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Friday, June 25, 2010

Pursuit of Profit


In a world that claims to be growing more and more concerned about environmental issues, resource supplies, man made atmospheric changes and pollution. I find it fascinating that no one is talking about the most consistent destroyer of ecology and the most continuous waster of natural resources there is--the pursuit of profit.

Before the Neolithic revolution its been well documented by anthropologist that there was a natural balance to the planet. Population was in balance because we could only do what the Earth provided for us naturally.

Once we started to control the planet through agriculture, and now through many different means, we began to create dis-imbalance, we began to create uneven supplies, we began to generate scarcity deliberately for the sake of self-preservation and profit.

Money, contrary to the opinion the most of the worlds population today, is not a natural resource. Nor does it represent resources.

If you read economics they present it as though it is a science. I'ts funny, you look at economics books and they have graphs and charts and they make complex novel equations ––it's all contrived ––it doesn't have any relationship to the natural order of things. In fact by all standards of logic ––money is only functionally relevant in society when natural resources and the mechanisms of creation are scarce ––and thus, a system has emerged where people are given value for their skills in exchange for their servitude which can thus be used as an median of exchange for those supposed scarce resources.

It is based upon an folkway of orienting production and distribution. The entire global economic system is based upon people constantly consuming irregardless of state of affairs and natural orders of energy, planetary materials and anything else.

It is blind, narrow, consumption with absolutely no regard for the environment.

The Capitalist economy is founded on the idea of exchanging property in the markets, even your labor is a form of property in a sense. The world as we know is so caught up in the process of buying and selling that most can't imagine any other way of functioning human affairs. Sadly, the culture is fully indoctrinated into this frame of reference. And like the rising sun most can not even consider any other possibility for social functionality.

Yet, with all this obsession over property very few ask the question, "Why do we have property to begin with?"

The answer is simple, Scarcity.

Property is an out growth of scarcity, the farther we go back in time, the difficult and time consuming it was for people to create tools or extract a resource. They in turn protected it because it had immense value relative to the labor entailed along with the possible scarcity associated. People claim ownership because it is a legal form of protection.

Property is not an American or Free Enterprise or Capitalist idea.

It is an ancient mental prospective necessitated from generations of scarcity. If there isn't scarcity the rational for property becomes an irrelevant issue.

The fact is that most of the original problems which required the development of the economic system we see today are no longer pressing due to the dramatic advancements of science and technology. We now have the means to move into a new social paradigm, one where the negative by products of our current social establishment such as perpetual war, human exploitation, poverty and environmental destruction are no longer tolerable.

Regardless of how logical, clear and obvious new ideas may seem. The public still remains, on average, in tremendous fear of any form of social change. This is largely due to the propaganda and indoctrination which has been pushed upon them by the established powers. Which, of course, prefer to maintain their power.

These institution range from religious organizations to government to business.

There are a great number of people out there that know that something is wrong but they do not understand the source of that 'wrongness' because they are in the box of indoctrination. People are locked into a box, they see the box around them, they see the leaks and the holes and the cracks. They go up to the cracks and they try to fix them, they try to patch to holes but they don't stop to think that maybe there is something wrong with the box itself.  Maybe the integrity of the box that they exist in is inherently invalided, its inherently void.

The economic system that we live in is a parasitic paradigm that is only going to lead to self destruction, but people don’t see that.

So if you attack the economic system for what it actual is, everyone’s feathers go up, everyone says wait a minute, this is the world we all live. We live in a profit based labor for income world ––cyclical consumption. This is what we are used to.

We understand we have the division of classes.

They throw in human nature, they throw in everything that will try to make it seem like it’s a part of the natural order of reality, when in fact it is not. 

So in other words, the biggest crush to the evolution of human thought is breaking your own indoctrination.

It’s very very difficult to overcome emotional elements that have become so engrained in you that you have an immediate reaction, and immediate suffering and pain when anything interferes with that. It’s a very very complex problem.

We have to learn how identify and make our own indoctrination if we expect to move forward at all as a civilization.

The cultural values and the education barriers of our conditioned culture is the most difficult aspect to consider and currently, society itself is a culture machine.

In other worlds a society reaps what it sows.

If your society’s foundation inherently supports self interest, elitism, greed and dishonesty, then no one should ever be surprised when certain members of society continuously fall into the extremity of murder, financial corruption or indifferent selfish gain.

In other words, society is not only a product of the sum of its member’s values, paradoxically, it’s also a generator of them for each new generation.

The self appointed guardians of the status quo are birthed in religion, birthed in economics, birthed in the illusion of democracy that we see today across the world. Birthed the various “isms” that are entirely pointless; capitalism, communism, fascism,  and socialism.

The self appointed guardians of the status quo --people that are suffering in the system just like anyone else, but their social identification is so powerful. They are so locked into the box, that they find it infuriating to think that what they’re living is actually wrong, paradoxically.

And as far as the infamous “they”, it is simply another social distortion culminated, and reinforced by our environment. There is no singular “they.” There is a massive superstitious basis out there.  It’s us against them that is extremely poisonous to the development because people are constantly looking for people to blame, when it’s really themselves because they continue to perpetuate the system that creates these things.

But that is still a product. These are still human beings.  We are dealing with negative tendencies. The real issue is human behavior. Human behavior is largely created and reinforced by the social pattern required for survival, as necessitated by the social system of the period.  We are products of our society.

And the fact of the matter is, it is the very foundation of our socio-economic system and environmental condition, which has created the sick culture around you.

All social systems regardless of political philosophy, religious beliefs or social customs ultimately depend on natural resources as the initial step toward social functionality.  The problem with humanity is that we are ripped apart.

There are far too many ideologies out there that have no basis on anything tangible.

In all orthodox religions, at least western religions.  There might be a few elements of Hinduism and Buddhism that are an exception. To me it’s no different that “isms” of state associations that we see in our political sphere; communism, socialism, fascism, and capitalism.

These are ideas that have been created that have no relevance to nature what so ever. In other words, they have absolutely no relevance to the caring capacity of the earth, to our ability to support ourselves, to our ability to produce, to the methods of production, methods of distribution, to the way we orient society and keep ourselves alive, and keep ourselves healthy, and prosper. And for the betterment of the, what I consider to be the organism of the human species (as a single organism).

None of those beliefs have anything to do with any of that. And that is a problem.

We have created an economic structure, a religious philosophical structure that is absolutely decoupled from anything tangible and real, and these ideologies are what will destroy the human species and destroy the planet. Humanity has to start thinking about its relationship to the earth.

Until it does so, we’re fucking doomed!

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Peter Joseph for the Zeitgeist Movement

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