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It gives me great pleasure to introduce Jeremy Rifkin. Many of you will have come across his books in the past. I'm sure he's a true baby boomer. He grew up in the United States and he was very active in the peace movement in the 1960s, quite prominent at that time. And ever since he has been on the radical side of thinking and has made a name for himself, I would say, worldwide. He's a publicist, he's a public intellectual, a concept which this side of the Atlantic is not so well understood in the United States. It is a public intellectual. And he looks at the big picture. He's a specialist in big pictures. And the biggest picture of all is the one that I think he's introducing now. I think it's the longest book he's ever written. It's called the Empathic Civilization. It's dramatic. He's going to introduce it now. It's my pleasure to welcome Jeremy Rivka.
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Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming out, Stephanie. Appreciate it. My sense is that we may be at a. Maybe at a seminal turning point for our species. Not sure it's possible that we may be facing our own extinction. Difficult to say something like that because there's been so many apocalyptic, pathetic statements through history that turned out to be just dead wrong. And I'm going to share a little statistic with you, you younger people here, and you make your judgment call. Here we are at the London School of Economics and it reminds me that the basic economy of this planet is Boba's eyes. That really is the bottom line. The sun's energy pays the Earth. Photosynthesis allows us to evolve. Life on this planet as simple and profound as that. 2010, 6.8 billion human beings. We represent less than 1% of the entire biomass of the Earth. Less than 1%. We're currently using 24% of all the photosynthesis in the planet. We've become monsters. We're the youngest species in the evolutionary neighborhood and we are literally enveloping the Earth and we're going from 6 to 9 billion people in 30 years. It's just not sustainable. We've had two seminal events in the last 18 months which I believe represent the end game for the great industrial era that spanned two centuries, propelled by fossil fuels. Let me take you back to July 2008. You recall that in that month, oil gave $147 a barrel in world markets. Prices soared, inflation went through the roof. Basic items became prohibitively expensive, from food in the stores to petrol. We have food rides in 30. And everything, of course, as you know, is based on fossil fuels. When we say industrial civilization, we're really talking about using the carbon deposits of the Jurassic age for everything. Our food is made out of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Virtually all of our pharmaceutical products are still fossil fuel based. All of our construction materials are fossil fuel based. Our clothes are primarily fossil fuel based. Our power, our transport, our heat, our light. The entire infrastructure of the industrial revolution is based on the carbon deposits of a previous period in history. So when oil hit $147 a barrel on more markets, purchasing power plummeted. The entire economic engine of the Industrial revolution shut off in July 2008. That was the economic meltdown. That was the earthquake, the collapse of the financial market. 60 days later, that was the aftershock. Our government leaders haven't yet understood the real crisis here. And the reason this happened is what I call peak globalization. We now know the outer limits of the endgame for globalization based on fossil fuels. And the reason is something called peak oil per capita. Not to be confused with peak oil production. They're two different things. Peak oil production is controversial. Peak oil per capita is not. Peak oil per capita occurred in 1979. And that is if you distributed all the oil reserves to everyone alive at that point, that would be the most each person could have. We found more oil in the last 30 years. The population rolls quicker. So if we distributed all the oil reserves we know today to 6.8 billion people, there's simply less per person. So when China and India make their bid virtually overnight to bring a third of the human race into the game, the demand pressure on fossil fuels was so great, oil skyrocketed. We hit an end game at 147 a barrel. You'll notice we're trying to rebuild the economy now to replenish inventories. What's happening? Oil's going over 80 barrel again. And what I've said to my colleagues is show me a way that it won't short circuit. Every time we hit around 147 a barrel, it's going to collapse again. There is no way to get through that wall. That is an end game. The energies are in sunset. The infrastructure they're built on is unlike support. This is what we're not coming to Grips with in G20, G8, or G2. Fast forward to December 2009. Copenhagen. World leaders from 192 countries come together after years of negotiation to deal with the entropy bill for 200 years of spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to build this great civilization, despite the fact that our scientific community says that we could lose upwards of 70% of all the plant and animal life on this planet in less than a century. Let me be clear on this. That's mass extinction. We've had five waves of biological extinction on this little planet in 450 million years. In the geological record, every time there was a mass extinction, it took 10 million years to recover the biodiversity we lost. So when we talk about 70% extinction in the generation separates you from your children and grandchildren. That's astounding. Despite this fact, our world leaders could not come to an arrangement on a carbon treaty knowing it's maybe the greatest threat since our species has been on this earth and the negotiations completely broke down in acrimony. So here's my question. Why were our business leaders unable to anticipate, even the day before it happened, the actual collapse of the industrial revolution, when all did 147imperial and they still don't know what to do about it? And why were our government leaders unable to come to a deal on climate change, even knowing it imperiled our species and our fellow creatures on this planet? The problem lies deeper than just the inability to come up with a new global mechanism to regulate this economy or new carbon treaty targets. I believe the real issue is that our government leaders, our business leaders, and the rest of us as well, we're using 19th century, 18th, 19th century ideas about human nature and the human journey that we inherited from the enlightened at the very dawn of the market era, in the nation state ERA to address 21st century biosphere challenges. And of course, what you were branded as the global age. It's a disconnect. It just doesn't fit. You know, for 1500 years, the church had the final say on human nature. And the church is very clear. Little babies are born in sin, he prayed. If you want salvation, wait for Christ and salvation in the world to come. At the dawn of the market, early in the nation state era, philosophers of the Enlightenment challenged us shibboleths with a new equation. John Locke, the great philosopher of the political philosopher of the Enlightenment, said, look, little babies are born blank slate, tabula rasa. Except he kept a little open. He said, there is a predisposition to acquire property. I don't know why they want to go to acquire property, negate nature and become happy. Slip through there. Adam Smith, the great economist, the Enlightenment said that each baby is actually born to seek autonomy and to pursue self interest in the market. And although he gave some leeway to sympathetic sentiments in his other discourse, he really believed self interest, autonomy, that's what human nature is about. In the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham said little babies are born to seek pleasure over pain. Our core nature is utilitarian as a species. Charles Byron, the British naturalist, added his two cents. He said, well, every organism seeks to perpetuate itself. The basic drive is to reproduce for survival. And then at the turn of that century, of course, Sigmund Freud captured the zeitgeist of that transition period by saying, little babies are born with an insatiable sexual appetite and a desire to continually extinguish an abedom. Do we have any parents here? Could you raise your hands? Where are my parents? Please raise your grandparents. Is this what little babies are? When that little baby comes out of the womb and mom and dad are looking at that little baby? Is that baby born in sin and depraved? Is that baby a rational, calculated, detached agent who seeks their own autonomy? Is that baby first of all looking for self interest and pleasure over pain and utility? And their ultimate desire is to extinguish libido? I know, it's silly, isn't it? If that is the case, if we are born depraved, irrational, calculating, detached, autonomous, self interested, materialistic pleasure, season of libido driven, I suspect we're doomed. I don't see any way that 6.8 billion people are going to come together in that global age if that is our true nature. In the last 10 years, below the radar, some very interesting breakthroughs among evolutionary biologists, neurocognitive scientists, child development researchers, and others that are challenging these basic shibboleths that we've inherited for the past 200 years. Let me take you to the early 1990s. Speaking of the laboratory in Italy, scientists had a MRI machine on a macaque monkey as the monkey was trying to open up a nut. And they watched certain neurons and they open the mite by sheer happenstance. And this is how science sometimes gives us the breakthroughs. Right after this experiment was finished, a human being walks into the laboratory, I guess by accident, sees the nuts. He was a little hungry, he picks up a nut and tries to eat the nut himself. The macaque is completely non fuss. What is this alien doing in the lab? He's gazing at this guy as he's trying to eat the nut doesn't move. But then they see the neurons lighting up in the brain of the monkey. The same exact neurons light up when the monkey's watching the man open the nut as when the monkey was opening the nut. They had no idea what they had discovered. Must have been a mistake in the MRI machine. They started putting this MRI machine on other primates and then humans. And they discovered something called mirror neurons. And it turns out that primates with big neocortex chimpanzee relatives, humans, we now suspect elephants, we're not sure about dolphins and dogs, but we are discovering across the human kingdom, neurons that light up. We call these the empathy neurons. And that is when someone observes somebody else, their condition, their emotions, their frustration, their anger, their joy. The same neurons will light up in the observer as the person they're observing. Now, we know this to be the case. If a spider goes up someone's arm and you're observing them, you'll get that creepy feeling yourself. Or somebody stabs himself accidentally, you'll get that feeling of being stabbed yourself. We are beginning to realize we are soft wired, not for aggression and violence and utility and detachment and capability, but we are software for affection and relationship and companionship and sociability. We are Homo empathicus, always have that. It's built into our biology, but it's actually either thwarted or expressed through our culture, whether the neurons light up in certain ways or not. Empathy is a very, very difficult and interesting phenomenon. It has the width of death and the celebration of life with it. When one empathizes, let me say, when little babies are in a nursery and one baby cries, the other babies will start crying. They just don't know why. That's empathic distress. Around two and a half years of age, a baby actually can recognize himself in the mirror, the top. They have the beginning of self identity. Then they can know that if they're observing someone else, that's another separate being. And so when they experience their feelings, they know it's not their own feelings. Around eight years old, a little child learns about birth and death. They learn where they come from, that they have a one and only life history, that their life is fragile and delicate and one day they're going to cease to be. This existential sense of one's identity allows one to then empathize with another's one and only life. When you think about if you've empathized with a sibling, a friend, a soulmate, a fellow creature, it's that feeling of that other being's fragility, their vulnerability. It's tough being alive. Whether you're a human being or a fox in the wood, it's tough being alive. So when one empathizes with another being, it's that fragility. Their imperfections, their one and only light. And you can smell their desire to flourish and be. And empathy is actually solidarity. It's a compassionate response. And I'm with you. We both understand how precious life is and we're in solidarity. There is no empathy in heaven, by the way, I can tell you before you get there, it can't be. There's no empathy in utopia. An empathic civilization is the opposite of utopia. Because in heaven, utopia, there's no mortality, there's no suffering, there's no existential sense of the fragility of every moment and the fiance of one's life. Empathy is grounded in a very, very different reality. So if we have software for empathic distress, here's my question. Is it possible to imagine the ability to extend empathy through culture? So we extend it to the entire human family as a family and our fellow creatures is part of our evolutionary family. And the master in which we live is our common community. It's impossible to imagine that in this younger generation. If we can imagine that, I believe it may be possible maybe to save our species and to save this planet we live. If we can't imagine this, I don't know what planet B is. So in this book, the Empathic Civilization, I ask myself, how does consciousness change in history? The way our brain is wired today is not the same way medieval serfs brain circuitry is wired or forged at 130,000 years ago. My sense is that the great changes in consciousness and history occur when new energy regimes emerge. Because when new energy regimes emerge, they create the conditions to bring more people together in complex living arrangements. But when you bring people together in more complex living relationships, it requires a communication revolution to manage the new complexity. When energy led regimes converged with new sophisticated communication revolutions, those are the pivotal points in history. They changed human consciousness, they changed gestalt, they changed temporal spatial orientation. Let me give you an example of convergence. Many of you studied anthropology. You read about the sumerians in Mesopotamia 3500 BC. They were the first to capture photosynthesis from the sun in cereal crops. Barley and wheat. That stored energy from the sun and the grain gave them the beginnings of great civilization. They created the first hydraulic agricultural civilization. Extremely complicated. Before that time, energy regimes were local small garden fed agriculture and pastoralism. The Sumerians indentured thousands of men for the first time in history to build these huge canals for irrigation. They set up the dikes which required craft skills in differentiation of labor. They created the granaries, the royal roads, the distribution system for a complex urban civilization. And it required a communication revolution sophisticated enough to manage this new complex energy regime. They invented cuneiform writing. Everywhere you see these great hydraulic civilizations in the Middle East, India, China, Mexico, independently, humans figure out writing to organize. That's just a maze. Let me skip all the way up in history. It's a long book, but skip up to the 19th century. First industrial revolution. Another convergence of energy and communication. The print press had been around since Gutenberg. But in the 19th century we upgraded it with speed. Power, lining type and rotary allowed us to make really cheap, quick, efficient print production. Then we introduced public schools and mass literacy at the same time. In Europe and America between 1830 and 1880, a print conscious workforce then managed coal, steam and rail. The first industrial revolution energies. It would have been possible to organize the first industrial revolution with Codex. Too slow. 20th century convergence of communication energy, first generation electricity with telegraph transitional to telephone, cinema, radio and television became the communication vehicles to manage and market. A second industrial revolution based on oil and the internal combustion engine. In suburban Willow, that second industrial revolution, the energies are sunsetting. The infrastructure is in life support. New communication regimes not only organize the new energies, they also change consciousness. Every forager hunter society in history, every one of them had plural language. In order to organize the foraging and hunting, every single one of them created mythological consciousness. Without exception, if we go to the great hydraulic agricultural civilizations, every one of them used script. Every one of them created theological consciousness. The great Abrahamic religions in the West, Buddhism and Confucianism, which is more of a secular religion in the East. In the 19th century, when we went to print for the first industrial revolution, print created a frame of rhyme that gave us ideological consciousness. Sense and sensibility everywhere. We had the first industrial revolution. Ideological consciousness emerges in the 20th century. Electricity as a communication vehicle stretched the mind framework and we created psychological consciousness. We think therapeutically. My grandma and grandpa couldn't. If my grandma was at a family function and she was getting upset and I could watch her and then all of a sudden she'd maybe throw a glass or plate down on the floor and break it while no one was looking. I say that, I said, grandma, wait a minute here. We need to have a chat. That seemed like a passive aggressive acting part. You must have been acting out some transference of projection from your childhood. Were there family gatherings like this that you didn't really like? She doesn't have a clue. She can't think therapeutically. She could Think ideologically, theologically, maybe even mythologically, with assault over the shoulder when the break of the glass, but that's it. So we see through history this isn't a steady progression. When energy and communication revolutions come together, there are dangerous periods at the end, which I'll go into, where there are implosions, dark sides, holocaust, genocides, et cetera. But we do see a jerky history where consciousness does emerge in various levels. And when it does, empathy broadens the larger domains. Empathy is the real invisible hand of civilization. And that is when energy and communication revolutions come together, diverse people come together. They become more differentiated, individualized in their skills. But that also requires they become more integrated into new associational ties so they can make the coherent civilization work. So what you see is empathy as the invisible hand that allows us to take more individualized, differentiated skills and bring people together in more coherent place. I'll give you an example. Every forager hunter society in history, their energy regime was very local. Blood ties were the family. Empathy never extended beyond blood ties, shouting distance, because it was all culture. Everyone on the other side of the mountain was the alien other. When we went to the great hydraulic agricultural civilizations, theological consciousness we had, skills became more differentiated. We started to develop the notion of selfhood. How do you integrate all those more individualized people into mokoto, clear and whole? We extended family from blood ties to associational ties. A new fiction. My religion is my family. Jews start to empathize with Jews as an extended fictional family, Christians with Christians, Muslims with Muslims. Skip up to the 19th century modern market, nation state era. And so we were able to now extend the family to national markets and create a new fiction called the national government. So now people began to see those of like minded national identity as an extended family. Brits start to see Brits as family, Germans as Germans, Americans as Americans. It was a fiction. But then we empathize within that fiction. So my question is, if we have seen a very uneasy, but progression, very uneasy and unsteady progression from empathy to blood ties, religious associations, national affiliation, Is it possible to imagine a stretch in a global age to understanding the idea that we empathize as a global family, part of an extended evolutionary community of other plants and animals in one community biosphere, is this a big stretch? There is a conundrum history of deep, deep bittersweet paradox. And that is that as civilizations bring more energy together and allow more sophisticated communication to create a more social we. Empathy does extend itself, but so does entropy. If you take a look through history, as civilizations become more Complex, more energy consuming, they bring more people together, they annihilate time and space for the expense of a bigger entropy Bill. It is a deep paradox in history. In the book I traced the empathy entropy paradox in the great civilization, hydraulic civilizations, the great rise and fall of Rome, the wood crisis in late medieval Europe where there were empathy surges followed by entropy collapses. Today we are a globally connected civilization and we're able now to stretch the central nervous system in real time and space. Think Haiti, they were just out here donating for Haiti and Chile. Within an hour after that earthquake in Haiti, the Twitter started coming out and within two hours of YouTube videos from the cell phones and within three hours the entire human race was in deep empathic ways to our Haitian news. If our enlightenment philosophers are right and we are rational, detached, calculated, self interested, materialistic, pleasure seeking, libido driven, you could not comprehend. But we now have the technology in this global world to connect the human race viscerally. So we're in each other's face within this. But the same civilization we created is increasing the entropy Bill. So in this bittersweet situation, which I'm sure all the young people here can smell, we can smell the possibility, the Facebook generation, that we're developing empathy to include vast domains that weren't there before. But right at the time, we can sense that we may be part of the human family. We can smell the possibility of extinction. It really is a bittersweet paradox. How do we break the empathy entropy paradox in history? A mission for your generation here at lse. I believe we're in a version of another convergence of energy and communication. We're in the early days of the emergence of a new civilization. And this new convergence of communication energy could take us from psychological consciousness to biosphere consciousness. It's possible and it could happen within a few generations. I don't know if the jury's out. There's no fail safe in history and there's no determinism. Anything can happen. We had a very powerful communication ICT revolution the last 15 years. The personal computer, the Internet. Now this is quite different than first generation electricity communication that was centralized, top down. This one is flat open source. And here's the key term, the new ICT revolution you grew up on. It's distributed. Distributed. Distributed. That means 2 billion people right now, this afternoon, with a small utensil in their hand can send their own video, audio and text at all the other 2 billion people at the same time in a distributed fashion, with more power than the BBC could have ever imagined. This Distributed ICT revolution is just now beginning to converge with a new energy regime. Distributed energy. When distributed communication manages distributed energy, we have a powerful third industrial revolution and perhaps distributed consciousness. Biosphere Consciousness across the biosphere. I advise the European Union and I was privileged to lay out the third Industrial revolution game plan, which has been officially endorsed by the Parliament, the Commission, and we're now rolling it out in regions across Europe. We're actually rolling it out right now across all of Rome in the next six months and many other regions. Let me lay it out to you, see what you think of it. We have committed to four pillars of the third Industrial revolution in the eu. Pillar one, renewable energy. These are what we call distributed energies. Why do we call them distributed? Well, they're not like elite. Coal, oil, gas and uranium are elite because they're not in your backyard. They're not distributed. They're found in certain places. So they require huge military investments to secure them, huge geopolitical investments to manage them, and massive capital to organize them. I don't have to remind you Brits how many millions of people died in Warsaw to secure coal, oil, gas and uranium. It's the dark side of the last few centuries on this great civilization we built for a part of the universities. Those energies are sunsetting. The infrastructure is on high support. The end game is 147 a barrel and our inability to deal with climate change. Distributed energies. The sun shines all over the world every day. The wind blows across the planet every 24 hours. Wherever we tread, there's heat underneath this earth. Hot geothermal coal. Where we have water, we have small hydroelectricity. In the rural areas, agriculture and forestry waste. The ocean tides keep coming in and out every day. Garbage can be recycled. They're all distributed. They're found in some proportion of renewable energies of every square foot of the ocean and the land of this planet. So the EU committed itself in 2007 to 20% renewable energy by 2020 and building electricity in Europe, done deal. But pillar two, we then asked ourselves, how do we collect this energy? Our first thought was, well, the southern Europe has a lot of sun. Let's go down there and get it, centralize it and ship it back. Or the Irish, they seem to have a lot of room. Let's go there and build the wind pipes and ship it back. I don't oppose centralized wind and sun, but that's 20th century thinking based on elite energies. It's transitional, but it's not a new game. If distributed energies are found in every square foot of the world, why would we only collect them in a few points? They're central. We did that with coal, oil, gas and uranium, because that's how you have to organize them. So, pillar two buildings. The number one cause of climate change is buildings. It's a third of the energy and a third of CO2. Parenthetically, the number two cause of climate change is beef production and consumption and related animal husbandry. Number three is worldwide transport. By the way, not one world leader in 192 countries has made a single statement about the number two cause of climate change. And President Obama takes his handler lunch opportunities at his favorite hamburger joint every Friday. But he wouldn't get in the hunger. Either he doesn't get it or he does get it. Either way, not so good. But the number one cause, buildings. And so buildings are also the solution. So across Europe, we imagine that every single building that exists right now in Europe, every home, every office, every factory, every shopping mall, every single existing building, is going to be converted to a partial power plant in the next 30 years to produce just a little bit of its own energy on site from the distributed energy around it. The sun, the wind, the heat under the ground, the garbage, etc. That jump starts an economic revolution because construction's the elephant in the room if you want to move the economy across Europe. The new buildings are positive power from scratch. The first ones are up in Spain. Axiona has a positive power building up in Navarre. Huig has just put one up in Paris. These buildings actually produce more energy than they even need. They already can do it. The third pillar we wrestled with was how do you store these energies? Because even here in Britain, the sun isn't always shining and the wind isn't always growing. So we committed 8 billion euros to putting hydrogen storage across Europe going into the market. Now Germany is leading this year. So when the sun hits your roof, it generates some electricity. If there's some surplus, you don't need electrolyzed water. Hydrogen comes out on the tank when the sun's down on the roof. Convert it back to electricity. It is an energy loss. Any engineers here? Engineers? Well, if you were, you could know that there's always an energy loss. It's called the second law of thermodynamics. Whenever you use energy, you lose energy. If you look at all the energy loss in converting coal, oil, gas and uranium at every stage, it's through the roof compared to what I just. Pillar four is where the distributed communication revolution converges with distributed energy to give us a third industrial revolution. We Hope, distributed consciousness. All of this is a hope. We use the same technology that created the Internet identity. We take the power grid of Europe and turn it to an inter grid that acts exactly like the Internet. So with millions and millions and millions of buildings across Europe, from the Irish Sea to the doorsteps of Russia, are converting just a little bit of energy on site, storing it with hydrogen, like you store digital and media, then surplus, sharing across the intergrid, across all of Europe, like we share information on the Internet, power to the people. We call this distributed capitalism. It's actually also called cooperative socialism. It's a hybrid because it requires a lateral shift in capitalism because everyone has to be an entrepreneur to be their own energy player. It flattens capitalism, it makes it lateral. But it also requires a new social model, a cooperative model, because we have to share it across energy spaces, like we share information on social spaces on the Internet. Think file sharing. We used to call it cheating by the way, file sharing. Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, these are social sites. These are collaborative, they're distributed. They're not higher up or top down. This third industrial revolution answers a question we couldn't answer for many years. For years governments would say, Mr. Rifkin, how do we run the world on solar panels and windmills? I mean please, let's not be naive. They have a place, but you have to have the hard energies. These are soft. You have to have cold oil, gas, and now in the uk nuclear again. We couldn't actually answer this question until seven years ago. Now we're ready to go because the new grid, it, it's the second generation 2.0. It's crossing all the industries. We now can take hundreds of thousands and millions of desktop computers that have very little distributed power on their own. When we connect them to software, we get much more distributed power than the most centralized supercomputers we could ever put online. We can take grid it to the power lines. Now millions and millions and millions of buildings are producing just a little bit of heat, storing the hydrogen, like to store digital media, sharing it across continents. The distributed power absolutely wipes out anything you could ever imagine. With little centralized nuclear and CO5 power plants for everyone here that grew up on file sharing. The music companies did not understand distributed power. File sharing and music companies were wiped out in six years. The newspapers did not understand the distributed power of the blogosphere. The newspapers are going down. Bill Gates and Microsoft didn't understand Linux and distributed power. Now they're a real player. This is distributed power. It creates distributed consciousness. It frames the Mind differently, this new communication energy. Because then each of us is responsible for that small part of the biosphere, that swath where we're hosting photosynthesis and energy. But then we have to share it with each other across a handful of continents in the world, distributed conferences, Biosfield awareness. Can we get there in time? I don't know. I won't see it. Everyone here, all the students, you'll know if you did it or not. I want to say I hope I'm dead wrong about all this. I really do. I hope we wake up and this is a nightmare about climate change. We're not at the end of the industrial age. Everything's okay. I don't think so. I think your generation has a tremendous opportunity and challenge. Consciousness can change very quickly in history when energy communication revolutions emerge. I'll give you an example of what I mean. How many of you looked in the mirror today? Why does everybody like to get nervous? How many look in the mirror? All right. It wasn't about narcissism. It's grooming, right? So you look in the mirror, got a little sense of yourself. You know, up until the 14th century nobody saw themselves. Think about this. There were no mirrors. You could see yourself in a pond of water or maybe a piece of metal. Pretty vague. Grooming wasn't too good until the 1400s. But what's interesting, the 1400s Nishab launched the Renaissance along with perspective and art. Glass flowing and perspective and art. We think of perspective and art changing the mind because with perspective we could create subject object relationships and we could think linear rather than vertical. Instead of looking up the heavens from the cathedral, we started looking at the landscape and dividing up to subjects objects. That gave us a scientific method all because of perspective and out. But glassblowing was another big one in Venice and morale. They started to mass produce mirrors for the first time and they would give them as giveaways if he bought a book. And so people started seeing themselves in the mirror becoming pastime. Look at that. Me. Well, look at you. You. This is where self reflection comes from. Reflect mirrors. It allowed us to develop our sense of self would even more because we could see I'm a unique individual with a one and only self. But then could see you are a unique individual that don't look. You don't look like me. But you had similarities. It deepened introspection but also deepened the ability to existentially empathize with someone else having unique identities. You follow me? Consciousness changes quickly. I'll give an example of how it's changing now in terms of temporal spatial orientation. When the spaceship Apollo took its last go around on the dark side of the moon in 1969, our young astronauts came out on the bright side. The sun was hitting the Earth. It looked gorgeous. The planet. They shot a couple photos. Everyone in our generation put those photographs on the wall. We saw this beautiful in color, very alive looking planet and we put it on our walls. That was an out of body experience. For the first time, we changed the star. We could see the world from the outside in every young person in this room. You can do it every day now with Google. You go up with a Google map, a satellite's map, and you take a satellite map and you google down and you want to look at some building 20,000 miles away, maybe someone you just skyped and you want to see their home and you go right to the door. We're able now to look from the outside in and see how small we are. But now with our Internet technologies, we can connect to the blogosphere and with our energy with the biosphere, we are becoming aware of the frame of reference. Being a master from the outside in and connected from the inside around. That is a gesture change. Go to any school in London here and our young kids are being taught a revolutionary change in paradigm. And the teachers don't even know it. They think they're teaching environment, they're teaching paradigm shift because they're teaching the kids that everything they do, their very behavior long to bond. The car their family drives, the clothes they wear, the food they eat is affecting the carbon footprint and someone else's ability to survive. Whether it's a human or another creature somewhere else on the planet. That's a revolution. That's biosphere consciousness. There are kids in the classrooms here in London who are skyping with a classroom in Tokyo. And the kids all know each other's names and they're thousands of miles away. What really hit me was the YouTube video of the polar bear in Kak last year on the Arctic ice floor, stranded. You know there were open waters in the Arctic, there hadn't been open waters in 3 million years. So when the climate change skeptics say this is seasonal. Yeah, 3 million years, if that's seasonal, this is seasonal open waters. Remember they showed the bear mother and the cop on a little ice floor stranded and they were drowning. Everyone empathized with that bear, mother and cub because this could be us. That's empathy for our fellow creatures. So we're beginning to understand biosphere consciousness, but we also are Facing the possibility of our own extinction. The empathy entropy paradox. Can we get there in time? I hope so. The third Industrial Revolution is moving quickly in Europe. Not so quickly here in the uk, unfortunately. But quickly on the continent is a harbinger of the future. It's not academic. I chair a team of 100 global companies and cooperatives. We brought them together. This is the hybrid of capitalism, socialism, the world's cooperatives and the world's global companies. The major renewable energy companies, the major construction companies, real estate, IT logistics and transport. We don't have the energy companies, of course. They don't like what we're doing. And we're rolling out master plans. We're right in the middle of one for Utrecht, the fastest growing economic region in Europe right now. We're doing well. We just finished Monaco for Prince Albert. And I advise that Mr. Zapatero and Mr. Papa, we're doing both countries starting this year. Both countries Germany. I advise Mr. Chancellor Merkel. She's already laying it down. So this is not academic. This is actually beginning to happen. I just don't know if we'll get there quick enough. Because what I have to tell you, when you see how daunting it is, how little we've done and how the time frame is narrowing, it is really a race against time. So I'm going to leave you with a story. An interesting story. Have anybody here taken a DNA? National Geographic DNA test. National Geographic DNA. Pretty interesting. $100 sent at the National Geographic website. They send you a kit. We take DNA out of our mouth. My wife and I, my in laws did this. We send the DNA back to the National Geographic geneticist and they analyze our DNA. Then they sent the results back and they tell us based on our DNA where we migrated from all the way back to the beginning of human history. Pretty interesting now. But what's more interesting, I'll save all you students some money because I know you could. I'm going to give you another part of the story. What they tell us. I didn't know this, that apparently 175,000 years ago, not very long ago, Rift valley of Africa, There were about 10,000 anatomy Modern human beings at that point in history. Walking the grasslands. They located one woman, the geneticist. She's a base data line. Genetic data line. They call her the mitochondrial DNA E. Apparently her genes pass to everyone in this room here today in LS the other woman didn't make gets even strange. More strange. They located one man a database line on DNA. They call it Alona chromosome And apparently a fairly potent guy. His genes passed all of us in the world today. The other guys didn't make it. So here's the 6.8 billion people at various stages of consciousness. Mythological, theological, ideological, psychological, dramaturgical and we hope, balance. We're conscious, but we're fighting. We have conflicts, we have all sorts of bizarre obsession, compulsion, things that motivate our lives. And yet we're all part of a single family. The Bible got this one right where it all come from. Two people, could have been hundreds, it makes no difference. But here we are in all of our divisiveness. Is it possible to imagine being an extended family living in one biosphere? Why is this a big stretch? But what we need is a new global conversation. 200 years ago, at the beginning of the market, the nation state air, we've written about this, we had a global conversation. The Enlightenment started here in Britain. I'm going to be tonight at the British Royal Society talk about this. They launched this 200 years ago. We need a global conversation here at LSE among a younger generation of scholars. We need to rethink human nature and the human condition. If we are Homo empathicus, and I suspect we are, we are the most social of creatures. We need this global conversation, lest we doubt the science. Do the deathbed test. My wife says the deathbed test is the best test. When we look back at life when we're old, we have the same feeling as when we look at life when we're young. When we're young, it's all about attachment. John Bowlby got this right. And the object relation therapist. But when we look back at life, we have the same feeling as we do when we're one, two or three. The precious moments we look back on when we're over 65. It's not the moment when we were autonomous island to ourselves that we were able to seek pleasure and utility. We extinguished our libido. We were able to pick a good deal. The moments that are etched in our memory are those empathic moments where we could actually transcend ourselves. Empathy allows us to transcend ourselves and be engaged in the mystery of life, the awe of it, by being in solidarity with another being. It's the most alive experience we ever had. Empathy, it makes us super alive. Those are the moments we remember. Can we extend these institutionally? We'll have to rethink parenting. Parenting is doing pretty good. But we'll have to rethink school. It's all based on the Enlightenment ideas. Knowledge is power. If we share it's cheating. The mission is to promote a productive citizen. There will be a little clog in the workplace. We have to rethink education along empathic lines. We have to rethink our business practices. We have to revolutionize the frames of governance so that we can prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilization. And then our key primary nature will thrive. And if it thrives, and the secondary drives, the violence, the aggression, the materialism, narcissism, that's all substitution. If we let the primary drive squares, we won't create a perfect world. We won't create a utopian world. Every family still fights. But at least we'll create a world where we can begin to appreciate another's life as if it were our own. That's the ultimate democratization experience. It allows us to live in a world that's real, that's grounded. It's based on imperfection and fragility in which there's constant struggle, there's no perfection. But we learn to live in a family and try to address this biosphere as a community. That's the mission. And for great schools like LSE that have been in the forefront of social and political frames of reference at least Since World War II, this is the place to start. This is the mission. This is the legacy. A daunting task.
- [45:41]
A
Thank you very much, Jeremy, for that tour de Force. Some 50 years ago, I can remember being enchanted by a historian of civilization who held everyone's spellbound. His name was Arthur Toyn, and his theory was that every civilization faced a challenge at some critical point. If it met the challenge, it survived a bit longer, but eventually it was doomed. It was quite clear to him that Western civilization was about to meet a challenge. I don't think he quite thought the challenge would be exactly as he. But I'm quite sure that Jeremy's part of the response. And a very significant part of the response, as you heard, he actually talks not just to the next generation, he talks to the leaders of today as well. And I think that gives us some reason to hope for the future, that there is a response in the making. And part of that response, I hope you will agree, is coming from a place like this. Thank you very much. Now, I do know that you have, I think, the possibility not only of answering questions, but also of signing your book. I don't know whether anybody here has a supply of the empathic civilization at the back. Is there anybody here who has it? If yes, we can do on sale or resign. So after. After the lecture, Mr. Rifkin is available to sign his book for those of you who are inspired to purchase it. But at this moment, he is very ready to answer any questions.
- [47:25]
B
Thank you. I think you gave a great speech for this. 10% of the world population were actually able to, like, grasp this global conscience collective, like, because they have the actual access to educational resource, to energy resource, to information technology resources. What about these?
- [47:44]
A
90% of the population don't have this.
- [47:47]
B
Access to grasp that, to get to that concept. I think there are two levels of discussion there. One is, we hope, the third industrial revolution is what we call re globalization from the bottom up. In a geopolitical world, if you didn't have access militarily or geopolitically to those energies and resources, you were marginalized out. And the best we could do with elite energies is provide for part of the human race. You know, remember, we talk about global connection and access, as you say, but 25% of the human race this afternoon has never had any electricity. And another 20% has marginal access. That's the best we could do. Even at $3 a barrel. Does anyone think we're going to get this electricity to the rest of them at $100 a barrel? No. No. The real question I think we face is the technologies that I'm talking about can be distributed very, very cheaply. If we get economies of scale, there should be solar roofs and vertical wind and heat pumps under the ground in every small village and every urban area in the world, because those energies are in every part of the world. It takes us from a geopolitical frame of reference to a biosphere, distributed reference. The big energy companies don't like it, but they're not the elephant on the block. There are other parts of industry here. I think the big problem here is we've got. We have 40% of the human race living beyond our means, with an unsustainable carbon footprint. We have about 40% of the human race living on $2 a day or less. No carbon footprint, but no access and barely able to survive. So how do we find a way to bring these two groups together? We have to find a way to rethink our notion of happiness. I'm going to see Professor Leonard right afterwards here. Did some good work on happiness. Is he here now? Oh, yeah. All right. I enjoyed your work, but. So I should really let him talk. I'm a little embarrassed now during his talk that, you know, the philosophers of enlightenment believed that the acquisition of property was tautological with secure and happiness. So Thomas Jefferson, for example, would Talk about life, liberty and happiness. But they would also talk about life, liberty and property. They went together. James Mill said, the acquisition of property makes you happy. The more property you have, the more secure you are. The more independent, the more free. Because we define freedom as autonomy. But today we have a younger generation that's beginning to rethink happiness. We now know by the studies that Professor Laird and others have done, that if you're really poor, you're not happy because you're not even surviving. As you get wealthier, you become happier. But there's a threshold where all the minimum comforts are provided. And after that, something interesting happens. You become increasingly less happy with increasing amplified support. And at some point you actually become unhappy. The possessions end up possessing us. And so when we look at societies which have a very big gap between rich and poor, they have very low unhappiness ratios. So what we need to do is figure out a way to change the dream about what makes us happy. The American dream was the gold standard for a long time, but that was based on the Enlightenment idea that happiness is individual autonomy, material self interest, and become an island to oneself. But we know that the more autonomous we become, the less participatory we are and the less meaningful our relationships we have. We have a younger generation that's moving the dream from the American dream to what you call quality of life. That's the European dream. The quality of life is a collective response. It requires the whole community to work together in order to create a community of meaningful relationships. It's a different dream if half the human race that's living with too high a carbon footprint could change the dream for quality of life, which is beginning to happen. I see this among young people in my country and yours. The college educated at least talk more about quality of life. And so the lower 40% of the human race to get up to the threshold of comfort and we meet there, then we base our civilization on empathic standards. And that's a quality of life standards. It really requires a change of what makes us feel happy. If we know damn well that we're not happy with more and more wealth, then why do we stay on the addictions? Professor Lance said it makes no sense. They say it's easy to frame it, it's difficult to get there. But remember, dreams change. The American dream was a unique dream in a unique period of history. It happened virtually overnight. The quality of life has emerged in the last 10 or 15 or 20 years. Pretty no idea. And the idea that they're now changing Indicators of economic prosperity from GDP to social indicators in places like the EU is an indication of the changes going on. The social indicators are about quality of life, not just output and production. So I think it's a daunting task. I think it can be done. This is what we call the shift from geopolitics to biosphere politics. In biosphere politics, it's one community, not several. There's only one quality of life for everyone. Someone want to hand over the M?
- [52:57]
C
Thank you very much for sharing your inspiration. I wondered if you knew of any more what I might call now maps that encompass the whole of everything you've been talking about. Met a little bit of Claire Graves's work. Dr. Claire Graves and his work in spiral dynamics in and also with traditional Chinese medicine theory, which encompasses. I wonder if you met anything to date that encompasses the things that you've mentioned, including the cosmological perspective.
- [53:33]
B
Well, I think that there in the book, the book is an interdisciplinary approach and I'm trying to take a look as best I can. I had to stop at 616 pages of text. You know, we couldn't. But there's a pretty intensive extensive bibliography in this book. And what we're seeing is that there's a lot of frame of references coming together. For example, the modern ecology, movement, systems theory. There's a lot with Eastern ideas about harmony of wholes. There's a lot of change going on, really building what I would say to embodied experience. The idea that existence in reality is a shared relational phenomenon. We are not autonomous agents as the British philosophy Enlightenment suggested we never were. That all of life is an experiential relationship with the other, that we are a participatory creature in a participatory existence in a participatory universe. And of course that brings together some interesting ideas for east and West. And it gives a frame of reference for how we rethink basic ideas like freedom, equality and democracy in the modern era, since we put such a high premium on autonomy and individuality. Freedom was the ability to be autonomous and mobile. That's why we love the automobile, autonomous and mobile. It gives us a sense of being an island to ourselves. But a younger generation believes in quality of life is starting to say, well, freedom means the full optimization of one's life. The full optimization of one's life is met by the deep, the depth of one's relationships and experiences with the other. Therefore, freedom is measured by the quality of community, not the ability to be excluded, but the ability to be included. Different idea of freedom. It changes our idea of equality. Equality is not just the ability to have market mechanisms to assure our property or a political mechanism to shoot our vote. Real democracy is empathy. It's when one empathizes with another, all the distinctions go because one actually feels the other exactly as if they're oneself. That's the ultimate democracy. Let's rethink political theory based on an empathic frame of reference. Show me an empathic civilization, I'll show you a more democratic civilization. Show me an authoritarian, patriarchal civilization, I'll show you a less empathy approach to nature. So a lot of these ideas about mapping across the disciplines, I think we're beginning to sense that biosphere consciousness. Biosphere consciousness is a completely indebted, interrelated ecological network frame of reference. What Vernadsky did, the Russian chrome biosphere process, and then others like Lovelock here and Margolis and others, they're starting to let us know that the geochemical and living processes are completely, completely synergistic, operate with each other to create a homeostatic community called the biosphere, where we're locked in. And so we need to create a climax global economy that can live in a biosphere community. That's the beginning of the new map. So when the kids in the school learn that everything they do has a carbon footprint that affects everything else. That's the revolution.
- [56:46]
C
Hi, thank you very much. That was very interesting. I wanted to ask you, you were talking about revolution, energy and communications. It seems that we're focusing a lot of the debates today around clean tech. What about agriculture? What about ecosystems? Because lots of people are saying maybe we are already past the tipping point or maybe we are very close to it. It's going to manifest in shortage of food, supply of clean water. What about a more distributed agriculture where we can restore ecosystems with natural methods, with microbiology, with agroforestry. What about decentralizing this agriculture while they are making us believe that we need the chemicals and the engineered seeds that two or three companies are producing?
- [57:32]
B
The reason I first indicated reminder, I was just in Italy with Carlo Petrini two weeks ago, the slow food movement. And he's come on my global team now. Here's Carlo Petrini together with era, the major development firms on our team in London, Adrian Smith, Gordon Gill out of Chicago, that does Nasdar, IBM and Cisco. He's from, he's on the team with Kyle Katrina.
- [57:53]
A
Why?
- [57:54]
B
Exactly what you're saying. An ecological protein starts with agriculture. We need organic based, sustainable, distributed agriculture. We need new relationships between, between farm and communities. So in Rome, as we lay out the master plan, we see Rome. Now this is being done for the mayor as a biosphere park. If you know Rome, there's an outer level of the old agricultural area that's been in decline really for centuries. A center circle which is industrial, commercial and the inner residential historical core. We're redoing the outer circle. It's going to have arboretums, germplasm preservation, embedded energy parks, slow food agriculture so that it becomes the life force, the baseline life force to feed Rome. Nice high tech, state of the art, sustainable, distributed. And of course, I think we should start with what Professor Picciari, who won the Nobel Prize for chair of the climate panel report, they said, what's the first thing everyone should do if they want to deal with climate change? He didn't say turn off the electricity. He didn't say get the Prius. He said, he said stop eating hamburgers. Meat production, because I think what we're beginning to see is not just, it's number two, it may be number one, our agricultural processes, not just with CO2, methane, nitrous oxide. It may be edging up to be the big elephant in the room. And the fact that we're not talking about our agriculture is absurd. How do we feed 6 billion people or 9 billion people when one third of all the food that we grow today is one third? And we're going to double meat production in 30 years, meaning 2/3 of all available land is going to go to feed grain for animals. So a handful of people like us can be high up on the food chain with grain fed meats while the rest of the human race has no access to accessible land. We've got to rethink agriculture. And so I'm glad you raised that. We need a distributed, ecological sustainable agriculture that is in tandem with the dynamics of the ecosystems that existed in the past year at large. It's not complicated. This isn't rocket science. And this doesn't take us back to the 1500s, it takes us into the 22nd century with state of the art genetics. We don't have to use GMO to be in state of the art genetics. Let me give you one example of that. As some of you know, I've been opposed to GMO, started this opposition back in the early 80s, but I'm not opposed to, to genetics. There's a new generation of genetic research which is moving beyond gmo. It's called marker assisted selection, where instead of engineering genes between species which creates all sorts of environmental possible problems. The marker assisted selection allows you to take a species like asparagus and know all the genes and all the rock varieties so you can more efficiently cross breed within a species. No gene splicing. And with more efficient cross feeding, using state of the art genetic science, we can create a more sustainable organic agriculture. The interesting thing, all the major life science companies have begun to give up GMO and they're moving to mark resistant selection because the first doesn't work well, the second, because it goes back to natural principles of how it works in evolution, works better. So you don't just say no to something, you have to ask and pick and choose. And being for the future means that there are other approaches to science and technology that can get us to where we want to go. It isn't going back to some romantic vision of a thousand years ago. It's going back, going forward to an ecological vision for a 22nd century civilization.
- [61:20]
A
I think one more question and after that you might be signing books and possibly individual questions. But after this question we will conclude.
- [61:31]
D
Jo, thank you.
- [61:34]
B
I'm an urban planner.
- [61:36]
D
It's quite fascinating all the strands that you, that you wrote together.
- [61:41]
B
It'S almost.
- [61:42]
D
Like a technological rollout of suppose. Do you have a sense of how much of the existing embedded infrastructure that in effect we're stuck with through design paradigms, development patterns that have been predominant in fossil fuel age and let's say substantially advanced over the past 60, 70 years, how much of that can be reused or retrofitted versus having to tear it all down and start over. And I think that I'm assuming that speaks partly to your comment about we're racing against time. So in fact how quickly can we make the stress.
- [62:21]
B
This is exactly what, this is the exact difficulty we're having as we're going in with our global teams and laying out these master plans, these 30 year master plans. This is extremely difficult. Even though we have the best urban development teams in the world, the best companies, we know how difficult this is. When I want to and I'm not just saying difficult. This is really difficult. You hear about all this green this and green that. I can tell you how little is going on because our companies and my team are the companies doing this. And glockers it's really very hard. If you get an infrastructure like and by the way, we open source. If you want to see our San Antonio plan, you can open source it. We have A group of 50 major architectural firms that are doing urban planning. You'll know most of These folks, you can open source it and see the difficulties and the challenges. Rome is particularly difficult because it's an historic city and it's very, very dense. And there's very little leeway you can have on changing circumstances, some of the history of it. We had the same thing when we just did a little monitoring. And so the difficult task is the existing infrastructure. It's easier to get to the new buildings because we can create positive power. Now with the return on investment less than four years, five years, we can do it. It's the existing infrastructure that's difficult. Having said this, what is amazing is how fast the science has moved into Moore's Law here, renewable energies. In the new architecture, we're doubling the knowledge and half of the cost every 18 months. We're beginning being able to use thin film now on the roof, so we can now put solar collectors embedded right into the structure of the buildings. We're now beginning to use kinetic energy. I'll give you a little hint of what we're looking at. Places like the Coliseum, kinetic energy. People walking in the energy collector will actually be able to send power back to the grid. There's a lot of this technology that is developing very quickly. It is very, very difficult that with own infrastructure, but we think we can do it. And we're laying out financial plans for cities, regions and countries based on that opportunity. What we have to get is a good playing field because the old energies have all the damn subsidies, even though they're matured, sunsetting and on life support, the new energies get a little bit of feed in terrorists, and that's about it. So this is a political movement. One can be empathic and still be tough. Empathic means understanding our common solidarity and also being taught so that we can make sure that we develop an impacted civilization that works for everyone. All right, so infrastructure is very difficult. You wanted to have a last say.
- [64:47]
C
I wanted to ask you a more emphatic question. How did you get an inspiration for your book?
- [64:56]
B
And how did you get the idea about the evolution of. Well, it shows you what happens when you get really old. You can't remember anything. And that's actually somewhat saving grace. But no, this actually happened. One of my young staffers reminded me that in my book Entropy in 1980, I spent a lot of time on empathy. I haven't even remembered 30 years ago, honestly. But if you look through the books, I've been wrestling with these ideas, but I didn't quite. I didn't understand the empathy entropy paradox until about six years Five, six years, and I don't know what had happened. It wasn't epiphany, but when I said, you know, this is really the problem, and when you say it, it's so damn obvious, isn't it? It's just so obvious when you say it. The communication, energy came together slowly. When I was writing the Hydrogen Society, I realized it's energy and communications coming together. I dealt with them separately. Energy historians just deal with energy. Communication historians like Worth and McLuhan and Harold Ennis just deal with communication. But when you see how they go together, it's something like, well, how do we not get it? A lot of it has to do, and I'm sure you'll appreciate this. We specialize in academia. We don't cross the disciplines. So sometimes we don't see connections that are pretty obvious. So in my sense, is that what I'm thinking in this book? Dr. Reyer's thinking in this book? Others are thinking about these same things at the same time. It is a collective, conscious emergence. So I hope what I did is justice to what a lot of folks around the world are starting to frame. It's particularly important that the PhD and the MA students here really, really take this up. All we're able to do is get a little bit of a kind of a rough roadmap here. But here's a generation that grew up on the Internet. You're growing up on distributed communities, communication learners. You can take this so much further. It's much more difficult for someone at my age to deal with this. So what I'm saying is, read the book, go from it, work with your scholars and peers. And LSE has been a hotbed of social activism for a long time. Really, a long time should be a hotbed to create a new conversation about getting us to an empathic civilization and finding the roadmap for us to make it happen.
- [67:10]
D
Thank you, everyone.