Sociology, Self regulation and Government Capture
The following is a cleaned up transcript of Peter Joseph’s 51st episode of the Revolution Now! podcast from September 12, 2024.
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In episode 51 of Revolution Now, Peter Joseph discusses sociological causality and its profound influence on human behavior. He emphasizes that systemic change, especially in the economy, is necessary to alter behavior, and activism must focus on changing the system itself, not just individual minds. He also explains the difference between internal and external system regulation, and hence the importance of cybernetic self-regulation, while offering a critique regarding the inefficiency of government regulation in managing market forces, noting that market dynamics, driven by money, overpower democratic efforts to correct issues like environmental degradation and inequality. This is not a side effect. The money-power feedback loop is far more powerful than the market-instability-regulatory loop and even democracy itself, making workable regulation toward homeostasis or balance impossible.
[Sam Richards]
“So when I was young, I thought that my freedom and my independence were the two most important things in my life. In fact, I thought that happiness could only come from me directing my own destiny in a way that was independent and free from the influences of other people. Then, I began studying sociology.
Everything you think, everything you feel, everything you imagine, everything you hope for, everything you do — down to the tiniest, most minute personal and private actions — everything is shaped by factors and forces outside of your control that you will never see nor will you ever understand. And I’m going to give you an example.
Imagine that I’m alone in my room. Tough times. I’m not happy. I’m struggling. I’m in pain. I’m thinking about committing suicide, and I have to make a decision. It’s the most personal, the most private decision that I could ever make in my life. So let me tell you what the sociologist says.
Sociologists would say, “Look, this might be a personal decision, and it is at some level, but it’s also a profound sociological moment.” There are two things to look at to help see this. One, suicide rates are steady over time. They don’t change very much. So in this person’s community, maybe, let’s say, on average, a hundred people killed themselves last year. This year, it will be about 100 people. Next year, approximately 100 people. This person is sitting here in this private moment of despair, thinking that they are making a free decision, but they are embedded into a structure that leads all the people just like them, who are sitting in their private moments of despair, to make decisions in coordination somehow. How is that possible if they are free and acting alone?
The second idea: whatever groups this person is embedded into, be they their religion, socioeconomic status, family, race, gender, whether they live in a city or a rural area — whatever it is, they all have different suicide rates. How is that possible? If each one of these people who are contemplating killing themselves is making a free individual act, a free decision, how is it possible that they all have different suicide rates? The suicide rates for human beings should be the same, but they’re not. Because somehow we are embedded deep into a structure of life that shapes us, even in the most private, personal actions.”
[Peter:]
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to *Revolution Now*, episode 51. Once again, I apologize for the gap between these episodes. Time has not been on my side as I’m battling some technical and legal issues with my new film, but it’s coming along. I appreciate everybody’s patience who is interested in the new films, like *Zeitgeist Requiem*, and the parallel economy project that will coincide with it, which is literally a whole ‘nother project. So it’s a lot to juggle at the moment to get all this up.
The opening audio was from a TEDx talk called “The Wisdom of Sociology” by Sam Richards. I thought it was a nice commentary on what sociological causality means and how profound it is. It eludes our most basic sensory intuition about who we are and how we operate, requiring a kind of systems thinking that challenges our sense of causality when it comes to behavior. In fact, in order to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand the structures that affect us, by which we are embedded and ultimately integrated. And it speaks to the heart of what this podcast is really all about, activist focus aside.
For without understanding the causality occurring, accepting that on a very deep level, what we think and how we behave as individuals are determined by structural forces that we are generally not conscious of. How can we claim to understand ourselves? How can we understand the culture? How can we understand civilization?
Even more, and I apologize for repeating myself because this has been touched upon before, but I like to reiterate certain things here. Such determining structure is not only external in the sense of sociology, it is also internal in the sense of biology, the field of behavioral biology. As an aside, behavioral biology and sociology — these divisions are things we’ve come up with in reductive analysis to try and compartmentalize and understand parts. When, as we all know through basic systems theory, it’s all one giant fluid, and the separation we see is an illusion.
And that’s how our brain is literally wired. We can’t avoid that tendency. It’s the way we see, it’s the way we perceive, and it’s the way we think, even though we are smart enough to develop that higher-level consciousness to understand that what we see is partially an illusion, right? But anyway, biology influences sociology and vice versa. Not to mention psychology, if we’re going to go for a third level of deconstruction.
Hence, the public health model that we know: bio-psycho-social. And crudely, I would argue that the psychological part of all that is essentially the outcome of the biological and sociological. But remember, that outcome — the psychological system, the way our seemingly free-will brains are wired to make this decision or that decision — is also turning around to influence our biological expression and the sociological expression at the same time.
Hence, the importance of individual activism, in fact. Where you take a bold stance as the army of one, why? Because you might be able to trigger a wave that affects others. Changing people’s minds, which of course is a huge part of this. But there is a caveat to that. Going back to this structuralist view, the proper path toward societal change isn’t just changing people’s minds. It has to be specific to working to change the system that is also influencing people’s minds.
That’s the level of complexity we’re dealing with when it comes to relevant sociological change today. Relevant social change today requires that we change the economy. We are being changed by a system we want to change, and that circular process has to be taken into account, especially on the population level. While it is true that our behavior creates the system outcome, we are still working within a pre-existing structure. In order to efficiently change our behavior, we have to stop the system’s incentives.
And it can’t be overstated. Reconditioning people to adapt to new patterns of behavior within a new social system, hence what we’re trying to achieve, isn’t going to happen overnight. This is no doubt a critical conversation that is often missing, by which the means are just as important as the end. In fact, when you think about these principles of recursion in cybernetics and the nested elements, the self-similar patterns, what it implies is that the means are the end.
When this parallel economy project is announced, what you’re going to notice is it creates microcosms of fragments of the future system, with consideration towards adaptability and, of course, acknowledging the middle ground bridging between the old system and the new. I could say a great deal more about that, but I appreciate everyone’s patience. Just let me get all the infrastructure and the website finally together, and then a formal presentation will run it down. The simulations will be on the website, and I won’t have to waste my breath trying to explain something that really just needs to be observed.
Ah yes, there’s one other thing before I started my tangent. I wanted to say about this issue of influence in the bio-psycho-social: those are the studies you may have read about where judges in courts, dishing out sentences or punishments to people, were noticed to have their punitiveness change based on how hungry they were or the time of day. Early in the morning, they had already eaten, and as they got hungry towards lunch, they became more punitive. After lunch, they got less punitive. That’s a pretty frightening example of how basic biology can affect psychology and decision-making. That study was in the 2010 *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* if anyone wants to look that up.
Hence, if we put all this stuff together, we have this perpetual bio-psycho-social synergy. When it comes to activism, the question inevitably becomes: what level of influence can we plausibly change in a relevant way? And in the dynamics of that bio-psycho-social phenomenon, we can see the importance of changing society to help change our psychology and to bring out the best of our biology — accentuation of our good nature, attenuation of our bad nature.
Today, we live in a society with enormous amounts of undue stress, with debt, finances, and economic pressure. Our very survival is contingent upon this terrible competitive game, and it should be readily apparent that those environmental stressors are bringing out the worst in people. Not to mention the incredible physical stress, as the work of Richard Wilkinson and, of course, Robert Sapolsky, have talked about at length. Socioeconomic inequality is deeply tied to all sorts of disease and illness — mental, physical, and so forth. Not to mention violence, of course, as we’ve also talked about.
If we can use our collective intelligence and wealth to provide people the necessities of life so they wake up and feel supported, they feel literally connected to each other. The ramifications of that, in terms of people’s psychology and their biological reactions — their stressors — will be outrageously positive. Not to mention the feedback back into the social system, where once those positive forces start to cycle, it will continue a cycle of improvement in that direction. There’s no shortage of studies that show complex linkages in this way.
Think about economic stress on bigotry or hate crimes and xenophobic crimes. While complex, there is a direct correlation to economic stress. Hence, psychology is being influenced by sociological conditions that very well ping our biological state, creating anger, creating emotional impatience, creating a sense of insecurity, or a sense that you’re being screwed over. Like that classic quote I love from Frederick Douglass, where he talks about feeling like the world is a conspiracy against you when it’s really just the nature of the system — to paraphrase.
So, to summarize all this before we move on, and again, I apologize if I’m repeating myself up to this 51st episode and some 30 hours of talking, but it’s important to revisit. The science of existence for the human being shows clear general truths, and these truths regarding how we should exist for the sake of our public health and, of course, earthly sustainability, as we’ve talked about before, are diametrically opposed to what we’re experiencing in the cultural condition of market capitalism.
And all of those supposed virtues, which are actually value system distortions — such as the importance of inequality and competition and narrow self-interest — none of that actually equates to positive public health science, and what fosters good biological health, good mental health, and a stable social condition without conflict, war, and so forth. We live in a precondition that simply doesn’t allow for that kind of balance. While this is old news to basic academia, it’s still considered abstract, and it’s certainly not applied in the systems science context that’s required.
In fact, sociology itself, as a utility, appears to be more or less rejected in all walks of modern society. Next time you get called for jury duty, when they put you on the stand to ask if you’re fit to judge the behavior of another human being, be honest and say that while you understand, sure, you can weigh evidence and decide if somebody did this or that. If the crime is about aberrant behavior, such as stealing or murder or whatever, you should point out the fact that the court system, the judicial system, takes zero initiative to actually address the roots of why people are behaving the way they do.
Always myopically falling back on this basic, free-will judgment. No solution process is even addressed. Only direct punishment is considered corrective, but we know that’s nonsense. In fact, it’s rather tragic on an intellectual level because the court system has all this incredible documentation of repeated human behavior, which can be strategically assessed to begin to understand the shared preconditions leading to that statistical consistency.
I’ll begin going back to the opening audio. Just like suicide, you’re going to have a consistent amount of murder occur across time, which means there’s a structure. But that’s ignored by the court system. Instead, they call prisons rehabilitation centers, which is preposterous on many levels. First of all, no one’s really rehabilitated. The recidivism you can study is replete. More people go to prison, and the worse they become on average.
With the cold reality that if you want to talk about rehabilitation, you have to take a sociological perspective. There’s no other perspective if the goal is to reduce the statistical prevalence of crime on the population level. Obviously, yes, you can talk about individuals that may have problems, but that’s a piecemeal approach, just like giving a homeless guy some money on the street. Yeah, you can keep giving one person some money every day, but that’s not going to change the system producing the homeless.
So in the end, no matter how you look at it, solutions rest in changing the sociological condition, changing the social precondition that’s creating recurring statistical problems. And I’ll add one more element to this kind of denial of sociological causality, and that’s the prevalence of this line of thinking when it comes to psychology and self-help. I would certainly never criticize someone for getting psychological help or meditating or doing something to try to better cope with the world around them and cope with their own internal thoughts and emotions. We all have to do that on some level. But there’s a limit, and it’s certainly not a solution to everyone’s woes.
It’s like a guy sitting in the middle of a street in a yoga position with his eyes closed while there’s a war going on with bombs falling around him, destroying the city, and he pretends nothing’s happening and nothing will happen to him because he’s “centered.” Cultivating personal resilience can’t overcome a toxic social structure. In fact, I remember years ago, I gave a lecture at the Maharshi University in Iowa, and it has a whole section devoted to transcendental meditation. Fine, seems to help people, but I was rather shocked to see in this sort of holistic counterculture university there was very little to no focus on society. Rather, it was all internal, personal, psychological resilience. That kind of focus simply isn’t going to change the world unless it’s conscious of the necessity to do so.
Now, all that said, shifting gears finally, I want to talk about system self-regulation. I received an email asking about this, and the question was, what does it mean for a system to self-regulate? Self-regulate.
Self-regulation is one of many properties in cybernetics when it comes to a viable system, and hence the context as related to Stafford Beer. But, you know, I’m always hesitant to draw personal associations to ideas, as it sort of feels like there’s an ownership of the idea, or even worse, that it’s more of an opinion of an individual. Take for example what people call Marxism, which has dozens of definitions. But the very fact it’s given that label in terms of the intellectual body of work, particularly the analysis of capitalism, completely cheapens it, as if it’s, again, just like some dude’s opinion.
But anyway, Stafford Beer was the most notable when it comes to thinking about what it is that actually makes a system work, hence his viable system model, which is a set of researched assumptions, as we talked about before, including self-regulation, but also self-organization, adaptation, resilience, and so on. Hence, a system that can sustain itself and change as needed to continue achieving its goals or functions. And I always encourage people to research the nature of this model in a bit more detail. I talk about it, of course, in my new film.
On the surface, it does feel rather abstract, but what you realize is that what Beer is getting at is simply prevalent in all biological systems, and he’s extrapolating from that. The more you learn about system dynamics and particularly cybernetics, the more what he’s observing, describing, and prescribing simply makes logical sense. You don’t even need to use his name. For example, the idea of recursion, whereby all subsystems at every level of an organization need to have the same basic structure and capability for self-regulation from the smallest subunit to the largest perceived system — autonomous, yet integrated. Of course, there’s an element of contradiction to that. But the reality is, you have to accept an element of contradiction in all of this if you’re going to talk about system behavior in the real world because it’s bridging this reductive analytics with a synthetic holism, as it’s called, and hence the unification of basically everything.
If you accept the idea that all systems in nature operate in the same fundamental way as a universal law, as cybernetics does, then on the most basic level, man-made systems must respect the same phenomenon if what we create is expected to actually work — especially with complex adaptive systems like a social system or economy, as opposed to just some engine or machine. We are nature. The networks we create in our own ecosystems are nature. It all bridges out, and it all shares the same natural laws.
That said, and more specific to this self-regulation idea and what it means, I’m sure everyone remembers the Watt governor regulator of the steam engine, an example often used by cybernetician Stafford Beer once again. We understand that there is a division of labor or purpose analytically when you break down the parts of a steam engine. They all work together towards a common end, with this component — the Watt governor — being a feedback control system that uses the engine’s own output as input in a circular capacity. Hence, it is in charge of making sure the engine’s power maintains stability.
While we recognize the relevance of this component part in a reductive way, we also see the whole it’s a part of, moving toward a common goal as a single system. The difference between internal self-regulation, which we would correctly label the total engine as achieving, and external regulation has to do with the degree of integration. And I would separate that into roughly three areas: how homogeneous the mechanics of the regulatory apparatus is in relation to the system it’s trying to regulate (you could employ the word recursion in that context); second, the degree of efficiency of the feedback flows, meaning the more continuous the monitoring and response, the more efficient; and third, that the two subsystems maintain the same primary function or goal.
Now, that latter point about primary function is less relevant to a Watt governor engine than it is to an economy, which I’ll talk about more in a moment. That’s ultimately what I’m building up to once again. So let’s create a contrast here to better understand.
There’s clearly a difference between the Watt governor regulator steam engine, capable of maintaining stability as a single system in reality through continuous, immediate, dynamic feedback flows. The parts are physically and structurally similar. There’s nothing endogenous to any of those parts that interfere with each other in terms of the final goal, which again is an abstract concept that doesn’t really apply here because these are mechanical, non-thinking parts, as opposed to a social system that has a different problem when it comes to sharing primary goals. As opposed to, say, some dude sitting next to an engine that doesn’t have a built-in governor, and he’s just manually monitoring, looking for instability, and tweaking it every couple of minutes to try and keep it in balance.
The definition of self-regulation is the ability of a system to monitor and adjust its own behavior to maintain stability, adapt to changing conditions, and achieve its goals without external intervention.
While we can see the obvious differences between the two examples, we also have to notice there’s an element of subjectivity, which is why the question was posed. It’s a kind of qualitative differential (sorry for the annoying term) that essentially decides if a system is self-regulating or not, taking into account all of those points I mentioned prior. With the basic overall issue being efficiency — efficiency to achieve the desired end.
I hope my generalizations here are relatively clear, and I think if you just look to biological systems, you kind of find the answer, such as in the original work of Norbert Wiener. The human body regulates temperature through sweating, ensuring it stays within an optimal range. It’s also a characteristic that is prevalent in all ecosystems, such as the predator-prey cycle, where as prey populations increase, predator populations rise due to the abundance of food. Predators consume more prey, the prey population then inevitably declines because of that increased consumption, which eventually causes predator numbers to decrease as well. Then we get a single system emerging as a cyclical cycle that regulates population overall between the two in ecological balance.
And yes, I just said cyclical cycle. Way to be redundant, Peter. I’m gonna leave that in — that’s funny.
But anyway, you can see the qualitative chasm between the prey population cycle in a homogenous environment — it’s just nature producing this homeostasis between different subsystems — and, say, an overpopulation of an animal somewhere where hunters come in and start shooting them manually. That is clearly a more external form of population control. It doesn’t have any of the consistent patterns that exist in the homeostatic balance between the predator and prey on their own.
To extend that to social systems, obviously in the crude market economy, we have the classic supply-demand balance via prices, where prices rise due to scarcity and decrease as scarcity decreases. That general observation is true, but as I’ve argued many times, what people think that actually does in terms of sustainability, for example, is utterly false because there are other interfering factors. But that’s for another conversation.
That is a good segue to move into self-regulation in social and economic systems.
So, what makes something external in an economic system that needs regulation, as opposed to internal, and hence true system self-regulation? To bring that question into a real-world context: is the use of democracy, government, and the regulatory apparatus and the legal system part of a self-regulating economy? Is it integral with the primary function sought, while having the highest level of feedback efficiency, adaptability, and resilience and so on? Is it recursive in its relationship and relatively homogeneous to maintain compatibility and consistency?
Well, anyone listening to this podcast knows the answer to that, and it’s no. We have constructed an external apparatus of extreme fallibility that quite empirically fails miserably at regulating the economy, and any cursory glance at socioeconomic inequality levels and environmental decline will confirm that. And this isn’t a radical thought. It’s so observable that economists came up with that classic phrase, “negative market externalities.”
In the primitive lexicon of market economic thought, since everything is reduced to costs and price, it is recognized that within this complex adaptive system of markets, which is doing all sorts of autonomous things through its incentive system structure and so on, there is still a total failure to account for environmental sustainability and equitable distribution in particular. One of the problems is that we’re dealing with two systems: government regulation and market dynamics, that don’t share any kind of primary goal.
Even worse — and this is what people really don’t understand — is that there is a disproportionate level of force in the nested hierarchy of these two systems, by which the market is dominant. The market forces are simply stronger, and its goals are not the goals of what the regulatory apparatus seeks. More simply, consider a basic loop diagram. On one side, you have a circle that says “government regulation.” On the other side, it says “market dynamics.” Now, take the government regulation circle and stick it inside the market dynamics circle, and then start drawing some feedback loops between the two systems, acknowledging that one is, in fact, entrenched in the other in terms of power imbalance.
The traditional perspective says, “Well, we are a regulatory apparatus of the state driven by democracy, and we perceive a problem in the market, such as pollution. We are going to take in that feedback information, understanding that pollution, and we’re going to output corrective measures and try to create homeostasis with that issue, resolving it.” That, of course, defines the entire concept of government regulation and what 99% of environmentalists or any kind of activists out there actually think is the solution.
But there’s another feedback loop. And that loop is stronger, where after the information comes from the market into the government, and the government creates regulation and feeds back into the market, the agents of the system that don’t like that — the conscious agents of the system that want the market to be more “free” — create a new loop, working to override that process of regulation instituted by the regulatory apparatus. And how do they do that? They use money.
That loop — the loop of money and ultimately capturing and hijacking the regulatory apparatus — is the most powerful loop in this entire equation. I’m sorry to say, it will never, ever get any better. Why? In simple terms, because the buying and selling of everything is the fundamental nature, modus operandi, and primary function of the system, or at least one of them. To think that you’re going to have the entire society for sale on every single level, literally, and then you’re going to have this tiny niche of democracy and politics — and hence regulation — that’s absolutely needed, somehow be free of that monetary influence, is insanely naive.
I’ll say one more thing on that, because people say I’m throwing out the baby with the bathwater in all of this stuff. Is it impossible to regulate the system properly? No, it’s not impossible. It’s just deeply, deeply, deeply improbable. As long as this is the nature of things, as long as the activist community is stuck in this way, as long as people think they’re going to somehow empower this regulatory apparatus — the government, democracy itself — in a way that can compete to stabilize all of the terrible negative effects of markets, interfering with its most core primary endogenous function, the thing that actually defines it: the buying and selling of everything, infinite growth, not to mention, as I talked about before, the intrinsic and extrinsic nature of runaway wealth inequality. All of that stuff is endogenous to the system, and so much so, you’re going to have one hell of a time attempting to stop any of it.
I’ll say one more thing before I end the podcast. Out there in the community, you always hear the same kind of routine: “Well, the Nordic countries have done this, why can’t the United States do this?” Or, “Europe has done this, why can’t somebody else do this?” There’s this notion that you can just superimpose some kind of sense of democratic organization, government, or whatever economic alteration within that narrow confine of changes in capitalism. And if everyone just did what the Nordic countries did, the whole world would be great.
But that also denies the very nature of a complex global system. The reason governments and cultures have a certain tone the way they do, the reason there’s variety, is because of the entire system’s behavior. Hence, even though there’s a range of changes that can happen, you can’t just assume you can take one system that one culture is adapted to and just slap it on another country. Bernie Sanders talks about that. He should understand by now that you can’t just imitate what Europe’s doing and expect Americans to absorb it. America is in a very different place in this entire evolution. Its character is far more militant in its pseudo-capitalist reality. It is only when the constituency, no matter how small, finally begins to move against the system in an active way that you’ll start to see radical global changes.
But as long as the framework of this system remains and is accepted, it’s always going to prevail, and you’re going to have this general murky, gross dynamic across the world. I’ll make a note to talk about that more in the next podcast, since I only touched upon it. I had much more on my list of points here, which I will pick up next time. Sorry again for the delay. I hope to get back in about two to three weeks, and I’ll keep everybody posted on the film and so on.
I have also been working on a new Substack article on the subject of monopoly. It’s been a common topic out there. I think people really need to understand what a monopoly and a cartel is in terms of its inevitable endogenous occurrence in capitalism and all the nonsense and propaganda about a society regulated by competition, Ayn Rand, and so on. So look out for that.
This program is brought to you by my Patreon. I really appreciate the support. Direct donations are very helpful at this time as well through gentalmachineproductions.com. And yeah, everyone take care out there, be safe, and talk to you soon.
