John McMurtry | The Cancer Stage Of Capitalism

00:17 Puppet masters almost surely have a clearly maybe something there they are and until you've thoroughly tested every last course just to think you know the less you really do That's true, Dr. Seuss Edward without THC cause we're two us just don't look without THC The Higher Side Chat Show Our one company

00:57 Alright, Hireside Chatters. I think many of us can agree we have watched the disease that is private fractional reserve banking and the profit or bust mindset slowly erode or infect nearly all aspects of reality From the exhausted environment to the march of the military-industrial complex, to the lives spent in unfulfilling jobs just to pay off the debt that got them there. Our societal and personal motivations are so warped by this green monopoly money that people regularly debate what behaviors even reflect true human nature versus the crack like addiction we have to this hamster wheel cycle of greed debt and consumerism

01:34 It's a lot to unpack, and many of us recognize this destructive and sociopathic system cannot continue forever. But before much can be done we need the communal equivalent of a full medical evaluation diagnosis and treatment plan. And lucky for us one of my favorite physicians of finance and doctors of the debt-based system of rule is here to drop some knowledge! His name is John McMurtry he's a retired professor of philosophy Expert in value theory and author of several books including The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. You've seen him in Zeitgeist moving forward and now on the day before election day it is an honor and a pleasure to have him here. John, welcome to The Higher Side! My pleasure too Greg Yeah man thanks for doing this I'm absolutely psyched to be able to talk to you about some of this stuff Well i just wanted to say Greg...I wanted to applaud your introduction And you've compelled a lot into you know a few moments of exposition

02:33 and what we can develop at many spots. One of the spots that fractional reserve for example is very much part of the cancer system, maybe we get the physician's diagnosis here. The cancer system is a disease and it's a disease of transnational money sequences without inhibition over Kind of expanding everywhere and over running all life needs and so on that's behind everything is going on from the wars to you know the loss of infrastructure to everything you identified. No fractional reserve banking is certainly a key part of it if they sort of like say the original disorder but its been

03:22 around really through modernity. What we've seen since 2008, 2007 and eight is the handing out of the banks. Fractional reserve isn't enough they spent it all and lost it all and they're speculating on. And so the government with US leading have given trillion after trillion in the case of the U S that was over 17 trillion by two years ago And Bernie Sanders was the one who insisted on exposing this through his ability to do so from the Senate. Now that trillions and trillions, it adds up to more than the whole gross national product and that has just been given to the banks with no fractional reserve. This was to recapitalize them! So the cancer system has gotten worse and worse. Fractional reserve is just the original drive wheel but

04:14 But now it's just giving the money straight out from the public sector, which is meanwhile deprived and dispossessed like people who benefited from the public sector. What I call a civil commons that make their lives safe and secure. It's taken all that they've raided all of the public sector options and capacities like infrastructures to to be able to really sustain the people because the only thing that matters is transnational money sequences and bribing them as well through corporations, not just through the trillions to the banks. But most of the public expenditures today are really being picked up by for example, the whole so-called green technology that's all really money flowing from the public sector into the corporation's transnational corporations pockets

05:05 for huge guaranteed profits and ineffective solutions. So in short, I would respond yes yes to what you say but don't think it just depends on this fractional reserve system. Yes it does but there's a lot worse happening here that indicate the carcinogenic nature of this whole system at the social level of life organization which I can explain if you'd like me to just go on with why I use the model of a cancer to diagnose the disease that you started with, with your lovely introduction. Sure yeah absolutely! I think those are terms that a lot of people probably aren't used to hearing equated to economics but you do a great job i think yeah definitely elaborate on that for us

05:49 If we just look at the cancer model itself and then i'll go into the money sequences how it works with a social level of organization but i was driven to the cancer model diagnosis by originally doing an article which was medically refereed back in nineteen ninety five. I really wanted to understand what was happening here, but through the lens of what is the most effective form of analysis that we have which is medical diagnosis. Medical diagnosis doesn't work beyond what philosophers call the agent relative level or beyond the individual level, the atomic level. They just look at the body, the individual body itself and whatever its problem is including with cancer it'll be a cancer of the life host, the individual life host not the social life host they just can't get there through their methods although there are movements definitely in that direction since 1995 to understand this social disorder as a disease

06:49 which is afflicting at the social level of life organization but has much the same characteristics, distinguish it. So that with a cancer for example and why I was driven to the Cancer Model also had like most people do have cancer in the family, cancer myself my wife died from cancer so it was a model that was very clear to me as a possibility. And then the more I investigated it, just more and more of the evidence... You always look at your scientific... you always look for disconfirming evidence as well as confirming evidence but you really want to look for disconfirming evidence as much as you can to ensure that your diagnosis is correct and you're always open to more disconfirming evidence that you'll have to meet so that's the way i was going. I didn't want to believe this. I was driven to it by the phenomena

07:39 So what you know is happening with an individual level of cancer and what I'm saying is just like the laws of physics or even the laws of biology apply far beyond the individual level to the social evolutionary level as a whole, so with cancer itself. It begins with...one recognizes that first of all there's something going at the cellular In the technical sense, tumors are created by cells that have lost the ability to assemble and create tissues of normal form and function. That's a technical definition of what is going on but the key to that is first of all it's uncontrolled and unregulated reproduction and multiplication self-multiplication

08:29 inside a life host. And the key thing is that it has no committed life function to the life host, that's really the essence of cancer. It's not only uncontrolled and unregulated reproduction and multiplication like say a virus is but it has no commitment to the life hosts in it only multiplies to the point at the death of the life hosts which is now society so that's feature that's also recognized by features is it's aggressive and opportunistic, and appropriates all the nutrients and resources from its host in order to multiply itself further. And here you really start to say well that's just what going on with these transnational private money sequences that have no life function could multiply their agencies within the body with absolutely committed life function

09:19 And the key though in terms of the body's immune system defense, and it also applies at the social level is that it's not recognized by the immune system. It's not effectively recognized by the immune system. That's the whole key to fighting cancer is you have to recognize it first and really, the whole revolution of society is dealing with disorders that are multiplying through the body in some way or in the body so as to give it...as to disorder it, disease it and usually we recognize that the immune system is a miracle of evolution

09:55 I mean, it... And that can go into the definite description at the level of the individual life host, your organism. But in both cases, deep response to all possible diseases has already been evolved inside our immune system and it's you know, the T cells, the killer cells, the T cells comes from the thymus gland up and anyway, it's a really marvelous beautiful process of recognizing and then isolating and attacking erasing this killer enemy but the problem with the killer enemy is that this really differentiates it from a virus, it metastasizes across the host. It jumps across the host. It doesn't just spread by an enlarging circle somehow it jumps right across the hosts

10:43 from one place to the other and in fact it can start at the sexual organs and end up as brain cancer or many, many other possible combinations. But metastasize which is a really scary thing. It means that your whole immune system is not working because its gone by the filters that normally pick these things out and they'd normally fight back and reestablish the health of the host It metastasizes, and it metastasizes every which way. It can metastasize across seemingly action at a distance leaping across the body from one part to another that's really distinguishes it and thats exactly what we see with transnational money sequences. It really begins at that level where it metastasizes just jumps from one realm or one domain in one society to the other

11:35 you know, how does it do this? Well in fact it does this through the so-called trade treaties which are essentially to protect and increase the transnational money sequences against all social life defenses. That's the essence and defining feature of a social level of cancer spread And disaster everywhere because that's it just keeps on going and never stops you know the things of all film that's the wonder of trump really is he has brought this possession phenomena that is going on.

12:10 He doesn't call it a cancer, more and more people are. But he's at least drawing attention to what the mass media, the corporate media always repress and will never report. He is drawing attention that whole society has been dispossessed and then belittled and then left to fend for themselves in a system that actually will kill them. one way or another and disease them on the way. And that is happening, so it progressively infiltrates and invades but also by metastasis which is a distinguishing characteristic and nothing is allowed to limit it when the cancer's functioning well nothing's allowed to eliminate you know that's why these trade treaties they go right into your constitution they become an obligation of the Constitution So the cancer system has gone into the Constitution itself

13:00 Trade so-called trade fees essentially production of transnational money sequences behaving in a cancerous way nothing stops. I can spend the rest of the program identifying all places which that's true and always in which is true and then this just goes on and on and we get more and more breakdowns of the life function of not only the individual body but at a social level, with life organization where the laws of biology apply as well. It affects the host and the host is not even now... I mean, I keep track when people recognize it And there are number recognitions of it But its usually screened out Selected out anything For example in my interviews with newspapers

13:49 They will always eliminate any reference to that when they publish the interview. You can count on their doing it." So, when I said for example the global capitalist experiment has failed in Russia this was you know earlier on back in the 90s. I said to interviewers, you know I just really want to insist that you do Now you can do what you want with it, but I do want the idea to be communicated. And then the journalist would be a journalist that I trusted would so agree and then it wouldn't come up and know what happens at the editorial level and tells you about how the cancer system works by lowering the social immune system from recognition of what is wrong they just wouldn't let it in. They won't let it in

14:38 I've done a lot of work for the mass media and one of them is by Lehers, which have published probably thousands of them. Letters have been published and headlined in the media. And one medium I more or less trusted was The Guardian Weekly, which is about the only newspaper with ads in it that I look at. Although New York Times Weekly has picked up on too so you start to see how the disorder is functioning and that's why I do it where I reported them just quoting international law that the invasion that everybody was saying was a sure thing going to happen in Iraq, I identified it as very journalistic terms that were documented. That this was the supreme crime of international law or aggression

15:27 and cited the charter from Nuremberg as well as the right inside our criminal code. We have that, so they just wouldn't publish it and I tried it from different authors you know get another person with other name another place to send in the same thing because I knew what was going to happen which is what did happen there was going to be what this system specializes in an eco genocide And that indeed is what has happened in Iraq ever since, right? Starting from 1991. But they used to do it under the pretense of sanctions and embargoes but it was the same thing just bombing their infrastructure to smithereens so that 500,000 children died from it and when these Secretary of Foreign Affairs who was Madeline Albright who's the hero Hillary Clinton, you know they're like joined at the hip

16:21 She was you know this is bad for her attention that started with the harvard medical school identify a death of five hundred thousand children and she said yes it is a large price to pay but we think it's worth it. No limit there is no limit to what they'll do, what this system will do. And there's a kind of positional determinism within it even if that person was okay when they went in as I thought the Clintons might be to begin with they get determined by their position and the position that they're within is now a cancer system, a global cancer system

17:04 And all the resistance that we see going on around the world can be really interpreted as a social immune reaction to what's happening. But of course it is not reported in the facts, it's not reported in the responses and here becomes the cornerstone of US ideology, imperial ideology, is the blaming of the enemy The enemy, the enemy. And it can be anyone at all. It could be your local worker community organizer as it was through Central America in the 80s with presidential support and 90's they just had death squads and so forth

17:47 It just continued because they were communists. And that used to be the great enemy term, once you called someone a communist as I did on an interview with a death squad officer who had reformed and there was a world summit in Toronto and it was a counter-summit anyway, it was the chair of jurors. And I asked this former death squad officer and he said just to give you a sense of how deep this identify as an enemy, as an automatic enemy of the listening audience and they'll just go like a Pavlovian dog in their salivations carrying on with their destructive activities. It's okay." He said well people at the top would identify someone as a communist or Marxist and normally we would eliminate that person

18:38 or persons. It was just built into the police apparatus and army apparatus as well, as the extra military forces that are very much at work now. ISIS itself begins with in Afghanistan to take down the Soviet Union and of course the Soviet Union was the enemy. You can just call it that. call it the enemy and anything is justifiable from now on. And that's where, there wasn't any such thing really as this jihadism. It didn't exist! I've traveled to the Middle East as a younger man have traveled through all of countries in the Middle East and at that time there was no such thing they were jihadi type mentalities but it wasn't organized force. That we can thank the United States for specifically Brzezinski

19:33 So we have this system calling anything that resists the enemy and that's the cornerstone operation of the global ideology and the disease it is carrying. Man, you covered quite a bit right there. I do love your breakdowns and I think cancer is a very appropriate analogy One quote that i really like from you that i think it's important for people to remember on a personal level, I think gets into some of that You say the most suppressed issue of our epoch Is the war between life capital in one hand and money capital on another Can you elaborate on that dichotomy? And how to separate the two

20:15 Well, in a way you've seen I talked about the way the money capital system operates when it has achieved and come to its cancer stage. Everything that's said in the last minutes has been really describing the phenomena of the money sequence but their question goes deeper than that as we know you might say well yeah I get the phenomenon which are identifying again why is cancer Exactly what's going on at the inner core the drive wheel of this whole system. And this is, as a philosopher I'm also a logician and I've worked it out as a logical sequence. In work actually that's not publishing and doing right now. What I have published in what you will see in the book too is the concept of rationality itself comes into play inside philosophy research

21:13 Really, it starts with modernity itself and David Hume. I won't go into that source of it but what the key of it is and still runs the understanding of say Harvard University's various scientific and philosophical forms of what's going on Rationality is self-maximizing choice or preference. That's what it is, so it begins right at the level where everybody says well that's the way evolution runs, that's what we are all naturally selfish. We have many many expressions of it human nature is naturally greedy and on and on we hear many many expressions of it but the underlying formula which actually governs all American social science

22:00 and all that it influences elsewhere, which is considerable. It gets control of even the higher research grants as it has now and just gotten much worse. In any case rationality means by presupposition if you're rational, if you follow reason then its a self-maximizing preference sequence in everything you have a choice in. It's only self-maximizing choice, well that seems innocent enough in itself but the self maximizing choice is only rational if you're consistently self maximizing so if you do anything on anyone else's behalf say in the economy which is the basic system at work here, it's not economic at all, its the opposite

22:50 What's the so called economy everybody every agent in the economy is presupposed by the subject of economics to be self maximizing inner choice and all our models are based on that being the case. all the way, not just you know. The key is the sequencing that it just keeps on going and keeps on going. Well so far we don't have a disease in the social body but if slowly turns into what that equals its basically an equation that always more money value for the self whether the self as a transnational corporation or even a consumer and worker

23:32 The cell phone is maximizing he always wants more economic man always want so-called economic men i was once more. Any other flash bar in money card that's a huge transition it takes, evolution, historical evolution of a whole culture. A dominant culture and imperial culture for 300 years or more but because it's sequencing the always more money value for the self meaning you know anything that is so self-maximizing including the corporation or indeed these corporations together is good So thats good and if your not doing that its bad Moreover its no efficient Its not productive

24:14 So efficiency and productivity always need people think all it means that things are going to come to us with less cost well yes left money cause investors or capitalists, what does all of me get me last call or more efficient here productive only. for those who are investing money, have much more than they need and live off their money sequencing. So once you get to there efficiency and productivity is ever lower cost to money sequences private money sequence transnational money sequences where you can see everything is done in accordance with order all that I described earlier is also called efficiency and productivity And it is in accordance with these formulae which of course are never revealed

25:01 are never talked about, they're just assumed as given. It's called the prime, you know it's an axiom and it's the first axiom of so-called economics. So efficiency in productivity only mean lower costs and ever lower cost to money sequences well that means lower labor costs that means labor can starve as long as you can get labor and there is lots of labor out there and so it starves that sufficient, that productive I'm sorry these are the laws of efficiency These are the laws of productivity. It's still going on now as people lose their jobs in the States and millions have lost your job in the States because it's self-maximizing money sequences for transnational corporations, for them is rational, it's productive, it's efficient and nothing else is. And so that's what the corporate media always carries us a story. And that's what the president who was very much positionally determined

25:53 carries as a presupposition he must act in accordance with or they'll hound him out. And that's why Trump again has been important, he doesn't understand this. He doesn't understand what I've been saying but what he does see and what he does understand is that much of our public more and more of our working public have been dispossessed They screwed you No one was allowed to say this. You could, you can look through all the papers and you're not going to find that the system screws the working class of America but he is saying that and that's what that's a good side of Trump right? What do you also see I can go on with that but i'd like to hear your question as we go on then I can pick up

26:47 Sure, sure. You did mention so-called economics and in the book you refer to economics as a pseudoscience and you have a section in the book with the heading methodological censorship in the academy I like that area a lot that's a good portion How has the school system been set up to influence our thoughts on economics? how are economics teachings skewed to hide a lot of points that you've been making The steps I've taken from rationality to self-maximizing choice, always more money value for the self is good. All these things are presupposed as axiomatic and that's how we're always governed and efficiency in productivity is doing this and moreover the profit drives the economic engine there has to be profit or it won't work all of these things are built

27:36 The inner logic of the system and everything that we see the trumpets identify. is in accordance, and that's why I look for counter examples. Show me one counter example. Show me one place, one medium, one party contesting for power, one president, anybody who doesn't act in this way? They don't know him because it's all... It's an inner logic. It's an unseen logic than the states themselves, states and governments themselves see themselves as a and in need of having legitimacy, and they'll only be picked for selection if they serve those transnational money sequences. And that are their gains. That's where Trump sees the downstream effect that the Senate has corrupt the whole Washington is corrupted so forth now just serving themselves it's not a systematic understanding but he sees the downstream effect

28:35 I would say just plugs in at that level of the set of equations where states serve the dominant private money sequence and they're called investors. And we must have investment to survive. So the state must serve them and it now serves them, you know it used to be basically by wars but now its not only wars the states serve them with handouts trillions of dollars in handout and not just to the banks but all major corporations I mean someone like Ralph Nader will point out the downstream effects there that how the states are basically corporate welfare systems

29:17 Everything else in accordance with this inner logic that you're saying, how did this happen? Well what I'm doing is describing an inner logic that is not conscious. This interests me perhaps more than anything is just this inner logic that nobody sees and it's not allowed to be laid bare. It is tracking it, and that's what I'm doing here so everything else becomes a means to this you know we've got to do this in order to grow and we gotta have profit and we gotta have governments helping ensuring their corporations are globally competitive And that means the efficiency and productivity of lowering labor costs, et cetera. And not having too many regulations. This is where Trump is completely schizoid because he one of the things he's attacking now in the latter weeks is regulations to many regulations. You know, the very thing with Reagan tax and tax cuts let's give more tax cuts for the rich. That's where Trump is himself a cancer agent

30:19 But he's, as I say, schizoid. He doesn't understand it nor do of course his followers but that's what happening at the inner logic is prevailing even though we see that the American working class has been screwed and an ordinary people have been dispossessed And then America is in a sorry state without even good bridges when it used to be lead the world or all that he was all right about all those phenomena they're undeniable Though nobody else had posed them out inside the corporate media because they'd be silenced. He couldn't be silenced and that's his greatest achievement is that he hasn't been silent, he's the only guy I have seen or only person I have see being able to take on the media, the corporate media and win in a sense of no matter how they diss him, no matter how they publicly assassinate and slander him

31:13 He just kept on coming and getting stronger because he was representing more and more of the dispossessed people. And then everything's obscured there, oh no that's because he is a racist, that's because he is bigoted, that's because he is a psycho all that stuff which no doubt it's true but its just diverting attention from what really going on with the disease which he seeing the symptoms And so this means it just overruns everything that we used to know as needs. There isn't, and this is back to the question more directly. This is why economics is a pseudo subject because all it does is describe this

31:50 as good. It never goes back to the beginning and say, well maybe we need a more life coherent sense of rationality and maybe we should consider the cost to life not just to money bags. And so it doesn't. It's not even a discipline any discipline that is real discipline is open to counter another paradigm. Is open when it keeps being refuted It's open to change and adaptation to the circumstances which have falsified it again and again. They don't even know what is coming next, of course they don't because they're just locked into this money sequence system as all axiomatically true in all their laws follow from it so there life blind apriori life blinded so called discipline is not a discipline

32:46 It's the propaganda of money sequences. That's all it is, and you will notice that's all it covers. It just covers the money transactions between people in the market and assumes this stayed out there except as a servant so-called night watchman of this system. So if it's a propaganda that is not any scientific sort of philosophy of science but more generally known You have to have propositions that are falsifiable. If they're consistent with anything at all, it's a pseudoscience. So-called economics has nothing... There is nothing that can happen that can disprove its so called science and pseudoscience and that's the first thing how you tell that is a pseudoscience? That's the scientific way of telling it. There's no evidence against it

33:41 And then I would say, as somebody who thinks that the real source of value and this seems self-evident. The real source of value is life and enabling life and the life capacities that produce more life capacities through time, through generational time. That's the real life capital and I call it capital because it has the features of real capital. Capital is a concept that's been appropriated, expropriated from the life sequence why it seems to make so much sense is because there is something wonderful about a value that produces more value

34:23 without loss and cumulative gain. That's a beautiful thing, it's hard... It's not really understood in all history before because usually it's understood cyclically you know what goes around to the beginning again and now people basically understand things in terms of natural cycles but the capital moment this is wealth that produces more wealth without loss and with cumulative gain You know thats a dynamic idea but it leads to cancer as a money sequence system, the transnational money sequence system. But as a life principle and a life axiom, the primary axiom, it leads to better and good

35:09 by definition. It only leads to better life, by definition that is as well let's say education it's wealth you know the education they even call knowledge capital they just mean knowledge capital is money sequence capital how the money sequences use knowledge to reduce costs and advantage money sequence investors that's the only thing they see and a phony understanding of capital. But if you understand, and this is a long time coming I couldn't even say it in print for years after I had so seemingly to my own mind that nobody else was talking about but it was so hard to shift from one mindset to the other

35:58 and I knew the left would be angry at somehow rehabilitating capitalism by talking about life capital. And I knew the right in the center would just not want to allow that distinction in because, the game's up! If you understand that distinction, the game's up. You can't go any further with that because everybody naturally, not just as a self-maximizing agent of a propaganda system Inactive everyday and every place because people prefer life to money a lot of literature is written about it in fact you might say that anything any good that's ever been done is really talking about that one way or another. Not the other but the life what i call the life code of the life value on the all the team and that's why its not allowed out and it's not allowed either by marxist

36:49 which I've written, one of my first books was on Marx and the structure of Marx's worldview with Princeton Press. And so you know, I read everything Marx ever wrote but I came to the conclusion after years and years puzzling over all this, well you've got to go to the life ground and there isn't a life ground in Marx. I can find one for him but he doesn't have one. He implies it but he doesn't have it and that's why Stalinism and everything can run mad calling itself Marxism because the actual theory doesn't ultimately have a life ground what its ground is productive force development or technological development

37:29 Determinism and often technologies can be even publicly owned and still destroy life. Indeed for marks the classes that were you know the peasant classes where necessary cost in order to ask in the world was a necessary cause of progress, He in a way is the last great bourgeois thinker, in the sense that he took capital to be implicitly God. That if the workers can just take over this money capital then everything will be solved. Well it isn't because life requirements are very different and what are those life requirements? And then I go down to what they are and you get a whole schedule of needs not manslaughter needs or any other type of needs we're talking about

38:18 A need is what life is reduced without. That's another formula you won't find anywhere else, but it captures the notion of need and only need and so what is that we cannot do without reduction or death of our life capacities? Well, we've got to have good air debris, gotta have clean air debris And indeed, we probably also need some space and we probably needed at least some green space or gotta have light. I call that the atmospheric good

38:58 Well John, let me ask you this though. I think a lot of the listeners probably see what we should do or know some of the things that we need but how do we get there? You know that's the real issue with cancer as entrenched as it is and how to alter the system's motivations to work for life capital for the greater good rather than individual wealth and greed It's easy to recognize it or easier to recognize it but its a lot harder to actually make a real world switch Well, being a...perhaps because I'm a philosopher. I see the things that ultimately decide what's happening are principles even if they're unrecognized principles and the key of science or all science basically, science looks for principles or laws in the case of nature then even in the case of social systems you look for laws what's governing it

39:50 In my case, I don't want to call it a law between the life sequence of value and the money sequence of value. But I do call those principles and identify them as regulating principles whether people are aware of them or not. It's a regulating principle that's at work. For example when someone says for many years they did Columbus discovered America The underlying principle is that all human discernment and understanding is European. And they don't know that's the underlying principle, but it in fact governs them and not only governs them, it leads to... It doesn't matter if we kill all the Indians or all the native population, it's good! So always behind what you see inside a system or inside a person's behavior as individual inside that system

40:42 it's always regulated by principles. And so I can just pose a question back, just to get to that first base. Can you think of anything that isn't governed by principle and indeed isn't governed by the life value principle today versus the money value principle or the money sequence of values versus the life sequence of values? So I'm arguing and look for, I love Conrad examples arguing that if you want to understand anything that's going on here, you've got to understand its regulating principle or you don't have a scientific understanding. You don't even have a logical understanding of it and anything that's exceptions to it causes one... If there is an exception to them then one looks examines that exception see if it really isn't an exception and then now you'll have to adapt your understanding

41:33 again, looking for the actually underlying principle that you will be able to predict from too that they'll continue to operate with that principle until there's another principle that is instituted. And we've had those principles instituted... For example, slavery everybody thought it was natural from Aristotle and Plato on but it was a natural state of affairs and that's that and that continued up until you know, hardly a century ago that was no longer a principle we can live with and live accordance with. And so the principle changed that slaves were not slaves by nature but by an institution that needs to be changed. The same with women who are in a sense like slaves basically the possession of their male master

42:22 And with no rights and we've seen in our own lifetimes, we've seen big changes happening there. But what we look for you know many feminists would say yeah I see a big change in the talk but you don't see any change and what's actually going on in the marketplace because they're women still only have two thirds of the pay of men And that's the big, you know seems to be an anomaly but according to a principle understanding with principal ground. Well thats because your economy is not feminist it doesn't recognize these as issues now they may bring in symbolic women into the hierarchy and even CEO office but thats not a change in principal thats basically propaganda

43:09 a symbolic gesture that stops people seeing what's wrong with the principle. So look to any problem or indeed, any success in our lives and this was really what we began with in our original conversation about doing this program was just saying not only is the war of the world, the life value principle for the life sequence of value versus some money Principal of the money axiom and any sequence of value it is also that war includes everything.

43:46 Everything is now involved in that war. And isn't that kind of the dirty secret though? That like these principles that really guide the system, there's different levels to how important they are to the integrity of the system and they allow us to debate and vote on issues that are kind of minor but these key ones are kind of off limits to us it seems. That's right! So that's a problem with thought And that's what I try to do, is to bring people's understanding to the place where they see this. Because what I am saying here can be falsified. You can pick out some phenomenon and say well you know there they're arguing about this or that, say feminism or racism which is associated with slavery and they haven't really changed a principle. Or they have actually changed the principle insofar as it isn't governing.

44:37 It's an empirical objective matter here. And then you say, well how can we do it? Because it just isn't that easy. I hear from your question we sort of are getting this but look at what's going on there still doing these dispossessing so-called trade treaties, trade agreements which only advantage transnational money sequences and override everything of life value to do some even though we know that principle Nothing's changed. They just give out different pretenses, you know? And basically have a brand change. Oh people are sick of that so we'll change from the Bush Cancer System leader they don't think about but we'll not change the cancer will change the front man right so we have a brand change with Obama and that's all and everybody saw things are going to be better now president of hope Nobel Peace Prize everybody applauds thanks for principles Jake

45:33 What i think the regulating principal hasn't changed at all you just been duped again by a brand change and the people inside that position until they understand these things are not going to be able to do it because now is master. But it's not mastered in my life and it's not mastered your life. And here we come to the individual level, which I think that individuals on halfway are determined by their positions within a system that has violence and force and lies behind it. That's always true of this system since its a cancer-like system. That is especially true. Well what about us as individuals? I don't do or act in my life including right now. I'm gonna take a sip of my water

46:19 Oh, that's nice. And I won't drink any water that is in a plastic bottle and I will never accept water...I've almost died from it when I was traveling through India choosing water that was in a well but it was polluted without my knowing it and without even the villagers knowing it. It almost took me down with amoebic dysentery overnight almost. And I'm going to only patronize the provision of water that is a good provision, that makes it universally accessible. So I'm only gonna use public water or demand public water or filter it in some way myself until we get that change involved. Now that's just water but go through every part of your life here you know this technical marvel that we have that we can now talk over a phone

47:15 and communicate to each other about what ultimately matters, which was never possible before. But you gotta watch it because that same system is into basically commercial control. It's basically into the secret of all propaganda as nicely said by Bernays who was a nephew of Freud he said its a mechanism of consent that rules rules and regiments people without their knowledge of it. And this is the invisible government, he said that back in 1926 and he's the founder of public relations so the public relations of the knowledge economy, the information economy and nothing but saturating ads everywhere for always transnational money sequences

48:07 or trying to be transnational money sequencers. So I can change my life by what media, my own life will change radically if I don't for example watch commercial television And I could say that since television came in, half my life has been without it. Or where the public sector gets into the television is more reliable Select changes my past time to get my computer which i live from basically as a writer made tremendous advantages for me and i always ask the life question doesn't enable life or is it like coherent does it more inclusive lane like coherently able my life and other life that's what the court answers

49:00 It's not only that it enables your life, but it's coherent with others' needs so that it enables their lives too. Every commitment for every act that anyone ever does can be a life value commitment and in fact we see people doing this all the time. Food is the best example really where you see a huge change of awareness coming. Ten years ago they really... The junk food well what you know the US had made sure they just said they would discontinue funding the World Health Organization if If they came out with anything about food and junk food or even a good diet, which you have to have for nourishing diet. They would stop it just defunded that's the principle weapon is defunding if not war did not kill the fun first then kill. And so every moment of our lives is such a choice between in our time the money sequence value when I see.

49:55 Right on. I do like a lot of what you're saying, people should live more principled lives but there is an issue here that we have to address because I've had several guests who talk about classic capitalism as the mechanism for lifting hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people out of poverty in the last century. That the technological innovations and advancements of our time have capitalism to thank as their catalysts and they say that our weapons shouldn't be aimed at capitalism but rather centralisation How would you respond to someone with that mindset or even anarchists or free market libertarians who argue the state is the real villain of this story here?

50:34 Well, you've just encapsulated very as you're doing throughout here. You've encapsulated the two main arguments. The first argument I would call is Marxist in origin but also that needn't be Marxists that capitalism is the solution. Marx believed that and we had to have capitalism reach its zenith of where it was no longer productive and then only when it was no longer productive when it was choosing between productive regression and productive advance, the system would always, he thought it was an historical law, choose the way you just described. That capitalism will always... You know all these for example life expectancy that will change and improvement then for example electric lighting it was through capitalism or through knowledge capital in the internet so forth. And each one of these I would go through and say well whether by Marxist

51:31 or by orthodox economics because they really do share that same argument, both of them. And that's why the one is not really a revolutionary argument in the sense of changing the system as basically how the system can still work if the workers are the ruling class and that doesn't get into the problem sort of built-in principle So in those cases I would say, well you know take the people die less especially childbirth would be the most dramatic success or life expectancy. That was capitalism that was in spite of capitalism

52:10 Right from the get-go. It was about having clean supplies of water right from the get go and separating water from sewage That was a secret to it and that happened, you know That was not capitalists that were the women in England for example at during the cholera epidemic said we gotta have they understood women are usually leading these things by the way if my capitalism at all probably the women and they led this force, ended up with public sewage and so forth which then was copied everywhere because it made the difference between life and death for most of your population. More than half of Europe was killed by not having a separation of water and sewage because if you bought in plague which is carried by rats which had parasite on them et cetera et cetera but the only way you're gonna fix it

53:03 You separated the water, which mothers would know. The women would know because they're dealing with water all the time And so it wasn't capitalism at all. And now you think, oh well but look at this the capitalism that gave us the internet no no as you know what you probably know more than I do about this is all been shareware from their beginning. It's all been a science to begin with when i was first introduced to it before became fashionable and I resisted because of I was used to the other way but my physicist friends because I was very much involved in then Science for Peace, which is by the way been usurped by basically US propaganda. But in the old days of Science for Peace they were at the front end. They had Nobel Prize members in their lot. They were at the front end of the internet because that's what they were doing in there physics experiments and discussions with each other without having to go travel thousands of miles or you know

54:02 affordable telephone expenses that only happen once in a day or you know the internet was introduced by public scientists and the people who have all the innovations like I mean what will the share were to be one way or another behind all of it. And then if some non-capitalist discourses and communications of fact in spite of capitalism is all the real information and knowledge that you can get from the web now by avoiding capitalism, by stepping around it which now these tools allow us. So I would say now, you know, I'm open to of course dispute here if anybody can think of a thing that capitalism gave us that wasn't in fact started beforehand by non-capitalism or in spite of capitalism

54:53 Right and I struggle with that too because i have guests on both sides of the question and so many talk about all if we just had a free market yeah that didn't have all this influence from the elites it would be more freer society but, im just not sure because i think that with capitalism you're always gonna have incentives for criminal action to get more profit. Of course your right This is a libertarian ideology on one half of it. There's capitalist libertarianism and there's socialist libertarianism or local libertarianism where its by the community determination, self-determination and anarchism is another expression of it so even in Marxist day there were anarchists that argued this way but its become much more especially through US not many people elsewhere

55:44 believe in any of that liberal capitalist libertarianism. That's basically what I would call an American religion, which isn't recognized as a religion since it is very rational but It's not life coherent. As you said, it's not just crime but if you leave that alone try to think of one social advance made without public authority, without public taxes and even from police to water supply again its the same thing so why don't they know that? because they're a religion, they're a dogma. And you know they've got the extraction and it's carried by Americans I don't...I have not met anybody who is a capitalist anarchist libertarian outside of the states or from the states are born and bred in the states It's more well it's penetrated Canada quite a bit but no to point where people take us seriously But it has penetrated but not elsewhere

56:44 And why? Well, this is a...you know usually there are religious substitutes for the lost religions we have. Although libertarianism pretends to and in many matters other than economic it is rational here its religious. There's only one God there shall be no other God before him and that is capitalism that is free investment with interference. That is ultimately the transnational money sequence cancer system, but they can't go any of those steps and I've been glad to you know...I tried to debate a very well-known libertarian up here an American of course but he's dead as many carpetbaggers came up here took over Canadian universities

57:34 And they just can't deal with it. They just cannot deal with it, so this changed the topic because the good sawers are good at sophistry. But that's what i think about it and i just say well just take a look at you think it'll all be better without the state by free investment then you can go into the cancer argument are you going to the argument of which particular advance do you think, do you are you sure has been by this money sequence private money sequence method right and whenever they're put that one day after face they change the topic or try to find something to be sophistical about. Paul Jay Right, well I mean it's the privatization of the medical system, of the prison system that creates a lot of America's problems but I guess maybe it's not an either-or maybe its a little bit of both. Richard Penalty Well it depends what you mean by privatization if you mean by privatization for profit, money profit

58:34 ever more money profit, life blind money profit. No it always fails and you try to think of any privatization that's actually run by corporations it always fails they never admit the failures but again in debate say well tell me one place that you think has been a success with this there isn't any right but if you mean by private like a friend of my brothers who is very well-known surgeon an agent in public health in Canada Associate Minister of Public Health. He has a good friend who's unfortunately since passed away, maybe he was poisoned that just occurs to me. He had a private system of surgery that was incredibly more efficient in wait times and in good results, that is healthy results than any other method and he could not get it in. It still isn't there

59:31 And the demonstration was clear. The public sector did not want to talk to them because it showed them up or that they were already, as has increasingly happened, they were already bought by the corporations who had done them favors and so forth which is what they do on inside lobbying. There's inside lobbying going on all the time nonstop to privatize, privatize, privatize and their very aggressive And they're always in suits and they always have deep voices, and they are very certain about what they know. But it's just propaganda! And that works because if it doesn't work then we won't fund that guy. In fact, it is time the newspapers exposed this inflexibility

1:00:14 Yeah, I'm with you man. We definitely have talked about a lot but I think probably one of the most important things for people to take away is that There is a huge divide-and-conquer program in play and if we can get over things like black and white Get over things like libertarian and socialist and instead unite around that Priority of getting a better set of principles to guide our system Maybe with that we can do something because we do have the numbers And we've got the life ground too, and the life ground is all the conditions required to take your next breath. There are a lot of conditions and they've gotta be in our consciousness as something to enable not destroy and to enable through time.

1:01:02 The life capital is the formula for that. And we're grounded, you see? We haven't been life-grounded before. No theory has been life-grounded before and it's really just taking things down to where it's self evident that that's what we're form and our questions and problems really need that to be the lens through which you understand Amen. Wow, well John this has been a real treat for this college dropout to spend some time with such an accomplished academic as yourself! Well you know the reason we're doing it is because you showed yourself to be very informed and were thinking in principled terms I try And not many people do that so it's been a pleasure for me too Greg

1:01:51 Well, thanks for taking me up on the offer. Would you like to remind the people where they can follow up on your work or tell us about anything else you're working on in the future before we go? Well, you can capture a lot of my book which was published in 2013, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism from Crisis to Cure and that's an encyclopedic book. And then as for articles and monographs that I've done since, I've done them all over the place but the place that carries all of them and archives all pretty well except the one on 9-11. It only has part of it, I think it used to anyway but all my work that I've done in monographs and articles that is really for a wider audience is on global research so if you just

1:02:38 dial in on your computer, Google global research. You'll come up with all of their work and my work is really the philosophical underpinnings of it whenever I address what is essentially current event problems and they have archives of my work that run to, I don't even know how many there are in there but it's more than a book worth because they wanted to turn it into a book. But I said well you've got it on archives so you can have it and then also on PRN Public Radio Network also you can Google it find it, you'll find on archives a lot of conversations like the ones we had today

1:03:19 And you got lots of me there. Although today I talked about things that have not been heard before, a lot of it. Awesome. Great to hear! Alright John, well keep fighting the good fight and take care out there alright? Yeah, you as well Greg and your listeners. Bye for now. Will do All right, all right. Big John McMurtry give it up for him I do apologize for his phone quality definitely one of the rougher ones in a while big thanks to those who helped make it better I do have a few people who've contacted me over the years about audio quality and when I get one of these rougher interviews I run it past them see if they can do a better job on it than I can and That's usually the case so I did have some help And it was appreciated

1:04:09 It'd be nice if it was a little more clear, but this was the only way to get him. And I'm a big fan of John's book and the speeches he has given on Zeitgeist Day events. I felt like it was a unique message worth getting despite all that. Plus, I think the libertarian let-the-free market free kind of view is very ingrained in this alternative world and I wanted to go the other way for a change. Everybody knows that's not my favorite paradigm But man, I know shows have been slow to come out this month too. The reason for that is that I recorded several at the beginning of the month because

1:04:46 Because I knew I needed some time to finish higher side clothing, which is officially done now Anyone who's connected with me on social media will see that but if you haven't just go to thehighersideclothing.com and we got 12 all-new full color designs amazing artwork all relating directly to THC episodes It's pretty sick! I'm very proud of that and thanks to my special lady who helped too, but it did take us some time. So I recorded at the beginning of the month got Hireside Clothing launched and then had some Thanksgiving obligations and now i'm working through the shows I have to get them out before the end of the month like I said in the beginning this episode was recorded the day before the election so we didn't really know what was going to happen but I thought John made it pretty clear that he saw some positives in a Trump win

1:05:39 I just been saying how shocked i am that the Clinton network was not only defeated like that but exposed in a big way with pizza gate and the Podesta email leak. These are interesting times, but let me tell you about these next two shows because they tie into this pretty heavily so I talked to John the day before the election And then I recorded an interview with Daniel Pinchbeck on the day after. And it's a weird episode, it's a weird show because my energy and Daniels were in very different places that morning. We have a fair amount of disagreements as the interview goes on...I mean you'll see

1:06:17 And then the next show after that is with the legendary author of The Secret Sun blog, Chris Knowles. And that's pretty great too because we have a lot of the same thoughts about what's going on in power networks That's gonna be a good one in that THC sweet spot that I think a lot of people love to hang out in. And then we can close the books on November and we'll be getting into a meme magic and kek show soon, A full-on pizza gate show soon with David Seaman who is really digging deep and playing with fire Looking into this exposed pedophilia network, I mean his last tweet was if i die it is not a suicide. So we need to talk to him quick and hopefully he stays safe in the next five days so things are happening people they are happening! I'm sorry for the delay releasing shows but I have no more T-shirt companies to launch going forward so we should be better paced

1:07:18 I say that all the time, but i do love you guys. Thanks for listening! I hope John's points about the underlying value mechanisms were of interest to you and hopefully we can get down to the root and change some of our incentives around to be more respectful of life capital Sign up for PLUS if you'd like to hear us go deeper into that conversation and get into John's thoughts on 9-11 as well as other good stuff. You know the drill, either way I've done what i can and I wish you the best! Your move market manipulators education indoctrinators and structural sorcerers of the Rockefeller Rothschild machine your fucking move. They built a little empire out of some crazy garbage

1:08:05 Called the blood of the exploited working class They've overcome their shyness Now we're calling them your highness And the world screams, save me THC They destroyed the bonds of friendship and respect Between the only people left Who'd even look them in the eye And make a fortune off the same ones that they tortured And the world screamed, save me THC Let's look for Jesus

1:09:00 Some will say, Mr. Jesus is so far away You're the only one who can tell me if it's true The birds and archers too They built a little empire They're out of some crazy garbage Called the blood of the exploited Working class overcome their shining Now we're calling them your highness And the world screams Save me THC, save me THC