Peter Joseph, I don't know how you do it, put it seems that you wrote another blogpost that made me cry again, because the implications you mention in your post are insightful, frightening and hopeful at the same time.
Absolutely right on. Structurally self-perpetuating, no one driving the bus, with the Hotel Owners (at Life as a Game of MONOPOLY (TM) naturally motivated to play, and consumers likewise with few other sources of meaning given the torn fabric of belonging. See the movie Ancient Futures, for context.
Thanks for clarifying the term and urgency of our critical time of late-stage capitalism, in the 21s century, where we face two options: Transition to a new system designed for balance or bust via the status quo destructive endless growth market-based system.
The challenge I see is that most people, as I'm sure you know, are not going to be able to handle the true level to which our system must be replaced and a new system must replace it. That is too scary, too foreign of a thought and too unfamiliar of an experience for them to handle.
But the DESIRE for most people to contribute to a system change that is based on well-being and a healthy ecosystem without systemic corruption is high. About 70% of people surveyed are concerned about climate change and want to do something about it - but they admit that they don't know what to do.
Most people who've been around for a while, know that voting isn't a solution in and of itself, many have given up on that completely. Most know, to some degree, that a system that demands infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is unsustainable. However, we were born into this mess. Locked into debt, locked into market dependence long before we were old enough to have a grasp of it. Then thrown into those cycles you mentioned and a viable off-ramp is not articulated or shown to many people in society.
Like, my town of 60,000 people has no tool library. Not one non-profit or worker cooperative tool lending library. But we have a public library, two branches, actually, yet no one has thought of sharing tools in any community-facing institution, in which we could SEE what a balanced economy based on regeneration, sharing, repairing and caring - within planetary boundaries - would actually look like, if developed further throughout our community.
Worse yet, the city of nearly 1 million down the road from me ALSO has not one tool library. I know this may seem like a weird trivial point to make. But how is it that a city of over 900,000 never had a group of activists come together and build a project for shared tool access in the city, because they understood it as a living model of a sharing, circular economy that isn't obsessed with competitive advantage and profit maximization? Probably because there really isn't any baseline training for activists to understand some core things that build a transitional base from one system to another.
I'm pleased Integral has come along with the infrastructure and the Preparation Guide for a proto-node is something I hope to communicate in a user-friendly way so that any ecological or social justice-focused activist in a community can get a group together and build their Integral proto-node around access, collaboration and cooperative commons management.
And I think the most likely way Integral developments can integrate into towns is with a group of activists who build the base of proto-nodes and some key public support institutions like tool libraries, mutual aid groups, repair cafes, community kitchens, etc. and the public sees how well they work - without even knowing that Integral infrastructure is supporting them - and the critical mass of the community shifts their lifestyle towards Integral because it works better. Not because the activists are preaching old white men's gospel and calling for political parties to reform the system from the top-down.
Good points. Just to be clear : Integral isn’t just an idea. It’s being built as a real software platform/system; a coordination system that communities can use to organize shared resources, make decisions, manage local projects, and begin constructing a post-market commons from the ground up.
Integral infrastructure software/system for a community coordinated commons economy is essential and absolutely something I'm excited to hear and help with, in whatever way I can. And as I alluded to, what I'm trying to do is develop a 'quick-guide' of sorts, that helps communities set up and prepare for Integral software, through the base of a tool library, in a way that can appeal to most environmental and social justice activists that will enhance the things they are already doing and then when Integral becomes fully functional it just keeps adding to the post-market and sustainable activities of these communities.
I note that literally every addiction is also the human body/mind perfectly reflecting the growth imperative of the larger social system they live in. The same recursive self-destructing patterns, making their way to perhaps the most atomic scale in society.
I am not clear on why you think debt and interest just happened? The charging of interest was not evenly distributed throughout all of modernizing economic activity. It only became widespread as certain perspectives gained the power to establish it.
Mediums of exchange -- turn into "commodities" (money) --- which turn into products (loans) --- and products become market instruments -- that require a mark-up (profit). Can you find anything else in the foundational nature of market economics that does not organize around exploiting exchange for (surplus) profit? This all goes back thousands of years and sure it's abused -- but that's after its self-organizing development with people (power) seeing the advantage and oppression inherent to the process.
And while it's true, debt appears to have preceded money, such as in ancient Sumeria, debt was still the very foundation of exchange itself. It was a cycle of IOUs when people needed something from somebody else.
I’ve followed your work since 2007 with Zeitgeist The Movie, and just “discovering” you here on Substack.
What do you see as some of the options of a gentle landing moving away from “late stage capitalism” and the carbon pulse it’s been riding on? I think human civilizations require organization and mythology for individuals and groups of people to organize around.
I see similar possibilities that can happen in terms of slow decline and collapse of modern organized structure. But I’m not sure how to maneuver around it or move beyond it.
Coming from a medical background, there are certain analogies that help me explain this better. Recent studies have demonstrated that, on average, people that recover from a heart attack, only 4% follow the recommendations set by physicians, nutritionists, and physical therapy after a year.
I see societal parallels in terms of chronic illness and heart attack is one of the best examples. If we cannot get individuals to follow recommendations and change lifelong habits, how do we expect society at large to be anything different?
I understand where you’re coming from entirely. Which is why a new system has to be forged by an intelligent group that opens the door for others that eventually see it’s merit. That’s the only way true system change will occur. It can’t be imposed from the top down or through some abstracted overnight revolution. It has to be a developmental transitional process that absorbs the old society into the new.
I am unclear from that if you are aware of the actual history of interest and its variable status as "usury". I asked a very specific question about specific nouns and verbs and I don't think there is any evidence that products just turn into loans. That structure parallels with the early (ie Aristotelian) conception of spontaneous generation as the origin of life in transmutation of inert or static matter into the simpler organisms.
I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. The historical record is fairly clear on this evolution. You said "The charging of interest was not evenly distributed throughout all of modernizing economic activity." So? The move into a medium of exchange solidified the product basis of the "production" of monetary loans which the entire society depends on - and interest became the markup on that product.
That "innovation" of monetary loans becoming what the entire society depends upon was extremely late wrt the development of economic activity such as to produce "capital" in its basic form. Please note that every word I use is intentional and none can just be ignored.
I think there's a lot of value in your general thesis, as a high level sketch of a general flow model. It is just that the low level observations matter for understanding what is actually happening, so much so that misattribution of where energy is, and what it is positioned in relation to, in one area of the model which looks like a monad at the high level view but is actually separable event-objects, can produce a model and therefore an understanding and therefore decisions about "what to do" which are exactly opposite of where reality sits.
As I understand it, the views of interest as "just happening", and now also that of "products just becoming loans", are two such high level statements that don't accurately describe what's going on, when one is close enough to see the component parts of these things described as "interest" and "loans" and "products" and also all the agents and associated objects and event-objects which buoy and funnel activity such as you are describing.
You know, Substack UI is just too buggy to continue typing any more in this open window. Sorry about that.
Social systems create structure through procedures organized around incentives, right? Hence survival inference, which then builds out in very complex ways.
Humans, trying to survive biologically, become the cogs inside a determining biosphere and sociological condition constantly being shaped by the social system itself. So the notion of “self-organization” always rests within those parameters.
Loans/Debt are "products" in the market ystem by definition, as practiced for thousands of years. Interest is both a penalty for late payment (ie before money- debt ledgers) and a profit mechanism for the “product-service” being offered. (ie with money/banking)
What logic do you disagree with? And what areas of the historical record support your disagreement?
I think you are mixing up 1/ scale and 2/ inevitability. Do you understand what I mean? My providing you examples won't help if not, because I am not going to provide you with an entire slice of history from the macro to the micro. Contextualizing an example of micro is necessary to make use of examples. And every time I mention phenomena at a micro scale you expand out to a macro based on what necessarily is a host of contingent more discrete hypotheticals and then try to create an inevitable macro rule about it.
The Problem with Capitalism is that it always needs to expand the markets (GROW) in order to survive (hence the Globalism/Imperialism). It's like a tumor that keeps growing, devouring competitors and their market share (hence the Monopolization and Merger with the Government).
So, the "bubbles" are the very essence of capitalism. Capitalism is basically constant CONCENTRATION of Capital, and therefore the Power, in the hands of a small group (Oligarchy).
Problem is, our planet is finite. And you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
I haven't gotten far in your lengthy article, but I feel like you're missing an obvious element of late-stage capitalism - extraction. We live with a marketplace characterized by extractive techniques and philosophies. At a certain point, implicitly, there's nothing left to extract. Collapse is inherent to the system.
So you have identified five scenarios where Homo Sapien intentionally grew their economy. Across a period of 7 million years? And you call that evidence of a “perpetual” biological drive? Humans are problem solvers - for sure there is something thst could be called a biological drive. But this looks like you have identified the exceptions proving the opposite rule - a period of 7 million years suggests to me that any such drive is balanced alongside the hundreds of other “drives” we could identify in human biology, (and social structures and culture), that prioritise sustainability and social cohesion, and are a million miles from the obsessive, one-dimensional focus of the market: if you are looking for more accurate biological metaphors I’d suggest its DNA is ROI.
Peter Joseph, I don't know how you do it, put it seems that you wrote another blogpost that made me cry again, because the implications you mention in your post are insightful, frightening and hopeful at the same time.
Absolutely right on. Structurally self-perpetuating, no one driving the bus, with the Hotel Owners (at Life as a Game of MONOPOLY (TM) naturally motivated to play, and consumers likewise with few other sources of meaning given the torn fabric of belonging. See the movie Ancient Futures, for context.
Thanks for clarifying the term and urgency of our critical time of late-stage capitalism, in the 21s century, where we face two options: Transition to a new system designed for balance or bust via the status quo destructive endless growth market-based system.
The challenge I see is that most people, as I'm sure you know, are not going to be able to handle the true level to which our system must be replaced and a new system must replace it. That is too scary, too foreign of a thought and too unfamiliar of an experience for them to handle.
But the DESIRE for most people to contribute to a system change that is based on well-being and a healthy ecosystem without systemic corruption is high. About 70% of people surveyed are concerned about climate change and want to do something about it - but they admit that they don't know what to do.
Most people who've been around for a while, know that voting isn't a solution in and of itself, many have given up on that completely. Most know, to some degree, that a system that demands infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is unsustainable. However, we were born into this mess. Locked into debt, locked into market dependence long before we were old enough to have a grasp of it. Then thrown into those cycles you mentioned and a viable off-ramp is not articulated or shown to many people in society.
Like, my town of 60,000 people has no tool library. Not one non-profit or worker cooperative tool lending library. But we have a public library, two branches, actually, yet no one has thought of sharing tools in any community-facing institution, in which we could SEE what a balanced economy based on regeneration, sharing, repairing and caring - within planetary boundaries - would actually look like, if developed further throughout our community.
Worse yet, the city of nearly 1 million down the road from me ALSO has not one tool library. I know this may seem like a weird trivial point to make. But how is it that a city of over 900,000 never had a group of activists come together and build a project for shared tool access in the city, because they understood it as a living model of a sharing, circular economy that isn't obsessed with competitive advantage and profit maximization? Probably because there really isn't any baseline training for activists to understand some core things that build a transitional base from one system to another.
I'm pleased Integral has come along with the infrastructure and the Preparation Guide for a proto-node is something I hope to communicate in a user-friendly way so that any ecological or social justice-focused activist in a community can get a group together and build their Integral proto-node around access, collaboration and cooperative commons management.
And I think the most likely way Integral developments can integrate into towns is with a group of activists who build the base of proto-nodes and some key public support institutions like tool libraries, mutual aid groups, repair cafes, community kitchens, etc. and the public sees how well they work - without even knowing that Integral infrastructure is supporting them - and the critical mass of the community shifts their lifestyle towards Integral because it works better. Not because the activists are preaching old white men's gospel and calling for political parties to reform the system from the top-down.
Good points. Just to be clear : Integral isn’t just an idea. It’s being built as a real software platform/system; a coordination system that communities can use to organize shared resources, make decisions, manage local projects, and begin constructing a post-market commons from the ground up.
Integral infrastructure software/system for a community coordinated commons economy is essential and absolutely something I'm excited to hear and help with, in whatever way I can. And as I alluded to, what I'm trying to do is develop a 'quick-guide' of sorts, that helps communities set up and prepare for Integral software, through the base of a tool library, in a way that can appeal to most environmental and social justice activists that will enhance the things they are already doing and then when Integral becomes fully functional it just keeps adding to the post-market and sustainable activities of these communities.
I note that literally every addiction is also the human body/mind perfectly reflecting the growth imperative of the larger social system they live in. The same recursive self-destructing patterns, making their way to perhaps the most atomic scale in society.
I am not clear on why you think debt and interest just happened? The charging of interest was not evenly distributed throughout all of modernizing economic activity. It only became widespread as certain perspectives gained the power to establish it.
Mediums of exchange -- turn into "commodities" (money) --- which turn into products (loans) --- and products become market instruments -- that require a mark-up (profit). Can you find anything else in the foundational nature of market economics that does not organize around exploiting exchange for (surplus) profit? This all goes back thousands of years and sure it's abused -- but that's after its self-organizing development with people (power) seeing the advantage and oppression inherent to the process.
And while it's true, debt appears to have preceded money, such as in ancient Sumeria, debt was still the very foundation of exchange itself. It was a cycle of IOUs when people needed something from somebody else.
I’ve followed your work since 2007 with Zeitgeist The Movie, and just “discovering” you here on Substack.
What do you see as some of the options of a gentle landing moving away from “late stage capitalism” and the carbon pulse it’s been riding on? I think human civilizations require organization and mythology for individuals and groups of people to organize around.
I see similar possibilities that can happen in terms of slow decline and collapse of modern organized structure. But I’m not sure how to maneuver around it or move beyond it.
Coming from a medical background, there are certain analogies that help me explain this better. Recent studies have demonstrated that, on average, people that recover from a heart attack, only 4% follow the recommendations set by physicians, nutritionists, and physical therapy after a year.
I see societal parallels in terms of chronic illness and heart attack is one of the best examples. If we cannot get individuals to follow recommendations and change lifelong habits, how do we expect society at large to be anything different?
I understand where you’re coming from entirely. Which is why a new system has to be forged by an intelligent group that opens the door for others that eventually see it’s merit. That’s the only way true system change will occur. It can’t be imposed from the top down or through some abstracted overnight revolution. It has to be a developmental transitional process that absorbs the old society into the new.
I am unclear from that if you are aware of the actual history of interest and its variable status as "usury". I asked a very specific question about specific nouns and verbs and I don't think there is any evidence that products just turn into loans. That structure parallels with the early (ie Aristotelian) conception of spontaneous generation as the origin of life in transmutation of inert or static matter into the simpler organisms.
I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. The historical record is fairly clear on this evolution. You said "The charging of interest was not evenly distributed throughout all of modernizing economic activity." So? The move into a medium of exchange solidified the product basis of the "production" of monetary loans which the entire society depends on - and interest became the markup on that product.
That "innovation" of monetary loans becoming what the entire society depends upon was extremely late wrt the development of economic activity such as to produce "capital" in its basic form. Please note that every word I use is intentional and none can just be ignored.
I think there's a lot of value in your general thesis, as a high level sketch of a general flow model. It is just that the low level observations matter for understanding what is actually happening, so much so that misattribution of where energy is, and what it is positioned in relation to, in one area of the model which looks like a monad at the high level view but is actually separable event-objects, can produce a model and therefore an understanding and therefore decisions about "what to do" which are exactly opposite of where reality sits.
As I understand it, the views of interest as "just happening", and now also that of "products just becoming loans", are two such high level statements that don't accurately describe what's going on, when one is close enough to see the component parts of these things described as "interest" and "loans" and "products" and also all the agents and associated objects and event-objects which buoy and funnel activity such as you are describing.
You know, Substack UI is just too buggy to continue typing any more in this open window. Sorry about that.
Social systems create structure through procedures organized around incentives, right? Hence survival inference, which then builds out in very complex ways.
Humans, trying to survive biologically, become the cogs inside a determining biosphere and sociological condition constantly being shaped by the social system itself. So the notion of “self-organization” always rests within those parameters.
Loans/Debt are "products" in the market ystem by definition, as practiced for thousands of years. Interest is both a penalty for late payment (ie before money- debt ledgers) and a profit mechanism for the “product-service” being offered. (ie with money/banking)
What logic do you disagree with? And what areas of the historical record support your disagreement?
I think you are mixing up 1/ scale and 2/ inevitability. Do you understand what I mean? My providing you examples won't help if not, because I am not going to provide you with an entire slice of history from the macro to the micro. Contextualizing an example of micro is necessary to make use of examples. And every time I mention phenomena at a micro scale you expand out to a macro based on what necessarily is a host of contingent more discrete hypotheticals and then try to create an inevitable macro rule about it.
The Problem with Capitalism is that it always needs to expand the markets (GROW) in order to survive (hence the Globalism/Imperialism). It's like a tumor that keeps growing, devouring competitors and their market share (hence the Monopolization and Merger with the Government).
So, the "bubbles" are the very essence of capitalism. Capitalism is basically constant CONCENTRATION of Capital, and therefore the Power, in the hands of a small group (Oligarchy).
Problem is, our planet is finite. And you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
***
youtu.be/oeWyARGkFDc?t=723
youtu.be/Lskj8TADSdM?t=306
I haven't gotten far in your lengthy article, but I feel like you're missing an obvious element of late-stage capitalism - extraction. We live with a marketplace characterized by extractive techniques and philosophies. At a certain point, implicitly, there's nothing left to extract. Collapse is inherent to the system.
Read.
Fair enough.
He doesn't miss that point at all.
So you have identified five scenarios where Homo Sapien intentionally grew their economy. Across a period of 7 million years? And you call that evidence of a “perpetual” biological drive? Humans are problem solvers - for sure there is something thst could be called a biological drive. But this looks like you have identified the exceptions proving the opposite rule - a period of 7 million years suggests to me that any such drive is balanced alongside the hundreds of other “drives” we could identify in human biology, (and social structures and culture), that prioritise sustainability and social cohesion, and are a million miles from the obsessive, one-dimensional focus of the market: if you are looking for more accurate biological metaphors I’d suggest its DNA is ROI.