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Thank you, Larkin and Amanda, and thank you to everyone for coming to this approaching humanity celebration today.

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In case you don't know me, I'm James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, and Amanda and Larkin were kind enough to invite me here to join you today

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to discuss an important topic,

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Pawsiewood.

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What? You've never heard of Pawsiewood before?

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Then you haven't been following the Corbett report.

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If you want to get caught up to speed on Pawsiewood, you can see episode 499 of the Corbett report podcast.

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The purpose of a system is what it does.

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But come with me, and I'll give you the long story short.

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This is Stafford Beer.

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Actually, to be more accurate, this is Stafford beer in full-on professorial business manager mode, and

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this is what Stafford beer looked like most of the time. Is that beer or

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beard?

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Anyway, you could say he's a pretty unconventional guy.

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The Bastion of Truthiness, Wikipedia, describes him as a British theorist, consultant, and professor at Manchester Business School,

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but that really only begins to scratch the surface of his esoteric exploration in the field of

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management cybernetics.

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In fact, his involvement with Project Cybersyn in Nyandes Chile

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complete with a Star Trek inspired retro futuristic

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command room for the technocrats to oversee the Chilean economy in real time is probably worth an exploration in and of itself.

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But today we're going to discuss something different.

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Pawsiewood.

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Pawsiewood comes from Stafford Beer's

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1979 book, The Heart of Enterprise. It stands for the purpose of a system is what it does.

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You see, as a researcher in cybernetics management, beer was fundamentally interested in systems and how they work or

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how they fail to work.

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He gives the example of a time he was living in London and bought a luxury car,

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that promptly proceeded to fall apart piece by piece as soon as he drove it off the lot.

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First a door handle came off, then a windshield wiper next to the odometer gauge.

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Despite all the servicing stations for this car having a mutual agreement to supply each other with spare parts,

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he was unable to get the last missing part before the next one broke off and as a good systems engineer beer decided to take

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his complaint to the source.

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I wrote to the managing director of the manufacturing company to point out that the system for spare part provisioning did not work.

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He disagreed.

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He said that there was nothing to matter with the system.

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I am of the opinion that our system is efficient and that it only fails to maintain

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availability due to manufacturing conditions or outside deficiencies.

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What is the nature and what is the purpose of a spare parts provisioning system and what are its boundaries?

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And if we may know the purpose of a system by what it does,

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then what did this system actually do?

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From my point of view, it was a system for not supplying spare parts.

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From the managing director's point of view, it must have had a different purpose.

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Minimizing the capital tied up in spare parts perhaps. In any case, the nature of the system was certainly a subjective affair.

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Beer's observation is deceptively simple.

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Determining the nature of a system is a subjective affair.

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The manager of the manufacturing company might have one explanation of a system's purpose,

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but that isn't necessarily reflective of any observable reality.

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If we completely ignore what a system's designer or its owner or its defender or its proponent has to say,

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and look at what the system actually does, we can see the objective reality of that system.

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Okay, all right, you get the idea. But who cares about car parts suppliers?

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Let's look at some more consequential systems.

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Like the war on terror. You know, the wars of aggression waged primarily in the Middle East in the name of 9-11.

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What was the purpose of the war on terror?

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George W. Bush tried to define it by its supposed end goal.

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Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.

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It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach

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has been found, stopped, and defeated.

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But let's not take his word for it. Instead, posi-wid. The purpose of a system is what it does.

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So what did the war on terror actually do?

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It killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. It cost the U.S. over $8 trillion,

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and it actually led to the rise of more violent and extreme terror groups.

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So the purpose of the war on terror was to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent

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civilians, transfer $8 trillion from U.S. taxpayers to the military industrial complex,

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and increase violent terrorism. The purpose of a system is what it does.

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Or let's look at the war on drugs. Everyone remembers when Nixon declared the war on drugs

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in 1971. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.

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In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.

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So the purpose of the war on drugs was to fight and defeat the enemy of drug abuse?

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But what has the war on drugs actually done? It has incarcerated nearly 1 million people per

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year for drug offenses. It has cost an estimated $1 trillion, and it has resulted in an increase

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in drug abuse. Thus, the purpose of the system called the war on drugs is to incarcerate a

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million people a year, divert a trillion dollars into the prison industrial complex,

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and increase drug abuse. The purpose of a system is what it does.

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Okay, one more example. How about the war on poverty?

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So the stated purpose of the war on poverty was to cure and prevent poverty.

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But what has it actually done? It has created a web of nearly 100 interrelated welfare programs

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spread across 14 government departments and agencies, and 9 budget functions that spend over

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a trillion dollars a year on various federal welfare programs. And the result of these programs

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is that there is a greater percentage of the American population living in poverty than there

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was when the war was launched. So the purpose of the war on poverty is to create a vast

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bureaucratic infrastructure, transfer a trillion dollars a year from taxpayers to bureaucrats,

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middlemen and welfare recipients, and to keep a greater and greater percentage of the

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population dependent on those handouts. The purpose of a system is what it does.

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Simple, right? And straightforward. It takes the guesswork and the subjectivity and the

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but we had good intentions out of the equation, and it gets to the heart of the matter.

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So are you ready to try it yourself? All right, come with me.

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So, let's test. What was the purpose of the American Revolution? Did it lead to freedom,

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prosperity, and happiness as the founding fathers supposedly intended, or has it resulted in the

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creation of the largest, most deadly, most data-hungry, privacy-invading, technocratically

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empowered empire in the history of the world? What was the purpose of MAGA? Did it make America

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great again? Or has it resulted in an even stupider and more meaningless war in the Middle

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East on the behalf of Israel? The expansion of the technocratic surveillance state,

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the growth of the military-industrial artificial intelligence complex,

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increased government protection for Monsanto and Bayer in their poisoning of Americans

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and the world, the hard-wiring of the stablecoin scam and the polymarket scam into law,

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and the systematic cover-up of the Epstein network? The purpose of a system is what it does.

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What is the purpose of voting? Is it to make the people's voice heard as the

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hope-and-changers believed when they voted for Obama in 2008, or the MAGA die-hards believed

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when they voted for Trump in 2024, or the pacifists believed in 1916 when they voted

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for Wilson because he kept us out of war? Or is it to provide the populace of the state

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with the comforting idea that they have any control whatsoever over a system that

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is fundamentally made for and by oligarchs? Finally, here's the most important question of all,

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and I invite you to apply everything you've learned here today to solve this question.

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What is the purpose of the state?

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While you ponder that, I'm going to assert my freedom as an unbound individual,

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and I'm going to start approaching humanity. I hope you'll join me soon.

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James Corbett, CorbettReport.com