Our Social Pathology is Imitating Psychopathy, (or for those that prefer, imitating a lack of empathic morality), and desperately needs to be addressed to assist us with transitioning and transforming our inherited cultural memes, infrastructures, organizations, and governing institutions. I thought the following paper by Peter Joseph could be useful to this discussion.
http://peterjoseph.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Social-Pathology-Peter-Joseph-2011.pdf
EXTRACT:
“Social Pathology” March 13th 2010, New York City By Peter Joseph
I've entitled this "Social Pathology." I decided to use the metaphor of disease to describe the current state of social affairs and the trends it foreshadows and perpetuates. I was first introduced to this idea of relating social state to a cellular state by a man named John McMurtry who wrote a book called "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism." The rationale is pretty simple. Just as human beings have to deal with pathogens invading and harming their life system so too does the social system we all share. Of course, these societal diseases are not generated by ways of physical germs or the like.
Rather, they come in the form of presupposed principles of preference cultural "memes" that transfer from one to another based on values and hence, belief systems. These "memes" or patterns of perspective and behavior are what eventually result from or comprise the cultural manifestations around us such as the ideas of democracy Republicans, Democrats, the American Dream, etc. In Chapter One we will examine the symptoms and hence diagnose the current stage of disease we are in.
Then in Chapter Two we will establish a prognosis meaning what can we expect from the future as the current pathogenic patterns continue. And finally, in Chapter Three, we will discuss treatment for our current state of sickness and this is where the concept of a Resource-‐Based Economy will be initially examined. However, as an introduction to this I am first going to describe what I call the "invisible prison". This is the closed, intellectual feedback system that consistently slows or even stops new socially altering concepts from coming to fruition. [It] stops progress. Let me explain.
The social order, as we know it, is created out of ideas either directly or as a systemic consequence. In other words, somebody somewhere did something which generated a group interest, which then led to the implementation of a specific social component, either in a physical form, philosophical form, or both. Once a given set of ideas are entrusted by a large enough group of people, it becomes an institution.
And once that institution is made dominant in some way while existing for a certain period of time that institution can then be considered an establishment. Institutional establishments are simply social traditions given the illusion of permanence. In turn, the more established they become the more cultural influence they tend to have on us including our values, and hence, our identities and perspectives. It is not an exaggeration to say that the established institutions governing a person's environment is no less than a conditioning platform to program that person with a specific set of values required to maintain the establishment.
Hence, we're going to call these "established value programs". I have found the analogy of computer programming to be a great way to frame this point. While there is always a debate about genetics and environmental influence which Roxanne Meadows will go into at length later in the program it's very easy to understand in the context of values meaning what you think is important and not important that information influences, or conditioning, is coming from the world around you. Make no mistake, every intellectual concept which each one of us finds merit with is the result of a cultural information influence one way or another. The environment is a self-‐perpetuating programming process and just like designing a software program for your computer each human being is, advertently and inadvertently programmed into their world view.
To continue the analogy, the human brain is a piece of hardware and the environment around you constitutes the programming team which creates the values and perspective. Every word you know has been taught to you one way or another. Every concept and belief you have is a result of this same influence. Jacque Fresco once asked me "How much of you is you?" The answer is kind of a paradox for either nothing is me, or everything is me when it comes to the information I understand and act upon. Information is a serial process, meaning the only way that a human being can come up with any idea is through taking in dependent information that allows that idea to be realized.
We appear to be culturally programmed from the moment we come into this world to the moment we die and I'm not going to drill in it much more than that. However, consequently, the cultural attributes we maintain as important values are most often the ones that are reinforced by the external culture. I'm going to say that again. The most dominant cultural attributes maintained are the ones that are reinforced by your environment. If you are born into a society which rewards competition over collaboration then you most likely will adopt those values in order to survive. The point is, we are essentially bio-‐chemical machines.
While the integrity of our machine-‐processing power and memory is contingent, in part, on genetics the source of our actions come fundamentally from the ideas and experiences installed on our mental hardware by the world around us. However, our biological computer, the human mind has an evolutionarily-‐installed operating system with some seemingly difficult tendencies built in which tends to limit our objectivity and, hence, our rational thought process. This comes in the form of emotional inclinations. You know, I'm sure many people here have heard the phrase "Be objective!" No human being can be fully objective. That's one of the important things I learned, actually, from Mr. Fresco.
Therefore, there's a very common propensity for us humans to find something that works for our needs given the social structure, and then to hold on to it for dear life regardless of new conflicting information which might rationally expect a logical change to occur. Change tends to be feared, for it upsets our associations. And, by the way, when it comes to maintaining income in the monetary system, you see this propensity in full force which I will talk about a lot more later.
Therefore, any time someone dares to present an idea outside of or contrary to the establishment programming the reaction is often a condemning of the idea as blasphemy or undermining, or a conspiracy, or simply erroneous. For example, in the academic world investigation often becomes confined to self--‐referring circles of discourse: closed feedback loops which assume that the foundational assumptions of their schools of thought are empirical and only these experts, as defined by their established credentials are considered viable authorities therein often dominating influence over the public opinion.
This is a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis and please excuse my lack of Hungarian pronunciation but he was a physician who lived in the mid 1800's who performed childbirths. Through a series of events, he realized a pattern that there was a relationship with the transfer of disease and the fact that the doctors of the times never washed their hands after performing autopsies. The doctors of the time would handle dead bodies in the lower elements of the hospitals and then they would go up and they would perform childbirths without washing their hands.
So, this doctor, realizing this pattern he started to tell his colleagues about this. He said "You should wash your hands before doing this before performing any type of surgery or childbirth especially after handling a dead body."He was laughed at. He was laughed at and ignored. He published papers and they were dismissed and ridiculed. And after many years of trying this issue, he was finally committed to a mental institution, where he died.
It was many years after his death when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease that his observations were finally understood and people realized what a horrible mistake had been made. In the words of John McMurtry, professor of philosophy in Canada "In the last dark age, one can search the inquiries of this era's preserved thinkers from Augustine to Ockhamand fail to discover a single page of criticism of the established social framework however rationally insupportable feudal bondage, absolute paternalism divine right of kings, and the rest may be." In the current final order, is it so different?
Can we see in any media, or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of the global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available? In such an order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda. Only one doctrine is speakable, and a priest caste of its experts prescribe the necessities and obligations to all. Social consciousness is incarcerated within the role of a kind of ceremonial logic operating entirely within the received framework of an exhaustively--‐prescribed regulatory apparatus protecting the privileges of the privileged.
Methodical censorship triumphs in the guise of scholarly rigor and the only room left for searching thought becomes the game of competing rationalizations." People tend not to criticize the social order because they are bound within it. We are running a thought program which has been installed on our mental hardware which inherently controls our frame of reference.
To use a different analogy, it's like they're in a game and the idea of questioning the integrity of the game itself rarely occurs. In fact, members of society often become so indoctrinated by their socially acceptable norms, that each person's very meaning is framed by the dominant established value system and the interpretation of new information is consciously, or even sub--‐consciously, prefiltered to be consistent with their prior biases. Now, this basic idea understood let's hone our focus and briefly consider this mind--‐lock phenomenon as you could call it in the context of economics specifically, market economics.
Actually, a more accurate term at this stage would be 'economic theology'. For, as this presentation will explore the majority of people on this planet not only have no idea how they are being affected negatively by the market economy at large, they actually, on average hold a steadfast commitment to its principles based on nothing more than the traditional indoctrination.
I got an email once that said to me "If you're against the free market, you're against freedom." (Laughter) And naturally, I shuddered at this state of mind control that the dominant established orthodoxy has successfully imposed. Of course, this is how power is maintained and has been maintained by the dominant established orthodoxies since the beginning of time. And the trick, again, is to condition people so thoroughly into the established value systems, that any thought of an alternative is inherently ruled out without critical examination.
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And to show how deeply pervasive this phenomenon is you will notice that virtually all the activist organizations in the environmental, social, and political movements of the day always exclude the market system itself as a determinant of harmful effects. It doesn't even occur to them. Instead, they focus on individuals and certain groups or corrupt corporations and while it is needed in a per--‐case basis to target problematic areas it avoids the mechanism which is essentially creating the problem. This is the fatal flaw of what's happening in the so--‐called activist community today.
Once we successfully took to the skies and could easily traverse the globe did our global leaders get together recognizing the phenomenal potential that technology had brought to humanity's table for uniting resources to ensure not
one person was displaced in the global social structure resulting in homelessness and starvation, (let alone displaced via enforced ignorance due to coveting and suppression of innovation and education)? No! Why Not?!
And why is this not considered, let alone questioned by our institutional leadership today, apart from the counterfeit orations to placate the masses amidst the declarations of patriotic fervour that does little more than ignite hostility? Why has this fundamental "logical" question not received the "meme-ship" it deserves? Could it actually be because "psychopathic logic" does not partner very well with "ethical logic"!
Why are we as individuals so conditioned within our social constructs to accept that evolution and progress requires starvation, homelessness, and war? Whose psychological "logical" game are we actually playing? Why are we repeatedly deceived into accepting that no other system could be intelligently thought of, let alone implemented, to evolve our global civilization?
[And by the way, there are innovative ethical global systems already on the table but they haven't gained enough traction yet to get to the fore of discussions for change. Why? Could it be because we have a global civilization dominated by psychopathic leadership? And if so, how do we fix this? Identifying the causality may be a good place to start, don't you think?]
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