As capitalism vs socialism debates become increasingly polarized, Dr John Demartini reveals why opposing extremes naturally emerge to restore equilibrium.

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As you go onto the media today,

you sometimes hear no, let me start over.

It's not hard to see in

media and social media,

the polarities of the far left

and the far right winged political

perspectives.

And some say there is no way of just

defining it in terms of those two

polls. But those are at least two

polls that are commonly seen out there.

You might say that one

is way over on the right,

which is a little bit

more on the capitalistic,

more of the people that are the haves

and the people that usually are the work,

the people that have the jobs or the

companies that other people work for.

And the other is the people that

usually work in the companies.

And they're the ones that are a little

bit more on the socialistic side.

Ones that basically want to

use economics in their favor 'cause

they have a value on economics and the

others have a more of a value on

family and social and physical things,

et cetera. So they're two

different value polarities.

And there's a whole spectrum in between.

That's why these are just extremes,

because really, we all have, each of

us have, somewhere on the spectrum,

a combination of the two.

And let me explain why.

Whenever you meet somebody you put

on a pedestal and you admire them,

and you're too humble to admit

what you see in them inside you,

and you minimize yourself.

And you're admiring them to such a degree

that you inject some of their values.

Values always go from those that are

more empowered to those that are least

empowered in society.

That's why rules and regulations and laws

all come down from the few at the top

that are haves, to the people usually

that are the have-nots, the many.

The one the many as we call it.

And so anytime you infatuate with somebody

or admire somebody or put them on a

pedestal, you'll tend to

inject some of their values.

Whenever you attempt to do that,

you'll sacrifice your own highest

values to fit into theirs.

And when you do, that injected

value you'll attempt to live by.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, beware envy

his ignorance and imitation is suicide.

And if you, Freud called it the superego,

the internalization of outer authorities

values into your life is called the

superego. And it moralizes you.

So when you're living according to what

you think you should be according to

their values, you feel good and

proud, which is an imposter syndrome.

And then when you are don't feel like

you're doing it 'cause you can't sustain

it, you'll beat yourself up and feel

shame, which is another imposter syndrome.

Anytime you exaggerate or minimize

yourself to another human being,

you've got sort of a facade,

a persona, mask that's on.

It's not your real authentic self.

And your real power is that authentic

one in the middle, the golden mean,

as Aristotle said, between the excess

and deficiency of perception of self.

But at the same time,

you can also look down on people and

think what an idiot and how much a failure

they are. And you exaggerate yourself.

And now you're too proud to admit

what you see in them is inside you.

And now you try to get them

to live in your values.

Now you trying to live in other people's

values is futile. It's non-sustainable.

Just try to do that.

Think about it when you first started a

new relationship with somebody and you

attempted to live in their values,

for the first few weeks you tried,

but it wasn't sustainable and you started

to resent it and you wanted your life

back. The same thing when

you go on to resent somebody,

you try to get them to live

in your values and they can't.

Anybody's been married

for a period of time,

eventually gives up on the

idea of trying to fix the mate.

They want to be loved for who they are.

And who they are is based on the

whatever's highest on their value,

their ontological identity.

So anytime you try to change you relative

to others or others relative to you,

you have non-sustainable futility.

And what happens is when you exaggerate

yourself and look down on people,

you tend to be narcissistic. You

want them to do what you want.

And you want to be,

you're the center of attention 'cause

you puffed yourself up with pride,

only to eventually be pulled down.

And when you minimize

yourself and exaggerate them,

you're down kind of in shame,

you're minimizing yourself.

And so eventually you get resentful about

that and you eventually build yourself

back up.

So either of those

polarities of personas and

imposter facades that you wear

eventually come back into the center and

oscillate around a mean, which is

your real self. And when you're there,

you have sustainable fair exchange

in relationship with people.

Now that's the individual, but on

the collective scale, people do that.

So when somebody rises up in

power and influence and somehow

they can, they can think that

they're superior to somebody else,

they can then take their values and

project them onto people and think others

are supposed to live in their

values. And so they can,

the have's tend to do that

because most people at the,

in the lower economics don't get to

have as much influence on the, you know,

political arena and the laws and rules

and regulations so the haves typically

project, and they tend to be on

the narcissistic side, not all,

but there's a tendency

there. And they think,

they're proud of themselves and

they stand tall, if you will.

And the people that are down

in maybe less economics,

they sometimes can be altruistic

and sacrifice. They're giving away,

they're working hard and they're giving

away their profits to the people that

have.

So the ones that haves are the ones that

are playing on the narcissistic side

sometimes, even though many of them,

I've met some great business people

that are very, very balanced,

but that's a tendency.

And the people at the

bottom are sacrificing their

lives and barely getting by

and giving profits to somebody else. Now,

you wouldn't be running a business if

you couldn't get a profit out of the

people because it's too risky to take

on that so it's an inevitable process.

But the ones that are the haves

typically go towards more of a right wing

thinking. They think in

terms of longer term,

they think in terms of

economics for the generations.

And the other ones are more

immediate gratification, survival.

And so in the process of doing

it, they're more socialistic,

they're more thinking about how do we,

how do we get the government to take

care of us instead of how does the people

take care of the government kind

of thing, on the other side.

So these two poles, the capitalistic

and the socialistic together,

if they go to extremes, they

breed the other. And you see this,

if you go to America, for instance,

and look at the presidency

and measure the Democrats,

which are typically more the real

extreme democratic liberals or,

and social,

a little bit more socialistic and the

most extreme over here on the right

conservatives are going to be a little

bit more capitalistic most likely.

And so what's going to happen

is you go back and forth,

you get a president that's a democrat

that's a little bit more social and that

could be anywhere on the spectrum,

but slants that direction.

And then you get over under Republican

and they're a little bit more

capitalistic. And these go back and forth.

If you look at the history of all the

presidents, they kind of balance out.

So you can't have one

without the other over time.

If you go to to purely capitalistic,

you end up having the have and have-nots

becoming so far apart that you get a

dumbbell shaped curve in

the distribution of wealth.

And eventually revolutions occur.

'cause People can't afford to live.

They create a revolution.

And then the extremist on this side

that are radicals come in to try to

counterbalance it. And at the same

time, if we go completely over on there,

we have, you know,

everybody's kind of the peace and open

the doors and immigration and everything

we eventually have to come in and do

the other side. Kind of a, you know,

the other extreme has to come in.

We have to stop and prioritize

who's coming into our country.

We have to make sure they're

producing more than they cost.

And it gets it back into balance again.

So nature forces a balance

between the testosterone and

estrogen, the competitive and

cooperative, the war and the peace,

the inner directed and outer directed,

the capitalistic and socialistic,

the one and the many as they call it.

You know,

when you go to a complete dictator where

you get all the wealth in one hand of

plutocracy or an aristocracy or something,

you then have people in extreme

properties on the other side.

You usually have kind of

irrational tyranny with that.

So nature is constantly trying

to strive for a balance,

an androgyny of male and female,

the one that's cooperative

balancing competitive.

So I don't want to make socialism wrong,

I don't want to make capitalism wrong.

A healthy balance of the

two is what's going to work.

And anytime we go to one extreme or

the other, it eventually breaks down.

Peter Drucker mentions this in business.

And if you go look at the

oscillations in business cycles,

you'll see when things are booming, they

start giving daycare centers, you know,

in the company, and they start giving

people time off. And then when they get,

they get a lot of estrogen if you will.

And then when all of a sudden

the market cycle goes down,

they trim the fat and they get

the muscle in and then they get the

testosterone again. It gets more on

the capitalistic. One is a right brain,

which is you're more social and more

people and family oriented and and

health oriented. And one is more left

brain, business, finance intellectual.

And so they go oscillating back

and forth and both are necessary.

And trying to find and strike some sort

of a stable middle, middle class bound,

you know, groundedness in

there is what stabilizes.

You don't have the dumbbell shaped

curve. You have a bell shaped curve.

Mean distribution. So if

you look at them over time,

if you look at the capitalistic

and the socialistic sides to it,

just go look at all the presidents.

You'll see if you go tick them back

and forth and count them all up,

they're going to come

pretty close to balance,

with a couple middle of the paths,

the libertarian and the wigs or

whatever between occasionally.

But they're just going

to go back and forth.

That's why if you go vote for this

side and you're always about this side,

you're going to be pleased

and then displeased,

you're going to have a bipolar condition,

'cause you're striving for a one-sided

pole instead of understanding that nature

must have both, because there has to

be a distribution of values in society.

Whatever your values are, there's

somebody with the opposite set of values.

So if you're very dedicated to

business, finance and intellect,

you're going to keep attracting somebody

that's dedicated to family, social,

and physical. One will be a producer,

one will be a reproducer, a consumer.

And so consumerism makes more

towards the socialistic side.

And the other is more towards the

saver and investor is the one that goes

towards the capitalistic side.

So one's deferred gratification,

one's immediate gratification.

One is a lower socioeconomic

immediate gratification,

and one's higher socioeconomic,

more deferred gratification.

One is extracting surplus labor out of

people and one is basically sacrificing

their labor value to others.

So the have and have nots.

What's interesting though, if

you go into the socialistic,

if they go to extreme,

they're the people that eventually want

the government to take care of them with

social welfare. If you go to the other

extreme, they go into building wealth,

they end up philanthropic.

Almost all the billionaires end up

having to be philanthropic to give money

back. So nature is trying to

get that into equilibrium.

So I'm not here to try to make one good

or bad. I don't find that productive.

I'm just saying that nature's going

to force you to strike a balance.

And when we go to poles,

we get radical responses and those

are the ones that hit the media.

'cause That's what sells. Anything

that's radical sells in the media.

That's not necessarily what serves,

that may not what be what's true.

And there's a, you know, if

you look at the stock market,

the stock market goes up when people

are kind of manic and exuberant,

emotionally exuberant, and

then they tend to think, well,

they're more optimistic. The

price earnings of a stock

goes up, it's overpriced,

but they're, everybody's doing it. So

the late bloomers are coming in. Well,

it's all do it. And it rise up

until it eventually has to crash.

It then goes down and now it's

undervalued stock and price earnings

is low. And now that's when Buffett

comes in and buys up the stock.

or smart people

buy when they, well,

the smartest person buys and holds it

and knows that all those oscillations

regress to a mean, which is the

intrinsic value of a company,

and the same exact thing occurs because

all of that in the market is nothing but

the psychology of people in

society. As Prector said,

that's just our society's psychology.

So if we do something and we know that

nature's going to oscillate between

those two,

why not have somebody who's a politician

that's intelligent enough to guide a

governed system?

The the blood glucose and oxygen goes

into the medial prefrontal cortex,

which causes the,

that executive center to govern

the amygdala's volatilities,

the amygdala assigns valency of

positive and negative things and judges

politically left and right,

judges this bad good,

it's a moral hypocrisy.

The person that's executive is the one

that's able to see and manage paradox and

see the pair of opposites simultaneously

and not react to either one,

but to act on the mission. The mission

is the integration of the two poles.

And they're not, as Aristotle said

in his work on excess and deficiency,

the vices, there was a

golden mean, a real virtue,

the golden virtue inside the middle.

That's the thing that buffet invests in.

That's why he has done so well.

And Robert Greene talks about

if you can't manage emotions,

don't expect to be a leader. If you can't,

if you're letting your amygdala run wild

with polarities and biases and tribal

thinking and ingroup outgroup

biases and subjective biases and

confirmation, disconfirmation

bias, false positive,

false negatives and all the thing

that the amygdala does for survival,

you're going to go to

one extreme or the other.

If you're in the middle and you

understand that both are necessary,

you'll be reasonable and understand that

the people that are the have and have

nots are valuable, and they both serve.

If a company is a bunch of executives

and they got nobody working for them,

they're not going to be executives.

They only became executives

by the help of the people.

So finding that balance

and caring about it,

and I've seen individuals that run

companies from that perspective and

they thrive.

And I've seen them go to the other

extreme and then they have unions and you

know,

teamster people coming in there to

cause a revolution to get the money

redistributed. So you need both. But

either extreme by itself backfires.

And this has been known

for centuries, really.

And so I'm not here to make

socialism bad or good, or capitalism,

good or bad, or any of

the spectrums in between.

Just know that they're part of a spectrum

of human behavior and human values and

they all are serving.

And it's just a matter of are you aware

enough and wise enough to find the mean

and not react and not label

and not take a side so much.

'cause Every time you take a

side, you create an opposite.

There's a law called the

law of Eristic Escalation.

Law of Eristic Escalation says, whenever

you take a side with some ideology,

an equal and opposite ideology comes

along to counterbalance it, pro-life,

pro-abortion, pro guns, anti-guns,

pro-Trump, anti-Trump, this kind of thing.

And these are just,

all you're doing is taking on a pole and

creating the opposite pole and getting

into a conflict. You're in a

debate instead of the dialectic.

If you study the dialectic

from Zeno and Hegel,

you'll see that there's a

synthesis of pairs of opposites,

a unity of opposites that

Heraclitus described, which

is where the real mean is.

Even in Christianity, they called

the Christ, they called the logos.

And the logos by Heraclitus

was the unity of opposites.

And that's why the wisdom of that

statement in Christianity was so powerful.

And wisdom is basically seeing

both sides simultaneously.

And that way when you do extract income,

you appreciate the people

that are helping you do it,

and you make sure that they're

taken care of along the way.

And so now you've found

a nice blend and balance.

And they don't have to have going to

revolutions and conflicts to extremes.

So socialism is not evil,

until it's to the extreme.

Just like water, too little

water can cause death,

too much water can drown you. The

right amount of water is the wellness.

That's all. You know, find the rhythm,

moderation and consistency

of social political thinking,

and you'll find yourself more

stable and less reactive and less

sensationally distracted by

media which sells distractions.

It sells things that grab your

attention. That's what's about,

it's not there to serve. It's there

to sell commercial time. ,

they're making money off your polarities

of ignorance and your amygdala

sometimes. So be aware, be wise.

If you live by highest priority,

you're more likely to get into the blood

glucose, into the executive center.

You're more likely to be moderate.

That's why I tell people to go and

identify their values and live moderately,

come to my Breakthrough Experience

program where you can learn how to balance

out,

see the quality of your life's based on

the quality of the questions you ask.

If you ask questions that

balance out your perceptions,

you liberate yourself from these extremes

and give yourself permission to be

empowered. True power is not

one pole or the other. ,

it's like trying to get a positive pole

without a negative pole or a negative

pole without a positive pole

in a magnet. It's futile.

Or a coin with one head

without a tails. The same hing.

Social political polarities

are by themselves, isolated,

are non-sustainable, but put

together and integrated wisely,

just like the brain does, the unity

of opposites is where the power is.

So give yourself power to not

be swayed by misinterpretations,

by ideologies that are biased

and incomplete in awareness.