Russell Brand on revolution: hero or villain? And what about Ed Snowden? Sincere people speaking truth to power, a case of the blind leading the blind, or is something else afoot?
NSA-gate continues courtesy of The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Le Monde, through which it emerged this week that Israeli signals intelligence, and not the NSA, was behind massive electronic spying on the French government and people.
America narrowly avoided a currency default, but in the meantime the rest of the world is preparing for life after the petro-dollar... what are you doing to prepare for global systemic collapse?
Meanwhile, Japan has been smacked by dozens of typhoons in quick succession, record early snowfalls have hit northern U.S. states, a(nother) record-breaking heatwave is frying everything in Australia, and fireballs continue raining down from space - NASA's All-Sky Fireball Network captured 15 of them over the U.S. on October 16 alone...
Running Time: 02:05:00
Download: MP3
Here's the transcript:
Joe: Hi and welcome to another SOTT talk radio. I'm Joe Quinn. With me in the studio today are Niall Bradley.
Niall:: Hello.
Joe: Jason Martin.
Jason:: Hello.
Joe: And Pierre Lescaudron.
Pierre: Hello.
Joe: This week we are doing another All and Everything, our patented show format where we talk pretty much about all and everything or certainly what's been trending in the news or what's been piquing our interest of late. There are several such things that we are going to talk about. Probably one of the more sensationalist topics that we have is, or more popular topics is the Russell Brand interview with Jeremy Paxman, a British TV pundit who has a long history of grilling politicians and supposedly giving them a hard time and getting the truth out of corrupt lying politicians, this Jeremy Paxman. And Russell Brand who is originally a comedian/actor/ social commentator/celebrity/I don't know he's a bit of everything. So he was interviewed by this Paxman character and he had a few interesting things to say and it has generated quite a lot of commentary on social media sites, on Facebook, on twitter. Quite a lot alternative media news sites have carried this interview. He also followed it up with an article in the New Statesman magazine that he was editing.
Niall:: The article actually came out first which is why he was brought on the show - to discuss it.
Joe: In the article in the Statesman, he says pretty much more or less the same thing that he said in the interview, so it's just a repeat. So we are going to be discussing that as well as other more events of a perhaps more global nature in the form of - well we've had a lot of this past month of October we've had a lot of - the earth changes, the weird weather, theye extremes on our planet in terms that the climate have been continuing as they have for months and months and - well years now. So it's kind of - every time we do one of these all and everything shows there's always a bunch of weird weather and stuff and it does tend to repeat but it bears repeating that it is repeating every month or every year.
Niall:: Well, what makes it newsworthy as well is the change. You can actually - just for casual browsing I mean you would need to be some serious researcher to come up the with figures but I'm pretty sure that from what I can see, its newsworthy because you can see the scale of things getting worse and worse, week by week. I mean there was a time when we would actually go "Oh did you hear about that? There was another fireball seen?" to now they're saying "Oh yeah, there were sixteen fireballs caught on tape over the US last night alone".
Pierre: Yeah, the repeated observation helps to define trends. Is this phenomena on the increase? Is it stable? Is it decreasing? To define those trends you need a long enough observation and this last month has shown that most of the weather change, cosmic change we've been mentioning for years now following the same increase pattern. Although, maybe later we can talk about the hurricane and typhoon season for 2013 because hurricane season is almost over so we can draw some conclusions about this specific topic.
Niall:: OK, brief mention also a shout out to the US Government for narrowly avoiding defaulting on its currency. There's really not much to say here other than that they did the same thing that they did before. They've postponed it. This time they've only postponed it some four months into the future so come early February we're going to find ourselves in the same situation where there'll probably be a government shutdown followed by the same phoney argument back and forth between the democrats and the republicans about what to slash, what to cut, to save money, money they don't have any way that they are liberally printing to keep things going. It's a confidence game. Well now Japan, China and the other large countries on the planet are playing with it. But you can bet they are preparing for - already they've got plans in place for the time when the US dollar as the global currency is no longer the global currency.
Pierre: Yeah, we announced during one of the previous shows, when we addressed this topic of the US "bankruptcy" quote/unquote data, the end result would be obviously to reduce even more the benefits for the US citizens, the pensions, the health, all the social services and that's the kind of hysterisation game you know. The not-so-subtle threat is 'OK, we're about to get bankrupt so we have to do anything not to get bankrupt. Imagine if we get bankrupt, what a catastrophe it would be'. Then you prime citizens to accept the unacceptable.
Jason:: Well, there's kind of another angle on this because when you mention pensions and 401Ks and all this stuff, and inflation, and all that stuff, it sounds really boring. But actually what we're looking at here is the single greatest mass-orchestrated con game in the history of the world. It's finally coming to the end. It's getting really close to falling apart. Its going to blow up in everybody's faces. It's really like - it's epic proportions. It's Tolkien-esque with like this massive epic story that has been going on for thousands of years and is leading up to this big explosion and I don't know I mean...
Niall:: So is Russell Brand right then when he says "now is the time"?
Jason:: No of course not. Russell Brand is an actor {laughter}. I mean, when we talked about it the other day when politics being show business and there's more and more show business people getting - there's going to be point at which there's no distinction between a politician and movie star or like a TV star anymore you know?
Joe: Well there hasn't been since Ronald Reagan.
Jason:: I know, exactly. It's like they're just like forget about it. He's an actor.
Pierre: But it's not because he's an actor that he's not right. He says he stands for revolution.
Jason:: No, no, no, but he's picked because what he says - I mean he's given air time. There's probably no CIA handler - there might be - he probably doesn't know about it, who's sitting there in his room coaching him on what to say. It's not like that. But he's chosen and put in the media because he's an attractive face, he's kind of humorous, he's got to little bit of flair for the drama and he says a couple of things that are well ok it's a little bit edgy, but...
Pierre: ... and what he says is not revelations. It's been in the air, it's been in the minds of a lot of people so he just stating the obvious finally.
Joe: Yeah, just back before we go to Russell Brand just on the topic of you sayings it's a a kind of a monstrous con game finally coming to an end. It kind of is. I just thinking about the actually mechanics behind it. Way back when at some point I don't know, maybe a hundred years ago or something, they set up the economic system up in such a way that one country, America would be pre-eminent, a global power, an exceptional nation blah, blah, blah and it had the means to show that it was and to enforce its 'might makes right' type of policy. But it was a con game. It was basically screwing over the little peoples, favouring the rich and the elite and all that kind of stuff. It seems like they set it up and they said ok we can do this.
But, I think it's got to the point where they've done it for so long they just - it's been increasingly they wanted more and more and more continually, they're pushing it, pushing it, pushing it to get more and more. And its out of their control at this point. It's like there's nobody stage managing I don't think. Stage managing a collapse of the economy or the complete default of the American government or the American nation type thing. It's just beyond their control at this point and they don't even know where its going to go. There may be other factors that come into play to actually define how the thing will collapse, but I don't think that's of human design. It's almost like Terminator 2, a computer system that becomes sentient and it's going to destroy itself, just because it's been set on a course.
Jason:: Microsoft has this gigantic room. I think it's quite large. And it's got just about every computer, or type of computer that they run on right? And they have this huge testing and all these testers supposedly, this is what they have right? And they still can't guarantee Windows and it still crashes and they still have to - so this whole idea that these guys are going to stage manage this thing, like every little thing and they're turning knobs and calibrating things, yeah, that is a little bit ridiculous. I think there are people who think that that's what's going to happen, they think that they are in control. But, the best laid plans of mice and men.
Pierre: And some control to some extent for some crises, some bubbles. There are evidence of some stage managed financial bubbles. But, I think what Joe said is...
Joe: Well when I say 'stage managed', I mean greed stage manages something, in the sense that greed is the overarching principle that is pushing the whole system in a certain direction. But at a certain point, that greed will collapse in on itself and it's that process of collapse that the greedy people don't really control. They may see it coming and they kind of try and get as much out it before it happens and they'll have a heads up before the ordinary people, but as far how it's going to affect the entire planet or a large portion of it, that's anybody's guess.
Niall:: It's still up in the air.
Pierre: There are several kinds of collapses. I mean there are manufactured collapses, real estate in 2008, new technologies in 2000 etc. etc., and there's some other collapses that are not engineered at least by the elites. But what you say I think is important. It's not black and white. You can very well have a situation, a collapse, where the elites in power do not control what is going on, but I don't know what is about them that controls them, that might control the situation and pull the plug at the optimal moment for their plans. That's not mutually exclusive. There's control and no control, depending on which level you deal with.
Jason:: But isn't that always kind of like the sad hope of it all? Is that somewhere, there is someone powerful enough to be in control. Even if you want to talk about kind of god or something or some demonic whatever, the devil, who knows? But at least there's someone driving the car, you see? But the whole idea that we might be careening towards the cliff and there's nobody driving the car...
Joe: Well that's just going to screw people over in the end because when the curtain gets pulled back and people realise that there is nobody in control of a collapse, that the elite will just say 'well listen, things have changed here. We're just going to cover our own asses' type of thing 'and whatever happens, happens'. Sure, they'll react to social unrest and stuff like that, but the cause of the social unrest, the conditions that create this mass social unrest say an economic collapse, no food in the stores, no pensions being paid, whatever, no government pay cheques being issued, no food stamps, for example, which there have been signs of, food stamps being cut off to certain people in recent weeks and stuff. That kind of thing, I don't think, is planned. It's symptomatic of just intense greed pushed to a limit where it's just not sustainable anymore and the whole thing is just a spring leak?
Jason:: It's like a virus. I'm sure a virus has a kind of plan but I don't think that things are really going to end up the way the virus plans.
Niall:: Exactly.
Jason:: It's like oh let's take everything over and it's like yeah but then he'll die.
Niall:: It has a design, it has a function and within a set of parameters it will act on the host in a certain way. You can predict the range of things but that's the extent of it.
Jason:: But at a certain point the person collapses and dies.
Joe: It's like in Political Ponerology there's a famous quote that we've repeated often enough from Ponerology where Lobaczewski says that the virus doesn't know that it would be consumed or destroyed in the flames that burn the body that it had ultimately killed, but it too will be destroyed.
Pierre: And at the same time when you look at history, you see some plans that span over decades. There is this famous example of the Vietnam War where you had U.S. forces moving assets around Vietnam at the time, Indo China before the end of the second world war. You have other examples of plans being developed over generations. So it suggests that maybe an analogy is like in a concentration camp. You have capos that are - capos, it's inmates but they became guards as well because they seem to have a proclivity to violence and control like psychopaths on our planet now you know. And they create a lot of violence and a lot of control and people suffering in a concentration camp. At the same time you have at another level - and they're not necessarily aware of the grand plan, i.e., the eradication of some specific populations. But it doesn't mean that there's no one above the capos who have a grand plan about mass extermination and specific vision of the world.
Jason:: No the perfect analogy is the prison, because most prisons, the bars are not what keep the prisoners in. Actually, the prisoners themselves that are insure - because at a certain point they could all just move as one entity and just escape. I mean they really could because the bars are not that great, there's not that many guards. But there is so much factionalisation, there's so many resources, snitches, and stuff like that and they have this whole web and network of inner politics and that's actually what keeps the prisoners inside the prison is that, more than the bars. And then the same is true for life, what keeps...
Joe: Yeah and it's kind of a key point in a way for those who are into conspiracy theories, trying to figure out what's really going on.
Jason:: {whispers} Who's on first?
Joe: Yeah all that kind of stuff. Because obviously there are conspiracies, people do conspire together to do things. But there seems to be - for me there's a kind of a division between people who think that there's no conspiracies, that it's just incompetency or just normal life and then people who think that there is this overarching controller or group that's controlling and controls it that over long, long expansive time. But that seems really implausible because if you look at all the stuff that's happened over the past - look at the course of the past 113 years say, since the beginning of the twentieth century. If you look at all of that and you see things that have happened and the way human society has degraded, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone, somewhere at the beginning of the twentieth century said "listen, human society, let's amass wealth into the hands of few people, take it away from the masses of ordinary people. Let's make the ordinary people sick. Letss feed them really crappy, unnatural food. Let's tell them that things that are good for them are bad for them and vice versa. Let's get them addicted to consumerism. Let's get them addicted to selfishness. Let's make it a century of the self. Let's do all the things that are against human nature, that are kind of anti-human nature." Because when you look at it, that is more or less what has happened.
So it's not hard to say, well, maybe someone planned that? But then it's really hard to find a plausible explanation or any evidence of someone being able to plot such a scheme and carry it out through a few generations, like the original people who came up with it died not within the first - within the first thirty or forty years, they were dead and somehow they had to pass it on, the same plan and people had to be committed to it, carry it through to its ultimate conclusion. It's very hard to find the evidence for that or even an argument for it.
Jason:: I think for these guys it's kind of like playing cricket and then you teach your son to play cricket. For us, in America, dad likes baseball, teaches the kid. The kid likes baseball, they watch baseball games, they plays baseball, they learns baseball statistics. And I think for these super mega, mega rich old blood families they play this power politics game. And I think it's kind of like very Plato's Republic noble lie kind of 'create the utopian society'. I think they actually - no one sits down I think, and says 'hey, let's just rape and pillage everybody'. It's more like people need to be controlled, is what they tell themselves. People are so hopelessly whatever, that they need to be controlled. And in order for society to work smoothly, they say it's like a machine and some cogs are smaller than others and they are lower in the machine and they need to keep their place and they can't be uppity and start thinking that they're going to be over here or over there and they want to keep society like a fixed machine, with this lower base of all these cogs doing all their things. And that stagnates society. That destroys society. That oppresses the spirit of society and of course ultimately it fails because this is a really stupid idea.
Joe: But the other question in that though is that aren't these people just ordinary human beings as well? OK they can be greedy and stuff, but they really seems to have pushed it to a point where they've really destroys it. They seem to have this unnatural level of greed and selfishness that would posit - because you would think left to their own devices, these people can have control. I mean you look back in history and they're loads of ways that they could have had large amounts of control, large amounts of wealth, without doing the kind of crap that they've done through really screwing things over. So it's almost like there's a destructive principle in there where they want to destroy. It's not just greed and me, me, me but they want all the people to suffer at the same time because it seems like that would be a requirement to get to work.
Niall:: Yeah, well that's backed up by looking at individual cases and it's very, very hard not to come away from seeing that along the way, part of the motivation was that they enjoyed it.
Jason:: Yeah, of course.
Pierre: Like psychopaths and if I was a bad god, a psychopathic god and I enjoyed the suffering of human beings, but I'm kind of lazy, so I don't want to do it directly, so I just spread some psychopaths...
Joe: Make a few in my image. I would make a few humans beings in my image perhaps {laughter} if I was a psychopathic god. Like the bible says, all of us aren't made in god's image, just a few of us. Just a few of them made in god's image.
Niall:: Well this is what a psychopathic got. Yeah, this is what it comes down to. This planet has - the more I learn - I hope I'm learning - the more I see, the more complex it is. There are so many different types of people. Yeah, we're all individuals, but you can sort of see that there are different sets of types. It's not a limitless number of types, but there's still a broad range. So, for example, when I hear Russell Brand talking about revolution - OK he's on a right note for me when he says "well I mean more revolution of the mind, revolution of consciousness than take to the streets with pitch forks". But a revolution for one person can mean something very, very different for the next person and in fact Lobaczewski in Ponerology warned about this, revolutionary ideas and how they take seat in different minds depending on that person's character.
Pierre: Well revolution has two meanings. There is the meaning we attribute to those historic events, the French revolution, the English revolution and in astronomy a revolution is the rotation of a planet and between the moment based in location A and then time it goes back to the same location, which is ironic because when you look at history most so called revolutions led people to be under an oppressive regime, there is also some change that leads to another oppressive regime. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So it's more an astronomic revolution than a social or economic or human revolution.
Joe: What's depressing about that is that at this stage, that's the best that's on offer. I would go for a revolution that ultimately results in the same kind of system being put in place, but at least with a revolution you would have an opportunity for things to change, here to get rid of some of the evildoers and stuff. Even if other evildoers come along after, because I really don't see any other option. And if its continuing to live in a system that we have lived and are living under and just watching it's getting worse and worse to the point that self-destruction or having some kind of mass unrest where at least it gives you a couple years of breathing space or a few...
Jason:: There's this misattributed quote to Einstein. I don't think he actually said it or - but there's this whole definition of insanity is performing the same action repeatedly and expecting a different result. So, you have to ask - I think that what I would envision for human society is for them to fix this particular problem without having to have a revolution because a revolution has never solved it. It's never ever led to something better. Even when we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire right? That's this whole big problem and all the assassins got killed and stuff and there was all this running around these purges and stuff. And what did it lead to? An even worse system of government was installed, the Imperial Rome was in. It never leads to anything good. The American Revolution didn't particularly lead to anything good. Because right after the American Revolution, there was the Whisky rebellion and...
Pierre: Joe said something important I think. He said yeah at least this period of this few years of social unrest, give you this piece of mind or breathing space. And that might be the main purpose of so called revolutions, to generate hope in people, hope of change and then so much violence then after the revolution they say, never more. It might be a kind of social control too? To release social pressure, so...
Joe: Yeah if there's any control in that sense, there are some in a group of people who are aware of dynamics and social dynamics and take the temperature of the population and stuff. That's pretty high level for someone to be organising it on that scale, but say that are doing that, that's possible that they would precipitate some kind of revolution just so that it can go in their direction or in a direction they want it to go in rather than it being in any way genuine and therefore they can't predict or control the outcome as well.
Niall:: I think it's more a case of trying to subvert it after the fact than working out a plan to instigate it. Because that takes us back to this, the difficulty, the implausibility we notice when we try to consider a grand scale conspiracy. Even though it's in a shorter time frame, there's no way they can foresee all the outcomes at the beginning. I think it's more about as Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out, they're aware of - I hate to use the word, but democratisation, the overall level of education of political awareness globally, has increased. And they're aware of a population that is more educated, but is hungry. So of course, they're going to be trying to gauge that and deal with it as it pops up. Arab Spring. dealt with. But I doubt it was a grand plan.
Pierre: Well and you don't need a grand plan. If you see revolution solely as a tool to read the social pressure, you let social pressure increase. You're happy to have people like Russell Brand who push for this quote/unquote "change" and to join the bandwagon you just have to twist the conclusion because all the diagnoses can be true. And its true. What Russell Brand is saying is true. And all this anger is legitimate and the desire for change is legitimate. It's deep inside a lot of us. Ao you let it go. But just at the end the conclusion or the medicine to address the symptom is twisted. You just see this one percent of lie to make those ninety nine percent of truth collapse just at the end. You twist it like they did with - look at the French revolution. What followed he French revolution? The terror. That was one of the worst the darkest pages of history. That was much worse than aristocracy that preceded the revolution for centuries. And the very sad truth as well about the revolution, when you read Douglas Reeds Controversy of Zion for example, you see that most revolutions, if not all the revolutions, were co opted and twisted by the elites. And the few genuine ones that couldn't be co opted like the commune in 1870 in France were repressing blood, killing thousands of people. So I'm wondering if in history, there is one case, one example of a genuine revolution started for people and has benefited the people. It's very sad, but I don't see one.
Jason:: But I think there also kind of like presupposes that that revolution must necessarily be some natural human tendency. What if it was never really a natural human tendency? What if it always was this kind of like stop-gap, let's relieve some pressure type of stuff that is always, kind of in a certain way, manufactured. But I was going to say on what you was saying there about the 'you don't have to control everything', the fundamental principle behind Aikido is essentially that you don't worry about like 99 percent of the force coming at you. There is one point that you just have to push a little bit and the person flips over, falls over or trips and this, that and the other thing. So it's all about finding that little point, that little pivot area where you can push, or pull, or kick, or punch, or whatever it is you are going to do, and that's the core of the whole philosophy. You don't need to worry about all that stuff.
Pierre: And psychologically speaking, it's very easy to spin the things when you reach the conclusion after years or months of revolution because of population is hysterised. There's been killings, there's been murders, and people don't see anymore. They are blinded by their emotions.
Joe: The problem, as I see it, with revolutions, is that revolutions require leaders, someone to lead the revolution or someone comes out of the revolution or the mass of people who revolt, some leader or leaders emerge. And the most likely ones to emerge as the leaders will be the ones who speak the loudest, have the kind of harshest rhetoric, and maybe the most extreme kind of views of how to deal with the situation. And those people, those kinds of people who lead a revolution or that lead us after revolution, they're the same kind of people we have in power today that we are saying needs a revolution to overthrow. So the problem almost is in the idea of leadership and that people will look to leaders to control things for them or to make decisions for them and people have this very unfortunate tendency to look to the guy who has the strongest views but very often amongst humans, the person with the strongest views tends to be an authoritarian, or a demagogue, or someone who ultimately doesn't care about the ordinary people.
Jason:: But a person who has that strong of an opinion about the universe probably does so because he is an extreme narcissist. Because nobody who has the slightest bit of introspection and self doubt and the ability to think critically with "what if I don't have all the facts?", that type of person is almost invariably a total complete narcissist if not a psychopath. So it's the worst criteria in the world for picking a leader is whether or not he is sure about things. In fact the more sure he is, you're like "wait a minute why are you sure? What if you don't know what's going on?"
Pierre: So if I follow you, it means for a proper revolution, a beneficial revolution to occur, sure you need a good leaders, but above all, you need people who are educated enough to know about ponerology, about psychopathy. Because the profile you describe fits very well with this schizoid psychopathic type, the spell binders, this discourse, this rhetoric, this eloquence, this mesmerising power that is almost supernatural. And we normal human beings fall into this trap and especially in time of crisis where we are highly suggestible.
Joe: Mm-hm.
Jason:: The only revolution that will ever succeed is an education revolution, one where people just simply acquire enough knowledge to quit falling for these tactics. Then of course the people who are in power will change their tactics. But if you look over history for the last at least 2,000 years, the exact - say - sometimes almost word-for-word - you read speeches of Cicero, political speeches from the old days and I was like reading his third or fourth Calinorian speech, I don't remember, and I was like, "it sounds exactly like John Kerry talking about Syria'. At this point it's kind of our fault. It's like 'fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me'. At this point, it really is on the population of the world to be like, 'we keep getting taken in by these people and we keep suffering and the only way we're going to get way out of it is to just stop falling for these specific little traps'.
Joe: In a way I think the problem is worse than just needing a revolution in education because the kind of sense I get is that what's needed is a revolution in human development, or the development of human beings in a certain sense. I know what you mean, not just like that people would be informed, because you could tell everybody the truth about everything and probably more than 50 percent of them would just go back and follow the demagogic leader again, you know what I mean? So it's almost like it's an impossible - it's an insoluble problem really that we have with humanity at the level of humanness or maturity. It's almost kind of like a maturity in human terms, not in terms of growth or intellectually maturity or emotional maturity, but maybe emotional maturity is closest to it.
Niall:: Well the way Brand put it is for me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
Joe: Yeah, but you can't force that, that's a process that is part of evolution.
Niall:: Absolutely. This is the thing, Brand is kind of being attacked by the mainstream media for inciting revolution. Okay, in the course of his thing he got emotional. But if you actually - I think where he's coming from is that he's observing that revolutionary reaction to what the psychopaths in power are doing is taking place. He's saying in an observation, he says to Paxman, "Look I'm not inciting this, it already underway, look around you". He wants you to see that it's happening.
Joe: Do we want to listen to something? A few pieces of what he said, just in case some people haven't listened to what he said. We'll play a few segments here. Here's the first one:
Paxman: But is it true you don't even vote?Jason:: Well, I mean I can't argue with that.
Brand: Yeah, no I don't vote.
Paxman: Well, how do you have any authority to talk about policies then?
Brand: Well, I don't get my authority from this pre-existing paradigm which is quite narrow and only serves a few people. I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity. Alternate means alternate political systems.
Paxman: They being?
Brand: Well I've not invented it yet Jeremy, I had to do a magazine last week, I've had a lot on my plate. But, I say, but here's the thing that you shouldn't do: shouldn't destroy the planet; shouldn't create massive economic disparity; shouldn't ignore the needs of the people. The burden of proof is on the people with the power, not people who like doing a magazine.
Paxman: How do you imagine that the people get power?
Brand: Well, I imagine there are sort of hierarchical systems that have been preserved through generations.
Paxman: Well, you can't get power by being voted in, that's how they do it. You can't even be asked to vote.
Brand: It's got a narrow err quite a narrow prescriptive parameter that changes within the...
Paxman: In a democracy, that's how it works.
Brand: Well, I don't think it's working very well Jeremy given that the planet is being destroyed, given that there is economic disparity of a huge degree. What are you saying that there is no alternative? There's no alternative?
Paxman: No I'm not saying that. I'm saying if you can't be asked to vote, why should be asked to listen to your political point of view?
Brand: You don't have to listen to my political point of view, but it's not that I'm not voting out of apathy, I'm not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class, that has been going on for generations now and which has now reached fever pitch where we have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system. So voting for it is tacit complicity with that system and that's not something I'm offering up.
Paxman: Well why don't you change it then?
Brand: I'm trying to...
Paxman: Well why don't you start by voting?
Brand: {laughs} I don't think it works, people have voted already and that's what's created the current paradigm.
Paxman: When did you last vote?
Brand: Never.
Paxman: You've never ever voted?
Brand: No, do you think that's really bad?
Paxman: So you struck an attitude what before the age of eighteen?
Brand: Well I was busy being a drug addict at that point because I come from the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifference system that really just administrates the large cooperation that ignores the population that it would...
Paxman: Well you're blaming the political class the fact that you had a drug problem?
Brand: No, no, no, I'm saying I was part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system and drug addictions, one of the problems that creates when you have huge underserved impoverished population, people get drug problems and also don't feel like they want to engage with the current political system, because they see that it doesn't work for them. They see that it makes no difference, they see that they're not served. I say that apathy...
Paxman: Of course it doesn't work for them if they bother to vote.
Brand: Jeremy, my darling, I'm not saying - the apathy doesn't come from us the people. The apathy comes from the politicians. They are apathetic to our needs. They're only interested in servicing the needs of cooperations.
Niall:: It's true no?
Jason:: Yeah, but at the same time it's like a series of true-isms in a certain sense. Where was the actual - to be honest, it sounded to me like he was basically reading off something that he had - I've heard all those words before, even heard them in that configuration.
Niall:: But they, his listeners will probably never have heard them.
Jason:: Oh I mean, I've listened to Russell Brand before and I've heard actually everything that he's said right there, he said months and months ago.
Niall:: This was on a primetime BBC programme though, all put together for them for the first time.
Pierre: What you notice is that Brand is very right, I think, concerning the diagnosis, the state of the society, what is going on.
Niall:: It's the power elite that's destroying everything.
Pierre: And even the way he emphasises the lack of empathy, the apathy of the elite is pretty close to the fundamental definition of psychopaths, absence of empathy. However, during this interview, several times Jeremy asks him about the solutions and he was kind of short about it. And I understand, but if I was a member of the elite and I feel that social pressure is getting a bit too high so we have to reduce the pressure so we need a quote/unquote 'revolution', I would promote this guy because he pushes this legitimate anger, this legitimate frustration amongst the population...
Jason:: In huge dollars.
Pierre: But for the treatment there is not - he doesn't prescribe any solutions so maybe there will be a second leader, a consultant that will help him define the new policy that we have been...
Jason:: But did you also notice that there were two conversations going on? There's the interviewer's conversation and there's Russell Brand's conversation. And they're only very lightly connected because he's not really responding to his questions in any real way. And obviously the guys trying to pull him down from the ceiling because Russell Brands a little bit frenetic and all over the place. But he wasn't - he had a spiel, you know, I'm just playing the devil's advocate a little bit here. I have to be honest, I'm a little bit of a devil's advocate because I like Russell Brand and I like what he has to say.
Joe: Well there's more as well.
Jason:: But I just wanted to say that like, he's going off on this spiel and it's not always completely connected with what he's saying, you know/ It really just seemed like they were having two different conversations in that room.
Niall:: I think Paxman came face to face with a little glimpse of reality and that's where there's this discordancy, Brand said it. Now I've looked back at some other things he said in chat shows, in other interviews, and you get the sense that he's dropped hints all over the place. This isn't just completely out of the blue. This time though he just said it, continuously.
Joe: Here's the thing. There's something Pierre just said that he, what Russell Brand has said in that few minutes was true, accurate and that you would promote him. But my feeling is, is that I wouldn't promote Russell Brand, I would take what I believe to be true from what he's saying and try and promote that. When we've already been doing that for a long time. But I would hope that other people would more or less ignore Russell Brand the person, listen to what he's saying, understand it or the parts of it that are true and are relevant to them, and make them kind of feel like yeah this is actually, it makes a light bulb go off in their head, and go and tell other people about themselves.
Jason:: Right.
Joe: Because there should be no kind of hero worship, nobody should be looking to Russell Brand or anybody else who says similar things as this person's going to save ups. That's the problem, is looking to one person. Because one person who gets into a position of power or becomes a popular leader is immediately co-opted into the existing power structure and it all comes to naught.
Jason:: And like right now in the media you have - I wanted to kind of just add to that - is just to say that you have like this really pathological world view from the media. I mean what the government is doing, what the elite people are doing, all of this stuff, it's like this gigantic target where you can't miss. You just kind of with a blindfolded guy and a gun, you point it in some direction, you're going to hit some truth just saying it's all bad and its crap, right? And people get amazed when someone like Russell Brand comes on and says things that are true, but actually the amazing thing is that so many other people are not. They're really going out of their way to kind of hide it and bury it, whereas he is saying a lot of true things. But it's really hard to miss, because these guys are ruining the environment and representing corporations and doing all this difference stuff, killing people, mass murder. They've been doing this for centuries you know.
Pierre: When I hear Russell Brand, I think we could have heard these words in the mouth of the early revolutionaries in the beginning of revolutionary movements. We could have heard his words in the mouth of Robespierre. We could have heard his words in the mouth of the leaders of the February 1917 revolution in Russia. But the ones who implemented the medicine the quote/unquote 'new regimes' it was not Robespierre, it was not actors of February, it was Danton, it was Lenin, or Trotsky or Stalin. So I hope, I hope...
Niall:: No, I would say to you don't hope, don't bother with that thing. And I think when Brand is saying that, he's not himself giving into any false hopes, I think he's accepting the world is screwed up and well hell, let's at least think about things are not - to see as it is. He himself has said that, at least in his written article. I don't think (skip) false hope.
Joe: I don't really care really who Russell Brand is or what he thinks, I would be very happy if a monkey was saying it. Anybody who would get on national TV and have a wide audience and wide exposure who can get to that point and say any truths, fundamental truths about our society today, is good by me. And then that person to just disappear back into the shadows and the next one comes in and says exactly the same thing or says in a different way, with a different voice in different words maybe, but the same thing, to appeal to maybe a different demographic or to try and get more people to understand it. The point here is information and awareness and it's the death grip that the media has on that information and it getting it out to the public and how they spin it and lie all the time. So that's why - we're in such a bad situation right now that even something like this, basic truths that this guy Brand, who's a scattered brained he's got ADD, he's bipolar, he's all over the place type of thing. But someone like him would be, that we would be kind of applauding or appreciative of the fact that he is simply getting these basic truths out, is indicative of just how bad the situation is. Well it's also its indicative how terrible the situation when we were like thank god, somebody's saying something you know. Do you want to go to the next one?
Jason:: Yeah, let's go.
Paxman: You don't believe in democracy, you want a revolution don't you?Joe: Well that's true, the last point anyway. Alright, I mean everybody must be able to understand that or see that or recognise that as true. Well, not everybody.
Brand: The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. We are exploiting poor people all over the world and the genuine legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political classes.
Paxman: All of those things may be true.
Brand: They are true!
Paxman: But you took - I wouldn't argue with you about many of those.
Brand: Well how come I feel so cross with you? It can't be just because of that beard, it's gorgeous.
Paxman: It's possibly because...
Brand: And if the Daily Mail don't want it, I do. I'm against them. Grow it longer. Dangle it into your armpit hair.
Paxman: You are a very trivial man.
Brand: What, you think I'm trivial?
Paxman: Yes.
Brand: A minute ago you were having a go at me because I want a revolution, now I'm trivial.
Paxman: No, I'm not having a go at you because you want a revolution. Many people want a revolution, but I'm asking you what it will be like?
Brand: Well I think what it won't be like a huge disparity between rich and poor, where three hundred Americans have the same amount of wealth of as the eighty five million poorest Americans, where there is a an exploitive an underserved underclass that are being continually ignored, where welfare is slashed while Cameron and Osbourne go to court to defend the rights of bankers to continue receiving their bonuses.
Paxman: That's all I'm asking: what's the scheme? You talked vaguely about revolution, what is it?
Brand: I think a social egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, heavy taxation of corporations and massive responsibility for energy companies and any companies that are exploiting the environment. I think that they should be taxed. I think the very concept of profit should be hugely reduced. David Cameron says profit isn't a dirty word, I say profit is a filthy word because wherever there is profit, there is also deficit. And this system currently doesn't address these ideas. And so why would anyone vote for it? Why would anyone be interested in it?
Paxman: Who would levy these taxes?
Brand: I think we do need - there needs to be centralised administrative system but built...
Paxman: Government.
Brand: Yes.
Paxman: There needs to be a government.
Brand: Well maybe call it something else, call them like the admin bods, so they don't get full of themselves.
Paxman: How would they be chosen?
Brand: Jeremy, don't ask me to sit here in an interview with you, in a bloody hotel room and devise a global utopian system. I'm merely pointing out that the current...
Paxman: You calling for revolution?!
Brand: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm calling for change. I'm calling for genuine alternatives.
Paxman: There are many people who would agree with you.
Brand: Good!
Paxman: The current system is not engaging with all sorts of problems, yes. And they feel apathetic, really apathetic.
Brand: Yes.
Paxman: But if they were to take you seriously, and not to vote...
Brand: Yeah, they shouldn't vote, they should - that's one thing they should do, don't bother voting. Because when it reaches - there's a point - see these little valves, these sort of like little cosy little valves of recycling and Prius, and lights you turn off somewhere, it stops us reaching the point where you think 'this is enough now. Stop voting. Stop pretending. Wake up. Be in reality now. Time to be in reality now. Why vote?' We know it's not going to make any difference. We know that already.
Jason:: I think that that particular segment actually won me over a little bit more to his side because even though he does go off on this very, very simplistic and naive 'oh there's this tax cooperation's' and stuff like that, he does at one point say 'why do you expect me to come up with a utopian governmental system in an interview in a hotel room?' That is a fair question because whenever anybody comes and complains about the things the way they are, they say 'well how'd you do it?' And if you don't have a damn good answer and 'I could fix every single problem', oh then you don't have any right to say anything.
Joe: Yeah, you come across that a lot you know and it's ridiculous. It's akin to saying a child's being beaten in the street by an adult and two people are watching and one of them says 'somebody should do something about that' and the other guy says 'well hang on a minute, what are you going to do afterwards? Are you going to take the guy to court? How are you going to prosecute him? Are you going to take pictures? How are you going to deal with the after-effects of it?' And they'll sit there for another few hours talking about it and have now come to the conclusions and say 'Well listen, it's too difficult to really figure the whole thing out, so let's not bother helping the kid out right now'. It's stupid, you know. When people notice a problem and they say you're fully entitled to point out the problem and that the problem is very bad and should be removed, the excesses should stop, the corruption should stop and I don't have to have an answer as to how I'm going to formulate the whole system afterwards.
Jason:: Yeah it reminds me...
Joe: To say that.
Niall:: But he did actually get to the - well at least social economic level, he did actually hit the nail on the head, because that is how things have been adjusted for the benefit of all. Real wages rise, there are improvements in the rights of people, when things are regulated. In another words when psychopaths are clamped down. And part of the problem that got us into today's mess was the deregulation. It's a very particular brand of economics. Laissez faire economics which really means let - laissez faire - let the psychopaths do whatever they want. That's how we got the situation.
Jason:: I don't know if I agree with that statement because look at France...
Niall:: Historically this is the case.
Pierre: Look at communist Russia.
Jason:: Yeah.
Pierre: You have a highly regulated system but in the end...
Jason:: It's actually worse.
Pierre: Neo liberal communists in both cases, you have a smaller elite, with a different name, a different brand that exploits the masses. So more regulation, less regulation, I don't think it addresses the core problem.
Jason:: Psychopathic people. Because look at, communism, democracy, every single system, imperialism, all these different systems that we've had over the - we've had a section, we've had a sample of every kind of political system you can possibly imagine throughout the last two thousand years. We've had everything. And each and every single one of them has been corrupted and rotted from within. Lots of regulation, lots of taxes, no regulation no taxes. The laissez faire stuff that he's talking about, that was shit. We go into this Democracy in America, oh everything's fine. Capitalism? That's crap. Communism? That's crap.
Joe: Well the core problem is the people in control of it, that they're just using that as a screen for greed and corruption behind the screen right? So, but there are some systems that are, that select for a corrupt society more than others.
Jason:: You would have to think they wouldn't have been Communism. But that one was pretty bad.
Joe: Well yeah exactly. Yeah although in some senses people did - everybody did have their basic needs met under Communism, which were as when you compare to capitalist system, there's a lot of people who don't have there's a lot of people in capitalist America, for example, who are worse off, and in terms of just there basic necessity of life, are worse off than people in Communist Russia. It's not the problem.
Niall:: Or in today's Cuba.
Jason:: Four hundred million people starved or something, so they didn't have their basic needs met under Communism. So I mean yeah because they starved off all those people. So starving capitalism, starving Communism, it's still starving.
Niall:: I thinks it's interesting that we've got into a discussion about the two isms, the two ends of the left right, when this is exactly what Brand is saying. It's part of the narrow paradigm that protects the elite one way or another. He himself was drawn into it and that's where that interview got a little emotional when he would not have liked to, I bet. And he did well. I think we'll see later that he did well to come out of it.
Joe: He did and that's because
Niall:: To the bigger picture.
Joe: What Paxman is doing, the interviewer, what he's doing is framing the argument and creating a straw man, you know. He's creating phoney arguments essentially that then he himself can knock down. It's something of a set up. Which is interesting because Paxman is meant to be this guy who grills politicians and guests. But he's exposing himself here in this interview as just a tool of the system essentially you know. So we'll just listen to the last segment here. It's just another couple of minutes and we'll go from there.
Russell Brand: But what I'm saying is that within the existing paradigm the change is not dramatic enough, not radical enough. So you can well understand public disturbances and public dissatisfaction when there are not genuine changes and genuine alternatives being offered. I say when there is a genuine alternative, a genuine option, then vote for that. But until then, pfffft, don't bother. Why pretend? Why be complicit in this ridiculous illusion?
Paxman: Because by the time somebody comes along you might think it worth voting for, it may be too late.Jason:: Yep.
Brand: I don't think so because the time is now, this movement is already occurring, it's happening everywhere; we're in a time where communication is instantaneous and there are communities all over the world. The Occupy movement made a difference in - even if only in that it introduced to the popular public lexicon the idea of the 1% versus the 99%. People for the first time in a generation are aware of massive corporate and economic exploitation. These things are not nonsense and these as subjects are not being addressed. No one is doing anything about tax havens. No one is doing anything about the political affiliations and financial affiliations of the Conservative Party. So until people start addressing things that are actually real, why wouldn't I be facetious? Why would I take it seriously? Why would I encourage a constituency of young people that are absolutely indifferent, to vote? Why would we? Aren't you bored? Aren't you more bored than anyone? Ain't you been talking to them year after year, listening to their lies, their nonsense? Then it's this one gets in, then it's that one get in, but the problem continues? Why are we going to continue to contribute to this facade?
Paxman: I'm surprised you can be facetious when you're that angry about it.
Brand: Yeah, I'm angry. I am angry. Because for me it's real. Because for me it's not just some peripheral thing that I turn up once in a while to a church fete for. For me, this is what I come from, this is what I care about.
Paxman: Do you see any hope?
Brand: Remember that - yeah, totally, there's going to be a revolution. It's totally going to happen. I isn't got even a flicker of doubt. This is the end. This is time to wake up. I remember I see you in that program where you look at your ancestors and you saw the way your grandmother would have to brass herself or had to have got fucked over by the aristocrats who ran her gaff, and you cried because you knew that it was unfair and unjust. And that was - what was that, a century ago? That's happening to people now. I just come from a woman who's being treated like that. I just been talking to a woman today who's being treated like that. So if we can engage that feeling, instead of some moment of lachrymose sentimentality trotted out on the TV for people to pore over emotional porn, if we can engage that feeling and change things, why wouldn't we? Why is that naïve? Why is that not my right because I'm an actor? I mean, I, I've taken the right. I don't need the right from you. I don't need the right from anybody. I'm taking it.
Joe: He's got the right attitude. You have to say if every other person in the world of the 99 percent all had the same attitude, well then we'd be living on a different world.
Jason:: I think so. He kind of won me over there towards the end. He really got - he hit some points that hit at the very core of the problem you know. And even when he mentions the emotional porn, everyone sort of they cart out these emo pieces, you know, to jerk on your heart strings to make you think that they care and 'oh they do care'. No they don't care.
Pierre: I think he sounds very genuine and convincing and true and what he says is right on the mark. But I'm wondering is as I said previously, you have very good leaders in the beginning of revolutionary movements.
Jason:: Always.
Pierre: What about the following steps, but maybe as well, I don't know, maybe there will be one time when history doesn't repeat because people have a high level have access to information.
Jason:: You can't hope that it's not going to be - I mean you have to fight against that kind of stuff. You fight against the ponerisation process. You don't think about fighting against governments or anything. You fight against the ponerisation process of these movements and people who have messages to say, things that they're on air saying. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with Russell Brand. Either he's going to sell out or he's going to get killed or something like that. I'm just waiting for that sort of like that queue that you know when something's gone a little too far and they've decided that they're tired of them. Because he does say a lot of things like what Joe was saying where it's just you know, it's just good that he's saying the words because there are people who are hearing those words and hopefully they're going to plant a seed in their mind. And that's the best that you can hope for. Some seeds going to land in somebody's head and they'll wake up to the, as he's saying, the massive inequality and the disparity of wealth and you know.
Pierre: Why did they give him air time on BBC?
Niall:: Well he's been interviewed before on the same show a couple of times with Paxman, so there would have been on personable terms. He is a fairly big celebrity in the UK. He's now living in the U.S. where he's not so much of a well known celeb. But why? Well I guess he's funny, I guess he draws attention, I guess he sells because he himself seeks attention. And he's not ashamed of it and therefore that's good. That pulls in an audience, you know. Controversy and attention.
Joe: There may have been an angle where they were along the idea of the pressure valve. Giving people a voice, letting off a little bit of social pressure. Someone may have selected him because he's a comedian, thinking that he would be able to broach this topics but make them funny. Because very often comedians - like look at John Stuart and stuff you know. I don't know how on the Daily Show in the U.S., I don't know how effective he is. He says a lot of true things but, he plays it up so much and he pitches in such a comedic way, that it loses its edge. People can assume that it's not really almost, because they're are laughing at it. So maybe Brand was seen as fairly safe in that way because they expected him to be just - everybody to see him just as a comedian and so therefore everything he's saying is more or less a joke, it's not real.
Niall:: Well I think it tells a lot, in terms of old, the court jester was the only one who was allowed legitimately - almost expected to tell the truth to - that was his role. It was understood. Here we are today, it's the same thing.
Pierre: Yeah, and what you say about the audience, I agree that profit rings a bell because in his bio, you can read that there was controversy about his nomination as the speaker for the MTV music awards 2009. Finally they nominated his as the official speaker and that audience, the highest audience they have ever had since 2004. So what he says might not really fit the doctrine, but at the same times he is so appealing that he boosts the audience and helps generating more profits.
Niall:: We're kind of in a trap here of our own making when we're going along with this argument. Namely that okay, it's implausible that things are planned to such an extent and yet whenever we do hear a bit of truth it's 'okay, what's the catch?' They clearly chose him and selected him to put him on to make us think something. What is it? And [laughs] we're sinking back into more fear, the very thing that Brand is saying...
Pierre: It's true.
Niall:: ...get rid of. Now's the time, whatever way you do it.
Jason:: But you know, once bitten, twice shy. And there's been so many head pieces and talking heads put up by the mainstream media over time that were just playing god.
Niall:: Who or what is comparable with this? Charlie Sheen?
Jason:: I would not - [laughs] Charlie Sheen? At some point I think Charlie Sheen started to be that way and that he totally went 'Fffssssshhhhhhhpp. come on bro, I've got tires blood and stuff, I'm by winning'. That guy was - he really did kind of tank. Was it Ron Paul at some point? There's been a couple of like Kucinich - I can't remember the guys name now, he's one of the...
Niall:: Dennis Kucinich yeah.
Jason:: Or something like that. And they put these guys up and then you're just like, I don't know should I - what should I do?
Pierre: There was this guy I mentioned in a previous show. There's a French comedian, Coluche, who's probably not famous beyond the French borders but he had the same speech. He was very funny, he was extremely popular, he was a candidate for the presidential elections. He had a high percentage, he was - he got pressured to cancel his candidateship because he became a threat. When he started what is called Restaurants du Coeura. There's a lot of poor people in France, lot of people who cannot eat. So since the authorities were doing nothing, what he did, he set up a chain of free restaurants where everybody was bringing food and the poor were eating there. And people who were not rich enough to be bring food, they were serving the meals. And within weeks, millions of meals were being served. And he demonstrated, actually something very powerful. He demonstrated that as we the people, we don't need the elites. We can solve all the problems by ourselves. But the elites - that the elites who needs us. And a few months later he was assassinated.
Jason:: Well I mean also back on what
Niall: was saying, look at Obama. I remember I was in the U.S. when Obama was doing his campaign and doing his whole thing. And I remember walking into the living room and my roommate at the time, she was sitting there and she was teary eyed and "he won" and "things are finally going to change". And even I first was sitting there for a moment I was saying "you know, this Obama guy says a lot of the right things, he's talking about change and moving forward and all this different stuff". And for a second, for a split second I had hope, you know? And then it disappeared very quickly (laughs) because when I went outside, I saw all these people had these vendors selling like Obama t-shirts and I knew, I was like. "Oh wait a minute hold on a second something's wrong here" But he's another example. When John Kerry was against Bush, it was like, well somebody's against him and he's starting to say some stuff and then he does this complete 180 and you're just like "But what about all that stuff you said when you were fighting Bush? Now you're like evil again. What is this?" That's not a perfect example, but there's all these people who come out and they say stuff that people want to hear and then they turn around.
Niall:: I think part of the problem is here we're looking at it from a different vantage point to most of the audience that heard this. The criticism being levelled at him by mass media is that oh that's negative, that's a very negative and pessimistic view of the world. We're looking at it saying it's far too optimistic {laughter}.
Jason:: Yeah, you know. We're like you just, you're little a bit too optimistic about all this stuff.
Niall:: And then the second point, your two examples, Obama and Kerry, very much within the system. Here's the guy's saying "Look forget about it mate, just walk away. It's a dead horse. It's all an illusion anyway that whole scam. Just walk away."
Jason:: Yeah, the walk away dollar. It's very big.
{laughter} - incoherent chatter -
Jason:: Excellent dollar {laughs} That for those who really don't know is a reference to one of Bill Hicks' speeches, one of Bill Hicks' comedy routines.
Pierre: So maybe that's it, he made a nice speech. He said a lot of truth. It was very convincing. He seemed very genuine and now let's not hold our breath and...
Jason:: I would like to see like what Joe was saying, which is him to fade away and the next guy to come out to keep changing it up and have more people coming on and saying the same thing, instead of us trying to pin everything on this horse, just another one and another one, a stream of people saying this stuff.
Niall:: The kind of questions Paxman levelled at him, are the number one criticism that will come out of, I say mainstream left, where OK you're like - the criticism that was levelled at the Occupy movement. But who's your leader and what is your manifesto, and what precisely are your aims? And do you have a timetable for how you're going to get there? This in itself is part of the old way of thinking. Whatever is taking place is organic and as such it will do its own thing. If its going to lead to a better future. It might. We don't know. But the point is, it's an organic - it's something else. It's breaking away from something that we're use to. I think it's a fear of the unknown that restrains. It's basically, I think it's inherently creative. People getting together, discussing, if nothing else, protesting. It's symbolic and they understood that and they came up against the long arm of the law when Obama went in 48 cities over the U.S. in one night last year in March, had the police in every single city wipe out all the tent cities. Media next day didn't mention it.
Pierre: That's a key word I think, creative. And when you listen to Brand there is this drive there is this vision. Artists are people who create. Usually they don't know all the details some tactical or strategy of technical level, but they have this drive, this vision. They know where they want to go. They don't know how they're going to go there. And they know what they don't want. And Brand fits this picture.
Jason:: And they're willing to go somewhere that they didn't plan. Like you know when he starts saying stuff like "I don't have the answers to this perfect utopia", that's the point. You get the project started, you get this project started and you go forward and who knows where you're going to end up? But you're hoping that where you end up is somewhere better from where you started.
Niall:: And he said it himself, you have fun doing it. He wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't fun. He wouldn't be saying these things or he wouldn't - we take the same approach. If this wasn't an enjoyable exciting - if it didn't have a lot of positive virtues going for it, it would be...
Jason:: It would be unfun. But like what you're saying about how they attack you by saying oh don't have any structure. I mean, if somebody comes out and says here's my three point plan type of thing, I would be worried about that point, the kind of a little bit chaotic creative "Oh let's just do something". I think it's actually for me a kind of creative type, that's a lot more safe actually because I know that there's a greater probability that it's going to end up somewhere new, than back to the same area that we've been to again and again and again. So if somebody comes up with tables and percentages and this is how we're going to redistribute this and redistribute that, I think if that doesn't take place organically, then it's actually just going to be totally crazy. It's easier to corrupt because psychopaths are really not creative people. They need a smart person to come along and give them a plan so they can mess it up then. But when it comes to a thing where its got to be creative and spontaneous, it's not controllable and it's difficult, there's no leaders. It's kind of like an anathema for them.
Niall:: Yeah.
Joe: Alright, are we done with Russell Brand?
Niall:: Well, just one last thing {laughter} that might open it up a bit, I wish there was a way to show our listeners, because it's a visual thing. It's a small short video and we have it up on SOTT, the title of it is Time Lapse Map of Worldwide Protests Since 1979 and what this guy did was he took gdelt - not sure what those initials stand for - but he took data on protests that have taken place of all different shapes and sizes for different causes, different movements all over the world and he plots them in this short video. And you see in front of you a map of the world and I don't know why 1979, but anyway, you press play and it starts the show. So you get one or two pinging up, maybe one in North America, now one in Europe, oh there's one in South East Asia ping, ping, ping. Now we're moving into the '80s and you see the activity going up ping, ping, ping. You get more and more protests up into the '90s and the globe is starting to flash all over the place. Into the 2000s it's so bright, it's basically a constant flash, the planet is like just one great big flashing neon sign. And then of course right up to today. So there is this underlying objective - revolutions or a series overlapping revolutions. They're localise. They comes and go, but the overall trend is going up and up and up. That is a reaction to the increased control from above.
Pierre: Inequalities yeah.
Niall:: I think Laura has written it really well when she summed up the kind of cycle that if we look back in history, what typically happens is things cycle through. So you begin with psychopaths rising to power and you're in good times. They start inflicting misery and suffering. Then you start to see the masses becoming unhappy and miserable, because they lack this knowledge and awareness of how it's being done to them, they suppress this within themselves out of fear. Then the planet starts to express the unhappiness of the masses though climate disorder, which may be related to other cosmic processes. Then the climate issues get worse and worse and worse, which makes people even more afraid, unhappy, and suffer even more. The psychopaths in power clamp down even harder...
Joe: It's a negative feedback loop.
Niall:: It's a negative feedback loop which cannot go on forever, and it doesn't. History shows that it doesn't. A breaking point is reached which we are pretty much at...
Joe: Where things break.
Niall:: Well this is to be seen, but I think we're at it. The breaking point is reached, humanity and planetary reactive to pathology and death and destruction on a massive scale is the result levelling the playing field.
Joe: There's a revolution for you.
Niall:: That's the revolution, that's the global cosmic revolution.
Jason:: Some revolutions that just are kind of like political tensions and stuff like that, yeah they do recreate the problem very quickly, like when we're talking about the French revolution, but there are also examples of some stuff where we're talking about - what percentage of the population was killed by the plague in Constantinople? There was - millions and millions people were dead. Everywhere it was a high percentage of the population.
Joe: It depends on the location.
Pierre: About fifty percent. But what is striking is that humanity as it works now, as it worked during the past centuries, doesn't seem to be able to maintain a policy. Fair policies that prevent those cosmic reactions, for more than two centuries. If you check the story of Europe that was obliterated, Western Europe until roughly 900, there was almost zero activity. Civilisation started to really develop in 900 and two, three centuries later you start to have the inquisition, the crusades and then three centuries after the (skip) of the civilisation, you have the black plague that would kill, depending on the estimates, hundred of millions and would last. Interestingly, the inquisition and the black plague will last for about five centuries, half a millennium, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth century or thirteenth century for the plague, nineteenth century.
Niall:: Such is the cycle of history. Will this time be any different? Probably not. However, I've noticed that Brand is, well in a lot of his other writings and interviews and so on he's pretty much flirting with new age, you know. This is where he seems to have grasped through his own meditation and his own personal discoveries, yada, yada, that yes, there maybe something unique about this time in that because of the way it is set up, because it's global this time, because the population is at its greatest and the suffering is at its greatest, it sort of forces tremendous opportunities for individuals to have such a thing as he's talking about, a revolution in consciousness. So it's kind of like a utopian revolution in consciousness? For all? No, I'm afraid not.
Jason:: It's like that saying, that Laura's always got on her forum signature from Agamemnon "He who learns must suffer so that even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart" so that you know despite ourselves or something like that "comes wisdom by the awful grace of god". When you think about it, people learn from suffering, they really do.
Joe: That's evolution.
Jason:: Yeah that's evolution. And right now is a special time like you were saying, because it is a global system but at the same time it's a lot global suffering. There's a lot of suffering going on in the world right now and I think if ever there was ever a time when people can learn from that suffering it might be now.
Joe: It's kind of funny because new agers talk about an evolutionary leap. New age people will...
Niall:: Ascension.
Joe: Ascension and that's a twist on a truth that kind of Jason is just touching on there. Because if you think about it - think about your own life or the life of anybody you know, and what has been the most - what experiences in your life or in other people's lives have taught you the most? By and large if you think about it, it'll have been experiences where you suffered in some way, So as Jason says, human beings generally speaking, learn through suffering. So as suffering increases on the planet and reaches a kind of a high point, well yeah, that is an opportunity for an evolutionary leap because human evolution is more or less defined by suffering and the experiences, suffering from one degree to another and what people learn from that. So if there's a lot of suffering going on in the planet amongst a lot of the people on the planet, well then yeah, there's possibly some kind of a step or a phased transition in human evolution. But it's not as a result of butterflies and bunnies, navel gazing and happy thoughts - quite the opposite...
Jason:: When they talk about evolution, they talk about the environmental stress, causes evolution, right? That's suppose to be the general idea. And since the 60,000 years with post-Neanderthals, the Cro-Magnon man, we kind of see this explosion in what we think of as the mind and consciousness. So if the mind could evolve too, then the kind of stresses that work on it, emotional stresses and psychological stresses and sort of constant pathological attacks, maybe it will develop some sort of way to immunise itself against the pathological disease.
Joe: That would be a big step forward in humanity.
Jason:: That would be huge.
Joe: Spiritual progress.
Jason:: Just not falling for the BS anymore, that would be an evolutionary leap.
Pierre: It might be - both might be possible. Increased environmental, emotional, physical stress that can either stimulate the growth or the opposite. For some people into transmarginal inhibition i.e., accepting anything and no more reaction, total apathy, both are possible depending on who you are.
Joe: OK, we have a call here. Let's see where this one goes. Hi caller, what's your name and where're you calling from?
Laurie: My name is Laurie and I'm calling from Idaho.
Joe: Hi Laurie Welcome to the show.
Jason:: How you doing?
Pierre: Hi Laurie.
Laurie: Hello. You guys are talking about evolution and how it takes suffering to basically cause evolution to happen or to make things different? But then earlier you were talking about how we need to look at things differently. Like via Russell Brand and how he's trying to - we want to look at things differently, we want to do things differently. But if we've always needed suffering, to make things better then, what could we do? What would it look like if we could evolve without the suffering, if we don't have to repeat the cycle again?
Joe: When we talk about suffering, it's not just physical suffering because you have to remember that it can be actually physically painful for some people to change their beliefs about the world and about themselves. That's a major first hurdle, so you'll have emotional suffering and emotional stress as a result of simply getting over your illusions and you sacred cows.
Laurie: Yeah well losing you religion is very painful.
Joe: It is, yeah. But ideally it would not involve physical suffering or horrible health.
Jason:: We hope.
Joe: Physical suffering for a lot of people - I mean that's what we try and do in a sense that we try say listen, work on the knowledge aspect, get over your issues, get over your programmes because that will actually help you to avoid physical suffering in so many different ways. If you're just running around in your illusion, you can imagine how that causes suffering in people's personal lives, but in a modern day, In the current state of the world if you look to authorities for security to take care of you and that's not what they are intending, then there's some really physical suffering coming your way.
Jason:: I don't know if suffering ever disappears though.
Niall:: I think first and foremost it's the suffering of acknowledging that you're being lied to and seeing the reality as it is. That is the kind of conscious suffering. In another words...
Laurie: Yeah and it's very painful.
Niall:: Part of that is owning up to the suffering you cause others and that you have contributed to in the world because at the moment the mass of people still avoid - they would prefer the lie over the truth. They would prefer the drug over actually working through their issues. They would prefer the crappy food. Well partially now because they've been forced to because it's cheaper.
Laurie: It's the comfortable misery.
Niall:: The term comfort, exactly. It's a bit like the U.S. deficit. We'll just keep putting it off. We know it's there, but hey we'll put it off for a little bit more. Eventually, the cards are called in. It's not going to go on forever. So this is what I mean by an opportunity for people to just acknowledge. They're acknowledging, and it will make you suffer but, Jesus, it'll be hard but...
Joe: Far better.
Joe: Far better than...
Niall:: Far better.
Pierre: Again there are several kinds of suffering. There's probably a kind of useful suffering, what we call conscious suffering, which is beginning to see the world as it is, as painful as it can be. Like in Matrix when Neo reacts negatively to finally seeing and Morpheus telling him "I only promised you the truth". And on the other hand you have some useless suffering as Gurdjieff says, that human beings that they are the most attached to, is their suffering. This kind of mechanical suffering due to ignorance, to blindness, to habits. So in one sense suffering can be helpful, help, progress and development and on the other hand it can be agent of entropy and stagnation.
Jason:: I'll give you an example: I shoot a bow right?
Laurie: Okay.
Jason:: And when you first get a bow, it's kind of heavy, it's got a heavy weight and a didn't have a glove but I still wanted to do it. And it started really creating calluses on my fingers and it hurt. But because, I learned to have a faster release because I didn't want the pain anymore, getting hurt taught me to release the bow string much faster than I used to, because if you don't then it basically hurts under the skin right? And so that's positive suffering. Everything that you do leads to some suffering. You want to go out and play soccer really well. Well if the guys who get really good at playing soccer, they get minor injuries here and there until they learn until they learn how to run right and kick right, this that and the other thing. So everything kind of comes with suffering.
Laurie: Yeah I refinish cabinets for a living and I have to climb up on ladders and get up and down. By the end of the day my body's pretty sore but then I step back and look at what I've done and it's beautiful.
Jason:: And that's the price you pay for that creativity.
Laurie: That's the price I pay. What would it look like in a world where if we all were raised as Gurdjieff's - Beelzebub's grandson in the Gurdjieff's story? Where everybody is raised in a way to know who they are and to try and figure out what they're capable of and to have that kind of a consciousness. I'm thinking outside here, I'm not thinking that what were stuck in, what would it look like if we were all raised to respect ourselves?
Pierre: I've been thinking about that.
Joe: John Lennon wrote a song.
Pierre: Yeah, you're right and I think I don't know. It's only speculation because we're far away from this world obviously. But I think we would come pretty close to the description of parallels of heaven. Heaven could be on Earth. I mean, if you get rid of all this pathology, of all these lies. You get pretty idea all over the world, I don't ask for more than such a world.
Joe: I think that's what we are aiming for. I'm not sure it's possible.
Jason:: Well, the whole idea of conscious suffering was that you get a definite kind of results from it. She's talking about making a cabinet. You have to bang you thumbs or something, your knees and you're climbing up and down and you're doing all this different stuff. But at the end you have this - something that is more than just the suffering that went into it. Just the energy that you put into it. A cabinet is much more...
Laurie: Yeah, it brings joy in the end too.
Jason:: For a long time actually, because such a thing that could last for generations and people could be getting some form of utility and enjoyment from it. So that kind of suffering leads - so imagine like an Edenic society would not be one that is completely devoid of suffering and everything easy.
Laurie: Oh no.
Jason:: But it's when all suffering led to positive results instead of like what we have now which is like unconscious suffering which leads to chaotic and negative results within our population.
Laurie: Exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking and I didn't even know it (laughs) until you just said it (laughter) Yes, okay. I can't see no suffering at all but for a reason for it, a good reasons for it.
Joe: Imagine you had been given, taught that the way to make a cabinet was to use, I don't know...
Laurie: My teeth?
Joe: Yeah, your teeth are totally inappropriate tools and you just went for it every day and you didn't get it and eventually you died never have ever made a cabinet, but spent your whole life trying to make one. That's kind of suffering for no purpose. That's what we have today.
Laurie: Kind of what the world is like now in a lot of places.
Joe: Exactly, when what's needed is to teach people - as you said teach people how to live their lives in a truly humane fashion and to know themselves and to know what human life and human relationships are all about and obviously to get rid of pathology.
Laurie: And to use their tools
Joe: Yeah, exactly. To use the tools that were given to them.
Jason:: And know the price, that everything comes with a price. Nothing is free but some things are worth the price and some things aren't and what the mainstream media and what the elites and all this stuff, they try to promise you things you can't deliver and all the suffering in the world is supposed to be about security and safety and all this different stuff, which they're never going to get. Whereas they should be consciously suffering to get the kind of life that they really want.
Pierre: And you have to look at the global picture, the trade off. When you build a cabinet, you are, to keep on with your analogy, you know there is an investment, let us say, in suffering.
Jason:: There's a price.
Pierre: There's a price to pay. And you saw that there is the satisfaction after and you know that there will be a balance and the more you invest the more satisfaction you usually you will have. So if you see, look at the global picture at the end of the day, the net result may be more positive, much more satisfaction than suffering. Now if you apply this analogy to truth and lies and two different kinds of suffering in both cases you will have to suffer because lies, as Joe described previously, will lead to suffering. As just an example if you were into lies, your body, the part striving for truth, and if you do analogy in you mind then your body will start to give you signs through disease and other manifestations. So you will suffer because of lies. And truth often it will be uncomfortable, not very pleasant, so we suffer a little as well. But in the second case, you will have the satisfaction with which you have better, positive emotions, the better state a sense of freedom, you're getting freed of lies. There's a progress.
Laurie: Yeah. It's kind of like being - it's like a weird analogy - an abusive relationship. A lot of people that are in abusive relationships stay there because they say that it's love, but they're lying to themselves and they don't even realise they cause themselves pain every day. More pain than they need to if they could just see the truth about what's going on in their lives and have the courage and take the pain of walking away because it is painful.
Joe: Yeah, but to get there faster.
Jason:: I'd hate to drag it off but I do have something to say on that cos she makes a really good point about that. Robert Cialdini who wrote a book called The Persuasion of Science of Influence talks about why women stay in abusive relationships. And one thing that he does say is that, it's their fear of the pain and suffering of having been wrong. He gives this description of a womenm she's with an abusive man. She finally kicks him to the curb. Then he comes back and says I'm going to change, I'm going to change. Everything's going to be hunky dory. So she takes him back and it lasts for maybe a week and then he's starts being abusive again. But now he say's - at this point she's totally trapped because she's too afraid of the pain of admitting her mistake in front of other people, and looking inconsistent and looking flaky, right? She's afraid of the suffering of the judgement of others. So sheès willing to accept the suffering of an abusive partner because of the social pressure. That's kind of how women sometimes will stay in an abusive relationship because of their real abject fear of the opinions of others. They may have had like a really pathological childhood.
Laurie: I actually have a really good friend that just passed away last year that was in a very abusive relationship and she stayed with him until she passed away. I asked her one time a couple of years before she died, "Why do you stay? What's the point?" She told me because she didn't want her parents to be right about him, because they didn't want her to marry him. That was like a 35 year marriage and that was the reason. It just made me sick.
Jason:: If you look at the situation in the world right now, you could almost say that a lot of the problem is that - not so much the people that see the stuff as bad, it's that they're just so terrified of admitting their culpability in the entire system of saying "I was participating in that. All those children starving in Africa. All of that. There is a measure of guilt from me too". They're so terrified of owning.
Laurie: Being an American citizen and trying to own part of that, it is, it's hard. It's very painful. I mean I'm disgusted with myself a lot of times for just playing the game that I don't know - you know, where do you go?
Joe: Well you do what you can. Step by step. That's a great analogy because you can pretty much say more or less as
Jason: was saying, that the entire world in the same way that a person can be in an abusive relationship with a psychopath for a long time a suffer as a result, the entire world is engaged in an abusive relationship with a psychopaths in power.
Laurie: Yeah.
Joe: We're suffering ...we're collectively.
Jason:: And we're tolerating them, you know?
Joe: As a result.
Joe: Well, Laurie thanks for your call in and your questions. They were great questions, great comments.
Laurie: No, I really like this show and I really enjoy this. This is the second time I've called in and I probably will again because its stimulating to talk with you guys (laughs).
Joe: Excellent.
Pierre: Call again.
Laurie: I will. Thanks. Bye.
Joe: Bye. There may be another call here. Hi, do we have a caller?
Rich: Yes. Hi, Rich here.
Jason:: Hi Rich.
Rich: I'm from England.
Joe: OK, fire away.
Rich: Well, I just found the Russell Brand video. The interview with Paxman is just really fascinating. I couldn't help laughing when I heard it. But I suppose one of my questions is, where do to see it going? Can it go anywhere? Will he get pushed somewhere? My first thought when I saw it is that some are claiming him as the new messiah, expressing a popular movement against the authority. What will they do with him? Will they use him?
Joe: I don't know, this is what we were saying earlier on that people need to focus on what he says and ignore him.
Jason:: Yeah.
Joe: Right? It's just the things that he said were true. People need to take those and say "that's true, I'm going to go and tell my friends that and we're going to discuss, we're going to agree and get together and everybody - just the little people all take that on board". If you agree with it and it is true, a lot of what he said, and go with it and forget about Russell Brand. Don't put him in the position of power, don't give him any kind of support where he would be leader of anything. We want somebody else to come along and be galvanised by what he said, by the word by the information and get a stage and say the same thing and it needs to be repeated over and over and over again by as many people as possible. But nobody gets the limelight, nobody becomes the leader.
Jason:: Forget the man, remember the message. It's the same problem with Jesus. If you read Jesus' words a lot of the time some of them sound actually kind of good. But people got obsessed with the man and not the message. It's the same thing here, forget the man. Remember the message. If it's a good message analyse it, if it's good it's good. If it's not, well okay.
Pierre: The future is open. There are many possible scenarios. He might get corrupted, he might turn crazy, he might get assassinated, who knows?
Jason:: There's a bit of potential in every situation, but is his mouth made of gold or something? Is there something special about the sounds that come from his mouth as oppose to...
Joe: You might think there is.
Jason:: If somebody else said those same truths, would they be any more true or any less true?
Joe: Exactly, it doesn't matter.
Niall:: Yeah go ahead Rich.
Rich: I was just going to say no, yeah you're quite right. The thing whole Russell Brand is he is such an ego and such an image and the way that the press are portraying him is, this is like a messiah. It kind of reminds me of the Love Police guy. He was - a lot of what he was saying - I forget his name, but a lot of what he was saying is very true. And then it reached a point when he got co opted, put into a TV show where he was talking against 9-11. But then he went completely silent. So I was just wondering, I was speculating that perhaps that the same thing might happen.
Joe: That may happen and we would like to see that not happen and that's what we've been saying what we've been saying. That should not happen. Ignore Russell Brand except - ignore him as a person and focus on what he said and expand on it. What he's said isn't his, it's the truth.
Jason:: We attach too much...
Niall:: Yeah, I would just savour it for what it is. It's a disturbance in the force and that's all. We live in very complex world and its non-linear. There's no way in hell we can what's going to come from this. We can have some good ideas, we can speculate about it. He's currently on a world tour, a speaking tour. It's a stand up show. I found it interesting that he set it up. It's called The Messiah Complex. So he's set that up as a kind of comedic vehicle, as a way to drop hints, basically to say some of the things he's been saying to Paxman. So it's funny, it's a disturbance in the force but that's the extent of it. Let's just enjoy it, see what comes but I wouldn't put too much...
Joe: I don't think it's going to go anywhere necessarily. We're just happy that he said it and he's got the stage. A lot of people have heard it and we just wanted to analyse it and look at it and make sure the signal was accurate.
Jason:: (whispers) The signal now it can never stop.
Joe: And also to address the point that do not deify him or anybody else. The truth is the truth and the truth is what will set people free. And everybody owns the truth if they'll just stand up and take it.
Jason:: Yup.
Joe: And claim it.
Rich: Well, I think yeah, from my own point of view, for example yeah it's good advice. When I'm sort of sharing with Facebook friends for example, yeah this video has some good points in it. But then the onus is on me really, to actually be far more proactive in writing about it and pointing out the fallacies and the what are the truths, just be more active. I get caught up in the Facebook example or just passing it on without comment or lol, but not actually taking the effort to properly explain what I do understand about it.
Joe: If there's any Russell Brand groupies or devotees out there the point to them is - maybe to put it in another way is: "Be Russell Brand". Don't follow him, be him. Find a way to say what he said to as many people as possible and your own truths in the sense other connections that you make based on that.
Jason:: It's real easy to get caught up in that "Oh you're just saying what Russell Brand said" or "Oh you're just trying to be like X". It's kind of really important for you to remember that every word of truth ever spoken in the entire history of all human kind is an endowment of humanity, it doesn't belong to any one person. If it's a true thing, then it is the possession of everybody and the right for them to share it and say it. It's not that Russell Brand said it that made it true, it's that it was true that made it true. That's just it.
Pierre: What he says along the line of what we've been saying and we've been saying more for years now. It's not like a great invention or a discovery just made.
Joe: No. Alright Rich anything else?
Rich: Well, I was just going to mention Nigel Farage? along similar lines.
Joe: Yeah.
Jason:: Who's he?
Rich: Nigel Farage is the leader of the UKIP Party which he had some very popular sort of speeches against the financial system and lot of speeches in European Parliament. His party went from nowhere recently within the last six months, to quite wide prominence. Yes, that struck me as quite strange that it's being supported financially. But he was getting airtime.
Jason:: I think Joe and Neil both mentioned it in one or two occasions, it's kind of like a release valves. It really does sound a little bit orchestrated to me, like they're selecting who's going to be showing up in the media a little bit by whether or not they are innocuous enough.
Joe: Yeah, they try to control it, you know.
Jason:: Try and control it.
Joe: They can't stop - ideally they would have nobody saying anything like that anywhere, but they can't stop everybody so one pops up its usually co-opted in some way or there's efforts co-opted.
Niall:: I think the - there's a limit here to the comparison. Russell Brand is saying "Don't vote, just forget it" and Nigel Farage is trying to...
Joe: Get for people to vote for him.
Niall:: You know, prop the system back up, whether he realises it or not. So there are degrees.
Joe: Yep, alright Rich.
Niall:: Good to talk to you.
Rich: Great show.
Joe: Thanks for your call.
Pierre: Thank you.
Rich: Thank you.
Joe: So speaking of what - we have about fifteen minutes left.
Niall:: Speaking of protests.
Joe: Yes, are you going to protest?
Niall:: No, well I am but by speaking and writing.
Joe: You're mad as hell and you're not taking it anymore?
Niall:: I'm protesting it little.
Joe: Go ahead, let loose.
Niall:: Well there was a protest in D.C. yesterday, Washington, D.C. "Stop watching us!" was the theme against the NSA. They got a few thousand people there. A few thousand - oh my god! - in a country of 300 million. But I think it came up or was timed with a whole string of recent revelations from NSAgate. Now okay, there's probably not much point. Everybody already knows, everyone is spying on everyone else.
But there was an interesting revelation, "Was Israel behind the hacking of millions of French phone calls and not the U.S.? Extraordinary twist in spying saga revealed". That came through Le Monde but actually the source of it was also Glenn Greenwald who co-wrote it with a French journalist. Specifically what happened was, the initial revelation via Ed Snowden was that "Oh the NSA in one month alone in 2012 tapped and/or stored the data from 70 million phone calls made within and outside of France. That kicked up a fuss, President Hollande said "I will talk to Obama, I will have a word with him". And I think a delegation from France is on its way to Washington to sort him out.
But in the middle of this charade - oh of course there's also Germany's revelation, another separate revelation is that Angela Merkel's phone was tapped since 2002 i.e., before she became leader of that country. But in the midst of this there was a report that actually the source was from a U.S. - it was from the NSA. They sort of dropped a hint that "No it wasn't us, it was the Israelis". And yet the charade continues with now a German team being sent to D.C. to discuss. I mean they must know.
Joe: They don't, they're idiots.
Niall:: Oh they're idiots. They're playing along...
Joe: They're playing a game.
Niall:: ...with the charade that the NSA is bad here.
Joe: All up in arms about "Oh they're spying on us" when Germans are spying on everybody. Everybody's spying on each other. They're all a bunch of idiots. I mean it's just so disgusting. I thumb my nose at the whole lot of them.
Jason:: I bite my thumb at you.
Pierre: During the protest, Snowden was depicted as a hero for revealing truth. And he made a statement. During this statement he said "Yeah, all those bad behaviours, that's really bad, the spying. But beware, you people in power, the elections are getting close". So you have an Edward Snowden the first pointed the finger at the wrong culprit, NSA, state of Israel and in addition, who maintains the illusion that was emphasised by Brand that elections for democracy could change anything.
Joe: I have one thing to say about Israel. Edward Snowden summed up Israel. ADL (Anti-Defamation League) publishes every year a list of the top anti-Israel groups in America. The list of top ten anti-Israel groups in America in 2013, there's ten of them. But the number one anti-Israel group in America today is Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.
Jason:: Wow!
Joe: So just think about that for a moment. It just speaks volumes. They shouldn't have published that list because the list of people who are all anti-war or anti-racism or anti-evildoing and ADL, Israel's mouthpiece in the U.S., is saying "These people are against us. They want us to stop being warmongers and racists. They should stop wanting us to stop. Oh forget it".
Jason:: I watched this interesting French programme (inaudible) (1:46:21) and it was basically a bunch of African Americans were basically saying that the African Americans are not very well represented in the media. There was some representatives from an ADL type of group who are just saying well "Who's over represented?". That's an interesting question. They didn't answer, nobody did. Everyone was like "No we're just saying there's not enough people of other ethnicities...
Pierre: It went further this description, I watched it too. And then the journalist said "What are you implying? Are you talking about" - again, a kind of "Jewish Zionist media conspiracy and ruling the medias and ruling the world?"
Joe: Olay, so just to clarify there, on that ADL list. The top number one anti-Israel group in America today is a group called Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. I just got a message that is wasn't very clear, the name of that group. The point being the Israelis in America are complaining that people are trying to stop them being warmongers and racists. They're doing that publicly. Do they have a PR department? Maybe not. Anyway...
Niall:: Right there they're saying that "We prefer war".
Joe: Yeah, pretty much. The people who are against them are the people who are against war and racism. And they're complaining about them being against them.
Pierre: I think it's more than that. I think that between the lines implicitly what they are alleging is that that their very identity is based on racism and war and violence. Their number one is the organisation that fights those two items.
Joe: Okay, we might have another call here. So we're going to check it out. Hi caller what's your name and where're you calling from?
Caller: Hello.
Joe: Hi, welcome to the show. What's your name?
Caller: Sarephina.
Joe: Okay.
Sarephina: I'm calling from France.
Joe: Okay.
Sarephina: I had a question, but I wanted to start off with a comment.
Joe: Okay.
Sarephina: You were talking about anti-Zionist, anti-terrorist groups and yeah, in terms of social pressure, what Russell Brand said in his video. People might listen to that and then the next day simply forget it because they have a prejudice against Russell Brand because some people have different perceptions as him. Or they care as seriously.
Joe: Mm-hm.
Sarephina: So once the not checking or in terms of messaging or being able to share that message, not exactly saying "Oh Russell Brand is the messiah" but what he's saying. Is there a way to be able to convey it that - because yeah, is there an appropriate way to kind of convey it that doesn't come across as offensive, depending on the situation? Like to people. Because he's quite emotional himself.
Jason:: Well I guess this, you want to share what Russell Brand is saying, the person's going to have to respond to the way that Russell Brand says it. He has a presentation for his message.
Joe: Well I think what she's saying is there a way for people to take that message and transmit it in a different way? Or in way that reaches a broader audience that reduces the chance that it would be offensive to some people in the way that Brand says it?
Sarephina: Yeah.
Joe: Yeah, there is. People just need to take the core ideas of that government is corrupt, that voting does not work, to cite the examples to cite the examples of corruption, and just talk about it in a level headed way that marshals the facts. And to spread that. And that's what we've been saying for people to take that core message and to spread it around in whatever way, whatever means they have to spread it, to do that. To discuss it amongst each other and don't even reference Russell Brand. This is the point. He just transmitted some information that is universal and is the truth and that is above and beyond any individual person. So it belongs to each person, each person claims it and then talks about it in the way that it is most meaningful to them.
Pierre: This truth is very simple and quite universal so it can apply to your personal experience, in your field of activity, to your country, to this or that era of history. But fundamentally it's always the same core problem that for centuries we are struggling against.
Jason:: In every country. There's no perfect country right now.
Pierre: No, unfortunately...
Jason:: It's the same everywhere. So, there's no end of material that you can communicate with someone on, because you don't have to - it doesn't have to be for friends, for England or America or Germany. Any of those countries or all of those countries have the exact same problems as everyone else. There is no perfect country, there's no good country, there's no...
Sarephina: Yeah.
Jason:: It's all rotten to the core.
Joe: People need to get together and network about it and share their experiences and come up with a common understanding and that way groups together have more force and more impact even in even just their holding of that information and that awareness together. That's better than anyone individual trying to get on the BBC.
Niall:: As regards offending people, I wouldn't throw complete caution to the wind and say don't worry about it all together. In Brand's case, he's a comedian so he's been working ways for years, how to make it appealable, funny to people without blowback on him. That's something o everyone can be doing that. But I think if you really feel it, and it's the truth as best you know, you just say it.
Jason:: Yeah, I mean if a person.
Niall:: Offending the next person? No one's going to say anything. We're all going to turn into complete mutes. We've got to throw caution to the wind there.
Jason:: What are you going to do with somebody who's offended with the truth? At that point, you know, it's a lost cause.
Joe: You move on to the next person.
Pierre: You will never please everybody in any case and you'll never reach anybody and although this truth is very simple, I think it's really important if you want to convey it, to repeat it as many times as possible with different examples, different contexts, different tones, different styles, to reach as many people as possible because that will work.
Jason:: And throughout history, there is something to be said for the truths that make people uncomfortable have a high probability of destabilising their delusional reality. If you try to sugar coat it too much, you make it too easy for them to ignore it. So there is something about shaking things up a little bit with an uncomfortable truth, as Al Gore would put it (chuckles).
Sarephina: One of the reasons I ask...
Joe: Go ahead.
Seraphina: Because I've tried. I find commonly, especially those who are - if they are able to do something, but those who are most oppressed, they end up that believing in lies or habits to kind of get through. And it's not as easy as say, in the Western society, people are educated and they speak English. So they kind of understand that message without having it seen as something against them. Because they've held onto these ways for years, generations. Think Asia or Africa where they're kind of not secluded, but they're kept out. They're are not well informed or up-to-date with what's going on.
Joe: I don't know, those people have to be informed first of all, to see if they actually care or if they're being affected by what's going on in the world. Well that's what it comes down to. If you can point to areas where people are being negatively impacted by the state of the world, then they're going to respond to it.
Jason:: Well, on that topic there's this great series of books and TV shows about this woman named Miss Marple. She solves these crimes. But her entire experience of the world comes from her experiences in this very, very small English village St Mary-Mead or wherever it is. And so I believe that it is possible to translate all of those idioms that he's talking about, even into a local - I mean I think that you can go into Africa and talk to a bush man about this type of stuff and I bet you, I guarantee you he has an experience with some pathological individual, even in that area of the world and you can't - but you're just going to have to translate that idiom to the locale obviously.
Pierre: I think that again, this core truth is very simple and I think people in Africa and Asia - Africa is a good example I think. Those people are directly impacted by this inequality, by this oppression. So even though they might not have the same level of academic education as you can have in Western Europe or the U.S. - which might not be a good thing actually - but they live it every day, this oppression. They see it right under their eyes. They see the limos, the limousine. AT the same time they see the babies dying in the street. So I think they would be very, very receptive because they live it with every cell of their bodies. Then for the one who wants to convey this truth to, you can always adapt the speech, the way you convey things to your audience, to you targets. If it's phrased in simple terms I think everybody can get it because it's right in front of our face because it's true.
Jason:: I think that like what Pierre was saying is basically in a certain sense Western culture can become a bit of a hindrance.
Pierre: Exactly.
Jason:: The indoctrination. And there was a quote and I can't remember what it was exactly but it's something - the problem with the world is not that so many people are uneducated and ignorant, it's that they know so many things that simply aren't true. When you have a highly educated person, you're actually fighting against all the things that they believe are true, which actually aren't. Whereas if you just meet a bush man down in Africa, he probably doesn't have as many preconceived notions about the world and you could probably talk to him about stuff and if you can translate that idiom, if you can talk to him from his experience of life, then I think you would find that he has a complete and rich experience of life just like everybody else. It's just - so maybe he's never watched a TV or maybe he's never been to Paris. But that doesn't define civilised - or the capacity to think is not, you know, did you go to a polytechnic institute and get a higher degree? That doesn't define a person's ability to think.
Joe: Not geographically specific.
Jason:: No human intelligence - he can have all of the necessary experience for understanding the world just out there. Living in the bush. Boom.
Joe: Okay Sarephina. Go ahead.
Sarephina: Just a last point.
Joe: Yeah.
Sarephina: I think people have to acknowledge their suffering should be able to understand the extent like others' suffering.
Joe: Exactly.
Sarephina: And sometimes it's very hard for people to see themselves as vulnerable or weak, especially if they have been ready to keep a very straight face, to keep a strong front. And that happens quite often in tribal - and especially religiously inculcated.
Pierre: It's very true, it's very true. It's a modern syndrome. You've seen modern societies where everybody pretends to be happy, is in denial of negative emotion and don't acknowledge it to others and to themselves. So difficult to be aware the suffering of the world of you are in denial of your own suffering.
Joe: Yeah.
Sarephina: Yeah that's it. I really enjoy the show.
Joe: Thanks Seraphina for calling in.
Pierre: Thank you Seraphina.
Joe: Have a good one.
Sarephina: Alright, bye.
Joe: Bye.
Niall:: Bye-bye.
Jason:: Bye.
Joe: Alright we're kind of out of time here. We were going to, given that Halloween occurs in four or five days, we were going to have a little bit of a Halloween special, but...
Jason:: I think we should.
Joe: ...we can talk about that kind of stuff - we couldn't really do it service. I don't think we'd do it service in a short period of time because there's a lot of stuff in terms of all off the high strangeness and weirdness. So we're going to have to pick another week and maybe dedicate a longer period of time, maybe even a full show to that topic.
Jason:: I think so. Poor John Keel style.
Joe: Yeah.
Jason:: The weird world which would be cool.
Pierre: Monsters.
Niall:: And it'll tie in a big way for people who ever wonder why on earth SOTT with all its social political commentary, tracks these kind of things. Russell Brand says "wake up to reality". Well part of our reality which people just blank out for the most part, is very strange. Very strange things that are documented that have been studied scientifically.
Joe: And it's beyond doubt.
Jason:: There's too many to discount. Too much weird stuff to discounted it as being just crazy.
Niall:: We're talking about the paranormal. We're talking about crytozoology.
Joe: So we're going to schedule a show on that - an all and everything on high strange ghost stories.
Pierre: Yes and it's not because it's off the boundaries of official science that it doesn't exist.
Joe: Absolutely, most interesting things are outside of that boundary.
Niall:: Next week, we have a very special guest, Dr Nora Gedgaudas - I think you pronounce it?
Pierre: Yeah Gedgaudas.
Niall:: She's the author of Primal Body, Primal Mind. So we'll be talking ice age diets.
Jason:: She's great.
Niall:: And fat for the brain and how to start that revolution in your gut.
Joe: So if you haven't read that book, maybe pick it up and get familiar with the topics and the ideas because it's very interesting book, a very important book.
Jason:: It's like "there's a party in my intestines and everyone's invited".
Joe: And itt's very well relevant in fact in terms of ice age diet because, just as a parting shot here, there's already been the earliest snowfalls in several states in the U.S. when leaves were still on the trees. Trees collapsed, branches fell because the leaves were still on the trees and snow fell on them and they were so heavy.
Niall:: I remember last year it was a big headline that "Oh wow it's Halloween and it's the first snowfall ever" for some in the U.S.". Well this was the week before.
Joe: Or more.
Joe: It was early October and just recently as well. So I think we're looking into a very interesting season this coming winter. Interesting being a euphemism for absolutely terrifying.
Jason:: This ties into out crytozoology with the abominable snowman.
Joe: Exactly. So we'll be obviously giving a breath to that topic as it evolves this winter and so until then, thanks to our listeners and to our callers and to all our chatters. We will be back next week with the aforementioned interview. Until then.
Pierre: Have a good one.
Jason:: Take care.
Niall:: Good-bye.
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