Tag: Humanism

“On this episode we talk with Douglas Rushkoff, author, teacher, and host of the Team Human podcast. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and each other. His latest book, also called Team Human, calls for the retrieval of human autonomy in a digital age. Rushkoff is also no stranger to the psychedelic scene having collaborated with Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, Ralph Metzner, Mark Pesce, and Erik Davis. We discuss some of the parallels between digital and psychedelic mainstreaming, the mental health epidemic as an externality of capitalism, and placing our trust capitalist cures. Will COVID-19 be to psychedelics as 9/11 was to surveillance capitalism? September 11th became the excuse to implement a surveillance state and surrender digital technologies to corporations. Will we see psychedelic medicines become the go-to recovery option for COVID-related mental health fallout? We also explore what a true psychedelic renaissance might look like.”

❝ Society is broken. We can design our way to a better one.

In our interconnected world, self-interest and social-interest are rapidly becoming indistinguishable. If current negative trajectories remain, including growing climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality, an impending future of ecological collapse and societal destabilization will make ‘personal success’ virtually meaningless. Yet our broken social system incentivizes behavior that will only make our problems worse. If true human rights progress is to be achieved today, it is time we dig deeper―rethinking the very foundation of our social system.

In this engaging, important work, Peter Joseph, founder of the world’s largest grassroots social movement―The Zeitgeist Movement―draws from economics, history, philosophy, and modern public-health research to present a bold case for rethinking activism in the 21st century.

Arguing against the long-standing narrative of universal scarcity and other pervasive myths that defend the current state of affairs, The New Human Rights Movement illuminates the structural causes of poverty, social oppression, and the ongoing degradation of public health, and ultimately presents the case for an updated economic approach. Joseph explores the potential of this grand shift and how we can design our way to a world where the human family has become truly sustainable.

The New Human Rights Movement reveals the critical importance of a unified activism working to overcome the inherent injustice of our system. This book warns against what is in store if we continue to ignore the flaws of our socioeconomic approach, while also revealing the bright and expansive future possible if we succeed.

Will you join the movement? ❞

❝ In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination―employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service―are suddenly legal. ❞

❝ For millennia, great thinkers have contemplated the meaning and purpose of human existence; but while most assumed that humanity was the end point of creation or the pinnacle of evolution, Ted Chu makes the provocative claim that the human race may in fact be a means rather than an end–that humankind will give rise to evolutionary successors. In this wide-ranging and authoritative work, Chu reexamines the question of human purpose in light of the extraordinary developments of science and technology. Arguing that a deep understanding of our place in the universe is required to navigate the magnitude of the choices that lie ahead, he surveys human wisdom from both East and West, traces the evolutionary trajectory that has led to this point, and explores the potentials emerging on the scientific frontier. The book addresses the legitimate fears and concerns of “playing God” but embraces the possibility of transcending biological forms and becoming or creating entirely new life-forms. ❞

❝ The Zeitgeist Movement Defined is the official representative text of the global, non-profit sustainability advocacy organization known as The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM). This tediously sourced and highly detailed work argues for a large-scale change in human culture, specifically in the context of economic practice. The dominant theme is that the current socioeconomic system governing the world at this time has severe structural flaws, born out of primitive economic and sociological assumptions originating in our early history, where the inherent severity of these flaws went largely unnoticed.

However, in the early 21st century, these problems have risen prominently, taking the consequential form of increasing social destabilization and ongoing environmental collapse. Yet, this text is not simply about explaining such problems and their root causality – It is also about posing concrete solutions, coupled with a new perspective on social/environmental sustainability and efficiency which, in concert with the tremendous possibility of modern technology and a phenomenon known as ephemeralization, reveals humanity’s current capacity to create an abundant, post-scarcity reality.

While largely misunderstood as being “utopian” or fantasy, this text walks through, step by step, the train of thought and technical industrial reordering needed to update our global society (and its values) to enable these profound new possibilities. While this text can be read strictly from a passive perspective, it was created also to be used as an awareness or activist tool. The Zeitgeist Movement, which has hundreds of chapters across dozens of countries and is perhaps the largest activist organization of its kind, hopes those interested in this direction will join the movement in global solidarity and assist in the culmination of this new social model, for the benefit of the whole of humanity. ❞

❝ Blending cutting-edge ideas with incisive spiritual insights, Evolutionaries is the first popular presentation of an emerging school of thought called “evolutionary spirituality.” Carter Phipps, the former executive editor of EnlightenNext magazine, asserts that evolution is not only a scientific but also a spiritual idea in a book whose message has the power to bring new meaning and purpose to life as we know it. Readers will be fascinated and enlightened by Evolutionaries, a book which Deepak Chopra, the world-renowned author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes, Jesus, and Buddha, says “is going to help create a worldview that will influence our vision of the future direction of evolution and also our role in consciously participating in it. ❞

❝ It is a well-established fact that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. The Spirit Level, based on thirty years of research, takes this truth a step further. One common factor links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Further, more unequal societies are bad for everyone within them-the rich and middle class as well as the poor.

The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level exposes stark differences, not only among the nations of the first world but even within America’s fifty states. Almost every modern social problem-poor health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness-is more likely to occur in a less-equal society.

Renowned researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett lay bare the contradictions between material success and social failure in the developed world. But they do not merely tell us what’s wrong. They offer a way toward a new political outlook, shifting from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more sustainable society. ❞

❝ Now includes “The Life Inc. Guide to Reclaiming the Value You Create”
In Life Inc, award-winning writer Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. The resulting ideology, corporatism, has infiltrated all aspects of civics, commerce, and culture—from the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self, from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking, from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of Facebook. Life Inc explains why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business. Most important, Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place. ❞

❝ The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel’s “Cosmist Manifesto” gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities. ❞

❝ In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think. ❞

❝ How does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword—Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah. The final chapters address the apocalyptic dreams that haunt technology, providing vital historical context as well as new ways to think about a future defined by the mutant intermingling of mind and machine, nightmare and fantasy. ❞

❝ R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, philosopher, mathematician, and dogged individualist. Perhaps best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term “Spaceship Earth,” his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought.

Critical Path is Fuller’s master work–the summing up of a lifetime’s thought and concern–as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation–at the limits of the planet’s natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future. ❞

❝ A Lama Foundation Book. Describes one man’s transformation upon his acceptance of the principles of Yoga and gives a modern restatement of the importance of the spiritual side of man’s nature. Illustrated. ❞