The empathic breakdown through manipulation

Laurie Penny was interviewed this week by the Artist Taxi Driver for his documentary in progress, 'This is not a recession, this is a robbery' and she made two great and fascinating points; the first was about the erosion of empathy being part of the capitalist project and how psychological damage that is being created by society is never factored into mental illness.

A fascinating statement and one I believe rings true. To lack empathy is to be a psychopath and may explain the decisions made by the people running this planet.

Empathy is hardwired into us and the RSA, Empathic Civilisation, explains this brilliantly. We witness it during everyday occurrences without noticing we are doing it, any time you have watched a spider crawl across someones arm and got that shivery feeling, that is empathy or when you see someone take a particularly hard tackle during a sporting event and you can "feel the pain", it is our empathic capabilities coming through.

What the war criminals and scoundrels seem to be doing is re-wiring our empathic civilisation to desensitise us to the horrors they conduct on our behalf the world over.

These claims may sound like psycho babble to some but there is a weight of evidence out there to prove the brains ability be re-wried according to its environment.  One such study has been conducted and reported by the Daily Mail of all agencies into the increasingly aggressive appearance of Lego characters today and that they may be harming a child's development. A documentary called Secret History of the Brain: Emotion, also covered this aspect of violence and programming of children. This showed scenes of children playing nicely together who then witness an adult attack a doll. They then replicate this behaviour with the most violent reactions occurring if the adult is of the same sex. It is called the bobo doll test and perhaps unsurprisingly the results were repeated by children who witnessed the same violence on television as opposed to witnessing it in the flesh. These reactions can be tempered by empathy as it develops within us as we reflect upon what we witness, the problem is the constant bombardment and violent environment we live in is hampering this. The problem is 360º immersive advertising and is investigated at length by the documentary Consuming Kids.

Make him angry, he'll make you angry

The re-wiring of the brain has also been discussed recently on BBC R4 which has been running a series called The Science of Music. The latest episode asked the question on how our brains are re-wired through music and explained that musicians are the perfect example of how the brain can be re-programmed according to what it called environment. We are all products of our environment whatever you may think.

By flooding our environment with violence, demonising the poor and highlighting our cultural differences, the establishment is able to manipulate and control us and our feelings, so that we are less likely to share empathy with people put into poverty by our governments, killed by our governments and arbitrarily locked away by our governments. We have to start seeing that we are more alike than we are different and that there are no problems but human problems, we are empathic by nature but it is being destroyed through nurture. An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.


You can follow Laurie Penny and The Artist Taxi driver on Twitter; @PennyRed and @chunkymark

Z-Day 2013, change is the only constant

Z Day 2013 has passed and this years event in London was a little more low key than the previous two I have attended but more importantly it was opened up to people from across different backgrounds. This brought with it some fresh perspectives on how to move forward to a common goal of a fairer more equitable world for everyone in it.

The theme again this year was on the transition from where we are today to where we could be tomorrow. As it has been eloquently put "change is the only constant" yet we live in a world where a few are desperately trying to hold on to their power base and wealth, restricting the wider society of the technology that could revolutionalise the way we live in a way not seen since the beginning of the industrial revolution. One such example would be renewable energy. Resources surround us such as geothermal, solar, wind, tidal and are all available to us and as technology advancements continue, there is every reality that we could move away from the shackles of fossil fuels and the devastating practices that accompany them.

Of all these energy sources they are all driven by one constant, the Sun.

For example wind is caused by uneven heating of the atmosphere and this is driven by the solar energy from the Sun in the first instance. In the case of solar power, of the 100% of total incident solar radiation that hits the planet, 20% is absorbed by the atmosphere, 49% is absorbed by the Earth's surface and 31% returns to space. Of this energy that hits the Earth one website claims that it receives 8.2 million quads of British thermal units of energy a year, the amount of energy consumed by the human race each year is alleged to be at 400 quads of energy in all its forms, meaning that the sun exceeds the energy output for the planet 20,000 times over. Other websites claim it is over 10,000 times the energy consumption of the planet, either way one thing is obvious, we have a resource available to us to enable a sustainable, efficient and free way to power our world and with new technological advancements in tandem there should be nothing stopping us.

Then there is hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking' as it is more commonly known.

The fracking concept - image taken from National Geographic

Residents in fracking towns have complained gas comes
out of their pipes and taps.

This controversial form of energy has come on the back of an economic malaise and is used to secure oil and natural gas formations deep within the Earth's surface. The recent National Geographic magazine featured a lengthy piece on the current situation in North Dakota where the fracking industry is in boom. The local mayor of one town cited that the place was dying economically before the full scale mining operation commenced due to fracking and that he is all for it. The fact his community may now be literally dying as a consequence of their actions seems to have been lost on him.

There are various documentaries out there on this latest energy rush such as 'Fracking Hell: The Untold Story', 'Gasland' and Matt Damon's upcoming new movie 'The Promised Land'. People have experienced issue with contaminated water courses and devastating affects on farmlands. The energy companies claim that the process is safe and that the amount of chemicals used in these processes amounts to just half of one percent of the total fluids used to flush out and frack the different wells, but this all adds up as the litres of water required to conduct this process build up. The different energy giants claim that the water used in this process is either recycled and used again or disposed of in accordance with government guidelines and legislation, whatever that means. Let us hope that the guidelines are followed better than the ones Texaco/Chevron followed in Ecuador.

But I digress slightly. As mentioned earlier the discussion hinged around transition and how we get from where we are today, toward a society with a revised value system and resource based economy?

One of this years speakers was Ben Dyson of Positive Money, a young man who, with the team at Positive Money, have made the idea of the economy or the market accessible to people with some excellent short videos on how the current monetary system works and proposing a way forward for the current system we live in. They may have also directly or indirectly influenced the mainstream names such as Mervyn King and Martin Wolf who have both recently come out and said or admitted the unthinkable; that money is made out of nothing.

Perhaps somewhat unfairly some in the crowd missed the point of the invitation of people from other fields or thought processes as some of the questions to Ben during the Q&A session were solely about the removal of the monetary system. I do not believe that Positive Money have ever advocated such a move, nor do I know what their full understanding of the proposals of movements such as The Venus Project (TVP) or The Zeitgeist  Movement (TZM), but what I do know is that they are proposing a system of debt free money and an independent regulator of the banking system that is only answerable to Parliament and not run by the political ideals of those in power at the time. This would go some way to ensure that the special interest groups had no say in where a countries money was spent and also ensure that funds went in to developing things the state needed, such as schools, hospitals and funding the research and development departments of the science world.

If the overarching principle of what we all want is a better, fairer, more equitable society than the one we live in now, then surely we have to understand that to get there will require lots of little steps? The idea that we would get there any other way is absurd and unrealistic. The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement are extremely unpopular or unknown amongst the majority of the worlds population and to get to the promised land we will have to help people walk down the path. Some of what Positive Money are proposing goes some way to helping influence these moves and I for one support that.

Next up was an extremely interesting session on technology with David Wood. He talked Moore's law, technological convergence and positive singularity. In short the next 10-15 years will see technology advance in a way cannot yet imagine but we also face the perilous task of surviving the next 15-30 years as resources are strained with our current economic policies of cyclical consumption and general bad practice in the pursuit of profit and perpetual growth. David Wood's session was perhaps the one I enjoyed most, if for nothing else to hear someone else lay it down for people on the technology on the horizon. Nano science, advancement in graphene and many other things that will quite simply change our world beyond recognition in the not so distant future.

The next couple of sessions were very different to previous years. Sean Baine, Chair of the Equality Trust gave a short but concise overview of the research and findings of the group and the book The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett. The findings are, as a general rule, that the more equal income is amongst the population of a nation, the better they score against almost all performance indicators that truly matter, i.e. lower levels of obesity, lower levels of mental illness and so on. In almost all cases the greater the inequality of income the worse the score was for those nations. Not unsurprisingly the great so called civilised Western Nations fared worse than any other.

Next up was a session on communication, specifically non-violent communication taken by Darren De Witt. I was hoping for or expecting a session more on the reprogramming of our language, something along the lines of explaining the fact we are the masters of our language and not a slave to it as we currently are, but De Witt's seminar was more about being nice to people, which worked on some levels too. He did explain how we are hard wired to be empathic and reminded me of the RSA short video called The Empathic Civilisation which is obvious, but in a not so obvious way until you have watched the video.

The last two speakers I saw were John Webster, who's talk was on 'The Strawman- the Nature of the Cage', covering some aspects of the work from Get Out of Debt Free and Mark Boyle who talked about his latest book 'The Moneyless Manifesto'. Both these talks could have been worthy of a separate day each to discuss the details of their topics.

John Webster tried to cram in forty minutes a subject that has taken some people years to get their heads around and to be fair he did not do a bad job but I am not going to get into that in this article and will perhaps save that for another day. His passion for this subject is as a result of the increase in the suicide rate for men which seem linked to issues of debt.

In essence he tried to explain that there two of us, a fictional paper document and the human us. They are very different and are bound by different rules. If you are interested in finding out more then check the link on the Strawman - Nature of the Cage and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Mark Boyle's talk was of a more simple concept, Mark Boyle has simply lived without money for three years.

Mark Boyle - The moneyless man

His story was one of intrigue and of a very simple outlook on life. He quite eloquently put it that there are two ways to be wealthy; one way is to rape the planet of its resources and to step on the people around you in the endless pursuit of wealth through monetary gains, the other is so reduce your desires or to find out what it really is that you need and desire. During the Q&A sessions one person asked him what he spent the proceeds from his first book on, 'The Moneyless Man', to which he responded with a quite brilliant rhetorical question back: "What do you spend your proceeds on?" He was referring to the every day wages we get for trading our labour and where( as he put it) we put our proceeds. We are essentially all consumers and in this moment Boyle explained the need for people to at least think in terms of ethical consumption. Not buying Coca-Cola as an example or wherever we can reduce our dependance on the mainstream market forces. One thing Boyle did highlight was the need for the corporations to have supply chains that are long and complicated. The further the consumer is away from the producer, the greater the emotional detachment.

This was a theme of Z Day 2012 where a section on transitional towns and community farming projects were discussed as a way forward for people to wean themselves off of faceless corporations and reducing our reliance on faceless corporations. This is not a new proposal and is one that has been advocated in the past by people such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. We live in a large eco-web and every action we take has a consequence to someone else further along the chain. What Boyle and the people who have gone before him are advocating is really the major tool we have in the fighting for a better world, economic withdrawal.

To answer the initial question Mark Boyle used the money from his first book to make the 'Moneyless Manifesto' and it is also available from his website, for free of course.

At this point time constraints meant we had to leave which meant we missed the final Q&A session at the end with the panel but two of the three key speakers from the day had already left by this point and was most disappointing for those who stayed until the bitter end.

All in all it was another successful day even if it was a little more low key than previous years in London. For people seasoned in the ideas and visions proposed by TZM and TVP it was light on new information and as always the question on most people's minds was "where do we go from here?"
I would suggest supporting the work of Positive Money being a good step forward, even if it does not go as far as some would hope, another positive move forward would be for more focused days (or another day in between Z Days) that focused on a specific hot topic from that year. This could help galvanise existing members and encourage new people to continue their own research. This year for example the organisers could consider another day based solely on the discussions from Mark Boyle and/or John Webster. Speakers have been generally been about providing information, such as David Wood this year; there is not a lot the average person in the street can do about Moore's law, technological unemployment or converging technologies other than being spectators and commentators but they can be active players and participators in something such as the Freeconomy work from people like Boyle or in getting skilled up to challenge the system from such trivial things as parking tickets.

There is no fate except what we make for ourselves and there is no time to wait for someone else to do it for us. Change is the only constant and to have any influence on it we all have to get involved.




Some videos below for interest.


Geothermal energy, how it works
Iceland geothermal
Moneyless Man TED Talks