stops progress. Let me explain.
The social order, as we know it, is created out of ideas, either directly or as a systemic
consequence. In other words, somebody somewhere did something which generated a group interest,
which then led to the implementation of a specific social component, either in a physical
form, philosophical form, or both. Once a given set of ideas are entrusted by a large
enough group of people, it becomes an institution. And once that institution is made dominant
in some way, while existing for a certain period of time, that institution can then
be considered an establishment. Institutional establishments are simply social traditions
given the illusion of permanence. In turn, the more established they become, the more
cultural influence they tend to have on us, including our values, and hence, our identities
and perspectives. It is not an exaggeration to say that the established institutions governing
a person's environment is no less than a conditioning platform to program, if you will, that person
with a specific set of values required to maintain the establishment. Hence, we're going
to call these "established value programs". I have found the analogy of computer programming
to be a great way to frame this point. While there is always a debate about genetics, and
environmental influence which, by the way, as I mentioned Roxanne Meadows will go into
at length, later in the program, it's very easy to understand in the context of values,
meaning what you think is important and not important, that information influences or
conditioning is coming from the world around you. Make no mistake, every intellectual concept,
which each one of us finds merit with, is the result of a cultural information influence,
one way or another. The environment is a self-perpetuating programming process, and just like designing
a software program for your computer, each human being is, advertently and inadvertently,
programmed into their world view. To continue the analogy, the human brain is a piece of
hardware and the environment around you constitutes the programming team, which creates the values
and perspective. Every word you know has been taught to you one way or another, and thus,
every concept and belief you have is a result of this same influence. Jacque Fresco once
asked me, "How much of you is you?" The answer, of course, is kind of a paradox, for either
nothing is me, or everything is me, when it comes to the information I understand and
act upon. Information is a serial process, meaning the only way that a human being can
come up with any idea is through taking in dependent information that allows that idea
to be realized. We appear to be culturally programmed from the moment we come into this
world to the moment we die, and I'm not going to drill in it much more than that. However,
consequently, the cultural attributes we maintain as important values are most often the ones
that are reinforced by the external culture. I'm going to say that again. The most dominant
cultural attributes maintained are the ones that are reinforced by your environment. If
you are born into a society which rewards competition over collaboration, then you most
likely will adopt those values in order to survive. The point is, we are essentially
bio-chemical machines. And while the integrity of our machine processing power and memory
is contingent, in part, on genetics, the source of our actions come fundamentally from the
ideas and experiences installed on our mental hardware by the world around us. However,
our biological computer, the human mind, has an evolutionarily-installed operating system,
if you will, with some seemingly difficult tendencies built in, which tends to limit
our objectivity and, hence, our rational thought process. This comes in the form of emotional
inclinations. You know, I'm sure many people here have heard the phrase "Be objective!"
No human being can be fully objective. That's one of the important things I learned, actually,
from Mr. Fresco. Therefore, there's a very common propensity for us humans to find something
that works for our needs given the social structure, and then to hold on to it for dear
life regardless of new conflicting information which might rationally expect a logical change
to occur. Change tends to be feared, for it upsets our associations. And, by the way,
when it comes to maintaining income in the monetary system, you see this propensity in
full force, which I will talk about a lot more later. Therefore, any time someone dares
to present an idea outside of or contrary to the establishment programming, the reaction
is often a condemning of the idea as blasphemy, or undermining, or a conspiracy, or simply
erroneous. For example, in the academic world, investigation often becomes confined to self-referring
circles of discourse; closed feedback loops, which assume that the foundational assumptions
of their schools of thought are empirical and only these experts, as defined by their
established credentials, are considered viable authorities, therein often dominating influence
over the public opinion. This is a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis, and please excuse
my lack of Hungarian pronunciation, but he was a physician who lived in the mid 1800's
who performed childbirths. Through a series of events, he realized a pattern that there
was a relationship with the transfer of disease and the fact that the doctors of the times
never washed their hands after performing autopsies. The doctors of the time would handle
dead bodies in the lower elements of the hospitals and then they would go up and they would perform
childbirths without washing their hands. So, this doctor, realizing this pattern, he started
to tell his colleagues about this. He said, "Hey, you know, you should wash your hands
before doing this; before performing any type of surgery or childbirth, especially after
handling a dead body." He was laughed at. He was laughed at and ignored. He published
papers and they were dismissed and ridiculed. And after many years of trying this issue,
he was finally committed to a mental institution, where he died. It was many years after his
death when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, that his observations were
finally understood, and people realized what a horrible mistake had been made. In the words
of John McMurtry, professor of philosophy in Canada, "In the last dark age, one can
search the inquiries of this era's preserved thinkers, from Augustine to Ockham, and fail
to discover a single page of criticism of the established social framework, however
rationally insupportable feudal bondage, absolute paternalism, divine right of kings, and the
rest may be. In the current final order, is it so different? Can we see in any media,
or even university press, a paragraph of clear unmasking of the global regime that condemns
a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available? In such an
order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda. Only one doctrine is speakable,
and a priest caste of its experts prescribe the necessities and obligations to all. Social
consciousness is incarcerated within the role of a kind of ceremonial logic operating entirely
within the received framework of an exhaustively-prescribed regulatory apparatus protecting the privileges
of the privileged. Methodical censorship triumphs in the guise of scholarly rigor and the only
room left for searching thought becomes the game of competing rationalizations." People
tend not to criticize the social order because they are bound within it. We are running a
thought program which has been installed on our mental hardware which inherently controls
our frame of reference. To use a different analogy, it's like they're in a game and the
idea of questioning the integrity of the game itself rarely occurs.