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RT-1 Your Children Are Under Attack

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:09] Hello and welcome everyone. It’s so good to be here with you and live show. Of course you are a part of this. So the comments matter. We’re going to be watching them all. Bring them in as are appropriate and important to bring in. We’ll do as much as we can. This show here is just 1/2 is.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:30] Your children are under attack. We have to talk about this. We have to talk about the ways. Actually, we’re all under attack. But this is what’s happening right now. No longer can be chalked up to simple incompetence. And we have to understand that we’re in in process of dealing with the system. And the system is doing things that we can all feel we’re aware of. It’s not helpful to us at this point in time to ignore what’s going on. So you don’t me. I kind of like to know what the cage is constructed out of. I’m a systems guy. I like to know what are the systems that we’re dealing with. And the system effects that we have right now are saying that we have a system that’s working against us and why is that happening? And of course, there’s a lot of conversation out there. Is it the Davos crowd? Is it the Bill Gates, you know, a specific individual? Is it just the system in which we live? Is this just end stage capitalism? Who knows? So we’re going to explore some of that. But I wanted to carry on with a set of ideas that we had with us last time. And so I want to really bring that forward. So where do we start with this conversation? Yeah, probably. Here is our 10th Livecast seeing how it’s going and hopefully it’s going well. So we’ll keep doing this as long as it makes sense for us to continue with this wonderful style of program. Here’s where I want to start the United States so this actually can apply to a lot of countries. I don’t mean to be U.S. centric. I happen to know my country best, but this actually applies with in a lot of places of the world. And so first up. If you were a martian, drop down on the earth and said, hey, score this culture. And by the way, would you recreate it if you could, just as is? We would have certain indicators. We will go. Maybe not. Maybe we could do better. Maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. So right here, United States has by far the highest rates of incarceration. This is per 100,000. So that’s probably not a healthy sign. You’ve got a lot of people in prison for some reason less and less. You have a system that the people who own the prisons are for profit private entities, and they lobby to make sure that the laws are extra tough and result in long sentencing guidelines. Right. Does that happen? That’s crazy talk. Of course it happens. The system we live in, it’s just how it works. And by the way, it’s a little bit crazy making, particularly for young people to notice that. Look at all the people who are in prisons, in jails for drug offenses. So 1990, 1980 is there in the red, in 2019, is there in the blue. So in state prisons, federal prisons jails through different classifications. Almost nobody was in prison back in 1980 for drugs. Now there’s lots of people. Why? Well, because we have these drug sentencing guidelines. Because why? There’s a war on drugs, I hate to tell you, but drugs one, that war I’d be the first to congratulate drugs for winning that war. But there’s still people in those blue bars who are in prison because of marijuana, which we all know is fundamentally a victimless crime, which we all know in our heart of hearts. You can’t resolve it. You can’t possibly explain to a young child, like, why is why is that person in prison for weed and that person smoking weed on the street and that person’s serving life for weed, but that person selling it in a state licensed dispensary, of course, he can’t make sense of that because it’s nonsense. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But that’s part of the program, isn’t it? Right, that things aren’t supposed to make sense when you’re in. A mass psychosis formation process. It actually matters that things don’t make sense. And so that’s just that’s nonsense. Right. And you know why we don’t fix that? You know what? You know why? Like every other country out there, if we could save one octogenarian, it’ll be worth it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Think of the weeks of life that have been saved. That that’ll be just heartwarming. Make a make a Hallmark movie about that. Show it to ourselves every Christmas. Be amazing. But we could. We don’t have to be this way. Right? We don’t need to have this many. Right. You know what? Why? If France has a rate of incarceration that’s under a hundred per 100,000, the United States is over 600, more than six times higher. Clearly, we could fix that if we wanted to, but we don’t fix it. You know why? Simple reason. We don’t care. I mean, that’s the only conclusion you can come to. Like, if you know, something is is off the rails and you know why it’s off the rails. And you can fix it, but you don’t. Just because you want it that way means you don’t care. You don’t want it to change. Or worse. You like it that way. Right. We’ve known for decades that people who are addicted to drugs, for instance. So if we said we have a drug problem and it’s a war on drugs, and the problem is the drugs, if we can just interdict the drugs and if there’s no drugs, then we’ll solve this. That’s how we’re going to fight this war. Well, that’s just stupid, right? Because obviously, if you can get drugs inside of Fort Leavenworth Supermax Prison, right. It’s just if you can get them there, you’re probably not going to stop a whole country from finding a way to get them. So that’s not the issue. But we’ve known this for a really long time.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:05:53] And there was studies run a long time ago, a long time ago where they asked the question, like, is this a genetic thing? Are some people predisposed? And they found out that indeed a certain number of people in a population out here at the end of the bell curve are going to be highly predisposed for a variety of reasons, some of them biochemical, some of them genetic, some of them structural or situational. And their lives are going to be highly sensitive to and subject to becoming addicts, which means it’s not a criminal situation that is a at best, a medical situation, but more likely it’s actually a social situation. And then since then, we’ve learned that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection that when people feel connected and they’ve got lives of meaning and purpose, that overall drug use drops tremendously. And so when they were doing the original addiction studies, they took a rat all alone in a cage, two bottles of water, one bottle’s got water in it. The others got water laced with cocaine. And that thing just starts hitting on that cocaine. Water, right? It says, Oh, my God, this stuff’s just addictive. Look, this this animal will choose this substance all the way up until it kills itself. Taking that, it must be the substance. That’s what we need to do. But then somebody else came along and said, Whoa, whoa. What if we gave this? What if we take the same rats, same two bottles of water? Same idea. But we put it into a healthy environment. It’s got lots of friends, it’s got plenty of food, it’s got things to do and checked it out. Guess what? The rats under that circumstance don’t choose the poisoned water. Right. They choose to be healthy instead. It couldn’t be simpler. Have we figured that out as a nation? They’re too complicated. You know why? Because we don’t care. And that level of. Of level of not caring, it sort of ripples through everything that happens in this country. And it creates a set of conditions that we’re going to talk about here that I think constitute an attack, a psychological attack upon us as a nation and other nations as well that that fall victim to these same thing. So how about this? Talked about this a little bit last week. I’m going to go into this a little bit more deeply, but we have a lot of unhappy, drugged children. Now it’s in the USA, one in 12 children, one in 12 are now on psychiatric drugs, including 1.2% of preschoolers and 12.9% of 12 to 17 year olds. 12.9%. Yeah. Boy, that depresses me. The use of psychiatric drugs in children has steadily increased, has been steadily increasing for many years in several countries, including the U.S. and Australia. Little is known about the adverse effects of these powerful chemical agents alone, or especially in combination on the developing brain. Now we noted last week that maybe this is something we should talk about because a lot of these violent things that are happening in the United States might be actually side effects, rare, but pretty deadly side effects that happen as a consequence of putting psychoactive drugs into developing brains. Maybe they don’t develop correctly. Maybe it’s a very subtle, sensitive thing. Maybe we’re going to find out that by masking children and covering up facial expressions that we’re going to find in a few years that oops masking children was a not smart thing to do because they’re at a very sensitive developmental stage where as they’re developing, they need to be able to read facial cues in order to develop certain subtle. It’s very subtle reading faces, right? So you look at the people who are basically aphasia and facial reading, right? That people with certain levels of autism just find it very hard to decode what’s happening on a human face because they’re a little bit blind to it makes it very difficult to figure out what’s going on out there around you, in the people around you. It’s subtle. And who knows what’s going to happen? We’re going to we just ran a huge experiment on kids for two years, continuing in some really benighted places, some really backward places. This is still continuing to this day in certain locations. So but we have a lot of unhappy and drugged children in the story. And the explanation for that is what? We just don’t care. Well, I mean, that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re just going to, you know, whatever. We’ll just give. Let’s figure out what happened. Let’s just give the pills to these kids and we’ll work it out later. Right? Instead, we have to come maybe to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with the system we’re asking the kids to be in, or there’s some other environmental fact or there’s something that we’re doing. That isn’t really healthy and wonderful if you have to drug a preschooler to get it somehow, you know, behaving correctly. It might be that the problem isn’t with the preschool or it’s with the system. We’re trying to plug, cram, force, fit, smash that little body in mind into it. It’s just such a we don’t ask we don’t ask that question. But that’s that’s what happens when you get ideologically subverted into a system. It demands your complete compliance with that system and even daring to ask a question outside of that. Gets you in trouble. And I know this because back in the day when my eldest, Erica, who’s now 28, back when she was in third grade, this is in Pfizer. I was working at Pfizer. I was we were living in Connecticut, Pfizer facilities in Groton, Connecticut. It’s a it’s a it’s a whole the whole town is it’s a company town. Right. A lot of people work at Pfizer. I was there for three years of my life working in corporate finance. But it’s only relevant to the story because she comes home from third grade, which is the last year a public school we otherwise homeschooled. And she came back with a dare pamphlet the debris and and so this strikes me as a little odd teaching somebody that young about drugs and drug use in the pamphlets pretty graphic you know, and got pictures of syringes and ruined lives and all that stuff and talked to the school about it and they’re befuddled. He’s like, why are you even questioning this? You know, obviously it’s never too early to teach kids about evil things called drugs. And I said, Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but kids are a little bit black and white at this age. How do I explain to her that I work for a drug company, you know? Have you thought that through? And a lot of the kids in your school work for a drug company and they’re just creating all this confusion and kids saying drugs are bad. Well, how do you begin to parse that and say, well, there’s illegal drugs and then there’s drugs, it creates systemic dependencies, and then there’s drugs that are psychologically addictive. And of course, it’s gradation and there’s a little bit of overlap and some Venn diagram crossover between blah, blah, blah. Right. They couldn’t handle any of that subtlety because their system said it’s drugs are bad and it’s never too early to start teaching kids. Never. Right. As if, like, once. Should they be taught about. Incontinence, too, you know, because that that’ll strike them maybe, you know, later on in life, whatever. It was just it was silly. But the point is that you couldn’t have the conversation even because it was impossible to get people to think outside of that rigid system that they’d gotten sort of crammed into. And so now it’s this is how the system is. If your kid isn’t fitting within the system. Problems with the kid. Here, take some pills. Let’s do that. All right. But that’s just nonsensical, right?

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:13:12] On some level, we all know that and especially our youth know that. But we got to talk about that and then about Serrano says, here I was born in the decade when they were still prescribing lobotomies. They were hailed as a miracle of medical progress. Hmm. Where we heard that one recently. Yes or no. The the lobotomies, where they, you know, peeled the eyelid back and pushed a sharp implement up into the brain and then scrambled the cortex a little bit. Yeah, that was that was state of the art for a period of time. And it was even during my interview with RFK Jr, he talked about I think it was Rose Kennedy in his family line, was troublesome and given a lobotomy and then pushed into an institution never to be seen again. It happened a lot and it happened to people who were troublemakers and that’s how they dealt with it. Now we’ve got these chemical lobotomies and it’s just, again, we should ask the question, is the problem with the kid or is the problem with the system? But you’re not allowed to ask the question about the system, because this where that’s the system is like sacrosanct. You can’t ask questions about that. Of course, the child has to figure out how to fit into this particular classroom structure. It’s the best who could conceive of anything different. You know, that’s the world we live in as well. I mean, these are just warning signs. I think, again, the Martian is here on planet Earth looking around, saying, what I recreate this as is this is an astonishing map. Right? Go ahead. Just start playing that and we’ll just take a look at this. So this is through time, 1987, 1988, 1989 is going to count through the years. And as the colors progressed from light blue to dark blue and then into the light orange and out into red, the BMI percentage of the population is climbing from a low of under 10% to a high of over 30%. Here we are in 2000, three and four. Ooh, things are getting a little, little scary here. And this represents an astonishing shift overall in what’s happened in this country. And so just just loop that one more time, if you could. Right. So this is this is pretty amazing to me because this this is like from 1986 to 2008. We’re talking 20 years. That’s an astonishing shift. That’s really fast. 20 years is just like that for a society to go from basically healthy BMI to a completely unhealthy BMI. Can we just talk about this? Right. Can is it possible to say there’s something in the system, something we’re doing to ourselves, something about the food, something about it’s something, right? But maybe we should talk about it. And obviously, you know, that’s a very difficult thing to do. And this is only progressed further and worse post 2008. So here we are. Right. The question is, why is that like that and what is going on? And is there anything we can do about it? And I could show you a bunch of other signposts that are kind of like that, that collectively would say we can do better. Yeah, we in fact, we deserve better. But if we’re feeling powerless and like just shrugging and going, Oh, there’s nothing we can do, you know, we don’t care. I can’t do anything about it. Well, then we lose before we even get started, because we bought into the dominant ideology, which is this is the way it is. And your job is to figure out how to live within it and not ask questions about it. Your job is not to figure out how to be different than that or to decide for yourself. God forbid that you should be, you know, in any way, shape or form in control of any of this stuff, because this is the system. And in every one of those cases, when I talked about the incarceration rates, the drugging of children, the obesity, I could also point you to a set of corporations behind there who all make money, fantastic amounts of money at every one of those junctures. And in fact, I could make a larger tapestry. Monsanto selling its roundup. Bayer selling its neonicotinoid pesticides on and on and on. There are these captured regulatory agencies that don’t know what to do about any of that. And as a consequence, we are rapidly sickening the planet ourselves. And most importantly, though, creating a future that our young can’t believe in, and that is the most insidious attack there is, is to take away somebody’s sense of the future, because that attacks their sense of hope. And that is one of the worst things that could possibly happen. So I’m here to reject that. I’m here to say it’s just it’s gross, it’s inappropriate. I want nothing to do with it. And more to the point, the people who insist that that’s how it is and you don’t understand this is this is the best we’ve got. And things have never been better, just aren’t I don’t share any of that slavish obedience to a system that is clearly not working in our collective benefit or my individual benefit. And I got nothing to do with any of that stuff. So let’s let’s go there. You know why we don’t know much about where that. Obesity is coming from because as Tom Krauss put it, no, you just don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers to.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:18:38] That’s it’s like, where did this SARS-CoV-2 virus come from? You know what? Let’s just not ask that, you know? Let’s let’s add to that. Say, are these vaccines working like we like we think they’re supposed to work. You know, don’t ask that question either. You get in trouble for asking questions when the system doesn’t want any questions asked about that. But that’s part of your job as a is a functioning adult is to ask those sorts of questions. So last time I did, I dipped into this briefly. I want to spend more time on this because this is actually brilliant. Every so often I come across a piece of writing that just changes how I see the world. This is one of them. And this is something called the Demoralized Mind. It was in this publication called The New Internationalist. There’s a link to it down below. I’ll put that down in the show notes. And this is by a gentleman, John F Schumacher. He’s a New Zealand psychologist and wrote this in April of 2016. Now, I wanted to step through this because this framing, when you understand this framing of demoralization. It for me. What it did was it snapped the world into focus, and I saw it in a whole new way that I haven’t been able to unseat. So I love sharing those moments when something has come along to changes my point of view, and then I can share that with you because there’s nothing more valuable to me than starting to understand the outlines of the cage that I’m in. I don’t want to just be shocked. I don’t want to just constantly be shocked by random things. I want to understand, even if it’s unpleasant. I want to know how the cage is constructed, where the next shocks are coming from. Because I love knowing where the future is going to go and how things are going to unfold. And I’m just curious that way. So for a lot of bases, I love this. So we’re going to go through quite a bit of this particular article here and thank you for the like goldfish school. So check this out. This is the opening paragraph. We’re going to go through this. Our descent quote, Our descent into the age of depression seems unstoppable. Three decades ago, the average age for first onset of depression was 30. And today it’s 14. End quote. Okay. Time out. Remember I just showed you that obesity map and something really crazy has happened over the past 20 years from 2000. And what was that? I think that was 1986 to 2008. Same thing here. They’re saying from this is written in 2016. So it’s over that same time frame, basically something in the mid eighties changed. And we ought to be curious about that. Don’t you think that it’s like maybe we should know the average onset is 14 like like the way these normally work, this is would be a bell curve of people. The average in the middle there would be. That’s was 30. Maybe if that wobbled back to 29 or up to 31, like, like that thing should be fairly stable when it suddenly lurches from 30 to 14. Your alarm bells better be just jangling and clanging because you’ve just jumped several standard deviations away from the mean. Yeah, I mean, this is just astonishing. What’s just happened. That right there, that opening sentence, the average age onset of depression has moved from 30 to 14 in just 30 years. That’s. Societal whiplash. And we ought to we ought to have some theories about that. Continuing quote, researchers such as Stephen Asare to Duke University point out that the rate of depression in Western industrialized societies is doubling. With each successive generational cohort, the rate is doubling. So not just the age of onset, but the overall rate. How many people are actually being affected by that quote? At this pace, over 50% of our younger generation, aged 18 to 29, will succumb to it by middle age. Extrapolating one generation further, we arrive at the dire conclusion that virtually everyone will fall prey to depression. End quote. That’s insane. This is really not okay. And we shouldn’t be okay with it. We shouldn’t just shrug it off. What you can do. Right. You know, we don’t really care. Like we’re. I’m curious. Who knows? It’s just mysterious. It’s not mysterious. Anything that happens at best has a reason. And it’s okay to ask questions about that. And for the people who say don’t ask questions about that, we got drugs for that. Now, listen, demoralization happens. Depression happens. We just give people these pills, right? Sometimes they’re preschoolers. It just happens, right? No, it’s not okay. Not how it happens. All right. So. But it turns out. Oh, almost comment there. So do you have a comment there for me? Right. Timothy Gordon Junior says can’t teach a fish to climb a tree, can’t teach a bear to breathe water. So just drag them. Yeah. Should this you know, if we say everybody’s, you know, we’re all fish but but we have we have these trees you got to climb. And the fish can’t climb those trees. Got to give em a drug for that. You know, again, it’s shouldn’t the systems be serving us as humans, not the other way around. I shouldn’t have to figure out how to fit so that I can be a better widget in an economic machine that has a thing it wants to do. It shouldn’t. All the things that we create for ourselves be in service to us, not the other way around. Interesting question. So it turns out, though. This is really critical here. Quote, By contrast to many traditional cultures that lack depression entirely, or even a word for it, Western consumer culture is certainly depression prone. But depression is so much a part of our vocabulary that the word itself has come to describe mental states that should be understood differently.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:24:27] In fact, when people with a diagnosis of depression are examined more closely, the majority do not actually fit that diagnosis. In the largest study of its kind, Ramin, which Dipti at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, sampled over 5600 cases, found that only 38% of them met the criteria for depression. So 62% or something else. That’s a lot. What? What are those? What? Who what’s going on here? And how is it possible that there are cultures that don’t even have a word for depression? And we seem to be so steeped in it that it’s going to possibly be something that everybody experiences at some point in the not too distant future. So. So, again, this is this seems like a major tragedy unfolding that we ought to understand, because one of the prime points of life is to be happy. And happiness and contentment are themselves functions of living, lives of meaning and purpose. So maybe it’s not that our brain chemistry is wrong. There’s been a lot of marketing going on out there to say, if you’re unhappy, there’s something wrong with you. Your brain chemistry is sparked up and we can fix that by adjusting it. Instead, it turns out that actually there’s something wrong with the system that we’re trying to cram ourselves into. So that’s something I think we all need to discuss carrying on here. We got wounded as if in war, quote, contributing to the confusion is the equally insidious epidemic of demoralization that also afflicts modern culture, since it shares some symptoms with depression. Demoralization tends to be mislabeled and treated as if it were depression. A major reason for the poor. 28% success rate of antidepressant drugs. Get that a 28% success rate. Try more. Adjust the dosage. Try a different one. A major reason for the poor 28% success rate of antidepressant drugs is that a high percentage of depression cases are actually demoralization, a condition unresponsive to drugs and, quote, demoralization. What is this thing? Would it work? We’re going to talk about this is really important. If it’s unresponsive to drugs, it turns out demoralization is also largely unresponsive to talk therapy, too. The reason being that often talk therapy. It’s design is to figure out how to get you functioning back within the system again.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:27:01] So you’re demoralized. You don’t really feel like engaging. You’re not really, you know, motivated to go out and get a job and somebody is going to talk to you until you get out of that condition to go get off the couch and go find a job. To the extent that talk therapy is designed to get you to fit back in the system, to the extent that these drugs are trying to get you to fit back into the system, doesn’t work for demoralized people. And that’s really important to understand. I have since I’ve gone into this line of thinking and I’ve talked to a lot of people about this, and I’ve made this a little bit of a cause that I’ve gone into and understood better. I’ve run into a lot of people with really tragic stories of people loved ones, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers who they now understand were actually demoralized and who ultimately really failed out and even sometimes committed suicide because they couldn’t withstand the constant attempts to try and cram them back into the system that they didn’t want to be part of. So. Carrying on. Existential disorder quote in the past. Our understanding of demoralization was limited to specific extreme situations such as debilitating physical injury, terminal illness, prisoner of war camps, or anti morale military tactics. But there is also a cultural variety that can express itself more subtly and develop behind the scenes of normal, everyday life under pathological cultural conditions such as we have today. This culturally generated demoralization is nearly impossible to avoid for the modern consumer. End quote. Okay, so now we’re starting to get down into it, but we have this like this demoralization. Normally, we would see it as if you were prisoner of war. You’re about to you got a fatal disorder. That’s your mortality is looming up on you or something really profound. You end up demoralized. Now, depressed is a low energy state. Depressive. Demoralized is an entirely different energetic state. It still has that same sort of presentation of not having a lot of zip. But you do get up and go, but it’s it’s demoralized. It’s even more damaging than depressed in its own way. It’s just a different different condition. So. Well, well, what what is what is this? What is this demoralization, then? This is really critical because it’s actually a breakdown of your cognitive map. And I’m going to get into what that is. I just love this idea because it snaps so much into focus for me, quote, Rather than a depressive disorder, demoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s cognitive map. It’s an overarching, psycho spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfillment. That’s pretty profound. So before I go further into that green part cognitive map, according to Wiki, a cognitive map is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire code, store, recall and decode information about relative conditions and attributes. Uh, things going on in their everyday life. So the cognitive map, you kind of, you got that, that was installed by your culture, your parents, your, your teachers. And it has a lot of elements to it. But that cognitive map is your is the way you negotiate the world. And so if you imagine that you had a cognitive map that was out of alignment with reality, then you have a problem. You have an existential crisis on your hands. You have something that’s very hard to resolve. So, you know, if you in my country, if you really bought into the overall American dream, right? So here’s a representation of the American dream. It says, you know, the American dream, there’s happiness, you’ve got prosperity. We’re going to live better. There’s rights, there’s opportunity. There’s all these things going on that you might sort of create in a word map, right? Part of the American dream. What how do you live it?

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:31:13] Well, you go to school, you get good grades, you go to college, you get a good job, you get 2.5 kids, you get the dog, you get the cars, you get the nice house, you get a mortgage. You work for a while. There’s a retirement piece there for you at the end and there’s an arc to it. And that’s your cognitive map of how this is supposed to go. And then you get out into the real world and you find out the world doesn’t care about you at all, that your grades don’t really have any reflection into what goes on in the real world, that you get saddled with college debt by people who told you that was the right thing to do, but that was a little bit abusive for a lot of folks. The companies don’t care about you anymore. And, oh my gosh, maybe your retirement is not going to even be there because it’ll get looted by Wall Street or the Federal Reserve printing money. Whatever the map you had that says, this is how I’m going to conduct my life, and then your experiences out in the real world. If those get too far apart from each other, demoralization sets in because your cognitive map is no longer a functional unit that steers you in the right direction. Which is why you can’t talk somebody into being better about this by saying, let me help you tweak your your cognitive map so that so that you fit in with this thing over here because you can’t do that without being completely honest with them. And that’s that’s one way that talk therapy can work for somebody who’s demoralized. You say, yeah, you’re right. There’s no there’s no legitimate reason for you to engage with that system under the terms that you were born to believe were the terms you should engage with it. And because it’s it’s it’s not fair. It’s not just it’s not this whatever it is, you know, you don’t get people back on the train by telling them things that will help them get readjusted to a system that they’ve rightly divined somewhere in their head. It’s like this. Is this a bunch of B.S.? What I thought I knew about, you know, truth, justice and the American Way and what’s actually being exposed are two separate, completely different things. You after subsume yourself completely into that new reality and just believe what that has to say. And so that’s what we see in the fracturing of the of the Democrats and Republicans into their own ideological worldview sets, you know, Oh, that person’s completely guilty of a crime. They need to go to prison. No, they don’t. They’re completely innocent. The two entirely different worldviews around that. And you can’t square that up with the American ideal of even justice. Of course, that’s been just shredded in the last few years badly the sense that there’s one set of laws that apply to us all equally. All right. Back here up to this quote in green, quote, The world loses its credibility in former beliefs and convictions, dissolve into doubt, uncertainty, loss of direction, frustration, anger and bitterness are usual accompaniments as well as an underlying sense of being part of a lost cause or losing battle. The label Existential Depression is not appropriate, since unlike most forms of depression, demoralization is a realistic response to the circumstances impinging on the person’s life. End quote. Uh, there it is. It is a realistic response. So, in fact, the people who are demoralized because their cognitive map isn’t isn’t lining up with reality, it’s actually a realistic response. In fact, the more the more mental capacity somebody has, typically, the more prone they will be to this particular adjustment process here where the cognitive map they have doesn’t work. So, I mean I mean, imagine this. Imagine this. You’re you’re in certain schools. It’s entirely possible to receive these two messages from the same teacher. Hey, it’s really important that you do well in this class, cause your whole life depends on you doing well in this class. Oh, there’s this thing called climate change. The whole world’s going to basically burst into flames in a few years and we’re all screwed. How do you resolve that at any age, let alone a tender young age? I don’t know. But those conflicting messages are very often delivered to the same person. And I think that how do you form a functioning cognitive map out of those two pieces of information? I got to work hard or life will leave me behind. I may end up under a bridge, homeless or, you know, participating in that life will make the world burn up faster and then we’re all dead. I mean, it’s just it’s it’s crazy making, obviously. But that’s the world in which we’re asking young people to live. And that’s why I say young people are under attack are children are under attack. John B How can we be depressed given our Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty. Exactly. John B You just got to subsume yourself completely into those ministries truthiness, right? Because that’s the thing about an ideology. Ideologies aren’t concerned with reality. The external reality. I don’t care about that. They care about their own reality and they want to manufacture that reality. And so as long as you have complete obedience to the internally consistent sets of realities that exist over here, you’re fine. The problem is, obviously, we can look around the world and go this reality over here that that this all those ministries of truth would have us sort of subsume ourselves into and believe in. How come those August pillars of all consuming omnipotence didn’t understand that maybe we should have had fertilizers shipped to farmers, and that maybe we could have foreseen some of these supply chain difficulties or done better at managing COVID or figured out that this the energy crisis we’re in or that maybe we shouldn’t have printed that much money. There’s only so many ways that those same keepers of the status quo have just failed us comprehensively, and yet they want us to believe completely in their version of reality. It’s again, crazy making. And there’s no there’s you can’t square the circle. Your options include checking out or buying completely in. There’s very little few ways to keep your toes in in both those pools, as it were. But I do like this idea here that, again, this existential depression is inappropriate. It’s actually demoralization. And it’s when you facing this demoralization, the world loses its credibility for our beliefs and convictions, dissolve into doubt, uncertainty and loss of direction and frustration, anger and bitterness are the usual accompaniments as well as an underlying sense of being part of a lost cause or a losing battle. That defines a lot for me. What happened during COVID, I had a lot of people out there who subsumed themselves into the larger COVID narrative, which was complete junk. We could provably, completely, obviously use tons of data and say This story that you’re asking me to live into and believe in is actually doesn’t even make sense. It’s like doesn’t it doesn’t comport with any of the data that we have going on out there. And that was irrelevant. It didn’t actually matter, right? Because the data doesn’t matter when you’re down to that. But I get it. So let me be fair. The people who did subsume themselves totally into that crazy BS narrative, if their choice was to either do that or face this sort of existential dread and demoralization, you know what? Maybe that’s perfectly valid response to say, I don’t have time for that, I can’t afford that, not interested in that, don’t have the stamina to go through that process. So I’ll just that’s who this is easier forces right. You know, and so I think that’s part of the process and I get it. Me, I like to know why things work the way they work. And it’s important to me too to understand those things. So let’s see. Continuing on this article is amazing. I mean, just so I hope this is working for you and snapping things into place like it did for me, carrying on quote in yellow as it is absorbed. Consumer culture imposes numerous influences that weaken personality structures, undermine coping, and lay the groundwork for eventual demoralization. Its driving features individualism, materialism, hyper competition, greed over complication, overwork, hurried ness, debt all correlate negatively with psychological health and or social well-being. In green, the level of intimacy, trust in true friendship in people’s lives has plummeted. Sources of wisdom, social and community support, spiritual comfort, intellectual growth and life education have dried up. Passivity and choice have displaced. Creativity and mastery. Resilience traits such as patience, restraint and fortitude have given way to short attention spans, overindulgence and a masturbatory approach to life. End quote. This is why I care about it, because I’m fundamentally about resilience. I want people to be resilient. We’ve got to really disrupt the period of history coming we’re about to skate through. One of the most awkward moments of any species existence is, which is when your species finds out that its primary source of energy is kind of leveling out. And that’s where we are. That’s that’s where the energy story is. Unless there’s some crazy amount of, like, free energy from aliens and Area 51 that I don’t know about, you know, if that comes out, I’ll have to reorient my brain. But for now, what we know about in the world of physical limits, we’re at a really unusual spot. We are 8 billion people who fundamentally live off of fossil fuels coming into a situation where. We can’t get more of them. We have and we know nothing. Our whole system isn’t geared for that. Our system is geared for infinite growth on a finite planet. And that’s we’re having that awkward departure between reality, the and this ideology that doesn’t want any of that to be true. Chris, you noticed those things. Here’s a happy pill for you. Maybe we could get you to, you know, back off of noticing those things because those are really serving you. Are they I mean, who wants to go around with those ideas in your head? Right on and on. That’s just how it is. So so we’re living at this moment in time that we’re particularly young people who have cast forward and looked into how we are inhabiting this planet and said that it doesn’t have a future, that thing we’re doing. So what do you do with that information? Well, you can try and get a happy pill and cram yourself back in. You can really reject the whole thing, maybe end up in prison. You can compensate and get addicted to porn, get addicted to video games, get addicted to eating. Maybe all three. You know, there’s lots of ways to sort of check out from that story, none of which are actually all that healthy in the sense of creating a condition where you feel like you have the agency to have a life of meaning and purpose. By the way, that life is never easy, that life is always to growth for me. And most people actually come from pain. It comes from bumping up against something painful. And then you learn something and you break through it and you grow and you gain wisdom and all of that. But I don’t live in a culture that values that. I live in a culture that values cheap, quick, easy, painless, constant, you know, show me the next current thing to get all wrapped up in. And I’ll, I’ll absorb that. But I’m not going to think about it too hard or, you know, make up my own mind about it. I’m just going to absorb whatever that next thing is, even though it doesn’t serve me at all to get all wound up about the next big thing just to drop it and never talk about it again. Crazy, crazy that we do that. But that’s just how it is. So this idea, though, that, you know, in yellow is what’s happening. We have all this individualism, materialism, hyper competition, greed over complication. Absolutely the case. I mean, ever if any of you out there in the United States actually tried to get through, like the typical terms of service for any of the apps you use or maybe your health insurance policy or looked at the writers and exclusions that actually, you know, apply to your auto and home insurance if you do, congratulations. But oh, my gosh, the level of complexity on every layer of that right on down to, you know, the cell phone bill you get in all the ways it’s all carved up, it’s impossible to keep up with it all. And that that over complication is actually part of the program. It wears you down. It breaks you down. And so we get that part in yellow and then in green, of course, what do we really need? We really need intimacy. We need trust. We need true friendship. We need sources of wisdom. We don’t need older people. We need elders with real wisdom, with social and community support, spiritual comfort, intellectual growth, all of that stuff. That’s actually what makes life really actually worth living. And all of that is under attack right now. And whether it’s under attack is a purposeful thing that the WEF wants to do because they want Western values to come under attack, because once you break culture, you can remake it, right? Build back better and all that other grandiose stuff is going to work. Trust me, your dreams of of that particular program are already failing. We saw that in the break out of, say, the trucker movement in Canada, the Gwich’in in France, the yellow vests on and on. This populism is still rising because there’s still a core of people out there, maybe about 35% or so who are like, nah, we’d rather we’d rather live live surrounded by beauty, truth, meaning, purpose or spiritual, this wonder. There’s a lot of great things we can live in, but the system doesn’t want any of that. It just wants to keep cramming us down into these little atomized particles for, well, because they make better consumers, honestly. And so that the consumer ideology is can we have been. It’s just boring, right? It’s just boring. I don’t care what the ads were like on the Super Bowl this year, and I don’t care which celebrity I’m supposed to care about. I don’t care what they dressed up and I don’t care about any of that stuff. It’s just fundamentally not interesting. But I’ve been told in every possible way that I should care. I just I just don’t. And that is perhaps editorially one of the greatest things that that like watching Justin Trudeau, I really dislike what he’s done and how he’s gone about it. I really think that is a leader. He’s failed spectacularly in his othering of his own citizens, trying to convince that everybody who drives a truck, who honks their horn must be some racist Nazi misogynist. You know, it’s just that’s just gross, right. But as much as I hold that in contempt, even worse than that, you know, it’s worse than that. It’s boring. It’s such a boring world that the Trudeau’s want us to try and cram into. It’s just boring and uninteresting and unexciting and just full of petty dictators and little tyrants. Anyway, editorially, that’s the biggest thing for me.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:46:12] It’s boring. All right. Quote, research shows that in contrast to earlier times, most people today are unable to identify any sort of philosophy of life or set of guiding principles. Without an existential compass, the commercialized mind gravitates towards a philosophy of futility, as Noam Chomsky calls it, in which people feel naked of power. Insignificance beyond their conditioned role is pliant consumers lacking substance and depth and adrift from others and themselves. The thin and fragile consumer is easily fragmented and dispirited. Oh, divide and conquer. This is one of the oldest things. So a pliant consumer who feels fundamentally disconnected and powerless. I’ll bet you anything. People have run the models. To say, wow, you can sell a lot of things to that individual. And that’s the point. That’s the point of the system. We are now in service to that system of consumerism, even though if we took a few minutes and had a real honest conversation, we would say that system of consumerism after it’s delivered the basics to us that allow us to live relatively comfortable lives. To go beyond that and to make it all about the next purchase and the next this and all the consuming that goes on. It’s not it’s no longer serving us. We’re serving it. There comes a point where that chart maximizes out and goes down in the other direction. And if we had intact cultures, if we had an intact set of wisdom out there, we would be able to have those conversations and we would be able to look at that and assess for ourselves, is that really what we want for ourselves? Now, again, by the data, I think we can clearly say we come from a culture that’s very unhappy, it’s violent. It shoots itself in all the time. It puts itself in prison. It drugs itself. It numbs itself out through all sorts of escapism sort of activities. And. Really none of that is very life affirming. So that part is sort of easy to judge and find wanting or worthy of improving. But I love this idea, though, that it’s that consumerism itself, it’s just it lacks any guiding principle. And that, of course, is actually part of the course. When you when in part two of this, I’m going to be talking about your three best Madoffs is this is a former Soviet individual who talks about how you would undergo an ideological take over a country. And I’m not saying we’re under one necessarily from an external source, but the process of ideological subversion that he talks about. Oh, boy, we’re ticking every one of those boxes. Of course, this isn’t something that the Soviets came up with. Sun Tzu talked about the process of how you defeat an enemy. And, you know, five out of the six things are psychological means because you don’t defeat somebody until they’re psychologically defeated. We saw that in Afghanistan, right? The United States dropped bombs everywhere. We had total control of the skies. We were droning out, leader after leader after leader. How many number twos did we kill? I don’t know. About 50. And as soon as we left either, you know, Taliban are back in charge. We didn’t defeat them even remotely on an on a psychological basis, maybe the opposite. And so you don’t defeat anything or anybody or any country until you’ve defeated them psychologically. And when a country defeats itself psychologically, that’s the best possible outcome. So that’s what you’re is talking about. I talk about that in part two, and that’s what he was talking about. Again, just more framing. I think it’s interesting to understand because maybe gives us a sense of what we’re actually up against. So here coming into this part, get rid of that because that’s not helpful. Quote By their design The central organizing principles and practices of consumer culture perpetuate an existential vacuum that is a precursor to demoralization. This inner voice is often experienced as chronic and inescapable boredom, which is not surprising. Despite surface appearances to the contrary, the consumer age is deathly boring. Boredom is caused not because an activity is inherently boring, but because it’s not meaningful to the person. Since the life of the consumer revolves around the overkill of meaningless, manufactured, low level material desires, it’s quickly engulfed by boredom as well as jaded ness, ennui and discontent. This steadily graduates to existential boredom we’re in. The person finds all of life uninteresting and unrewarding. So I actually think that’s that’s a big part of where we are in this story at this particular time. And the more I talk about this with people, the more I yeah, this is it. This is it. This is why I want to share this article with you because it just it’s beautifully captured. So, John Schumacher, if I can get a hold of this guy, I can’t wait to talk to him if he’s talked. Somebody who’s been willing to talk to because this is great framing, helps me understand what’s going on in the world and why. And our system is saying we want to take maybe your preschool kids and drug them so they fit better into this consumer model. And maybe we should ask the question, well, at what point does a consumer model serve us and at what point are we serving it right? What should be like the ultimate metaphor movie, The Matrix, right, where the protagonist, Neo wakes up and into reality and finds out that he’s just a battery, in essence, that they’re humans in little pods everywhere, and their life force is being used to power this larger machine. Great metaphor. I mean, because that’s actually what’s what’s being asked of us here is to just be those consumer batteries in a machine, and we’re kind of useless until we become good consumers. And then as soon as we no longer consumers, we’re useless again. So people don’t really become adults now until they’re in their thirties in some parts of the country. Right. You got to go to school and graduate school and all of that. And then as soon as you’re done, it will put you off on our version of ice floes. We call that Florida, right? And you know, you’re just because what matters is the consumer. And we can tell this in how we what we value and who we value, who are who are the people who can get on TV instantly and be listened to right away? Billionaires. We know this because they have money. And money is the ultimate sort of collector and unit of value within an across a capitalist consumer model. And if this person has more of those units, they must be smarter or more worth listening to or inherently more valuable or something. All right. That’s that’s how this sort of all sort of pulls together in that particular story. All right. So I just want to share with you, this is a comment written by somebody shocks it at my site. This is in response to a piece that came up just a couple of days ago. So I always do two parts. I do a public part, and then we have a part for my members. He’s responding. He or she is responding to the member’s part last time and wrote, quote, I’m having a hard time figuring out their true motives. Is it to usher in a totalitarian state or is it to hasten the extinction of the human race? They’ve perverted people’s perception of truth and reality. They shamelessly desecrate and destroy culture, tradition and history, e.g. statues being torn down through history, no longer being taught in schools. They are in feeble ing, strong, proud and self-sufficient individuals, whilst holding up the most despicable elements of society as its exemplars. They’re doing everything humanly possible to destroy the economy in the human spirit. By now, it’s becoming clear for everything they say. Assume the opposite is true. With this in mind, is the goal to build back better or is it to destroy forever? There’s no way to build back better after the destruction of culture and memory is surely to destroy forever. And they’ll do this while persuading people it’s for their own good. End quote. So just I want to share that, because this actually captures perfectly what I was I was thinking about this. This is the kind of conversation we’re having over at Peak Prosperity. And sometimes we have those comments down here in the comments below here at YouTube. It’s okay. But this is actually a conversation that’s more appropriately had behind a wall and with people that we really know and trust, we curate the heck out of the conversations over there, and now we don’t have to do anything we used to, but now we don’t because we’ve got such an awesome group of people, even great comments like that. And we’re all curious. Nobody knows the truth, but we’re we’re digging for it. All right. Where we go? The moral net. Oh, okay. Here it is. Here it is. This is it. This is where it gets really good. Consumption itself is a flawed motivational platform for a society. Repeated consummation of desire without moderating constraints only serves to habituate people and diminish the future satisfaction potential of what is consumed. This develops gradually into a consumer anhedonia, where in consumption loses reward capacity and offers no more than distraction and ritualistic value. Consumerism and psychic deadness are inexorable bedfellows. I like that consumer anhedonia. Hedonic hedonic for the pleasure of anhedonia, the opposite of that consumer losing pleasure. So it’s kind of like, you know, on a hot day, that first ice cream cone is amazing. A lot of pleasure. Put 15 more ice cream cones right after that. That last one. Pretty, pretty much not. Maybe it’s like the pleasure line’s gone backwards, right? So the point is, there’s only so much consumption that can bring happiness. And then after that happiness point, it actually is destructive. That’s the main point here. So this is something that I think we need to talk about because the question is rapidly coming before us, where are we going? What kind of culture do we want to create? Where do we want to be in ten, 20, 30 years? I haven’t seen a single presidential candidate or congressional or Senate candidate in this country in my adult lifetime even dare to ask that question which is or present it. Hey, I have a vision of where I would like to see this country in 20 or 30 years.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:56:25] Here it is. Let’s debate. Nobody has a plan or our plan is very capitalistic. It’s like, can I get through the next election, the next quarter, the next month, the next week, or in the case of the Federal Reserve, monkeying around in our markets? It’s a daily intervention now just to keep the whole thing patched together. I don’t know how many fingers the Federal Reserve has to put in the dikes in the financial markets. But it’s a lot. But now we’re now we’re down to just maintaining the system for its own sake. And it’s time for us to ask the question, is it working for us? Is this really the system we want to preserve or can we do better? And the answer is we totally can do better. The first thing you have to be willing to do is question if the cage you’re in is the one you want. Well, I approach it. As I say, probably 80% of that cage is exactly the cage I want. I love having the power. Come on. When I hit the light switch. I love having food in the stores. I love that level of prosperity. Wouldn’t want any of that to go away. And I think there’s some things we should stop doing, like turning soil into dirt and, you know, putting people in deserts and ruining aquifers as we make golf courses and grow alfalfa in the middle of the desert. I think there’s some things we could stop doing reasonably as smart people. But then there’s some new things we should start doing. And that’s the part of the question that you can only get to. What do we keep doing? What do we stop doing? But what do we start doing that we aren’t doing? Once you understand the dimension of the cage we’re in and whether or not we feel like we want to improve it, the data says this is an improvable cage. This article we’re reading together says that if we don’t do this and we continue down this materialistic, capitalist consumer pathway, we’re sacrificing our children. And we’re doing it with full knowledge, like a surgeon not attending to a hemorrhaged femoral artery. Like we like this is like this is the damage is being done and that’s it’s just not not appropriate to me. So at any rate, so far, yeah. Okay, here’s this part and then I think it gets gets a little later. Human culture is mutated into a sociopathic marketing machine dominated by economic priorities and psychological manipulation. Never before has a cultural system inculcated its followers to suppress so much of their humanity. Leading this hostile takeover. The collective psyche are increasingly sophisticated propaganda and misinformation industries that traffic the illusion of consumer happiness by wildly amplifying our expectations of the material world. Today’s consumers are by far the most propagandized people in history. The relentless and repetitive effect is highly hypnotic, diminishing critical faculties, reducing one’s sense of self, and transforming commercial unreality into a surrogate for meaning and purpose. End quote. We are the most propagandized in all of history, and I watch this propaganda happen all the time and I’m astonished at its effectiveness. Did you watch how people went from basically ratting out their neighbors for not wearing a mask outside on a sunny day to saying maybe we should just put people in prison for not being vaccinated with this vaccine that we can’t actually prove works to. Hey, let’s just let’s just support, you know, the potential outbreak of a nuclear exchange and World War Three. Why not? Right. That was a seamless transition. And that happened because the propaganda machinery is extraordinarily effective at hopping people’s attention like that. If you’ve been paying attention for long enough, you realize it’s always the next thing. Right. Do you remember? I don’t know if you remember. I remember. I got a long term memory. North Korea. Oh, my God. It was North Korea was going to be the worst thing ever. This was years ago. Right. And there was all this noise about that, next thing you know, oops. Not that it was Iran. There was all this noise about Iran and oops, not that. On and on and on and on. It’s an endless series of hobgoblins, as H.L. Mencken put it, that is just simply designed to keep our attention focused on on that next thing. And it’s become an incredibly sophisticated machine. And that machine is now doing what it does. And again, I don’t think it has a smoke filled conclave of cigar chomping people in the back, pulling levers and dials. It’s a machine that if you have enough people who’ve been raised into it, they operate it effortlessly, all on their own. And I know you know what I’m talking about, because you’ve run into them and you’ve had this difficulty with friends, neighbors, colleagues, family members, etc., in the context of of not being able to have this shared reality based conversation about this world we live in. Right. I’ve had the most incredibly painful conversations with people trying to explain to them data that I have about things like COVID, about oil, about whatever it is. It’s just data. But they can’t see it that way because they their whole system of belief says, I can’t if if I believe even part of that, I have to let go of pretty much everything I believe is true. And I’m not I can’t go there. So they don’t go there. So I often don’t press the press the the subject. Richard L writing quote, As I think about the coming Great Depression, our grandparents generation had a higher moral compass. I fear a more violent future. Your thoughts? Yeah, Richard. Exactly. Without that moral foundation, without that without that sense of we’re in this together, it’s it devolves very, very rapidly. So. There has to be something worth fighting for, for people to really pull together. I mean, are we really going to band together in a suburban cul de sac because we want to make sure each of our individual lawn tractors is safe from. Marauding people coming towards them? No, of course not. It’s just it’s not worth defending. You know, it’s not it’s it’s not that core of beauty of of real deep values that matter. Right. And so what does matter? I think we all know that our family matters. We would defend our family. We get that. You watch a male Robin, you know, another Robin’s encroaching on its nest in spring and they will fight. They’ll fight and drive them away. A lot of squawking until they’re about 20 feet away from the nest. And then and then their their interest in flying further drops off pretty quick, right? Because they’ve got a little they got a thing they’re going to defend, which of course, is important, is their progeny, is their offspring. It’s of course. Of course. But what I rise to the defense to make sure that the local strip chain with a Popeyes and a KFC was safe. I wouldn’t even I mean safe from what, a wild fire marauding hog? No, there’s nothing there worth defending. There’s just literally nothing there that that’s that’s of beauty and value and that’s what we have to get back to. So I think in our grandparents in the Great Depression, Elise, they had a they had a a a shared sense of moral territory, a shared sense of in being in it together. There was there was more of that community. Right. And that’s the bond that I think allows you to really pull together. So we’re going to have to figure that out on the fly. And I think it’s really important because I’m pretty convinced that we’re going to see these financial crises. We’re going to see energy crises. They’re conjoined twins in this story. As these come forward, there’s no avoiding them. It’s just what the data says. Right. And so we’re at this next period of time, we’re going to need each other really a lot. And the extent to which we’re drugged, atomized, disinterested or demoralized, I think we’re going to have to undo all of that even before we can get back to the zero line to begin to build together in the ways we need to, to, to come together.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:04:03] Hello, from Australia. Whatever you do, don’t give up your guns. Yeah, thanks, Jesse. No, no, I just can’t it. Listen, um, thank you for that. And I won’t. I’ll that’s a that is a hill. I’m willing to. Well, bad terminology there. So that’s a hill I’m willing to defend. Listen, not a chance, because history’s really complete about this, that when governments have asked people to give up their guns, the next thing that happens is usually very unpleasant to those same people pretty much every time. And that’s what’s happened over and over again all around the world. So really not looking forward to this this next. You can feel the push here in the United States and Canada, obviously. But nope, this is really important that we maintain our ability to defend ourselves at this point in time, because what have we learned? Government isn’t a thing. It’s a collection of people. Often that collection of people aren’t your best in your brightest, in the sense that these are your most entrepreneurial folks out there who bring the most value to the world. But sometimes they are the most power hungry people because they’re gravitated to that that lifestyle and that particular profession. And they often make some of the worst people to lead you because because they don’t like being wrong. They don’t actually know how the world works and they hate admitting they’re wrong. And so it’s a bad combination because they often mess things up and then they need a scapegoat for that. And we’ve seen this path many times. So, by the way, you know, when I said our children are under attack, under attack, this is U.S. drug and alcohol related deaths and kids 0 to 17 from the CDC. This is in their Wunder database. And this over here, this part that’s happened here, that’s 100% that wasn’t a virus. That’s 100% done by adults to children. We instituted policies that stripped away their connection, schooling, social connect, took out whole chunks of their life. Imagine being imagine, you know, being 16 in this story. And then two years later, you’re 18 from 16 to 18. I don’t even know how my life would have turned out if all of a sudden those years were taken away from me and I was forced to live at home. That would not have been awesome for me, for sure.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:06:17] And so that happened. Why did that happen? Well, because we had to keep people safe. No, no, not for the kids, because we had the data. Two years ago, the kids weren’t impacted by this virus. I mean, like, at all, like, not even like you have to squint at it. And we can disagree like 99.998% survival rates and all of the ones who unfortunately made up that small percentage that were affected. Many of them had very serious co-morbidities. And so those would have been relatively easy to identify and isolate if we weren’t complete knuckleheads about this whole thing. But the adults in charge said, you know, we don’t really care. It’s too complicated. We don’t know. We have this one story. We would want to confuse anybody. This is a terrible virus pandemic, and we have to do this. And you know what? If you know, if if suicide, drug and alcohol related deaths, which are fundamentally deaths of despair, if those are going to double. Yeah. That’s a price we’re willing to pay in the story. Right. Madeleine Albright style, because they had a point of view, they had a thing they wanted to do and they didn’t care. So when you have a culture that doesn’t care about its own children, what do you have that’s worth defending or protecting? Not much. Now, this isn’t for everybody. This isn’t an indictment of everybody. There are whole communities of people that would not do this. There. This is not about the people of the country, but the leadership of the country, the system, the keepers of the system, the operators of the machinery of this juggernaut that we’re now running in to them. Those extra child deaths are just irrelevant statistics because they had more important things they needed to do. They lacked the compassion. They lacked the humility. They lacked the the humanity. To be any different than they currently are. And that’s a problem. That’s a tragedy. But to me, I don’t just look at that chart right there and say, oh, you know, this that’s horrifying. That’s going from, say, an average of 350 to 700 plus. Right. That’s 380 kids who shouldn’t have died. Shouldn’t have died, who did die, a death of despair, drug or alcohol related. And this is just drug or alcohol related. Right. So that’s awful. And that’s a heavy indictment of our of our culture, a heavy indictment of our system, a heavy indictment of the people in charge. And we’re being asked to just throw it away. What are you going to do? I mean, just like a shrug. What are you going to do? We can do better, obviously. And so first we have to understand why. Why, why would there be all these drug induced and alcohol induced deaths right here that we saw on that chart? Why would those why would that be the case? Well, they’re demoralized. And by the way, saying 0 to 17 is kind of weird because I don’t know any zero year olds that drink themselves to death. But at any rate, this is this is fundamentally demoralization in action, right? When you have really your cognitive map says this whole thing is is up and I don’t know any way to fit into it and I don’t even want to because of fitting into this means I get to just basically become a replacement for the same people making this decision to do this to me today. I don’t want to participate in that. And that is perfectly rational, healthy and normal. And the problem here is not the person who doesn’t want to participate in that system. The problem is with the people who are the keepers of that system. Full stop. So they are let me get off of that little horse for a second, because that one really bothers me a lot. So now we get down to it here and we’re coming into the close of this whole part. For the younger generation, the course of boredom, disappointment, disillusion and demoralization is almost inevitable as the products of invisible parents commercialized education, cradle to grave marketing in a profoundly boring and insane cultural program, they must also assimilate into consumer culture while knowing from the outset that its workings are destroying the planet and jeopardizing their future. Yep. Well done. Well said. I think that’s absolutely perfect. Quote, Understandably, they’ve become the trance generation with an insatiable appetite for any technology that can downsize awareness and blunt the emotions. With society in existential crisis, in emotional life, on a steep downward trajectory. Trance is today’s fastest growing consumer market. Hey, Metta. Listen, don’t go outside and expose yourself to nature. Yes, but the little bagels on and we’ll have, like, a simulated natural environment there for you. And look, you can meet your avatar friends who have, like these computer generated, you know, flat affection, less sort of like faces staring back at you and all that metta. Right. That’s. That’s our response. Like, wow, what a what a business, mark. You know, there’s people sit around boardrooms with spreadsheets going, this is amazing. You know, we’re just going to sell people more ways to just trance out and we can’t lose. And they’re right and that’s wrong. So this is something that, you know, we need to reclaim our lives back. The first step always is this framing is the education. It’s it’s being I’m here to say it’s okay to say, wow, I just I don’t want to put more of my life energy into persisting, maintaining, fitting into or otherwise emboldening this consumer culture. I’d rather have this consumer culture deliver the basic goodies I need to live my life, but then that’s it. And then going to decide for myself and within and among my tribe of people, what do we value? What are our mores? What are our morals? How are we going to conduct ourselves in? How are we going to participate in life in a way that brings true joy, happiness, meaning and purpose? And we need to have that conversation because we’re rapidly going in the other direction. The Transhumanists, Klaus Schwab, the WEF, they don’t want any of this. They want us to be tagged bag digital currency units of cattle. Every every utterance tracked, every motion tracked. They want to know everything about us and it’ll be for our own good because we’ll be happier if we didn’t have to think about reordering the milk in the fridge. It should just show up because our phones know that much about us or something like that. Again, I get why they why they believe that stuff, but they’re nuts, right? They’re nuts to think that the culmination of human experience says we can just we’re just we’re just we’re just billiard balls in a in a atomic universe. And if we could just calculate all the trajectories, we could fashion a predictable and better outcome.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:12:57] No, you can’t. We live in a complex universe. We’ll never going to figure it out. Full stop. We shouldn’t even be doing anything other than trying to figure out how to be more human, not less human. So these transhumanist contained within that phrase is there’s something wrong with your humanness. We have to go beyond it and create a better human. No, no, no. There’s nothing wrong with the human. Nothing wrong with the human. It’s it’s a it’s a just a beautiful, beautiful outpouring of an facet of evolution. We are. Yeah. It’s like, I don’t. I just reject everything. They’re all about peace, love, goddess. Writing in says it suits the oligarchs to blame individuals for their own inability to function in an ominous cycle society. Krishnamurti says it’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Exactly, exactly. Thank you for that. I love that. Krishnamurti quote It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to this profoundly sick society. This whole idea that that there’s something that’s what’s been marketed to us. There’s something wrong with you. There’s always something wrong with you. And there’s a product to fix that your brain chemistry is wrong. We’ve got product for that. You know, your immune system. Well, not quite up to the task. We find a way to hack it and be better at that. We have this new thing, this MRSA product. Your beauty isn’t appropriate, your hair color like that. It’s just a constant, neverending series of defects that’s going to be fixed. And yeah, I think we’re at the end of that story. And so hopefully we don’t get to that generation one more removed where we get to 100% demoralization, depression, because screw that, let’s not go there we can. This is time for us to say no. I see where you’re going with this whole thing. Not for me. Knock yourselves out with putting little neuralink transplants in and giving yourself, you know, weekly mini boosters. Go for it, have fun. I’m checking out and I get the right. That’s my right. I don’t want to have any part of that stuff. No, thanks. I’m going to be over here tending to my cows, raising my chickens, making sure that I’m eating really heavily nutritious, micronutrient food out of my own garden and hanging out with my neighbors. And we’re going to make our own music and raise our own kids. What? We’re good, right? That’s that’s where we’re going in the story. The sooner people get on that vibe, though, the better. Because I got to tell you, the windows closing on this whole thing pretty quickly and we may well have to yet really push back hard because there are people out there who are keepers. Of this consumer model who are true cultish devotees to it, who will defend to the death that machinery of of consumerism, because that’s what they know and that’s what they’ve been born into and that’s what their entire salary depends on. So it’s going to be very difficult to get them to see it any other way. But yet I think that’s what we have to do. So. I think the checking out is actually a healthy response. I think that if you’re smart, intelligent, whether you’ve got, you know, the mental intelligence or you’ve got the intuitive intelligence, they’re equal. In my book, if one way or the other, if somebody’s come to the conclusion that they don’t want to participate in that society, there’s nothing wrong with them. In fact, these may be our future leaders. There’s something right with them, I think, because I think that’s a healthy response. So when we look at this, you know, to me, this is just an intense tragedy that there’s so many people bought into the idea that there’s something wrong with my kid because they’re not fitting into this little box we’re trying to put them into. And they don’t seem to perform well in this box. And it may be that, you know, they receive some earlier environmental insult to their development that requires them to be recalibrated, I guess. But for the most part, a lot of this, I think well, here’s my experience with it. My kids, we got them into a an outdoor education program. It really it was it was a lot of home schoolers running around in the woods building teepees out of sticks and, you know, doing all that kind of stuff. Great stuff, great teachers, amazing philosophy. A lot of the kids who came to that program were homeschooled because their parents had pulled their kids out of school because these were problem kids typically diagnosed with ADHD, and some of these kids had pretty profound ADHD. What we saw over and over again, though, was that these same kids out in the woods, which you think would be an ADHD nightmare. Right. Like every little sound would distract them. There’s like wind and movement and trees and leaves blowing and insects. And it’s just. But instead, we found off and saw over and over again. These kids had an exceptional ability to actually re normalize and focus. And this was an oak box for them to be. And it worked really well for them. It was astonishing to see. And so to me, it was just experiential education that said nothing wrong with those children. The box they were in wasn’t right. So let’s spend some time figuring out how to make the box, you know, one that that serves us rather than the other way around. So to close this up and get to the end of this. Demoralized. Hey. Nothing wrong with you. That’s my message for today. He writes here, The real task then before us is somehow to treat a sick culture rather than at sick individuals. Erich Fromm sums up the challenge We can’t make people sane by making them adjust to this society. We need a society that is adjusted to the needs of people, end quote. That’s the challenge before us, like fish and water. We’ve grown up around this consumer culture. It’s got a momentum and an inertia all on its own. It’s pretty intense. The question then becomes, what do we do about that? And so this is where the parallel structures come in. So it’s time. And I see this happening all over the globe. I’m really happy about it. People are beginning to get on this vibe and decouple and figure out how to create those parallel structures for themselves. How do they educate themselves? How do they go about entertaining themselves? How are they raising children? On and on and on? This is this is starting to become something where it’s completely obvious that a kind of need to do these things anyway because of circumstances and resources and financial conditions. But it’s also once you get your head up above the water that you’ve been swimming in, you go, Oh. We can we get to choose which way we want to do this. Well, let’s choose a way that obviously and with observational evidence behind it, is one that makes us happier, more productive, having lives of more meaning and purpose. So that that’s that is the the invitation on this. And so I am going to be having here a year at home what we call Honey Badger Farm. We’ve got an event coming up so you can go to Peak Prosperity dot com. It’s in September and we’re going to be experimenting with exactly that, getting people together, having these conversations and talking about parallel structures. So last week I talked about this topic, very important if you haven’t seen it, is Europe committing economic suicide? What’s happening there with the embargo of Russian oil really important? A number of people. I just love calling out some comments. Terry Riley wrote, Oh my God, Chris, what a brilliantly prepared analysis and presentation of oil supply chains, types, production, distribution in world energy markets, and the reasons why the EU’s refusal to buy Russian oil will be so devastating for the European people in their everyday life in the midst of such blistering inflation. Your inspiring, thoughtful teacher. Thank you. I appreciate that. I, I want people to know about this. Everybody should watch this this particular episode. If you want to understand what’s going on, the context behind what’s actually happening in Europe, but by extension, coming soon to a theater near you wherever you live. This energy story that that’s breaking right now is the story of of a of a lifetime of what it’s once in a species. It’s really big. So I really wanted to call that out and give another chance that anybody who hasn’t seen that give that one a look. Very important concept there. More reader comments here. We got John Berthier writing in the best and truly informative program that’s ever been introduced to the people of the world. Oh, thanks, John. Very nice. I’m sure that most leaders have been told by petroleum experts about this for years, yet these warnings have gone unheeded. This is critical. If I can think of this stuff and come to this data and we know other people can, and it would be a mistake to think that these world leaders don’t know about this same data. Kind of weird, right, to see that these same world leaders flying in their private jets all over the world lecturing us about how we need to take more cold showers because, you know, climate change. But I actually think once you understand the oil story, you understand a deeper, maybe more profound motivation for why we are being steered into a much more controlled, less energy dense lifestyle for us. While I don’t see anybody saying maybe individual billionaires shouldn’t have 400 foot yachts, maybe private jets really don’t make sense in this world. Nobody’s saying that because of course, the people driving the narrative messaging are the same people who have the yachts and the jets. So we don’t get that story. But honestly, once you understand the energy story and where that’s actually in this thing, it’s so predictive, you get so much understanding around that. So that was what that episode was about. This is something I talk about all the time now, is helping understand people, understand the systems of energy because these are the things that are going to most impact our next ten years of life or 20 years or maybe forever years. It’s just it’s really that profound, a lot to get our heads around. But I do like getting our heads around as much as possible. Janet Green Hall Writing. I really appreciate your exploration explanation of the average Joe how truly complex the energy processing business is. I was a piping designer for 30 years and got really sick and tired of all the ignorance on how precious and unique geological formations are and how complex oil and gas processing infrastructure is. It makes me feel respected when the public understands what I and my colleagues did for a living, the value we brought to their lives in the form of energy at the turn of a valve, as the big yellow taxi song says, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. End quote. Thank you for that, Janet. And and thank you for doing all of those complex things to bring us energy. It’s astonishing how complex that world is. And I, for one, am very grateful that we have that energy and that’s been brought to us. And there are people who work on it. And I pay for the demonization that we see going on among the ESG crowd. That’s environmental, social governance, the ESG, the green mean. You know, there are people out there who are very strongly demonizing the oil industry, atlas tax, their windfall profits and all that other stuff. Right. I get how that makes political sense, but I’m pretty sure those people saying those things, Janet, they don’t know anything about what you do and none of them have ever worked to produce something of value in their lives. Went to the best schools. Went to the best consultancies, got the best legal degrees, and now they’re out there making laws and most of them have no clue how the world works. And that’s a risk. So that’s something I really wanted to bring people’s attention to. And that brings me to this next comment here, which was awesome, really good full clip audio wrote in response to that same Russian roulette episode. Quote is someone that manufactures precision tools and does so in the United States. I have a very good understanding of what it’s like to have a supply chain that stretches around the world, as well as the benefits and pitfalls of just in time, the just in time delivery system. When they announced two weeks to stop the spread. I wrote and published articles explaining exactly what was going to happen. I understood, unlike our worthless politicians, that 99% of what you need is still zero. Thank you for that. Full clip audio. After all, if I have a product that requires 400 inputs and I have 399 inputs, then I do not have a product. It isn’t like you’re going to get a smaller product or maybe it’ll be lacking a feature. No, you get zero something that requires 400 inputs. Got to have all 400 inputs. My business uses the same semiconductors that everyone uses. See, when you push a button, turn a knob, step on the gas gauge, brakes, pull up on the yoke, etc. You’re not actually doing those things. But sending a signal to a microprocessor or semiconductor that tells the pump, electric motor, the inlet, etc. what to do. These things get used in everything from cars to medical devices, tractors, and without them, the world shuts down. So closing out that at some point in the near future, the inputs necessary for modern civilization to function will no longer be accessible. I’m not sure what that looks like, but. We have ten times more population than 1850. These kinds of comments are of gold to me, the really important. These are people with real experience who know how the world actually works. Saying. Listen, if I get 400 inputs, I need 400 inputs. And I don’t think our leaders get that. And they’re busy legislating in Europe right now. We don’t need Russian oil. It’s such a colossal mistake at this particular juncture. I have to chuckle a little bit, but that’s where we are. That’s the world in which we live. That’s the world in which you live so well worth knowing about. So it ain’t right that that was that particular comment. Loved it. So thank you. Full clip, audio and everybody else. You left comments all every week. Be pulling up comments from people that catch my attention, bringing them in. And part two of this, we’re going to be talking about this prelude to subversion, which is the larger concept around what actually it means when you’ve been ideologically subverted and what comes next and how do you respond to that? So that’s what I’ll be talking about over there at Peak Prosperity right after this. And otherwise, hey, it’s been great having you here today. Thank you so much for listening. It’s just been absolutely wonderful. Build back better. Hey, thanks for that. Maple trees build as in Bill. Eddie, if you’re just listening to audio build back better I actually think it could be build better bunkers. Yeah, I’m joking, but I know, I know a lot of people who are actually doing that. And some of these people are CEOs of companies you’ve heard of. It’s astonishing. You know, the vibe is out there that something is a little off. So I think having this sort of shared understanding is important. Thank you for listening. Knowing the difference between demoralization and depression, really critical understanding the genesis of that so that we can begin to understand what this cage is that we’re in so that, hey, we’re not shocked by things that happen and hey, so that we can figure out how to make it better. Because that’s why I’m here. I’m an optimist fundamentally, even though I talk about things that seem not optimistic, but they are, because otherwise I’m just going along with the flow and trying to figure out how to better adjust to a sick society. And I don’t think that’s what we want to do here, and I don’t think we have time for that. So that’s what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this. I will see you next time and I’ll see the rest of you who are coming over at Peak Prosperity. All right, everyone.

Unidentified [01:28:19] Bye bye. And.