Name: 彼得-約瑟夫："民主的先決條件？"：2018年4月29日，德克薩斯州，"我們聯合站立節"。 (Peter Joseph : "A Democratic Precondition?" : United We Stand Festival 2018, Texas, April 29th 2018)
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My name is Peter Joseph and I've been working for the past ten years in the hopes

to see some meaningful long-lasting change in this world;

In 2009 I helped start a nonprofit called The Zeitgeist Movement.

It's a global sustainability advocacy organization

and we specifically focus on economic change

because we feel it's the most important to set the stage

And as expressed in great detail in my recent book

'The New Human Rights Movement' published last year,

A pathology if left unchecked, and uncountered,

wealth and income inequality and hence social instability,

it's gonna ruin our habitat through the drive for economic growth

and no doubt continue to undermine basic principles of equality,

And with this latter issue which is what brings me here today,

in the free and equal event 'United We Stand,'

what enables a truly democratic open free society?

where a population can actually reach rational consensus

allowing for political egalitarianism if you will,

intergroup respect, and the elimination of power-based oppression.

Do we have a proper "precondition" for viable democracy,

not only in this country but on this planet?

A precondition means something that comes before

in order for something else to follow in causality.

to driving a car of course is to obtain a driver's license.

Medically a person can have a genetic precondition for a given disease,

and the same can be applied towards environmental exposures such as

smoking cigarettes is a precondition for lung cancer.

If we as a society are to strive for increased human rights,

social equality and egalitarian democratic principles,

that the most foundational and dominant institutions,

traditions, practices, root philosophies of our society,

can we conclude that they foster the proper precondition

Are we planting seeds in lush nutrient-rich soil?

or are we planting seeds in arid, stone, nutrient-void soil

To consider that, we're gonna go back in time,

Roughly 12,000 years ago the human species transitioned

tribes foraging and hunting with no real agricultural skills -

This has been termed the Neolithic Revolution.

Before the Neolithic Revolution as corroborated by numerous anthropologists

studying both existing and historical hunter-gatherer societies,

social and economic life was actually very different.

Small bands or tribes operated without money or markets,

they were egalitarian, and they had no economic dominance hierarchy.

It also is well-established they had much less violence,

at the seemingly crude reality of hunter-gatherer life,

it has been well argued in fact that there was a kind of minimalistic affluence,

If you don't know you're poor, well, maybe you're NOT poor.

A unique distinction because it challenges how we today think about

social success or even "progress" itself.

To highlight the contrast anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once stated

"To accept that hunter-gatherers are affluent is therefore to recognize

that the present condition of man's slaving to bridge the gap

between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means

Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed,

dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity.

is first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples.

The market industrial system institutes scarcity

Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices,

and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending,

insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit calculable starting point

I'd like you to keep this notion of scarcity in mind

as it's a central understanding to our political economy

hunter-gatherers mostly had a gift economy it was called,

where they shared with no direct expectation of reciprocation.

There are even modern stories of outsiders

having their first visit with these cultures

and they would be given things like handicrafts from the existing tribes,

and the Western cultures would feel the need to give something in return

as many in our market exchange culture would.

And this reciprocal behavior was actually considered offensive to the tribe

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彼得-約瑟夫："民主的先決條件？"：2018年4月29日，德克薩斯州，"我們聯合站立節"。 (Peter Joseph : "A Democratic Precondition?" : United We Stand Festival 2018, Texas, April 29th 2018)

crisis

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conflict