We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
From a rational perspective, we should make only decisions that are in our best interest (“should” is the operative word here)… and choose the option that maximizes our best interests… Unfortunately, we’re not.”
This is where behavioral economics enters the picture. In this field, we don’t assume that people are perfectly sensible, calculating machines. Instead, we observe how people actually behave, and quite often our observations lead us to the conclusion that human beings are irrational.”
The above and subsequent quotes are taken from Dan Ariely’s book, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. Ariely is a Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and author of other works on behavioral economics.
Standard Economics Vs. Behavioral Economics: A Matter Of Perspective?
… there is a great deal to be learned from rational economics,” he says, “but some of its assumptions—that people always make the best decisions, that mistakes are less likely when the decisions involve a lot of money, and that the market is self correcting—can clearly lead to disastrous consequences.”
Social And Market Forces
The Financial Crisis
… think about the implosion of Wall Street in 2008 and its attendant impact on the economy. Given our human foibles, why on earth would we think we don’t need to take any external measures to try to prevent or deal with systematic errors of judgment in the man-made financial markets?”
This is where behavioral economics veers far from standard economics, because it seeks to look at human evolution and psychology in addition to standard economics, in order for social and market forces to be able to exist in balance:
Essentially the mechanisms we developed during our early evolutionary years might have made perfect sense in our distant past. But given the mismatch between the speed of technological development and human evolution, the same instincts and abilities that once helped us now often stand in our way. Bad decision-making behaviors that manifested themselves as mere nuisances in earlier centuries can now severely affect our lives in crucial ways.”
The Need To Address Human Nature
Ariely argues that this dichotomy between social and market forces, and some of our technological developments existing in discordance with our evolutionary development/nature, holds ramifications far beyond the credit industry:
When the designers of modern technologies don’t understand our fallibility, they design new and improved systems for stock markets, insurance, education, agriculture, or health care that don’t take our limitations into account (I like the term “human-incompatible technologies,” and they are everywhere).”
Behavioral economists want to understand human frailty and to find more compassionate, realistic, and effective ways for people to avoid temptation, exert more self-control, and ultimately reach their long-term goals. As a society, it’s extremely beneficial to understand how and when we fail and to design/invent/create new ways to overcome our mistakes.”
All quotes taken from Prof. Ariely’s book, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home.
We will conform to the group. We’re very social creatures. We’re very much aware of what people around us think. We want to be liked. We don’t want to be seen to rock the boat so we will go along with the group even if we don’t believe what people are saying, we still go along.” *
This is a conclusion from what is known as “The Asch Experiment,” an experiment originally conceived in the 1950’s by Social Psychologist Solomon Asch, demonstrated in the video below [2 min.]:
The 3 Levels of Distortion
As indicated in Martin Shepard’s video about conformity [10 min.], “Asch proposed conformity could be explained by distortions occurring at any of three levels: perception, judgment and action.”
At the action level: subjects believe the majority are wrong, but go along with them anyway.
At the level of judgment: subjects perceive there is a conflict but reject their own judgment, concluding the majority are right.
At the level of perception: subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted by the majority’s answers”.
“If it’s true that the subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted, that means that group opinion has the potential to affect an individual’s information processing on a very profound level.” **
And there you have a group of (effectively) strangers who were exerting the pressure not to intervene, not to help; and it’s very difficult to rebel!”
This Bystander Effect is demonstrated in the following video [3 min.]:
Using Other People’s Behavior As Clues To Reality
There are, in fact, many reasons why bystanders in groups fail to act in emergency situations, but social psychologists have focused most of their attention on two major factors. According to a basic principle of social influence, bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Each person uses others’ behavior as clues to reality. Since everyone is doing exactly the same thing (nothing), they all conclude from the inaction of others that help is not needed. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance or social proof.
The other major obstacle to intervention is known as diffusion of responsibility. This occurs when observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so each individual feels less responsible and refrains from doing anything.”
Bystander Effect Extends To Cyberspace
The bystander effect also extends beyond reality and into cyberspace. Specifically, in a study performed by Markey (2000), the experiment focused on the amount of time it took a bystander to provide assistance. The researchers examined the effects of the gender of an individual seeking help by measuring participant response time (dependent variable). The perceived gender was manipulated by the usage of a male or female screen name in an Internet chat room (independent variable). The treatment conditions examined the number of people present in the chat (two to nineteen), and then asked the stimulus question: ‘Can anyone tell me how to look at someone’s profile?’
The findings reflect a correlation between the number of people present in a computer-mediated chat group and the amount of time it took for an individual to receive help. The higher the number of participants, the longer it took for someone to help. This research reveals that bystander interventions in Internet chat groups reflect the same patterns as interaction in non-computer based environments.”
The Bystander Effect was first demonstrated in the laboratory by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968. These researchers launched a series of experiments that resulted in one of the strongest and most replicable effects in social psychology.”
Is it time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane?”
Professor David Harvey, PhD, researches to
figure out the role of crises in the whole history of capitalism and what’s specific and special about the crisis this time around” by looking at “the internal contradictions of capital accumulation.”
An Internal Contradiction Of Capital Accumulation
Financial profits in the United States were soaring after the 1990s” while “profits in manufacturing were coming down … you can see the imbalance … you’ve screwed industry to keep financiers happy,” and as a result “the wealth of the rich … has accelerated.”
How Did This Happen?
Since the 1970s, we have been in a phase that we call wage repression.”
If you diminish wages, where is your demand going to come from?”
The answer was, well … get out your credit cards.”
Capitalism Never Solves Its Crises Problems, It Moves Them Around Geographically
Out of this comes a theory which is very, very important: that capitalism never solves its crises problems, it moves them around geographically.”
In other words,
you had a finance crisis … you sort of half solved that, but … at the expense of a sovereign debt crisis!”
If you haven’t been in a coma the last couple of years, then you might have noticed that the economy is crashing, food and gas prices are on the rise, and if people weren’t protesting in your city square, then they were protesting in one close by. However, as shown by the following 6 films, these instances and many others are tightly interconnected, and there are people looking into what’s causing them, where they’re leading humanity, and what can be done about them.
The realization of the negative influence of a society that prominently values individual self-interest upon human development & the need to build a new kind of social influence that promotes people’s well-being
I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place in the human soul, in the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh paper and say… ‘okay, how do we solve this problem?’”
Starting with peak oil, Ruppert clarifies how oil is literally everywhere in a person’s life…
All plastic is oil. Most paints, all pesticides are made from oil. Everything from toothpaste, to toothbrushes, is made from oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every tire. There is nothing anywhere, in any combination, which will replace the edifice built by fossil fuels. Nothing. Peak oil is probably now very easy to explain. Much easier than it was a long time ago. People have felt what $147 a barrel of oil feels like.”
…and how the running out of oil in the world will force humanity to make very big changes:
The end of oil is like end of the way of life. We’re hitting a new era.”
What Will You Do When Money Runs Out?
Ruppert continues by painting a bleak fade-to-black picture of the world as it heads into the future, stating the complications or even impossibility of replacing oil with the alternative energies usually proposed – ethanol, electricity, coal, nuclear, tidal and solar power – and explaining how food and monetary systems throughout the 20th century were setup in a way that would lead to a collapse of humanity’s systems, and which is being felt globally today.
The whole global economy cannot be sustained, it requires infinite growth. But infinite growth collides with finite energy. … So you have finite energy and you have a financial paradigm which demands infinite growth and we’re at the point of human history where the infinite growth paradigm collides with something that is more powerful than money is.
By 2006, I knew that the collapse was very imminent, that there would be a major implosion of the US economy. … And now, collapse is happening, these pieces are falling exactly as everything else had written, said, done. All the peak oil activists, all the sustainability advocates. Our map was proving deadly accurate. Things don’t break up, they break down.
When a government collapses, what happens? The mail stops getting delivered. Air traffic controllers don’t get paid, so they don’t go to work, which means planes don’t fly. Bridges and highway inspections don’t get made. Food and drug administration inspections don’t get made. Maintenance is going to be defrayed. Law enforcement stops working. I mean, it’s no secret now. You see the headlines every day. California’s bankrupt, Michigan’s bankrupt, Ohio… They’re shutting down services left and right. There are tent cities springing up all over the country, there are homeless, displaced people. The great many billionaires, who we would call the elites, the many very, very wealthy people are getting crashed, burned and eaten alive.
What you don’t hear is the fact that all over the world economies are collapsing much faster than the US economy. Britain is an absolute basket case. There is a curtain of despair descending across Eastern Europe. There’s a revolution underway in Greece: it’s not riots, it’s not civil unrest… it’s a revolution. Drug violence right across the border in Mexico. This is all part of the collapse. Pakistan, Afghanistan, there’s lots of violence. The people who have run the planet to this point and who are running the planet now are losing control.”
Will You Be Concerned About Humanity’s Basic Survival? Will You Try To Find Balance Among People & Nature? Will You Change The Way You Think?
Ruppert continues by discussing a paradigm shift for humanity, involving:
The need to shift to a concern about humanity’s basic survival
The need to find balance between people and nature in order to survive
The need to change the way people think, which Ruppert considers as being “humanity’s greatest challenge ever”
The human race now is only going to be concerned, not with an ideology, but what allows them to survive. Capitalism, socialism and communism are all terms that need to be tossed in the trash can immediately, because all of them were created on the assumption of infinite resources. Not one of those ideologies – which are now dead dinosaurs, archaic fossils – is relevant to our way of life. Not one of them recognizes that there must be a balance between growth, the resources, and the planet.
Forget the idea that you can have as much as you want, because until mankind surrenders to the fact that it lives on a finite planet, and it must have balance with that planet, with the planet’s resources, with the animal life and all the other life, there can be no happiness for anything. Anything. It’s all about getting balance back.”
Maybe You Will If Everybody Does…
After confronting the viewer with a situation that seems impossible to solve, Ruppert’s final words in Collapse shed a thin beam of optimistic light, hinting that when 10% of the human population realize a change of thinking, then that thinking will spread to the entire human population.
There is a legend, or a fable about the 100th monkey. A long time ago, in the late ’40s, early ’50s, when atom bombs and H-bombs were invoked with above ground testing, we set off an atom bomb on an atol in the Pacific. And then we waited a number of years, because we wanted to answer questions like how soon after we nuked something, would it be possible to get any kind of life started again? So they went back to this island and they decided to repopulate it with monkeys. And the monkeys ate coconuts. Everything was pretty healthy, except for the fact that the husks of the coconut were slightly radioactive. So the scientists took 10 monkeys or so, and taught them to wash the coconuts in the fresh water stream on the island before they cracked them open, and turned the whole thing loose to see what would happen. Well, you know, pretty soon maybe 12 monkeys out of a population of 10,000 were washing their coconuts. And then 20, and then 47. But a funny thing happened. As soon as the 100th monkey started washing his coconut husk, all 10,000 started washing simultaneously. I guess one way that I have always looked at my life, especially since I clearly understood what this issue was in late 2001, is – this is my quest for the 100th monkey.”
Based on current scientific research and expert views about the accumulating crises humanity is expected to face over the coming century, Earth 2100 is a predictive portrayal of the century through the life of Lucy, a fictional woman born in the U.S. in 2008.
No Crisis Exists On Its Own
Earth 2100 paints a picture of the global crisis’ tight interconnectedness, how no one crisis exists on its own and cannot be dealt with in a pin-point manner. What the film shows is that:
an oil crisis becomes a food crisis,
they both connect to increase climate change and global warming,
which increases drought and affects a water crisis,
bringing about famine and thus, mass immigration of people seeking food and water,
as well as deforestation and mass animal and plant extinction,
rising sea levels and thus, floods,
which then bring about outbreaks of infectious diseases,
and this all becomes intensified by rapidly increasing human population, increasing worldwide consumption demand and natural disasters.
The Need To See Things At A Global Level
In presenting this complicated global crisis tangle humanity is expected to face, i.e. many individual crises as one global, integral crisis, Earth 2100 fundamentally proposes the need for a change in people’s approach to the world, from approaching problems locally and nationally to approaching them globally. As mentioned toward the film’s close:
[By 2100] we’re going to have joint management of water resources, of energy resources, of disaster management. We’re going to be living on a planet where we don’t see things at a national level, but we see things at a global level.”
–Peter Gleick, Ph.D., world renowned water scientist, President and co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security
By the time we get to 2100, the challenge of building a global, green economy where we’re sharing technologies and where we’re not fighting wars over water and oil… That’s going to bring out the best in the human family.”
–Van Jones, senior fellow at the Center For American Progress and a senior policy advisor at Green For All
That’s if we move in a positive direction. However, Earth 2100 also points out a major threat if the change toward a global, integral approach to the world is not met in time. This would result in much suffering, verging on the brink of civilizational collapse.
If we continue on the business as usual trajectory, there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert. We will indeed drive the car over the cliff.”
–John Holdren, advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Inside Job presents how a chain of actions and decisions underpinned by increasing self-interest in the U.S. financial sector over the past 50 years has brought the U.S. to its current worsening socio-economic state.
Maximized Self-Interest – The Financial Crisis Time-Bomb Ticker
The key point that Inside Job presents is how the “securitization food chain” developed – borrowers, lenders, investment banks, investors, ratings agencies – governed by the commonly held value of maximized self-interest at every rung of the chain. It shows how precisely this chain was the ticking financial crisis time-bomb that exploded in September 2008, the effects of which are felt worldwide until today.
Here’s how maximized self-interest worked at every level of this chain:
Borrowers wanted loans for buying homes or other high-cost assets (and since it was in the financial interest of people in the higher parts of the chain for as many people as possible to get loans, then loans were highly promoted during the first years of the 2000s)
Lenders wanted the extra money they could make from any loans they provided, no matter how risky, since they sold all the loans to investments banks
Investment banks wanted the extra money they could derive by collating all the loans they bought into complex derivatives called CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations), and selling those CDOs to investors
Investors wanted the extra money they would get from the borrowers paying back the loans (the CDOs)
Ratings agencies, which were hired by investment banks to evaluate the CDOs, wanted the extra money they would get from giving high ratings to the CDOs (since people in the ratings agencies would get paid more for giving CDOs high ratings, regardless of the actual value of the CDO)
This setup presents how the financial crisis of 2008 hit, showing one bankruptcy after another of major firms as the securitization food chain imploded:
Lenders could no longer sell their loans to the investment banks
As loans went bad, dozens of lenders failed
The CDO market collapsed
Investment banks held onto billions of dollars in loans, CDOs and real estate that they could not sell
Who Is Accountable For The Financial Crisis? A Few People Or Commonly-Held Values That Frame Society?
As the film follows the effects of the 2008 economic meltdown, it searches for a voice to be held accountable among the major players of the financial sector, finding none. No person or group of people could be found responsible, but speaker after speaker, what becomes clarified is that everyone in this chain was simply subjected to the commonly held value of “maximize your profit at any expense.”
As long as everyone in the chain was getting what they wanted, everything seemed fine. However, when the system imploded, resulting in bankers having to lose those profits, and millions of people losing their homes and jobs, it shows how the commonly held value at every layer – “maximize your profit” – is in dire need of a revision.
Through the voices of scientists, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward stresses the central, vast role social and environmental influence plays in shaping people’s lives, how today’s Western society’s influence leads individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis, and the need to change the values permeating society in order to set the conditions for a healthy, balanced society.
Social Influence Makes Or Breaks You
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward raises current scientific views that challenge age-old views that diseases of all kinds – mental, heart, cancer, strokes, rheumatoid, autoimmune, addictions – and inclinations toward violence, are not genetically determined, but acquired through the social and environmental influences a person experiences, from as early as one’s fetal development, emphasizing the considerable sensitivity toward a person’s development through fetal stages, infancy and childhood.
Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward thus uses this basis to show how the values that shape Western society – self-interest values that measure people and countries’ well-being based on how much money and assets they have – create an unsustainable feedback loop that continues leading the world deeper into myriad crises.
If Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You, What Kind Of Social Influence Would Be Needed To Remake You?
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward very clearly brings the problem and its approach to the surface:
People are products of their societies
Society’s current self-interest values lead individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis
To undergo a positive change, each person individually and society as a whole, needs to perpetuate different values into the society that would bring about personal and social well-being
It’s clear that we’re on the verge of a great transition in human life. That what we face now is this fundamental change of the life we’ve known over the last century.”
–Dr. Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of social epidemiology, University of Nottingham
Blind Spot analyzes the problem of peak oil, that:
Oil and fossil fuel energy is finite, and coming to its end in the near future
Human population is constantly increasing
Society is not preparing for the end of oil and fossil fuels, but instead self-interest values, which encourage the direct and indirect use of fossil fuels, continue being perpetuated in the media.
The Problem Of Peak Oil – That It Connects In A Complex Web Of Other Problems
Blind Spot presents the complications in dealing with the problem of peak oil, by showing how it connects to many other current and future problems: inflation, stagflation, pollution, climate change, global warming, overconsumption and overpopulation.
Through interviews with scientists and experts in ecology, economy and sociology, Blind Spot proposes some approaches to these problems, including population control, policies for using less energy and implementing different kinds of energy.
Peak Oil’s Central Problem – Challenging The Strong Influence Of Self-Interest Values Upon Society
However, central to the problems that the film’s experts’ mentioned is the issue of social influence. There is an in-built threat in challenging generations of self-interest values at the center of society’s beliefs and assumptions, or “The American Way,” as people in Americanized societies are used to relying on cheap oil and energy, living in big houses, being highly individualized, and traveling long distances.
The cultural constraint on change becomes very dangerous, because when it is challenged, it is challenging generations of belief and assumptions. … There are people who have to study raw data, who are trained as scientists to have their belief system based upon evidence, and when that contradicts generations of belief, then they become cultural outcasts. That became incredibly frustrating to me. I have kids, I want peace on earth, I want all good things, and yet, I found that people that also want those things unable to realize that we’re all a huge part of this problem.”
–Jason Bradford, PhD, ecological scientist and expert in sustainability and local food systems
Watch Blind Spot Trailer
For more info about the movie & to purchase a DVD copy, visit: blindspotdoc.com
From a rational perspective, we should make only decisions that are in our best interest (“should” is the operative word here)… and choose the option that maximizes our best interests… Unfortunately, we’re not.”
![Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/meltdown_C_600.jpg "Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]")
![Blind Spot [Film]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/blindspot_C_600.jpg "Blind Spot [Film]")
![Inside Job [Film]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/insidejob_C_600.jpg "Inside Job [Film]")
![Earth 2100 [Film]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/earth2100_C_600.jpg "Earth 2100 [Film]")
![Zeitgeist: Moving Forward [Film]](https://mutualresponsibility.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/zeitgeist-moving-forward_C_600.jpg "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward [Film]")
