 Okay, we're back for the noon block. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. And more specifically, this is Community Matters. Okay. With Lewis Herman, he is a professor of political science at the West Oahu campus of the University of Hawaii, but he's much, you'll see much, much more than that. So Lewis, you know, we're talking the title of our show, which we had to negotiate was how COVID has revealed an inflection point in human history. It's an ambitious title, but I know you want to discuss it for maybe five or six hours. Let's see if we can do that in 30 minutes. So I want to let you go, let you run with some slides and you can sort of answer that question. How COVID has revealed an inflection point in human history. Go for it. Thanks. Okay, so human history has got quite a lot packed into it. So, you know, we've got to have some sense of what we're talking about when we talk about an inflection point or a turning point. So I want to try and cover a lot of material and images really help and a few quotes, managed to sum up things very succinctly. And, you know, feel free to interrupt with questions as we go. So the first quote is from Vaslav Havel, who was the leader of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia against the communist regime eventually became president addressed Congress 1989. And basically what he said was that we will never have an end to our crises without a revolution in consciousness. And so what he's calling for is a fundamental change in the operating system of civilization, not just Czechoslovakian civilization but global, because every country on Earth is now part of a global system of industrial capitalism, representation of democracy, and the template for that is the United States of America. So this is a system of organizing a global economy, nation states that emerged out of revolution since 16th century Europe. So if we want to understand the nature of our crisis now, we really got to understand what's dysfunctional about our operating system. Basically, it's about 300 to 400 years out of date. It's antiquated the vision of humanity, the earth society that the founders were operating on was understandable in the 17th century and 16th century, but no longer makes sense. We know a lot more. So that's the importance of the whole truth quest seeking knowledge in this moment of crisis. Are we sleeping? I mean, why do we let it get ahead of us that way. At some point along the way people were enlightened, the great thinkers or semi great thinkers were enlightened. But now we seem to have, you know, we lost track of the changes in our world. And that's why we need to have a revolution in thinking. Is that what you're saying. Yeah, I'm saying that we need to have a revolution, our attitude to thinking. It's not like you get enlightened, then the job's done, then you can give up thinking for the next 200 years, which is basically what we did. We went through an enlightenment. They were great founding philosophers, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, founding fathers of the Constitution. And then we went to sleep. They put in place a system of government clarified a set of values. So go for it boys and girls. And for the next 200 years, we never really seriously questioned these foundations. So the point about a revolution in consciousness is that we've got to wake up to thinking and seeking knowledge as a way of life as a precondition for any politics. It's not something you do once and then you've done it. You've got all the answers. You have the truth that's fixed and forever. It's a process and even assuming the revolution was the right thing, even assuming that they were enlightened and they knew they knew best at the time what to do. I think what you're saying is you've got to keep on working at that. And we have not been keep we have not kept on working at that. We have been distracted for many reasons. We've had problems that took us off the path. This is a problem because now you get to 2020 and you find that we're way behind the curve. And I think I also hear you saying that going forward, we're going to have the same problem unless we remain flexible and we update all the time. Exactly. Yeah, and this process of updating all the time is really what we've neglected. You know, there were provisions in the Constitution for amending the Constitution for change for the Constitution growing, being a living document. And Jefferson talked about the necessity periodically to have revolutions in thought. But it's almost impossible to do that within the constraints of the bureaucratic and legalistic structure of the Constitution. We haven't been able to do this fundamental rethinking about what it needs to be human. What is the natural world? What is our relationship to the natural world? So if you could just blast through a few more slides summarizing our crisis and then the foundations. So that gives a sense of this turning point in consciousness, creativity, beauty, art coming into our approach to politics. And then on the left side of the image you've got, you know, the current state of politics, which is really if you can just hold it there, a series of converging crises for the crisis, the next one is next slide. So you've got a whole series. I've just listed them. I won't go through them in detail. I mentioned them last time. It's starting with the climate crisis, industrialized agriculture and its connection to pandemics like COVID. The connection is not immediately obvious to most people, but this industrialized system of farming is concentrated enormous populations of animals in very stressed unhealthy conditions next to human populations. Perfect breeding ground for infectious diseases. In addition to which I industrialized system of farming is polluting waterways, polluting rivers. There's a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. That's about 8000 square miles of dead ocean because of the runoff from our agriculture. It goes on and on. The concluding point why this pandemic is an inflection point is that everything is suddenly stopped and people are confined to their homes, a lot of time on their hands, compelled to see what's on the news and start thinking about big questions in the big picture. So it's almost a God given opportunity to start rethinking everything, which is just in time. Next. So, yes. Tell us quickly because it's hard to read. Yeah, and well, yeah, I can't see it either. Okay, so this is honesty and integrity and provisions. You can see nurses at the top. This is a Gallup poll done in 2014. It's exactly the same in 2018, which was the last time this was done. You can see if you can just enlarge the slide in some way. You can see, can you see politicians at the base? Yes. Politicians right at the bottom. So we've got a problem with corruption. Politicians are not trusted. Politicians are the most powerful people in our society. They make the laws which shape the economy, shape the development of society, shape how we love. So it's critical to invert this to have politicians or leaders as the most trusted, respected, truth loving, courageous, generous hearted concern for the community. We're in a situation now where we have exactly the opposite. It's becoming self-evident increasingly to anybody who watches more than one channel of news or stays within their social media cocoon that we have a crisis in integrity and it's not simply the United States. So why? Where does this come from? Next slide. There we have Jimmy Carter's assessment of the situation. Politics is the world's oldest profession, closely related, second oldest profession closely related to the first. Which traditionally for obscure reasons is prostitution, but it's pretty clear that money corrupts politics. That's a general accepted principle more. So here we have a measure of inequality. Russia was rated by credit Suisse as the most unequal country on the planet with about 89% of the wealth owned by the top 10% of the country. It's basically a kleptocracy, a tiny elite to control the wealth of the country. The country itself is almost run like a gigantic mafia ring. And then the United States is fast catching up 10% of the population and keep the slide up 76% of the wealth and all the increase in wealth and since 1980 since Ronald Reagan has gone to the top 1% of that top 10% and most of it has gone to the top 0.1% of the top 10% of the top 1% of that 10%. And most of that has gone to the point 0.1%. So there's incredible concentration of wealth. Globally, we have 62 private individuals who own literally half the wealth in the world. This is a situation which is people are beginning to realize including the wealthy, absolutely unsustainable. It perpetuates itself, doesn't it? It perpetuates itself because of an underlying philosophy that's based on property and the freedoms of the individual to accumulate unlimited amounts of property. That is the primary moral foundation for government and for individual rights and freedoms, essentially private property. It's sacrosanct. This is missing. This was a great achievement when Europeans were fighting against the corruption of feudalism and the inability of an individual to control their private property. The king could basically assert whatever he liked. But it's not a basis for a society because a society also has responsibilities and obligations. There's almost nothing in the Constitution of the United States and in these philosophers about cultivating individuals with a sense of connectedness to society. So as Margaret Thatcher famously said, there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals. We don't have a theory of society. So it's not surprising that in our world today and now politics, we see selfish individualism gone mad, epitomized in the apex of our leadership right now. But Louis, is that possible? Or is the individualism for some individual survival built into the species? Can we ever do what Margaret Thatcher couldn't find? Yeah, that's why it's so important to do big history, which is part of the way forward, which is part of this revolution in consciousness that Vaslav Havel was calling for. Because big history reveals that for about 99% of human history, we actually loved human beings were fashioned in small bands of cooperative, egalitarian, democratic, nomadic hunter-gatherers, largely peaceful. Because there's no point in private property. You're moving all the time. There's no hierarchy. People can just come and go as they please, bands of voluntary. And there's no need for warfare or slavery. These things begin 5000 years ago. We locked into a bubble in our thinking of the last 5000 years, and about 90% of us are locked into thinking about the last maybe 50 years in terms of politics. So, you know, a picture of reality is massively constricted in terms of what is human nature. If you want to know what human nature is, you've got to say what is the human? And that requires an evolutionary picture, an anthropological picture. You've got to love knowledge. There's no other way around this. But you know, it occurs to me that you can't motivate groups of people, however knowledgeable, to invent, you know, enormous projects to undertake enormous projects and invent spectacular machines and software, what have you. It takes billions to make a given piece of fabulous software. And so you cannot achieve the billions without private property. Somebody has to accumulate large wealth to make large investment in large projects. Isn't it true? Of course, I'm not saying that private property isn't essential and valuable, and that some degree of concentration of wealth is necessary, whether it's in private hands or not, or how much is in private hands is another matter. So clearly there needs to be considerable freedom for the individual to display creativity and initiative in controlling what's immediately necessary. What we have is the situation where all our focus has gone on monumental products that have basically devastated much of the biosphere of the planet, and we've completely neglected the moral quality of the individual. What it takes to make a good human being. What it takes to make a good trusting honest relationship. What it takes to make a happy society where everyone is flourishing. We're not even paying attention to those questions in any fundamental way. Would you return to Hawaii before the overthrow? No, it's not a question. Do you return Hawaii as a monarchy? No, certainly not. You know, because a monarchy part took off some of the distortions and deformations of medieval Europe. And so, you know, clearly the monarchy itself in many ways embraced Westernization, many aspects of Westernization, and could see that there's something powerful and true and good in this expansion of Western industrial capitalism. But one sided, you know, just because one idea is good doesn't eliminate all competing moral values. You know, as Plato said this is really important principle. No value on its own is good. Any value pursued on its own, like individual freedom or private property becomes a supreme evil, unless it's balanced with its opposite. In any case, the opposite is caring, sharing society, building relationships and expanding awareness. Awareness is invisible. You don't need monumental architecture for awareness. You need to activate what's above your neck. It's very simple. Everybody does it. The trouble is it's eliminated from our educational system in the service of training kids to fit into the job market. So it's not, again, not either. Well, we obviously got a function in the system. We all need jobs. But if you're not cultivating good people, and if you're not cultivating awareness of what is real, you get precisely the sort of situation that has been building in the United States for the last 300 years. And that's the catastrophe, the convergence of crises that we're facing. So if you want to go through some more slides, it sort of puts this in a sequence and then let's do that. Yeah, maybe just, okay, so how do we get into this just in sequence? Please just go through them in sequence. How do we get into this mess? So this is the promise of a revolution in consciousness. This is waking up to consciousness, self-knowledge, personal growth, primary value. It doesn't appear in our educational system, right? It's a matter of our educational systems accumulating information that's going to be useful in changing reality in some way. Second point is face-to-face discussion. This is a way of organizing them as a single complex, self-knowledge, discussion, involvement in community. We've got to recognize that we ourselves couldn't function, feed ourselves, speaking language, wouldn't know English without our participation in community. So community is fundamental. None of this means anything without weaving all our experience and all our knowledge into an increasingly large story, which would reveal things like what I mentioned a little earlier, that human beings are actually evolved to be co-operative, caring, sharing, to have honest, trusting relationships with one another if you look at the big picture, if you study a bit of anthropology. Is there proof of that? Has there been a society in human history where they were caring, sharing in a completely co-operative, collaborative community? The evidence suggests that most human societies were like that for most of human history. We can't go back in time. There were no books during our hunting-gathering phase, but we lived as hunter-gatherers. And we've got models for how hunter-gatherers lived from surviving hunter-gatherers like Son Bushman, of whom I've made a detailed study, published a book about a future primal, which examines in detail the connection between contemporary hunting-gathering societies and the evidence for the nature of human society before their books, before there was written history, roughly for the last 100,000 years, nine-tenths of human history. And all the evidence overwhelmingly is that these bands had no reason, there's no evidence why they would accumulate property. If you're nomadic, you've got to carry it with you. You know, you've got to carry this big, beautiful rock that you found. You know, you're living in a completely different reality where the wealth is encoded in your experience and in your stories and in your relationships and in the shared history of the community. This may have been a wonderful time. You know, at one with nature, close relationships in the tribal group and all that. But as I mentioned to you when we spoke the last time, you can't build dentists that way. And your life expectancy was about 26 years. So we're willing to trade that, do you think? Yeah, it's not a trade, Jay. Again, it's not either or it's both and more. That's the point and that's the value of consciousness because you can understand that, you know, we have all this genius technology, but we are choking on our technology and our technology is poisoning and destroying us. It's destroying the biosphere. We've dumped, by 2050, there'll be more plastic in the world's oceans than there will be biomass of fish. That's a product of technology and our genius wealth. It's not a good thing. We're not going to survive that. We're over. Forget the human venture if that happens. So we've got to wake up and mobilize this, which we've ignored increasingly for the last few hundred years. Don't you think a lot of this has to do with the number of people that have propagated on the planet? I mean, if we have eight point something billion people on the planet, that puts a lot of pressure on things. If we go back to one billion or two billion, life would be a lot easier, wouldn't it? Yeah, but don't forget, you know, we had one billion not so long ago and we had one billion locked into a growth model and the growth models produced the situation. So it's not good just going back to numbers. Again, it's what's guiding people's behavior that you're going to look at. Could this work at eight billion? Could it work? It would work better. I mean, we could right now everything will work better if we start introducing a concern with human flourishing as opposed to producing material wealth and concentrating that wealth in the hands of an increasingly shrinking elite. It makes absolutely no sense. It's guaranteed civilizational suicide. We have to pull back from the abyss or we're going to go spiraling down into chaos, which we are on the point of doing. This is the inflection point. This is the knife edge. We have to develop better consciousness about these principles and values. But there are eight billion of us. And how do you get all eight billion or at least a critical mass of them to buy in to agree. Yeah, awareness. Okay, so you do what you can with what you have. I'm starting off with J. Fidel and think tank and my students, you know, there is this, this, this new culture is emerging. It's emerging at the grassroots. It's emerging. I participated in the pro protests a couple of weeks ago at the Capitol. These new values are surfacing in the new youth culture and many aspects of it. There's a regression to the old values, doubling down, getting even harder and more brutal and more cruel and more violent. Trying to hold on to the old model, which is essentially this West European model of, you know, technological material dominance individualism competition and a sort of a religious fundamentalism. We need to go back to recognizing the sacredness of all living creatures that all living creatures emerge from a living earth and that the primary moral imperative is to wake up to the sacredness of nature, the earth and all living creatures. When we do that, everything falls back into place. And we have models. I don't know if you want to flash up some slides, race through the liberal slides. You know, this is the big picture of human history. And you can see that we've lived as hunter gatherers for nine tenths at big column on the left, industrial society barely registers, and that is the big flip over something happened in the 16th century. Next. That's what happened in the 16th century, everything exploded population energy information number of scientific journals mobility, three revolutions science capitalism or reformation. The basic values underlying all three converged into liberalism, the political philosophy of liberalism which is our operating system. It was a genius move in the 17th century. It's about 300 years out of date it's antiquated, and it's leading us over the edge next classical liberalism and basically globalized selfishness greed and materialism, along with inequality individualism next. So here we get the foundations decor foundation of science, essentially materialism nothing is real unless you can measure it. Science is only concerned with material reality in the external world doesn't deal with any experience next. John Locke nature has no meaning of value until converted by human labor into valuable property. So here we get an attitude to nature and an attitude to property as the foundation of society next more. There we get Thomas Hobbes human nature is basically selfish aggressive acquisitive state of nature is an endless war of all of all against all. This is a description of our society today because our society was built on these assumptions. That's what we don't realize the founding fathers you wrote the Constitution took this as gospel. This was accepted certainty about human nature. We now know it's wrong. It's simply not true. This is not the way most human beings behave next. Well, it's not sustainable. And what you know what I want to ask you a few minutes left is is your your political scientists and you're focused on how we manage ourselves and we manage all those 8 billion people. And going back to the beginning of our discussion we seem to have lost touch with the best way to manage them, not only the philosophy but the best way to manage the people consistent with the philosophy. So right now we have what I would call a failing democratic state here, and to the extent the US fails other democratic pretenders will also fail. We have a big problem. It's an inflection point for sure. But query. What is the political system that would that would work to achieve what you're talking about this level of awareness and harmony. So what we need to do as much as possible these decentralized decision making in power local communities. So it's a model of decentralization empowering neighborhood boards, but the most important thing is education, because without this expansion of consciousness, no bureaucratic structural government, no new constitution is going to do any good as we've seen with our Constitution. Our Constitution has led to the rise of fascism in the United States to an incipient autocracy, something approaching a dictatorship that makes America look like a banana Republic, the dictatorships of Eastern Europe we moving in the wrong direction. So the point is not to dream up some complex bureaucracy by which to make decisions. The point is for ordinary people at the grassroots level to wake up and take control as much as possible of the political process as much as possible. It's not accessible to you vote, but educate yourself first run for office, but educate yourself first, educate yourself second educate yourself forever. Don't stop because we don't know what we're doing as a society, lifelong education. And maybe one of the problems over the past 300 years is that we haven't done lifelong education we have we've formalized education into schools, and we've stopped after school. The only education that follows is really not not robust, but the problem I see in education and maybe you can help me with this is that if I make an initiative to educate every, every young person born in this world to teach exactly what you're saying what's on your slides, what's what the great thinkers have allowed for us. It's going to take a generation or two or three before those individuals better educated can get into a position in the human scheme of things to actually make the change. And do we have this is an important question. Do we have enough time to wait for them to get in that position, better educated. No waiting, we have no time to wait. This is all hands on deck. This is a global emergency. Everybody needs to wake up as soon as possible, do what they can with what they have, because we're getting over the edge of the abyss. We have at most 10 years to turn the whole thing around. In my estimation looking at climate change species extinction, the crisis and food production. Pandemics, this is just the first taste of what is to come because the system that generated this is still in place, and people haven't really grasped what the deep causes of the rise sudden rise of infectious diseases are the connection to industrialized agriculture. The Department of Agriculture has just been taken over by the biggest villains. Trump is just appointed the people who responsible for this benefiting from the system of agriculture, which has absolutely no future. I might add at this point that West Oahu is pioneering a system of sustainable community based agriculture which can feed everyone sustainably into the indefinite future. We're starting to do this at UH West Oahu where we're introducing into our mission, the vision of lifelong learning of integrating life experience of integrating the first person, integrating interdisciplinary big picture thinking we're doing what we can with what we have. But this is a it's a global imperative at all levels of society in every in every global task. Also, and so I'm reminded of one of those little quotes you see at the bottom of some people in their email. The one one that's common is a few determined individuals can change the world that works at that effect. What I hear you saying is that yes it's in West Oahu. Yes, it's here on Think Tech. Yes, it's, it's you. But query how do you reach the 8 billion or those who are influential enough to turn the 8 billion in the right way. Exactly. You reach a critical mass and that's happening already. It's happening in the youth culture that's happening through the global internet because the pandemic has allowed everybody suddenly to tune in to the fact that we are one species on one planet. And that the crises that are threatening us on increasingly global. So, you know, with with America's wake up to its history of slavery, you know, a little bit late, but better late than never is now part of a global movement of waking up to the West's implication in slavery and the recognition that slavery has been part of the civilizational story for the last 5000 years. There's something profoundly sick about the way we've organized civilization. There hasn't really been a non slave society in the last 5000 years. So, you know, this is a big wake up. I think that in this situation where we globally interconnected instantaneously, where we have access to this big picture history of of human existence and planet Earth, and the extremity of our crisis, these changes can happen very very quickly. And they work with what we've got. It's not a matter of getting rid of the Constitution of the government of the United States. It's a matter of wherever we have access to what already exists, redirecting it in terms of a new vision and new values concern for the good of the whole concern for expansion of awareness concern for defense protection and We're going to have to unpack the practical aspects of that. In our next discussion, we're going to have to unpack that. I've got a bunch of examples. You know, that's the other half of my slideshow. So there'll be another half, but right now we're out of time. I'm together. So we'll have to leave. But I'm sorry, but, but there's plenty to discuss here in terms of where we go from here and how we do it in detail. And with the slides you have, and I want to cover that the next time. So if you don't mind, we'll have to cut this now, but we will reschedule to finish or at least go in the direction of wrapping our arms around it. These are big questions. Thank you so much, Lewis Herman.