Adbusters co-founder and Occupy Wall Street protagonist Kalle Lasn is hoping his new book, Meme Wars, will ultimately facilitate the occupation of the worlds financial institutions, corporations, and governments from within. Its a lofty goal and a long game, but as Lasn so eloquently puts it: If we don't start fighting for a different kind of future then we're not going to have a future.
Over the course of Meme Wars 400+ pages, Lasn challenges students in the economics departments of learning institutions around the globe to rise up, reeducate their professors, and demand they cast aside the failed tenets of orthodox economics. He also sets forth a more holistic curriculum which takes into account the psychological and environmental costs of doing business and redefines the concept of wealth to include mental and ecological health.
We spoke with Lasn, who was born in Estonia but is Vancouver based, by phone.
Nicole Powers: The book is absolutely beautiful, but why call it Meme Wars?
Kalle Lasn: Originally the title that we were going to use was Occupy Econ 101 and then somebody suggested just Occupy 101 as being sort of almost there but somehow intriguing. But then everybody was coming out with books about Occupy and all of a sudden there was a feeling in our office that the word occupy wasn't charged up anymore. It was being overused. And then, in my book Culture Jam 10 years ago, I started using the words meme wars and meme warriors and meme warfare and this whole idea that the battle for the future will be a kind of ideological battle, a war of ideas, and we thought that seeing as the book was basically asking the students to rise up and have a war of ideas with their professors, we thought that Meme Wars was just a perfect title.
NP: In popular culture, the concept of memes has been reduced to funny images and/or phrases that are passed around the internet. Can you tell me what the word meme means to you?
KL: First of all we called ourselves culture jammers and then after that we started trying to somehow build on that and we thought that meme warfare was a perfect way to describe what activists need to do. I must admit I've always found this idea of a meme to be fascinating, this idea that in the physical environment we have genes and genes determine physically the human evolution. But then I like the idea that the other side of the coin is memes, and human evolution is also determined by the kind of memes that propagate through our culture. I like the idea of the physical and the mental somehow being the two cutting edges of human evolution.
NP: So to you, a meme is a mental gene, an idea that will propagate.
NP: Yes, yes, I think that it's a fascinating idea to realize that human evolution isn't all about the best genes winning and being the cutting edge of human evolution. But that somehow, especially in this age we're in now, this Internet age, the idea that the future of humanity will be decided by the memes that we propagate and how well we do that and by who wins the various clashes of ideas, for me that is a fascinating way for activists to think about what the hell they're doing.
NP: The earlier title, Occupy Econ 101, does make sense because in the book you're specifically exploring how economics is taught and how the ideas of neoclassical economics currently prevail. Can you explain what you mean by neoclassical economics?
KL: Well neoclassic economics is a paradigm of how our national economics and the global economy works. It's something that was pioneered by the Chicago School and by other economists with a very mathematical, very rational tradition. They have basically turned economics into a mathematically driven microeconomics and macroeconomics. And they have posited that the center of economics, this guy, this parody of a human being called the rational utility maximizer who runs around, you know, maximizing his or her positions in the marketplace. Neoclassic economics is basically the ruling, the dominant paradigm in pretty well all the universities around the world. That's what the current students of economics are taught. This is the prevailing paradigm in the think tanks around the world, the prevailing paradigm of the economic policymakers who advise our government, and that of course includes the people at the World Bank and IMF and everything else. So basically we have this one mathematically driven way of looking at the global economy.
And what this book, Meme Wars, is suggesting is that for years now there have been heterodox economists of all stripes feminist economists and ecological economists and behavioral economists and these people have been sniping at the heels of this neoclassical paradigm now for years and years and years, maybe 30, 40 years. But then when the financial meltdown happened four years ago, all of a sudden it became crystal clear that these neoclassical economists don't know what the hell they're up to. Not even 1 in 100, perhaps not even 1 in 1,000 of neoclassical economists were able to predict that this meltdown was coming and that included all the big luminaries, the professors and the Lawrence Summers. None of them were able to predict it. So this book was written in a way [to say] that this is the opportunity now, a few years after the meltdown, when it's quite obvious that the old paradigm is in retreat and doesnt really know what its up to anymore, now it's finally time for these heterodox economists to suddenly rise to the top and finally grab those old school practitioners by the scruffs of their necks and then just throw them out of power and shift the paradigm.
NP: You talk about how economics is presented as a science when it's not even anything approaching that. I remember as a kid when I started economics, one of the first things that you get taught are the laws of supply and demand. Right there I knew something was fishy. Prices aren't set according to supply and demand; they're set according to what people think is the maximum that they can get away with charging.
KL: I think it's really interesting you said that because looking at what weve just described and then especially what happened after the meltdown, the common man in the street, we know that there's something fishy about the current economic paradigm. We know that these economists don't know what the hell they're doing, that they don't know how to measure progress and they don't really know how the market works and all the rest of it. Yet somehow these guys are hanging in there, even four years after the meltdown. The same economics are still being taught in Econ 101 class and at the IMF and World Bank, and the policymakers all around the world are still doing that. The New York Times business pages are still saying that Growth is God and when you turn on the business news on TV they keep on pushing the same old axioms of neoclassical economics. So this is a wonderful opportunity for Occupiers and for activists all around the world to finally say the best thing that we can do, this one big demand that we were all looking for during the height of the Occupy movement, this one demand could well be the shifting of the global economic paradigm.
NP: In the book you reference Evolutionary Economist Kenneth E. Boulding and his quote: "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." These neoclassical economists have chosen to ignore a very self-evident truth, that you cant have unlimited growth in a world with limited resources, and yet these are the people that have been running our world and steering it into the financial abyss.
KL: That's right, yeah, this tradition has very deep roots. Neoclassical economics was actually born 30, 40, maybe even 50 years ago. At the timeeverybody wanted to turn their science whether it was psychology or sociology or economics everybody wanted it to be a science like physics. There was kind of a physics envy going on. What we have right now, right across many disciplines including of course economics and especially philosophy I think philosophy and economics really stand out as the two sciences that have been totally corrupted by the over use of this physics envy is this idea that we have to turn our discipline into this rigorous scientific enterprise that has equations and uses mathematics. If we can do that, then we will be important people and then we will know how to run the world. That attitude has driven the world against the wall here, because these crazy mathematically driven mad men, they don't know how to measure progress. If you ask a professor how you measure progress, professors won't be able to answer that. They'll babble on about GDP and tie themselves all up into knots explaining how they're trying to measure progress.
There's never been a better moment for students in universities all around the world tostart turning their economics departments into meme war zones. If we can do that, and if we can start killing off some of the crazy axioms of neoclassical economics, this idea that Growth is God and all the rest of it, if we can do that, then I think we actually have a crack at coming up with a new crop of economists who will then inhabit the think tanks of the future. I think the shifting in the economic paradigm is actually the only realistic thing that I can think of that could help us rethink the future and move towards a sane, sustainable future. I can't think of anything else that could actually work.
NP: This book is very specifically aimed at students, and asks them to re-educate their teachers, because there's such a small group of prestigious schools that set the tone and the syllabus for institutions around the world, and the people that come from these institutions are the people that are setting global economic policy. Could you talk a little bit about that?
KL: If you look back at the history of scientific revolutions then you'll find out that the way that things are supposed to happen is that these hallowed scientists, these Nobel Prize winners and these great men who have come up with economic paradigms and other scientific paradigms in all the disciplines, you think that if they are then presented with some anomalies like things aren't working, their theories are not predicting things in the proper way, then you expect these people to say, okay, so none of us were able to predict this meltdown coming, so what's wrong with our science? Let's tweak our science or let's rethink our science and rethink some of our axioms and come up with a new way of looking at the economics which is more powerful and does a better job. But that's not the way that scientific revolutions have ever happened. If you go back to the most famous of all scientific revolutions, the one that happened many hundreds of years ago when people like Galileo first started pointing out that the sun and the rest of the planets don't go around the Earth but actually it's the Earth that's going around the sun, moving the center of the universe from us to some other place, that was a huge, new big way of thinking about the universe.
NP: And a heretical one.
KL: And heretical, and some of the people who came up with those ideas, they were ostracized and the church didn't like it. It took years and years after that for them to finally shift the paradigm, and I think the same thing is necessary in the science of economics. Because those professors, they have tenure, their whole lives are invested in the old paradigm. All the papers they've written and all the nice checks they get and their salaries and all the rest of it, especially tenure, they have hung their lives on the old paradigm and they're not going to easily give up that old paradigm.
In our brainstorming sessions here at Adbusters, the only way we could think of shifting the paradigm would be to use the power of students because students have a long history of challenging their leaders and being the original catalysts for revolutions and huge, big shifts that causes and societies go throughThey know, young people today are basically inheriting a future that doesn't compute. The core impulse behind the Occupy movement was this feeling among hundreds of millions of young people around the world that the future doesn't compute and we have to stand up and fight for a different kind of a future. But we never quite figured out exactly what to do about it, besides talking to each other and somehow inspiring the world. But now I think this idea of shifting the global economic paradigm, this is a wonderful project to cue into. If we can shift that paradigm it actually would make a huge, huge difference.
I can imagine students at some of the prestigious universities like Harvard and Oxford and Cambridge and the University of Paris and like half a dozen of the really prestigious schools of economics around the world, if the students there started creating a raucous and suddenly all the students in the universities around the world got wind of the fact that there's something happening within our profession, you know, in the prestigious schools the students are all rising upAnd there was a bit of an uprising there during Occupy last year when Harvard students walked out of their professors' classes and started occupying Harvard University. I can see a small revolt at half a dozen prestigious universities suddenly blowing up into hundreds of universities around the world. Then the hundreds of universities around the world, when the world gets wind of the fact that economic students all around the world are rising up in revolt against their professors, then this is something that could infect the IMF and the World Bank and policy makers everywhere, and all of a sudden this mad paradigm could start shifting before our eyesFor me, personally, I've been trying to pull off this paradigm shift for a long, long time. Even 20 years ago I remember making a film once about the global economy and calling for a paradigm shift. So when the Harvard students [protested], that was the one Occupation that really fired me up, even more than Zuccotti Park.
NP: I guess the root of the problem is that economics is being presented as a hard science, when in essence it shouldn't be an abstract study of money, but a study of money and human behavior. But these institutions have managed to take the humanity out of economics which is completely missing the point.
KL: There's all kinds of little points of course that the book makes, but the two or three main points are that first of all, instead of this neoclassical economics we should perhaps call it bionomics. Because the center of economics should be in nature somehow, in the actual environment, and we should start measuring the ecological cost of our way of doing business. We should be asking our professors, Mr. Professor, how do you incorporate climate change into the neoclassical model? Then watch him try to answer that question. If an eco system collapses or if the coral reefs suddenly start eroding away, how do you measure the negative side of our way of doing business? Once you start asking questions like that, then all of a sudden the neoclassical economics starts to shift toward this bionomic model.
The other thing that's fundamentally wrong with the current paradigm is that, as I said earlier, they have this rational utility maximizer. It's a sort of a horrible parody of what the real human beings are like. There needs to be a kind of merging of psychology and economicsI coined the phrase psychonomics as being a word that explains that at the heart of economics is not just nature but it's also human nature.
Then the third big idea in the book I think is this idea that at the moment we have a global marketplace, but the prices of the products in that marketplace do not tell the ecological truth. You buy a car for $30,000 and you fill it up with gasoline at whatever it is a gallon, and those costs do not account for the tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage that you do to the planet with your car in terms of climate change and all the other bad things that are happening. So the idea is to take the current dysfunctional marketplace where the prices are all wrong and to come up with a true cost global market regime in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth. And the real task of economists, instead of pontificating about micro and macro economics and talking about Growth is God et cetera, the real job of economists is to measure what is the real cost of the products that we buy and then to start pushing the world in a direction of a true cost marketplace. If we had a true cost marketplace in the worldthen we wouldn't be having the problems that we're having right now.
NP: I remember I interviewed John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, and we were talking about vegetarianism. He said, for him, it wasnt an issue of eating meat, or not, as the case may be, but that everyones eating habits would be better moderated if the price of a chicken reflected the fact that an animal had to die, and reflected the true cost of it without subsidies. Then the cost would be higher, we'd think more about eating meat, and therefore we'd naturally eat less of it and we'd be healthier as a society. It is weird the way subsidies have skewed the price of food, that a hamburger is cheaper than a loaf of bread. The costs don't make sense
KL: Well, his sentiment is right on the button, but I think it goes a little bit deeper. At the moment because our economics is so fundamentally wrong, when you buy that 99 cent hamburger it doesn't really include the fact that maybe 100 gallons of water were used to make that hamburger for you and it doesnt include the ecological damage that was caused by growing the beef and so on. All it really includes is the minimum cost the corporation that made the hamburger was able to get away with. And the negative side of the equation, that's somehow borne by some ecosystem in Peru where they were grazing the cows or whatever. So yes, there is something so obviously wrong. I mean to realize that just about everything you buy whether it's a Mars bar that you buy tomorrow or it's filling up your car with gasoline or whether it's a hamburger that you buy at McDonalds almost every damn thing that you buy in the global marketplace puts the planet deeper into a hole.
Now we've got to the point where economists are still championing the current marketplace, trying to convince us that the marketplace is really the only way to run an economy, and if that marketplace is fundamentally flawed and it's driving the human experiment of ours on planet Earth into the wall I mean I can't think of a better reason for young people to stand up and fight against these idiots who are saying that.
NP: One of the other ideas that you explore in the book is the concept of fiscal health versus cultural health. We're so focused on the fiscal health rather than the cultural health, yet when you consider it's a society's confidence in their currency that ultimately sets its value, it actually makes more sense to deal with the cultural health first, because then the fiscal health will follow. But we're taking the opposite approach to that. You see that with Greece where were destroying a culture rather than raising it up.
KL: This is a really fascinating concept, this idea that for example, we have a one trillion dollar a year advertising industry worldwideI call it the mind-fuck industry. It's basically an industry that psychologically, emotionally gets you to do things that you wouldn't necessarily do. And it's one of the contributing causes to this epidemic of mood disorders and anxiety attacks and depressions that so many of us are living through, especially in the developed first world. It's not just the seas are rising and that the coral is dying. That's one of the externalities of our way of doing business. But there are also psychological costs to the kind of system that we have right now.
I find it especially interesting to look at the debate that's going on right now in the United States of America about whether America is in decline or not. There's people standing up and saying we're in a bit of a slump here, we're caught in a bit of a problem but we can fix it by putting some more stimulus in the economy. Some people are saying we need to improve our education system or we need to improve our infrastructure, and there's all kinds of ideas that economists are coming up with for what needs to be done to reverse America's decline. But perhaps the real cause, the real root cause of America's decline is the fact that the people aren't good enough anymore, that the people have been turned into fat pigs. Many of them, you know 30, 40 percent of them are obese, and there's a huge epidemic of mental illness, and 10 percent of high school students are on Ritalin, and maybe the root cause of America's decline is that America isn't producing good human beings anymore.
NP: Do you think that we've got the leadership that we deserve because of the kind of human beings that we've become?
KL: Well I wouldn't quite put it that way. I think that psychologically, culturally, America has lost her way. And not just America. I don't think there's a huge difference between Canada and America or Japan and America. Basically the kind of capitalism that we've been given since the Second World War has produced the process that we've all been living through for the last 50, 60 years, and this is the tail end of it
50 years ago, when I was a young man, then America was the most wonderful place on Earth. Everybody wanted to emulate America and follow the American dream and American people. I remember meeting them in Germany when I was there after the Second World War and getting my Hershey bars from the GIs there and what wonderful young guys they were. And later on in Australia, when the big military ships would arrive in Sidney and the younger people would come off, what wonderful human beings they were. Then, 50, 60 years later to suddenly look at what's happened, it is really sad to see.
You can't say we get the leaders we deserve. It's just we're living the wrong process and the huge part of the blame I think goes to the economists. These are the people that basically egged us onto this system that we're living through now, and that system really isn't working. We're all caught in a process that isn't working. We're all part of a doomsday machine I call it. The economists have created the process. It's like a machine that keeps on churning on, and it's like a doomsday machine. We're all caught in it and we're all getting a little crazy and fat and nobody quite knows what to do. And this Meme Wars book says, here's something we can do. We can basically shift the paradigm. We can shift the theoretical foundations of economic science and if we do that then we can start building a new process.
NP: What I fear is that the thinking of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics is so institutionalized within our system now, within institutions like the Fed where the people who run them are beyond elected officials they stay in power regardless of whom we elect that the system has become intrinsically intransigent. Also, one of the golden rules of change is that it only happens when it becomes the easier option. So the question then becomes: how bad do things have to get? I don't think even the economic crash of 2008 was bad enough to affect true radical change.
KL: Yeah, yeah, I have exactly the same fear, even though it would be wonderful if we could all somehow wake up and if the students could all see the light, and then this process that I described earlier where a few students in some of the prestigious universities catalyzed something which then takes over the world. This is a beautiful, non-violent scenario that would be wonderful if it happened. And I think it is happening and will happen to some small degree. But, as you say, it isn't just professors that need to be grabbed by the scruffs of their necks and thrown out of parties, it's the rest of the process as well.
Like in America you have this two-party system that just isn't working, no matter who you are. The election you just had is like a Coca-Cola / Pepsi-Cola election where which whatever you drink it tastes the same. So there's lots of other things to do there. I have the same feeling as you, that it's going to take something 10 times, maybe 100 times bigger than what happened in 2008.
I actually, in my most darker apocalyptic moments, can see this human experiment of ours on planet earth really hitting the wall and all these financial and ecological and political crises all sort of feeding off each other and creating a kind of a crash that the world will not recover from for not just 10 years or maybe not even 50 years, but maybe 100, maybe 1,000 years. Maybe after the crash we'll wake up to the fact that we've sort of really done the planet in and then after that we'll all start fighting for what's left of the water and the minerals. There's going to be this last ditch fight for what's left of the natural resources of the world and we'll spiral into what I call nightfall.
NP: An economic and ecological Dark Age?
KL: Yeah, it's like a 1,000 year Dark Age that we're at the brink of right now. I know that sounds crazy and nobody wants to hear that, but I believe that we are at the brink of a 1,000 year Dark Age and unless we stand up viscerally and powerfully and with civil disobedience and everything we've got, if we don't start fighting for a different kind of future then we're not going to have a future.
NP: I absolutely agree with you. As an activist and an Occupier, however much effort I put into it, it still feels like I'm just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
KL: Yeah, yeah. But then again, I think this is exactly what we on the political left have to overcomeWhen I was a young guy in University in Australia back in the 1960s, then the political left was the coolest thing around. We had all the ideas and we had the empathy and we really believed that we knew how to live and we knew how the world should be run. And since then we've sort of lost it pretty badly. For the last 20 years of running Adbusters magazine we've basically been saying that we have to jump over the dead body of the old left if we're going to make any kind of progress. And what you just said there reminded me of that, because there's something about the political left that's so cynical. We don't actually believe anymore that we can succeed. Even this Occupy movement which felt so euphoric and wonderful, all of a sudden people who slept in Zuccotti Park and the people who were part of the thousand occupations that were happening all around, many of them are shaking their heads now and wondering what the hell happened. There is some sort of a leap of faith that needs to happen, and I think that the leap of faith should be something a little bit more crunchy than what we had going last year. It wasn't enough just to hug each other and to sleep together in the parks and have feisty GAs, now we actually have to say what is our one demand? That is the question that we have to answer and the Meme Wars book is one attempt to answer that question. I think that having a meme war in the economics departments of universities all around the world and demanding a paradigm shift, that should be our demand
NP: This book is rather elite in the sense that its very much aimed at economics students in the educational institutions around the world. But one of the other campaigns that you have championed is Buy Nothing Day, which functions at the other end of the economic spectrum. I've always equated this with the Arthur Miller play After The Fall, in which he explores the American obsession with satisfaction. You have a great statistic in your book where you talk about how in 2011 major media advertising spending per capita was $498 in the US, $22 in China, and $67 worldwide. We have a whole industry that's aimed at making us feel dissatisfied. They market at us to make us feel inadequate and to create need. It's no wonder that we're a very mentally unhealthy society.
KL: Well that's just one of the dimensions. I think that Buy Nothing Day has always had an ecological dimension, this realization that the more you buy, the more the planet dies and that living lightly on the planet and not having this five-planet lifestyle like most of us have in North America, that that's a horribly unethical way to live. Then there's the psychological dimension, this idea that if you actually participate in a powerful way in consumer culture then you're actually making yourself mentally sick. This pursuit of satisfaction is actually a road to mental illness. You become one of the statistics of this epidemic of mental illness that's sweeping the planet right now. Then there's the political dimension, this idea that if we, the rich one billion people on the planet, keep on consuming three-quarters of the global pie, and if we leave just a quarter of the global pie to the rest of the six billion people on the planet, then don't be surprised if some of them get very angry at us and turn into terrorists and come after us. So I think that Buy Nothing Day gets to the heart of our ecological crises, of our psychological crises, and also of our political crises. Not only that, but if you never tried it before, then it's a wonderful experience to have for people who've never lived 24 hours without consuming, who have never experienced this consumer fast.
But it troubled me that you said this book is for the eliteIt's not elitist at all. Sure we need students at universities who may be somewhat elitist to fight back, but we also need the Occupiers to let off stink bombs in front of Goldman Sacks and we need to do something to the ATM's [in one Tactical Briefing, Adbusters suggested activists tape prank Out of Order signs to ATMs to deter customers from using them to prevent banks from making money off their fees], and I think that when it comes to talking back against these economic leaders, the people who are running the global economic shift, we should be fighting back on all fronts. So I'm hoping that this book isn't just talking to the students, but somehow the message spills over and that all of us start fighting back against the system that simply doesn't compute.
NP: Well if we don't start fighting back, then the world will anyway. I mean, you spoke briefly in our conversation about this five-world idea -- can you talk a little more about that five planet concept?
KL: Yeah. If everybody on the planet lived like we live in North America, then we would need five planets. Because there are seven billion people on the planet and at the moment it's just one billion of us who are living high on the hog so to speak. We're the five planet lifestyle people. So, in a way, I think that there's some sort of a shaming that has to go on. Buy Nothing Day is a perfect time to ask: How much is enough? How much is enough for me? How much is enough for my family? How much is enough for my city? How much is enough for this country that I live in? Isn't there something sort of unethical about me having a five-planet lifestyle and saying what President Bush said many years ago that the American way of life is not negotiable. Well Buy Nothing Day is a day when you wake up to the fact that yeah, it is negotiable, this American way of life is negotiable, and it has to be renegotiated.
NP: But part of the problem is were preaching to the converted. Historically what changes have voluntarily been instigated by society en mass? Change is forced on a society when there's no other option?
KL: Hold on a second, you know, I think that soft part is doable. I've done Buy Nothing Day now for 22 years in a row and I think it's made some sort of a difference. It's got a lot of people thinking about the dark side of consumerism et cetera. But when a culture starts to heave, then sure, it is driven by the fact that something is terribly wrong. Everybody knows that there's something terribly wrong right now...
I do believe that we do have a crack at the opposite, the other side of nightfall. And the other side of nightfall is singularity. It's singularity or nightfall that's the choice that we all face. And singularity is exactly this idea that people wake up, that they can't live a five-planet lifestyle. Some people will wake up doing Buy Nothing Day, some people will wake up doing some occupations, some professors will wake up when the students go viscerally after them and then shame them in front of the whole university. Bit by bit by bit I think it is possible for global culture to heave into a new orbit. So, yeah, let's not be too cynical. You know that famous Chinese saying that in dangerous times it's also opportunistic times that's the way I see it right now. I fear that we may descend into nightfall, but I still believe in singularity.
NP: Well I very much hope that you are right. I really do.
KL: Well, I'm okay. I'm 70 years old, and if the really bad times come I probably won't see them. But you will, so you have to become the fighter.
NP: Yeah, I have a step-son and I worry about him. I can't imagine what his life is going to be like when he's 70.
KL: I think that's really part of this thing about the Occupy movement and the Indignados in Spain and the anarchists in Greece and all those media reformers in Mexico and the education reforming high school students in Chili right now and the Pussy Rioters in Russia and those hundreds of young people in protests that happen in China almost every day of the week. I think that hundreds of millions of young people around the world are waking up to the fact that something is terribly wrong and they are starting this global wave of youthful protest that Occupy was one part of. The next few years are going to be fascinating
My final thought is this; that I've lived 70 years on this planet and right now is the most pregnant moment in my lifetime for global revolution. There's never been a riper moment for global evolution than right now.
Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is published by Seven Stories.
Over the course of Meme Wars 400+ pages, Lasn challenges students in the economics departments of learning institutions around the globe to rise up, reeducate their professors, and demand they cast aside the failed tenets of orthodox economics. He also sets forth a more holistic curriculum which takes into account the psychological and environmental costs of doing business and redefines the concept of wealth to include mental and ecological health.
We spoke with Lasn, who was born in Estonia but is Vancouver based, by phone.
Nicole Powers: The book is absolutely beautiful, but why call it Meme Wars?
Kalle Lasn: Originally the title that we were going to use was Occupy Econ 101 and then somebody suggested just Occupy 101 as being sort of almost there but somehow intriguing. But then everybody was coming out with books about Occupy and all of a sudden there was a feeling in our office that the word occupy wasn't charged up anymore. It was being overused. And then, in my book Culture Jam 10 years ago, I started using the words meme wars and meme warriors and meme warfare and this whole idea that the battle for the future will be a kind of ideological battle, a war of ideas, and we thought that seeing as the book was basically asking the students to rise up and have a war of ideas with their professors, we thought that Meme Wars was just a perfect title.
NP: In popular culture, the concept of memes has been reduced to funny images and/or phrases that are passed around the internet. Can you tell me what the word meme means to you?
KL: First of all we called ourselves culture jammers and then after that we started trying to somehow build on that and we thought that meme warfare was a perfect way to describe what activists need to do. I must admit I've always found this idea of a meme to be fascinating, this idea that in the physical environment we have genes and genes determine physically the human evolution. But then I like the idea that the other side of the coin is memes, and human evolution is also determined by the kind of memes that propagate through our culture. I like the idea of the physical and the mental somehow being the two cutting edges of human evolution.
NP: So to you, a meme is a mental gene, an idea that will propagate.
NP: Yes, yes, I think that it's a fascinating idea to realize that human evolution isn't all about the best genes winning and being the cutting edge of human evolution. But that somehow, especially in this age we're in now, this Internet age, the idea that the future of humanity will be decided by the memes that we propagate and how well we do that and by who wins the various clashes of ideas, for me that is a fascinating way for activists to think about what the hell they're doing.
NP: The earlier title, Occupy Econ 101, does make sense because in the book you're specifically exploring how economics is taught and how the ideas of neoclassical economics currently prevail. Can you explain what you mean by neoclassical economics?
KL: Well neoclassic economics is a paradigm of how our national economics and the global economy works. It's something that was pioneered by the Chicago School and by other economists with a very mathematical, very rational tradition. They have basically turned economics into a mathematically driven microeconomics and macroeconomics. And they have posited that the center of economics, this guy, this parody of a human being called the rational utility maximizer who runs around, you know, maximizing his or her positions in the marketplace. Neoclassic economics is basically the ruling, the dominant paradigm in pretty well all the universities around the world. That's what the current students of economics are taught. This is the prevailing paradigm in the think tanks around the world, the prevailing paradigm of the economic policymakers who advise our government, and that of course includes the people at the World Bank and IMF and everything else. So basically we have this one mathematically driven way of looking at the global economy.
And what this book, Meme Wars, is suggesting is that for years now there have been heterodox economists of all stripes feminist economists and ecological economists and behavioral economists and these people have been sniping at the heels of this neoclassical paradigm now for years and years and years, maybe 30, 40 years. But then when the financial meltdown happened four years ago, all of a sudden it became crystal clear that these neoclassical economists don't know what the hell they're up to. Not even 1 in 100, perhaps not even 1 in 1,000 of neoclassical economists were able to predict that this meltdown was coming and that included all the big luminaries, the professors and the Lawrence Summers. None of them were able to predict it. So this book was written in a way [to say] that this is the opportunity now, a few years after the meltdown, when it's quite obvious that the old paradigm is in retreat and doesnt really know what its up to anymore, now it's finally time for these heterodox economists to suddenly rise to the top and finally grab those old school practitioners by the scruffs of their necks and then just throw them out of power and shift the paradigm.
NP: You talk about how economics is presented as a science when it's not even anything approaching that. I remember as a kid when I started economics, one of the first things that you get taught are the laws of supply and demand. Right there I knew something was fishy. Prices aren't set according to supply and demand; they're set according to what people think is the maximum that they can get away with charging.
KL: I think it's really interesting you said that because looking at what weve just described and then especially what happened after the meltdown, the common man in the street, we know that there's something fishy about the current economic paradigm. We know that these economists don't know what the hell they're doing, that they don't know how to measure progress and they don't really know how the market works and all the rest of it. Yet somehow these guys are hanging in there, even four years after the meltdown. The same economics are still being taught in Econ 101 class and at the IMF and World Bank, and the policymakers all around the world are still doing that. The New York Times business pages are still saying that Growth is God and when you turn on the business news on TV they keep on pushing the same old axioms of neoclassical economics. So this is a wonderful opportunity for Occupiers and for activists all around the world to finally say the best thing that we can do, this one big demand that we were all looking for during the height of the Occupy movement, this one demand could well be the shifting of the global economic paradigm.
NP: In the book you reference Evolutionary Economist Kenneth E. Boulding and his quote: "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." These neoclassical economists have chosen to ignore a very self-evident truth, that you cant have unlimited growth in a world with limited resources, and yet these are the people that have been running our world and steering it into the financial abyss.
KL: That's right, yeah, this tradition has very deep roots. Neoclassical economics was actually born 30, 40, maybe even 50 years ago. At the timeeverybody wanted to turn their science whether it was psychology or sociology or economics everybody wanted it to be a science like physics. There was kind of a physics envy going on. What we have right now, right across many disciplines including of course economics and especially philosophy I think philosophy and economics really stand out as the two sciences that have been totally corrupted by the over use of this physics envy is this idea that we have to turn our discipline into this rigorous scientific enterprise that has equations and uses mathematics. If we can do that, then we will be important people and then we will know how to run the world. That attitude has driven the world against the wall here, because these crazy mathematically driven mad men, they don't know how to measure progress. If you ask a professor how you measure progress, professors won't be able to answer that. They'll babble on about GDP and tie themselves all up into knots explaining how they're trying to measure progress.
There's never been a better moment for students in universities all around the world tostart turning their economics departments into meme war zones. If we can do that, and if we can start killing off some of the crazy axioms of neoclassical economics, this idea that Growth is God and all the rest of it, if we can do that, then I think we actually have a crack at coming up with a new crop of economists who will then inhabit the think tanks of the future. I think the shifting in the economic paradigm is actually the only realistic thing that I can think of that could help us rethink the future and move towards a sane, sustainable future. I can't think of anything else that could actually work.
NP: This book is very specifically aimed at students, and asks them to re-educate their teachers, because there's such a small group of prestigious schools that set the tone and the syllabus for institutions around the world, and the people that come from these institutions are the people that are setting global economic policy. Could you talk a little bit about that?
KL: If you look back at the history of scientific revolutions then you'll find out that the way that things are supposed to happen is that these hallowed scientists, these Nobel Prize winners and these great men who have come up with economic paradigms and other scientific paradigms in all the disciplines, you think that if they are then presented with some anomalies like things aren't working, their theories are not predicting things in the proper way, then you expect these people to say, okay, so none of us were able to predict this meltdown coming, so what's wrong with our science? Let's tweak our science or let's rethink our science and rethink some of our axioms and come up with a new way of looking at the economics which is more powerful and does a better job. But that's not the way that scientific revolutions have ever happened. If you go back to the most famous of all scientific revolutions, the one that happened many hundreds of years ago when people like Galileo first started pointing out that the sun and the rest of the planets don't go around the Earth but actually it's the Earth that's going around the sun, moving the center of the universe from us to some other place, that was a huge, new big way of thinking about the universe.
NP: And a heretical one.
KL: And heretical, and some of the people who came up with those ideas, they were ostracized and the church didn't like it. It took years and years after that for them to finally shift the paradigm, and I think the same thing is necessary in the science of economics. Because those professors, they have tenure, their whole lives are invested in the old paradigm. All the papers they've written and all the nice checks they get and their salaries and all the rest of it, especially tenure, they have hung their lives on the old paradigm and they're not going to easily give up that old paradigm.
In our brainstorming sessions here at Adbusters, the only way we could think of shifting the paradigm would be to use the power of students because students have a long history of challenging their leaders and being the original catalysts for revolutions and huge, big shifts that causes and societies go throughThey know, young people today are basically inheriting a future that doesn't compute. The core impulse behind the Occupy movement was this feeling among hundreds of millions of young people around the world that the future doesn't compute and we have to stand up and fight for a different kind of a future. But we never quite figured out exactly what to do about it, besides talking to each other and somehow inspiring the world. But now I think this idea of shifting the global economic paradigm, this is a wonderful project to cue into. If we can shift that paradigm it actually would make a huge, huge difference.
I can imagine students at some of the prestigious universities like Harvard and Oxford and Cambridge and the University of Paris and like half a dozen of the really prestigious schools of economics around the world, if the students there started creating a raucous and suddenly all the students in the universities around the world got wind of the fact that there's something happening within our profession, you know, in the prestigious schools the students are all rising upAnd there was a bit of an uprising there during Occupy last year when Harvard students walked out of their professors' classes and started occupying Harvard University. I can see a small revolt at half a dozen prestigious universities suddenly blowing up into hundreds of universities around the world. Then the hundreds of universities around the world, when the world gets wind of the fact that economic students all around the world are rising up in revolt against their professors, then this is something that could infect the IMF and the World Bank and policy makers everywhere, and all of a sudden this mad paradigm could start shifting before our eyesFor me, personally, I've been trying to pull off this paradigm shift for a long, long time. Even 20 years ago I remember making a film once about the global economy and calling for a paradigm shift. So when the Harvard students [protested], that was the one Occupation that really fired me up, even more than Zuccotti Park.
NP: I guess the root of the problem is that economics is being presented as a hard science, when in essence it shouldn't be an abstract study of money, but a study of money and human behavior. But these institutions have managed to take the humanity out of economics which is completely missing the point.
KL: There's all kinds of little points of course that the book makes, but the two or three main points are that first of all, instead of this neoclassical economics we should perhaps call it bionomics. Because the center of economics should be in nature somehow, in the actual environment, and we should start measuring the ecological cost of our way of doing business. We should be asking our professors, Mr. Professor, how do you incorporate climate change into the neoclassical model? Then watch him try to answer that question. If an eco system collapses or if the coral reefs suddenly start eroding away, how do you measure the negative side of our way of doing business? Once you start asking questions like that, then all of a sudden the neoclassical economics starts to shift toward this bionomic model.
The other thing that's fundamentally wrong with the current paradigm is that, as I said earlier, they have this rational utility maximizer. It's a sort of a horrible parody of what the real human beings are like. There needs to be a kind of merging of psychology and economicsI coined the phrase psychonomics as being a word that explains that at the heart of economics is not just nature but it's also human nature.
Then the third big idea in the book I think is this idea that at the moment we have a global marketplace, but the prices of the products in that marketplace do not tell the ecological truth. You buy a car for $30,000 and you fill it up with gasoline at whatever it is a gallon, and those costs do not account for the tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage that you do to the planet with your car in terms of climate change and all the other bad things that are happening. So the idea is to take the current dysfunctional marketplace where the prices are all wrong and to come up with a true cost global market regime in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth. And the real task of economists, instead of pontificating about micro and macro economics and talking about Growth is God et cetera, the real job of economists is to measure what is the real cost of the products that we buy and then to start pushing the world in a direction of a true cost marketplace. If we had a true cost marketplace in the worldthen we wouldn't be having the problems that we're having right now.
NP: I remember I interviewed John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, and we were talking about vegetarianism. He said, for him, it wasnt an issue of eating meat, or not, as the case may be, but that everyones eating habits would be better moderated if the price of a chicken reflected the fact that an animal had to die, and reflected the true cost of it without subsidies. Then the cost would be higher, we'd think more about eating meat, and therefore we'd naturally eat less of it and we'd be healthier as a society. It is weird the way subsidies have skewed the price of food, that a hamburger is cheaper than a loaf of bread. The costs don't make sense
KL: Well, his sentiment is right on the button, but I think it goes a little bit deeper. At the moment because our economics is so fundamentally wrong, when you buy that 99 cent hamburger it doesn't really include the fact that maybe 100 gallons of water were used to make that hamburger for you and it doesnt include the ecological damage that was caused by growing the beef and so on. All it really includes is the minimum cost the corporation that made the hamburger was able to get away with. And the negative side of the equation, that's somehow borne by some ecosystem in Peru where they were grazing the cows or whatever. So yes, there is something so obviously wrong. I mean to realize that just about everything you buy whether it's a Mars bar that you buy tomorrow or it's filling up your car with gasoline or whether it's a hamburger that you buy at McDonalds almost every damn thing that you buy in the global marketplace puts the planet deeper into a hole.
Now we've got to the point where economists are still championing the current marketplace, trying to convince us that the marketplace is really the only way to run an economy, and if that marketplace is fundamentally flawed and it's driving the human experiment of ours on planet Earth into the wall I mean I can't think of a better reason for young people to stand up and fight against these idiots who are saying that.
NP: One of the other ideas that you explore in the book is the concept of fiscal health versus cultural health. We're so focused on the fiscal health rather than the cultural health, yet when you consider it's a society's confidence in their currency that ultimately sets its value, it actually makes more sense to deal with the cultural health first, because then the fiscal health will follow. But we're taking the opposite approach to that. You see that with Greece where were destroying a culture rather than raising it up.
KL: This is a really fascinating concept, this idea that for example, we have a one trillion dollar a year advertising industry worldwideI call it the mind-fuck industry. It's basically an industry that psychologically, emotionally gets you to do things that you wouldn't necessarily do. And it's one of the contributing causes to this epidemic of mood disorders and anxiety attacks and depressions that so many of us are living through, especially in the developed first world. It's not just the seas are rising and that the coral is dying. That's one of the externalities of our way of doing business. But there are also psychological costs to the kind of system that we have right now.
I find it especially interesting to look at the debate that's going on right now in the United States of America about whether America is in decline or not. There's people standing up and saying we're in a bit of a slump here, we're caught in a bit of a problem but we can fix it by putting some more stimulus in the economy. Some people are saying we need to improve our education system or we need to improve our infrastructure, and there's all kinds of ideas that economists are coming up with for what needs to be done to reverse America's decline. But perhaps the real cause, the real root cause of America's decline is the fact that the people aren't good enough anymore, that the people have been turned into fat pigs. Many of them, you know 30, 40 percent of them are obese, and there's a huge epidemic of mental illness, and 10 percent of high school students are on Ritalin, and maybe the root cause of America's decline is that America isn't producing good human beings anymore.
NP: Do you think that we've got the leadership that we deserve because of the kind of human beings that we've become?
KL: Well I wouldn't quite put it that way. I think that psychologically, culturally, America has lost her way. And not just America. I don't think there's a huge difference between Canada and America or Japan and America. Basically the kind of capitalism that we've been given since the Second World War has produced the process that we've all been living through for the last 50, 60 years, and this is the tail end of it
50 years ago, when I was a young man, then America was the most wonderful place on Earth. Everybody wanted to emulate America and follow the American dream and American people. I remember meeting them in Germany when I was there after the Second World War and getting my Hershey bars from the GIs there and what wonderful young guys they were. And later on in Australia, when the big military ships would arrive in Sidney and the younger people would come off, what wonderful human beings they were. Then, 50, 60 years later to suddenly look at what's happened, it is really sad to see.
You can't say we get the leaders we deserve. It's just we're living the wrong process and the huge part of the blame I think goes to the economists. These are the people that basically egged us onto this system that we're living through now, and that system really isn't working. We're all caught in a process that isn't working. We're all part of a doomsday machine I call it. The economists have created the process. It's like a machine that keeps on churning on, and it's like a doomsday machine. We're all caught in it and we're all getting a little crazy and fat and nobody quite knows what to do. And this Meme Wars book says, here's something we can do. We can basically shift the paradigm. We can shift the theoretical foundations of economic science and if we do that then we can start building a new process.
NP: What I fear is that the thinking of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics is so institutionalized within our system now, within institutions like the Fed where the people who run them are beyond elected officials they stay in power regardless of whom we elect that the system has become intrinsically intransigent. Also, one of the golden rules of change is that it only happens when it becomes the easier option. So the question then becomes: how bad do things have to get? I don't think even the economic crash of 2008 was bad enough to affect true radical change.
KL: Yeah, yeah, I have exactly the same fear, even though it would be wonderful if we could all somehow wake up and if the students could all see the light, and then this process that I described earlier where a few students in some of the prestigious universities catalyzed something which then takes over the world. This is a beautiful, non-violent scenario that would be wonderful if it happened. And I think it is happening and will happen to some small degree. But, as you say, it isn't just professors that need to be grabbed by the scruffs of their necks and thrown out of parties, it's the rest of the process as well.
Like in America you have this two-party system that just isn't working, no matter who you are. The election you just had is like a Coca-Cola / Pepsi-Cola election where which whatever you drink it tastes the same. So there's lots of other things to do there. I have the same feeling as you, that it's going to take something 10 times, maybe 100 times bigger than what happened in 2008.
I actually, in my most darker apocalyptic moments, can see this human experiment of ours on planet earth really hitting the wall and all these financial and ecological and political crises all sort of feeding off each other and creating a kind of a crash that the world will not recover from for not just 10 years or maybe not even 50 years, but maybe 100, maybe 1,000 years. Maybe after the crash we'll wake up to the fact that we've sort of really done the planet in and then after that we'll all start fighting for what's left of the water and the minerals. There's going to be this last ditch fight for what's left of the natural resources of the world and we'll spiral into what I call nightfall.
NP: An economic and ecological Dark Age?
KL: Yeah, it's like a 1,000 year Dark Age that we're at the brink of right now. I know that sounds crazy and nobody wants to hear that, but I believe that we are at the brink of a 1,000 year Dark Age and unless we stand up viscerally and powerfully and with civil disobedience and everything we've got, if we don't start fighting for a different kind of future then we're not going to have a future.
NP: I absolutely agree with you. As an activist and an Occupier, however much effort I put into it, it still feels like I'm just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
KL: Yeah, yeah. But then again, I think this is exactly what we on the political left have to overcomeWhen I was a young guy in University in Australia back in the 1960s, then the political left was the coolest thing around. We had all the ideas and we had the empathy and we really believed that we knew how to live and we knew how the world should be run. And since then we've sort of lost it pretty badly. For the last 20 years of running Adbusters magazine we've basically been saying that we have to jump over the dead body of the old left if we're going to make any kind of progress. And what you just said there reminded me of that, because there's something about the political left that's so cynical. We don't actually believe anymore that we can succeed. Even this Occupy movement which felt so euphoric and wonderful, all of a sudden people who slept in Zuccotti Park and the people who were part of the thousand occupations that were happening all around, many of them are shaking their heads now and wondering what the hell happened. There is some sort of a leap of faith that needs to happen, and I think that the leap of faith should be something a little bit more crunchy than what we had going last year. It wasn't enough just to hug each other and to sleep together in the parks and have feisty GAs, now we actually have to say what is our one demand? That is the question that we have to answer and the Meme Wars book is one attempt to answer that question. I think that having a meme war in the economics departments of universities all around the world and demanding a paradigm shift, that should be our demand
NP: This book is rather elite in the sense that its very much aimed at economics students in the educational institutions around the world. But one of the other campaigns that you have championed is Buy Nothing Day, which functions at the other end of the economic spectrum. I've always equated this with the Arthur Miller play After The Fall, in which he explores the American obsession with satisfaction. You have a great statistic in your book where you talk about how in 2011 major media advertising spending per capita was $498 in the US, $22 in China, and $67 worldwide. We have a whole industry that's aimed at making us feel dissatisfied. They market at us to make us feel inadequate and to create need. It's no wonder that we're a very mentally unhealthy society.
KL: Well that's just one of the dimensions. I think that Buy Nothing Day has always had an ecological dimension, this realization that the more you buy, the more the planet dies and that living lightly on the planet and not having this five-planet lifestyle like most of us have in North America, that that's a horribly unethical way to live. Then there's the psychological dimension, this idea that if you actually participate in a powerful way in consumer culture then you're actually making yourself mentally sick. This pursuit of satisfaction is actually a road to mental illness. You become one of the statistics of this epidemic of mental illness that's sweeping the planet right now. Then there's the political dimension, this idea that if we, the rich one billion people on the planet, keep on consuming three-quarters of the global pie, and if we leave just a quarter of the global pie to the rest of the six billion people on the planet, then don't be surprised if some of them get very angry at us and turn into terrorists and come after us. So I think that Buy Nothing Day gets to the heart of our ecological crises, of our psychological crises, and also of our political crises. Not only that, but if you never tried it before, then it's a wonderful experience to have for people who've never lived 24 hours without consuming, who have never experienced this consumer fast.
But it troubled me that you said this book is for the eliteIt's not elitist at all. Sure we need students at universities who may be somewhat elitist to fight back, but we also need the Occupiers to let off stink bombs in front of Goldman Sacks and we need to do something to the ATM's [in one Tactical Briefing, Adbusters suggested activists tape prank Out of Order signs to ATMs to deter customers from using them to prevent banks from making money off their fees], and I think that when it comes to talking back against these economic leaders, the people who are running the global economic shift, we should be fighting back on all fronts. So I'm hoping that this book isn't just talking to the students, but somehow the message spills over and that all of us start fighting back against the system that simply doesn't compute.
NP: Well if we don't start fighting back, then the world will anyway. I mean, you spoke briefly in our conversation about this five-world idea -- can you talk a little more about that five planet concept?
KL: Yeah. If everybody on the planet lived like we live in North America, then we would need five planets. Because there are seven billion people on the planet and at the moment it's just one billion of us who are living high on the hog so to speak. We're the five planet lifestyle people. So, in a way, I think that there's some sort of a shaming that has to go on. Buy Nothing Day is a perfect time to ask: How much is enough? How much is enough for me? How much is enough for my family? How much is enough for my city? How much is enough for this country that I live in? Isn't there something sort of unethical about me having a five-planet lifestyle and saying what President Bush said many years ago that the American way of life is not negotiable. Well Buy Nothing Day is a day when you wake up to the fact that yeah, it is negotiable, this American way of life is negotiable, and it has to be renegotiated.
NP: But part of the problem is were preaching to the converted. Historically what changes have voluntarily been instigated by society en mass? Change is forced on a society when there's no other option?
KL: Hold on a second, you know, I think that soft part is doable. I've done Buy Nothing Day now for 22 years in a row and I think it's made some sort of a difference. It's got a lot of people thinking about the dark side of consumerism et cetera. But when a culture starts to heave, then sure, it is driven by the fact that something is terribly wrong. Everybody knows that there's something terribly wrong right now...
I do believe that we do have a crack at the opposite, the other side of nightfall. And the other side of nightfall is singularity. It's singularity or nightfall that's the choice that we all face. And singularity is exactly this idea that people wake up, that they can't live a five-planet lifestyle. Some people will wake up doing Buy Nothing Day, some people will wake up doing some occupations, some professors will wake up when the students go viscerally after them and then shame them in front of the whole university. Bit by bit by bit I think it is possible for global culture to heave into a new orbit. So, yeah, let's not be too cynical. You know that famous Chinese saying that in dangerous times it's also opportunistic times that's the way I see it right now. I fear that we may descend into nightfall, but I still believe in singularity.
NP: Well I very much hope that you are right. I really do.
KL: Well, I'm okay. I'm 70 years old, and if the really bad times come I probably won't see them. But you will, so you have to become the fighter.
NP: Yeah, I have a step-son and I worry about him. I can't imagine what his life is going to be like when he's 70.
KL: I think that's really part of this thing about the Occupy movement and the Indignados in Spain and the anarchists in Greece and all those media reformers in Mexico and the education reforming high school students in Chili right now and the Pussy Rioters in Russia and those hundreds of young people in protests that happen in China almost every day of the week. I think that hundreds of millions of young people around the world are waking up to the fact that something is terribly wrong and they are starting this global wave of youthful protest that Occupy was one part of. The next few years are going to be fascinating
My final thought is this; that I've lived 70 years on this planet and right now is the most pregnant moment in my lifetime for global revolution. There's never been a riper moment for global evolution than right now.
Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is published by Seven Stories.