Zeitgeist: Moving Forward Page #18

it tends to be in same sentence

with something called 'democracy'.

It's fascinating how people today seem to believe

that they actually have a relevant

influence on what their government does

forgetting that the very nature of

our system offers everything for sale.

The only vote that counts is the monetary vote

and it doesn't matter how much any

activist yells about ethics and accountability.

In a market system, every politician, every legislation

and hence, every government is for sale.

And even with the 20 trillion dollar bank bailouts

starting in 2007

an amount of money which could have changed

say, the global energy infrastructure

to fully renewable methods

instead going to a series of institutions

that literally do nothing to help society

institutions that could be

removed tomorrow with no recourse...

the blind conditioning that politics and

politicians exist for the public well-being still continues.

The fact is, politics is a business

- No different than any other in a market system

and they care about their self-interest before anything else.

I don't really, honestly, deep down believe in political action.

I think the system contracts and expands as it wants to.

It accommodates these changes.

I think the civil rights movement was an accommodation

on the part of those who own the country.

I think they see where their self-interest lies;

they see a certain amount of freedom seems good

- An illusion of liberty- give these people a voting day every year

so that they will have the illusion of meaningless choice.

Meaningless choice- that we go, like slaves and say

"Oh, I Voted." The limits of debate in this country are established

before the debate even begins and everyone

else is marginalized and made to seem either

to be communist or some sort of disloyal person

- A "kook" -- there's a word...

and now it's "conspiracy"... See - they made that.

Something that should not be even entertained for a minute:

that powerful people might get together and have a plan!

Doesn't happen! You're a "kook"! Your a "conspiracy buff"!

And of all the mechanisms of defense of this system

there are two that repeatedly come up.

The first is this idea that the system has been "the cause"

of the material progress we have seen on this planet.

Well... No.

There are basically two root causes which

have created the increased so-called "wealth"

and population growth we see today.

One:
the exponential advancement of production technology;

hence scientific ingenuity.

And Two:
the initial discovery of abundant hydrocarbon energy

- Which is currently the foundation of the entire socio-economic system.

The free-market / capitalist / monetary

market system - whatever you want to call it -

has done nothing but ride the wave of these advents

with a distorted incentive system and a haphazard

grossly unequal method of utilizing and distributing those fruits.

The second defense is a belligerent social bias

generated from years of propaganda

which sees any other social system

as a route to so called "tyranny

with various name droppings of Stalin, Mao, Hitler...

and the death tolls they generated.

Well, as despotic as these men might have been

along with the societal approaches they perpetuated...

when it comes to the game of death

- When comes to the systematic

daily mass murder of human beings -

Nothing in history compares to what we have today.

Famines - throughout at least the last century of our history

have not been caused by a lack of food.

They have been caused by relative poverty.

The economic resources were so inequitably distributed

that the poor simply didn't have enough money

with which to buy the food that would've been

available if they could have afforded to pay for it.

That would be an example of Structural Violence.

Another example:
in Africa and other areas -

I'll particularly focus on Africa -

tens of millions of people are dying of AIDS.

Why are they dying?

It's not because we don't know how to treat AIDS.

We have millions of people in the wealthy countries

getting along remarkably well because

they have the medicines that will treat it.

The people in Africa who are dying of AIDS

are not dying because of the HIV virus...

they are dying because they don't have the money with

which to pay for the drugs that would keep them alive.

Gandhi saw this. He said:

"The deadliest form of violence is poverty."

And that's absolutely right.

Poverty kills far more people than all the wars in history;

more people than all the murderers in history;

more than all the suicides in history...

not only does Structural Violence kill more people

than all the behavioral violence put together

Structural Violence is also the

main cause of behavioral violence.

[Beyond the Peak]

Oil is the foundation of

and is present throughout, the edifice of human civilization.

There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy oil and natural gas

in every calorie of food you and I eat in the industrialized world.

Fertilizers are made from natural gas.

Pesticides are made from oil.

You drive oil-powered machines to plant - plow - irrigate harvest

transport - package. You wrap the food

in plastic that's oil. All plastic is oil.

There are 7 gallons of oil in every tire.

Oil is everywhere; it's ubiquitous. And it's only because

of oil that there are 7 billion people or

almost 7 billion people on this planet right now.

The arrival of this cheap and easy energy

which is equivalent, by the way, to

billions of slaves working around the clock

changed the world in such a radical way over the last century

and the population has gone up 10 times.

But, by 2050, oil supply is able to support

less than half the present world's

population in their present way of life.

So, the scale of adjustment to live differently is just enormous.

The world is now using six barrels of oil for every barrel of finds.

Five years ago it was using four

barrels of oil for every barrel it finds.

A year from now it is going to be using

eight barrels of oil for every barrel of finds.

What's disturbing to me is the

lack of any real effort from governments worldwide

and industry leaders worldwide to do something different.

We have these, sort of, attempts to build more wind power

and to maybe do something with Tide...

we've got attempts to make our cars a little bit more efficient

but there's nothing which really looks like a

revolution coming along- these are all pretty minor

and that I think is pretty frightening.

And the governments who are driven by these economists

who don't really appreciate what we're talking about

are trying to stimulate consumerism to restore past prosperity

in the hope that they can restore the past.

They're printing yet more money lacking any collateral at all.

So, if the economy improves and

recovers and the famous growth comes back

it will only be short-lived because

within a short period of time counted in months

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