Building out a post scarcity, collaborative economy.

The following is a transcript of Episode 53 of Peter Joseph’s Revolution Now! podcast. Please support Peter Joseph through his Patreon

Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody.

My name is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now episode 53. This episode marks a new beginning for the program, with a visual component that I hope will be more engaging and communicative. I’m also going to be expanding the nature of the program a bit to include interviews, media analysis, current events, and things of that nature. But note, for those listening in audio-only environments, I will still do my best to make sure the visual tools used are verbally described as well.

So, why am I sitting here talking to you, wasting my precious time in this short life? Well, it’s because we live in an increasingly upside-down, dysfunctional world — offensively so — and I can’t stand it. The reason for this insulting dysfunction rests upon a misunderstanding, one that has to do with the overwhelmingly deterministic influence of the very structure of our socio-economic world: its influence on human behavior, its influence on human values, specifically what is being incentivized and reinforced in our social system, and what is not being incentivized and reinforced.

The net result of this sociological influence is the manifestation and perpetuation of our deeply unsustainable, unstable world — a global society riddled with human rights abuses; ongoing environmental destruction. A societal condition that has also made this trajectory very, very clear: it’s only going to get worse. The grace period of our incompetence is now over. Hence, the solution can only be changing the very social system that is causing the problems to begin with if we expect a positive future. And make no mistake, the issue is no longer up for debate. I’m happy to bring people on this program to contradict that.

This is not about pandering either to some sensational doomsday scenario, which I get a lot. The fact is we live in a global system that is diametrically opposed to what is required to maintain stability with our habitat and peaceful coexistence with each other. The specifics of this dichotomy have been expressed at length in prior podcasts, in my writings, in my films, and beyond. And fortunately, I’m not alone in this perspective, even though we, as a group, remain deep in the minority.

What we see is a broad intellectual failure at large. There is almost zero system-level analysis occurring in our world when it comes to societal problems. Rather, when it comes to poverty, environmental destruction, degradation, war, oppression, and so forth, all the activists and political communities at large want to do is move the deck chairs around on the Titanic, completely ignoring the true link between the state of society and the system of market-based economics that defines its state.

Markets are the problem. Markets are the problem. Trade is the problem. And no, this is not a contention of ideology. This has nothing to do with Karl Marx or socialism or whatever nonsense many wish to try and deflect that opinion with. As of the early 21st century, through the lens of systems science, we can now understand the true endogenous nature of market capitalism, formally and empirically, realizing that this system is going to kill us off if it remains, no matter how we try to adapt within it- as far as common activism, in-system activism.

Yes, there are certainly lots of solution proposals out there, but they are mostly all myopic and hence false solutions. In fact, I think my favorite false solution within all of this is the idea that technology is going to save us in a material sense. This is the big one with the reigning techno-capitalist apologists out there — the millionaire and billionaire tech class who dominate the media with their ambitious concepts, who certainly indeed have no incentive to dismantle the very system that made them so wealthy and powerful. So, they just assume science will prevail to continue cleaning up things as we go along without addressing the system itself.

For example, we just won’t worry about the market-incentivized industrial mechanisms that are producing air pollution that kills millions of people each year. Instead, let’s just build massive air-cleaning machines or other such methods to clean up as we go along, once again. The logic that whatever problems capitalism creates will be fixed by some new technology is not only painfully lazy, it’s utterly unworkable in the long run. The negative market externalities, as we can summarily categorize them, will just keep multiplying at a rate faster than we can solve them by such patchwork.

Again, we have to go after the root causes, needless to say. And if we are going to invoke innovation in the context of solving social problems, that innovation needs to go toward the re-engineering of the social system itself — the redesign of our determining social structure, once again. But that is not in the general conversation out there. And it’s not in the conversation because of a few reasons.

First is the tremendous pressure the system exerts due to being literally the basis of human survival, procedurally. This means the pattern of behavior everyone is conditioned into as they go about their daily lives. It’s operant conditioning. Another reason is the “limit of debate” — an excellent phrase — that has been firmly set culturally for generations now. People have been conditioned into incredible mental prisons when it comes to entertaining any notion of true system change, largely rooted in this false duality of so-called socialism, as an average, and its supposed nature and effects, which I will talk about more so in a moment. You know, socialism, communism, Marxism — all of that nonsense.

So, what we have today is a world centered around policy-making when it comes to trying to solve problems. And as a general rule, policy will only be as effective as the degree to which it does not move against the nature of the system it is within — hence, the market economy. For the more any given policy inhibits the so-called free market, the faster that policy will be eroded, if initiated at all. This is a critical general rule people need to understand.

And if you don’t believe that, just take a look at the consequences of every single environmental conference of the past 50 years seeking to provoke policy and agreements to policy. Lots of great rhetoric, lots of seemingly feasible proposals, yet virtually no progress — from biodiversity loss to plastic waste to resource overshoot to every other kind of environmental concern, including, of course, climate destabilization. We see nothing but running in place.

And that running in place is going to persist until the entire planet collapses into dust and chaos as long as market capitalism remains the prevailing system. Why?

Because every single thing that needs to happen to restore environmental balance specifically is antithetical to the way markets function. The market economy is a growth system by endogenous default. And the only path toward human sustainability on this planet is by way of the exact opposite ethic and function of what the system does. This is something that even the most established progressive ecologists do not seem to understand today.

Markets cannot function without perpetual consumption and sustained growth. That is the only pattern of behavior it knows. And hence, it is not a decision or a choice — it is what the system does and must do in order to maintain internal stability. What does internal stability mean? It means that the more you constrain economic activity, the more it starts to break down on the level of basic operation, such as people losing jobs. And yet, as I’ve run into the ground countless times, the true goal of any real economy is to do more with less — the opposite idea.

You want the system designed to move toward fewer and fewer needed people to be employed and fewer resources used. Less waste, right? You want higher levels of sustainable output in that equation because of increased efficiency. True technical efficiency, not market efficiency. This is a common-sense notion anyone would apply in their normal household economy — it’s about reducing waste, which is essentially what the term “economy” means. Unfortunately, that focus is the exact opposite of what market capitalism requires to maintain its own internal stability. The system is literally built upon waste as the driving mechanism.

So back to my point: policy attempts have limited effects by default, and that doesn’t just apply to ecological problems, but also to social problems in the form of poverty, crime, hierarchical power abuse, corruption, and the like. In many contexts, policy evolves into institutions — regulatory institutions, interventionist institutions, and so on. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example. Or the general institution of mass incarceration as an outcome of the legal system. In some cases, you even have seemingly activist uprisings attempting creative destruction of existing institutions by developing their own institutional replacements.

In that context, I must say my current favorite example of this false solution of institutional change is the hilarious pop-culture fascination with cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. While most people in this arena are just gambling in the context of Wall Street, there is a substantial subculture that shockingly thinks the rise of cryptocurrency will forge an institutional transformation of the financial system for the better. Unfortunately, this is not going to be the case, as much as the financial system needs reform. Again, just like policy, institutions are fundamentally subservient to the system they are born from.

Bitcoin is no different. It is just a system modulation that ultimately challenges nothing in terms of the fundamental flaws of the financial and banking institution realm. It rests, in fact, on a grand delusion and mythology, largely rooted in old libertarian ideas around so-called “sound money.” Please understand, it doesn’t matter how sound you think money is or could be in whatever form — as long as it exists as part of a larger-order market system, there will never be much of a difference in core outcomes for public health and society. For example, the persistence of inflation and debt.

I have long been a critic of the fiat system and have described its basis in debt as a form of slavery, which is precisely the function it serves. But even if you were able to design a currency that wasn’t built upon debt at the government level — meaning the elimination of central banks — debt would still be present through the loan structure of commercial banks or whatever institutional variation arises to replace it. Even if all currency in the world were replaced by cryptocurrency, being peer-to-peer and decentralized, the same structure would still materialize to distribute that currency to people who don’t have it. This is due to the inherent income imbalance generated by market trade.

The same market trade would also incentivize fees for those loan transactions, which would serve the same role as interest charges. And boom — the debt-based, indentured servitude society persists. I mean that as a broad distinction — it doesn’t have to pertain specifically to cryptocurrency. But let’s get to inflation.

What’s missing in that conversation is understanding the system adaptation as simplicity has moved to complexity over the past 100 years. Bitcoin is designed to only produce 21 million coins, and it’s argued that this scarcity reduces inflationary risk. This is merely a variation of the utility of a gold standard or precious metals backing a currency from hundreds of years ago. The point people don’t ask when reflecting on why we don’t use a fixed money supply anymore, moving into the realm of near-infinite fiat, is that it has to do with total system evolution as it continues to grow from simplicity to complexity.

Modern capitalism today cannot function with a fixed money supply. It is too inflexible to compensate for the extreme imbalances constantly created in the modern global system. It doesn’t matter how much you subdivide a single Bitcoin. It comes down to the value of the total supply — the total Bitcoin supply in this case. The moment the immediate monetary needs of society exceed that value, the entire society locks up.

In the fiat system, value can be created out of thin air based on need — and regionally so. Yes, there are huge problems with the fiat system, but the fiat system is consequential of the larger-order market economy and the system-level imbalances it creates. A fixed money supply, no matter how vast, is a recipe for disaster in such a complex economic architecture. There will be massive crises that will still happen because of the very nature of market economics itself, having nothing to do with the nature of currency itself.

And those crises will have to be met with mass liquidity injections of monetary values that can meet those needs regionally, in virtually all cases. Therefore, coming back to the phenomenon of inflation, this is just what the total system has to do in its current adaptive form. If you don’t believe that, just model it with modern statistics.

Imagine an island with X number of people. They create a fixed money supply with a given value. You mirror the velocity dynamics of the real world — meaning the rate of exchange, how fast things are changing hands — and then start unbalancing the system in terms of wealth and income disparity, as is endogenously consistent with mass market trade. Over time, you’re going to see the money supply get sucked up by fewer and fewer people, along with cyclical major crises that will occur. That society will come to a halt if new monetary value isn’t introduced out of thin air. It is inevitable.

In the end, the cryptocurrency sphere is a huge waste of time and energy from a social change perspective. I hope people who have been sucked into this delusion begin to understand that. If you’re into gambling, go ahead.

Take other people’s fiat money, as quite ironically, the very value of each crypto coin is literally derived from fiat currency. And if you want to use it to send money peer-to-peer without a third-party institution, cool. Some countries can very much benefit from that as well, along with using it as a hedge against domestic currency problems, or perhaps even having utility as an alternative to foreign currency reserves and other things that are discussed. So, there is use, there is utility out there. And again, I’m all in favor of peer-to-peer decentralization, as I’ll talk about more so as we go along.

But please, please stop the nonsense distraction that this marks some new path toward revolutionary change. It doesn’t. So, in the end, all of this Bitcoin crypto delusion has really done is cause great damage to the activist community through distraction. And it’s rather grotesque to see propagandists promote it in this way — as a grand solution — when all they’re really doing is trying to get other people to buy it, so the price will continue to rise for the sake of the propagandists’ wealth — that they already hold.

In fact, as an investment or gambling asset, which is likely all it will ever be, Bitcoin is arguably the most idealized Ponzi asset ever conceived, as the perceived utility is absent of everything but conjecture, and its foundational scarcity can only push the idea of the price rising. That’s why it’s so popular as the mass delusion it is. Unlike stocks, which symbolize the behavior of an existing company, crypto has no fundamental relationship to anything but the vast subjective assumptions of its purpose coupled with its contrived scarcity once again. It’s really quite fascinating and quite depressing as well.

In fact, the whole phenomenon can be summarized with an old Woody Allen joke: A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says to the doctor, “Hey, my sister thinks she’s a chicken.” And the doctor says, “Well, you should bring her in, we’ll try to fix this.” And he says, “No, I can’t. You see, we need the eggs.”

Now, before we move on, I’d like to say one more thing on the issue of false solutions and bad assumptions: the ever-pervasive idea that your individual ethical actions are going to carve out a better world irrespective of the existing social system. The implication of this thinking is that the economic system is neutral or malleable by way of un-orchestrated intention. You know, ideas such as “voting with your dollar,” buying an ethically sourced this or that, riding your bike to work to avoid hydrocarbon use, and so forth. The idea being that as long as you as an individual have a proper moral compass, and if we all have a proper moral compass — whatever that means — everything will work out, regardless of the preexisting system you are inside of.

No.

Such behaviors should be encouraged, of course, but they are not functional toward system change for a few reasons. First is the subjective nature of what morality is supposed to be within the current culture. Where does a culture derive its sense of ethical responsibility? It’s not the scope of this podcast to go into such philosophical analysis, but what we can agree upon is that morality and ethics are a cultural phenomenon. This begs the question: Where does the culture come from? It comes primarily from the system of survival and the social relations inherent to it.

And as far as I’m concerned, a truly moral person wouldn’t just be concerned about overt abuses, such as the fact that there are more slaves in the world than at any time in human history, according to United Nations standards, but also the very incorporation of human exploitation itself, which defines the very essence of market capitalism — the extraction of surplus value, to use a technical term. You can only generate profit through imbalance, such as seeking cost efficiency, which is often rooted in the exploitation of a desperate human being for labor power.

Most are drawing arbitrary lines when it comes to what they think is morally appropriate or not. And that is consequential to the social system itself, which determines the overall moral aptitude of society — what we call “normal.” Similarly, we can directly see what the socioeconomic system is incentivizing and rewarding and realize that the average person is going to go with that flow for their basic day-to-day survival.

From a person who must save money due to income scarcity and does not have the luxury of supporting businesses that may be doing things a little bit more humanely, a little bit more ethically, or a little bit better in terms of production and sustainability, to the general business mindset required to stay profitable — which is fundamentally competitive. Meaning, you run a business with truly sustainable practices, the costs incurred will force you to lose your competitive edge and lose money in the long run. That’s why unsustainable practices prevail. It too expensive to do things properly as you compete.

A common cliché retort to that, of course, is: “Well, if you produce more sustainable goods, people are going to want to promote sustainability and simply spend more money on them. You will create the demand by your ethical behavior.” While that may be partially true for those who can afford to be more sustainable and ethical, that will not be the majority of consumers in the scarcity-based system we have, as they try to desperately save money for their own survival. The vast majority simply do not have the luxury of this kind of behavior.

The same goes for wanting to care more about your employees as a business owner. Pay them more than the average industrial wage? The result is the same: You will lose a competitive edge and lose money in the long run. Why? Because the strategic advantage within capitalist competition is in the abuse — the abuse of the habitat, the abuse of each other. It is self-regulating tyranny, if you will. And there’s really no escape from that. Businesses will simply fail if they do not conform to fundamentally abusive practices — or relatively abusive practices, we’ll put it that way — in this game of strategic market exploitation.

In fact, in recent news, Kroger Corporation here in the United States has been under antitrust scrutiny due to its proposed $25 billion merger with Albertsons, another grocery chain. The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit to block this merger, citing concerns that it would, of course, reduce competition, lead to higher prices, and negatively impact worker wages and benefits — which is always what happens in general. But as I detailed in my prior Substack article called The Competitive Illusion, this is exactly what should be expected of all businesses as they seek to battle competitive forces. This is precisely what Kroger Corporation said in its defense: They are just trying to compete against massive companies like Walmart that also have grocery store elements.

I mean, what do you expect? All businesses are moving against competitive balance because that’s exactly what you must do — as I’m going to talk about more in a moment. My main point here relates to this delusion that there are other options in the market economy to be anything but unsustainable, abusive, and monopolistic. The matters of degree don’t matter. And it warrants tremendous frustration when you think about it. The causality could not be more clear, and yet, rarely do we ever hear any system-level conversation amongst NGOs, nonprofits, or the general activist community.

And if you do hear people talk about system change, inevitably, the subject is immediately encountered with the assumption that the only known alternative that has ever existed is something called socialism, or communism, or Marxism, etc. As if any of those abstracted, subjective ideas exist as formal systems — they do not. But those symbols, linked to vast arrays of supposed societal failures or abominations in history, human rights abuses, and so on, help preserve the paradigm of market capitalism. Because everyone’s been trained to fear the idea of any alternative as being substantially worse. It’s really quite incredible to see how powerful this propaganda has been.

If I hear one more person frame economic change in this false duality construct between capitalism and socialism, between free markets and collectivism, or whatever bullshit term people come up with, I’m going to blow my goddamn brains out. It’s like a trance. It’s like mass brainwashing — mass hysteria on a certain level.

So that said, I’ll finish this section by saying this: It doesn’t matter what you think of any real or assumed alternative to capitalism. If we do not change this system, it will destroy civilization. In fact, it’s destroying it right now, if you pay attention, as every single life support system remains in decline — and accelerating in that decline. The more environmental stress that exists, the more destabilized and conflicted society becomes. Therefore, this highly propagandized fear of change needs to be put to rest. There is no choice but to change, and I hope people that have researched the material I’ve talked about — and others have talked about — can put this in the proper context.

Okay, enough of that. Let’s now move on to the core section of today’s program, which is a continuation of the prior episode regarding the destructive nature of economic competition, in particular. In contrast to the capitalist mythology alluded to earlier that says competition is the mechanism of balance, efficiency, and, of course, freedom in society.

And then I’d like to move from this competitive basis to a collaborative basis in a theoretical speculation, which I argue we must do. It’s not an option. This isn’t idealism if we’re going to make sure our society is sustainable in the future and survives.

To inch into this, let me first start by getting a few general points on the issue out of the way.

First, it is a long-standing belief that humans are competitive by nature. I’ve talked about this before at length, and there are plenty of behavioral scientists and evolutionary biologists that can express this better than I can. The modern consensus does not support this ancient idea that we human beings have this inalterable competitive drive toward domination.

And there are lots of variations of this kind of thinking — it’s basically an elitist theory. Because if you believe in a society that is ultimately competitive — or I should say immutably competitive — and hence hierarchical, it preserves those that are at the top of the pyramid by default. The wealthy power establishment has everything to gain from you maintaining a competitive disposition. The truth is, human beings are deeply adaptable organisms, as we see throughout anthropological history. Collaboration is a powerful social stabilizer and eclipses the very limited, very few positive effects that competition creates when it comes to social unfolding, including innovation.

The trick is, we need a social system that reinforces and rewards true collaborative behavior, which is the opposite of what our system today rewards.

Secondly, the modern competitive sickness is not just an interpersonal or intergroup phenomenon. The very basis of our economy has forced us to be at war with nature itself. It might seem a little strange to phrase it that way, but it’s completely accurate. Market economics only sees the Earth as an inventory to exploit for its infinite growth requirements. This means it holds the habitat in contempt, as there is no respect for regenerative balance or homeostasis.

Carl Sagan once said, “An organism at war with itself is doomed.” It’s bad enough we sit at the edge of apocalyptic violence on this planet by way of military establishments, but our complete disharmony with the habitat through the competitive, exploitative economic system moves us toward the exact same end.

Thirdly, one thing I find that people tend to refuse to accept when it comes to understanding the nature of market and business competition is that it is that very incentive that leads to government corruption, particularly in the context of shutting down needed business regulation. And I don’t mean just environmental regulation, which is obvious, but also regulatory intervention that tries to help those people who end up on the wrong side of market imbalance — hence, the poor and those suffering from the structural violence of low socioeconomic status, a reality that literally kills millions each year.

As an aside, make no mistake: Poverty, as a general term, is the leading cause of death on Earth — a slow-motion genocide born from systemic processes of the market economy. In fact, as weird as this may sound, poverty did not even exist on this planet in its true technical nature before the utilization of trade-based society. Why? Because with the exception of absolute poverty — meaning the lack of nutrition and things that directly inhibit your biology — all other forms of poverty are socially relative.

That noted, when it comes to overall government corruption, everyone always says the same thing, right? Get money out of politics. What a naive and absurd thing to say when your entire society is run by money and markets. It is the exact same competitive function that keeps businesses trying to outdo and stifle each other in the business game that incentivizes fighting back any regulatory interference on the part of government. It is fascinating how the activist community can’t get a handle on that yet.

In fact, the general public at large tends to accept the basis of competition in business as a good thing, but draws the red line when this competitive ethic enters into the relationship between business and government. I’m sorry, but this is just what the incentive structure does, which is why, at the foundation of things today, lobbying is completely legal.

And corporate lobbyists outnumber lawmakers 10 to 1 here in the United States, many of them writing the actual laws that policymakers put forward. A fundamentally business-run government is what you have, and that is a result of the competitive intent built into the market ecosystem. Don’t want that to happen? Well, I guess you could try to outlaw such things, as the common logic goes. But wait a minute — if laws are written, essentially, by policymakers as they are influenced by money, why would those people write laws to remove that influence? See the problem?

And obviously, I’m being purposefully rhetorical here, but the truth remains. Naive. I have brought the subject up to many before, in fact, and my favorite response is, “Well, if we just get rid of Citizens United” — you know, that Supreme Court law in the US that says money is free speech, allowing unlimited spending on political influence — “then everything will be fine. This is just a rouge Supreme Court ruling that’s caused all the problems.” No. If you remove Citizens United, it would not stop the problem of the intent.

This is why you can never, ever expect things to get substantially better when it comes to core social problems. The short-term, competitive drive of profit-seeking industries will continue to compete against regulatory institutions through the use of monetary influence, and they will always win in the long run. Why? Because those system forces are much more powerful than the counter-market forces by default. Everything is too entrenched. The state apparatus is not independent of capitalism, once again — it is a consequence of it. Its character is defined by it, which, again, is why environmental laws are virtually ineffective, along with many other empirical examples that can be sourced.

And yes, to balance this out, you can argue some countries are doing better than others, but there is a limited global threshold as well. The rich will fundamentally continue to get richer on this planet. Power will continue to consolidate, and the environment will continue to decline — by force, once again, of the market economy’s endogenous nature, producing networks of human agents that are far more inclined to serve that system’s most natural gravitations rather than oppose it. Why? Because it rewards them with their survival and standard of living to do so — even if it means, in the long run, the end of civilization itself.

Now, as an aside, does that mean we just give up and not attempt to elect people or push policy in the political construct to try to collar these terrible natural gravitations of capitalism for the betterment of health and the environment? Of course not. We cannot give up on that level. We need to slow the machine down so we have more time for revolutionary change. But once again, the level of common activism can’t be the final solution, and hence we have to be focused on system change simultaneously. Unfortunately, time is increasingly not on our side.

At the present moment in particular, market agents are deeply winning — especially in the highly influential United States. The rise of Donald Trump is perhaps the most dominant signpost of this acceleration toward a deregulated abyss, which is why I have been so vocal about stopping his reelection. It has nothing to do with Democrats, Republicans, or left or right. But again, from the standpoint of economic competition, all of this is expected. In fact, I see it as a new stage of system adaptation that increasingly throws off needed regulation so the market can be “free” in order to continue to pretend that it’s still a workable system, that it’s still viable.

Because in the short term, deregulated markets will have a robust reaction. But in the long run, again, it will only exacerbate income inequality, power consolidation, and environmental decline.

Okay, moving on. The fourth issue we need to get out of the way, when it comes to the overall dysfunction of a competitive society, is the integrity of information itself, including cherished scientific consensus. So much of what we have been led to believe about the world — told it was arrived at through the method of science — has been utterly wrong. Not wrong in the context of natural falsifiability of things over time, in the march of scientific progress — as obviously everything is going to change in our understanding over time. No, I’m referring to very specific problems of incentive distortions, where profit-seeking entities, whether an individual or an entire industry, willfully promote biased science because it helps their bottom line.

And the problem is twofold. First, you have the direct problem of fraud or the willingness to not be completely truthful, manipulating data for self-interest — such as the oil industry has been doing for many decades regarding how hydrocarbons affect the ecosphere. Or we can go back to the food pyramid that was taught to people like myself in elementary school, which was literally constructed by corporations as a marketing gimmick, polluting the lives of millions and millions of children.

Point being, it’s been well established that even prominent scientific journals have been infiltrated to promote such bias by corporate influence, making the necessity for skepticism essential in areas we just hope we could kind of trust, once again, as a scientific outcome. And there’s no shortage of examples with that in all areas.

Secondly, since this awareness of historical manipulation exists, it pushes people to reactionarily; impulsively mistrust scientific consensus itself as a kind of impulsive reaction. Not critical skepticism through thought and research, but a rejection born from cynicism, again from mistrust. In other words, since there is precedent for corruption, they just assume corruption will be consistent. And it’s very dangerous to have that kind of attitude float around society — particularly in the modern era. A massive trust problem, which is deeply polluting.

And you know, as an aside, we are all familiar with this terrible pejorative that has swept modern culture: the phrase “conspiracy theorist.” It’s fascinating to hear this term used so passively now, as if it’s some kind of technical distinction of perspective. Even some of the most professional-appearing news organizations now use this phrase, not understanding that what they are actually doing is engaging in a kind of impulsive insolence and intellectual bigotry, if you will. What they’re actually saying is that someone is either dumb or insane for their view in fear of some kind of ulterior element behind a given phenomenon.

It’s right up there with the vague use of terms like “socialist” or “communist” as descriptive pejoratives — fundamentally meaningless, abstracted, subjective terms, apart from relatively getting across the idea that a person or an idea itself is to be debased in a given context and having no validity or integrity. I wrote about this a bit in an article on Substack, dealing with conspiracy culture. Anyone can go and read it.

And here’s the question: Where do people think this social paranoia comes from?

Where do people think this enormous mistrust of power and institutions finds a psychological root? It’s very obvious. It’s rooted in a kind of emotional reaction based upon blind skepticism of our society at large and its behavior — hence our social system — because everyone in this system is constantly manipulating everything on different scales for their own personal or group advantage, at the expense of others inevitably. That is just what the capitalist system does.

In a climate where everyone is fundamentally dishonest and angling at all times — of course, you’re going to have pockets of mass exaggeration, irrational causality, and a consensus that just assumes the worst, inventing things that don’t even exist. Of course, you’re going to have that. Of course, you’re going to have QAnon. Of course, you’re going to have flat earthers. And of course, you’re going to have exploiters like Alex Jones, shamelessly profiting off of the most extreme ideas, culminating this societal skepticism in a feedback loop.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s all a side effect, once again, of the inherently competitive nature of our society. I’m not saying this is the only reason people believe stupid things, of course. But it’s made that much worse by the ecosystem of mistrust that is inherent to our social system.

Governments of the world don’t just lie occasionally — they lie as a matter of practice. As do all corporations. Have you ever heard of advertising? The system is premised on a strategic game of manipulation, which again is why Donald Trump will be the next president. He is the archetype of a kind of con artist mentality that the system rewards, and hence why people support him — because that’s the way they are trained to think as well.

Okay, moving on. In the prior episode, I began to talk about famed economist F.A. Hayek, as he is a great jumping-off point to get into this reigning propaganda that economic competition is the most optimized state of affairs. In 1944, deeply influenced by World War II, Hayek wrote his classic work, The Road to Serfdom. While he may not be a household name today, he was long ago, and the premises in this book are at the root of modern free-market philosophy and dogma.

One core idea is that anything dealing with so-called “central planning,” a “command economy,” or whatever vague phrase people wish to use when describing what they assume is the quality of anything BUT free-market capitalism — not only can’t work in his view but also leads to deteriorated conditions of freedom, liberty, and human rights. Hence the phrase The Road to Serfdom.

One of the core reasons he argues all of this is that he considers the competitive element as the glue that holds it all together. It is competition that ultimately facilitates the invisible hand of Adam Smith, fostering spontaneous order and self-regulation while ensuring human liberty. And you hear this line of thinking everywhere, all the time today. Every time somebody complains about something going wrong in the market, someone inevitably chimes in and says, “Oh, we just need more robust competition.” It’s one of the greatest catchphrases of all time, particularly in the libertarian community.

In the words of F.A. Hayek himself, “It is of the utmost importance to the argument of this book for the reader to keep in mind that the planning against which all our criticism is directed is solely the planning against competition, the planning which is to be substituted for competition.”

Now, before we go into how a collaborative function — collaborative dynamics, a collaborative economic system — can most certainly compensate for the assumptions of what competition is magically supposed to do in markets regarding what is produced, consumer preferences, how value is designated, how distribution unfolds, and so forth, let me quickly take issue with the very idea that economic competition is the best way to secure freedom, liberty, democracy, fairness, and all the rest, as promoted and implied by Hayek and a whole subclass of libertarian culture today.

Can you recognize the glaring fallacy of this idea?

I’m not sure if there’s an exact term for it, but I think it would be something like the “means contradicting the end” phenomenon — the “means contradicting the end” fallacy. Invoking a simple, well-established philosophical rule that is empirically supported, highlighting self-defeating methodologies: In other words, you can’t fight your way to peace. You can’t enslave your way to freedom. You can’t oppress your way to justice. You can’t conquer your way to unity. You can’t divide your way to harmony. And you cannot compete your way to equality, freedom, liberty, democracy, equity, fairness, and the like.

Albert Einstein famously once said, “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.” Just as Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” This is also foundational to Gandhi’s non-violent resistance movement ideas, which he termed Satya-Graha. And I know someone may say, “Well, that’s just poetic idealism.” No, it’s not.

We see the outcome of this contradictory thinking everywhere around us. People say things like, “Well, if the United States didn’t drop the atomic bomb on Japan, there wouldn’t have been peace and the end of World War II.” A dubious assumption in and of itself, if you know the history. But what has been the actual result? Every technical power in the world has moved to develop its own nuclear weapons now, fostering an even more delicate and dangerous situation, given that today there are enough nuclear warheads to destroy the planet thousands of times over.

And back to Hayek, as an aside — he was very consistent in his character with this kind of fallacious thinking. He was also in favor of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet after the 1973 overthrow of democratically elected, self-proclaimed Marxist president Salvador Allende of Chile.

All the capitalists could recognize in this country was, of course, “evil socialism,” just as they do today, which is code for any threat to Western capitalist power and profit.

Hayek actually stated that he saw this dictatorship of Pinochet as a necessary step to — you guessed it — a move to a more free society, invoking, of course, the need for free markets to be implemented. Even if those free markets, which are supposed to be the root of human liberty and social freedom, are to be governed by a murderous dictatorship, as was the case with Pinochet. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

So, coming back to my main point: as far as competition as this balancing, liberating force, it is logically ludicrous to argue that everyone constantly fighting each other for strategic dominance — which is the essence of competition, building power hierarchies — will somehow magically lead to anything but the very nature of what competition incentivizes in and of itself. Which is disregard, abuse, autocracy, oppression, indifference, apathy, subservience, exploitation, and so forth. And the world you see around you is the result.

Capitalism is firmly based on hierarchical power, which means it’s designed to produce winners and losers, where some losers are going to be less valuable than some winners, of course, and they’re going to have less freedom as well. Hence why capitalism is today the strongest social precondition for fascism. In other words, competition is the very problem — not the solution. You cannot solve the problems produced by competition, which are legion today, with competition once again.

So. If we wish to create a society that actually cares about freedom, liberty, equity, human rights, and so forth, and of course cares about the environment, homeostasis, and being collaboratively in balance with our ecosystem — sustainable — we must imagine and design a system where the foundational dynamics are rooted in that very intent, that very value structure: In collaboration. Reinforced, incentivized, and rewarded.

And yes, humans are perfectly capable of being collaborative in this way, if we had a structure to work with that actually incentivizes it, once again. If you look at volunteering statistics, for example, or what is often referred to as the domestic or volunteer economy, we see enormous participation in non-monetary collaborative interests. Rampant, in fact, even though in the minority. It’s estimated that up to 40% of GDP in some countries is mirrored in unpaid communal labor.

According to AmeriCorps in the U.S., roughly 28% of the U.S. population actively volunteers to help others, to the tune of five billion hours a year. According to the United Nations State of the World’s Volunteerism Report, one billion people worldwide engage in volunteering annually, with informal volunteering — helping neighbors and providing caregiving — accounting for 70% of that. This shows a strong inclination toward communal support once again.

In an older 1992 Gallup poll I’ve referenced, it was found that 50% of American adults volunteered time for social causes, averaging 4.2 hours a week to a total of 20.5 billion hours a year. It was calculated that this equated to $176 billion in value — free labor, doing things for the community.

At the same time, globally, more than a billion people are members of cooperatives, meaning businesses owned and run for and by their members, generally promoting communal goals over profit, at least initially.

I could go on with those variations. But the point here is that we’ve already proven ourselves to be economically collaborative. The culture already exists, even though it is naturally in the minority. We could also look at behavioral studies in behavioral economics showing that our satisfaction really comes from helping others in a communal way, more so than maintaining a competitive disposition — essentially taking advantage of others, which is what this system does.

We are so much more psychologically rewarded if we don’t fall victim to that kind of soft sociopathology that defines normality once again. So, point being, people are not inherently competitive. The market system is not some manifestation of our immutable human nature.

The problem is we are trapped in this economic condition of our own creation that suppresses collaborative tendencies, rewards the opposite, and forges a dominant culture of toxicity — “normality,” once again.

Okay, that said, moving on. What I’d like to do for the rest of the podcast is take three core points that pertain to the general free market concept of complex regulatory dynamics through competition, which I began talking about in the prior podcast. These things are often attributed to F.A. Hayek but are not unique to him, and we are going to reinterpret them from the standpoint of a collaborative, complex adaptive system.

Remember, this is the crux of the argument: the idea that free markets and competitive functions lead to spontaneous, viable adaptation of an economy, which, as Hayek argues, is the only way things can work out. And keep in mind, we’re not trying to build out a collaborative economic concept based on any notion of bureaucratic planning. This is what is, again, pejoratively referred to as “central planning,” vaguely associated with anything that isn’t free-market capitalism.

We have to observe that complex adaptive systems have certain self-organizing properties, as I’m going to talk about. I point this out just because it’s a kind of red herring, really, if you think about what people like Hayek have promoted, where they’re constantly assuming a certain kind of structure in a non-market society that is just a pyramid of people making decisions, lacking all the feedback and absorbing all the complexity that’s required.

But again, this is why I continue to argue that historical notions of so-called communism, socialism, and Marxism have no true dynamic foundation. They are based on a series of assumptions. They are not systems in the truest sense of the idea, meaning they do not have shared self-organizing properties by which one model of behavior exists to define an idea. In other words, the USSR’s system of economics was the USSR’s system of economics. It was not socialism or communism as routinely described. It doesn’t matter what these labels were. There’s no system identity.

And if that still doesn’t make sense to folks, please review my Substack article on this subject called “Why Socialism Sucks — and it’s not what you think.”

Okay, these three points in question are going to be: efficiency, self-regulation, and spontaneous order.

Number one: Efficiency. From the competitive market standpoint, the following proposition is assumed:

“Efficiency arises when decentralized decisions driven by competition allocate resources through trade and hence the price mechanism.”

Now, transforming this through a collaborative lens, this becomes:

“Efficiency emerges through decentralized cooperative networks with all knowledge shared, infused with direct democratic mechanisms to arrive at economic action.”

What does that mean?

First, we have to define efficiency properly. The goal is technical scientific efficiency, which means maintaining homeostasis with the environment, ensuring all goods are strategically designed for longevity and adaptability — including aspects like standardization — ultimately working to get as close to a zero-waste, circular economy as possible. This is not equivalent, again, to market efficiency.

Market efficiency has no comprehension of true technical efficiency. Market dynamics are explicitly based on random growth and waste driven by proxy through profit-seeking. That is the root function. If people get fed and have elevated standards of living and so forth, that is entirely a side effect of the system in the short term. True efficiency assessment must include science-driven analysis combined with democratic mechanisms, such as bridging consumer preference with natural law standards.

How is this achieved? Through an open-source participatory design platform adapted with sustainability and efficiency filters. This may sound fancy, but it’s essentially just a more tuned-up crowd-sourced CAD system. As far as things like informational integrity, it can be protected through distributed ledger mechanisms, while basic artificial intelligence will underpin efficiency and sustainability calculations based on empirical data. Again, it sounds really fancy — it’s actually not.

The process will extend differently depending on the specific goal. But if it moves towards, say, physical goods, such facilities will be cooperatively organized, both internally and externally, using the same efficiency approach to minimize waste. In the early stages of this model, localization is inherent. But it’s not just about where a system resides or where production resides, but also about what resources and production mechanisms are accessible.

Because everything has to scale, the early stages of integral produce very simple things. Yet, as participation and resource access grow, complexity increases. This happens within the recursive nature of the total system, keeping cohesion as I will describe more so.

Let’s consider a practical example: food production. A regional community collectively decides to create a vertical farm system. They collaboratively design it using this open-access CAD platform, ensuring that their participation, coupled with science and fact-based efficiency considerations, guides the design. Once the food production system is designed, it moves into production, sourcing physical resources and land.

This could involve a cooperative “maker space,” if you will, if you know these terms. The vertical farm is then installed in an ideal location, moving to the next phase: maintenance — making it work. Now, someone might ask pragmatically, “Well, how does this even start in a market system? We have to have money.” Well, of course, externally, money is still necessary. We are still entrenched in the system.

However, within the cooperative, within the system, within the network, non-monetary systems and structures — specifically things like time bank variations — are used. These are very easy to organize. For example, a community of 50 people could use money to buy a space, but once owned, the internal operation of that institution, along with the network it is a part of, does not use any money whatsoever. It’s a true cooperative. Any food produced is then distributed without monetary transactions. All labor engagements occur without monetary transactions as well.

Over time, this approach, by its very nature being detached from market incentives, evolves toward true economic incentives — technical incentives — particularly doing more with less, or approaching zero marginal cost, as Jeremy Rifkin would say. This aligns with Buckminster Fuller’s concept of ephemeralization.

In the early stages of this process, it’s not about what is being achieved, but how it’s being achieved. The critical goal is increasing efficient output while constantly decreasing input in terms of resources and labor, maximizing strategic efficiency.

Once this process is refined, it can be applied to virtually anything when it comes to material economic production. That’s all I’m going to say about that at the moment.

Moving on to number two: Self-Regulation.

Starting with free market theory once again, the competitive assumption is that

“Competition provides self-regulation as individual actors adjust their focus and behaviors in response to market signals, guiding and adapting the economy.”

Now, from the cooperative non-market perspective, this becomes:


“By leveraging dynamic feedback in a decentralized cooperative network, infused with participatory democracy and efficiency optimization, adaptive variability and homeostasis are achieved.”

Let’s first remember the importance of this property of self-regulation. Viable system self-regulation means a system requires the least amount of external intervention. What qualifies something as external? Anything incongruent with the dominant system dynamics of what is attempting to be regulated. A classic example is the legal system versus the market system. The legal system attempts to regulate the market but operates in a completely different way in terms of its structure, of course.

In the context of this collaborative concept, the goal is for whatever is occurring within an institution or between institutions to have as much built-in consistency and confluence as possible to solve problems both horizontally and vertically, meaning relationships existing between different scales of operation. If you’re familiar with this kind of thinking, you would call it recursive relationships.

The cooperative network must maintain requisite variety to meet any emerging challenges, which usually come from changes in the environment, meaning the system’s ability to match the complexity and unpredictability of what happens around it, influencing it, of course.

This is achieved through dynamic feedback — constant circular information flows about what is happening in the system, allowing outcomes to be anticipated and addressed. It requires many levels of consideration, of course, one of which we’ll call variety attenuation. Variety attenuation is critical to data systems when it comes to analysis, because there’s always an overflow of virtually infinite data that must be strategically assessed, reducing what is important and blocking out the noise.

That stated, let’s reflect on the contrast of this to the competitive price system for a moment. Instead of competitive trade and all the downstream preferences and adjustments that occur due to it — its information development, such as the price dynamics of supply and demand — this is done through engagement-based information, not trade-driven information. This is something that F.A. Hayek thought would be impossible, along with others like Ludwig von Mises, who famously wrote Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, arguing the same thing.

And again, such thinkers have done a tremendously good job of brainwashing many into believing that only price dynamics through competitive trade can foster efficient self-regulation. It is certainly true that the market system does self-regulate, and robustly so. But it does so in the wrong ways — in very wrong, myopic, truncated, narrow ways. Take, for example, consumer preference.

Today, advertising turns abstract ideas into human wants through social manipulation, quite simply. Capitalism’s decisions about what to produce generally have nothing to do with individual preferences at the start of development. It starts with profit-seeking companies pushing the culture to adapt through strategic suggestion. If you don’t believe this, think about the first and most profitable product in the development of Apple Corporation — the one that saved them. What was it? An MP3 player: the iPod.

Nobody asked for this, but it took over because Apple was able to have extremely clever marketing — breakthrough manipulation, in fact — breeding a bunch of automaton customers with these trademark white earbuds. Walking advertisements they became, wandering the street, listening to music, routinely almost being hit by cars at every intersection.

In hindsight, of course, people would say, “Well, I like my little MP3 players, easier to carry than a CD player in my bag,” and so forth. And we retroactively justify the innovation. Why? Because it’s already pervaded culture. But in truth, it’s really an innovation that wasn’t driven by need. It’s more of a developmental repetition with minor improvement, forging a luxury concept that certainly doesn’t apply — or didn’t apply — to existing needs. The needs were created.

And again, through marketing and advertising, using appeals to social inclusion, people decided this convenience — this minor improvement in listening to music — was to become a high-demand need. And that’s a very modest example. This machine of turning arbitrary, superficial ideas into socially supported needs is the cornerstone of capitalist enterprise. Hence the term marketing.

In a collaborative system — a world without advertising — this would not exist. The feedback of what consumers want would be built directly into the design programming engagement, using methods as simple as asking people what they want or running systems to anticipate trends. Simple. Far more efficient. It not only removes all the guessing and gambling corporations do on products they are trying to develop to sell — products that no one necessarily wants or needs — but it helps to do what an economy is designed to do: reduce waste.

We don’t want to create new, attractive ideas to use more resources when people have no use for them in their own minds. I hope that makes sense. It’s a difference between solving a problem that exists, efficiently using resources and information to do so. That is not the same as creating emotional problems and social inclusion problems through the invention of items that people become emotionally fascinated by or that relate to their social inclusion. Market capitalism creates waste constantly as it competitively searches for the next big profitable item to sell or to create selling trends with.

In a collaborative system, nothing would be created that people didn’t actually want, and the manipulative force of marketing, once again, would be erased.

Likewise, the required efficiency ethos of non-duplication and standardization would be employed. Instead of 10 different companies making 10 different vehicles to compete with one another, trying to make minor improvements, people would come together to design the best set of variations. Dynamically so, it’s constantly updated, reducing all of that incredible competitive duplication and, hence, waste.

At the same time, this self-regulation would be deeply tied to the natural limits of the earth, needless to say. Design efficiency is what we’re talking about. It must always consider each product not on the individual level, but how it fits into the entire output of the industrial system. It’s one giant equation, in other words.

And I’ll be honest — think about the simplicity of this. Why are there not regulatory programs of this nature in the market system today, at least in an attempt to impose good restrictions for a healthy ecosphere and so forth, on the existing system for the sake of public health? It’s so basic to have this kind of integrative system. It’s the kind of thing that organizations like Greenpeace should be spending their time on — not holding up signs and trying to derail commercial boats.

Anyway, much more could be said in rant on that, but let’s continue to number three.

Number three: Spontaneous Order.

Once again, going back to the competitive free market perspective famously described by F.A. Hayek:

“Spontaneous order emerges when individual actions involving trade, guided by self-interest, unintentionally create a coherent adaptive system as a whole.”

Now, it’s important to restate that this property of spontaneous order is, again, what separates a true complex adaptive system from a rigid, contrived bureaucracy — which does not work and is not a true system on this level.

Even though market economics self-organizes in the wrong way, becoming increasingly unsustainable and destabilizing in the real-world environment, it is still meeting the criteria of a robustly self-organizing system. From the kernel seed of individual trade, the entire structure is built out. It starts with two people trading, and then it grows into groups that trade, leading to businesses and companies of increasingly larger, complex networks.

This includes other consequential institutions, such as regulatory bodies, the legal system, and even the very nature of what defines government itself. Even ideas that are more abstract, such as property, are culminated through this system as a natural outcome. Again, all contained within the act of trade.

A truly collaborative economic system must maintain similar spontaneous order properties to remain emergent and adaptive, providing requisite variety, and so forth.

In other words, once again, it’s recursive. It must be self-similar for the sake of cohesion, where the microcosm gives way to the macrocosm as a natural extension — not some contrived superimposition, like we see in bureaucracy. The more consistent or congruent the dynamics within the system, the more viable that system becomes.

That stated, going back to the market premise, how does this translate from competitive to collaborative in the context of an emerging spontaneous order? It would be stated as follows:

“Spontaneous order emerges when individual actions, engaging cooperative networks, guided by personal and societal interest, build out an adaptive system as a whole.”

Simple enough, which begs the question: What is the kernel seed of this new collaborative economy? What is it that multiplies and scales up in an increasingly complex way to build out a viable, workable economy?

The answer is that, unlike the act of competitive market trade between agents, this has to be about a collaborative construct. And by construct, I mean it’s not a singular act, but rather a unified pattern of behavior.

One root process — a pattern of behavior — that facilitates emergence and expansion. Put another way, instead of entities growing at the expense of others, which is what capitalism does, the growth of one node in the collaborative network strengthens the system as a whole for the benefit of everyone.

We can call this kernel seed, the “root construct” of the system. The root construct consists of three institutional elements or subsystems: Collaborative Value Exchange, Shared Resource Stewardship, and Participatory Economic Governance.

Starting with Collaborative Value Exchange, this subsystem combines time banks, cooperatives, and mutual aid networks — mechanisms for equitable and non-monetary value exchange — fostering reciprocity, shared ownership, and direct support within and across communities. For the purpose of today’s podcast, I can’t go into full detail beyond emphasizing that this value exchange is the nuts and bolts of how things get done. A properly structured time bank facilitates service exchange, while cooperatives allow for non-competitive production, as alluded to earlier.

The internal workings of such systems rely on collaborative crowdsourcing via open-source digital systems, combining technologies like distributed ledgers for security, regulatory AI for filtration, and other features touched upon before.

The next issue is Shared Resource Stewardship. This subsystem exists because designing and producing collaboratively obviously requires resources on all levels. So where do they come from? How are they maintained? How does each process fit into the equation? This marks the variation of what we hope, in later stages of the system’s expansion, will lead to common ownership of the means of production as a single society, with the earth’s resources shared through decentralized stewardship.

Of course, again, this is a distant dream and is not a necessity for the system to work at whatever degree it can. If land is needed to establish a collaborative institution, the community can pool financial resources, crowdfund the project, and once the institution is established, everything that happens operates inside the new system in total contradiction to the way market economics works. The more resources and means of production the system absorbs and creates through this collaborative network, the stronger it becomes. The more it dissolves the market-based network, continuing the transition out of capitalism itself.

And the third issue : Participatory Economic Governance. This subsystem overlaps with the other two and is different from the representative democracy we think about today. Even though there could be exceptions, the democratic attributes of this system are actually built into every level of procedural engagement. For example, if a community wants to decide what to produce, they begin engaging in the design process, showing others their ideas. This naturally gives rise to what the public is interested in or not, creating a democratic confluence. It’s a collaborative process, in other words.

Similarly, if a society is dealing with core shared infrastructure interests, say, building a bridge in a city, the same engagement emerges, along with, perhaps, in this case, more traditional direct democracy mechanisms to reach consensus. In other words, governance is integrated and self-regulating as much as possible at various scales, directly involving participant input. It’s not about secondary external legislative power or power authorities. It is a built-in, dynamic, unified approach.

The ideal in this kind of equation is to have as much participation as possible by the community to arrive at consensus. But it’s nonlinear, once again — not one person, one vote. No one’s elected in most cases. There could be issues of maintenance through managers, depending on the situation. These are all things that can be fleshed out. People are actively involved at different levels of engagement, influencing the total outcome, which is the ideal: self-regulating.

Now, I know I’ve covered a lot here, and anyone thinking critically about these ideas is going to have more questions than answers. But I hope you’ll begin to see the light. Much more will be said about this “root construct” and how it uses feedback processes across the entire system, driven by public engagement, moving the total system from simplicity to complexity in an emergent, recursive way, maintaining coherence.

But we are going to stop today on that note. Everything I’ve touched upon will be included in Integral documentations that I’ve mentioned earlier, along with simulations we hope to develop that will actually show the process.

And this concludes the program for today. It’s a bit of an epic one. I know I’m more tired than I was when I started. And please know, I’m just as trapped as anybody in this system, and time does equate to money today. I hope those who find value in this conversation will support me.

You can go to my Patreon to support me. Know that I don’t hide behind paywalls for anything that I do. If you support Patreon or make a direct donation, it goes toward the entire community because I don’t actually restrict anything I’m doing — it’s always freely available. If you can help support that entire network of development, I really appreciate it.

Please take care out there, folks. Talk to you soon.