The Urbiculture Foundation

So – here is Charles’s response to Foster’s post yesterday.

Charles writes:

I am flattered that Foster Gamble has taken the time to read my work. I would rather not dwell too much on our differences, and have no desire to undermine Thrive, which I think is a valuable film. In advance of tonight’s call, however, I would like to clear up some misconceptions that may have arisen about my views, so that I can focus on my core material.

Evil: The point isn’t about the metaphysical status of evil, but more practically on where to place the ultimate blame for the planet’s predicament. Is it on an elite group of bad people who have created a monstrous system of enslavement, and who consciously perpetuate that system for their own aggrandizement? Or is it on the system itself, that has emerged without conscious human design? Each of these answers implies different strategies and solutions. My view is that the elites are puppets of a system, an ideology – indeed, a mythology – of which they are barely conscious. In my books I name it “Separation”. It emerged over tens of thousands of years, intensified in the last few thousand, and reached its zenith in the scientific era.

Embedded as we are in a sense-of-self that is separate, we enact the various behaviors that are preventing life on earth from thriving. The Ascent of Humanity draws it out in detail, explaining how all of the institutions of civilization – science, medicine, education, money, religion, law, etc. – arise from separation, embody separation, and perpetuate separation. The discrete and separate self, marooned in a universe that is other, of course seeks to maximize its own control and domination over everything else. The film implies that the root of the problem is the people who are in control. But I think the system has created such people. They are symptoms and not causes.

Free energy technology: I think Foster misunderstood my comment that it appears to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That statement was not a “swipe at [his] credibility.” I used the word “appears” on purpose (whereas most debunkers would say simply that it violates the Second Law) because I agree with Foster that these technologies do not in fact violate the Second Law at all, for precisely the reason Foster adduces. That said, I think that the Second Law itself needs further scrutiny. It plays into the mythology that I call “ascent” – that humanity must struggle against nature and is destined to triumph over it – in that it assumes a natural tendency in the universe toward entropy, against which we struggle to maintain order. Order versus chaos. But as I am sure Foster would agree, we live in a universe of self-organizing systems. This is part of the fundamental abundance of being. It is not order versus chaos – it is, as Ilya Prigogine put it, order out of chaos. The universe is not our opponent. It is here where I resonate most strongly with the film, for it too is informed by a deep faith in that fundamental abundance – that the nature of life is to thrive.

A quick word of clarification on the following: “In his book, Charles goes so far as to excuse J.P. Morgan’s suppression of Nikola Tesla’s radiant energy tower by writing ‘Perhaps Morgan was even on some level cognizant that humanity was not ready for Tesla’s gift.’” This sentence was playful speculation on what might have been an unconscious (hence “on some level”) motive in Morgan. The context surrounding the quote makes it clear that I believe Morgan’s conscious motive for canceling Tesla’s project was that he saw no way to profit from it. But given that each new source of greater and greater energy was used first for war (witness the first use of atomic energy!), perhaps it was for the best that Tesla’s discoveries were not unleashed before human consciousness had reached a level where we won’t use the unlimited energy to kill each other.

I will ignore Foster’s criticism of my book that it will lull people into complacency or that it advocates government intervention backed by force to solve our problems. I think the book itself answers those objections.

This paragraph gets to the crux of our disagreement:

Charles: “A nefarious power, inimical to human well-being, manipulates the course of human events from behind the scenes, seeking the total control of every human being. Rather than an evil Illuminati, could that power be money? Could it be that it is rather the money system that controls the global elite?”

Foster: This is like saying the gun was guilty of the murder. Are the banking elite unaware of the unfair advantage the money scam gives them? They have the power to remedy it if it is not their intention. Our corrupt money system did not create itself, nor will it get rid of itself without dedicated effort.

Charles: A gun is different from an ideological system. I would ask the reader, have you ever been in an organization that seems to have a “life of its own” – perhaps even to the extent in which the organization does things that not a single of its members really believes in? I think that in an important sense, our money system did create itself, or to be more precise, that it is what in non-linear dynamics is called an emergent phenomenon. In a complex, non-linear system, sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the “butterfly effect”) ensures that no one can predict the eventual consequences of any choice. For example, as David Graeber describes in his magnificent, scholarly book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, our money system arose in large part from early forms of money that were used exclusively for social purposes such as marriage gifts, blood money, and so forth, and never for commerce. Who could have predicted that the psychodynamics of the social debts of Middle-Eastern herders five thousand years ago would, when married to temple accounting systems from Sumer, result in the kind of debt-based slavery that has taken over the world? Was this all a conscious master plot? Is there really an elite with such superhuman foresight, competence, and such evil intentions?

Does the financial elite really have the power to remedy the sickness built into the money system? My impression is that they see the system as immutable, nearly a law of nature, and they respond with increasing panic to each new, unpredictable symptom of the system’s breakdown. They are thralls of an ideology that, far from being cynically conceived of whole cloth by an all-knowing cabal of controllers, has emerged over time through an interplay of complicated social, ideological, economic, and political forces. Perfectly good-hearted, intelligent people can believe in the basic rightness, or at least the inevitability, of the current money system.

Most of the rest of Foster’s response targets my views in general, and not specifically my review of Thrive. As to charges that I advocate non-action or eschew logic and empirical observation, I will let my writings speak for themselves. These quotes have been taken out of context and given interpretations that are in many cases caricatures of my intended points.

I think they read like some kind of cartoon version of my thesis. But nowhere do I say, as these disembodied quotes imply, that I think injustice needn’t be confronted, or that we can trust centralized authority to solve our problems, or that we can blithely ignore dangerous people. As for Foster’s criticisms of my views of money, fractional reserve banking, fiat currencies, and credit, there is certainly room for informed debate about these issues, but they are not trivially mistaken as these criticisms imply.