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let's talk about some of the fundamentals that make a democracy work and what democracy is and tie it in with personal development work that we're doing with consciousness work with spirituality and also with the current events that are happening around me i've gotten multiple uh comments and feedbacks over the last couple of months that i've seen in the comments sections where people want me to talk about kobit 19 or they want me to talk about the black lives matter black lives matter protests and other things that are happening in current events so that's going to tie in with this discussion of democracy so what is democracy how do real how do we really understand what democracy is and how to make it work effectively where to even begin with this topic um we're going to be kind of going all over the place this is going to be a freewheeling discussion i don't have anything planned per se but the first thing we should notice about democracy is how much it's taken for granted especially if you grew up in a democratic country more or less a developed country first world country where some degree of democracy is available it's very easy to take it for granted and to not see the challenges the inherent challenges that democracy brings so fundamentally what is democracy about about it's about giving ordinary people autonomy in controlling their futures their lives and the trajectory of their society it's where ordinary people are involved in important decisions about war about taxation about regulation about discrimination about rights about laws and the direction of society how to structure health care how to structure the economy and so on and people we just sort of assume that well democracy is just sort of like the default state and it just works because if you're in a country like in america then it's sort of been here for a couple hundred years and people just take it for granted but and then also you know like when we look at other countries less developed countries third world countries from america or from europe we look at those countries like iraq or perhaps china or perhaps other places in the middle east or south america or something like that where there are dictatorships and autocrats and tyrants and oligarchies and and things of this nature we tend to look at that and we say oh look how crude and how barbaric they are how evil they are and if we could just bring democracy to them the way we tried to do with iraq but then of course we see the problems and the limitations of of what happens when you do try to bring democracy to the middle east to places like iraq it doesn't work so why doesn't it work and we also have negative stereotypes about what autocracy and tyranny is is sort of baked into our culture like oh well tyranny is wrong and evil then we look at people like hitler or stalin or mao and others like that throughout history we look at them as emperors and tyrants and dictators and this is supposed to be like bad stuff but have you actually ever wondered about why autocracy is so prevalent throughout history and still is even now in the 21st century there are still many dictators and tyrants around the world in various countries why is that if dictatorship and tyranny and authoritarianism is so bad why is it so popular i mean wouldn't it be obvious that like people in iraq would just automatically see saddam hussein as a bad person and overthrow him wouldn't that be the obvious thing that happens because obviously it's bad so why do people put up with something that's obviously bad and wrong and unjust we tend to have very simplistic notions of democracy the first thing we need to understand about democracy is that it's not a binary it's not like oh well we have democracy or we don't there are many many degrees and orders of magnitude of democracy and there's this sort of myth that we've developed at least within american democracy this this notion of like well america was just founded on democratic principles it was a democracy from the beginning now of course obviously people say oh leo but america is a republic technically let's not split hairs about this sort of terminology what's important is that one of the innovations of the american constitution was the idea that uh citizens get the right to vote now of course there were severe limitations on what counted as a citizen you excluded females you excluded blacks you excluded uh native americans and and a bunch of other stuff and you even at the very beginning you even excluded poor white people who didn't own land and didn't have any kind of status so really even though america was a democracy we sort of say you know in the history class we say that america was started as a democracy but really how democratic was it the degree of democracy there was pretty limited looking back at it now to uh two and a half centuries later we see so many people were disenfranchised didn't have a lot of power so they're sort of like the myth of democracy the sort of idea that oh everybody in the country gets to decide the direction of the country and then there's the sort of reality of it of what who's really pulling the strings in terms of influencing the direction of the country and the reality of it is that it's it's a very select group of elite people who have status power certain position usually they're born into a certain class even though they're not might be official classes but basically the people who are on the show are are a pretty small segment of the population the general population even today in the 21st century not to mention two and a half centuries ago don't have much of a say at all in determining the direction of the country why is that see there are certain inherent limitations to democracy and democracy only works effectively when it fits a certain psyche at a certain cognitive level of development a certain moral level of development and a certain educational level and a certain level of consciousness within people if we just take a group of chimpanzees and we try to give them democracy it's not going to stick why not because they're operating at such a low level of cognitive and cognitive development moral development and level of consciousness that they're not going to be able to sustain that even if you were able to teach them assume we can get over the language barriers and so forth they wouldn't be able to sustain it because there are more animals and as animals you know it's it's it's hard to sustain democracy within a society of animals so you see all if we go back thousands of years into the origins of human civilization all of these civilizations thrived on strong leadership and basically tyranny and authoritarianism because survival was very brutal basic matters of just having a shelter having a farm raising your children and making sure that that's secured in that you don't get attacked by marauders and warlords and enslaved raped and pillaged and have all your goods and and work stolen just to ensure that that didn't happen required severe compromise on behalf of those farmers and workers they were basically put into a very difficult situation where either they could act like libertarians and try to just maintain their autonomy and their freedom and not be subjugated by anybody they could try to do it that way but if they did then they would quickly be just physically overrun by warlords and marauders because they didn't have the physical power they didn't have the organizational structure to defend themselves you know a couple of farmers living in a little village can't defend themselves against some marauders coming in from out of town who have thousands of of troops and uh elaborate weapons and horses and carriages and and catapults and whatever else they've got see there's there's nothing they're going to be able to do to prevent them from getting just overpowered physically so what they're sort of forced to do is they're forced to find some other leader who's going to protect them they're forced to band together so you have multiple villages come together and then just it's a is basically just a function of brute survival for them to survive they have to come together and they have to organize themselves under some leader and then that leader has to take control and make decisive actions that are going to ensure the survival of this group of villages let's say and on the decisions of that leader is going to hinge the survival of everybody in that community all the villagers all the women all the children all the men all the soldiers all the farmers all the doctors and intellectuals and scholars all the uh politicians and ultimately he himself is gonna lose his head he in fact will be the first one to lose his head if he makes the wrong decisions so it's a lot of responsibility to put on one person and it it really matters who that person is you see because if you get some buffoon some incompetent buffoon he's not going to make the the right decisions and then quickly everybody's going to die now that might seem to us now because we're looking back at it it might seem like this is a very archaic and brutal system and it is but you also have to appreciate the bind that our ancestors were in back then and i mean some of them still are some of these people still exist on this planet in certain parts of the world africa south america asia and elsewhere where we we have in in developed countries we have the luxury of freedom that was hard won that now we can kind of like say oh well but i would never subject myself to some authoritarian some tyrant uh i would always want to maintain my freedom this sort of libertarian stance but this is this is absurd because your freedom is only valuable to you assuming that you're alive assuming you don't get overrun by warlords and other tyrants which exist out there in the world so as long as that's taken care of then yeah you can you can talk about freedom and you can [ __ ] and moan about people infringing on your freedom of speech or some other you know second amendment rights or whatever that you might feel entitled to but what you have to understand is that these freedoms they don't really exist they have to be invented and they have to be enforced otherwise they are lost very easily so what happened is that in many cases these just ordinary people who you know think about a couple thousand years ago the average farmer most people a couple thousand years ago were farmers there was like nothing else to do there weren't computer programmers there weren't engineers per se there weren't scientists there weren't uh marketers there was there was basically farmers ninety percent of people farmers and then maybe five percent were scholars or mark uh something let's say like um bazaar owners or shopkeepers that sort of stuff and then maybe less than one percent were politicians or military leaders and so on of course there were also probably a good chunk of people who were just troops soldiers maybe 10 of those or something but most people were just ordinary farmers now these farmers didn't go to school they weren't literate because education was very very expensive so you you have to remember that education we take it for granted now in the 21st century everybody is literate basically everybody goes to school at least 10 years of school maybe 12 years maybe 16 years in developed countries but a couple thousand years ago most people didn't know how to read didn't know mathematics didn't know history had no historical context for things had no study of philosophy or government or politics so what did these people really know they knew nothing except what they learned through direct experience from their family so you were born your father and mother were farmers and so what do you know you only know whatever your father and your mother and your extended family whatever they knew so if one of them was a blacksmith maybe you could have learned some blacksmithing skills if one of them was a you know a shopkeeper you could learn some maybe some business skills although they were very crude uh this sort of stuff but most people just knew farming and that's like all you knew try to really put yourself into that position of a farmer from a couple thousand years ago like you were so utterly clueless compared to the way that average people are today in the 21st century there was no internet there were no books if there were books they were extremely expensive and only afforded by the most elite wealthy aristocrats who were the equivalent of today's millionaires and billionaires so there were no books there was no printing press there was no school there was no university for you to go to if if there was anything even close to that it cost millions of dollars basically to send your your child to a university you know you think university is expensive today back in the greek and roman times literally you'd have to be a millionaire to send one of your kids off to school for private tutoring and this sort of stuff so what did you as this basic simple-minded poor farmer what did you know how to do what did you know about the world what did you know about reality almost nothing it's whatever what was programmed into you by your culture by your religion which of course played a huge role for you in shaping your worldview so you you clung to your religion and you just did your task and that was it and you didn't know very much about world affairs you couldn't go on facebook and see what's going on today in the world or cnn or anything like that none of this was available like it's we've we've advanced so much that in a sense we're now victims of our own advancement because we forget what it really took to get us to where we are today and that makes us take for granted what is allowing us to stay where we are today and that makes us ignorant of what's coming in the future and what it'll take us for us to to advance to to new stages in the future some of the sacrifices that it takes see a lot of sacrifices were made by our ancestors that are completely taken for granted today by us by libertarians and so forth so these people the majority of people were so ignorant that they weren't capable of even casting a ballot for some politician because to cast a ballot for a politician just to go and vote you need to be able to read to write you need to have a sense of of civic responsibility just the idea that every four years or every two years that you are going to go into some ballot box at some appointed place and you're going to vote for some person and if this is your civic duty to do so and that this if you don't do so then somehow you're not um contributing to the to the society in the right way these things had to be invented and developed they the technology this so it was a combination of confluence of things there was the material physical technology that needed to be invented such as writing books paper papyrus whatever your ballot was cast on um and then how to tabulate all these votes see even just the very notion that you're gonna you're gonna get all the people in town to come into town and to vote on a specific day at a specific time that means you need to invent clocks calendars there needs to be a social system a cultural invention where we all agree that this is something we're going to do on such such a date at such-and-such a time that this this is like our moral civic duty to do this all these all this infrastructure needs to be built up you see people need to understand and make a connection in their mind of like well me going to this ballot box and making some some chicken scratches on this piece of papyrus and putting it in this little box and it's going to be all counted and tallied up and then you have to like make the connection between that and then the person who's going to who's gonna get elected and then the person who's elected how do you know even who you're voting for well you need to have some sort of like marketing system basically a crude form of marketing so that people know who that person is and they know the alternative you know rival candidates the opponents then you gotta decide who to vote for based on what are you gonna decide which of them is the best do you have a deep knowledge of history and government and politics and human psychology and warfare and all of this to understand which person is going to make for the best leader do you understand how leadership works you see even today most people don't understand these things these are very complex and nuanced things to understand or to make educated decisions so back then this was simply impossible democracy was simply unsustainable back then back then the situation was that hey we've got a a rival army headed our way that's going to be here in two months we've we've got some news that it's coming so we better rally together and build a fortress around our villages uh build like a wall defend this wall raise an army and and try to defend ourselves otherwise we're all going to get raped and pillaged and enslaved that's what would happen in ancient times during the times of ancient rome times of caesar it was well understood by everybody in the city that if a city got sacked if the perimeter wall between the inner city and the outside of the city was ever broken through that was the end of the entire city it wasn't like it is today where the united states invades iraq maybe strategically bombs a few power plants and the electrical system maybe bomb some military installations maybe accidentally bombs and drones a few you know civilian buildings and factories but overall like 95 percent of the infrastructure of the city is is maintained and ordinary people can still go about going to the market buying their food going you know doing their work and all this sort of stuff can still be maintained that's not how it was two thousand years ago two thousand years ago if that city was invaded all the men would get their throats slit by the invading army and all the women would be raped and all the children and women would then later be enslaved uh or sold off as slaves and oftentimes that city it was either captured and totally repurposed maybe for a new military base or you know a new outpost for the invading army or it was just completely ransacked and burned to the ground a lot of times that happened because certain cities just hated other cities so much that they wouldn't even want to like live in the city they conquered they would just raise it to the ground or it would just be raised to the ground in the process of invading it and those people who were defending that city they weren't just it wasn't just like oh well yeah some of our military troops might die in this invasion it's like no no if this city gets invaded everybody's going to die everyone's going to be screwed including the women the children everybody so understand the stakes that are involved here in this game of politics and government the stakes are enormous and these stakes they still exist they're just buried today under a lot of infrastructure and bureaucracy which uh helps to sort of mask that and it it softens the edges of the brutal nature of of human beings because we have thousands literally thousands of years of infrastructure and and and moral and cultural development it it sort of it pacifies our brutal nature such that most people aren't going around raping and killing and pillaging and even most countries aren't really doing that these days so you see when you're faced with such stark survival conditions democracy is a luxury in fact it's completely unworkable what's necessary is very strong leadership and a group of elites basically the smartest strongest people out of your village need to come together and they need to devise a plan because we don't have time to educate all the masses we don't have time to explain everything to the masses because the masses are mostly stupid so it's only those few elites they come together they form a cabal which will govern all the mass the masses and then they will elect one of theirs as the leader the authoritarian the king and then he's going to be the boss and on him we'll hinge our future and our our survival see now this might seem very unfair from a sort of libertarian perspective like how dare they do this and then they impose taxes on all the farmers and we don't even get a say of like who the king is going to be and yet we we start to pay the king taxes and give a portion of our of our grain supply that we generate every you know of our harvest every year um yeah but that's still highly preferable to getting slaughtered by the enemies that are coming out from from outside and they're coming they're coming because it's a lot easier to come and to conquer some poor defenseless farmers than it is to actually do the hard work of farming for yourself it's very appealing to go invade other villages and towns if you can just rally enough people together build an army it's very very appealing it's appealing on many levels first of all it's appealing to the ego there are many ambitious tyrannical people who you know want that sort of power who want to be in that position of conquering others so in that sense it's very appealing to spiral dynamic stage red egos um but it's also appealing because hey you know farming is very hard work who wants to labor in the fields day after day after day harvesting fruits and vegetables and grain this is hard work you'd much rather prefer to invade somebody who's done that work for you and then enslave them and have them keep doing more of that work for you than having having give you a portion of their harvest every single year to support you see this is just basic human laziness we don't want to work we want to have somebody else work for us so democracy here is completely unworkable which is why a large chunk of the developed rather underdeveloped world even today is not democratic because democracy is unworkable it's not so much that the tyrant is this evil person who oppresses the ordinary individual and takes away his rights it's not so much that actually in a sense the tyrant and the authoritarian the king is doing those farmers and an ordinary folks a favor because he's taking on a lot of responsibility to make sure that they stay safe now of course he can abuse his power but also you can have good kings and there have been examples throughout history of good kings who had a lot of power a lot of authority and they used it responsibly they weren't lazy they weren't drunkards they weren't just about having orgies and you know living in luxury and exploiting people underneath them they were actually like working for the people there are certain roman emperors that were like that and um and actually quite a few kings throughout history were like that they fought for their people they cared about their people a lot in fact that's what you see mostly with the authoritarians even today many authoritarians like we see authoritarians in china um xi jinping and he you know he has certain authoritarian tendencies in in russia we have putin with certain authoritarian tendencies in the philippines we have duterte with certain authoritarian tendencies but these people what are they really fighting for sure some of them love the power of course they do but uh i would say that most these people aren't in it for the power per se they are actually patriots they really care about their nation their nation they see that amongst all the other nations in the world their nation is not at the top um they see how much better their nation could be they see that their nation is getting exploited by others like america and other european powers which are which are stronger than them they're they're getting exploited they're getting the raw end of the deal and so it's like their patriotic duty to take on that responsibility to not just sit around and wait for people to democratize themselves and to fix this problem for them but to take the reins and to fix it yourself have you ever found yourself in a position or a small group of people where there's maybe five or ten of you and then you notice that most of the people in that group they're meek some important decision needs to be made but but it's like a committee thinking nobody's making any clear strong decisions there's no sense of leadership people are just kind of waffling around throwing around ideas debating each other bickering with each other gossiping with each other but like nothing is getting done in the meantime nobody is willing to step up and take responsibility everybody's blaming somebody else but nobody's doing anything about they're talking but they're not doing anything about it so what you have to do is you have to step up in that situation and you have to say i'm going to be the leader i'm going to take responsibility and now of course what happens some of the people in that group will say oh well but who said that you're going to be the leader i don't like you as the leader blah blah blah blah blah and then they [ __ ] and moan and they gossip amongst themselves about how you shouldn't be the leader well okay if i'm not the leader then who is the leader say well maybe that person should be the leader but then as soon as that person is picked out somebody else in the group will say oh but i don't like him because of this is this and that and then they'll start to fight with each other over that you see so part of the the challenge of of selecting a leader that is a certain sense the leader is going to be the one who steps up who steps up and annoys himself as the leader this of course takes some gall some arrogance some ego some ambition and some confidence to be able to to do that because we could always say well who appointed you king and in the end you have to say i appoint myself king and then whether that actually works or not will depend on how strong you are as a person if you're a weak person you'll be dethroned very quickly usually it takes a vicious person a highly ambitious highly vicious ruthless person to take that position because what's going to happen is that as soon as you stand up and say i'm going to be king i'm going to lead us here's my vision there's gonna be at least a few people in the group who will challenge you and question your vision and will not agree with your vision and will try to stop you even though they themselves may not want to take that position as king and as leader and maybe they don't have a good vision but they will sit back and they will whine and moan and [ __ ] about how your vision is not going to work so oftentimes what you have to do is you have to just fight those people and conquer them win them over to your side you can do it through diplomacy you can do it with money you can do it uh with with rhetoric with you know a motivational speech you can convince them but when all of that fails you can also use reason of course when all of that fails you're going to defeat them physically which is why authoritarians are known to be bloodthirsty and vicious oftentimes gassing their own people killing their own associates and colleagues and political rivals who are friends of theirs playing these sorts of games of throne because that's what's necessary in that kind of environment to come out on top and then to to unify a diverse group of of people who have their own agendas unify them together the unification is absolutely crucial in order for us to survive i have an episode i'm actually going to be bringing multiple prior concepts from old episodes that i've talked about that are important here we're going to be synthesizing a lot in this in this conversation here about democracy um i have an episode called uh unity versus division where i talk about how the structure of all of realities that things are getting divided and separated and then getting reunified back together that this is a fractal process that is happening at all scales and levels of reality well of course it's happening within the formation of societies and governments because what we start off with is our sort of default state is a is a a loose diverse collection of individuals and small clans and tribes and then we unify them if we unify them we get more strength because now we can organize all these tribes to work in a coordinated manner to build something larger than a tribe something more like a a state or a country a nation but how do you you unify all these people who have diverse cultures maybe different ethnic backgrounds different religions different belief systems different economic ideas about how things should be structured different ideas about the military how do you bring all of that together under one banner and have them act towards one common purpose such as for example building a fortification around the perimeter to defend all of those folks from outside invaders or how do you get them all working towards some sort of larger public project like building a pyramid or building a temple which costs a lot of resources uh thousands of of man years and man hours go into that to build something as great as a pyramid well you can't build something as great as a pyramid with just a couple of tribes you need to unify giant groups of people small groups into into much larger groups and those the groups as even larger groups you know you got to unify before you can start to build great monuments and really build amazing feats of architecture and infrastructure you can't build a lot of fancy roads and marble courtyards and fountains and great cities unless you're able to defend all that stuff and also you're able to tax people and you're able to get people to buy into that vision because you know one person might say well let's build a pyramid guys another person in the tribe might say well no pyramid is stupid let's build a cube instead of a pyramid and then somebody else says no not a cube let's build a sphere well which one are we going to do and if we just let people bicker back and forth and argue with each other about what we're going to do endlessly then what we get is we get the sort of problem that stage green actually faces um and we're seeing a bit of that today in the news and in our politics one of the problems with stage green sparta dynamic stage green is that it's sort of that hippie uh social justice warrior type of mentality and we're seeing you know in recent news that they they they took over some some chunk of seattle and they created this jazz zone c-h-a-z um the capitol hill autonomous zone and it's sort of like this uh this hippie commune type of vibe a little little town in the middle of the city and they sort of cordoned it off and now they're offering you know free this and free that's sort of this almost like burning man kind of culture taking place there and it's sort of since it's cool it's nice but the problem with that it's it's a very loosely distributed hierarchy it's a flat hierarchy there there's nobody who's the boss at stage green and one of the problems and negative downsides of stage green is that when you get a bunch of green people together in a group they're so concerned about gathering a consensus not offending anybody in the group and being nice and cordial and accommodating to everybody in the group that you have this committee thinking where no clear decisions get made no strong vision comes out you can get a you know 20 people 20 green people into a room and have them sit there for 24 hours in that room trying to decide you know okay what's going to be our project that we're working on what's going to be our next business idea let's say it's a small startup and everybody's just sitting around and they're just throwing around you know spitballing stuff they can be sitting there for a week spitballing stuff and still at the end of all that there's no clear decision made maybe you've experienced that in some of your corporate uh experiences if you work in in corporations sometimes you're going to do a meeting or you'll be doing meetings all day but then these meetings happen you sit there you spend hours discussing stuff but at the end of the day nothing gets resolved that's because that shows you uh that just endless deliberation and a flat hierarchy has its limits it can be valuable to have someone who's like a director a creative director or a manager or the ceo who comes in there and kind of sets the agenda and says okay we have five hours we're gonna discuss for five hours but at the end of this five hours we're gonna have a concrete plan for what we're gonna be doing and here are the specific values that we're gonna be using to to to guide us towards what our decision is going to be that can be very helpful because you can't just sit around and endlessly deliberate about what to do next sometimes not making a decision is the worst decision you can make and that's especially true when you have some horde of warlords and marauders coming to pillage and raise your little town to the ground in a few months you need very clear decisive action which is the function that the authoritarian is playing there and that is exactly the function that people like putin duterte ji jinping and other authoritarians around the world are playing today it's it's it's easy sometimes for americans american political pundits to say like oh well putin is this evil dictator and the chinese you know the chinese leaders also now starting to become this dictator and so forth taking on power but you have to consider the environment there that they're in you see they're playing ketchup those countries are still highly underdeveloped like russia china the philippines they need a lot of decisive strong action bold visionary leadership in order to get them up to parity with the united states with europe and other parts of the world see and this is a double-edged sword because of course when someone gets a lot of power they have a lot of power to do good but they also have an equal amount of power to do evil and of course oftentimes they get corrupted by that power and they end up doing more evil than good one of the problems we have now in the united states is in a sense we've become so democratic everybody has a say now to the point where there's no clear vision of what america is shooting towards or working towards anymore we're very fragmented politically and ideologically half of us want to go in this direction half of us want to go in that direction and it's actually worse than that because it's not just two two forces there's there's many many different forces tugging and pulling in different directions and there's no real strong clear leadership and in a sense america has become so complacent now because we've got a decent democracy but it could still be much better but we don't have so much of the power in america is distributed it's distributed between the supreme court the executive branch the uh the congress the you know the senate and the the house and then it's distributed to the media it's distributed to business and corporations and it's distributed to you know civil rights leaders so like the power has gotten so distributed that everyone believes that they should have a say as to what is best for for the country going forward and in a sense what's happening is that when when you have 10 different forces equally pulling in 10 different directions the net result of that is a movement of zero you stay in place and then you stagnate and then actually that actually ends up being the worst thing you can do after a certain while it's just stagnating because other countries are moving forward they have a sense of direction see so one of the myths we need to bust about democracy is this idea that democracy is a unmitigated positive thing and that more and more democracy is just better and better and better automatically and that authoritarianism is just bad automatically this is a simplistic fairy tale that they taught you in school when you really start to look at how politics works it's it's incredibly ingenious and intelligent there's not a lot of room for fluff and ineffectiveness in politics politics is so derided and it's called dirty and and and all this precisely because it's so ruthlessly effective see it has to be it has to be extremely pragmatic and survival oriented and of course this this ends up going full circle and kind of biting it in the ass because when you get so pragmatic and survival oriented that then you know you lose your humanity in doing that so so part of the challenge of life is that again bringing in my episodes about understanding survival part one and part two which are very important make sure you watch those we're always in this very delicate balancing act where it's like we're trying to balance a knife on on its point on on a flat glass surface we're trying to balance because you know if we go too much to one direction then we're gonna we're gonna stray too far away from survival we're gonna die as a species or as a group as a society but if we stray too much towards the other direction where we're just only concerned about our survival and nothing else then we become savages and um all sorts of evil happens and that also ends up destroying us you see because too much selfishness will destroy you and too much selflessness will also destroy you so reality is all about balancing that knife on its point very delicately and this is both collectively and individually as well this you know brings in my episode about collective ego there's a sort of a self-similarity between as i talked about in that episode between the individual human life your life personal development and so forth what's happening with you and then what's happening collectively in your society in your family in in your company in corporation and in your nation and in the whole globe for humans as a as a species there's similarities there one of the similarities is that we're both of us individually and collectively are trying to balance that knife delicately between being not too selfish and not too selfless because if we go too much in one direction the knife is going to fall over and everything's going to collapse and then we die see so here's sort of my general simplified story of the rise from authoritarianism to democracy so if we go 2 000 years ago rewind the clock to ancient roman greece what we see is that even though there was talk of you know the athenian democracy the athenian democracy collapsed pretty quickly and it quickly turned into actually an authoritarian state and the reason it did is because the democracy wasn't sustainable in athens and probably one of the reasons it wasn't sustainable is because the people weren't selfless enough weren't conscious enough weren't developed enough to sustain it it was a good idea and it lasted for a short while but then eventually um authoritarianism took over and it took over for for hundreds and even thousands of years through the middle ages and then beyond that so in the last 200 years especially what we've seen in america and in europe is we've seen a softening a moving away from kings kingships and authoritarian states towards more democracy and this is good in this in a sense this this equalized a lot because for thousands of years we had rigid cast systems the way that they still do in india but we had it in europe as well um we had separations between the aristocrats and the sort of the plebs and the surfs and the slaves and the working class versus the the elites and the clergy and the you know the aristocracy all of this these these boundaries they all started to get dissolved after the french revolution and then you know continuing up to the 21st century till today every single decade every single century basically power has become more and more distributed taken away from aristocrats and elites and given to ordinary people in a sense this is a great trend because today society is more equal and fair than it's ever been we have the least racism that we've ever had the least slavery in the world than that we've ever had the least raping and pillaging that then we've ever had in human history um since the rise of major civilizations um the least you know animal cruelty that we've ever had the least environmental destruction that we've ever had so you know people say oh we're destroying the environment well yeah we are destroying the environment of course but in a sense people 2 000 years ago were much less environmentally friendly than we are today they just didn't have the enormous scale and the technology that we have today you know and not everybody didn't have a car back then but if they did they would all drive and they wouldn't give a [ __ ] about what it did to the environment this idea that ancient people care about the environment this is this is absurd you only start to care about the environment once you get to spider-dynamic stage green and higher people below that at lower stages they don't have a sort of a systemic ecological consciousness the the only extent to which they don't destroy their environment is simply because they don't have the power yet they haven't become so developed that they haven't developed the technology and the scale the sheer numbers you know it's easy to live ecologically when you're living in a tribe of 100 people pretty easy you can just [ __ ] in the river the river will carry your [ __ ] downstream into the ocean no problem because relative to the size of the planet 100 people is nothing same thing with animals you know some people say oh leo but how dare you say that animals are below humans in their development animals are actually more developed because they live so peacefully and harmoniously with nature no they don't the only reason animals live harmoniously with nature is simply because they haven't developed the capacity to outstrip nature and in those areas where they have developed that capacity you know like you have a giant locust swarm that will just uh you know fly through some forest or through some grassland and just eat everything in its site and then eventually just dies of starvation because it's eaten everything that it can there are examples of that happening in nature as well so don't think these animals somehow care about nature they don't they're acting completely selfishly and unconsciously it's just that uh for them living harmoniously with nature is sort of automatic because if they don't they're automatically killed by nature so that sort of solves that problem rather quickly for them and so yeah so like for the ancient greeks it was fairly easy to live harmoniously with nature because they they didn't have nuclear weapons they didn't have cars they didn't have oil refineries and all this sort of stuff and their scale was so small that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people maybe a million people at most but today we're talking about billions of people who are all driving cars and actually this is the consequence of democracy see because if only a king got to drive a car or fly on a commercial jet then we'd have no environmental problems the environmental problems are precisely a problem of scale when you have seven billion people and we give them a lot of democracy which means that these people get to control their own life they are relatively well off economically they're not slaves they're not plebs they have disposable income that they can use to travel which means they use airplanes they have their own vehicles many times they have multiple vehicles they have their suvs they can buy hummers and other you know gas guzzling cars and all this so you got to supply them with with trillions of barrels of oil every year and all this sorts of stuff yeah then you have an ecological catastrophe on your hands that's coming so what's been happening in the last couple hundred years is that there's been a rapid democratization for thousands of years humans were just content to basically live under kings and aristocrats the king and these aristocrats and maybe these aristocrats were like five or ten percent of the population they had the majority of the wealth and there was so little social mobility that it was impossible for you if you were born into a farmer family to ever become an aristocrat never basically now today we still have a lot of inequality our democracy is not perfect and in fact one of the lessons i want you to take away from this discussion is that democracy has so many degrees in a sense don't even think of human society as either being autocratic or elitist or aristocratic or democratic there's not these categories really what you have is you have one single scale this scale represents democracy in a sense and this scale also correlates to some degree with consciousness and with development so as we start to crank up the consciousness and the development of human beings of human minds basically democracy becomes more important and more necessary because the more conscious you are the less you're willing to be subjugated by somebody else and also the more conscious you are the less the less willing you are to subjugate other people because that no longer pleases you either you actually want others to be on your level you want to help raise up others around you to also be conscious and loving and to have the opportunities that you have see because also along this scale what we have is we have democracy going this way we have consciousness going this way and we have selflessness going this way and we have love it's all going in this direction now they might not be perfectly correlated you can think of these as like separate toggles on a mixing board you're dragging them in this direction but generally what that does is that it sort of raises the volume of the entire soundtrack so to speak um so if we take ancient rome and greece it was down here if we take the middle east it's down here and then as we move to more developed countries over the centuries in europe and america and elsewhere everything is moving generally in this direction now it's not always just purely moving with no backsliding it moves it backslides it moves it backslides it oscillates but as it oscillates it moves upwards so we've got this upwards oscillating curve we might say and so really what we're talking about when we're talking about society and government and creating a better country is we're talking about creating a better country for everybody a more equal more fair more softened environment in which all of us can prosper together that's what we're really talking about but of course what we have is we have our own nature which interferes with us getting what we want the only ones we have to blame for the structure of our society and culture is ourselves you see we created it we invented it so why is it that we created these authoritarian structures that are unfair and unequal and distribute resources to the top and so forth enslave people and so forth uh because that's all that our level of consciousness could sustain if we were more conscious if we were more selfless if we were more loving if we were more developed if we were more educated then we could sustain a higher more equitable distribution of resources and power then individual people could have more autonomy but when our consciousness is low we're basically close to the level of development of an animal and the way that you govern animals is harshly with a whip because the animal doesn't understand anything but a whip if you have a vicious animal and so it's a mistake to blame simply the the death spots tyrants and autocrats who are supposedly responsible or like the elites it's popular today i hear this the there's a lot of populism in the air today right-wing populism left-wing populism and this is popular to blame the elise media or the elite democrat or the elite republicans or the elite business class or the the silicon valley elites or the wall street elites or the you know the jews who are running the world elites this sort of conspiracy stuff uh or just even conspiracy theories are so popular today it's like oh bill gates is you know doing something behind the scenes george soros is doing something behind the scenes the koch brothers are doing something behind the scenes you know to manipulate all this and it's all their fault but this is this is really um a shirking of responsibility in fact it's this sort of mindset where you're trying to blame these elites for the state of our society it's actually this mindset which is a low level of consciousness and understanding that prevents you from taking responsibility over your contribution to the problem because what it does is it sort of separates you says well i'm not the problem the ordinary citizen i'm not the problem it's the elites it's bill gates who's the problem no no no it's not bill gates who's the problem it's you the average person who's a problem it's your own lack of development your own selfishness your own fear your own susceptibility to conspiracy thinking your own lack of systemic understanding of these complex and subtle issues your own lack of education your own unwillingness to actually go and read some books on politics and government history to actually study this stuff carefully that's really the problem of course i'm not saying the elites are innocent they also contribute to the problem because they're part of the system everyone's part of the same system so it's not about blaming some one part of the system it's about seeing sort of the the meta of what's really going on how we're getting in our own way so over the these last hundred years a lot of stuff has become democratized voting at the ballot box has become democratized now we have women who are allowed to vote we have gay people who are allowed to vote we have black people who are allowed to vote foreigners who are allowed to vote people of different religions who are allowed to vote poor people are also allowed to vote now of course it's not all fair there is still shenanigans and gerrymandering and and you know this sort of stuff it's still happening there's still racism within the voting system systemic racism and so forth yes all this stuff is still there to a degree but it's gotten a lot better than where it was you have to admit but it wasn't just the voting that got more democratized uh everything in a sense has become more democratic the economy has become more democratized believe it or not you might say oh but how can you say that in the 1950s you know you could just go work a decent job in america and earn a decent wage you know at a normal job today you can't do that because you have millionaires and billionaires who have sucked up yeah that's happened to some degree but still um considering how unequal the economy was a hundred years ago or 200 years ago it's a lot better today than it was back then overall today people have more opportunity more freedom to move up the social hierarchy it's easier to become a millionaire or a billionaire today than it ever was in the past because in the past you had to be part of a millionaire or billionaire family today that's less important because technology allows you to create something amazing and then to earn you know you can create a billion dollar company within 10 years today it was very hard to do that 100 or 200 years ago and of course so the economy has become more democratized you have more control over who you can work for you have more control over what kind of career you want and a lot of that has to do with also the democratization of technology and education so technology also has become more distributed whereas in the past the most advanced technology was only available to the to the wealthiest people today highly advanced technologies are actually some of the most accessible the most advanced computers and cell phones and so forth they're pretty cheap and they're designed for mass market so a lot of technology has been democratized you know everybody has access to a microwave to a refrigerator to a telephone to a tv to the internet and the internet has been a huge development in the last 20 years which has led to a massive democratization of information and knowledge whereas before it was elite scholars in universities and in various kinds of esoteric sects that had all the information and knowledge and it would cost you thousands or millions of dollars to access this knowledge and you have to have the right social class and status to access it now it's easy online you go you can look up any fact basically that you want to you can you can buy any book with with 20 you can basically buy any book in the world that you want to get it shipped to your door for free um you could take online courses you can go to you could take harvard classes through the internet you don't need to apply to harvard anymore um so it's all getting democratized and this is amazing and you have access to news instantly you know a thousand years ago you didn't know if there was some 911 a thousand years ago you would even know about it as some stupid poor farmer now today you click on facebook and you see everything immediately so this is all great but of course now you're trying to reconcile the everything i'm telling you you're trying to reconcile this with sort of the bleak picture that you're seeing now in in the news you say well leo if all this year that you're saying is true then how come we're facing all these problems how come we're facing the rise of trump how come we're facing the alt-right how come we're facing these neocons how come we have these uh you know kkk and all this racism and how can we have these police shooting black people and how come we have you know the coronavirus and we have all this stuff and we have rising income inequality and we have healthcare problems and you know we have um politicians cheating in the election systems and gerrymandering and blah blah blah blah yes of course we have all of that what you first and foremost have to understand is how much worse it was for your ancestors all these things that you're bitching and moaning and complaining about today that you think are so terrible that are the end of the world you think these are signs of the apocalypse uh that some black guy got shot you think this is the the end of the world that's not the end of the world mankind has survived such horror in the past that makes coronavirus and these police protests and riots and stuff and looting this makes it looks like like kindergarten this is child's play our ancestors would look at this with envy at how good we have it now this is not to discount the importance of of handling the coronavirus intelligently unlike what trump is doing and the importance of you know wearing face masks and the importance of not looting and the importance of not shooting innocent black people and so so forth these are all important causes so i'm not um i'm not simplistically discounting the importance of you know fighting systemic racism so forth all of that is important i'm just trying to put it into some perspective for you some historical larger perspective the perspective of the entire human species in our entire history which has been very brutal and and uh and vicious i mean human history is so brutal that it's impossible to capture the brutality and horror of it the selfishness of it on paper like human history is just atrocious when you look at all the slavery the pillaging the raping the genocide the you know the wars the world war one and world war ii and all the wars that came before and afterwards um the torture and the the imprisonment and the massacres and just war crimes that have happened public executions private executions horrible weapons of all kinds used on the battlefield for centuries that wiped out up to a third or even half of the european population so you know our ancestors have been through a lot of [ __ ] and that survival dna it's coded into your genetics and my genetics we're here we're we're standing on the shoulders of giants all that all that survival history is in a sense what's making us so egotistical and selfish today it's sort of one of our biggest obstacles to overcome that survival karma of our ancestors because all of that is coded in our dna it's also coded in our culture in our infrastructure it's got a very long tail [ __ ] that happened thousands of years ago it's still informing our culture and our society today never mind something like the civil war in slavery which is only a couple hundred years old of course all that is still with us today in in various subconscious ways so humanity as a species is developing and growing and becoming more conscious more loving more selfless we've got a long way to go we're still in a sense in the dark ages but we've also made it pretty damn far and life overall is pretty damn good even if you're poor still life is pretty damn good you still have opportunity no matter what race class or sex you have you have you have pretty decent opportunity now is it all fair and equal no of course not there's a lot of corruption and inequality and it's harder for some than for others might be harder for women than for men maybe it's harder for blacks than for whites maybe it's harder for gays than for straights maybe it's even harder for trans gender people than it is for normal people yeah of course there's there's a lot of this stuff and all of that will get smoothened out with time because that is the trend line throughout human history is an increase in democracy but uh you have to also appreciate what democracy really means here democracy is not all rainbows and butterflies as you democratize society move it away from elitism and authoritarianism what happens is counterintuitive things happen fragmentation happens so ironically when a dictator comes to power in ancient rome like augustus the one of the first roman emperors one of the most effective roman emperors because he was so managerial and so controlling also brilliant strategist so as that the emperor what does emperor do the emperor unifies like i said unifies gives a coherent vision in a singular sense of direction this can be very very powerful because you can effectively get a lot of stuff done you can build temples and win wars and build cities but also if that vision is wrong it can go south very quickly too so there's a double sword there but as more and more people become educated we all become more developed democratized power goes away from the emperor and gets distributed to ordinary people that means ordinary people like you and me who are not kings or politicians or aristocrats we get more ability to control our own lives we can be more creative we can be more autonomous we can travel more we can spend our money more we have more money to spend and and so on but as that happens each of us now becomes like our own little mini tyrant it doesn't automatically solve the problem in fact what it does is sort of fractures society society now breaks apart into factions when you don't have one strong force to unite people together sometimes through vicious force when you don't have that people will naturally tend to break apart into clicks and factions that then start to fight with each other this becomes quite wasteful in terms of wasting a lot of energy and we're seeing this today with american politics back in the nineteen fifties and sixties one of the things that made america great back then in a sense that america was predominantly spider-dynamic stage blue america was unified by a certain culture of uh judeo-christian values many of the conservative values that conservatives pine for today the whole appeal of trump's you know make america great again this idea of going back to the 1950s and 60s where america was simpler it was more white it was more protestant judeo-christian um there wasn't so much political turmoil there wasn't this rank partisanship that we have today in a sense there's there's some truth to that and the reason that was was because we were at spider-dynamic stage blue back then for the most part which means that we were more unified by a single religion a single set of values which kind of shaped our sense as a nation as a civilization we were very nationalist so when we were fighting off enemies like nazi germany or communist russia or communist china or communist korea something like this or communist vietnam you see we had outside enemies and we kind of rallied together as americans under sort of a cohesive idea of you know maybe it's american patriotism the founding father you know whatever is the american narrative so we sort of came together under that we all sort of agreed on that and um and we were actually able to be quite effective but then what happened was that after that the democratization continued and we started moving beyond sprawling stage blue into orange orange is more business oriented more individualistic the spirodynamics pendulum swings if you watch my sparrow dynamics series it swings from individualist stages to collective stages back to individual stages so stage blue was the 1950s and 60s was a collectivist stage which many conservatives don't understand today because many conservatives today are actually in stage orange which is individualistic and they think that oh everybody was individualistic back during the world war ii era no they were very collectivist in a sense individualism was very suppressed during the 1950s and 60s there was more of a sense of america as a sort of a a higher identity that all of us subsumed ourselves to but then the pendulum swung after that with the baby boomer generation the pendulum started swinging more towards individualism there was the rise of consumerism the rise of marketing that appealed to every individual consumer the rise of technology the rise of luxury and then also what opened up after the 60s is with the counterculture revolution the hippie psychedelic revolution 1960s which is very very significant i'll talk about that in a separate episode the significance of the psychedelic revolution of the 60s uh that opened up stage green so you see as we move higher up the spiral as we develop more as we become more democratic what that means is that that opens up more room for voices suppressed and marginalized voices to come to power and to speak their truths and to put forth their survival agenda so as we bring more people into the melting pot and give them a voice now we have to start to listen to their voice so you know you bring in women and i have to listen to women you bring in black snapchill listen to blacks you bring in asians they have to listen to asians you bring in gay people you have to listen to a gay people you have to treat them all as equal to your own if you're white now you say well that's great it is great but it also comes with problems because now you have to spend a lot more time listening to different perspectives and voices and now the unified monoculture that used to exist in america or in other countries it starts to crumble and fragment what was once unified under a great pressure now when the pressure has been removed it starts to slack and fall apart and break apart into fragments to disintegrate and that is in a sense what we're experiencing now in the last let's say 10 or 20 years of american society we're starting to experience this sort of disintegration different stages on the spiral are starting to fight with each other because now we're not all predominantly a sage blue now maybe a third of us are at blue a third of us are at orange and a third of us are green now we're pulling in three separate directions now with the rise of the internet information has become democratized the news media is becoming democratized whereas 30 40 years ago you had a couple of cable news shows on tv that everybody listened to and everybody got their information from and everybody agreed you know when some you know walter cronkite or somebody on on the evening news came on everybody watched him everybody thought he was a decent guy everybody just listened to what he said about vietnam or about the soviets or whatever the communists whatever and everybody agreed and that was actually you a unifying force for the whole country but what's happened since then as we've had now we don't have a couple of cable channels we have hundreds of cable channels now we have not just tv we have radio we have satellite radio we have podcasts we have youtube we have facebook we have online blogs and websites and whatever you want you can go start a blog website a podcast start talking preaching about your religion your philosophy your ideology your latest conspiracy theory your opinion your criticism of the news your criticism of elites and so forth so this is a democratization of information and media but the problem is is when you have a bunch of ignorant people and you start to give them power you can't just assume that that's automatically a good thing it's like giving power to children and in a sense that's what's happening today so one of the reasons that we're seeing a bit of a backlash and a bit of a some of the negative effects of this democratization because you would think like well leo the way you've been describing it up to now everything should be hunky-dory and peachy and positive we shouldn't be seeing all this strife and conflict but actually no that's exactly what you should be seeing is strife and conflict as democracy increases at least for now temporarily you should be seen more conflict because people are getting a sense of their own power but they they haven't really developed a responsible relationship with this power yet they don't know how to use it responsibly these people are still children and yet you're giving them enormous power oftentimes these people are morons and idiots and you're giving them a lot of power any [ __ ] and idiot can now go and start a podcast and start ranting about the latest conspiracy theory about whatever any selfish devil can go on facebook open an account and start running ads with some misinformation campaign some you know doctored deep fake videos that are sensationalized to get clicks and to delude people and to subvert democracy any [ __ ] who hasn't thought deeply and studied deeply history and how government works can go and start a podcast or a youtube channel and start rave ranting and raving about the idiot elites who are mismanaging the country even though this person was ranting in raven has zero governing governing experience zero deep understanding about how governance works how politics works and so he's ranting and raving about his favorite enemies who he's demonized and he's going to infect the minds of millions of his followers with that same toxic ideology that conspiratorial thinking that's going to start to eat away at the the the institutions and the the bureaucratic foundations which are actually the pillars that are supporting the entire system of democracy you see but he's ignorant without understanding what he's doing and his followers are ignorant and don't understand what they're listening to and how they're being brainwashed by it and who's to say which of these news sources and media sources is the right one does leo get to decide does the president get to decide does your does your church leader get to decide does your professor get to decide does your mother or father get to decide do you get to decide see when everybody gets to decide for themselves now we have this problem of ken wilber calls it a perspectival madness what happened was that before most people at stage blue were just sort of forced into seeing the world through the perspective of stage blue of the society that they were born into so if you were born into america in the 1960s like a baby boomer you saw the world according to sort of the american mythos whatever that was it was a very artificial way of looking at the world but everybody sort of got imprinted with that way of looking the world if you're born today you know a millennial or whatever the next generation is after that um now there's so much diversity there's so much more diversity in perspectives you could become a neo-nazi you could become a neocon an alt-right person you can become a libertarian you can become some an anti-fascist you can become there's so much there's so many different perspectives now that are that are considered um acceptable and that are easily accessible you can access the books the websites the blogs the podcasts whatever you want you can create your own echo chamber that will feed back to you exactly whatever you want to think the world is like so if you think that jews elite jews are controlling the world you can find sources of information that will feed all that back to you as confirmation bias and then you'll really become convinced that you're right and if you're some conservative you can find a conservative news source that will just feed back to you everything that you want and you will then just get entrenched in that and if you're a liberal you can find a liberal news source that will feed everything back to you create this echo chamber and then you're going to be stuck in that and unable to see the world in any other way and in a sense now there's no daddy figure there's no ultimate authority figure to tell average citizens what to believe what's true anymore see one of the functions of the king in the past were the pope and oftentimes the position of the king and the pope were interchangeable or they were held by the same person basically the religious chief and the military chief and the political chief they were oftentimes one person divine monarchs they called it in europe uh where the king was the head of the church and the state or they could be separate people but anyways you had you you in the past you had a couple of big daddy authority figures who told you what was true and what was false what was good and what was evil what was acceptable and what was unacceptable what was decent and what was indecent what was it a reasonable perspective and what was an insane or a criminal perspective but as democracy is happening those big daddy authority figures are going away they're getting questioned and it's right to question them because of course what they were peddling us they weren't peddling us absolute truth nothing that some king or pope says is the absolute truth it's just one perspective that's right but in a sense it was functional it was useful at least in that time in human development because we needed one source of truth one source of morality in the past because that's what unified us in order to overcome the survival challenges that we faced which were very serious today the survival challenges have largely been overcome most of us are not an imminent threat of getting you know ransacked by a neighboring country raped and pillaged most of us don't live under that threat so in that sense we sort of transcended and overcome those survival challenges but we have new survival challenges now our survival challenges how do we survive together while allowing all of us to be so diverse see in the past if you lived in a society a thousand years ago everybody in your town in your village and in your nation probably had the same religion probably pray to the same god probably went to the same church probably had the same ideas about race ethnicity homosexuality economics politics and other things it was this sort of siloed narrow culture very nationalistic and ethnocentric people didn't even know that there were nations or cultures outside of their culture because a thousand years ago there were no jet airplanes there were no atlases there were no doc nature documentaries or documentaries about other countries there was no internet you couldn't interact with a indian person or a chinese person or a south american person the way that you can today there was no international media so nowadays you know everybody watches hollywood movies and hollywood movies are very diverse there are hollywood movies about homosexuality there's hollywood movies about racism there's hollywood movies about whites and blacks and asians and and uh chinese and japanese and africans and even aliens and and so this hollywood culture now has become global culture but what it's done is it's exposed these siloed narrow cultures to other cultures now even if you live in africa in some little village you've probably seen some you know hollywood movies and those hollywood movies have exposed you to new ways of life you've seen gay married men which you would never see in some african village you you see it in a hollywood movie or you see some you know some asian person living some weird asian lifestyle through some youtube video that you would never have seen if you were living in africa a thousand years ago or whatever and so this amount of diversity is difficult to hold together think of it almost like a small family small family of four where you have the mother two children of the father the father is extremely domineering almost to the point of being abusive he physically will beat the wife if she doesn't do what he says and he will beat the children too and he has a gun and they know it and he won't hesitate to use it if they get really out of hand and so in this situation um in a sense the family is counter-intuitively very unified because they live in fear and this strong male presence is the king in the family around which everything else revolves and it holds it together now it's very dysfunctional i'm not saying this is good or desirable but in a sense you can actually maintain a family this way much longer than you might if the father was very permissive and the father just let the woman do what he wants and the children do whatever they want and everybody's doing whatever they want and then when you we have a family like that often times what might happen is that they just decide to to spread apart the wife will say well i don't feel so happy with you anymore i i like this other guy more so i'll just go marry him i'll get a divorce and the husband will be just like okay yeah sure sure honey you can do that i'm not gonna i'm not gonna hold you back go ahead and i'll give you the divorce and you can go be with that guy i want you to be happy i'll find my own new uh wife for me you know who i'll be happy with and the children you know now they're grown up they can just go off and do whatever they want and we're not going to control them so in this sense you know yeah you got democracy but then the family falls apart you know one of the reasons conservatives you know one of the things conservatives say they say well but leo a lot of these problems we have is we have the collapse of the of the old-fashioned family it's collapsed yeah it's collapsed precisely because that's what happens under democratization the old-fashioned family was often ruled by some [ __ ] father who was very domineering and now as women have come to parity with men in terms of their economic and political power now all of a sudden of course yeah women have more more freedom and so when a woman isn't satisfied in a relationship before she had to endure it she had no other option now she gets a divorce she can go do whatever she wants and this dynamic is still playing out for example in the middle east in the middle east in certain countries now women are so suppressed and so dominated that they don't really have the luxury of getting a divorce for example like in saudi arabia it won't be allowed or only under some certain extreme circumstances which are very favorable to the man not to the woman so in a certain sense this this makes it easier for people in the middle east to maintain their classical traditional conservative values and families and there are certain positives to that children might benefit from that to some degree of course it can also be very dysfunctional but that's one of the problems i want you to notice with democratization is that it leads to fragmentation so with the rise of social media traditional media now is getting subverted undermined this is one of the things that i'm seeing which is concerning to me is that people now have way more autonomy and control over their own epistemology which means their own knowledge base their own world view see as we democratize we give more power to everybody in different fields you have more power with your sexuality you're more powerful with regards to where you can travel in the world you're more powerful economically you're more powerful because you have more technology you're more powerful because um you have more you know career opportunities and so forth you have more freedom but as you give people more freedom it takes a lot of responsibility now now something that was done for you by some authority figure now you have to do it yourself and if you don't do it properly you [ __ ] it up so in the past epistemology wasn't even a word that people understood your world view was handed down to you by your church and your culture there was no thing like where you're like okay well should i be a christian or a muslim or a jew or a hindu or should i be a buddhist or should i be an atheist or a theist or should i be a solipsist or should i be a nihilist or should i be a nietzschean or should i be a conservative or a liberal you didn't have these choices and of course a lot of people still don't have those choices today but you have more of a choice today than you ever did before in the past so in the past you know you were you were born into a buddhist family you were a buddhist that's all you knew that's that's it you didn't even question it in a sense that's easy it's easy to live life that way where you're only given one opportunity one possibility it's almost like an arranged marriage see arranged marriage is also counterintuitive because you think well if if my parents just you know like arranged a marriage for me that would be so terrible i don't even know how i would live with that person we would probably fight all the time we would not get along we would be so incompatible because i got to choose the most compatible person for me right that's kind of how we think in the west but actually counter-intuitively like in india where they do arrange marriages a lot it almost works the opposite because if you do submit to the authority of your parents to pick your mate for you that's actually a huge relief think about it you don't have to go dating anymore you don't have to have all the stress of thinking about am i going to die alone is that person going to like me you know oh what if i get this person but then i like that other person more there's all this complicated all these complicated choices and we sort of hang ourselves with all this freedom whereas if your parents just like when you were born if your parents said oh you're marrying person x we already have it set in stone you're just gonna marry that person if you resign to and you say okay fine i guess i have to because there's no alternative and you do it in a sense you're so all in on that bet with no alternative you actually make it work you actually are so committed you have that necessary commitment that is needed to actually go through the arguments and the challenges and actually learn to love that person in a more unconditional way because you had to whereas if you if you just you know have sex with the hottest person you see in a certain sense that's a very shallow reason for for dating somebody's you know based on their physical appearance and then you you quickly find somebody else that you like more because they're more attractive or whatever um but in an arranged marriage you don't have that freedom and in a sense that actually helps you to maintain a cohesive marriage now of course it comes with a lot of downsides as well those are pretty obvious i won't even mention those but anyways my point with this arranged marriage thing is that so going back to this epistemology business you see now you have a lot more responsibility over how you would what what world view you're going to adopt there's more world views than ever which one is right which one is healthy which one is conducive to democracy there's a lot of traps now with epistemology because see the problem is that most people don't even know what the word epistemology means they have no appreciation of it they have no appreciation of the dangers of epistemology and belief systems and worldviews and ideologies and paradigm locks and all the stuff we've talked about in the past they have no idea how any of this stuff works so what they do is they just go online and they just start watching some youtube channel or some podcast and it could be alex jones or it could be some you know conservative person or some liberal person and they just get sucked into it whatever it is they're not consciously choosing the information they're watching they're unconsciously just consuming information and places like facebook and youtube make it very easy to unconsciously just consume information go down some particular ideological rabbit hole and then get stuck in it see and so you might say but but that's that's freedom that's great that is great except here's the problem in the past the primary worldview that you were programmed with from your from your culture from your monoculture yes it was very narrow and limited but it was also in a certain sense it was time tested and it was effective because it survived many generations of trial and error and um and you know survival challenges it had to survive all that otherwise it would die out so in a sense only the best world views the most effective i should say world views were able to survive um and they they weren't too extreme either for example a worldview like the kkk it couldn't have been the mainstream worldview because it was too extreme certain world views are so extreme they have to they have to be niche in order to survive they can't survive at mass scale so even though you know atheists love to criticize for example the evils of religion and things like islam or christianity and how stupid and how ignorant they are and how much evil has this has caused actually we can flip this on its head in a certain sense these major worldviews like christianity buddhism islam and so forth these were the most moderate and sensible worldviews what you shouldn't take for granted is how many other extreme world views existed which were way worse than these major worldviews they were so bad so extreme so toxic that you probably even haven't heard of them because they never became mainstream because they died out long ago or simply because they they they still exist but they exist in a very um specialized uh narrow way and they can never fully go mainstream so for example the kkk can never go fully mainstream even though it still exists but you see the danger now is that now that you have access to all the media you want now that it's been democratized but you're still a child epistemologically you just go around stumbling to various conspiracy theories and now you can really get trapped into some cult into some radical ideology which you might think that well but but it's better than the mainstream it's better than all those elites that were controlling me but actually it's worse just because something is different than the status quo does not automatically make it better don't make that mistake i see a lot of naive people these days who are getting into politics who are starting to follow some of these populist channels on the left or the right which are now demonizing cnn and msnbc and are demonizing the elite media and the new york times and all this sort of stuff and they think that they're so much better but actually they're not better they're even stupider you have to be very careful about whether your critiques of a system are from above or from below a lot of these critiques are actually from below before you go criticizing a system understand why it exists in the first place see it's very easy for some ignorant naive person to sit back and criticize the politicians the democrats the republicans the clintons the bill gates's this and that yeah it's easy to sit there to criticize all this you can criticize mark zuckerberg and elon musk and all this but the but the reality is if i had to bet money on who would actually be able to make a more stable successful society i would bet on all those people over you over some [ __ ] youtuber who sits there and rants and complains and criticizes all day but doesn't know how to achieve jack [ __ ] it's very easy and tempting to sit in to criticize it's a lot harder when you actually go and try to lead others in a conscious manner towards something better than what already exists and this is now starting to get ironic because usually i'm very critical of jordan peterson and his whole ideology but i think the part of his ideology which i totally understand and uh now i'm some extent agreeing with is that he has sort of made this point about how young liberals and progressives on university campuses you know they get so idealistic they try to you know go and you know involve themselves in politics but they're young they're like 22 years old or something and they think that they've got reality figured out they have politics and government figured out and they go and they start you know protesting and getting politically active uh and then you know this is where his advice comes into like clean your own room fix yourself first before you go off and try to fix the world because it's very easy to sort of start to fall into this trap of thinking that all you know how to fix the world how everything should be but in fact you've accomplished nothing in your own life you've not started a successful business you've not awoken yourself you've not done any deep inner development you've you have no you know serious relationships or understanding of how they work and yet you think that you can go figure out politics in this sense he's right now of course the problem is that as bad as this might be on college campuses this is even worse with young conservatives this is not a liberal exclusive problem this problem exists with young conservatives as well libertarians you know they have no idea how how government works and why government exists and why some of the things that exist need to be there see government is a very tricky thing because we can have ideas about how government should be about how society should be but society and government is such a complex [ __ ] thing that all of our idealistic utopian ideas about it just completely wither and crumble away when faced with the brutality of real life you might have ideas like oh well police shouldn't shoot black people and you know we should be nicer to gay people and should be nicer to women and we should be doing this and we should be in that you have all these ideas but then reality hits you in the [ __ ] face and then you start to cry and you run away and all of your fancy ideas crumble now that's not to say that you know fighting for equality is bad of course we should generally fight for equality but um you have to be very careful about just forming opinions about politics and government without actually being involved with it and seeing how it really works politics is notoriously dirty precisely because it's so brutally utilitarian and it's so harsh you you might have some ideas but oh yeah bernie sanders should be leading everybody he should win and if bernie sanders didn't win then [ __ ] joe biden i'm not going to vote for him he's some corporatist shill i'm just gonna vote third party sort of this sort of mentality it's this very naive simplistic utopian uh perspective on politics the reality is that bernie didn't win because bernie is too radically liberal for the majority of the citizens of america that's why bernie didn't win not because he was robbed or because some you know some elitists some elitist you know hillary clinton shills that they somehow you know stole it from burning no no no most of the population is develo is not developed enough to appreciate what someone like bernie offers see so the problem we have now is we have democratization than ever but this power and freedom and autonomy is being distributed to morons who are uneducated about history government politics science epistemology personal development spirituality survival and they're just stumbling into the most obvious traps and they're developing new world views that are actually more toxic and less functional than the old ones that they are fighting against you have to be very careful that the new thing you create is actually going to be better and more democratic in practice than the old system you're replacing it with and the trick with politics and policy is that oftentimes you come up with some idea about how to change a system and actually it makes it worse it doesn't make it better these systems are so complex that no one individual ever sat down and just while sitting in his armchair in his loft you know came up with the ideal economic system or the ideal voting system or the ideal constitution like it didn't work this way when you do that you end up in disaster utopian disaster what actually happened was that a bunch of different ideas there was sort of a marketplace of ideas as they say um a bunch of different ideas for different political systems and economic systems they all were you know shared by many people and there was a battle for which of these ideas is the best one and then the ones that were the most survivable and realistic those are the ones that actually persevere and all the other ones they died off or they got marginalized see and this happened through sort of a natural evolutionary process in a sense evolution is more intelligent than any one individual human being and so that's sort of what's happening now our political process now to start to link this to the present moment and to start to wrap this up i guess what i want you to see is i want you to see how many of the challenges that we're facing today whether economically in the media culturally with racism and other issues how this is related to what is actually a positive force of democratization and in a sense this is a consequence of that and in a sense what's necessary is for us to educate ourselves more to become more conscious as citizens to understand more deeply the dynamics of these systems that are going on so that then we can be more responsible voters and more responsible citizens so that we can take ownership and responsibility for our epistemology our worldview so that we don't get tracked into various toxic ideologies conspiratorial thinking and other things like this which will um make things worse not better and you can see now why there's a sort of a oscillating up and down feature to this curve of mankind's development as we get more power that calls on us to be more responsible to be more conscious more loving more developed but we're not there yet and so because we're not there yet we we misuse that power and then that power that misuse of power that we're given that misuse of responsibility down that pulls us down see for example mankind develops nuclear weapons in a sense that's that's amazing you know we have nuclear technology now we can have nuclear power plants awesome right if an asteroid is coming to hit the the earth we can even send nuclear weapons at it and blow it up in theory are we in style uh maybe that would save the earth that's a positive thing that's a positive trend we're becoming more powerful with atomic knowledge see it wasn't just the invention of nuclear weapons you have to think of it more broadly as that the nuclear weapon is actually a consequence of the fact that we gained atomic understanding understanding of quantum mechanics basically that's a powerful thing we've used that understanding of quantum mechanics not just to build nuclear weapons but to to build gps systems and to build rockets to the moon and to build computers and the internet and all this couldn't have happened without understanding of you know fundamental principles that ultimately led to the nuclear bomb so we get this this massive boost in our power but then we don't have the responsibility yet to use this power in a conscious loving manner and so therefore we go and start throwing bombs at various places and then you know potentially cause a nuclear war and so that that that dips us down but then as we get dipped down of course we start to see that we're we're going to annihilate ourselves or something bad is going to happen and then that is what triggers us to say wait a minute we gotta what's happening here how do we fix this let's let's pull the plane back up before it crashes and the way we do that is by taking more ownership and more responsibility becoming more conscious more educated and more more loving and then we we rise back up to eve even higher level than we began than when the dip began but then you know we that leads us to even more technology and more power and then more power and more power more democratization more equality as all this is happening consciousness is just kind of doing this snaking dance up and down so you might wonder how did trump come to power well in a sense trump came to bower because we actually had massive democratization we had so much democratization that people started to say hey wait a minute i don't like the status quo anymore let's get somebody who's outside a complete outsider somebody who's not a traditional politician [ __ ] those politicians they've been so corrupt for for centuries let's get somebody who's a businessman let's get somebody who's who's not from washington let's get somebody with without government experience that government experiences all corrupt [ __ ] we don't need someone like hillary clinton who has a bunch of government experience we need somebody fresh somebody new who can come in there somebody bold who will you know kick some ass and and uh and not be bashful about it who's not going to be the sort of typical polite politician who says the the cordial things who's not gonna follow decorum somebody who's a little bit brash somebody who's a little bit more normal like us and then what you get is you get idiots electing somebody who's like them an idiot idiots vote for idiots and that's how you get trump and now you say well but but trump is a sort of a quasi-authoritarian fascist and so leo what you're saying here it's not true because trump is a fascist and the world is becoming more authoritarian there are authoritarians on the rise in in eastern europe in south america in and other places but that's precisely a consequence of the democratization you see it's a temporary temporary dip you have to see that it's temporary it's actually part the dips are part of the trajectory of going up you can't go up without having dips this sort of idea that just because something is different it's better it's going to solve the problem this is this is a perfect example of this sort of fallacy is exactly what happened with trump see a lot of people who voted for trump thought that trump would um would change washington because he's not from washington and this idea that government experience is actually a negative this is actually one of these examples of thinking that you're more clever than the ones you're trying to replace when actually you're dumber than them as it turns out having government experience is extremely important you can't just get some business buffoon to come out to come in from the outside and to be able to run an effective government even those things that the conservatives wanted from trump they can't really get from trump because trump is so [ __ ] incompetent at managing things and understanding how government works we see that with the recent supreme court decision on daca the only reason that they didn't go through is because trump was so [ __ ] incompetent and his administration was so incompetent with their racist policies that they were so ra so blatantly racist with their immigration policy that even us a conservative supreme court couldn't rubber stamp it because they would feel like um like devils for doing so see so experience does matter notice that it's much harder to build something better than it is to tear something down or to criticize something that already exists every idiot can criticize an already existing system but it takes a visionary genius leader to be able to build one that's better that's far harder so you see in a sense what's happening is that this is also something i forgot to mention is that as american society becomes more democratic also notice what happens it becomes more vulgar vulgar is an interesting word look up the definition of vulgar in the dictionary what i mean by vulgar here is that like in the 1950s and 60s in american culture there was more propriety simply because the culture demanded it of you you couldn't go around just spouting the f word on tv you couldn't even say words like [ __ ] on tv you couldn't show certain sexual images because they were seen as too immodest in a sense this is sort of an old timey cultural relic we might think oh immodest or crude or vulgar or obscene these sorts of notions these notions have have significantly been eroded in the last 60 or 70 years of american culture nowadays even on cnn like i turn on anderson cooper sometimes i i hear him saying [ __ ] i hear news anchors saying the f word sometimes uh our culture has become a lot more vulgarized and the reason is is because as the cultural power gets more democratized what happens that it goes to it goes from the aristocrats and the elites who have been well educated mannered they were taught manners and ethics and such things at universities you know or in religious schools because universities used to be religious schools basically all of them were um and so there was a sort of a high a high bar a high kind of bar of decency in order to go to a university that you must meet certain ways you must act and behave but now that the power is getting spread to ordinary people who most of them haven't gone to university haven't been educated uh you know they have a more vulgar language a more vulgar style and you see that vulgarity spilling out now into youtube into facebook all over the internet podcasts blogs but now even it's even infecting mainstream media this vulgarity because now of course the mainstream media now has to appeal to to these people and has to compete with with uh platforms like youtube and facebook where the vulgarity is off the charts and of course i'm not i'm not saying that i'm not some bulgarian of course i'm a bulgarian so i'm i'm i'm not trying to say that i'm above this i'm completely in it um i'm just i'm just pointing these things out to you just so you notice what's happening and in a sense there's something there's something nice about the vulgarity but there's also something bad about it too what's nice about it is that it feels like media is becoming more real like you one of the biggest differences between watching cable news show and watching a youtube video is that on a youtube video you get sort of like real people talking to you the way that people really talk to you like the way you would sit down with a friend and talk about politics you can get that on youtube or that the way that maybe some teacher um for example in the way that i communicate with you i communicate in a sort of vulgar very common simple style i mean i talk about very advanced metaphysical topics but i do it in such a um how would i characterize it it's almost like designed for high schoolers right like i use very simple language um i talk to you the way that a normal person might talk to you whereas when you go on cnn or some you know some really polished source like that which you might say an elitist source it's it's got super high production values it's all everybody's buttoned down wearing a tie and all this and they speak very proper and you know everything is very produced and managed and all this sorts of stuff and in a sense it's unreal it's fake people don't behave that way they don't talk that way to each other in real life so in a sense it's nice to get that realism from youtube or from facebook or whatever but in another sense yes it's kind of more real but also in a sense it's a lot more vulgar and something is lost in that something positive is lost in that see and so what we what we're seeing now is is we're seeing both sides of the aisle sort of the conservatives and the liberals they don't respect one another anymore in the past there was more respect people wouldn't just like call each other the f word and so forth to their faces whereas now it's that's a lot more prevalent and so there's just like more polarization going on that's just a microcosm of the larger dynamic of the macrocosmic dynamic of the unification and and the di that division that reality is going through right unification division like this reality is always doing this at all scales at all levels so right now in america and maybe around the world we're sort of going through a phase of fragmentation polarization diversification that's going to be happening i don't know for how long maybe for 20 years 30 years 50 years and then it's going to sort of reach its its climax it's going to reach its peak probably some bad [ __ ] will happen as a result and then there will be a correction the pendulum will swing the other way towards unification and then we're going to slowly start to come back together unify at a higher level and each time this unification happens it's not the same reunification happening over and over again it's a new higher order of reunification and then again once that unification happens again it'll sort of hit its minimum and then it'll or maximum whatever you want to call it and then it'll start fragmenting again and again that won't be the same fragmentation all over again it'll be a new order of fragmentation a higher one leading to a higher reunification after that so overall i'm very positive about the direction of mankind i don't buy into any of these apocalypse theories about how mankind is going to end the environment is going to kill us all nuclear weapons will kill us all this stuff i don't buy any of this [ __ ] because mankind has been dealing with very serious bloody problems life and death problems from the very beginning for tens of thousands of years we've been dealing with these problems and even for longer um but at least in in sort of recent recorded history we've been dealing it with it for all of recorded history for thousands of years we've faced much worse problems we've faced plagues and we face world wars and we've faced um terrible atrocities and racism and other things like slavery which if you think about it it's amazing that we were able to abolish it at all it's amazing we were able to overcome many of these problems that we have so based on our track record i would say we're also capable of overcoming all of our future problems whatever racism remains we can fix it um will people still get hurt and die from it of course in the meantime yes but you have to understand that we're talking about this very grand scale or we're talking about the deaths of millions and billions of people here so you know a couple of people here and there is you know a rounding error in the grand scheme of things not to say that you should be callous and not care about an individual person's life you should it's important not to just turn people's lives into into mere statistics and rounding errors but uh but also it's important not to get overly outraged over one or two deaths because that can turn into a into a distraction from the real issue it can turn into a red herring see and we see this with some of the riots some of the looting that's been going on um some of course some of these protests are very justified and healthy and all good but also um it gets out of hand as well and we already know if you study sprawl dynamic stage green go check out my episode it's probably dynamic stage green if you've studied that you already know i i talk in that episode about the excesses of stage green we already know what that is a sort of a mob mentality an indecisiveness a flat hierarchy structure we know the limitations of green does that mean we don't go green no we go green right now what i'm seeing is america is experiencing a green awakening that's really what's happening we're transitioning from orange into green that transition is by no means complete it will probably continue for another 30 or 50 years to fully complete itself there's a lot of resistance a third of americans want to take us back to blue still they're completely in denial about green but nevertheless they're going to lose they're on the wrong side of history blue is not going to be where america goes in the next 50 years it will be green now one of the mistakes i see people making here is that they see the excesses of green and they start to use that as excuse to stay at orange this is not going to work and this is counterproductive yes there are excesses to green just as there are to orange and blue and every other stage but what's really needed now is for us to fully move into green of course just saying that's not going to make it happen the only way we get to green is by slamming our face in the brick wall of orange the excesses of orange see right now more and more people are starting to wake up to the excess of orange the gross income inequality the shenanigans on wall street this sort of private uh looting and hoarding that is happening amongst the elites in washington and on wall street in silicon valley this sort of stuff the the sort of monopolistic business practices that are happening um the corporatization of politics and government the corporate lobbying that happens in washington that is corrupting our democratic system these are all the excesses of orange which ordinary people are now facing more and more and more and more and of course trump is the ultimate embodiment of that he's also quite red spider dynamics red stage red but um but in a sense trump is sort of the culmination of stage orange he's the ultimate manifestation of the limits of orange of the orange worldview and value system and the world is now seeing the ugliness of orange the ugliness of trump and this will then be the thing that leads to the correction that will be necessary in the next four eight or whatever 12 years to start to now put a nail in the coffin of orange what is necessary is for us to develop a consensus as a society that stage orange is not the end-all be-all libertarianism um unchecked you know capitalism unchecked corporate power and corporate success and uh and a constantly increasing stock market that these are not the true metrics of success and we as a culture have to come and unify around that idea to form a new sort of cultural norm where we say that society is not about your individual ability to create a business and to earn billions of dollars and to stay independent and free and not pay a dime in taxes and to be a libertarian that's not what society is here for society is here for a much larger purpose and if that's the best you can do with your life is that then that's fine you can still do that but we're going to limit you we're going to limit the damage and the excess of that on the rest of society because in a sense what's happened also which is an interesting thing to notice is that the tyrannical authoritarian power that a single king used to have in a country what's happened to it is that it has become democratized but not fully what's happened is that that that power both political power and economic power because the two go hand in hand has been diversified not to the entire population but to a select number of the most successful business people in the country so in a sense it's true that people like jeff bezos and mark zuckerberg and bill gates and others like that warren buffett they have an enormous overwhelming amount of political power because of their economic power and in the future that's not going to be tenable what's going to have to happen in the future is that we're gonna need to democratize not just the government and voting rights and civil rights we're gonna have to democratize the business sector wall street silicon valley these giant media platforms they're gonna have to become more democratized because fundamentally it's not right or fair that somebody like a bill gates gets to control all the operating systems on the planet or most of them or that someone like jeff bezos gets to control and make decisions about every single purchase that's made online or most of them or that somebody like mark zuckerberg gets to control and decide how people can connect with friends through the internet right this is fundamentally undemocratic for one person to have that much control and that much power the only reason they have it is because these are new frontiers of technology that have been developed recently and they have not yet been regulated because we haven't figured out how to best regulate them there's a lot of criticism of people like mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey from twitter and so forth because they're not regulating their platforms the way that people want them to regulate it but this this problem of regulating and policing platforms is an extremely challenging problem i don't envy zuckerberg or dorsey or other people like this they have an enormous responsibility and one of their problems is that these people they're from stage orange mostly so they came into this endeavor with twitter and facebook and so forth and google you know amazon they just came into it saying like well i'm gonna start a website it's gonna become popular and i'm just gonna earn a bunch of money from it that sounds like a good idea and then they did it and they succeeded great but what they didn't realize is that you didn't just start some website that's earning you a lot of money you created the reason your website earns you so much money is it because you created a platform which is integral to the functioning of the entire society whether it's google amazon facebook twitter the only reason these companies earn as much money as they do apple as well with their itunes and app store especially uh the reason that these companies earn so many billions so effortlessly every single quarter is because they're so deeply intertwined with the culture and the fabric of society but it's precisely for that reason that they can't be ruled by one single individual or even a small corporate board because that's fundamentally authoritarian and so in the future we're going to see the democratization of these giant companies in all these various sectors because people will get more and more frustrated by it because these companies are sucking up more and more resources increasing the economic inequality in the country and getting too much power for their own good see the problem is that you get so much power you ultimately it goes full circle it starts to corrupt you these companies like facebook and google and apple and microsoft they think that they need more money and more success and more power but actually what happens is that after a certain point it starts to backfire on them they're seeing that now and what i predict will happen in the future is that these these handful of companies in particular which are so integral to the functioning of society in the world not just america but the entire world facebook twitter amazon google microsoft apple and a few others that i'm not mentioning uh these companies are gonna be the source of a lot of tension going forward in the future because they've monopolized together these companies have basically monopolized probably half of the world economy is owned by these six companies or so and it's only going to get worse and right now all these companies are still new that means they still have some sense of the original founder's vision you see these companies usually the way the company goes through a life cycle the company is usually found a successful company usually founded by some visionary leader this visionary leader is usually pretty good pretty benevolent pretty caring and passionate about the field he's in which is why he's able to create this company sometimes people like to criticize people like bill gates or mark zuckerberg or jeff bezos but if you think that's bad imagine what happens when the when the life cycle of the company because right now we're still in this phase of the life cycle of the company still the beginning chapters what happens in 50 or 100 years when all of these founders die from old age and they get replaced by tools and corporate shills and committees and wall street types who only care about now you might say oh yeah but that's already the case bill gates and warren buffett and and elon musk and all these people all they care about is just money no that's not right the original founders of a company they didn't found the company just for money even though that's a popular stereotype they actually found it because they were passionate about something the pure money types the wall street wolves those types those are who come at the end of the life cycle of the company once all the ideas have been exhausted all the creativity of the company has been exhausted that's when the wolves come and they try to squeeze every penny out of the company and they they bankrupt the company morally and then usually that moral bankruptcy leads to a financial bankruptcy in the end and then they're going to pull out all the money before it goes bankrupt you see they suck it dry these wall street wolves because these are not true visionaries these are not the founders so what happens when half of the world's economic power and therefore also political power as well is put in the hands of these wall street wolves who are just going to be thinking about how can i extract as much money for myself and my family as possible and my partners as possible from this company like google like facebook like amazon like microsoft what happens then that's what i foresee as being a huge huge looming problem in the future that nobody is yet talking about people do not appreciate how much power a company like google has or amazon has or facebook or apple has it has way more power than we currently appreciate because it has not we have not really seen any of these companies yet as much as you might hate these companies or think that they are undermining democracy you haven't even seen the beginning the tip of the iceberg we've only seen the tip of the iceberg of how much damage these companies can do if they really stopped caring and if they really were controlled by people who just didn't give a [ __ ] and were willing to do any kind of damage for money yeah but at the same time even though that makes it sound very negative and pessimistic here's the silver lighting the silver lining and here's a thing that nobody will really tell you in the news or on youtube in any political analysis because they don't understand this this it takes a deep understanding of human consciousness and collective consciousness to understand this corporations are also evolving corporations are not a static thing how many times have you heard that oh corporations they only care about money that's actually not true it might seem on the surface that corporations only care about money that's only because right now predominantly most of our corporations in the 21st century are at spider-dynamic stage orange but as the people in the organization evolve as the leaders who run the organization evolve up the spiral so will the corporations because highly advanced loving conscious developed moral leaders are not going to lead organizations that are unconscious fearful selfish depraved immoral and so forth it's not going to happen so the silver lining is that corporations like facebook amazon google and whatever else they will also have to evolve and in fact they are in the process of evolving this is exactly what we're seeing with google and amazon and facebook we're seeing these companies evolve you're seeing their employees staging protests which is forcing the management of these companies to respond many of these silicon valley companies are already halfway staged green at least culturally if not economically companies like google are some of the most advanced high consciousness companies that exist compared to oil companies and others military companies and others some of these companies like google for example they have fairly high ethics now you might have certain things you can nitpick about google you might say oh they don't treat this person right they don't treat that person issue or this issue right whatever but overall these silicon valley companies you have to appreciate they're actually better than the majority of companies you should actually be grateful that internet companies are roughly spiral dynamic stage orange slash green in their culture rather than pure orange or blue orange which many companies are for example many wall street companies are just pure orange google is not like that if it was google would be a lot more evil than it is now that doesn't mean google is not evil at all um every company every organization is selfish like every individual is selfish it's a matter of striking that balancing act see but what i'm saying in a nutshell is that these companies will also have to evolve into pure green and then above that and this will soften them make them more compassionate more loving more democratic and so in this sense i'm i'm an eternal optimist i'm an optimist in the long view i think mankind is going to be able to deal with all of its problems i think we can deal with all of our war problems our famine problems we can deal with all the environmental ecological problems we can do it and in fact i think we're too [ __ ] selfish to do anything else because in the end it's our selfishness which will keep us from destroying ourselves because we're just too selfish to kill ourselves see now will a lot of people get hurt in the process of course they will they always have that's always been the case there will always be casualties and collateral damage and innocent people getting run over by this machine that humanity is but then again do you have a better idea see it's easy to sit there to criticize about how awful humanity is but what else what other game is in town you got a better way of of managing seven billion people even though right now we live in the dark ages this era will be known as the dark ages by future generations hundreds of years from now um [Music] we are in the dark ages scientifically spiritually psychologically emotionally politically so even though we are in the dark ages i'm still very optimistic because we have from the darkness the only the the only other alternative to darkness is light you see and we are right at that point now that we have we have the knowledge and the understanding that's the crucial thing we have the understanding to really um get our [ __ ] together by which i mean we have the spiritual understanding we have the psychological understanding we have the metaphysical and existential understanding that is necessary to understand what drives all of mankind and what unifies all of mankind which is the desire for love and consciousness now it's just a matter of how long is it going to take to to spread all this information the high quality information out to the masses because right now there's a lot of high quality sources happening on youtube but there's a lot also a lot of low quality sources creating a lot of noise and turmoil and people are not able to differentiate between what's the good stuff what's the bad stuff what should be trusted what shouldn't be trusted this process has to play itself out it's going to probably take us another 50 years to really resolve all this and to start to upgrade our education system to start teaching this this new material the material that i talk about so much on this channel this has to get spread out through official channels like the education system into the mainstream media and elsewhere that will take time to happen and there will be a lot of resistance to it and there will be a lot of noise in the meantime a lot of conspiracy theories and distractions and red herrings and so forth and traps so you as an individual don't get trapped by that but also don't be surprised that a lot of your friends and colleagues will fall into it we should expect that it's uh it's all part of this democratization process see once we really upgrade our education system and we start teaching these fundamental spiritual metaphysical conscious concepts to people early on and get them not just to learn it as a dogma but actually experience it to feel it to start to understand things like spiral dynamics and so forth at an early age that is going to create sort of a new metaculture that's going to link us together what we're really missing now is some sort of vision for what america could be if we work hard together over the next 50 years that's what's really missing i don't see any politician really articulating that vision there's so much we can do as americans if we get our [ __ ] together if we come together and we really want to grow and we start to educate ourselves and we start to take seriously the idea of lifting everybody up helping everybody raise their consciousness in the meantime as we're doing that we're also spreading opportunity across laterally to all the marginalized groups [Music] and if we act fearlessly america could set the next prototype for what all the other nations in the world could be moving us into spider-dynamics tier two level of governance with all the intellectual power and economic power that we have and all the cultural power that we wield still through hollywood and through the media because the whole world is basically watching us and following us culturally so in a sense we're doing a great disservice to other nations other nations are starting to out pace america in certain ways because we're so fragmented and so polarized we're just kind of running around with our head's cut off like a chicken with no sense of direction but also i understand this is totally necessary this is a necessary phase for america to go through before we find a new sense of direction and vision and there's a lot of resistance so a lot of what you're seeing a lot of the turmoil you're seeing a lot of the confusion and noise in the media and elsewhere that you're seeing violence and so forth a lot of it is coming from people who are being left out from the prosperity and from the development you see what's not going to work is it's not going to work to take half the country and to lift up half the country but the other half stays where they are that can't work so the part that wants to rise up needs to figure out a plan to help elevate those parts that are struggling to rise up that's part of the challenge we can't just as as progressives we can't just look at at conservatives and just call them idiots and morons and uh and just kind of like leave it at that that's not going to resolve the problem we need to figure out a way how to get them to see what we see to buy into our vision to help them along economically culturally whatever to understand their point of view and of course many of them will resist and the reason that happens at any given point in time you take a society you can take that society you can cut it in half half of that society will be progressive half that society will be conservative roughly speaking half of that society will be on the upper end of the spiral half the society will be on the lower end of the spiral and of course the lower end of the spiral is going to resist moving up to the higher end of the spiral the higher end of the spiral half is going to look down at the at the lower half and is going to like do a face palm wondering how ignorant stupid they are but at the same time it's the higher half's responsibility to find a way to elevate the lower half because the higher half is more conscious and more loving by definition this is higher and therefore it's more capable of doing that and in the end how do you elevate the lower half consciousness love understanding fundamentally those are the principles and then of course how that actually gets manifested and fleshed out in practice that that can all the devil of all that is in the details see the more conscious and loving you become the less interest you have in controlling others the less interest you have in power and so naturally you want democracy because you want everybody to experience life at your level and life at your level of high consciousness and high development is you take a lot of responsibility and ownership for your creation of reality you are the creator of your reality and of course by being the creator you you take on the responsibility and the autonomy you create consciously and then you can be entrusted with more power without worry that you're going to abuse it or get corrupted by it and that's sort of what all of all of life is leading towards is becoming more powerful as a creator more conscious more loving all these go hand in hand more selfless fundamentally the reason our society is so [ __ ] up and has been for thousands of years and will be for probably hundreds more is because we're too selfish too many of us are too selfish not the elites are too selfish but ordinary average people are too selfish and nothing is going to fundamentally change until you become less selfish that is true both individually for your own life and for the collectives that you're a part of whether it's your family your business your town or your country or your species your planet so hopefully this interconnects a lot of stuff for you makes a little bit more sense of what's going on in the world remember to keep your eye on the ball develop yourself you can still partake in collective issues so i'm not i'm not doing the sort of jordan peterson nonsense i was telling you that oh clean your room and that's it mister it's like no no yes clean your [ __ ] room of course but also have an eye out for understanding how collective systems work and educate yourself about it contemplate about it don't just adopt some ideology from some person on youtube about it really get curious start to study these systems and then play a play start to play some leadership role in changing these systems take some responsibility and ownership over them don't just sit and whine or start some youtube channel about bitching and moaning about the politicians but actually try to go out there and construct something do something constructive you see criticism isn't really constructive go build something that's actually more conscious and more effective as a system for your collective contribute to your collective in whatever way is appropriate to you maybe that means running as a volunteer for some politician or even running as a politician for some new position maybe it's that or maybe it's something less direct it doesn't have to be that direct maybe it's about becoming a coach or a teacher or a shaman or whatever and having your impact that way on the collective so as you're going forward in your life really there's two fundamental facets to your development that are related and both very important your individual growth and then how that connects with and intersects with your contribution to the collective that you're a part of so keep those both in mind see it's natural that as you become more conscious and developed you're going to want to take more responsibility for the collective that you're a part of and you can get a lot of meaning and value and satisfaction from having an effect using your personal growth to then affect others in positive ways whatever those are whether it's through business or through spirituality or through politics or government or environmentalism or art or whatever that is so even though there's a lot of [ __ ] that comes with being a social species there's also a lot of positive as well the positive is the opportunity that it gives you to impact others which you couldn't otherwise do if you were just living alone by yourself in the woods somewhere so you have that opportunity start thinking about how to best leverage this opportunity really it can be a win-win situation where you grow yourself into this powerful conscious leader and then you lead others with that and you help inspire others to be conscious leaders you empower them and that synergizes and the two work hand-hand and that's how we create more democracy and that's how we create a better society that's how we elevate the consciousness and love of the entire planet and since that's really the only game in town what else are you going to do you only have two options here you're either going to do this or you're not if you do it you can either do it consciously or unconsciously if you unconsciously you won't be effective at it if you do it consciously you can be very effective at it if you don't do it if you choose to just kind of be selfish and hang out and kind of live an irresponsible life where you don't really contribute to your collective in a positive meaningful way if you do that or if you resist it you're going to be on the wrong side of history the human species will become more conscious and more loving and more egalitarian and more democratic and higher up the spiral whether you like it or not whether you become a nazi or not whether you join the kkk or not whether you become a conspiracy theorist or not whether you blow up some some civilian building or not whether you shoot up a school or not so why not um just like side yourself with the inevitable forces of consciousness and love rather than fear and depression and selfishness and misery side yourself with god in other words and then um turn yourself into a vehicle towards this evolution and then you will reap the rewards that naturally come with that and if you don't if you act lazy and depressed and [ __ ] and moan and complain and act like a victim then um or you act out of fear and so forth with your conspiracy theories and you criticize and you act toxic and polarized if you do that then [Music] you're also going to suffer the consequences the karma that comes with that the karma of selfishness so make a conscious choice start working on that and you should notice that you start to feel better about your life and you start to feel better about mankind there's a lot of distraction happening these days in the news and it's very easy to get sidetracked by get all pessimistic about it because the news shows you all sort of negative stuff like war and genocide and racism and this sort of stuff uh it doesn't show you the good stuff so again don't get distracted by all the petty human [ __ ] that's happening around you keep your eye on the ball on your purpose on developing yourself and then having the contribution to mankind and leading others towards consciousness and to love that's what you've got to do and ignore all the naysayers and all the uh all the people who are tearing their hair out and whining and complaining and worrying and caught in fear you can't be a powerful creator or leader when you are trapped by fear even when it's fear of something like economic or sorry environmental collapse that's still fear-based thinking if you're sitting there worrying about the environment which is not to say that the environment doesn't need our attention it needs massive attention but that's not solved through fear and through criticism that's solved through developing yourself and then becoming a vehicle for god to then do god's work on earth and to inspire and uplift others with your creative contributions positive creative contributions that's what we need so get to work all right i'm done here please click the like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website you'll find my blog the life purpose course the book list the forum uh you can support me on patreon by going to patreon.com actualize chip in five bucks a month that helps to fund my work and lastly what should i say to wrap this up hmm try not to treat policy with some dirty thing that you are above i notice that people who treat politics this way they actually contribute to its dirtiness there's something very very profound going on within politics that people are not aware of there's something profound going on in society with how our government is organizing itself that people are not aware of society is organizing itself to higher and higher complexity systemic complexity and you can play a role in that you can shape that you can start by trying to understand how it works and you can actually start to appreciate how politics is love see usually you tell a person all politics is love like what kind of hippie [ __ ] is that of course it's not but what's really really profound and the point that i want to ultimately guide you to is to the point where in your life you will be able to understand how politics is love even the most dirtiest kinds of politics is love but of course that will take a lot of development from you a lot of awakening a lot of contemplation a lot of open-mindedness a lot of surrendering of your judgments and criticisms and political positions so whatever political positions you have i recommend that you throw them away and start from scratch start to look at government in a non-ideological way start to see the spiritual aspects of it that are there it's not there because some evil people want to control the world it's much more subtle and complex than that it's much more benevolent than that but that's a topic for another time so stay tuned because yeah i probably will have more political topics in the future we still have yet to talk about economics i want to have some some videos about economics i want to have some videos about libertarianism i still want to talk about i'm going to have videos about leadership there's still some important insights about leadership that i need to communicate to you we're going to have more videos on spiral dynamics more videos on developmental psychology uh other social endeavors like science that's coming soon we're gonna have a series of videos about how science works and the the complexity the social complexities that are involved with science so yeah there's there's a lot of material that's sort of at the at the nexus point between the individual spiritual growth and sort of the collective development that we're doing as a as a species so stay tuned for those