Conscious Politics - Part 1 - The Deepest Political Analysis You'll Ever Hear

https://youtu.be/klWq18u3GiU

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[Music] welcome to conscious politics part 1 the next level of political analysis I'm really excited about this topic this is gonna be a three maybe four part miniseries so make sure you stick with me through the end because each part is gonna build upon the next and they're all gonna get better and better and better and it's gonna be a very holistic and cohesive topic and the reason we need so many episodes on this topic is because we're we're working to address a very deep ignorance within our populace and within our culture about how government and politics works there are so many traps here and so much ignorance from both sides of the aisle that it it really requires a lot of correcting of preconceived dogmas and ideas which is why we need to go into so much detail now over the last couple of years really since Donald Trump got elected I've spent I spent a lot of time closely studying politics in a way that I'd never have before and that's because I'm concerned about what's going on but I'm not coming at it from a partisan perspective I've been studying this issue from a Spile dynamics stage yellow and turquoise perspective and I've been having many awakenings over the last two years so as I've been experiencing my own personal enlightenment and awakening my spiritual awakening we might say I've also been experiencing an awakening of sorts politically and I've discovered some profound insights and principles about various problems that exist within governments and politics which I think will be really practical and useful to you guys so I really want to lay the foundation here for conscious politics what I'm calling conscious politics this is a new type of politics that has really not existed before this is cutting-edge stuff we're talking about a totally radically new way to think about government and we're gonna start with very theoretical foundations but it's not just gonna be empty philosophy and mental masturbation we're going to talk about specific policy proposals and what it's actually going to look like so don't don't get scared off by this title of conscious politics it might sound Larry fairy at first but uh it actually gets very tangible and concrete as we get into it I'm going to be telling you things that you've never heard about before a new type of political analysis that you don't see in mainstream media or anywhere on YouTube and this is gonna completely change how you see politics for the rest of your life for the better it's gonna make you much more savvy politically and it's gonna also give you tools intellectual tools for arguing with other ignorant people who don't understand what politics is to bring them around to proper understanding this is a very sprawling topic which is gonna encompass a lot of stuff we've talked about in the past so this is advanced stuff don't think that as a newbie if you're just watching this as your first actualized video don't think you're gonna understand I'm gonna throw stuff in here that's going to be very advanced and I expect that you've already watched some of my other earlier episodes for example some prerequisites for understanding what I'll be talking about here will include you need at least a conceptual understanding of non-duality you need an understanding of spiral dynamics go watch my six-part mini-series on sprawl dynamics you need to watch my three-part miniseries on self-deception because there's so much self-deception in this topic you need to understand survival go watch my two-part series understanding survival you need to understand collective ego you need to understand devilry and evil go check out my episode what is the devil and the mechanics of evil we need to understand how ideology works check out my episode how ideology works you need to understand relativity and relativism go check out my episodes about relativism you need to understand systems thinking go look at my episode intro to systems thinking and you need to understand what love is go see my episode what is love we're going to be pulling all of these things together and really this is sort of a payoff for those of you who've been sticking around and watching this stuff and being diligent and consistent if you watched all those episodes now we get the desert this is the payoff from having that very deep theoretical foundation so watch how all this stuff comes together in a beautiful way politics and government is extremely self deceptive it's not only that the politicians are trying to deceive you it's that the politicians themselves are thoroughly self deceived and you as the one who's voting for them is also thoroughly self deceived so it goes both ways it's bad in both ways it's not only that we have bad politicians but the people who elect the politicians themselves are extremely ignorant and so really you can't blame the politicians in a simplistic way that people do like you can't just say oh it's all Trump's fault or it's all Congress's fault or it's all the Democrats fault or it's all the Republicans fault no no no no you're not appreciating how deep the problem of politics and government goes but you will by the end of this episode you're going to start - now I'll be mostly talking about American politics I'll be using examples for American politics because it's what most of my audience is American but I know mostly a lot of you are also watching me around the globe and you have your own specific local politics but you have to understand that the principles and ideas that I'll be explaining here are globally applicable this is not just Democrats versus Republicans conservativism and liberalism these are trends that exist all around the world in all countries and actually there's a shocking amount of similarity between the politics and various countries despite individual local differences so the principles are gonna still apply so it's gonna be useful to you now let's we're gonna have to address so many objections here so you know stick with me I know you have a lot of objections and questions so I'll be trying to cover many of them throughout this whole multi-part series so first we have to address the elephant in the room which is the objection of but Leo politics is such a dirty and anti spiritual topic it's filled with ego isn't it just a distraction I mean after all if you just work on yourself you turn inwards you become awakened you just do your spiritual practice and that will solve all the world's problems Leo the world's problems aren't real they're just imaginary you said it's just a dream so why talk about politics well this is precisely false the world's problems contrary to what many spiritual teachers will try to teach you cannot be solved merely by turning inwards if only it was that easy see there is an individual layer to our problems and there's a collective layer to our problems and generally traditional spiritual schools do a pretty good job of helping us to fix our individual problems but not our collective problems and in fact they contribute deeply to our collective problems and one of the ways you contribute to our collective problems is by denying that we have collective problems or by trying to reduce all collective problems to simply individual problems so this is one of the first traps and of course there's also a trap of conflating the absolute with the relative thinking that just because you become conscious of some absolute truth some awakening thing that that automatically means that now your politics are gonna be in order not at all not at all these are different domains now there's important lessons that we need to bring in from the absolute domain into the relative but we got to be careful about how we do it we don't want to just do a simplistic conflation here and in fact if you take the position that spirituality and politics should be two totally distinct fields unrelated to each other notice that itself is a dualistic position because you're creating a boundary or a duality between the two and of course as you should understand what non duality teaches us is that everything is interconnected when things are interconnected but then you artificially separate them problems results see so actually if you think that you're being non-dual by avoiding politics you're actually being dual the non dual position would be to understand just how important politics is towards the raising of the consciousness of society and of individuals it's a lot easier to raise the consciousness of an individual when he or she is living in a higher consciousness society and when the society and culture as a whole is not toxic overly materialistic and dualistic and dogmatic and ideological and filled with cults and filled with partisan politics and dysfunctions and pathologies of various kinds see so there's a very important interplay between the two and if the goal as the goal is for example with Buddhists is to be a body sought fund to help to enlighten the whole world if that's your true goal as a Buddhist you got to take politics and government very seriously because you're not going to be able to do it one individual at a time see there are social systemic problems at work here which meditation and enlightenment alone will never fix as important as meditation and laymen are so you got to be careful not to just say that everything it's a societal problem because of course that's not true you have to take responsibility and develop yourself that's extremely important but we also have to acknowledge these systemic problems when most when sorry when the most conscious people refuse to engage in politics and government because they think to themselves at oh well I'm above all this ago--at dirty nonsense what ends up happening is that the most unconscious people end up prevailing and taking power and then they end up governing you and you see how this is backwards we actually need the most conscious people to be our leaders our politicians our community organizers precisely because it's the consciousness that they have and the levels of awakening that they've attained that is what's gonna save the world you can't get some egotistical neurotic pathological deluded person to be in control of large groups of people placed in important positions otherwise what you get is you get disaster sure you get disaster so be careful you have a certain responsibility as being a human and part of a society to not only wake yourself up but then to help you use that awakening to awaken the rest of the world by doing nothing the status quo prevails you have to understand that with politics you can't just sit this one out you can just say oh well politics doesn't concern me doesn't affect me it does no matter how much you deny it it does you can't even live in a cabin in the woods without politics affecting you because your ability to live in those woods without getting harassed or oppressed or murdered depends upon you being in a country which protects you which has police which will have firefighters in case you have a fire in your kitchen in your cabin which will supply you with food and roads and electricity and so forth so that you can live in that cabin with some sort of sewage system you see it's all very deeply interconnected but we'll be getting more into that in a minute so the status quo if you do nothing if you don't vote if you don't take conscious politics seriously is not that you get to ignore politics the default position then is unconscious politics which is what we mostly have today and then you get all sorts of results that are not ideal and what you really have is you have devilry run amok it's important you understand the way in which I use the word devilry I'm not using that word to demonize people even though I might sound like it I'm using that word as a technical word to signify deep blind selfishness and egotism go check out my episode what is the devil it's a very important one especially when it comes to politics so what happens if you just sit this one out is that selfishness fear oppression and exploitation will be the default and devilry will run rampant one of the problems with traditional spiritual schools like Vedanta or Zen Buddhism well and Christianity - and even Judaism really all of them because they they emerged thousands of years ago they're not good enough to solve today's problems because back then ecology was not a serious concern the way that it is today ecology is an extremely important topic which I'll have a dedicated episode on in the future I still have yet to talk about that but the problem is that many of these traditional Orthodox spiritual schools do not understand the importance of ecology and because people get stuck in each traditional Orthodox teachings they think that well these teachings are complete like Zen and Buddhism and Adviser they're complete and they're perfect and there's nothing more to add to them and this is precisely wrong there is more to add that and one of the things to add to them is ecology another thing to add to them as systems thinking another thing to add to them is modern psychology these are very important oversights that just didn't exist back then because these are scientific developments that have happened in the you know preceding ensuing centuries but a lot of times these get ignored because people get stuck on their favorite teacher teaching or tradition now what we're doing here and talking about conscious politics is really we're sort of going back to the roots of Western civilization in ancient Greece Athens specifically where philosophy and politics went hand in hand and to be a good citizen you have to study rhetoric logic philosophy because you had to understand human nature and in a sense you know philosophy was how people did psychology back then and of course morals and ethics that was part of philosophy as well and it was understood back then that these two go hand-in-hand and Athens had some important political innovations that they developed and the reason that was is was because they were such good thinkers and philosophers and so we need to return to that that's what we're doing here so even though it might sound kind of theoretical remember that theory informs your practice when you don't have the proper theory your practice is going to be all wrong which is exactly what we're seeing today in our politics in American politics especially and in Europe as well you're seeing it in in South America and Brazil and really you're seeing it in India as well you know you're seeing the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism all around the world these days it's it's problematic and I've been carefully studying and observing like why is this happening and so I want to share with you some of my insights about that the first problem for understanding conscious politics is selfishness bias and ideology immediately corrupts this discussion so even as I'm starting to say some of the things that I'm saying already people who are watching me who are not conscious of their own selfishness egotism their own bias and ideology who are stuck on some sort of ideology whether it's a left-wing one or a right-wing one they're immediately going to try to criticize me because the things that I'm saying are gonna conflict with their ideology and then we quickly get into some sort of partisan bickering back and forth some argumentation some debate and we get into culture wars these culture wars that we're seeing these social justice warriors versus the anti social justice warriors this sort of left and right bickering back and forth about who can out own whom this creates a very big problem because we're not able to have serious discussions about serious issues this is all distraction go see my episode about the egos favorite defense distraction that's what's happening collectively right now within our culture with regards to politics and government there are such important discussions that we're not having we need to create enough elevation from the partisan food fight that's going on right now to step outside of all the ideology and the conventional group think that is infecting both sides that we need to be able to open our mind to something totally new and not just be picking one side or the other that's a mistake it's a false choice both sides are wrong in unique ways and when I say that don't misunderstand me as saying that they're both equally bad they're not equally bad there's important asymmetries between the left and the right and generally the right is more unconscious than the left but see the problem is that even just for me to say that already someone from the right hearing that is gonna say oh well leo leo then is a leftist that's what he is okay I understand him now but see that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is that there's a higher elevation that we need to reach this higher of a late Evolet elevation is beyond left and right but the problem is that sometimes from someone who's at the lower elevation it can assume that someone at a higher elevation is just some radical crazy leftist and then in this way one's own bias and ideology gets projected onto another who is actually trying to show you the way trying to point out things to you that you aren't missing in your worldview so be very careful with projecting your own political biases on to me what I'm presenting here is not a simple leftist position but it might seem that way to some of you so watch out rule number one of conscious politics is at any position that you have is limited and highly highly partial so the counterintuitive move then is to stop defending your political positions understand that your own mind is tricking you and using you when it is getting defensive about your political positions see this allows us to get a little bit of elevation conscious politics is about going meta going beyond ideological positions and what I'm talking about here this entire teaching of mine is a trans partisan teaching now some people can construe a trans partisan teaching as just the other side of some partisan debate be careful about that I'm trying to show you new ways of thinking about politics and government this is not merely a left-wing position even though I will certainly be perceived as a leftist because the truth is and this is one of the truths that many right-wingers don't want to hear but it has to be said because the left and the right are not equal is that you cannot be highly conscious and still maintain a right wing ideology those two things are directly at odds with one another and in fact the reason people adopt right-wing ideologies and the further right the the worse it gets is because they're not conscious of so much and that as you become more conscious you'll realize that those far right-wing ideologies become untenable but that's not to say that you just go full-bore leftist and that there's no problems with that either there are problems with both sides remember it's not so much about picking left or right it's about which elevation are you at that's the far more important metric and this metric of what is one's elevation and by elevation we're talking about is one's level of self-awareness and consciousness that is the critical dimension that determines the quality of one's politics not so much left versus right so in the media the way that the stuff is talked about this dimension of low consciousness versus high consciousness is completely drowned and lost on all political analysis and all political pundits and commentators as they get lost between the left and the right and in this way they completely miss analyze the situation so what you have to understand is that because politics and governments are a matter of life and death the first thing that the devil does is try to demonize anyone who isn't acting blindly selfish in the way that a devil wants see the way our politics is done right now is that it's done by Devils who are trying to be maximally selfish and they think that just by being as selfish as they can be that they will get as much as they can out of the system for themselves and their tribe and then hey once I win that then everything's fine me and my tribe are happy this is the state of our current politics this is not gonna work and conscious politics is about going beyond that and recognizing how the devil uses these systems and these ideologies to grab a hold of our minds now remember I'm using the word devil not literally but metaphorically here I'm not talking about a guy with actual horns okay so the next issue we have to address is how easily government today is taken for granted in a sense we are victims of our own success over the last 5,000 years human civilization has evolved so much that people born today cannot appreciate how much evolution has happened and they take government totally for granted precisely because it is in such an evolved State and it works so well most of the time if you live in a first world western-style democracy either in northern Europe or in America or a few other countries there are some countries in the East like Japan and so forth which are also pretty recent first-world developed countries in these places for the most part you can go about your life and live freely doing a lot of stuff without ever thinking about politics or the government's because it just works electricity just works roads just work telephone lines and communication just works the internet just works subway systems they just work you're able to speak you're able to go online you're able to socialize you're able to do so much stuff and you've taken all of that for granted as though that's like how mankind has been living in millennia past this is not at all the case so it's very easy to not see what government is doing for you and in this way we can start to get very complacent and we can adopt ideologies like oh well government is stupid voting is for fools the system is just all rigged it's all corrupt government is just getting in my way government's just taxing me exploiting me these sorts of ideologies would never spend quite a bit of time combating these ideologies because it prevents us from taking a deeper look into what government actually does for us and we'll be doing that throughout this series notice that government is like a technology it's a soft technology it's an abstract technology which is difficult for us to get our minds around because it's so complex and so abstract people don't usually think of government as a technology but it definitely is in fact it's more important than the internet or electricity or some space rocket all of those harde technology all that gadget or II that I call gadgetry all of that is only possible because of prior technological advancements within politics and government things like democracy that was an innovation a radical innovation in its time someone had to invent democracy and it wasn't at all obvious that democracy was was right or proper or good you see because before democracy was invented which was umbrella relatively recently in human history it was dictatorship tyranny and monarchy or mob rule or mafia or some sort of oligarchy or plutocracy where the majority of people didn't have a vote didn't have a say at all it's not that the elections were raged there were no elections and the idea of an election was absurd to people how could you give ordinary folks the right to decide what the nation should be or who the leader should be this this was insane a thousand years ago or 2,000 years ago if you if you tried to if you try to advance this idea people would say you're a lunatic you're you're an idealist you're a utopian this would never work notions like free speech this is like a technology the idea that you should have free speech minority rights is a relatively recent development and very radical a fair judicial system a competent bureaucracy religious freedom separation of church and state the right to protest having a social safety net so that if you lose your job you're not gonna starve on the streets diplomacy environmental protections uncorrupted police who you can actually turn to for help in case you're getting chased by a murderer or a burglar or something currency free trade accountable representatives who you could actually call and [ __ ] to when something isn't going right who might lose an election if they don't satisfy you and your friends term limits and he trusts laws and I could go on and on and on all of these things were inventions someone had to think of them and then someone had to convince the the people that these were good ideas and often times there were bloody battles to put these into place to confirm that they're good ideas and it wasn't obvious that they were good ideas so be very very careful about just taking these things for granted these were all very massive innovations and also I want you to notice that these were radical in their time see one of the common problems that happens is that we get stuck in the status quo you know sort of groupthink where we just think that well we don't want to be too radical in our politics we want to be moderate we just want to be average but you see the politics we have today the government we have today is not moderate go back a hundred years 200 years 500 years a thousand years everything we have today would have been considered extremely radical by the people of of those ancient times see and so likewise we need to be open mind to the possibility that there might be radical new advances that need to be made within society and within government especially as it grows it's also very important to consider the problem of scale a lot of people think about government without understanding the scale problem they think of government assault like well government is just like a big tribe it's really no different than having a group of my friends or a hundred people together no it's extremely different and then some people go further and say they say well government is like it's really no different than a giant corporation which has a couple thousand people or maybe a hundred thousand employees no no you don't understand government is a totally different order of magnitude of thing even compared to our largest and most complex corporations government is something different very different than any other kind of organization and I'll be talking about why in a moment right we're talking about hundreds of millions of people that many governments in the world control hundreds of millions but how do you organize and build a consensus amongst hundreds of millions of people with diverse diverse perspectives religions genetics different abilities different strengths and weaknesses different ideologies mm different ethnicities how do you unify that many people this is not an easy problem to solve it's actually amazing that government is able to do it at all and that it works as well as it does most of the time sure of course we have problems we have corruption we have war but generally you have to admit living the 21st century is amazing if you're living in a first world democracy compared to what it was like to live 500 years ago I mean it's amazing you need to wake up every single morning and and pray to God that you live in the 21st century and not a few centuries earlier otherwise your life would be so much more miserable so just keep that in mind but even as I say that some people in the audience are still saying well Leo but what is government really done for me some people get stuck on this notion that government is just a like a monkey on our back and it doesn't do anything for us and that it just sucks us of our resources and doesn't offer us anything in return so let me just clarify what government has done for you first and foremost and this is the biggest thing that people overlook is that government protects you from enslavement oppression and genocide this is very important what people don't understand is that if there is no government some other group will come and enslave you and you will have no say and no vote about it this is a point we'll return to in greater depth in a moment let me keep going with this list though government also prevents external and internal oppression realize that oppression doesn't just come from outside some other country some neighbor of yours conquering you but also from the inside internal oppression exploitation scammers Ponzi schemes religious cults factions gangs mafia these are all internal forms of oppression corporate oppression economic oppression that's very important government prevents theft and ensures property rights some people especially the libertarians one very critical of they they have this silly notion that property rights is some Analia bull inalienable god-ordained right that everyone has naturally this is completely false there is no such thing as property rights unless they are invented first by the government and then protected through physical force of violence by the government otherwise people can just steal from each other with no repercussions they have to provide their own security and then that escalates very quickly government also provides you with court systems and this is super important people do not appreciate the significance of court systems a court system is a peaceful means of resolving a dispute without a court system what happens is that people grab their knives and their guns and they go for each other's throats and children so to live in a country where there is an uncorrupted and relatively decent and fair and honest court system that's something so many people take for granted but it's it's something you really appreciate when someone does you wrong and then you're able to go to court and actually get redress sure it could take years it cost a lot of money there's problems with it the court systems are not perfect but uh still far superior to having no court system at all or to having a totally corrupt court system which is paid off by by the people who have done you wrong what else government is done for you it prevents torture and cruel and unusual punishment now people say Oh leo but government does do torture and cruel and unusual punishment to some degree but generally a first world democracy is going to protect you against those things and of course the court system as well it prevents child labor as well provides you with police and firefighters who you can rely on and Trust who are not corrupted or paid off provides riot control what happens when a riot breaks out and there's no one to control it that riot could kill you and your family could rape you and your family provides you with criminal investigation prosecution of various kinds of criminals not only hard criminals but also con artists and other kinds of white-collar crime which is equally as damaging provides prisons for serious criminals who otherwise would be running around loose provide search and rescue the coast guard if you're off on a boat somewhere and you get lost in a storm the government will come and save your ass in many cases natural disaster relief for earthquakes fires hurricanes and floods and we're seeing this more and more with our climate change problems emergency health care if you cut off your hand you can run to the emergency room and they'll sew it back on infrastructure roads bridges the electric grid sewage systems most people don't appreciate what it's like to live without a sewage system see all of these things we take for granted farming subsidies which prevent famines you know famines used to be a common thing in first world democracies there's no such thing as famine anymore even if you're poor for the most part you still have access to food government provides you with poverty relief in case you go broke it's not perfect by any means but still there's some kind of safety net there provides you with public education universities what people don't realize is that without governments the way it was a couple hundred years ago the majority of people in society are illiterate and completely ignorant and uneducated this lowers the whole standard of living of the entire society so public education in universities is he's a huge service that government offers government offers grants loans and subsidies government creates national parks which are protected from lodging and from trash and other sorts of private privatization interests the post office minority rights most people don't appreciate that minority rights are not going to be enforced without a government without a government it's majority rule whoever is the most powerful will dominate and destroy all minorities out of racist hatred or ethnocentric eccentric preferences or cultural and religious preferences minorities get wiped out government provides vaccines and disease prevention from pandemics and so forth and it provides the research and development to to create new vaccines and cures building codes so your buildings don't collapse build to high quality standards government provides insurance unemployment insurance flood insurance retirement insurance like Social Security disability insurance many of these things are non-existent without government government provides food regulations and meat inspections most people don't realize how dirty meat is unless it's inspected by the government the entire books have been written centuries ago about how terrible the meat industry was in America for example just a hundred years ago before there was a massive movement to get their own government to crack down and to do meat inspections because like there was feces in the meat a business you know just cutting costs try to maximize profits so of course they don't need to keep a clean butchering table oh when they're butchering animals because that cuts down on their profits you know they have to clean stuff you know restaurants kitchens they don't need to be clean unless the government demands that they're clean and then people get sick and died from that government provides pollution regulation begging regulation currency enforcement market protection when markets take a downturn when there's a depression governments allows satellites allocation of radio bandwidth R&D funding for science technology and new drugs space exploration historical preservation of fossils and artifacts that otherwise would be gobbled up by private collectors and kept in their mansions and then historical sites would be desecrated can you imagine for example if some corporation bought the Great Pyramids of Egypt if that wasn't controlled by the Egyptian government but it was run by some some shady corporation well what that would what that would turn into they would just sell off the whole pyramid brick by brick to the highest bidder government provides accountability for business antitrust regulations government collects and shares statistical data in an objective way government offers peace treaties arms treaties and diplomacy that otherwise would not be possible government looks after foster homes and adoption services can you imagine if foster homes and adoption services were for private business businesses that were run for-profit how terrible that would be as terrible as they are already just try to imagine how terrible they would be if they were run for profit by some giant corporation literally children be sold off for money it offers prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons can you imagine if private corporations were able to build and develop their own nuclear weapons what would happen there would be no life on this planet and it offers certification accreditation for various doctors lawyers psychologists psychiatrists and pharmacists and various kinds of legal professions which ensures high quality standards so all of that government does for you so don't don't tell me that government doesn't do anything for you now of course the libertarian comes in here says oh alia but all of these things the private sector can do just as well we don't need the government for the post office because we can have FedEx and UPS and you know we don't need we don't need government to to to provide vaccines the business community will just do it and space exploration you know we have SpaceX they're doing a better job than NASA this is fantasy the private sector cannot fulfill all these functions of course yes some functions the private sector can fulfill and it can supplement government but many of these things the private sector cannot do specifically what this private sector cannot do is it cannot insure you against enslavement it cannot provide a fair court system for adjudicating disputes because if the private sector was controlling these things it would be for profit you pay the right person the right amount of money and they will rule in your favor or they will enslave whoever you want or allow you to enslave who are whoever you want while they look the other way this is how it word works in many underdeveloped third-world countries their police and their courts are so corrupt that the way to do business is just to bribe and the person with the most money gets to bribe whoever they want and get away with anything that's how it works this is the reality of human nature you have to understand that human nature is utterly vicious it doesn't follow any more moral norms it has to be enforced by somebody these moral norms can't even be taught because there's not schools to teach in government you understand and what libertarians don't understand is that if given the chance to do so the private sector would enslave you the largest corporation will arise and amassed so much power that it will be in its financial best interest to enslave all of its employees and all the other smaller corporations which it can buy up and make part of itself until this one corporation ends up taking over the entire region and becomes a sort of pseudo government except the problem will be that you're not gonna have a vote in this corporation this corporation is not gonna have any kind of Bill of Rights or a Constitution it's not gonna be held accountable by any kind of court system there's not gonna be any representation it's just gonna be that one guy who owns all the stock of the corporation he's going to become the pseudo corporate dictator and if you think that a corporation would not enslave you if given the chance you really underestimate the motivations of corporations they will certainly enslave you if given the chance they will develop nuclear weapons they will develop their own armies they will buy off whoever they want they will overpower whoever they want they will buy up as many smaller corporations as they can until they have monopolized everything so watch out how much had credit you give to corporations you really need to appreciate how vicious human nature is there is no such thing as the non-aggression principle the non-aggression principle has to be enforced with aggression that's what government is about tada that's what we're talking about here that's why it's so important that's why people take it so seriously and get so ideological about it because it is a matter of life and death there are many problems with the Spile dynamic stage Orange worldview and it's politics go check out my episodes spa dynamic stage Orange that's perhaps the most important one for you to watch and to understand for our purposes here because most people who follow me are at a spa dynamic stage orange level of psychological and cognitive and moral and spiritual development which is not a very high level and this level is characterized by some specific political misunderstanding which I want to just list off for you here first of all people who are stuck in stage orange these are tent these tend to be the libertarian types the individual lists or for freedom and no government the problem is that they turn freedom into an ideology into an absolute good without really understanding the limitations of freedom and what freedom really means we'll go into that in a minute another problem is that they have a fantasy of free markets they think that if we just let the free markets do whatever they need to do that everything will just work out fine this is not going to work I've already explained various various examples why doesn't work if you truly allow a free market what happens is enslavement not a healthy well-functioning economy and really we don't have free markets anyways we never had and we never will there's no such thing as free markets there's always somebody manipulating the market controlling it from one side or another it ain't ever free and these so-called free markets are always propped up by physical violence and aggression see so it's a power play it ain't free at all it's a libertarian fantasy the notion that you can privatize everything to make it good is absurd privatizing the national parks is not going to make them better it's gonna make them worse and it's going to lead to various kinds of corporate exploitation because the problem with corporations is that they're only function and their only motivation at least right now at the level of development at these corporations are at is exploit everything monopolize everything to maximize profit and all costs damn the environment damn the people damn the impact on anybody else this is a problem so that needs to be kept in check and the problem is these corporations are not accountable to anyone except their stockholders which are usually a select few number of people not the majority so in a sense a corporation if a corporation becomes too powerful it ends up being anti-democratic because this corporation has so much power that actually becomes more powerful than the government and yet most citizens who are under the influence of its power don't have any say in what the corporation does or decides or as with a good government first world democracy you do have some say that is an important distinction that is lost on many libertarians these stay George libertarians also subscribe to a fantasy of individualism this idea that you are just you are individual everyone's an individual they're just responsible for themselves there is no collectivism we're not part of a community and you know leave me alone leo I'm just gonna do my thing and you can do your thing and this is how we're gonna live this is a fantasy of pure fantasy it has never worked this way human beings even when we were pre humans when we were Neanderthals or humm and earlier hominids and chimp like creatures we lived in troops we were communal you were never individualistic it's impossible to survive in life as a chimp or as an ape of some kind as an individual you just don't find it this is a fantasy and in fact the only reason you can sit here and extol the virtues of individualism and talk about how we're all individuals and you can just go off and live by yourself and nobody bother you this is a modern luxury that is only possible thanks to government thanks to millennia of evolution of government and all these infrastructures that have been built and for which was paid a lot of blood and tears and suffering to allow you to sit here and to talk about how we're all individuals you're kidding yourself you're not really an individual you're part of a collective you're both I'm not saying you're only a collective you are part of a collective but you're also an individual that needs to be that paradox needs to be held at the same time they're important some people get too much hung up on one or the other without seeing that there's a balance that's happening there they're very complicated and nuanced balance humans are like ants or termites in a termite colony no individual ant can survive by himself it's impossible so get rid of this fantasy that you were some individual ant you're not an individual ant you're part of the entire colony get used to it you'll learn that as you evolve up the spiral my bag is issued another problem with the stage oranged level of politics is that it doesn't see any collective problems it thinks all problems are just a problem of personal responsibility and that if if that person just took more responsibility for his life or her life then that would solve the problem there's also this sort of sense of entitlement that winners and losers both deserve what they get so those of us who do well in the economy we deserve it and those of us who do terribly well we deserve it too because we're not working hard enough this ignores the systemic problems that are really at work and the various kinds of manipulations that humans do in order to ensure that they win and that others lose this is ignored by libertarians and the extent to which people will rig the system in their own favor the staged orange people also generally are just about maximizing profits and growing the economy as much as possible never-ending growth assuming this will solve all of our problems when in fact our problems are way deeper than that and they will never get solved no matter how much economic growth we experience in fact the more the economy grows while ignoring the the real problems the worse those problems become because we're ignoring a deeper cancer these stage orange people tend to be unlimited materialists life for them as a material exercise and they have a philosophy of materialism scientism and generally they're anti spiritual anything spiritual sounds new agey Andrew to them or it sounds theocratic and religious and and all of this is to be done away with and their ideal society is just like a hyper rational hyper materialist hyper scientific society this of course tends to pair with a sort of toxic masculinity this idea that men and masculinity is the way the society should be run and that femininity this is kind of a weak way to structure society and that society is weakened when women come into positions of power or when feminine values are offered to men that this somehow weakens the man these feminine values when nothing could be further from the truth it's a sort of a philosophy of me me me my own survival at all costs is survival of the fittest that's the stage orange philosophy many of our businesses Wall Street fortune 500 companies CEOs they subscribe to this sort of philosophy they think that is survival the fittest and I'm just gonna get as much as I can for myself damn the environment dan what happens to other people who cares about my employees I don't care about their suffering it's just as long as I get what I want I get my millions and billions then everything will be fine Leah what's the problem once I have my millions and billions I can hire private security I can buy my own property my own houses I can defend it all everything's fine I don't need to worry about the environment because I'll just I'll just get myself clean water and I'll just live in a non polluted area it's this sort of mentality it's very myopic selfish mentality and it takes for granted courts and bureaucracy these are thought to be bad bureaucracy léo bureaucracy that's bad we don't want a bureaucracy ha actually what you want is more bureaucracy you want high quality bureaucracy that's one of the key things that differentiates first world country from a third world country is the quality of their bureaucracy and the quality of their courts but get to that a little bit later so now let's go to the very fundamental question I've sort of I've tried to address a lot of objections here because we can't even had this discussion without having spent an hour talking about all these traps and problems and incorrect ways of thinking so now finally after an hour of introduction we can talk about what is government why does it really exist so for this we need to really go back into the history books and take a look at how human society evolved and developed here's a simplistic little version of why government exists so government is a human invention it doesn't exist unless humans invent it agreed is this obvious enough to you I hope so because there's no government for example within a chip society so a million years ago there was no government and even a hundred thousand years ago government was very very limited government really started to arise only when mankind was able to settle down thanks to developments in agriculture and to accumulate resources in one area because before that if you look at the animal kingdom animals take a look at giraffes lions polar bears dragonflies mice whatever they're not able to accumulate large stashes of resources see mostly what they do is that every day they have to go out and find food for themselves and they can only find as much food as they can carry and that food could last them maybe a few days maybe a week maybe a month at most and then they got to go out and find more they can't just like you know a lion can't just build up a hoard of a hundred thousand antelopes that he just has for himself you know in his den he has to go out every day and hunt for them otherwise he starves and he dies so you might say well so what what's the big deal it's a very big deal when a species comes to the point where they're actually able to accumulate resources so when mankind stops just running around and hunting buffaloes and being nomadic but when mankind acquires cultivated animals who can be stationary who he can milk and farm and so forth and get food from and when he can plant wheat and other crops and and grow his own food now he can acquire stashes of grain tons of grain which become valuable and so here's the real problem of government in the animal kingdom there are no rules notice that it's extremely brutal and selfish anything that you can do in the animal kingdom to assure your own survival is fair play and that's how animals play and if you notice animals tend to be very deceptive they're very sneaky nature is very sneaky because when it comes to survival it's a matter of life and death and there are no moral qualms about what it takes to survive if you got to eat somebody you eat them if you got to fool somebody you fool them if you have to camouflage yourself and then like a rattlesnake bite someone in the neck from a camouflage position you know bite a rabbit or whatever as he's passing you by you do it you do it if you got a cannibalize your own children to survive you do it that's how nature works it's extremely brutal we as humans today we find ourselves in a very cushy position where we are protected from this brutality and that's thanks to government and that's why government Rose is because what happened was that as these resources got accumulated there were many small tribes remember humans were never individualistic we always lived in tribes fifty people a hundred people 200 people whatever it was doesn't matter but it was a tribe and within that tribe there was a form of pseudo government there was a sort of structure there was no individualism when you're living in a tribe you're at Spile dynamic staged purple you don't even have a sense of self or personal autonomy or individuality you are living for that tribe you are like an ant in an ant colony so keep this in mind you libertarians make sure you get your human development right so we have these different tribes and these tribes start to accumulate resources grain various metals objects that they work plates pots houses they develop families children wives all of this farm lands herd animals you know sheep and cows and all this sort of stuff skins and pelts and furs and and all this various kinds of tools weapons and now there's an interesting development one tribe gets the crazy idea that hey you know instead of growing my own crops and hurting my own animals and going collecting food every day now that's a lot of work why don't I just go to the neighboring tribe which is completely defenseless has no perimeter has no border has no weapons because all they do is they're just peacefully farming and let me just conquer them and steal all their stuff and while I'm at it I'll rape their women too and I'll enslave their children and then they can work for me and not only do I get to conquer them but I get to enslave them such that they work for me and do all the work for the rest of my life brilliant perfect this is the perfect survival strategy so of course I make some weapons and I go do it but what's the problem with this survival strategy it works the short term but it doesn't work in the long term because there's a lot of tribes around the entire earth there's hundreds there's thousands there's hundreds of thousands of different tribes and there's always under this situation a stronger tribe so while you or I might go and conquer those defenseless weak people over there we might do that but then ten years later some stronger tribe comes and conquers and enslaves us and rapes all our wives do we like that no we don't like that and then see that stronger tribe even when it conquers us some even stronger tribe will come and conquer them and enslave them so what happens is that we see the rise of the classical Greek and Roman sort of city-state all throughout the Mediterranean and other parts around the world we see societies as city-states not countries but city-states which means it's a city with a walled perimeter a very thick high wall and that wall is the only thing that protects that city and those citizens from being butchered people don't appreciate this you know what the standard was in the Mediterranean area with these city-states around - two and a half thousand years ago here was the standard operating procedure if your city got attacked and your wall was penetrated and your city was conquered the standard rule was that all of the men in your city would be slaughtered all of the women would be raped and the women and the children would be enslaved that was the rule that was the whole point of conquering other cities which is why you see they build these massive walls because that wall is the only thing that's keeping you from getting raped and enslaved or your throat slit that's human nature that right there I want you to understand that that is freedom that is freedom that is how freedom works it's gang warfare the most powerful ends up conquering everybody else and it's a situation which is quite nasty and brutal and humans don't like it so what we looked for is we looked for systems that were less brutal how do we mollify these extremes of violence and conquering and slaving and thieving and stealing and raping and and all of this how do we prevent that by creating a government first and foremost the government was created simply as a means of defense against enslavement that's literally what it was and our early governments were quite brutal themselves because they what they were protecting us from was a greater brutality of enslavement murder and rape and genocide so we could tolerate a little bit of cruelty towards our own citizens as long as it protects us against the greater cruelty of what our enemies and other tribes and foreigners will do to us if we don't unify together you see we were forced to unify it was an arms race if you didn't unify you were murdered enslaved and raped that was your reality there was no option to say oh well wait a minute guys wait a minute guys but what about the non-aggression principle what about morals what about being nice and kind isn't slavery and rape wrong don't you realize that it doesn't matter they'll enslave and rape you anyways there is no non-aggression principle at this point there is no moral standards at this point they weren't evolved or developed yet this is the animal kingdom the animal kingdom is freedom this is what freedom means and this this notion of freedom is extremely important for us to explain in a bit more detail so many people misunderstand freedom and it leads to a lot of confusion within our politics freedom is not an absolute good you have to understand from the human perspective freedom has deep complexity to it and it tends to be very counter intuitive and fold in on itself so here's what true freedom means true freedom means that I'm allowed to do whatever I want and you are allowed to do whatever you want and there are no rules that's true freedom that means if I like your wife I can rape her if I like your daughter I can I can slit your throat in the middle of the night and I can take her for myself and I can make make her my slave and she'll be feeding me grapes at gunpoint for the rest of her life that's freedom you libertarians out there understand that what freedom means people get this idea that all freedom is all good and it's all rainbows and butterflies if only we had more freedom no freedom is something you need protection against you're way too weak and you care about your own petty little comforts in life too much to tolerate true freedom so we collectively as a species what we did the freedom was so brutal that we have to find systems to mollify it and therefore we accept the limitation in a sense government is about reducing absolute freedom for the purpose of fairness and peace so we accept certain limitations so that we can avoid getting enslaved and raped and thieved and murdered and scammed and all those other things we need somebody to adjudicate these for us we need to lay down some common rules that we can all agree upon that we can act on so that we can just live a peaceful life and just go about our daily business and just walk down the street without getting raped that's the reality but how do you get millions of people with different backgrounds ethnicities religions languages and worldviews and values and levels of development and conscious how do you unify all of those people to agree on a common set of rules about what is right and what is wrong you might think oh well let's see it's obvious it's easy you know people know that it's wrong to kill don't they don't know they don't people go and it's wrong to rape no they don't people know that it's wrong to scam people no they don't that's the whole problem if they knew all those things if people were just well-behaved then you're right we can live in libertarian fantasy and we wouldn't need any strong government or military or any of these things but that's not real life that's fantasy I'm talking about real life in real life when you give people freedom total freedom they enslave murder and rape you and they steal from you that's what they do because that's survival survival is [ __ ] brutal it doesn't care about being good it doesn't care about being moral it doesn't care about being fair he doesn't care about equality it only cares about life its own life it doesn't care about other life it only cares about its own life it only cares about its own people his family its friends maybe it's tribe maybe it's religion but nobody else outside of that all foreigners are disposable all minorities are disposable anyone who's not like me is disposable anyone with a different skin color is disposable anyone with a different gender is disposable this is how low consciousness people live this is how they think how do you solve this problem this is a very serious problem I want you to understand the depth of the problem that government solves it's amazing that it even worked at all this is as humans this is our most remarkable technology and we don't even think of it as a technology so freedom is counterintuitive you think maximum freedom would be great but actually it ends up being very harmful so we have to limit it but of course if you limited freedom too much then it also becomes a sort of oppression and it kind of goes full circle and it turns into its own form of enslavement as well so there has to be very careful dynamic balance between between the two also I want you to notice freedom is counterintuitive in the following way at first it seems like we have to give up our freedoms in order to prevent ourselves from being attacked and enslaved by neighboring tribes and it might seem like that's a like that's a downer it's like oh man I have to give up my freedoms my individualism in order just to not be raped and and killed and all that and it might seem like that's that's a downside but actually it goes deeper than this yes you give up certain freedoms but then as government allows us to unify together were able to be more than the sum of our parts were able to coordinate in collective ways we're able to build things that we couldn't build by ourselves what a million unified people could do and build is very different than what a hundred unified people can do and build a million people can build something much greater than what a hundred people can build and so in a certain sense what happens is that we build stuff we build up infrastructure and that infrastructure then ends up increasing our freedom so for example 2,000 years ago you didn't have the freedom to fly around the world because there were no airplanes there were no airports there was no electricity there was no government that enabled these things and if you think that you can have airports and electricity and airplanes and global travel for one country to the next effortlessly the way that we can today where you can just kind of go on priceline.com and you can just buy a ticket for 500 dollars for $1,000 and fly halfway around the world in the next 24 hours if you think that that would be possible without modern governments you're completely deluding yourself all of that is enabled by modern governments modern infrastructure you see so yes you had to give up some freedoms your ancestor had to give up some freedoms 2,000 years ago but that was the cost that was paid to ensure that now we have all sorts of amazing freedoms like the internet YouTube social media amazing food from all around the world available in any supermarket you didn't have this couple thousand years ago airplane travel cars and just like I could spend an hour listing all these different freedoms that now we have we can go into outer space even which would totally not be possible without government without infrastructure don't think it is simplicity like all well but space set Leo SpaceX is a private company and it can build a rocket better than government this is so superficial you have to understand that SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of giants you can't have a SpaceX without first having a stable government and without having NASA and other government programs that paved the way for what SpaceX was able to do so yes of course now SpaceX and other private industry will colonize space and that's great but you have to understand why that's possible the freedom that SpaceX has comes only on the shoulders of giants that came before it see is very important to understand and appreciate it's also important understand that there are trade-offs between individualism and collectivism it's not that individualism is best or collectivism is best this is a false dichotomy the reality is that these need to be dynamically balanced all the time within society we need to at the same time allow people to have individual rights and freedoms and autonomy but also realize that these individuals are not really individuals but they're part of a larger collective and that there are certain benefits that we get from being a collective in fact mankind's greatest strengthens of species were the most powerful species on this planet because we're able to form cohesive ordered collectives on a massive scale like no other species is able to do you could have a small herd of antelope you could have a school of fish but what it's like a couple hundred a couple thousand fish in a school at most maybe you have a flock of birds that has a couple thousand birds in it but but there's no serious organization there so they're not able to do anything really interesting so really these animals are just restricted to very basic things like shelter food and a couple of other basic things they're not able to do anything interesting and therefore they are very limited you might say a bird is very free yes a bird is free in the sense that it doesn't have a government controlling it but notice also how limited the bird is it's not free in the sense that all it does is shits and eats and has sex and that's all it can do and it can't cure its own diseases it can't build nice shelters for itself it can't educate itself there so they're so limited see so we as a species because we're more intelligent were more capable we need that collectivism we need to form a community not only are we forming a community because it serves us individually but also it's something that feel good being part of a community gives you a sense of larger purpose which a lot of people on stage Orange overlook the importance of community community is not an evil you know there are problems with taking collectivism too far certainly there are problems it needs to be delicately balanced but there's an even deeper point here which many people don't understand at all which is that society is a whole lawn and human beings are whole ants what is this a hold on mmm hold on it's a whole topic that I'll have an episode on in the future but a whole lawn means that it's a part and a whole simultaneously so for example my hand is a whole lawn what that means is that it's a whole and that it can do whatever hand does and we can call it a hand and we can understand that it's a whole you know hand is like an individual unit but also it's made up of little cells and molecules and muscles and bones and tendons in each of those or parts of the whole so in this way the hand is made up of smaller things but also the hand itself is a smaller part of my entire body and the hand itself doesn't have any power or ability unless it's part of my heart and my brain it's all interconnected my whole nervous system and all this you know the hand needs the teeth because without the teeth I can't eat food and I can't generate the calories that are necessary to power this hand so you see how it's deeply interconnected this way likewise the hand can't be a handless it has all the parts that it needs it needs the bones it needs the veins it needs the blood it needs the molecules that are making up this hand so here is the problem that people fall into they don't recognize that human beings are also whole ons we are not the highest unit there is a society above us so the way that nature works is that there are whole lawns within whole lawns within whole lawns within whole lawns all the way up and all the way down but we humans tend to be so arrogant that we think that all of this is just for us and is just all for my personal individual ego and then we forget that we're part of this larger collective we're part of a communion we're part of society which is its own whole on and so the trick with these whole ons is that there's always a delicate balance that needs to be struck between the autonomy of an individual part versus the communion that that part takes part in of some larger hold on so for example for my hand to function my hand cannot have a will of its own it needs to be subject to the communion of the larger unit that is a part of you know because if my hand had it's its own desires and ideas it would start doing whatever it wants right this would be a problem because the hand then is not serving me the higher unit that it's designed to serve so the hand needs to know its place within the whole scheme otherwise it becomes pathological and dysfunctional so this is what happens with a lot of libertarians and staged orange people is that they are like the hand which forgets that it's part of something larger and so they act like individuals swing their pendulum all the way to the side towards 100% freedom and autonomy without recognizing that it's not just about autonomy it's about communion as well you don't just want 100 percent individualism and autonomy you want some measure of communion but also you don't want too much communion to the point where you just become like the Borg collective and your own individuality is completely wiped out so what you have to understand is that when we're talking about government in society there's more going on than just a bunch of individuals at each level of reality when you get a bunch of little parts together combine them together it's more than the sum of its parts so reductionism doesn't work we can't just reduce the hand to a bunch of atoms even though it is a bunch of atoms but we can't just reduce it to that because the hand has its own unique functions that atoms do not have it has emergent qualities likewise societies and governments and groups of people and communities have their own emergent properties so government is not only responsible for regulating individuals and creating a great life for individuals government is also responsible for regulating groups of individuals because within a society you have subgroups you have religious denominations you have political parties in factions you have cults you have corporations and businesses you have clubs you have sports teams you have all of this stuff that I talked about in my episode about collective ego and so society needs to not only deal with individual egos but also collective egos which adds an additional layer of complexity to this entire thing of course on top of all that society as a whole is one giant collective ego which is more than the sum of its parts so this is very tricky as you can see this is very complicated now you can see that the way that we discuss politics none of this has taken into account usually usually all that it is is it's just one individual or one lobbying group lobbyists group special interest group trying to look out for its own individual interests without caring about the interests of anybody else in society and this creates a sort of myopia the sort of stage orange myopia which creates for a very dysfunctional society and in a nutshell we can boil all this down to simply blind selfishness or what I call devilry when you're acting out of blind selfishness without any concern for your impact on your environment or others around you or what it means for society as a whole you're being a devil and you can expect the kind of results that a devil gets you can just expect a lot of evil corruption and all sorts of other problems including of course suffering which is why we're you know this whole topic is to reduce suffering that's our whole goal here fundamentally what reality is doing on a metaphysical level is that it's dividing itself and that it's figuring out ways to reunite with itself and it's doing this over and over and over and over again at all levels of reality from molecules to cells to individual humans to societies to countries this is what's happening division is problematic because every boundary that's created needs to be enforced and maintained and these boundaries are always temporary and they can die which leads to suffering if you get too attached to one of these boundaries so what mankind has been doing since the beginning of its existence is that it started off as like a unified group of people let's say in sub-saharan Africa then they all migrated around the world and by doing that they divided themselves into various tribes and races and ethnicities over thousands of years and then eventually these tribes all grew into cities and city-states and countries and all this and then they started to clash with each other and because you know the populations just got too big and they started to to overwhelm the environment to the point where they started some bleed literally bleed into each other every tribe grew so much that it's like a fungus you know - fungus is just like growing into each other and clashing with each other to the point where we are in a world now where it's no longer sustainable to stick to one tribe because we're recognizing that were a global species see you can either deny that and resist that or you can accept it if you deny it then that creates all sorts of serious political problems violence war genocide and so forth this happens because people deny that we have divided ourselves and that now the proper thing is to start to unify ourselves and that this is totally proper and natural this is just how reality works at a metaphysical level this is what happens and then once we unify we'll divide again there will be further divisions for example when humans start to colonize the Moon and Mars and the rest of the solar system we're going to divide ourselves again you see and then after a certain point once all the planets get populated 100,000 years from now you know once Mars is full and the moon is full then they starts a war with each other now we have to unify them again see what's happening human political history has a definite arc to it I want you to notice this arc what this arc is ultimately doing is its leading towards greater equality and consciousness less brutality less oppression less enslavement greater complexity greater freedom because remember by building up infrastructure and complexity we're actually able to do new things that could not be done before like space travel there cannot be space travel without governments and it's leading to greater unity and the long run the very long run of course it's not perfectly linear there's always ups and downs so you know you could be living through an era or a century where there's a lot of disunity there's a lot of war there's a lot of violence but then after that passes there will be a higher level of complexity more fairness more equality and less suffering and then more unity and then and then that will also you know oscillate and go up and down and back and forth so what is politics and government really about first and foremost it's about survival individual and collective survival there's no such thing as survival in the abstract or survival as a universal for everybody survival is relative to your identity whatever you identify as is the thing that needs to be survived so what do you identify as being a Christian a Muslim a Jew an atheist a man a woman French German Japanese American Native American African American rich poor upper class middle class lower class gay straight transsexual bisexual identity plays a huge part in politics its central its central it's not just that the Left plays identity politics everybody is playing identity politics all the time that's what politics is about and not only is it individual in any it's collective identity you know do you identify as a hippie as a punk as a socialist a communist a capitalist as an American these are all collective identities you see people get attached their collective identity just as much as they do to their individual identity these things are fused together and so this is why politics gets so heated and gets so emotional and it gets so irrational and it gets so unconscious is because people are generally not conscious of the fact that identity is the thing that's being survived because they haven't done this work that we've been doing with actual eyes that aren't they don't understand what an ego is or what a collective ego is they're just blindly acting out on selfishness that's what low consciousness means you're not conscious of your selfishness you're not conscious of the selfishness of your tribe or of your collective so many Americans are not conscious of how America as a whole is extremely selfish as a nation neither are african-americans or Jews or Muslims see so I'm not picking on any one particular group here this is a rampant problem for 99% of people nobody is immune to this stuff and it's extremely tricky so what is politics and government really about it's about moderating between different competing survival agendas regulating this selfishness so that people are selfish but not in extreme ways because if it's too extreme it's it's not pleasant for anybody and in fact selfishness itself becomes its own worst enemy it's Karma you might think that we'll believe but being super selfish what's wrong with that well what's wrong with that is it comes back around what's wrong with going in and raping your neighbor's wife what's wrong is that then he comes back and does it to your wife see if you could just go do that again get away with it without any repercussions then there wouldn't be anything wrong with it per se you could have moral objections but I mean just like pragmatically there'd be nothing wrong with it but in practice there's a big problem because it's tit for tat you do something nasty to somebody else they do it back to you have you noticed how this works in relationships a relationship needs to be rather even where one side is not so selfish that it's taking everything and dominating the other side because because that ends up being unsustainable because this side the one that's getting dominated and pressed builds a resentment and what is up happening is it gets so resentful that it takes a knife in the middle of the night and cuts the other guy's dick off that's what happens that's reality right so we need to come to a sort of truce we say okay look okay look I won't cut your dick off you won't cut my dick off and we'll live peacefully ok can we agree to that and of course you know some people agree to it and some people still don't agree to it because they think that I can get away with it I'll cut off his dick but he won't cut off mine because I'll have an army bhai see it sort of but then that doesn't last because there's always a bigger army and then also you're always living in fear that someone's gonna cut your dick off even if you have a giant army still when that tyrant or dictator is sleeping at night he's still having dreams and nightmares about getting his dick cut off so what is politics about it's about distribution of power and resources this very silly idea that's thrown around in the media that all these Socialists are for redistribution of wealth and that this is a bad thing all government and politics is about redistribution of power and resources that's the whole game it's a giant negotiation we're sitting in a negotiation table and we're trying to decide who has too much power and too many resources and the way that most people play the game because they're so selfish is that their strategy is simply to maximize their own power and resources they don't care about fairness or equality so even if I already have more power than everybody else more money than everybody else if I'm a stage Orange typical CEO or corporate person I don't care I need more I need more power I need even more resources cuz it's not enough that I have billions I need trillions cuz I have enemies out there Leo if I don't do it some other company will do it so I got to do it that's their thinking it's all about redistribution of power and resources what do you think lobbying is about every single major corporation in America and really all around the world lobbies their government why so that the rules of the game can be rigged in such a way that resources are redistributed to them rather than their competitors that's business that's life that's survival a company can't not do this if it's not doing this it doesn't survive but also this produces a lot of collateral damage there are worse and better ways to go about it there are pathological ways and there are healthy ways to go about it there are on ecological ways and there are environmentally-friendly and ecological ways to go about it there are unconscious ways and conscious ways to go about it politics is about reduction of brutality and oppression at least that's what it should be about that's what it is in the long term it's about creating a fair playing field for people it's about building infrastructure and systems that increase freedom and allow for greater complexity and more interesting things to be done by all the citizens of the society it's about community it's not just about utility and pragmatism it's also about a sense of community you can participate with others you know in a festival carnival or a football game or singing the national anthem or pledging allegiance to the flag or participating in some sort of large-scale religion religious gathering you know these are all communities and we get satisfaction from being part of a community politics and government is about evolution and about emergence of higher whole ons so don't you dare think that evolution ends with man we are just a tiny speck a little part little particle of something much larger at is emerging inhabiting and really everything the society is doing as its evolving is really beyond our individual control evolution is guiding all of it and evolution is guiding it towards higher levels of organization and higher levels of consciousness and you need to understand and be humbled by that so that you don't think that you're at the top of the food chain because you're not and if you think you are you're going to behave like a devil and there's going to be pathology as a result and lots of suffering find your proper place in the universe is my point government is also about creating a consensus amongst millions of people with diverse survival agendas of course with so many people to please not everyone can be satisfied but there are some decisions which benefit the majority and which are generally beneficial to most people which are the ones that we should be cared about carrying the most about government is about building a consensus between millions of people which becomes a battle of agendas which is why we have culture wars we have policy debates we have economic manipulation we have legal battles in the courts and then we have actual war what is all this about it's about enforcing one's own survival agenda and changing the culture in such a way that it benefits you and your tribe see so you might be wondering at this point Leo what kind of government or society is the best that should it be capitalist or socialist or what well that's the whole point who's to say what the best is the best for whom you have to understand that this notion of the best is a very simplistic and fallacious notion there's no such thing everything is relative what's best for your survival is not best for somebody else's survival and there are no rules that say what we should do we're making it up as we go along so how should we make it up what kind of things will we say are right and what kind of things will we say are wrong because there is no such thing objectively as a absolute we are defining what is right and what is wrong and of course every government on the planet has their own definitions of what is right and what is wrong if you haven't noticed yet it's important to understand this it might seem very basic but but you know a lot of people get stuck in all these policy debates because they have firm convictions ideological positions about what they know is right and what they know is wrong it would be much wiser if we all admitted that we're making it up and that there's no such thing as right and wrong and that when we say something is right or something is wrong really what we're doing is we are unconsciously blindly executing our own survival agenda so usually when people insist that something is right or wrong really what they're doing is they're just acting out what's right for them what's good for their survival without realizing that what's good for them is not necessarily what's good for their neighbor and that therefore we have these disagreements and Wars and so forth see so we want to start to get along together and we really want to unify at higher levels of hold on organization we need to start to understand that our notions of right and wrong are relative otherwise we can't do it and this is why a lot of right-wingers get stuck because right wingers tend to have very firm ideological convictions about right and wrong now of course the left wingers also do but generally they're a little bit more open to the relativism to conservatives and right-wingers relativism is a dirty word and of course just by me saying what I just said already I'm going to be labeled as a leftist and all the stuff that I said here is going to be dismissed and discounted but on the other hand I can't not say what I need to say here this is conscious politics the problem is that to a devil conscious politics is not gonna look like conscious politics to a devil conscious politics is gonna look like evil because the devil projects his own devilry out onto everybody else so that he can appear to himself to be an angel because he's blind to his own selfishness so actually when I advance conscious politics as a sort of a selfless way of going about politics trying to transcend the self those who are the most selfish will view what we're talking about here as the most selfish this is their defense mechanism you see this is how it works there's another very deep problem that people don't understand about government which is that government must be inclusive in a way that other organizations don't have to be which makes government much more difficult to manage and organize see government is the highest structure that humans have developed unlike say a corporation or a religious order or a commune or a club or a gang these are all smaller subunits of the larger overarching unit of government or country see and what this means is that for example if I have a spiritual community let's say I build a hippie commune and I have people who I invite to you know come join my community some criminal some violet insane you know psychopaths criminal somehow makes his way into my commune and you know after a little while all of us together maybe it's 50 of us in this commune we all recognize that you know that guy's a troublemaker he's violent he's dangerous he's crazy we gotta kick him out so we just kick him out and then everything goes fine we can do that a club can do that because there's a larger unit of society which is able to to take that person you see and and that larger unit has mechanisms for dealing with that person there's a legal system there's mental health professionals there's a police there's insane asylums if he needs to go there there's prisons if he needs to go there's a court system that can try him there's all these various remedies that exist in large society which enables us as a little spiritual community to kick someone like that out but society as a whole doesn't have that option what does society or government as a whole do with poor people disabled people sick people insane people crazy people deluded people psychopaths sociopaths schizophrenic religious fanatics fundamentalists criminals terrorists insurgents you can't exclude them where are you gonna put them are you gonna what kick them out of your country to some other country well that other country won't take them I mean maybe they will if they were immigrants and they gained marry legally maybe you could deport them but for most you know in most cases they're not immigrants the problem is not immigrants the problem is your own internal people what do you do with them because every country has their own hordes of poor sick mentally ill and saying crazy people and I'm not judging these people I'm just saying this is a reality there are some really fringe cases out there which can destabilize your whole society if you don't somehow control them so what do you do with them you can't kick them out and even if you could kick them out let's say you sent them off to some island in the Caribbean well then you would have an island full of criminals and terrorists and other people and these people would rally around together and they would form their own government and then they would come and attack you with their crazy ideas see so it's not gonna work so what needs to happen is that you need to integrate them and you need to create systems and infrastructure for deal with these common situations every country has sick people mentally ill people like addicts people who are disabled and non-functional in various ways people who are just in crippling poverty or they have mental conditions where they can't maintain a job what do you do with these people you can't just say well [ __ ] em who cares Leo it's all just every man for himself you can't say that because while you are sleeping in your comfy little house with your beautiful wife and your children one of these sick mentally deranged poor people who doesn't have a home who you just said aw [ __ ] him he's gonna crawl into your house and rape your family you see so it don't work your plan don't work it's not sustainable wouldn't it be better if we found ways to actually solve these problems in a more humane way where these people got some treatment they got some help so that they weren't harm to themselves and to the rest of society you see because when you have someone who's dissatisfied with it with his own life and has nothing to lose and he feels like he's completely lost and hopeless and he has no chance for success or improvement and that nobody cares about him this is the type of person that goes into a school and shoots up your children see so maybe it's in your own best long-term self-interest to take these fringe cases seriously and not just to say ah [ __ ] them every man for himself because you're part of a community see likewise this applies to other governments we could ask the same question like what do we do with the poorest countries the most dysfunctional countries in the world like maybe Afghanistan certain very underdeveloped countries in Africa and certain countries and in the Middle East you know these countries are our less developed and they have some serious pathologies and you could say well who gives a [ __ ] about them you know I'm just here in America and I'm comfortable everything's good I don't care about what happens in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or anywhere else yeah unless you happen to be working in New York at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and then a plane crashes into your building and you or your family dies as a result of that now all the sudden see now it's no longer oh just [ __ ] it no now it matters it matters that there are people in the world who are suffering through enormous hardships and who feel that their life is so miserable they feel so oppressed that they feel they need to get on an airplane and crash it into a building see it matters so rather than a leaning those people the smarter wiser thing to do would be to integrate them to help them because happy people don't crash airplanes into buildings happy people don't start Wars happy people don't rape others happy people don't feve and steal and create scams so these sort of isolationist policies where you separate yourself off with a wall from other people or where you lock others in a jail cell or you you confine them to some bad country that you forget about this doesn't work it's like sweeping dirt under the rug eventually you got to clean it out at some point otherwise it becomes a cancer what happens if some terrorist cell in Pakistan acquires a nuclear weapon can you ignore that no because the world is interconnected and it's not just a bunch of individuals we're dealing with complex collectives here multi-layered collectives collectives within collectives within collectives within collectives so government is uniquely difficult because it has to account for all people it has to be inclusive you can't just take the best of the best and sort of start your own personal Country Club of the richest most elite most intelligent high IQ individuals because the majority of the people are not high IQ individuals by definition nor are they elites nor are they geniuses nor are they super wealthy billionaires so if you do start your little billionaire Country Club guess what the rest the people will gang up and take you over that's what they'll do because there's more of them than of you and if you get too much power and you you try to oppress them too much or you try to be too exclusive you leave them out of the club they'll get resentful and they'll hurt you for it and they'll take away all your money and your freedom and they will cut your head off in some revolution so government is so difficult precisely because people have so many different world views and perspectives because there are so many diverse survival agendas that people have like I talked about in my episode why people seem crazy people literally inhabit different realities because reality is not an objective static thing but it is mind dependent your mind is constructing your reality and so millions and billions of people are constructing their own realities and now we have to somehow unify them all together otherwise we all slid each other's throats and destroy ourselves through nuclear holocaust this is why government is so difficult it's like herding cats and you're trying to get everybody to understand what's really going on but everybody is so goddamn selfish and desperate just to survive to make ends meet and to feed their family and to protect themselves that they have no interest thinking about philosophy or different perspectives or about systems thinking or about awakening about spirituality they don't give a [ __ ] about any of that all they care about is how to pay the bills how to put food in their children's bellies how to defend themselves and their home see this is the condition we're in so it's very very difficult there are no easy answers here government cannot be merely an intellectual exercise government is a highly pragmatic endeavor these issues were talking about our life and death issues for people many of you listening to me you live in a first world democracy you have enough money you have a shelter you have food and you're relatively comfortable still you suffer a lot but you're relatively comfortable you're not desperate so for you you can just sit around and theorize about politics but there are billions literally billions of people on this planet right now who are dealing with famine poverty oppression slavery sex trafficking addiction drugs abusive relationships exploitation by their bosses and their companies and co-workers underpay corporations stealing from them toxic pollution that's happening in their neighborhoods oppression racism genocide ethnic cleansing gang warfare violence in their neighborhoods these are life-and-death issues for these people and government needs to address serious survival threats so put away your culture wars and your petty ideologies because there's real problems that need solving you'll really appreciate that when your own survival is threatened that's what all of your ideals will fly out the window you're only a libertarian as long as your survival hasn't been threatened as soon as it has you ain't going to be a libertarian for very long you're gonna [ __ ] and whine and moan and your survival your ego is gonna kick in and it's gonna get you to do what needs to be done for you to live otherwise you're gonna die and that's how it's been for thousands of years I also want you to appreciate that no human knows what the best design is for government because government is not just something that one person sits down designs and controls for rather government evolves through natural selection and trial and error the difference is that even though our bodies evolved through natural selection this was done for us we didn't have an active conscious participation in how our bodies evolved but with government we do we get to say how we want to create it and what we think is best and in this way we are consciously participating in the evolutionary natural selection process which is rather cool but it's also a pretty big responsibility so how do we create the best government here's a thought experiment which will help you to understand how to do this I want you to imagine that before you're born you can look down upon the planet look upon the governments that exist different countries the different people and you can you can decide who you're gonna incarnate as you can be born into any country into any part of the country as any race as any profession as any anyone with any kind of talent you can be a man or a woman or a Muslim a Christian family or whatever you want you can you can be born into that and while you're doing that you also get to determine what kind of government you want but there's an additional wrinkle you're also fully conscious that you will incarnate as everybody else as well so even though this one time you're gonna come down let's say as a rich white man living in New York City who's a stockbroker who's a billionaire let's say you pick that one first cuz that one sounds like the most appealing to you but there's one very important difference is that you know that after that one you're gonna incarnate as a poor person in the south you're gonna incarnate as some kid in Africa with AIDS you're gonna incarnate as a heroin drug addict who's homeless on the streets you're gonna incarnate as a gay person as a trans person as a black person as a Muslim as a Christian as a fundamentalist as a Jew as a Palestinian as a as a man as a woman has everything that can possibly ever exist and now you ask yourself what kind of government would you want the F that's the kicker right there now all the sudden you realize how important it is to have a fair and equal government because the thing that keeps people from having an objective sense of fairness is their own selfishness and individual bias and so what happens is that somebody happens to be born into a rich family white male in New York City and becomes a stockbroker because his dad was a stockbroker and he's a billionaire because his dad was a millionaire and gave him millions of dollars to start his stock brokering business with you know that person his attitude and worldview is such that he never thinks he will be poor he never thinks that he's gonna be a drug addict he never thinks he's gonna be gay or trans or black or a Muslim he never thinks he's gonna grow up in Africa never he never thinks he's gonna get cancer or AIDS or he never thinks he's gonna be exploited by some corporation like McDonald's that pays you a slave wage or he's gonna be born and work in some sweatshop in in in Bangladesh for you know 18 hours a day as slave labor he never thinks he's gonna be born as a young girl who gets sold into the sex trafficking trade he never thinks that because he's so locked into his own persona and identity of being this rich white guy that like that's all he knows and in fact he actively denies and doesn't want to look at all of the other people in the world who are suffering and living through incredible unfairness and brutality he blocks all that out of his mind because it's very painful to think about these things because if he thought about these things his wealthy New York stockbroker lifestyle could not be maintained he would have a moral crisis he would have a existential crisis of consciousness a spiritual crisis for all the suffering and qualms what is going on around the world but if you know that you're gonna incarnate as all of these people then what do you want you want a fair government that treats everybody well it doesn't exploit anybody that doesn't enslave anybody that doesn't treat one group over another group that doesn't favor one religion over another religion see this is what Christians for example fundamentalist Christians don't understand they don't understand that they're gonna reincarnate as a as a Muslim how would you like to live in America as a Muslim if right now you're a Christian you think you'd like that you think it's fair how would you like it if you were born as up as a black person in the South 300 years ago if you're a white Southern Christian today you think you would like that you think it's fair see very quickly you see how unfair it is because the ego your identity doesn't care about fairness it cares about blind selfishness and gaining survival advantage that's all you care about so the whole trick with conscious politics is finding a way to step outside of our egoic survival agenda only then can we construct a proper government it's rather like balancing in game design I used to be a game designer and if you've played video games especially certain online games which are very competitive you know that bad balancing can destroy a game if you're playing some world of warcraft the paladin and the sorcerer and the elf Archer they need to all be balanced now that doesn't mean they're all equal they have unique skillsets and strengths and weaknesses and pros and cons but it needs to be balanced so that they can all play together in a in a good way and see as a game designer you come to appreciate that you can't just have one favor you can't just say oh well the palette is the one that I came oh stand screw all the rest I'm just gonna make the power the pallet and the most powerful one you can't do that that makes you a terrible game designer you need to be able to step outside of your personal preferences and you guys say okay if I was being objective how do i equalize all of these so that they can play well together and then it's a it's a fun game and nobody is is overpowered because if if one of the classes is the best objectively the best and everyone's gonna play that class and that's gonna be worse for everybody to see it's better it's healthier for your online game when people are playing the different classes rather than where 90% of your entire playerbase is only playing the paladin cuz then it's boring everybody's just a paladin it's it's lame it's much better when you've got your Sorcerer's and your elves and all that nicely balanced out it also means that the the other person can have some incentive to play through the different roles they don't just play paladin your game will actually get more longevity out of it if the guy can then reroll his character into an elf Archer and then a wizard and an orc and so on it's very much like that with society mankind generally speaking has not yet discovered the true aim of government here it is the ultimate aim of government should be to elevate consciousness and love that's the key the true aim of government is to elevate consciousness and love this is what everybody ultimately wants this is the one common thread through all human lives no matter whether you're living as a rich person poor person sick person disabled person African person white person or whatever because this is what life is about consciousness and love government should be about creating a healthy ecosystem for raising the consciousness of all beings as much as possible that's the ideal now of course doing that it's going to be quite challenging but still to know what we're aiming for is very important most people and most politicians and most political analysts don't even understand this they don't even use the words consciousness and love when they're talking about government or politics it's ridiculous we're living in the dark ages we are living in barbarous times because the word consciousness is not even used within politics and it's dismissed as some all airy-fairy thing consciousness of love yeah Leo right that's gonna that's gonna help somebody you have to understand we need to know theoretically what the aim is first before we can reach it see because if government is not being designed for the maximization of consciousness and love what is it being designed for by default remember it's being designed for devilry it's being designed for materialism profit greed power fear hatred isolationism ethnic identity division theocracy every man for himself anarchy something like that these are the default things when you're not designing society for high consciousness and love you're by default designing it for low consciousness and hatred it's really that simple see and right now most of our politicians and people think that society needs to be designed towards life designed towards towards materialistic greed that's what our society is being designed towards right now and that's why we have so many problems now when I talk about by the way spirituality and politics intersecting don't make the mistake of thinking that what I'm talking about is removing the separation of church and state and creating a theocracy that's not what I'm talking about some of you Christians might might get that wrong idea or some Muslims no no remember that there's pre rational rational and post rational there is like religious scientific than post scientific spiritual all right so human consciousness in society evolves through these various stages so I'm not talking about building a theocracy I'm talking about an on ideological form of spirituality which is the underpinning of all of government and society now you can see already have the enormous problem here is that many stage orange people balk at this idea that all Leo you're gonna introduce spirituality into government this is this is terrible this is this is taking a step backwards we need less spirituality we need less religion not more but then what do you have you have rampant scientism and materialism and reductionism that's all you have then you have a society built on greed that's not gonna work we're already doing that he's producing terrible results you might wonder though but Leah why consciousness in love what's so special about these two isn't this some sort of just hippy Airy fairy ideal can you really build a real government on consciousness and love of course of course you can that's what we've been doing all along it's just that there's there's many gradations and degrees to consciousness and love right now our consciousness and love is so low that we don't even recognize that what we're doing is elevating consciousness and love it's happening anyways because here's the secret all that evolution is doing is maximizing consciousness and love that's what evolution is doing as a universal force this goes way beyond humans the squeeze scope this goes way beyond my own personal hippy new agey ideas I'm talking about the entire origin of life and physical existence now for this you have to really reach some high levels of consciousness but eventually you awaken so deeply that you realize that all of reality is an infinitely expanding love fractal of which mankind is one tiny branch and so when you become conscious of that that recontextualizes all of politics and government for you it recontextualizes all of human life now you start to see what we need to be doing here on earth what this whole life is about individually and collectively we can be aligned with the force of evolution or we can be aligned against it if we're aligned against it we're going to go extinct if we align with it we're going to create a beautiful society and amazing things will happen and we will reduce suffering the choice is ours we have this freedom you might wonder well Leo how is evolution about love and consciousness this makes no sense because there was no love or consciousness before humans existed you're wrong love and consciousness was there before the Big Bang happened that's what you discover with deep awakening but of course I don't expect many staged orange people to understand this so I just want you to see for now that there is an arc a trajectory to the universe something much bigger is going on then what materialists and scientists think it is not a brute mechanical process of trial and error that is not what evolution is there's a lot to say about evolution which I'll have a separate episode on in the future so what I'm talking about here is aligning ourselves with the force of the entire universe and this is what makes what I'm talking about your conscious politics very different from traditional politics because traditional politics is just about selfishness it's not about consciousness or love it's not about helping everybody to raise your consciousness it's just about helping yourself helping your tribe helping your family getting rich that's what it's about getting favors for yourself I'm talking about expanding or shrivel of concern to include the entire universe all living beings and then acting from that in an unbiased objective way to help all beings raise their consciousness and love not just humans all all beings this is what happens when you become very conscious this is a sort of stage turquoise spy dynamic stage turquoise way of looking at government and politics politics and government must be grounded in consciousness because in the end consciousness is the only thing there is and consciousness is the ultimate key to solving all problems because all human problems are the result of either too low of a consciousness or some twisted pathological form of consciousness which needs to be transcended and awoken out of individual consciousness and collective consciousness are deeply interconnected the structure of society directly impacts how easy it is to raise one's own consciousness which is why we need to structure society in a way where we have infrastructure that helps people to meet their basic needs so that then they can spend the rest of their life pursuing the raising of consciousness by doing this we're not just helping them we're helping ourselves because the more conscious all of your neighbors are the better neighbors they will be to you to your family the better co-workers they will be the better more informed citizens they will be the better politicians they will elect into office the better work they will do the better inventions they will create the more responsible they will be see the less likely they will be to shoot up a school there is a sort of a vicious cycle here where low consciousness government creates low consciousness citizens and then low consciousness citizens recreate low consciousness government and it gets locked into this cycle on the other hand we can flip this around and if we have a high consciousness government ill rate high consciousness citizens and high conscious citizens will create an even higher consciousness government the choice is ours what we do the fundamental problem with government is that most people use it to self deal you see because government taxes people a large pool of money is accumulated over which there is quite little oversight literally billions and trillions of dollars every year is collected but then it's very easy for people to leech off of this money because it's much easier to leech off of taxpayer money than it is to start a legitimate business from scratch for example or to do something creative like create some beautiful music or some beautiful art that people like will pay you for it's much easier to leach off the system and so there are entire professions that exists solely to leech off the system but the mistake that many libertarians make is they they say well leo but this is just proof that government is bad you know big government is worse than small government and so the solution is to reduce government and to eliminate government because let Leo like you said yeah it's easy to corrupt and people just leech off this money this taxation and this taxation is just theft this is wrong the solution is not to reduce government the solution is to eliminate self-dealing and corruption from government what you want is not small government what you want is good effective responsible government which gives you a lot of bang for your buck because the reality is that we can't eliminate government government is a necessity taxation is a necessity you're not going to eliminate these things that's a fantasy so as long as a taxation is happening what we can do though is we can as citizens that are voting power and our political activism we can try to get that money used in productive ways so that rather than wasting trillions of dollars on Foreign Wars that ends up killing people and just deepening their misery and frustration well not not getting us much in return we can invest that money into infrastructure better schools and mental health and training programs re-education programs that will help to lift people up so that they can then pursue the raising of their consciousness so the solution is to end the self dealing and the way you do that is by becoming more engaged more aware of what's going on in government so you could hold it accountable what's missing is the accountability from you see the mistake people make is that they love to blame the politicians without taking their own responsibility for what's going on in government those politicians are a direct reflection of our own individual consciousnesses of your own voting choices of your own political activism or lack thereof of your own laziness of your own ignorance about politics and government works the proper way to end government corruption is by being educated and engaged as a voter not by undermining the government not by privatizing everything but by strengthening the government making it more transparent and accountable to the people because if you privatize everything there's not going to be accountability private corporations are not accountable to the people see this is the fundamental problem with the libertarian agenda is that it tries to undermine government with just a privatization of everything without realizing it if you do that you're actually going to end up in a more enslaved situation than you have with the government because with the government at least you get to vote every couple of years you won't with a corporation and the corporation ain't gonna be looking out for you it's gonna be looking out for its own profit government needs to be about something other than profit which is why having businessmen and CEOs as presidents or as government leaders is very problematic people sometimes think all ya --let let's get somebody in there who's a businessman and he'll he'll run the government as a business and this will this will create an efficient government no it won't because that person will just try to privatize everything and undermine government government's purpose has to be the well-being of human beings not profits that's what makes governments so unique and whenever governments purpose becomes profits that's when government is corrupted and undermined and that's when it's not being effective and that's what needs to be reformed understand that the biggest self dealing in government is not welfare the way that some conservatives like to say rather it's corporations it's lobbying is the military-industrial complex its subsidies which are given out frivolously to companies that don't need it for example like oil and gas companies its political favors its corruption its power Fame status and sex which comes from having positions of authority and celebrity that come with being a politician it's the revolving door of entering government to be a public servant but then only doing that for a few years so that you can exit and then go become a lobbyist and work for some corporation to then help that corporation to to corrupt the government and using your government experience as just a way to undermine the government this is the revolving door this is very toxic and pathological it's really traitorous although it's not commonly thought of that way influence peddling Ponzi schemes and scams these are truly the biggest problems with government not welfare certain welfare is a drop in the bucket compared to the kinds of white-collar crime and corruption that playing most governments so it's that that needs to be cleaned up and of course it can be cleaned up but it takes active political participation and consciousness and education and an engaged citizenry to do that that's our best bet see starting some new organization is not going to work we already have a massive organization called the government rather than scrapping that and trying to do something new reform what we've got because it's an evolutionary process right it's sort of like you're designing a human body you don't just start with a human body from scratch you start with some Neanderthal body and then you you you make little adjustments to it to create the human body you refine it likewise you don't just start with a Neanderthal body you start with a chimp and then before a chimp you start with like a monkey and before a monkey you start with like a some some mammal mouse and then you go back to reptiles and birds and fish and all this you know you go down the evolutionary chain this is how it works evolution doesn't just create stuff from scratch so we've got to keep evolving it but we have to stay vigilant and we have to be responsible for this process because this process doesn't just happen automatically as we sit at home and watch TV all day the difference is that we are active participants here all right that's it for part one I know it's long but there's so much material here and I'm so passionate about it stay tuned for part two next time we'll talk more about fundamental insights about the nature of how government works we're going to talk about what conscious politics actually looks like and the core principles of it so it's it's gonna be less theory and more practice and as we keep going through these parts into part three as well it's going to get more and more practical and tangible and there's going to be serious policy repercussions of the things that I'm saying so don't just think that this is all philosophy make sure you stay tuned for those I'll see you then you