R.K.: Well I don't know if you have read, I've done a whole bunch of series on psychopaths and the like, I interviewed Daniel Quinn last year and he speculated that one of the elements in the onset of civilization was having a surplus and then having police to defend and protect it.
K.F.: Yeah it's certainly one of the main attributes of civilization. Surplus or storage of surplus is one of the five key attributes of civilization. It's very difficult to surmise exactly what order it came in. The surplus may have come later when people decided that they wanted to store, when that surplus may have been necessary when people stopped moving so I'm not one hundred percent sure about it, there is, funnily enough I've written about this in the last couple of days, it's not efficient to be moving and have a surplus, it's not efficient to be moving and taking all your stuff with you, it uses energy so surplus only existed when people stopped moving.
Yeah we don't necessarily want to keep moving around and I don't think we can with anything like the number of people we've got on this planet or where would we go? But it's a careful balancing act but I don't think civilization came about because of surplus, I think surplus happened very soon afterwards because we just stopped and said what do we need if we want to stay where we are and grow.
Something else happened in certain people's brains before that.
R.K.: Well I think that we, what Quinn was getting at was part of it was staying in the same place, taking possession of land, and then protecting the land and the surplus. And creation of a police force or an army to protect both of those things.
K.F.: Yes.
R.K.: I think there is craziness involved. I really do. When I look at billionaires, which I have said we should get rid of, I don't think billionaires should exist on this planet, and it's not that hard to stop them from existing, you just have to take away what they have which puts libertarians into apoplectic state, I consider that a form of Munchausen by Proxy.
K.F.: I don't have much time for libertarians really. This is an awful one attitude again, yeah get rid of government, great, but don't try and attain as much wealth or land as you possibly can because you're just again falling into the trap of civilization. You're just repeating the same errors. That's not a sustainable way of living in any way. All the times you take, you gain something and someone else loses. This is what people need to understand.
All the time we've got consumer goods, then some poor bugger at the other side of the world has had to make that and suffer for that so that's a mindset that we have got to get rid of straight away.
R.K.: Yes. So I had notes from the book and I wanted to kind of just throw some concepts at you for you to just, discuss briefly, okay? Subvertising as a replacement for advertising. What is it?
K.F.: Subvertising, it is simply a play on words. It's giving the message that the advertisers don't want you to get. So it's potentially very powerful thing and if you look up subvertising gallery, I used to be quite prolific at producing these subverts, you'll find them online, they're a lot of fun to make, and they're a lot of fun to do.
R.K.: What's an example?
K.F.: One example is something I took, the Ford logo, this elegant italic logo and I turned it into the word "Fooled" as in you've been fooled. Surprisingly easy to do actually. It's getting that subvert out there. That's the tricky bit. If you can get people to believe that's what, that's the real thing, then suddenly the advertisers are on the back foot and they are worried.
R.K.: Okay, dominant culture. You talk about dominant culture. What's that?
K.F.: The dominant culture is essentially the culture that controls the most people. So we have our dominant culture on Earth is industrial civilization. Before industrial civilization there wasn't really a dominant culture. It didn't control the majority of people on Earth so it is about control essentially.
R.K.: Okay, you talk about barter and capitalism and consumer goods and profit. Discuss that a bit?
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