Audio Transcription

Moderator: Today, we’re going to talk about solutions toward a thriving world, so let me introduce Foster Gamble.

Foster: Thank you, thank you. I am deeply honored to just even be a part of this group. I’ve been having a great time at the intermissions learning from the amazing minds and hearts that have come together in this room and to have the opportunity right now to share with you some of the thoughts which are most important to me. It’s really a privilege for which I want to thank Jordan Pease. He’s an amazing visionary. Again and again, it takes one person to say I’m going to do this and Jordan said that about this conference and here we are. I want to thank his whole team, too. Just the quality, the safety, the love in this room is very much thanks to all of you.

I am also especially appreciative of each of you who have carved out the time, put down the money, taken the risks to come here for two days to participate, not just to watch a bunch of talking heads, buy some books, or something like that because that isn’t what this conference is. In fact, that’s why Kimberly and I are here. We haven’t actually been doing conferences very much in the past couple of years because we are very busy working on other things, but when Joel told us what this one was going to be about, that we’re really getting up to the fulcrum of consciousness itself in terms of worldviews (because it’s out of worldviews that our actions come and it’s out of our actions that the results come), that was inspiring. But especially the format, that this is about recognizing that we are each - every moment, every insight, every action - the architects of the new paradigm. And that we were going to have a think-tank rather than just a show, that’s what got us here. And I really appreciate it.

The subtitle of my talk is “Principles, Strategies, And Tactics For The Most Critical Moment In Human History”. That may sound like a little hyperbole, but probably not to this group. What I mean by that is human beings have only recently acquired the dubious ability to destroy a life on our planet in a matter of moments. We’ve been able to get away as a species with a lot of really destructive behavior for millennia and we can’t do that anymore. We actually need to figure this thing out if we’re going to make it as a species and in order to do that we need to be clear on the elements of the paradigm that could actually lead to a thriving world for everyone. That’s what this whole gathering is about.

Most movements have strategies and they’ve got tactics. I’ve been an activist all my life and I’m here to attest that most of them don’t have clear principles. I was a consultant to the Occupy Movement in several different ways and they had hundreds of issues, like the Thrive Movement does, that they were working on and it really splintered the efforts because they weren’t common principles around which they could cohere the activities. I really want to explore that today.

I want to recognize that you’ve been sitting for a long time and I really appreciate your listening. We are almost there. You’ll get something to eat soon. I’m grateful for your listening and we’re going to go a little longer and were going to go a little deeper and we’re going to build on top of what all these amazing speakers have done so far. What I like to do with this talk is I’d like to explore three things.

The first is I want to give you a glimpse of exciting solutions. Kimberly and I are willing and experienced with looking at the gnarly bad news that is going on with the planet. You know that if you’ve seen the movie. How many of you have seen the movie? Thank you. We’re happy to report that the film is still being seen by close to 1 million people a month in 27 languages around the world and we don’t market it so it’s people like you being willing to trust the information and the perspective and share it with your friends that’s really making all that possible.

So, I want to start with a glimpse of exciting solutions because that’s what most of our emphasis is on now. Then, I want to talk about what’s in the way of some of those solutions coming out. And finally, I want to share the key elements that I see that could get us out of this lethal mess. Let’s start right off with the solutions.

One of the great blessings about putting out the communication that we did was that it has inspired over 1,050 self-created Solutions Groups around the world taking on close to 300 different issues in approximately 100 different countries. If you want to find out more about that, you can go to the Solutions Hub section of our website and you can search by country, you can search by issue, you can search by Sector and find out who around the world is doing what you’re working on. That’s the reason we created the Solutions Hub when we saw all this activity going on so that groups don’t have to be re-creating the same wheel. You can actually share best practices, petitions, lawsuits, resources, information, and so forth through that Solutions Hub. It just makes it a lot whole lot more efficient and fun for everyone.

As well, because we dared to say a lot about the motives and the means for suppressing breakthrough technologies, we got contacted by now approximately 1,000 different inventors and innovators from all over the world. It’s been a very time-consuming project, but a really encouraging project to be in communication with all these people. We can’t vet them all. We don’t have the team and the resources to do that, but we sort it through various filters and out of the thousand we have approximately 500 of the projects in our private, encrypted priority database. We are in touch with and monitoring all those projects. Out of those 500, we have narrowed it down to approximately 70, representing all the different sectors of human endeavor that we are particularly focusing on. We inadvertently turned into a sort of cosmic dating service where we’re hooking up these brilliant innovators in all these sectors with investors and philanthropists who are waking up to what’s really going on and in many cases have tremendous wealth and no matter how much they have, they have been frustrated with not being able to really transform the world for their grandchildren. People have been contacting us from both sides and we are in the process of putting those together.

I want to share a few examples. This is my favorite thing to talk about. For security reasons, it will be without divulging the actual names and locations of most of these projects. This will be just the tip of the iceberg, but will give you a sense of it.

In the energy area, Joel talked brilliantly with his overview and probably a third of our projects are new energy projects. It’s astounding all the brilliance that’s emerging. We’ve been looking at self-charging motors. One technology, very inexpensive, runs on a few watts and has to do with geometry, of course, and if you get the configuration right it will boil water in eight seconds. I’m not a great cook but I can boil water so what’s the big deal about boiling water? As Joel said before, that’s what coal-fired power plants do. That’s what nuclear power plants do. This is doing it for very low energy and releasing all this energy. We’ve seen radiant energy battery chargers. Radiant energy was what Tesla was working on. We’ve seen over-unity motor generators coming out of various countries around the world.

In the area of health, this is one of the most exciting and one of the most tragic areas. We are in touch with people now who are doing phenomenal cures for AIDS, for cancer, for chronic fatigue, and a host of other diseases. I’ve seen some of my friends cured from these things. The hope for the future that this holds is so thrilling.

Another new technology that’s been invented is totally natural. The guy has invented a molecule that holds nutrients and then goes through your skin. You just take a shower in it and it delivers 10 to 100 times the nutrition to the cells that you could ever get from any healthy amount of organic eating. People are literally getting up out of their wheelchairs and walking and at least getting really helped, if not cured, from, particularly, nervous system diseases.

The engineer that built a lot of Royal Rife’s cancer-curing technologies years ago before he was suppressed has come forward and contacted a doctor friend of mine and said that he will share the secrets and rebuild the actual technology. This guy’s in his early 80s so we’re trying to get him the funding to really do it right, and soon.

In the area of water, there’s a device that is totally chemical-free. It’s a double toroidal vortex device that purifies a polluted pond in 72 hours. There’s another one, actually an inventor in Marin here, who has got some patents on the phi spiral as applied to certain technologies and he’s got a little propeller that you can float in the top of one of these million-gallon water tanks that most communities have. Because it will circulate the entire tank and make it into a torus device, you don’t need chemicals that you usually have to dump into the tank because when the water separates into different levels and you get the heat differential and you start getting bacteria and algae and you’re in trouble, so you’re drinking a lot of chlorine and fluoride and all that kind of stuff. This little thing that runs on about 100 watts will clean that whole thing.

In the area of food, we’re working with wonderful organic polyculture and permaculture projects. Several eco-communities are combining things like aquaponics with new energy and alternative currencies all into one community. They’re like model communities for what a thriving world would look like. We’re working with a number of different groups, including the group in Hawaii who has just been so successful, at least in that last stage, in stopping the GMOs on Maui.

In the area of environment, we’re working with some teams trying to get them the sufficient resources to hire the really professional, savvy private investigators to expose and prosecute the covert engineering that’s going on, particularly with chemtrails and HAARP. We are working with anti-nuclear groups. That’s really where I cut my first teeth in activism in the Nuclear Freeze Initiative that Kimberly worked on way before I knew her and that I worked on for many years and then our friend, Danny Sheehan, his group was really the one that finally stopped the building of new nuclear power plants through the whole Karen Silkwood case. We are working with anti-nuclear groups and were working with several groups that have very innovative ways of restoring contaminated land, unfortunately a very big issue.

In education, we’re particularly focused with our filter of looking through the torus as the sustainable pattern for Systems in the universe. One of the educational groups that we’re working with has developed a beautiful software program that basically allows you to design and experience your own education, particularly accessing different sources on the Internet as well as a lot of awake teachers that they’ve gathered, and out of just following your own preferences, you create a 3-D geometric world where you can go off fractally into various areas that you want to study and the whole thing is guided by just moving your hand in 3-D in front of the computer. It’s a trip. The young people will love and the rest of us will love working on this thing.

There are a number of educators…Karen Elkins. She’s sitting in the back. She publishes probably my favorite magazine in the world, “Science To Sage”. If you haven’t seen that, it takes beauty and geometry and physics and consciousness and blends it into one amazing experience every time that magazine comes out. She and others are really helping educators to design courses that are based on the fundamental patterning because the academic courses are so divided into physics and chemistry and biology and psychology and sociology and so forth, but all of those trace back to just different scales of the torus energy field.

There’s another group that has a torus-based software for collecting the best solutions and dispersing them from around the world.

In justice, one of the ones that means the most to me and to Kimberly is exposing and stopping child trafficking. Once again, Danny’s group, the Romero Institute, is doing this Lakota People’s Law Project. Find out more about that from him, but they’re literally saving thousands of kids who are being basically kidnapped and subjected to drug testing and then sex trafficking and so forth. It’s just hideous. He’s one of the ones who’s taking that on. Also, my favorite private investigator, Monique Lessan, is here and she’s another one of my heroes working in that area.

Peaceful parenting. Over 80% of the parents reportedly in the United States are still spanking their children and calling it righteous discipline. That is child abuse. If you did that to an adult you would be arrested and put in jail. People are waking up to this. My favorite philosopher, Stefan Molyneux, has been doing shows on this for years on the Internet. I’ll talk about him a little bit later, but by his estimates, their podcasts alone have transformed that behavior in over 250,000 families. They’ve stopped doing that and learned ways of communicating, listening, negotiating with their children to actually do peaceful parenting because he believes, and I think it’s true, that the root of the problem of the destructiveness that we’ve got going on in this world right now is abuse during childhood years. So, we are getting to the root of it.

Another group that’s been doing fantastic work for 25 years, but really is ready to go to the whole next level globally in resolving race, gender, power, and class issues.

I could go on and on with that and I would love to, but we don’t have the time to do that.

So I want to pose the question, “What do you think is the common denominator of all of these solutions?’… I’m hearing lots of words that all can be boiled down to this word, “wholeness”. One of the things that we are seeing is that all of the issues we’re dealing with, they’re all breakdowns in the wholeness of a natural system, whether it’s crushing or burning things or fusing things to access energy or GMOs or monoculture and so forth. It’s taking natural system, destroying it, and then having to do all these bad things to supposedly fix it, but the key is if we’re going to fix those problems, it’s a matter of recognizing what the wholeness of a natural system looks like and then figuring out how to restore the wholeness of those natural systems.

So all of a sudden, we began to realize there were all these issues that all come back to this awareness of the torus, not just as a metaphor. The torus is the fundamental pattern of wholeness throughout the universe. As we restore that, we are actually being given a blueprint of how we can create sustainable systems.

Before moving on, I want to give you the rest of the story with a number of these solutions. Very quickly, in the area of health, doctor #1 that I was describing with the cancer, chronic fatigue treatments, and so forth, all of his cultures were stolen by an American medical institute. They’ve slandered him in the public for which he sued them and won a lawsuit, fortunately. But then, there were three attempts on his life and now he’s in hiding in a foreign country.

Inventor #2, the one with the molecule and the nutrient delivery, he’s under overt threats and harassment. He’s being bombarded with ELF waves that have his tongue swelled up so that he could hardly get it out of his mouth. He can hardly breathe. His joints are aching. He’s constantly under these attacks.

Obviously there are people who don’t want these things out.

In terms of energy, there are raids on the labs, patents have been confiscated, lives threatened, and gag orders have been issued.

Even in the food area, there are raids on raw milk farms, rain catchment, home vegetable gardens, and, obviously, people being arrested for growing hemp and cannabis.

How can we not have the new paradigm just be the next regime change, the next tyrannical new world order? How can we assure that these game changing innovations actually come out safely? We need to build a little more groundwork before answering those questions.

People in this room have probably seen this quote 1000 times:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” — Albert Einstein

But, it’s kind of like “I love you”. It may sound trite because it’s so true. It’s so important. In the context of the new paradigm, these problems that Thrive Movement is taking on, we realized they cannot be solved with the old paradigm thinking by definition. We really need to understand what a new paradigm is.

Those who know me know that I usually carry a dictionary around and if I’m going to be in a think-tank the first thing we need to do is define our terms so we know actually what we’re talking about. So, of course, I looked up “paradigm” for this conference. The dictionary says it’s “the cognitive framework or set of beliefs shared by members of any discipline or group”. It comes from the Latin and Greek roots from the end of the 1400s. I was kind of mind-blown to see that what the roots actually mean is “to show the pattern”.

I was excited about that because those of you who have seen Thrive know I’ve been fairly obsessed with this particular fundamental energy pattern of the universe since I was a teenager. For those of you who may not familiar, it is the pattern of sustainability at every scale of our universe as far as we know so far, from subatomic particles to atoms to an acorn to the planet itself to the galaxy. As I said in Thrive, every successful free energy device that I have seen is mimicking or creating the toroidal pattern. Most importantly for us, a human being itself, we are physically a torus. We’re a continuous surface with a whole in the middle and we are embedded always, we’re held by this invisible toroidal field.

Why don’t we have the solutions out in the world already? There are a couple of reasons. One is lack of adequate funding and that’s what we and others are working on very hard. The other one is suppression. As Joel mentioned a little bit and I’ve given you a few examples, suppression is by those operating in an old paradigm. Obviously if you were operating in a win-win paradigm, you wouldn’t be blocking these cures and these amazing technologies to come out. The problem, I want to suggest through a quote from Stefan Molyneux. He said that “the problem is not just the abuse of power, it’s the power to abuse”. We’ll talk a little bit more about Molyneux later, but really let that one settle in because our culture trains us to go only as far as “well, if only I get the right enlightened leaders in there and so forth, things are going to work out. If we get, the Democrats, that will work. Oh no, if we get the Republicans, that will work. Oh, the Libertarians, that will work.” Well guess what? It’s not working. So maybe we’re missing this part about giving anyone the power to abuse. Most recently through the NDAA, it authorizes exactly this sort of thing, where for dissenting with the government, you can be hauled off with no attorney, no right to a trial, whatever. It feels like we’re being set up for something.

Let’s look further into this paradigm thing. What is in common with the old paradigms? Since I found out that I was going to be having this opportunity, Kimberly can tell you, I’ve been interviewing people in social situations, professional situations, all over the place that “have you heard of this new paradigm?” “Yeah, sure.” “Well, what is it to you?”

Here are the most common responses that I was getting were that the old paradigm was disconnected, about win/lose, centralized control, power over, and that the old paradigms have been based on the abstractions of God and government. We’ll go into that more in a minute.

Before looking into what they said about the new paradigm, I want to just take another look back at the history of where the paradigms have come from and I want to do it through the lens of Nature. Like the process of growth from seed to stem to leaf to branch to bud to flower to fruit and then back to seed, there’s this natural progression that’s going on all over the planet all the time in these seven stages. There is an order in nature and there’s a natural pattern to the progression through developments in consciousness as well.

Let’s take a look at the correlation of this with some of the other scholars on worldview. This was a major quest for me for many years, studying other peoples’ histories of the development of consciousness. One of my major mentors was Arthur Young and he laid out what I still think is the most accurate cosmology for the process of evolution in our cosmos that I’ve ever come across. He observed Nature in these seven stages, going from pure potential to subatomic particles to atoms combining into molecules. That’s the contraction of Nature into the material world and then expanding out, this turn on the other side of the octave where it moves and molecules arrange themselves into plants (which have this new power to grow) and then into animals (which cannot only grow but now they can move) and then into humans (which cannot only grow and move but they can actually self-reflect).

When I looked into a lot of the other scholars, Duane Elgin has got a beautiful model of the development of human consciousness from archaic humans through awakening hunter/gatherers, to agricultural, industrial, mass communication, and global reconciliation. He says that’s where we are now. It’s the same turn Arthur Young described. We’re trying to move from this condensed, solid, self-threatening humanity into actually blending, learning to harmonize with ourselves, with one another, and with the environment in such a way that we can master reconciliation. Then, he says, after that will come global bonding and celebration. Then, trying to balance on the creativity that’s unleashed. And, finally, the end of the octave will be establishment of a planetary-scale civilization. I absolutely feel that I know that if were going to achieve that, it’s not going to be through some top-down, tyrannical government. It’s going to be through empowering the sovereignty of each individual and we’ll go deeper into that. But, what he describes is (and he got this in a vision himself 20 years ago) that this is actually the creation of the torus of consciousness at a species level on this planet.

Many of you are probably familiar with Clare Graves and Spiral Dynamics. There’s a similar octave moving up through the levels of means. Richard Barret’s looked at it very much in terms of performance and cooperation in corporations. Again, a seven stage model going through that fulcrum in the fourth stage.

I could go on with those models because they’re all observing Nature rather than just thinking something up.

So, where is all of this heading? Bucky Fuller says that we are at the crossroads, utopia or oblivion. Arthur Young said it’s about increasing degrees of freedom. Others have said it’s leading to service, to cosmic consciousness, to peaceful creativity.

Another guy, who we’re celebrating on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That’s an important one and we’re going to unpack that in just a minute, but first of all I want to get back to what people thought about the new paradigm.

The new paradigm is about oneness, realizing that we’re all connected. It’s about realizing where part of a greater conscious. It’s about expanding our capacity to love and be loved. It’s about raising our frequency and transcending into the fifth dimension. I’m not exactly sure what that means (but I’m sure a lot of you in this room do), but I’m hearing that a lot. And it’s about win-win solutions and relations. It’s about mastering collaboration, empowering one another to fulfill our purpose, and using our interconnectedness for good.

So my question (and this is kind of the fulcrum of my talk) is what might be critically missing from all that really good stuff that has us actually still on the brink of global police state, environmental destruction, and economic collapse? Are you ready to take the red pill? For myself personally, I tend to be more of like an emergency plumber kind of guy rather than heading up the cleanup crew. Imagine for a moment that you drive home or you fly home on Sunday night, you go into your house but something smells a little funny when you get up to the front door. You open the front door and there’s this tsunami of putrid sewage coming down the steps from the second floor down into the front hall, into the living room, and so forth. Some people immediately are going to run for a broom and a mop. Other people are going to immediately call 911 and so forth. My tendency all my life (it’s got me into trouble but it’s also been a very fruitful quest) is to somehow swim upstream, even though that’s a really unfortunate analogy given my previous metaphor, to actually get up there and find out is there a toilet plugged, turn off the flow to that toilet, and then find out what plug that, and solve the problem. We can clean that other stuff up or other people can be working on that in the meantime, but what is it that’s missing that has us in this predicament?

This is the point in my talk where the Surgeon General and the Department of Homeland Security and the NSA really have requested that I warn you that certain ingredients and the remainder of this talk may be hazardous to your paradigm.

I want to kind of ease into this one a little bit. You’ve probably heard of figure-ground, this optical illusion thing. When you look at this, what do you see first? Yes, somebody sees a saxophone. Now, look at the, saxophone player, but then can you also see the woman’s face? It takes a little bit of a shift of consciousness. Now that you’re good at it, if you’re only seen two old white guys talking to each other, which could be a metaphor for government, then you’re probably missing the Holy Grail, which is the space around all of that. That’s what I want to explore.

This is not easy stuff. It’s going to sound really simple, but it took me three months of arguing with the person who introduced me to what I’m going to be sharing with you now before I finally realized that he was making a lot more sense than I was in my arguments. I felt like I was in ethical quicksand and he kept having answers for all my arguments and then to add to the humbling nature of this whole thing, it was my son. He had just spent three years of intensive research trying to figure out how the world really worked. He was in his mid-20s at the time. He came to me and said, ‘Dad, we gotta talk.” This is my son, Trevor, and he ended up being our primary script consultant, our content consultant, for Thrive. He really taught me about the banking schemes. He taught me about a lot of the conspiracies. And he ended up teaching me about what we call the liberty perspective. So listen to your children. Even if you’ve been here longer, they’ve been doing other stuff.

Since he introduced me to this, it obviously affected Thrive tremendously and I’ve been studying this liberty perspective, literally, hours a day for the last 10 years. It’s not something that necessarily just clicks for you right away. Even if the notion does, it’s taken me 10 years to feel the real confident in terms of what the implications and applications are and we are going to be going into that.

So what is it? What’s this thing that might be missing? The Dalai Lama points at it. He says, “We’re at the dawn of an age in which many people feel that extreme political concepts should cease to dominate human affairs. We should use this opportunity to replace them with universal human spiritual values so that these values become the fiber of the global family that is emerging.” I would go so far as to suggest that politics themselves, the very notion of politics, are the extreme concepts that have us in this problem.

Winston Churchill, he said, “Democracy is the worst form of government…except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Now, of course, that’s become a justification for democracy, which indeed was the shining light on the hill for the world, but if it comes with the assumption that we’re done… remember Martin Luther King said, “it bends toward justice”, but I suggest we’re not there yet. Thoreau said, “There are 1000 hacking at the branches of evil to one who’s striking at the root”.

So what’s the root? I’m going to get really, really simple on this one. It just helps me to go back to the simplest things I can grasp. In elementary school and at home, most of us try to teach our kids “don’t lie, don’t hit (even if I’m spanking you), and don’t take other people’s stuff”. That’s kind of obvious. We can all agree to that except then even people who agree to that turn right around and they’re promoting their next political party, their next ruler. So, if politicians are actually lying during their campaigns and then stealing your money (whether you like it or not) as taxes, and then going out and spending it on their cronies and on wars and so forth, then the very root of civilization (given that government is by definition dependent on taxes, on taking your money in order to survive), the root of civilization then is standing on a violation of human morals. That’s a big deal. That’s the red pill, or at least one side effect of the red pill.

What I want to suggest we’ve been missing in that figure-ground is that the idea of government itself is the one thing we haven’t been looking at. We look at all these problems with government, but we don’t notice that the common denominator all along, even if it’s getting a little better in some ways, has been government. Looking at that is like someone 500 years ago telling you, “I think the earth may be round”. We’ll get into what happened to those guys.

I want to suggest (and Kimberly’s mentioned this already and it can’t be repeated enough, in my opinion – at least you’re going to hear about it for the rest of my life) is the Non-Aggression Principle and what the Non-Aggression Principle is is it’s an ethical stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate, except in true self-defense. “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of physical force against persons or property, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property. A simpler version: I don’t get to hurt you, cheat you, or take your stuff, nor do you with me.

I don’t know how many people remember from Thrive, this was actually the punch line of the whole movie. I’ve run into a lot of people think we put that in later on or something like that, and there was a lot of stuff in that movie, but this is what everything was leading toward, where we said, “In a thriving society, no one is allowed to violate anyone else except in self-defense”. This is the only thing we‘ve found that everyone agrees on. Do you realize how hard it is to find something that everybody agrees on? I’ve got to admit, I have had chilling conversations with high-level leaders in the government, in the military, in corporations, in banks, and including in the New Age movement who say, “Yeah, I don’t want to be violated, but given the state of the world and given how ignorant people are, I do actually think that I should have the right to tell people what they shouldn’t be able to do”. Try out that conversation sometime. It can get a little testy so don’t do it at weddings and birthday parties and such.

If this principle of non-aggression is so important, what’s a principle? The dictionary suggests that the principle is “an accepted or professed rule of action or conduct”, like in a person of good moral principles. A second definition is “a fundamental, primary, or general law truth from which others are derived’” like the principles of modern physics. So you really have an ethical definition and a scientific definition and one of the beautiful things for me is those two are starting to come together.

I had a conversation. I was actually attending one of Danny Sheehan’s classes at UCSC (University of California – Santa Cruz) where he was teaching different perspectives on the Kennedy assassination and someone came up to me after his class. This is a wonderful woman, a wonderful activist in the Santa Cruz Community for a long time. She came up to me and she said, “I want you to know I really loved your movie. I really liked your focus on liberty and so forth.” And then she said, “but don’t we need to be ruled by someone?” That’s a moment I won’t forget because I realized I believed that most of my life and I think probably most of us have, if we are honest about it. When you look at all the election furor that’s going on, obviously people believe that. So that’s a big one. Don’t we need to be ruled by someone? (And your favorite is probably on there!)

Gandhi wrote a book called “Hind Swaraj”, all about self-governance. He says, “It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.” So here’s my next question for you: does your new paradigm contain any justifications for violence or co-version (this is kind of the dark night of our political soul here and this is what I went through in front of my son, arguing for my particular party or policy or whatever) other than true self-defense?

Let me share with you some of the most common responses I’ve gotten (and Kimberly and I are writing a book on this now so will break this out in great detail when that’s done) when people were honest about answering this question. They said, “Well yeah, it does have violations, but only in the name of the good of the group.” “For the good of the group”, which is really the slogan of collectivism, where the group is more important than the individual. I don’t say this in a demeaning way. I really understand that point of view and it’s a means, a lot of people think, to achieving certain values about taking care of people. I really share those values and I honor them completely. It’s just that if you look at the history of collectivism, it’s millions and millions of deaths within national boundaries - 200 million deaths and more in the 20^th century alone by collectivist governments. That wasn’t including war. In collectivism, you end up with socialism and communism rather than if you actually have voluntary collaboration, you end up with a community. A community is where people actually choose to come together voluntarily and collaborate. That’s not what communism is - a really important distinction even though the words are close.

The second one was some people think we have to have centralized control. We need to consolidate power over for various reasons. We need to be able to control the markets, as if the natural, voluntary actions of people were something that a few people should be controlling any more than the environment.

Another one is my opinion of what’s fair - it’s only fair that we take from these people and give to those people or whatever because look at the situation – my opinion of what’s fair is more important than other people’s rights to be free.

And finally, taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized country. It’s the social contract. I don’t remember signing that contract and in a contract you actually are agreeing to something and that’s often followed by “love it or leave it”, like you should give up your property and your home and your family or whatever if you don’t agree with my opinion of the way it should be. So actually, involuntary taxes…I mean, a kindergartner would know this. If you took half of that candy, they’d be pissed and they would know something’s wrong here. So actually, and I challenge anyone on this and we can go into this on the workshop tomorrow, involuntary taxes are theft, plain and simple. You own you and I own me, simple as that.

Rape is not the same as love-making. The difference is coercion. And the keyword in love-making is voluntary. I think it’s that way in all human associations.

“Statism” – ideas so good, they have to be mandatory and enforced with a gun. As several speakers said earlier, “Watch out for that distraction.” Watch out when the guy is wearing a gun. Watch out when they tell you that it’s mandatory that for your own good and the good of the community, we are going to inject these chemicals into your child, as they have now passed a law in California. The revolution could start with this.

Here’s the challenging thing that I hope will stick with you. Once you have heard the moral argument - which is just what I’ve been presenting a version of, that it’s not okay for you to violate anyone else for any excuse except self-defense – once you have heard that, if you let it in, if you can integrate the logic, the reason, the common sense, the sheer morality of that, once you let the moral argument in, then you have moral responsibility. This comes back to what Kimberly was talking about about no matter how passionate your intent is, are you fulfilling it with conflicted behavior like thinking that your party should be able to have the power? You don’t want this one or that one telling you what to do, but as long as the people that agree with you are in power (and therefore they’ll help you get your way), then that’s okay.

The worst of authority is a lot like slavery. Well, it is slavery. We abolish it, coersive authority, not because the alternative is obvious or easy, but because it is the right thing to do. That doesn’t mean it will be simple or even safe in the short run. The implications of this are so vast that it can lead to social ostracism or worse, as when it was considered heresy by the church and the State to suggest that the earth was round or our world was not the center of the universe. Nicholaus Copernicus came up with this notion that maybe we actually rotate around the sun. Fortunately for him, he published that just before he died. Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, who was a big advocate of that theory, born a little later, was burned at the stake for promoting that idea. Galileo Galilei, also a big proponent of this humble notion, he said, “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual”, and he was forced to recant his work and spent the last decade of his life under house arrest.

This worldview thing is a really, really big deal. So, where does it come from? A real simplistic version is that it used to come mostly from religion, but the problem is different religions have their different ideas about God and politicians would use the religions to inflict their points of view and so forth. Then, along came the State and took over even more power and those two concepts have been the greatest source of human suffering and destruction in history. And then there was a breakthrough: Science. Science actually started to come up with some objective means of determining wisdom, of determining truth. So where does science come from? Greece was a big contributor. Socrates came up with a profound method of questioning (well, he was rewarded with being poisoned with hemlock) and then Aristotle came along and developed a whole system of logic, which is really the underpinning of the scientific method today.

The quest for truth through scientific inquiry leads to philosophy and philosophy applied to daily life becomes ethics, but where do ethics come from? Ethics used to come from religion, commandments, but the different religions had different commandments. Whose God are we going to rely on or do we have to take the word of some old scripture that supposedly came from someone different from us? Then the State comes along, but whose State, whose opinion? Science, I believe, has the possibility of actually leading to an ethics that we can use. What if you could apply the scientific method to ethics?

Back to Stefan Molyneux. He made this statement: “The greatest fight in the history of the world and the world of ideas is the fight to establish a universal morality”. Think about that for a minute because we have been trained since childhood, particularly in our generation, that morality is relative. There’s no absolute Truth. We should each be able to look into our hearts and our intuition and do whatever. I’m sure that’s what Hitler thought he was doing. And Mao and Pol Pot and the rest of them, they all had their justifications.

So what in the world would a universal morality be? I want to tell you this is not just some whacky idea. First of all (and I don’t have time but I’ve got three slides, single-spaced, of the history of this idea of non-aggression going back to B.C.), this guy, Molyneux, he’s a young Canadian and he has created the largest and most active philosophy show in history on the Internet. He’s been doing it for 10 years and he’s just recently passed more than 4 million downloads a month of his podcasts. When I was at the national Occupy conference, the two most energized and popular events were a debate between a young socialist and a young libertarian, Ron Paul advocate and you could see the compassion from each one of them that one of them was really going for liberty and honesty and the other one was really going for taking care of people and it was intense. Which one of these is going to win out? And then I did a workshop on these principles where people finally got a sense that there may be a way to actually reconcile all of that. We’ll be going into that a lot in the workshop tomorrow.

He’s written a book called “Universally Preferable Behavior”. Somebody asked me in a public event recently, “What do you think is the most important book in history?” For me, as you might guess, it’s not the Bible. It’s not the Koran. It’s this book, “Universally Preferable Behavior”. The subtitle is “A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics”. In other words, he’s created a scientifically-based, logical structure that shows the requirements of ethics as universally applicable. When all of a sudden that’s true, people can’t get away with these relative things that benefit them and not women, not blacks, and not people from other religions and all that kind of stuff anymore. That’s available for free from his website www.freedomainradio.com.

Here’s a list of liberty authors. It’s just a short list, but many of them have meant a lot to me, including my son who, out of his work wrote a book called, “The Secrets to Non-Violent Prosperity: The Principles of Liberty”. I’ve got to tell this story really quick. He was living in Ashland Oregon at the time and a lot of the awareness he got at the time that he later shared with me that went into Thrive, he derived from the free lending library called the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library, which was created by our own Jordan Pease. So Jordan informing him, informed, me, informed Thrive, which informed probably 50 million people around the world already and then that comes full circle back to this conference.

I’m almost done here. I’ve reached my maximum time. Let me just wrap up here.

How do we get from where we are now to a free world where people are not only free, but also more secure, more prosperous. We laid out in Thrive three stages, not to be coerced, but what we think are going to be the naturally evolving stages because, you know, we’ve got big institutions, big governments, and so forth right now, so we’re not going to be out of that tomorrow or soon. But, I think the way that it’s going to happen (and the more aware we are of where we’re heading, the more we’re apt to be able to navigate getting there), these are the three stages to bring to a free and prosperous world. The first one really honors the insights and compassion of what Danny described as the progressive, liberal political faction who genuinely, for most of them, only want to take care of people most in need and I share that sentiment. We just recommend doing it rather than creating new taxes, new theft, by immediately cutting the military budget in half and getting rid of the Federal Reserve. That frees up close to $2 trillion a year, which would not only handle all these issues for the United States. It would handle it for the entire world.

Stage one is bringing as much reform as possible to the current systems while we’re shrinking government. This is more the libertarian or minarchist (minimal government) where government is only there to protect individual rights and to protect whatever’s deemed to be the common. This is based on sound currency, no foreign wars of aggression, and so forth. Then, I believe, as that’s shrinking down generally people will be so much wealthier, so much more prosperous. They will feel so much more secure.

I’ve done some calculations, some with Catherine Austin Fitts, with Bill Still, With Hazel Henderson, and others economists in my network and their estimates were with a combination of free energy and a true free market moving in this direction, that the average family and individual would have 6 to 10 times the income and assets that they do right now. Imagine that. Just multiply your bank account and your income by let’s just say eight and then picture how that would change your life and then you go out on the street and everybody’s experiencing that. All of a sudden you’re in a world where people aren’t having to take from each other. People are starting businesses and creating new jobs and so forth. It’s almost hard to imagine.

People ask me, “It seems very utopian, but could that ever work?” Well, whenever we get a glimpse of this throughout history, it’s been shown to work. In northern England in the Industrial Revolution, way more prosperous and secure them Southern England where they weren’t allowing the same kind of entrepreneurship. In America in the 1800s. In Sweden and Denmark, which are held up as the model for social democracy right now, they were way more free and prosperous in the early 20^th century than they are now. I’ve got a number of articles if you’re interested in actually following the economics on that. Shanghai before World War II. Hong Kong in the early 20^th century. But, you don’t just look at nation-states. That’s just going to be a limited view anyway because by definition they’ve got some State intervention. Look at what happened with the freedom in Silicon Valley. Look at the prosperity and the raising of everybody’s quality-of-life that happened there. Look at eBay with voluntary exchange and feedback on when people aren’t being honest. It’s the same thing with Craigslist. There’s something called the Economic Freedom of the World Report that comes out once a year that gives you all the data backing up what I’m saying, that the more politically, socially, and economically free a country is, the more happy, the more prosperous, and the more secure they are.

This is just a glimpse of the workshop wrapping up this talk. Those of you who are interested in joining us tomorrow, we are going to go into how do we actually go about manifesting the new paradigm in our daily lives? We are going to look at the question, “What are the compass and tools by which we can alter the moral course of humanity on spaceship Earth and create ways of living where everyone has the opportunity to thrive?” This will be very practical, step-by-step things that we have found work in your personal life, projects, and so forth.

I want to divide it, ideally, into two sections tomorrow. In the first one, we’re going to be looking at the tools. It’s going to be interactive with you, identifying your purpose, your level of engagement that you’re interested in, your sector of interest, your issue of choice, and then we’ll be describing some of the most powerful tools that have been effective in other activist movements in our network.

The second one will be an exploration of the Principle of Non-Aggression and a stateless society. How could it actually work? I’m not going to go into this now, but it has a lot to do with a dynamic triad of dispute resolution organizations, independent security companies, and private insurance groups. The three of them balance out in a way that is miraculous. And I’m not talking about Blackwater or AIG. They would be out of business immediately in a true free world where they weren’t protected by the state. We are going to explore by what authority do the would-be controllers claim to rule us.

In closing, I want to say I believe the first principles, which can guide us out of our lethal mess on this exquisite planet, are the scientific principle of the torus, the fundamental natural blueprint of sustainable systems throughout the universe, and the Non-Aggression Principle, which is the application of the torus in the fundamental ethic for thriving human relations. I believe that this needed new paradigm is calling to us in the same way that the oak tree calls to the acorn. It’s already in us. It’s calling us to a line with the flow of the torus in our bodies, and in our emotions, and in our minds, and in our spirits, and in our relations to one another, and to our environment. It’s calling us to express ourselves in the moral integrity that is alignment with the Non-Aggression Principle and then to take that into economics, into agriculture, into media, into leadership, self-defense, justice, and more. And finally, I just want to appreciate you and thank you for your incredibly full day of listening and the rest of this weekend I want to hear from you. I’m really grateful to you for your coming, for your opening your heart and opening your mind, and for every courageous moment of your process of architecting the new paradigm. I am convinced that we already have what it takes to thrive. We can do this. We will do this.

Thank you very much.