Radical transition, the inevitable failure of government policy, and the destructive nature of competition

The following is a transcript of Episode 54 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 54.

So, on the agenda for today (this is gonna be another long one):

First, I want to clarify some things regarding this collaborative post-capitalist parallel economy idea from the prior podcast called Integral.

I received some feedback I wish to address, bringing up some important issues regarding the very idea of social change and transition. Then, I’m going to spend some time reviewing the solutions section from a book by Jason Hickel called Less is More.

It’s a great book, but like many, it falls under the heading of what I call the “anti-capitalist capitalists” — well-meaning folks in the activist community who see the flaws of the current system, seeking change, but they don’t actually attribute those flaws to its root construct: the origin-point definition of capitalism itself. Hence, they continue to support monetary market trade by extension, as if it’s somehow separate from the definition of capitalism, which it is not.

I will also expand upon the problem of relying solely on policy approaches toward relevant system change, once again.

And finally, to wrap up the section on competition, which has been a core focus for at least three or four podcasts now, I’m delighted to feature a 40 minute interview with author and researcher Alfie Kohn, who we’ve talked about before. We will be exploring the structural and educational roots of our neurotically competitive culture, which I would argue is effectively a public health disaster.

You know how you can look at things like drug addiction or school shootings as a public health issue? The same lens can be used for framing the modern cultural neuroses of competition — a dramatic, socially destructive force on virtually all levels.

But let’s begin.

On the Subject of Radical Social Change we have the reality of transition — some path to be forged, which we can all agree will likely not be simple, will likely not be linear.

Very often today, we hear the phrase system change. It’s become rather common in activist speak, even though many who use the term don’t seem to know what they’re saying in many cases. Rather, it’s employed more as a gesture to express a radical extreme intent, such as, again, more forceful policy demands.

And as I’ve talked about, policy approaches to regulate or influence a social system are rarely a concrete move toward true system-level change and I’m going to be running that into the ground exceptionally today.

So, I apologize in advance for any redundancy.

But fortunately, there are people out there who have indeed come to terms with the root problem of a market economy, rejecting mere policy-regulatory initiatives and realizing just how dramatic the needed paradigm shift really is.

The first tendency of these activists, as I think we’ve all seen, is to start pondering: What’s the new society going to look like? Based on ideas of sustainability, public health, science, technological potential, education, and so on, they want to build new models around core principles.

Which is great.

We need that.

It’s all well and good. It’s informative. It’s educational. It helps show the potential that we really do have for an improved future, putting to rest the idea that everything we see around us today is the only way it can be — a dogma that is ever apparent, sadly, once again.

The problem is, rarely in these developments is proper gravity given to the role of transition. And I’m not simply referring to those that just lack all transitional ideas — which is also very common — but the recognition that, from a technical perspective, given we are dealing with the properties of a complex adaptive system, what unfolds in transition is, in fact, even more defining to the outcome than the goal assumed.

Any preconceived vision of a new model becomes almost secondary, because what will define future change is going to be far more contingent upon what happens in the extreme complexity and indeterminacy of transition.

This is why simple goals are important, especially at the beginning of development. And that’s why I’m so focused on this Integral Parallel Economy Transition Project. The indeterminacy has to be anticipated in the most strategic way for any of it to matter.

Let’s remember — there’s no chance some magical new landmass is going to materialize on Earth where people seeking a sustainable society can just build out a new system. Likewise, even if there was a total revolution in some nation politically, with the option to install a completely new socioeconomic model, we’re still faced with the cultural crisis of those who remain locked in the current system’s values and practices.

And this requires the need for gradual acclimation — something people don’t talk about enough.

Part of the Integral Parallel Economy Project, excuse me, is not just a collaborative model development but also gradually forging different values and practices.

Furthermore, and this responds to a series of messages I’ve gotten since the last episode — if a new nation did somehow adopt a new, contrary system, other major nations dedicated to the market religion will no doubt see the emerging heresy of the new state as a threat to their way of life, working to destroy it.

History is sadly full of such examples.

The market economy requires homogeneity and constant openings for capital accumulation as well. This breeds a mentality by which, under the cloak of assumed social threat — such as claimed loss of freedom and democracy in the target nation — such nations are overthrown.

Sure, we’ve seen some radical initiatives in the past make a dent. The Bolshevik Revolution, which, regardless of ideology, did counter some of the prevailing norms of the time.

But today, the world is far more homogenized within this neoliberal market structure, posing tremendous influence over the behavior of seemingly sovereign economies. And if a nation does move against the market god, odds are they’re going to be sanctioned and punished.

Point being, any total revolution option isn’t a dependable option in the traditional sense of political or democratic uprising. Some may disagree with that and still push for traditional political revolution through social movements. And it’s certainly worth a shot, in the same way using common politics and regulation should be pursued regardless as well. But such efforts are really complementary and supplemental by default.

You can’t expect it to work alone.

In fact, it’s one of the major realizations I’ve had over the years, having spent well over a decade engaging countless activists, assisting large-scale social movement activity. The development of hundreds of local chapters, watching their behavior, thousands of educational events, and so forth — the limitations begin to become clear.

Community development, protest, and awareness campaigns are all important, but they are only one small part of the chess game required in the interest of radical economic change. Trying to appeal to the public and ultimately appeal to power in large force to demand change is needed, in summation here.

It’s just not going to be a completely dependable angle.

And please know, I’m well aware of the extreme gravity of the situation when it comes to the pollution crisis, the hydrocarbon industry, and other elements. There is a need to put tremendous pressure for immediate change to reduce future damage, even without a new socioeconomic model.

And we should do that.

But unfortunately, once again, the path toward true governmental influence is severely blocked. Hence, part of this process has to be developing and building, not awaiting approval from anyone.

On that, to quote System Scientist Donella Meadows from her book Thinking in Systems, she talks about finding powerful, “magical” leverage points — not the best usage of language — but we get it. She also talks about this “dance” inherent to the complexity of change.

She writes:

“Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.”

So, keep this idea of dancing with the system in mind, as it’s an apt metaphor in the context of always needing to be adaptive and flexible as you approach complexity.

For those unfamiliar with the idea of leverage points, I always recommend the work of Donella Meadows, who ranks interventions from relatively shallow — such as changing parameters like taxes and subsidies — to extremely deep, such as shifting the very goals of a system.

The market system’s resilience is amazing. It is extremely powerful in maintaining its dominance, not just because of some powerful elite that happens to sit at the top of the pyramid pulling strings, but because of endless feedback forces that keep it in place, including the daily patterns of the public.

Hence the conclusion that you have to go outside of the system to begin leveraging against it — working to extract economic actors, pulling them into a new system that, by its very existence, pushes the old system out of commission.

And back to my core point here regarding the complexity of it all — whether in-system leverage points or out-system leverage points — there is strong indeterminacy when it comes to outcomes.

For example, from an in-system perspective, consider the history of Prohibition.

Think about the attempt to outlaw alcohol in the United States years ago, which also applies to the modern-day War on Drugs. Using the leverage point of legislation — hence what Meadows would call a rule change — to alter the behavior of the population, backfired in numerous ways and ultimately failed.

Notably, it gave birth to vast organized crime. Huge black markets emerged for alcohol, as everyone knows. Consequently, enormous corruption with the police and politicians followed, as they received kickbacks from the incredible amount of money being made by bootlegging.

Put another way, it generated a whole new set of feedback processes that reorganized the system of alcohol attainment, with a very limited effect on the stated aims of the prohibition legislation.

And obviously, as an aside, I can’t stop myself — trying to stop drug and alcohol consumption or abuse in society with prohibitory laws does not make anything better.

It always makes things worse.

Does it matter how many drug dealers you arrest or kill? Does it matter how many users you put in jail, how many money-laundering banks you shut down, how many cops are busted, or how many crops are destroyed?

It is only through access, tolerance, a common-sense educational and treatment campaign, and a value system of compassion that real progress can emerge — getting to the root of drug use and alcohol addiction as a medical issue.

Obviously, this isn’t the scope of this podcast, but let it be stated that as long as people profit off the sale of personal numbing, escapism, and addiction, it will, of course, persist.

Such leverage points of changing the rules through legislation fail — and will always fail — in this context, as they don’t get to the root of anything.

If you want to truly stop drug abuse, maybe we should start thinking about the stress of our social system, which has long-enduring effects, as epidemiological studies show. That stress manifests and snowballs into a spectrum of mental health disorders, including addiction, violence, and so on.

And since I’m on this tangent, don’t forget the life-blind system-level shadow incentive, as I call it, which seeks cyclical turnover by whatever means possible, rewarding it. All that money spent on prisons, police, rehab, legislation, and the like serve the system’s internal strength — since commerce is the needed fuel of markets, and the more, the better.

The market system isn’t about spending money; it’s about moving money.

And just like the engine of a car that needs constant power, market economics thrives in the movement of money — irrespective of what that movement is for.

In other words, by having a culture addicted to drugs and alcohol — with hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars moved around each year as a result — an entire industry is sustained.

And sure, in this context, you do see some success with in-system leverage points through high taxation, price hikes, and warning labels, along with some general public health education leading to, for example, a decline in recent years of cigarette smoking.

But consider the amount of time it took for that shift to occur, with countless killed since smoking was popularized long ago through advertising.

And why has it remained a cultural pattern?

Because it had such high degrees of profit, any argument against it was buried by force of industry — aside from the highly addictive nature of it making itself perpetuating.

In fact, it is the exact same model we see with social media, which is designed to be as addictive as possible.

And while we are already learning about what social media has done to kids, it’s not going to be until many, many, many years down the road that the reality of the damage truly becomes clear — because it’s being obfuscated.

It’s obscured on purpose.

Same for the hydrocarbon industry and that history.

We’re probably only about 15% into our transition toward renewable energy. Why? Because the immense profit structure and the infrastructure that refuses to change within it keeps it all in place — funded by massive lobbying campaigns and propaganda.

Yet another reason, by the way, profit is a horrible incentive.

They’re life-blind incentives, and anyone who claims profit-seeking is the path to innovation and progress is simply viewing things in a deeply one-sided way.

Okay, back on point here.

The relevance of system change transition remains wildly underemphasized in the post-capitalist, post-scarcity community.

We’ve seen all the famous inspiring quotes, such as Buckminster Fuller’s:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

And as great as that is, it’s still rather platitudinal.

You can build or theorize whatever models you want, and it might, in principle, make something obsolete. But that doesn’t hold much weight until a path is carved to utilize that new model, firmly realizing the nature of that path.

Likewise, since I’m already a tangent machine today, there’s no such thing as productive collapse.

Now, I used to believe in such an idea — that things must get worse and more unstable to inspire true revolutionary change.

No.

In truth, society is and has been in a state of collapse for some time.

Having about a billion people starving, with countless homeless in the industrialized wealthy nations, is a form of collapse — same with the litany of environmental crises that are clearly showing their trends and effects.

There will never be a stage of capitalism where everything as we know it just ceases to function entirely, opening the door for a new model.

System failure is a matter of degree.

The problems we see tend to become normalized.

You would think the idea of walking around a city full of homeless people would shock everyone, all the time, every day.

No.

They see them so often that they say, “Oh, that’s just the way it is. How sad.”

We are culturally, slowly “boiling the frog,” as that old metaphor goes — becoming essentially a more sociopathic and apathetic society.

That is the long-term path of our cultural adaptation in this regard.

I would also say that the pressures emerging at this time, and those that will continue to emerge, are far more likely to create a stress response — a kind of anti-social impulsivity, fear — not rational thought.

An increased level of selfish tribalism is far more likely than any kind of thoughtful, concerted community effort to solve problems.

Why?

Because not only have people been trained to think selfishly and competitively, but stress can also trigger biological reactions that amplify thoughtless responses, as has been studied at length.

Remember, at no time in human history has society been faced with the global-level crises we have now.

The walls are closing in environmentally.

And I think it is improbable that our sick culture will suddenly galvanize in community spirit with a new vision for a more sustainable and stable system once things break down to that point.

And I know in some of my earlier works, this concept was brought up, such as Zeitgeist: Addendum with Jacque Fresco.

But let’s not assume anything like that now.

The worse things become, the harder relevant transition will likely be — including the fact that government is only gonna grow more totalitarian.

As society becomes more unstable, it’s not gonna be open to more reforms and democratic processes.

It’s gonna be open to more controls.

Which, once again, is why I still encourage people to do what they can within the traditional political system, the traditional leverage points, while also working with far more important out-system leverage points, as we’ll be talking about more.

And remember, all politicians are not the same, no matter what side of the aisle or what categories have been thrown around them.

Take things as they are.

Do not fall victim to partisan groupism, where anytime someone brings up an individual politician for their absurd behavior, somehow, you’re either supporting or against the group they are part of.

That’s all a big distraction as far as I’m concerned.

We need to be able to recognize the differences in leadership to, again, slow down.

We don’t need more damage accelerators out there.

It’s not about trying to find politicians that have true solutions.

It’s about trying to find people in power who are not going to make things worse that quickly.

Because they’re all going to make things worse.

Now, before we move on, there’s one more thing to add in regard to this parallel economy project that I’ve been talking about — Integral — and what separates it from common social movements.

Grassroots social movements, particularly those that are not institutionalized with paid workers and income, almost always self-destruct over time.

Grassroots volunteer organizations rooted in protest, educational and awareness work, appealing to the public for action to push politicians or political power in the hope of change, inevitably become vulnerable to disappointment, boredom, internal and external conflict, sabotage, and other layers of distraction and interference.

And the larger they become, the worse it is.

In my time with TZM, for example, I watched it all — whether it was attacking an assumed figurehead of an organization, absurd critical news media and propaganda, general harassment, internal frustration within the community, or the presence of misguided ambitions.

Meaning folks that come into a voluntary organization ostensibly seeking to work toward the stated aims, only to deviate with egotism, and so on.

There’s a shelf life to the whole thing.

The beauty of this Integral Parallel Economy Project is that these kinds of problems will not exist to any degree that would have a true effect.

The effects will be marginal.

Why?

Because people in Integral participate in the network tangibly.

There is no other form of participation. It’s not about awareness or appeals. It’s not about a group event. It’s not about appealing to authority.

Again, it is about the community building an infrastructure that people are motivated to join because it benefits them directly.

No need for lectures or conferences, no need for debate on social media, no need for press liaisons or figureheads.

You see, this is about doing, not talking — whether it’s helping improve open-source software or design in general, actively engaging the working system materially as it grows, helping it scale, what have you.

Integral is protected from such destructive distractions and problems by the very nature of what it is.

Obviously, people are going to attack whatever they don’t like. They’ll say, “Oh, this group is a cult. Oh, this is a slippery slope toward totalitarian socialism.” And all the stuff that we’ve all heard before — but there’s no effect to be had because this isn’t about a person, a group identity, or an ideology.

It is about true direct participation in the development of a physical network, not the dissemination of radical ideas. It’s not political ideology versus political ideology. And the more strength this network gains, the less anyone will care about what others have to say anyway.

And finally, on this point, I want to emphasize the power of no group identity, something I continue to remind people about.

If you support ideas, it means you appreciate the ideas alone — not a person who promotes it or an association to some group, party, or whatever.

All of that is gone. As most should know, I am vehemently opposed to groups. I’m anti-group on every level.

All human group categorization is a social construct and destructive, period — and that includes identifying with social movements. We support and share a train of thought that binds people with shared interests, not the advancement of an abstracted organization or a group.

You see, what group identity does is give opposing entities leverage to poison the association. This goes back to intelligence agency work, psychological operations, counter-revolutionary operations.

You see this stuff in the declassified documents with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael. I’m sure even Gandhi was exposed to this kind of thing. It’s almost intuitive, in fact, on the internet today, the way attacks work.

Troll mentalities know that the way to ruin an idea is to debase assumed leadership and group identity. So not only do external people want to stay away from it, but they try to alienate the people inside of it — to make them feel uncomfortable because they are now associated with something foreign, evil, weird, and fringe.

And, of course, that speaks to larger narrative structures of propaganda that have been around for a long time.

Depressingly, for those that follow the Israeli ethnic cleansing and colonial genocide of Gaza — now backed by the United States in full force — and, of course, the West Bank being next, Hamas and Palestine in general are not looked at as having any role in combating the oppression they’ve experienced through decades of apartheid, theft, murder, oppression, embargo, and endless, endless human rights violations.

The propaganda has been so successful on the part of the U.S. and Israel that Palestinian identity as a whole has now been firmly associated with essentially terrorism. And the power of that narrative has allowed Israel to conduct and succeed at a level of violence and oppression that you would have hoped had disappeared in the 18th century.

But I won’t belabor that one.

Now, one more thing before we move on — aside from Integral’s basis of doing, not talking, without the need for leadership or group identity, there’s another kind of secret weapon built into this project:

Its potential to help marginalized and economically oppressed people.

Imagine that a community employs this network, and it works as intended, and they’re able to reduce local poverty with improved economic access without markets. Not only is that a wonderful thing, but it has power. How do you attack that?

A politician, pundit, or whomever would be very crass to try and attack a non-government program that is actually helping alleviate poverty. It would be ridiculous to work at ways to defund or to limit the ability of that kind of network to function as well.

And this is why, today, common time bank structures and mutual aid networks are all legal across the world and generally respected. It’s ethically preposterous for someone to argue against such a non-government scarcity alleviation, right?

How do you attack a soup kitchen feeding the poor? Is it evil socialism?

Those games aren’t going to fly. And this point speaks to those who raise concerns regarding government backlash against such transitional ideas.

You know — “why would the state not just make laws against something like Integral?”

Because, firstly, on the surface, it would seem to support capitalism’s resilience — because it’s reducing poverty stress as a seemingly complementary system.

It’s not really. It’s a Trojan horse.

The larger the network grows, the more it starts to override the market economy itself by design — not driven by force, but by people simply choosing to engage it over the old system. In fact, it’s libertarian in that sense because it’s giving people freedom to choose.

Well, if you’re truly libertarian and you believe in the freedom to choose, as Milton Friedman’s book was called, then you have the right to choose not to use the system of market economics if you want, and it sustains those philosophical principles.

Now, shifting gears into the next section, I would like to affectionately address these anti-capitalist capitalists — people who claim to disagree with capitalism, calling themselves post-capitalist, socialist, or whatever the case may be. But it doesn’t matter.

They offer critiques of the current system, highlighting its problems. Yet, when they start to describe what needs to be changed, you realize they’re not really going after the system itself?

And, ultimately, in many cases, they fail to understand that money and markets are actually what define capitalism. And hence, money and markets are at the root of the negative market externalities these people try to stop.

As an issue of semantics, I’m reminded that I should, in my own language, use only the term market economy and drop the word capitalism because of this very tendency.

But I think I’ve clarified my point a lot — such as in my book, The New Human Rights Movement.

Really, the terms are synonymous. Let’s step back.

So, what is capitalism?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as:

“An economic system characterized by private ownership of capital goods, investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined by competition in a free market.”

The truth of the matter is, this basic definition is really only a snapshot of the emergent, institutional, and conceptual development of the system.

Meaning, it’s part of a larger pattern of development rooted in the most basic mechanics of market economics itself. Let’s consider some history.

We see trade, money, and markets as a shared economic feature in all large-scale economic practices going back to antiquity. Thousands of years ago, ancient Greece had open markets, money-based trade, private property, and the like.

Even though there were variations to that — even though, for example, they had things like slavery, which many theorists argue simply can’t be part of the capitalist mode of production — as capitalism is deemed to require voluntary labor exchange, like wage labor, meaning the buying and selling of labor power, not direct slavery coercion.

And if you wish to be a Harvard graduate economist, this is what you’re trained to believe — drawing lines that, in truth, do not exist.

The distinction between slave labor and so-called voluntary wage labor exchange is not a distinction at all, but a variation on a theme.

If a society is constructed in such a way that your survival requires you to submit to servitude in some form — by force of the structure — whether dealing with a king, a feudal lord, or a corporate CEO, and you’re not going to be able to survive without that submission, by definition, it’s not voluntary at all.

Likewise, if the relationship of labor power means another person is going to gain advantage off the fruits of labor disproportionately, it is not a mutually beneficial transaction either, in the sense of equal gain.

In other words, it is inherently exploitative — as all market transactions are. In other words, it’s not the specifics that matter. It’s the structure of social relations, as I will describe.

Remember, history is written by the winners. People that promote capitalism definitely don’t want to admit that the economic incentives for abject slavery, regardless of any political, religious, or social tradition overlap, are absolutely coherent with market economics — and hence, capitalism.

For what is the economic purpose of cheap or affordable or low-cost labor costs? Or competitive labor costs? Cost efficiency. Slave labor extracts 100% surplus value, minus the basic cost of food and shelter for the enslaved, while modern wage labor — which the vast majority of workers today are involved in — is merely a variation of this.

Whether earning minimum wage and barely surviving, or working a high-paying corporate job, all workers exist within the same fundamental structural relationship, serving the interests of those extracting disproportionate gains in the interest of cost efficiency. This is about relationships of the structure — not a snapshot of what the system has manifested qualitatively or in variance at any given point in time.

Hence, it’s no surprise that, according to basic United Nations standards, there are, today, in the capitalist world, more slaves than at any time in human history based on absolute numbers.

Now, let’s step back for a moment and better frame this perspective.

What I’m explaining here, in systems science lingo, is what you call structural invariance or organizational invariance — which means the root or organizational architecture of a system remains the same, but various contextual differences make the behavior appear different on the surface as things change.

The reason people maintain a myopic definition of capitalism — failing to understand that it is the active manifestation of monetary-market economics — is because the superficial differences they are trained to observe are just that: superficial.

It’s all about custom definition, like a person jumping on a trampoline. A photo of them is taken when they are in mid-air, and you don’t see the trampoline. You don’t see anything. You just see that snapshot in time. You don’t know the dynamics — though you might infer them — but it’s just a snapshot.

That’s people’s frame of reference today when they define capitalism. Now, going back to Greek antiquity — major urban centers like Athens were bustling trade hubs. The market economy in ancient Greece was robust, even though different in terms of peripheral attributes — that snapshot once again.

The main difference between the capitalism of ancient Greece and the capitalism of today was the degree of emergent adaptation, clouded within cultural factors. But the core system — the endogenous development of money and markets — was there. And it makes those peripheral cultural influences far less meaningful than market theorists today would have you believe, as they try to box in some rigid definition of the capitalist mode of production.

This is also what you could call a proto-capitalist perspective. If people want to research that — meaning an evolutionary perspective that links common threads prior variations. Consider feudalism. Feudal structures, while different, still have the same embryonic elements: money, markets, merchant finance, which evolved into modern capitalism as we know it, including continuity of social relations once again, with dominant classes appropriating economic surplus.

Again, the core difference between today and back then has to do with older cultural factors interwoven within this multi-stage adaptation of markets. The practice of monarchy and the powerful role of religion, for example, were both complementary and conflicting, depending on how you look at it, forging historical variations of the economic system one way or another.

And there are certain erosions and amplifications that happen in this process over time as well. For example, in the age of feudal monarchy, obviously not everything was for sale. You had the divine right of kings owning vast domains, absent market dynamics. This element was indeed eroded over time in most places on Earth today — and predictably so.

Today, essentially, everything is for sale, sanctioned or not, in the spirit of free enterprise.

Why? Because the idea of having everything for sale is more coherent with the foundation of the market system in general. And the system has grown increasingly more dominant as time has gone on.

Some may remember a quaint book I’ve referenced a few times — What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel — where he talks about the increasing marketization of life, how we have gone from a market-based economy to a market-based society. And this tracks with the emergent pattern we’ve seen going back centuries.

For example, today, people constantly argue about politics and how money should not be in politics — how we have to get big money out of politics or maybe just money entirely out of politics. The common-sense position is that money should not be influencing policy about people’s everyday lives.

But it does. And the question is: why do we consider this to be off-limits? What is it about this market economy that makes us trust the dynamics of money and markets in everything — except in government? We all have common sense with that. We know what the problem is.

But if you think about it, this logic is completely inconsistent with the dominant structure we are inside of once again. And that’s why, slowly but surely, the power of money and markets prevails — not democracy, not common sense. It’s inconsistent for money and markets not to be involved in politics and legislation, because that would be the only domain left that didn’t utilize market forces.

Which also explains why laissez-faire economists and modern libertarian mindsets once again see the state apparatus as a foreign entity that interferes with the purity of their market religion. It’s not natural to them. The system has evolved to not understand any type of human activity that isn’t embraced by market forces.

This is also, once again, why democracy is fundamentally incompatible with market economics and hence capitalism — unless one’s idea of democracy is simply the freedom to buy and sell without concern for anything else. Forget the well-being of society. Forget the habitat. It’s the invisible hand of the market. And that’s the implication of those who continue to invoke that kind of self-regulation rhetoric.

Once again, it reinforces the trajectory that we see: The destruction of regulation, policy, and even the most basic role of government is occurring. It’s an erosion process. The system wants to get rid of the regulatory apparatus and let the true dynamics of the aristocracy of capitalism flourish. That is literally what everything suggests in this emergent adaptation.

What is happening right now with the Trump administration, with Elon Musk, and all of these characters? They are gutting the entire governmental system. It’s all part of that general sensibility. They have other reasons, but it’s all part of that general idea that government is an interference. “It’s not really democracy. It’s something else.”

It’s a very clever distinction, because if you’re against government, you’re against democracy itself by default. So the trend is clear to see — we’re moving toward modern oligarchy.

A modern adaptation. Amplifying oligarchy, I should say. Rapid consolidation of power in the United States right now. And this is just what we can expect as this evolution continues, this emergent adaptation. It’s not a side effect or a bastardization or an abomination that capitalism produces oligarchs, monopolies, and highly anti-democratic features by extension. That is simply what the system does.

Hence, back to my point — while we recognize that this capitalist mode of production has certain outstanding properties today — particularly the idea of free exchange, investment, capital accumulation, the buying and selling of production means, and so-called free labor — all of that was simply under the surface as a latent potential as the system has evolved.

For example, in the Middle Ages, as time went forward, feudal lords increasingly demanded monetary rents instead of in-kind labor. And in some cases, the peasants had to enter the market to sell produce or labor to obtain currency. This shows the adaptation.

You start to see the bridging in that proto-capitalist perspective. And to complete this point, let me just break this down into the core adaptation properties, if you will, that I think — if anything — are at the root of people seeking change.

I would reduce it all down to two basic problems that exist throughout the root structure:

(a) Built-in exploitative human abuse.

(b) Built-in infinite growth necessity, and hence, environmental abuse.

No matter the historical variation in the utilization of markets, no matter what kind of regulatory policies are attempted, the market system endogenously moves toward (a) elitism through exploitative human abuse, which is hierarchy- and oppression-producing, (b) coupled with the necessity of constant consumption and growth and hence environmental abuse. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when, as industry becomes more productive over time.

(a)Now, more specifically, to exploitative human abuse, which occurs either on the interpersonal level or the intergroup level, it is inevitable, as there is no collaborative form of market economics. The structure of social relations is immutably antagonistic.

Even in, say, a business cooperative, where everyone earns an equal share of profits and wages, that seemingly egalitarian internal structure does not isolate the enterprise from the broader system. Markets systematically pressure all producers — cooperative or otherwise — to keep costs down, including labor costs, in order to maintain competitive edges and hence profitability.

This cost reduction incentive, required for all businesses — cooperatively operated or not — forces exploitative abuse for cost efficiency somewhere down the supply chain, somewhere down the labor chain.

The only exception would be completely isolated cooperatives that employ, source, and produce from within a closed or semi-closed network (if we’re talking about a transition) that is not market-based at all — which, by the way, is exactly what the Integral Project is designed to do — it allows for truly non-competitive cooperatives that network together without cost efficiency exploitation in the network alone, both on the level of resource access and labor access.

And, of course, I could say much more about that. Point being, market economics is underpinned by the need for surplus generation, and a defining factor generating that surplus is cost efficiency. It doesn’t matter what permutation you come up with — this holds true in any type of economy that uses markets because it’s all about angling imbalance, if you will, hence the innate competitive nature, seeking weakness in exchange.

(b) Now, for the second shared attribute I listed of all market-based economies — guaranteeing environmental decline — the system simply requires perpetual turnover and consumption. This is both obvious and profound. Nobody is ever going to sit back, with any kind of market-based organization, and be incentivized to want fewer people to buy their stuff or have less income coming in.

I challenge anyone to come up with a market economic scenario, regardless of the period of time, where there is a system-level rewarded incentive to slow production and consumption. It doesn’t exist.

Because the root basis of the entire idea of market economics is the selling of labor to infuse with capital goods to produce something to sell, which someone has to buy repeatedly for the cycle to remain stable.

And hence, it is only through a non-market-based collaborative system that a society can be allowed to relax — and not be forced to produce just for the sake of producing, to keep money moving, and hence, the market system afloat.

Before we move on, since all of this has been said, let’s now more accurately define this thing we call capitalism.

“Capitalism is the evolving institutional manifestation of market economics, using a medium of exchange — money and price — endogenously leading to: Private ownership of production means; Profit-seeking through required competition; A condition of social relations rooted in dominance hierarchy; A positive reinforcing feedback loop requiring infinite resource consumption.”

That’s capitalism.

Allow me to describe a little bit of that kind of developmental situational determinacy. If you took a group of people and dropped them on an island and set in motion the process of market trade — using a medium of exchange, and hence the creation of price values, etc. — the first thing to realize is that the very idea of property is inherent.

You can’t have market trade without property. With the medium of exchange creating the bridge for that property exchange, and hence, the invention of prices — boom, the price mechanism. From there, the individual realizes the inherently competitive nature of the game that’s been born — having to sell something to someone else, repeatedly, to survive.

They must position themselves to reduce costs and maximize demand at every turn, no matter what level of economic engagement. That is just the logic of the game. A seller wants to get the most while the buyer wants to pay the least. It doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of land, labor, an apple — whatever. A competitive construct.

And from that construct, new inferences emerge — including the rise of private ownership of the means of production, right? That can be:

A single person with a farm selling produce to his small town.
Or a massive corporation with a network of office buildings and factories.

In fact, as an aside, there’s no condition where there would be such a thing as true public ownership of the means of production in a market system — unless your definition is simply government control of industry.

Government ownership is not synonymous with public ownership. In reality, government just becomes another business or company — a monopoly of sorts. The Soviet Union was not communist. It was state capitalism.

Not only did the Soviet Union trade with other nations — just like all other capitalist nations of the time — making it literally the exact same in terms of economic relations on the global market level, but its internal industries still used money, markets, wage labor, and surplus exploitation (which is the same as profit extraction), even though it was controlled.

The Soviet Union set terms for these things, but the structure was still the same. The relationship between labor and capital still reflected a hierarchical structure and class antagonism in form, rather than workers collectively owning and managing industry — which never occurred. Nor could it, as long as markets were the foundation, once again.

And yes, I know some pro-communist purists will have lots to say about what a true, unrealized nature of actual communism should be and all of that. But it doesn’t matter here. The only empirical example we have of the supposed communist idea is the USSR and a few other offshoots flying the flag of communism as a victory.

While self-professed capitalists attack that same flag. It should be no surprise that when the USSR fell, oligarchs rapidly took over — and almost overnight, a far more private enterprise-based market economy was instituted. All they did was take the existing state corporation and the apparatus and infrastructure, chop it up amongst a bunch of business-only elites, and that was it.

Okay, moving on finally.

Let’s now talk about the solution proposals in Jason Hickel’s book, Less is More, which I think will be an informative exercise as to why some solutions are better than others in the interest of large-scale social change.

And let me just say up front that I encourage people to read his works. I like Jason. I’m not here to attack his intentions. He has been invited on this show. Let’s hope that he actually chooses to come on. Now, the core content of this book is diagnosis and philosophy, with some anthropological insights here and there.

The title is about support for de-growth — the core theme. Overall, the work takes aim at many of the same criticisms and system observations that have been covered on this podcast, such as: The problem of capitalism’s growth needs; The absurdity of green growth; The absurd measure of GDP as some indicator of public health or progress; How rich nations abuse poor nations in the growth context of historical colonialism: All good observational stuff.

Now, as far as solutions — it comes down to only one chapter: Chapter Five. And it’s this chapter we’re going to be talking about. Divided into 15 sections, five solution steps are proposed. But let’s just go through each section step by step.

And remember — here’s the question from a systems perspective: “Understanding the endogenous nature of market economics, which we should all agree is synonymous with capitalism — Why do these proposed solutions fail to get to the root of the problem? And why are they improbable to be implemented or sustained in a meaningful way?”

Keep that in mind.
The opening section, titled Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World, begins with a quote by Greta Thunberg: “We cannot save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed.”

This is true, but it depends on how deep you go. The Monopoly game does have rules that can be changed, but the real problem is the very structure of the game board itself — not just the rules. One of the things I will be repeatedly saying here as we go along is that some of these rules that we are not to play by — or at least not rely on as the most important mechanism — is government itself: politics, voting, and our so-called democracy.

It is indeed part of the transition equation, but not the most important part — by far. Keep that in mind as well, and let’s continue.

The opening section continues to challenge the economic growth narrative and how it’s not inherently positive, suggesting that: “Once we understand that we can flourish without growth, our horizons suddenly open up.(Hickel)”

The message is that de-growth is the core solution to climate change and similar environmental crises, along with being the basis for more equitable resource distribution as well. And we just need to figure out how to do it, right? He emphasizes the need for some kind of organized economic reformation — properly so.

The implication is that some kind of new system can be born through a planned transition that moves from this old growth paradigm to something more steady-state through incremental policy shifts.

The next section is called The Emergency Brake. Here, he continues talking about the merits of de-growth — meaning less material and energy use — and how, of course, it will lead to fewer negative market externalities such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the like. In the second section, he states: “In other words, de-growth — reducing material and energy use — is an ecologically coherent solution to a multi-faceted crisis.(Hickel)”

Okay, we get that. Using less stuff is better for the ecosystem — rightly so. But this proposition starts to give away the fact that while he sees de-growth as a solution, he’s sidestepping the root of the growth problem itself. It’s like saying a diabetic needs insulin injections, and that is the solution to diabetes overall. Obviously not — it’s just a counterbalancing force.

Let’s let him continue. “And the good news is that we can do this without any negative impact on human welfare. In fact, we can do it while improving people’s lives. How is this possible? The key is to remember that capitalism is a system that’s organized around exchange value, not use value.(Hickel)”

And it is this vague phrase that sets up the next five sections, which he sees as five steps forward. However, before we go into that, let me explain his point on value.

Exchange value is price, and use value is utility. A bottle of water has high use value — as without it, we die.

But it has low exchange value because of general relative abundance. While this isn’t actually inherent to most things that are mentioned in his five steps, it is an important point philosophically.

Price is a terrible method of defining value and pollutes our culture’s sense of reality, in fact. It has given birth to terms like expensive or cheap or worthless — where we think about things not through the lens of reality, but through the lens of market-based values.

We see this idea even with people. Rich people, just like a famous painting, are held up on a pedestal for being rich or of greater value. People are trained to think these people are more important.

We can also talk about the Veblen Good, as I’ve commented before — by which the want of an item is tied to its high cost, regardless of its purpose — meaning it’s all about status. In fact, and I think I’ve commented on this before as well, over the course of social movement work, doing lots of events — usually free events — thousands of them…It was found that even though we did a lot of free events, sometimes we had to charge a few dollars just to get people to come.

Because they saw the quality of the event through the lens of exchange value — meaning free means something worthless, once again.

It’s fascinating how markets have ideally perverted human value sensibilities.

Anyway, back on point here — let’s begin with Step One, as he states it: “End planned obsolescence.”This section mostly defines and gives examples of planned obsolescence and its wastefulness. All good observational stuff.

So then, how do we end it? He writes: “One option is to introduce mandatory extended warranties on products. With simple legislation we could require manufacturers to guarantee their products for the duration of maximum feasible lifespans.(Hickel)”

So, the solution is legislation to force better practices. Okay, how do you do that? You vote. You lobby your local politicians.You make noise in public protest. Maybe you yourself run for office. And you hope that the idea of mandatory extended warranties will rise to the surface and become law.

He continues: “We could also introduce a right to repair, making it illegal for companies to produce things that can’t be repaired by ordinary users.(Hickel)”

He also proposes transitioning to a leasing model for large appliances, holding manufacturers responsible for maintenance and repairs. And he describes these policy-seeking steps as part of an organized transition to a so-called new economy.

Now, let me state that, on a more grand level of this kind of “let’s just do this” thinking — specifically with mandatory extended warranties — if it was possible to simply turn the entire market economy into a leasing system, where the companies producing the products had to maintain them for their entire lives, you would certainly see a dramatic change in the quality of goods and sustainable integration in the market network.

I’ve also proposed these kinds of theoreticals in the past, but with an important caveat — That it will never, ever happen. I’m not saying it is impossible for mandatory extended warranties to occur to some positive effect, but the more such policy challenges cyclical consumption — and hence creates business contraction — and hence economic contraction by extension, the stronger the opposition to that policy becomes.

At the same time, if such a policy was ever implemented, for it to work at all, many other downstream changes would be required to compensate for the loss of economic turnover as a general rule in order for it to even be remotely feasible — and that has to be taken into account.

So, let’s consider the example of a store owner that has three employees. They need to gain X amount of income a month to remain profitable and stable. If a mandatory extended warranty occurred, it would result in increased costs, lowering profitability — which could lead to the firing of one employee to keep balance, to reduce costs once again.

And if that pattern continued across multiple businesses, it would lead, of course, to unemployment in society. So, what happens if this unemployment grows troublingly large?

Well you can remove the de-growth laws creating this unemployment, which is exactly what would happen, or it would be attempted considering the pushback that might keep it in place.

Or you’re going to need to make more regulatory policy adjustments to compensate for the new problems created, meaning other legislation.

The market economy itself cannot self-regulate to correct any of the problems that de-growth is going to foster. So you have to start creating multiple kinds of patches through legislation in the downstream effects.

This could come in the form of forcing reduce wage-work hours for individuals, spreading hours across more people. So instead of a person working 40 hours a week, two people now do the same job at 20 hours a week. But wait, what is the downstream problem now?

Now you have the problem of wage income itself. If a person gets $1,000 a week for 40 hours, they now only get $500 for 20 hours. So, legislation would then need to come to mandate higher wages because the market isn’t going to do that on its own once again.

So, if a company is mandated to hire two people at 20 hours a week, doubling the wages for the sake of their living standards, how does the business even afford that? That’s twice the pay. Well, they raise prices, which means inflation.

And now, with higher prices, consumers have less purchasing power, which can lead to reduced demand. And reduced demand may lead to further business contraction, forcing some businesses to close or further cut jobs, creating even more unemployment, and on and on. If it’s severe enough, the government might be pressured to intervene even more — in the form of subsidies, price controls, universal basic income, and so on.

The pattern goes on and on, and I’m not saying there are no areas of balance where de-growth policy is able to work to a degree without causing too much economic hurt downstream — but the general pattern is clear and observable.

The moment you push de-growth through policy, you have to compensate for the downstream effects, which are legion — ultimately leading to even more and more complex legislation because the market economy can’t do it itself.

And the more pain those de-growth elements and de-growth policies create, the more politicians — and even the general public — will seek to remove the initial policies that were there for de-growth, in their short-term interests, in the interest, really, of the stability of market economics itself.

Now, I want to point out before we continue that I truly get where Jason is coming from. In my books, TZM Defined and The New Human Rights Movement, I also express this policy approach. But it’s done with the view that it’s supplemental, once again.

In The New Human Rights Movement, I refer to the 4D’s: design, deter, detach, and demand. The demand section describes the interest in using democracy as best we can. I state in that book:

“Political influence, whether through grassroots protest or institutional lobbying via NGOs, will naturally be important. This is the arena of democracy that most think of, though often they misunderstand its limitations. Public appeals to directly reduce socioeconomic inequality and stop environmental degradation are always going to go against the grain within a market system, which will resist every step. Regardless, we should constantly demand things such as universal basic income, maximum wage and wealth caps per person, government subsidies to incentivize cooperative businesses rather than hierarchical ones, universal standardization of good components by industry sector to reduce waste, and other socializing and income-wealth-equalizing means. Basic public health services, as common to Nordic countries, should also be pushed to ease social stress while larger strides are made. These are not solutions in and of themselves, but they will help.”

That stated, let’s now go back to his section on planned obsolescence. First and most fundamentally, the incentive that creates planned obsolescence does not change. Planned obsolescence is a symptom of the system.

Even if we eliminate some or all levels of planned obsolescence, the market system remains consumption-based, meaning extreme waste will occur by default in whatever other means, like a game of whack-a-mole. You cannot simply legislate away capitalism’s built-in need for constant growth.

If you want to stop all the waste and inefficiency, you have to stop the root mechanism that requires it — market trade itself. Second, since his proposal relies on legislation, it assumes that those who control economic policy — big business — share environmentally friendly ethical incentives.

They do not. Market actors always have two conflicting roles in the system:

-Doing what’s morally right.

-Doing what ensures short-term economic survival.

Can it be outlawed or regulated? Technically, yes. Is it probable to work? No. In 2015, France became the only country I know of to enact such a law. And it’s been enforced only a handful of times — maybe three or four times, if I’ve checked the record right.

Which makes sense, because the true nature of planned obsolescence is far less planned. Consider a cheap vacuum cleaner made from inferior plastic parts. It’s there for a demographic that’s poor, right? You see it on Amazon.

It will break quickly, and the company will change the model design rapidly, making old replaceable parts unavailable — if they were ever available to begin with. If a company makes a cheap product that prematurely fails due to inferior materials, is that planned obsolescence? Unless there’s an explicit memo saying:“Let’s make this cheap so it breaks down faster.” Then, no.

Market economics itself guarantees that inferior materials will be used to create inferior products to reduce costs at all times — because competition demands it. This is what I call in my work intrinsic obsolescence, and it’s worse than planned obsolescence. It embraces planned obsolescence because it hides behind the guise of cost efficiency, which everyone practices.

It is a de facto disposition. The landfills we see in the world today, full of broken goods, are mostly due to intrinsic obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is merely a more overt form of it, and the lines between them are deeply blurred. Apple has been sued for planned obsolescence. Remember Batterygate? What did Apple say? They claimed they were just implementing performance upgrades.

They made some concessions to the public, but in reality, nothing changed. Tech companies in particular will always find an excuse. The bottom line is that such premature obsolescence is inherent to market economics.

If you want to create sustainable goods, you cannot do it within the market system because its competitive profit-seeking, scarcity-driven foundation requires constant turnover. Put another way, it’s not just about one company getting more purchases. The total system is driven by the need for obsolescence. Whether it is a car company or a cell phone company, they unify in this common drive toward constant economic turnover, consumption, and growth.

In fact, I will invoke the idea of the shadow incentive once again. The system needs inefficiency — and the more, the better. In the same way, people who smoke cigarettes financially support the tobacco companies initially. Then, when they get lung cancer, they move to financially supporting the medical industry.

You see the network connection? The system is based on needing more and more problems to service. And even though France has tried this with little success — due again to the narrow nature of the perspective — awareness of this problem still goes back 100 years.

And if you haven’t seen serious legislation against this by now, odds are you never will — for all the reasons described. Anything that reduces the flow of money through trade, reducing consumption and growth will be met with vast resistance on many, many levels. That said, moving on to step two, cut advertising.

This section is about the reality of advertising — its manipulative nature. It gives some history and denotes its obvious role in promoting unnecessary consumption. He makes a point about fast fashion — cheap clothing, a serious problem — and how “proper” regulations against fast fashion could theoretically cut textile output by up to 80%, and so on.

His policy suggestions include introducing quotas to limit total ad expenditure, legislating against psychological manipulation, liberating public spaces from pervasive advertising, and that’s essentially it. Step three, let’s just do that.

As with planned obsolescence, regulating advertising doesn’t get to the heart of the problem first and foremost. Today, advertising is the lifeblood of a market economy, which is why you can’t go 10 minutes or 10 feet without seeing an advertisement — horrifyingly enough. And they all serve the same function.

He notes that long ago, ads were made simply to showcase a product rather than being persuasive or imposing, and that’s partially true. But advertising has always really been about promotion. However, the science of marketing adapted quickly, particularly after the Industrial Revolution, when mass production and mechanization required the public to be actively motivated to buy more and more and more.

To stop the true poison of advertising, you have to eliminate its reason for existing, which means you cannot have a system once again based on market trade. That’s a fundamental observation.

While any such anti-advertising policy, of course, should be encouraged, once again, we need to be realistic about what we’re actually talking about. As I discussed in the last podcast, introducing new ideas to society and letting people’s needs dictate what they want — having it built in without the need for advertising — is not difficult, as with the Integral Project, but you can’t do it in this system. You can’t do it within the market system.

There’s very limited efficacy to the types of anti-advertising policies. Maybe you’ll get something that doesn’t promote too much nonsense to children before a certain age. Maybe. The goal of every market agent is to sell something to somebody else at a rate that keeps the economy running, preventing contraction.

This requires a communication mechanism to get the public to what is being sold, hence all businesses must behave this way in the competitive arena, and deeply so. Which is why some corporations actually spend more money on advertising than they do on actual product development. That said, of all of his prescriptions here, this one about advertising is definitely the weakest of the bunch. I’ll just say that as an observation. But let’s move on. You can be the judge.

Step three, shift from ownership to usership. I too am a fan of Jeremy Rifkin, who helped popularize the idea of access over ownership many years ago. Makes perfect sense. One-person, one-use models are silly in a scarce world. In fact, I feature this idea in my own chart of general transitional ideas in The New Human Rights Movement, though my focus is not, of course, on assuming policy will simply regulate these things in reality, but rather on abolishing market economics altogether as the assumed goal throughout.

But in this section, Jason lays out the logic for an access-based society over a property-based one. He states, ‘We need more public transit support. We need community-driven ride-sharing apps, and other such ways to reduce vehicle use specifically’.

And if we were to consider all the ways we could share utility in society, we could envision lots of creative approaches to share access, and all such ideas should be encouraged if you can get them going in your community. But how do these ideas lead to system change exactly? Aside from just being generally practical or something low-fi the community can do?

As part of the Integral Project, the idea is to combine mutual aid and collaborative access and development systems, structured as part of a unified transition away from market economics — not isolated, scattered incentives people do without connection. The unifying element is just so critical. Structure is important.

But as before, I agree with the sentiment of his proposal, the basic rationale, but I disagree with its assumed efficacy. It’s just so vague. It’s not strategic in any particular way, which we really need.

But let’s keep going. Step four, end food waste.
This section outlines statistics and the scale of mass food waste, which is huge. And it is concluded once again that we just need to legislate against it. And of course, to simply say, “We need to end food waste,” is like saying, “We need to end poverty,” discounting the systemic causes producing the problem in the first place and, of course, the inherent hurdles required if you attempted to do anything like that, which are more important than the idea of the resolution once again in terms of transition.

Remember, the feedback loops linked to required economic growth and, of course, business power over the state provide very low probability of this kind of policy change occurring.

In fact, let me put it this way. Imagine someone says we can end scarcity of rare earth metals by mining an asteroid in space that has an abundance. But the asteroid is a billion miles away.
See my point?

We have to have a path for the assumed pragmatic goal to be real. It’s easy to say something can be done, and sure, there are a few instances where legislation against food waste has been attempted in different countries — to very weak outcomes, I will add — but it has occurred. We haven’t seen much improvement in decades.

But the transition to get to that end ignores the feedback processes born from the system, built into the psychology of the winners of the capitalist game who have more power than the public in almost all cases.

And please understand, I’m not sitting here poking holes just for the sake of it, but to simply declare, “We need to end food waste now,” and how great that would be, with no approach, doesn’t help anything.

Of course, everyone wants to end food waste. Of course, most people want to end all sorts of negative market externalities out there. And just to say, “We’re gonna legislate and do it,” kind of assumes no one has thought about legislating and doing it before — when I assure you, they have.

Let’s move on. Step five, scale down ecologically destructive industries. In this section, he explains how some industries are harmful, disproportionately so, providing some statistics and chains of causality. He then suggests more policies such as ending subsidies for beef farmers in high-income countries, implementing a tax on red meat to curtail emissions, providing public health benefits while lowering medical costs, and other ideas.

He also talks about the need to establish a pattern for industrial downsizing, shift supply chains, use democratic means to decide which industries should be prioritized, separate essential industries from superfluous ones, and cap resources and consumption at current levels, and so forth.

Great. These are all fantastic goals. But why stop there? We can go down the line with hundreds more equally valid proposals to scale down ecologically destructive industries. But the true solution rests not with such a general policy proposal, but how that proposal could actually be implemented and sustained. And that’s the problem, which means it would have to override the vast market-reinforcing feedback processes that would fight such ideas viciously and likely win in the end. Simply saying, this is what should be done, sidesteps the system-preserving feedback processes that will inevitably kick into gear to remove those hindrances so the market can be “free” once again.

This is the empirical pattern. I’m not just making this up, which is why we have conservative factions today in the U.S. working to undo the most basic regulatory measures that FDR put in place almost a hundred years ago during the Great Depression — measures that have remained with us for the sake of social stability, such as retirement protections, labor security, and protections against workplace abuses, including the presence of labor unions, of course.

People are still trying to erode those ideas because of this very tendency. Now we are on to the next section after his five steps, called “What About Jobs?”

He starts, “Now here’s where things start to get tricky. The policies I’ve suggested above are likely to reduce total industrial production. But as products last longer, as we shift to sharing things, and as we slash food waste and scale down fast fashion, employment in these industries will decline, and jobs will disappear across the supply chains.(Hickel)”

Obviously, he’s referring to this general issue of unemployment due to de-growth. And firstly, as a literary technique, I’m a little turned off by how he just assumes these five steps are now a success to whatever degree, and now we’re on to the next problem of consequential unemployment — even though he probably doesn’t mean to approach it this linearly, because, as I said earlier, it’s all going to happen at once.

But I have to reiterate that, I’m sorry — those five steps are not only vague, they are some of the most difficult policy measures you could ever push forward against the system and forces inherent to market economics. Every policy idea suggested would receive massive counter-lobbying efforts from big business and most of the public over time to destroy the initiative, and they would likely win in the long run.

That said, let’s return to his point about jobs. He acknowledges the technical problem that within a market economy, efficiency-led de-growth means job loss. So how do we deal with that? More policy once again.

Shorten the work week. Deploy retraining programs to help workers transition from declining industries to sectors that are more useful socially. He then suggests implementing a job guarantee so that anyone who wants to work can access jobs in areas like health care, renewable energy, local food production, and ecosystem regeneration, he says.

And of course, he adds, “they’ll all be paid a living wage as well.” We have to legislate that in as well, you know, which is fine because, you know, why stop there? If we’re just presenting ideas that we assume can work in theory through legislation, let’s just go hog wild, right?

Now, there are other good observations here, such as mentioning the classical economist John Maynard Keynes predicting a 15-hour work week long ago due to increased efficiency — something you’ll notice we are nowhere near achieving today. Despite the abstracted proposals of people like Bernie Sanders in the United States and others who have proposed shorter work weeks; this conversation has been around for a very long time.

But the reason it’s been around for a long time tells you something. It tells you what forces have stopped any such progress.

Next, we have A Theory of Radical Abundance. This section discusses scarcity in the capitalist system and the market economy in general, emphasizing how scarcity is consistently manufactured, which is a good point, and it’s important people understand it.

The author also states, “Once we grasp how this works, solutions rush into view. If scarcity is created for the sake of growth, then by reversing artificial scarcities, we can render growth unnecessary.(Hickel)”

Think about that sentence. No. And this summarizes my position once again. You cannot reverse the manifestations of artificial scarcity in any form without changing the system at its root that demands it.

To apply policy in this regard is to attempt to legislate against Goliath, as implied before. The river is more powerful than your boat, no matter how well the boat is constructed. You can’t change the course of the current, though you may be able to ride against it for a little while.

And once again, I get the idea here — the assumption that we can counteract the forces of growth internally through policy, and then use that as a leverage point for larger system change. The logic here is very messy and omits a great deal because you can’t reverse artificial scarcities, rendering growth unnecessary, in a system that requires growth endogenously.

The causality is not coming from the existence of artificial scarcity itself. It’s coming from the system that requires and creates that artificial scarcity. Again, this is a system that demands constant consumption, and it produces artificial scarcity through numerous reinforcing mechanisms, such as intrinsic obsolescence. Scarcity exploitation is hence the basis of the entire market model, not a side effect.

The superficial idea that we can simply find a way to counteract such an entrenched endogenous characteristic through policy ignores the true power of the root causality.

Put another way, the growth imperative of market economics does not exist simply because we haven’t created enough counter-policy to slow it down or stop it. The growth imperative exists because it is built into the fundamental structure of monetary market trade, and it will bulldoze anything that gets in its way — which is why you have to go outside of the system to force true change once again.

Moving on, next is The Law of Jubilee. He continues with his policy proposals to address the reality that money is created through debt, which accumulates interest, highlighting compound interest, and how all of that comes together to create systemic scarcity pressure. As we all know, this is something I’ve discussed at length for years. I assume anybody here is familiar with this stuff.

What is his solution? Cancel the debt. The classic jubilee. So we just push that button. Simple, right? It’s got to be easy. Just as we see today with every attempt to ease exponential debt burdens — whether it’s for college student loans, medical debt, or national debt of some poor destitute country — the resistance is enormous.

Financial institutions operate under the same capitalist logic. Debt and interest are the contract and the income.

Money is the product to be sold, and interest is the profit, just like any other widget. While it’s true that some debt dismissal can and has occurred historically, the idea that broad systemic debt forgiveness will happen today, either at the domestic or nation-state level, is beyond improbable. I’m not going to say it’s impossible. None of it is impossible. It’s just beyond improbable.

This idea also sidesteps the geostrategic — dare I say, class war intent behind debt, which goes back thousands of years, something that people don’t like to talk about. Countries in debt serve geopolitical interests that maintain the power of the world, the balance of power. Debt is not just a monetary issue; it is a leverage mechanism for control. It is and has been part of the economic warfare methodology of large countries for a very long time, just as aid-providing institutions are as well, from a different angle.

The same applies to the general population and serves a very important role in maintaining power imbalance in class relationships. This incentive structure can’t be ignored. And just as you compete in the market economy for strategic edges to gain market share and profit, which is understood as the required approach in the near zero-sum game, the same applies to macro-level competitive advantage when it comes to debt.

Some can call this conspiratorial, but the balance of power in the world hinges, in part, on the obligations imposed through debt on both the macro and micro scales. That is the observable element. Define it’s causality all you want; you can say that people don’t think about this, and they don’t have to think about it because it happens on its own. But people in power are conscious of it, in the same way a loan shark operates in the mafia.

When the mafia loans you money, the goal isn’t always for you to just pay it back with high fees. If you own or are in charge of something valuable, like a nation with resources or you hold influence like a politician, your indebtedness becomes leverage to compromise you for future advantage. This is exactly how economic sanction patterns work globally if you take off the blinders.

Point being, back to this chapter — good luck convincing any ruling circle of people fully aware of what preserves their power to agree to broad debt forgiveness. Sure, little points of forgiveness occur here and there, but there’s no reason to expect anything but minor alleviations.

And he concludes with a quote from David Graeber: “Debt cancellation will be salutary, not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, and that these things are human arrangements, and that if democracy is going to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.”

Well, I agree with that statement. And there it is. Do you see it?

Democracy, as we know it, in fact, doesn’t mean enough — not inside the market system. The system has everyone by the balls through complex forces that are often largely unseen. And when you move against the system, almost as if it were a living organism, feedback forces rise to preserve its most natural state.

But let’s move on to the next section.

New Money for a New Economy. He opens this section by stating: “But debt cancellation is not a one-off fix. It doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. There’s a deeper issue we need to address.(Hickel)”

Okay, so once again, we’ve just magically enacted this grand debt cancellation to whatever degree, and now it’s time to move on to the deeper issue — now that we have that under our belts.

He continues: “The main reason our economy is so loaded with debt is because it runs on a money system that is debt itself.(Hickel)”

He then rightfully explains how money comes from debt, how money is created out of loan approval, how fractional reserve banking works, and so on — including the fact that banks create the principal, but they don’t create the money needed to pay the interest, which, of course, creates artificial scarcity, forcing increased labor and production for the sake of growth once again.

And everyone on this podcast is aware of all this, as it has been discussed for at least 15 years.

So what is the next proposed solution? First, remove compound interest and focus only on simple interest, which is a weird decision because, while compound interest is certainly bad, so is simple interest. Remember, none of the interest money exists in the money supply to pay it back.

Second, he then proposes — you guessed it — that it’s time to just create a new non-debt-based currency. Now, it is true that, although very few and far between, there have been historical proposals for currencies that are not based on debt, such as the organization today called Positive Money.

What is Positive Money? It proposes a transition from a debt-based monetary system to a public monetary system where the state, not private banks, creates new money. So the government simply creates its own sovereign money to start. And as far as citizens, well, it’s a little vague in the data that I’ve read from them, but basically, the public can get the money without commercial bank loans, which today, of course, create well over 90% of all the money in circulation.

Now, for a little history — some may remember from the Zeitgeist film series that in the 18th century, American colonies used something called colonial scrip, which was indeed debt-free.

Colonial governments printed their own money and spent it directly into circulation for public infrastructure, salaries, trade, and so on. It was not backed by gold or silver and was issued without debt once again. Then British authorities banned colonial scrip in 1764 with the Currency Act, which forced colonies back into a gold-backed debt-based system controlled by the British. Many historians still argue that the suppression of that money was a major factor leading to the American Revolution.

But the central flaw was still there. While the money was created by the government debt-free, it still produced debt in the public sphere, as the equivalent of commercial banks existed to loan that money back out at interest. And once you introduce interest charges, the balance is gone, as the money to pay the interest doesn’t exist in total money supply.

All they can do is make more money to cover future debt as a general trajectory. I point that out because it is also the same problem with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, as I talked about in the last podcast. Money is still a product to be sold through loans, and profit is going to be expected — hence the interest fee.

The Positive Money people see this, and that’s why they post theoreticals to get average people money without commercial bank loans.

All of this is to say that the state producing, sovereign non-debt-based money is just one level. You have to remove the entire infrastructure of selling loans to people with profit interest as well. If the true goal is to remove the burden of debt in society, you have to alter the entire financial structure, not just the nature of money itself.

And I think Jason knows this, but this section really leaves out all required detail to have any meaning. I mean, sure, we can just nationalize the entire network of private banks, force them to make non-interest loans, and abolish the Federal Reserve or any central bank, bringing sovereign money back to the states or to the country at large — but to just say that ignores the enormous political, financial, and business power that has every incentive to keep that system intact.

It’s the belly of the beast, in fact.

In the end, it’s not altering the nature of money that will lead to solutions. It’s removing money itself and the needed medium of exchange in the market network, and hence, the removal of the market economy itself.

There’s no way around it. I know it seems like I’m throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but there’s no in-between. There are too many downstream chain reactions that will destroy the policies that attempt to do these counter-market efforts.

And I can hear the disdain now from people saying right now, “Hey Peter, you’re criticizing people for requesting things that you feel are outlandish at proposal, yet here you are making the most massive change proposal of all.”

And this is gesturally true. But the difference is in the nature of what will actually work as a point of activism.

I don’t propose relying solely on policy to step forward into a sustainable economy. I propose that we cannot trust policy as a legitimate form of leverage, and you must build out new systems at the same time as the core leverage point for economic change. Just trying to alter the old system in a step-by-step, gradual way to arrive at some new structure. It’s going to take a combination of pressures.

So I don’t dismiss this outright. I’m just saying it’s completely minimal compared to the efforts that are required to really get things done.

Okay, and the next section is called A Post-Capitalist Imaginary, where he assures the reader that all of this doesn’t have to be painful and that even though he doesn’t really know how to get there, we can find a way through social movement.

He states: “No one can give us a simple recipe for a post-capitalist economy. Ultimately, it has to be a collective project. All I’ve done here is offer a few possibilities that I hope will nourish the imagination. As for how to make it happen, that will require a movement, as with every struggle for social and ecological justice in history.(Hickel)”

And that’s true. I’m glad he states this concession. It makes me feel better to know that he realizes what he’s doing in these proposals, even though they are thoroughly disappointing. Again, gesturally, they’re great. This conversation is hard, but we have to have it, and it has to go beyond these policy prescriptions.

You give me a piece of paper and a pencil, and I can tell you exactly how we can use policy to solve anything. I could write out a plan to solve global poverty tomorrow. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It’s not enough to simply abstract solutions on paper.

And if you’re like me, the more you see this kind of thing, the more irritating it becomes, because it’s the ultimate end of all of these books — including with myself — because I’ve been vague at times too. It’s the end of all this diagnosis where you see, Oh, they’re so on point. Take Kate Raworth and Doughnut Economics — she does precisely the same thing. Millions of people look at these social change books and are being perpetually reinforced with the idea that it’s all up to the basic roots of democracy to get it done through the channels that we’ve established.

And I’m here to say: no, that’s not going to happen. I don’t say that to be radical or to separate myself or to sound cool. I say that because that’s the fucking reality of it. And if you step back and look at it all with an objective eye, you’ll see the exact same thing.

It’s all empirically clear. Numerous social movements have created change. But if you look closely at those changes, they’ve been far more accommodating by power than they have actually modulating the system into something completely different. And MLK knew that. That’s why his Poor People’s Campaign was so important to him before he was assassinated.

He has many quotes about all the civil rights work he did. He said, You know, we’ve done all this, we’ve got voting rights and so forth for Blacks in America, but you know what? I feel very empty. (I’m paraphrasing, but essentially): If we don’t go after this economic thing, then all of this is really of minimal proportions, of minimal consequence.

Which now brings us to the final closing section of his work, which again, I recommend, titled The Power of Democracy, which he knows he has to address.

He begins this section by recalling a 2014 study called Cooperating with the Future, which featured an abstracted game that, in his view, proves that with proper democracy, sustainable decisions can override selfish or unsustainable ones.

The study introduces this Intergenerational Goods Game, an experimental model outside of market dynamics, examining how individuals make decisions affecting future generations with respect to resource extraction and so on. The game modeled a common resource pool, which is important to note, rather than a privately owned or traded commodity.

There were no supply-and-demand dynamics. There was no price mechanism. There was no competition amongst players for the resources in that kind of network investment. There was no profit maximization. It was far more minimal and experimental. It was more of a governance or policy-setting simulation than anything else.

And while it’s pleasant to see that the study concluded that we can have more sustainable outcomes in the right democratic climate — as opposed to individuals making selfish decisions alone — you have to cringe at what it omits. Market dynamics are the problem.

Remember, society is producing outcomes that no one actually intends on the whole, and what we call democracy is subservient to market forces — provably so — as a matter of structure.

And Jason goes on, and he points out this fact, but still doesn’t really understand the immutable nature of it. He states: “Elites have managed to capture our democratic systems. We can see this particularly clearly in the United States, where corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising, and where there are few restrictions on donations to political parties.(Hickel)”

He continues: “One of the reasons we’re staring down the barrel of an ecological crisis right now is because our political systems have been completely corrupted. (Hickel)”

And finally, he concludes: “The journey to a post-capitalist economy begins with the most basic act of democracy. (Hickel)”

Fair enough. But what people see as corruption of the system is actually just the system expressing its most endogenous nature. Capitalism is not just a market economy; it is a system of power.

What we call political corruption is simply a cultural perspective, a moral lens — not the truth of what the system is and does.

For example, the Supreme Court ruling Citizens United was not the beginning of corruption via monetary and business power. I’m not saying he’s saying that, but this is something cited often. It was simply an extension of it, resolving toward a system where everything is for sale — including democracy, once again.

Democracy and market economics have no compatibility on any fundamental level, by any stretch of the imagination. They are diametrically opposed. One is about egalitarian decision-making. The other is about hierarchical power and control from the top down, with subservience from the bottom up. It is a mass delusion driven by culturally codified limits of debate.

There is no country on Earth that organizes its social laws and overall politics through true democracy. It doesn’t exist. We just call it these things. Money and business are the root forces fundamentally, regardless of how people wish to look the other way and pretend it’s an anomaly, it’s corruption. No, it’s only corruption in our value system, not corruption on the system level of expression. It is business as usual.

Hence, it is only through building something new that any prospective change will occur, even though once again, we should still attempt democratic forces regardless, but only as a supplemental measure. Used to buttress the true means of change, which will have to come from evolving a new model from the ground up, in parallel. That has to happen. The model has to be shown. It has to be exemplified. And we have to account for the complexity of transition.

And I’m going to stop there.

We are now going to transition into the interview with Alfie Cohn.
*
[Peter]And It is my pleasure to welcome to the program Alfie Cohn. He is the author of 14 books to date centered around human behavior, education, and parenting. But today, we’re going to home in on a very specific subject, notably expressed in his book titled No Contest: The Case Against Competition.

Alfie, thank you so much for taking the time today. We really appreciate it.

[Alfie] Glad to be here.

[Peter] And let me start by pointing out this sort of cultural phenomenon that, from the nature of the educational system to most recreational games or sports, to the very structure and incentives of the global economy, this expression of competition is absolutely ubiquitous out there. One of the things that seems to hold all this together is a series of narratives, a series of stories that we’ve been told about the supposed value of this winners-versus-losers antagonism.
Would you mind giving a kind of overview of those established narratives?

[Alfie] Well, I organized the book along the lines of several myths that we’re raised with to the point that we don’t even recognize them as myths — or for that matter, even narratives — and come to believe it’s just an accurate perception of life itself. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Or even how we teach that to tiny children — we could say a doggy-eat-doggy world.

That competition is just part of human nature, so there’s nothing we can do about it. That it’s more productive. That people are motivated to do their best when they’re set against others, so the goal becomes victory. That competition builds character, and so on.

I should be clear that when you look at a given task, there are really three ways you can go about it. One way is to compete, so that I can succeed only if you fail, which I call mutually exclusive goal attainment, a fancy term meaning I succeed only if you fail.

Another possibility, of course, is I succeed regardless of what the hell you do, which is a more individualistic arrangement.

And then the third possibility is I succeed only if you succeed too. We sink or swim together, which is a formally cooperative arrangement.

So I want to make it clear that there are three alternatives, whether we’re talking about the workplace, the classroom, children, or adults. Step one, I argue, should be at least moving to an individualistic approach, which is not particularly friendly or neighborly, but at least much less destructive than competition — so that we are not required to interfere with each other’s performance. You can make a given environment non-competitive.

Step two, in many cases, would be to make it affirmatively cooperative. But there is that intermediate step as well.

[Peter] And going back to these kinds of myths once again, you’ve done such tremendous research on social studies, evidence-based scientific studies, and examples of some of the core contradictions you see between these myths and what the science actually says when it comes to the fruits — or lack thereof — of competition.

[Alfie] Well, when I went into this project, I was already convinced that competition was not great for our psychological health. If we have to spend our lives trying to defeat others and fend off those who are trying to defeat us, this is not going to be great for the way we feel about ourselves or our sense of balance in the world. The research proved that correct.

I don’t know how many people mistrust that or already accept it, but when you plumb people, when you invite them to reflect on it, I think a lot of people realize that winners as well as losers are perpetually in a state of doubt about their own status, their own competence, their own value.

Because even when you succeed, it’s only temporary, and your sense of self-confidence and self-esteem is perpetually conditional. You are only as good as the number of people you’ve defeated lately. And that’s a recipe for neurosis.

The research also shows a great deal of harm in terms of our relationship with other people. Interpersonally, we are desperately trying to be winners. We envy other winners. We are contemptuous of losers. And we’re suspicious of and defensive about just about everybody — because even if you’re not my rival today, you could be tomorrow.

In fact, the research demonstrates that competition is enormously destructive to people’s social and moral status. Children who are placed in competitive situations are less generous, more likely to tend toward envy, and less able or willing to imagine how the world looks from other people’s points of view, which psychologists call perspective-taking. This is one of the foundational elements of a moral way of life.

What’s interesting about the research on those first two points — psychological health and relationships — is that the problem isn’t just when competition is done badly, or to excess, or too early in life. These problems are inherent to any arrangement that says I can succeed only if you fail.

That’s a running theme throughout my book: you can’t solve the problem by just putting competition in its place, by doing it a little less overtly, or by telling kids “Just be a good sport about it.” The problem is not with the implementation of competition. The problem is with the very idea of competition.

Anyway, what I did not expect when I went into this project was that competition is also destructive to performance, to productivity, to achievement. I confess that I thought a less competitive society might be a healthier and happier one, but that we might have to give up some level of achievement.

And here, I was dead wrong.

What the research overwhelmingly indicates is that competition tends to hold us back from doing our best. In fact, study after study has shown — across cultures, across genders, across ages, and across tasks — that if you take a group of people and ask half of them to complete a task (like a puzzle, for example), and the other half to complete the identical task but with the added incentive of a prize for whoever does it best, the people in the first group tend to outperform those in the second group.

In other words, there’s something about competition that actually interferes with bottom-line achievement. So competition turns out to be as counterproductive as it is unhealthy.

[Peter] And of course, you look at other examples in the economy in particular — it’s just a skewed motivation, wouldn’t you agree? When people are trying to sell something, that’s very different from trying to develop a product that actually has public use, right?

And then you consider a field of marketing and advertisement. In a way, if you think about marketing and advertisement, it’s really another form of the competitive embrace that deepens into manipulation.

And let’s change gears a little bit here. You mention in your book this kind of structural versus intentional dichotomy — the difference between someone who is trained to value competition, like parents, sports, and whatnot, and then people who are exposed to or placed within structures that essentially force that incentive. Can you define those distinctions and talk about their relevance?

[Alfie] Yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily say born into — you can walk into it on a given Wednesday. So this is just a schema for understanding the whole idea of competition.

By structural competition, I mean when the rules of the game — sometimes a literal game, sometimes figuratively speaking — are set up so that there’s no way I can achieve what I’m trying to do unless I make sure that other people don’t. I may not desire that. I may not be the kind of person who enjoys competition or wants other people to lose. But there’s no way for me to get that job, succeed at this literal game on the field, or do well in school unless other people don’t.

That’s not a function of personal desire — it’s a function of the system.

Intentional competition refers to individuals who, even when there is no prize being given out, feel a compulsion to compete regardless. They don’t feel successful unless they are winners, which is, of course, completely different from being excellent at something. And by the way, those two concepts, I think anybody would have to agree, are different, at least in theory. I can write a book, cook a meal, or build a house without ever being concerned that it outdoes somebody else’s, right? I can just be concerned with doing it as well as I possibly can. And yet, we constantly conflate the two ideas.

Even before we get to the empirical question of whether competition enhances or detracts from excellence, we have to admit they are two different ideas. And yet, we don’t. In fact, we use the word competitive and attribute it to a corporation, a whole company, or even school systems. “Our district is competitive.” And what we mean by that seems to be really good, even though the word implies that we have to outdo others. So we have to start by teasing apart the difference between excellence and victory.

And then we look at the research to find that the more focused you are on victory, the less likely you are to be excellent — particularly in tasks that require ingenuity or creativity.

But anyway, the main point is there’s a balance here. We have to look at both the psychological issues of people who are intentionally competitive (and the structural factors that encourage it). For example, if you want the apotheosis of this kind of psychopathology, you look at our felon-in-chief. I mean, I’ve been using Donald Trump as an example of how not to be a human being for a long time. And while there are many aspects to his psychopathology — malignant narcissism among them — as I wrote in an article back in 2015, most of his dysfunction is based on the idea that I’ve got to be better than everybody at everything.

He sees all other human beings as potential rivals. But we’ve all met these kinds of people — you know, the kind of folks who have to out-debate you at a dinner party, even though there are no prizes being given out for that. They look around the room and are concerned that they’re the most attractive, the funniest, or whatever, even in the absence of structural competition.

I started this project thinking about these two forces — structural and psychological — in some kind of balance, and both are important. But gradually, as I’ve thought more about this over the years, I’ve come to believe that the structural aspects are far more important and tend to drive the psychological aspects of this.

You know, I remember when the book came out, I commented to somebody that if people started accepting this research and questioning these beliefs, you would start to see books in the self-help section of bookstores called Ten Steps to a Less Competitive You, because our society is so individualistic that we tend not to look at systemic or structural causes of problems. We tend to think it’s just a matter of your attitude, your mindset, your orientation, and we’re each left on our own to solve the problem.

[Peter] Absolutely. I could not agree more. We’ll touch upon that a little bit more in a moment. You’ve made some excellent points.

Of course, I’ve always considered Donald Trump to be an archetype — the amalgamation of our culture — both structurally induced and, of course, psychologically. You also mentioned something interesting regarding debate. I’ve always found it fascinating when you watch people debate, which is supposed to be some kind of investigation of a given subject, and it should be thoughtful and use evidence and such. But no. When we watch debates, particularly political ones, what’s the end result?

It’s about who won the debate — as if that’s a thing! And it’s just truly incredible how ubiquitous this kind of thinking is.

[Alfie] And that’s built into the concept of debate. Right. I mean, we can disagree with each other in a discussion, but in a debate, the point is not to seek the truth. The point is to outperform your opponent.

I have described myself most of my life as a recovering debater. I was a very successful high school debater, and it took me years before I was able to say, “Huh, that’s a good point. I never thought of that.” Because you’re trained to win, not to be right.

And that’s true of all debates.

As for Trump, by the way, in a healthy society, a man like that would be viewed as an object of pity.

[Peter] Absolutely.

[Alfie] But this is what happens when you get psychopathology in a dysfunctional culture that offers support for his pathology instead of seeing him as an object of derision or somebody who needs a great deal of help.

[Peter] Let’s shift gears here to a slightly different subject. We’ll come back to the structural issue.

I was really fortunate to come back and read your book again. I’ve read it twice now. It does such an excellent job — I encourage everyone to read it — of addressing another thing that’s been long propagated by competitive proponents. That is a kind of desperate attempt to link competition to some immutable human nature.

From Thomas Hobbes to a range of Western philosophers, it’s almost as if Western philosophy as a whole has intoned this idea as a form of justification: that early humans — the so-called primitive humans — were the embodiment of our deepest nature, our deeply warring, aggressive, and violent tendencies.

You’ve sourced people like Margaret Mead, a cybernetician anthropologist who did great research in the early 20th century. And there are some others in the modern era, even though they are kind of few and far between, such as David Graeber or behavioral biologist Robert Sapolsky.

They continue to pose these arguments that we’ve been misled about this idea that we have this ingrained, warring, war-as-human-nature construct. This is something I’ve talked about a great deal and have also written about.

But what has been your experience with this, even in the modern day? Do you still run up against this narrative?

[Alfie] Yeah, not just with respect to competition. I mean, you’ve sort of blurred competition and aggression, but there’s any number of things that are just casually attributed to human nature, and they all tend to be negative.

Nobody says, “Well, of course he helped that person out. It’s just human nature to be generous.” It’s always, “It’s just human nature to be competitive, aggressive, territorial, lazy, stubborn.” All the bad stuff.

Which is pretty interesting — this extremely dour view we have of our species. It’s interesting to think about where that comes from — how religion might be involved, and so on.

I return to this in my next book, The Brighter Side of Human Nature, where the first chapter asks why we keep attributing negative qualities to human nature and whether the research supports it.

I mean, when you think about it, the quick attribution of the status quo to human nature is very convenient because it relieves us of any obligation to make improvements in our society — especially of an enduring and deep nature.

“Oh yeah, sure, it would be nice if people were cooperative,” but — shrug — “it’s just human nature to compete. You can’t do anything about it.”

And therefore, it doesn’t matter how unjust and counterproductive it is. It’s idealistic — which is a pejorative — to have ideals, to think that you can make any meaningful change, because the problem is built in.

So we are permitted to just put up with all the bad stuff because it’s “part of our DNA,” we like to say very easily.

And so in this book, I pulled evidence from cross-cultural anthropology, starting with Margaret Mead, to show that there have been quite a number of non-industrialized cultures where there is apparently no competition — not in the way they play games and have fun, not in the way they distribute resources, not in the way they raise children.

Nothing. Which is very interesting. And by the way, all you need is one such culture to disprove the idea that competition is inevitable or innate.

And indeed, what we tend to find is that the cultures closest to nature, so to speak — the ones that are less industrialized — are not always non-competitive but are more likely to be non-competitive. There’s evidence from all kinds of fields that converge on the idea that, to sum it all up, we’re competitive because we’re raised that way, not because we’re born that way.

[Peter] When people bring up this “human nature” argument to me, I always refer back to a quote I read: It’s really our nature to be quite variable. We have incredible adaptability, but that also makes us extremely vulnerable to the environments that we’re in. In fact, in one of my books, I wrote about the social dominance theorists — which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with — who construed the idea that upon the Neolithic Revolution, because there was a surplus, surplus for some reason generated the need for people to want to dominate each other, to hoard more resources as a kind of abstracted scarcity.

There’s a guy who challenged a lot of that named Andy Schmookler, who wrote The Parable of the Tribes some years ago.

I’m not sure I’m familiar with all those people, but it does take a certain degree of almost willful myopia. I mean, the bar should be very high to attribute anything to human nature because you’re saying, in effect, that this has been true of all cultures, it’s always been true through history, and it must always be true.

There’s not a lot you can really make that case for. There are some things, perhaps, but we ought to be very humble about making such claims. And again, always ask the question, which I think is implicit in your discussion of the unjust political implications and ways in which those claims are made: cui bono — who benefits from these claims?

[Peter] Good point, yeah. It serves a kind of hierarchical power system — and an oppressive one — to have people believe this kind of stuff. I’ve often commented that competition is sort of the best value structure that upholds power, and for the worst. Because we all know that the structure is kind of slanted, and if everyone believes in fighting, then the people that really have the advantage in that game are going to persist, and they’re going to maintain their dominance.

So let’s move on to a nuance in something that you wrote that I thought was very interesting. It kind of surprised me, because even though I’ve done research into this myself, so many people attribute scarcity stress to a kind of reactionary social psychology — that people naturally develop a competitive attitude in response to scarcity.

But you argue in your book that there actually isn’t evidence for this and that some cultures — and it also makes perfect sense — will actually bond together in a far more collaborative effort, in fact, to conquer scarcity issues. Talk about that a little bit, because I think it’s very counterintuitive to people.

[Alfie] Yeah, that goes back to Margaret Mead’s early studies and those of other anthropologists. Imagine a two-by-two table. There are societies where there’s plenty of stuff and societies where stuff is perpetually scarce — those could be the columns. And now the rows in this little table are responding competitively and responding cooperatively.

What the anthropologists tell us is that you can populate all four of those cells. In other words, there are examples of societies where there’s scarcity and they are competitive, where there’s scarcity and they are cooperative, where there’s plenty and they are competitive, and where there’s plenty and they are cooperative.

That means, in effect, that in some societies where resources are scarce — like food, for example — the response is we can’t afford to compete; we have to cooperate because it’s not adaptive to be trying to outdo each other. So it just means that when societies are cooperative or competitive, it’s a function of something having to do with the culture itself — something that is often passed on over generations. It is not a necessary function of the objective state of how much stuff there is.

[Peter] Yes, absolutely. In the COVID-19 pandemic, you had this behavior of people hoarding supplies. Someone may intuitively look at that and say, Well, this just means this is a sociobiological reaction to scarcity. But really, people have been given this scarcity mindset for so long in the culture, even though it’s totally abstracted, that they just run out and feel the need to hoard. There’s such a great correlation between that scarcity mindset and hoarding behavior. So the cultural element is definitely very pronounced.

Moving on and speaking of how we can kind of change this stuff, the core of your work in childhood development is truly fantastic. That’s the majority of the study that you’ve put forward if I understand correctly. And I’ve read a good portion of it and have always followed it. I’ve really believed in part that, obviously, we have to impart proper values and conditioning on children because it carries over into adulthood.

And the educational system — we know we really have this sort of arcane, highly hierarchical, grade-oriented, competitive gaming kind of psychology in the entire educational system.

[Alfie] First of all, with respect to the whole human nature claim, it is rather ironic that if it’s just human nature to compete, why the hell do we spend so much time carefully socializing children to do that and to accept it as natural? That would be redundant if we had no choice about it. But in fact, we are training children from the earliest days.

I use the example of the first game that I ever learned at a birthday party, in which N children scrambled desperately for N minus one chairs. That’s a prototype of artificial scarcity, and you start learning that this is what it means to have fun — that you have to make sure you triumph over the other people who came out to play.

And when you get that message on the weekends and in the late afternoons, along with spelling bees, awards assemblies, and who’s sitting nicely and quietly so they get to go to lunch first — and on, and on, and on in elementary school — you get the message that life is about beating people. Other people are potential obstacles to your own success, which is the central message of the American elementary school.

And it is destructive on many levels.

First of all, it trains children to accept this as inevitable and dampens any inclination to make change. But it also, as I indicated earlier, undermines self-esteem, destroys relationships, and interferes with excellence. Children learn better in cooperative learning groups — when they’re in pairs or small teams, learning with and from one another — than they do left to their own devices. And they certainly learn more effectively than when they’re pitted against each other in a perpetual contest.

And that continues to be the case throughout school.

The other thing that competition does — besides undermining those things, and which is also related to the achievement effects — is that competition, like other rewards, tends to undermine intrinsic motivation, which means the desire to do things for their own sake.

So it doesn’t have to be competition — it’s just the most toxic variant. But any sort of extrinsic reason for doing something — a sticker, a gold star, a grade, a dollar, a pizza offered conditionally on success — tends to make people less interested in whatever they had to do to get that reward.

I wrote another whole book about that called Punished by Rewards. But my point here is that the only thing worse than a reward is an award. The difference? An award is a reward that has been made artificially scarce.

Not all grades are competitive. A teacher can say, “The point here is to get an A, and I hope all of you get an A. All of you can, if you do this quality of work.” But my heart sinks because this is not a classroom that’s about learning. Learning has now been made into a tedious prerequisite — something you have to get through in order to get the good grade.

But if you really, really wanted to destroy both excellence and interest, you would say, “Not only is the point here to get an A, but only a few of you are going to be able to get the A.”

I’m going to rank you. You’re going to be graded on a curve. I’ve taken a bad thing and made it even worse.It’s like adding the arsenic of extrinsic motivation to the strychnine of competition. And each of these aspects of childhood and education has alternatives that turn out to be not just more pleasant but a hell of a lot more productive and constructive.

And I added, when I did the revised version of No Contest several years after its publication, a whole chapter that I clonked myself over the head for not including in the first edition: a detailed discussion of what cooperative learning means in the classroom. So there are alternatives. Some people implement them. But obviously, not enough.

[Peter] Yeah. And I really encourage parents out there to absolutely investigate the work that you’re doing. It’s just so pivotal. I remember from my own education and just the nature of how things were pushed in terms of motivation. I remember, for example, growing up as a classical musician in a very competitive environment, entering competitions and things of that nature. It really did stifle a sense of development and also generated, as you pointed out earlier, a tendency toward inferiority. When dealing with sensitive performance issues or learning, many of my friends simply did not enjoy playing music anymore. They felt so intimidated by the environment.

In fact, when I was in elementary school, starting musical studies, the teacher would give us, as you pointed out, little stars for how well we performed a given passage of music. And at the end of the semester, they would give you some reward if you had the most stars. So what did us degenerate percussionists do? We broke into the lockers of all the violin players and stole their stars, which again speaks to how competition corrupts people’s sense of motivation.

[Alfie] And their interest in music. Yeah, I mean, in high school they have music festivals, which are not really festivals at all — they’re contests. I love the way we warp the use of language. Same with science fairs, which are not really fairs. We ruin it by turning it into a contest. In orchestras, there are challenges to be first chair, and so on. I’ve talked to a number of music educators who have tried to push back against all of this — to rotate kids through different chairs in the orchestra so they can hear each other play — not so you have to ruin it by turning it into a contest.

[Peter] Yeah. And let’s conclude the conversation by going back to something you said at the beginning, which I completely agree with, regarding the importance of structural change — whether it’s in education, the economy, or the social system at large.

It’s such a strange conversation to have, especially politically, when you start to criticize the structure of, say, market capitalism or market economics, which I think we’d all agree is a kind of near zero-sum game environment. It’s scarcity-based. It’s kind of hard to be collaborative in a system that doesn’t really reward that.

I just want to get some final thoughts on that issue. People have this sort of diffuse propaganda sense, I believe, where they say, “Well, that’s just socialism, or That doesn’t work, or If people are collaborative in their economic ways, it will lead to gulags, like in some Soviet” whatever. Round this out with your opinion on all of that.

[Alfie] Well, I mean, the last part is just a matter of tendentious rhetoric, separate from the substantive arguments throughout competition. There will always be people who use poorly chosen historical examples to fend off meaningful change, or who conflate democracy with capitalism or socialism with Soviet communism.

I forget if it was Mike Harrington or Noam Chomsky who pointed out that, ironically, the United States and the Soviet Union, as adversaries, shared one thing: it was in both their interests to pretend that Marx’s democratic socialism was equivalent to what the Soviet Union was doing.

The Soviets could point to that as proof that they were completely aligned with Marx’s humanist vision — which was false. And the Americans could point to that conflation, that confusion, in order to justify not having democracy in the economic realm — which is what democratic socialism is all about.

People will always do that. They use socialism — or these days, even liberalism — as an epithet, not as a label for an economic alternative.

This requires us to work on many levels to question the whole idea of competition as a good. I’m not an economist, but when I look at the research on individual workplaces, I find persuasive evidence demonstrating that people in a workplace, or teams or divisions within a company or organization, pitted against each other in competition — tend not to do good work.

The great guru of quality in workplaces, the late W. Edwards Deming, was someone who realized — and for a while persuaded a lot of Fortune 500 executives — that if there’s competition in your organization, your organization is not going to reach quality because people are too busy trying to beat each other to become really good at what they do.

And so I just take a step back and say, If the research is this clear about competition being counterproductive in individual workplaces, how is it we’re so sure that that same philosophy — of having to defeat people — makes sense writ large on the macro scale?

I know that’s work that you’ve done a lot more of than I have — looking at alternatives and understanding the problems with competition in an entire society and economic system.

But the point is, I think where you and I agree, and where our work complements each other, is in recognizing that we have to ask not just the superficial questions of implementation, but to ask the deeper questions, the radical questions.

Radical, as I think you know, comes from the Latin meaning root — the root question. Not just Are we competing too much or in the wrong way? but Why are we building from competition itself?

And the other thing I think we’re trying to do is help people realize that you’re not some starry-eyed utopian if you question this stuff. Because to the extent that competition lends itself to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation — as opposed to being just a statement of values — the reality is that competition simply isn’t very effective.

Even with a hard-bitten, hard-boiled, bottom-line kind of criteria by which to judge an economic system, a classroom, a family, or a playing field, competition tends to be not just unpleasant. It tends to be counterproductive with respect to most of the criteria that most of us value.

[Peter] Absolutely. That is definitely a revelation that hopefully we can impart and get society back on the right track.

I’ll conclude by saying that even though competition is considered an interpersonal or intergroup affair, I think there’s some truth to the fact that we’ve embedded this psychology so deeply that we are basically in competition with the planet — with nature.

We’re substituting our own idea of this growth system, for example, completely in contradiction to the way we have to be sustainable on the planet. I think that’s, of course, an extension of this.

But that’s another thing that definitely troubles me — this sort of mindset that maybe we could attribute to religion, I guess, on some level, in the sense of humans being special and impervious to the laws of nature.

At the same time, I think our exploitative perspective, our scarcity-oriented perspective — which quite bizarrely translates into a need for infinite consumption — leads to this paradox in our economy. We have a scarcity mindset, yet the growth economy is infinitely growth-oriented. It’s a bizarre situation we have in the current paradigm.

But Alfie, I really appreciate it, and good luck with all your work. I will continue promoting it, and I really appreciate your time.

[Alfie] Thank you so much. I appreciate your interest and your own work.

[Peter] Thank you. Take care.