Zeitgeist

= a series of documentary movies, and a movement

Zeitgeist Movies

The first movie was the one that was heavily biased and based on all sorts of ridiculous conspiracy theories. The 2nd was more balanced and introduces the Venus Project as the real alternative. Now we also have a third that next week will be released on dvd/ internet and was released through independent/ underground cinemas this week.

The first one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist:_The_Movie, criticized for its conspiracy theories

Transcript at http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/wiki/index.php?title=Zeitgeist,_The_Movie_transcript

The second: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Joseph#Zeitgeist:_Addendum & http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/wiki/index.php?title=Zeitgeist_Addendum

Review

By Thomas Greco:

"Back in June of this year I viewed an amazingly good documentary film titled, Zeitgeist. I recommend it highly. Get it at http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

Most of the information in it was already known to me, and includes much of what I've been trying for years to tell people in my own humble way. This film is well put together and pretty accurate as far as I can tell. One aspect that was somewhat new to me was the material that shows the congruence among the various "redeemer" myths going way back B.C. That part, and some of the political material, won't go down easily with true believers of any stripe -- the devout and patriotic, but if one can keep an open mind, there is much to be learned - much that could save our lives.

Now there is an addendum to the Zeitgeist movie that focuses more attention on the "money problem," economic imperialism, and emerging sustainable technologies. The Zeitgeist: Addendum can be downloaded from: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/; also at,

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912

The first twenty minutes do a creditable job of describing how our conventional political money is created. It's a good supplement to the films Money as Debt and The Money Masters that I previously recommended.

The next part of the film features John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He does a superb job of clearly explaining how the empire achieves dominance over other countries, giving examples from his own experience. As he describes in his book, there are three levels of action. The imperial forces first try to corrupt the country's leaders and get them to play along, saddling their people with huge debt loads and selling off government owned assets. If that fails, they will stir up internal opposition and either overthrow or assassinate a recalcitrant leader. If that fails, the military will be sent in as a last resort.

In recent years, the reluctance to use the last option seems to have diminished, as war affords opportunities for great profits to be amassed by political cronies and well-connected companies, and the power of Congress to mount opposition to military adventures has all but evaporated.

The original Zeitgeist movie contains important information about the central banking system and the Federal Reserve. If you don't have time to watch the entire film, a relevant seven minute excerpt can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ."

Review of Part 3: Moving Forward

Andreas Exner:

1. The blindness to production

“Infantile disorders” of Zeitgeist

The weaknesses of the Zeitgeist approach are firstly the blindness towards production and secondly its dangerous affirmation of science as a mere reflection of an allegedly objective reality.

That people are not only consumers, but also workers at home, in the factory, at the office, that they are jobless or peasants producing their subsistence is not part of the story the movie tells. This does not only fit quite well into the bourgeois view of the world, that only knows consumers and households, and which is deconstructed so ruthlessly in many other parts of Moving forward, but it also blocks an explanation of how people can really transcend capitalism. An alternative is not created on the desktop of engineers, but in the hearts of people and above all in a concrete transformation of social relations: at the workplace, at home and in the streets, i.e. in the production and reproduction of society. On this issue Zeitgeist has not much to say- thus the peculiar gap between Frescos circular cities, that remind us of Stanislaw Lems city landscape in Transfer or a scenery in Star Trek on the one hand, and the lucid (although market-fixed) critique of capital.

In an interview section in Moving forward, Jacques Fresco says that all people are “victims of culture“. Yes, we are all victims in some sort or theother. Yet, we are not bound to be victims, but interpret and reproduce orchange our social interactions constantly. This is done mainly in constant social struggles on all levels, from the household to the office. Demonstrations are only a minor part of all those struggles – and even a rather superficial and often quite helpless one. So, we are not only victims, but at the same time people that resist domination, fight back and create spaces of freedom. Otherwise it would be a complete mystery why people such as Peter Joseph or Jacques Fresco can ever escape the position of a victim.

2. The patriarchal authority of science

The blindness on the eye of production leads Moving forward also to a nearly complete ignorance towards the relation between genders and the importance of feminized work at the household and in “mothering” (a term Genevieve Vaughan has coined) for the market system. This fits all to well into an affirmative view of science that seems to hold the solution to all problems. A view, that the movie itself embodies, since practically all people that are interviewed have academic titles – and are all male (with one exception) and seemingly endowed with some sort of superior knowledge. It is as much astonishing as dangerous to think that anything like absolute and universal truth exists “out there” and that this truth is the business of people called “experts” and “scientists”.

While it is true, that technical problems of how to organize production are not to be solved in political terms – there is indeed no republican or liberal car – it is quite false to think of one solution for all and to imagine any technology as being neutral. This isn’t true for atomic bombs, and it isn’t true for computers. It seems that Zeitgeist wants to replace the absolutist authority of the state – which it correctly critizes – with another absolutist authority: that of science, the domination of an allegedly universal, neutral, and objective reason, mediated by similarly neutral, objective and – of course – well-meaning scientists.

In the realist view, that Zeitgeist regrettably promotes, science is seen as a reflection of reality – this is certainly false. Reality is a construction, and this construction is done by different means, including everyday language and culture, modern and traditional, Western and Eastern science.

While it is clear that oil is finite and we can’t run through a wall, the terms in which we explain this peculiar resistance of the “outer world” to our goals are variable, flexible, depend on cultural predispositions and assumptions – they are anything else than absolute. We cannot even say, why the simplest solution to any scientific problem (as the commonly accepted principle of “Occam’s Razor” requires) is also the “true solution”, has more to do with “external reality” as a more complicated explanation. And to give universal and transhistorical criteria for what is “simple” in a scientific sense will also prove to be hardly feasible.

The praise of science makes one chilling, when some of the interviewees shortly speak about the question of population and an assumed collusion with a so called carrying capacity. As a matter of fact, world population will most probably peak at 9 billion around 2050. And it is subject to – yes, what a surprise – scientific controversy and ideological battles as a part of class struggle, wether 9 billion people can lead a good life or billions are expected to vanish by way of catastrophes due to some sort of an alleged overshoot.

3. The false promises of technology

Hence it seems that Zeitgeist rescues the original idea of communism – “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Marx) – while perpetuating one of its great mistakes: that the organization of production and distribution is a mere technical question for which a universal scientific solution exists. This mistake had its heyday in the interwar period. And it is not by chance that there also are the historical roots of the Zeitgeist-movement, which is an offspring of the so called technocratic movement that took (and takes) Frederick Engels saying that if suffices to replace the domination of people over people by the administration of things at face value.

The final, visionary part of the movie makes clear, that the satisfaction of human needs does not fail due to a lack of technological means (indeed, this was probably never the case in human history, since needs are shaped by technology as well as the other way round). This is certainly true. Yet it is false to promoting the one universal solution of a utopia of technophile administrators, consisting of a global system of managementof resources, of production, and distribution. The fact that human needs are to some extent universal does not imply that the ways these needs are satisfied, interpreted and deployed converge on one and the same global path of societal development.

Global cooperation might be useful, even partly necessary. But it cannot and should not rely on people functioning like machines, obeying the allegedly natural constraint of resource management which might be enforced by a scientific steering comitee – the movie interestingly enough is completely silent on such things as decision making and control of decision making institutions.

Jacques Frescos vision of a perfectly “clean and efficient” way of living and producing in circular cities dangerously resembles what James Scott called “high-modernist schemes“, which, according to his book Seeing likea state, “failed to improve the human condition“. At this point, Fresco appears to be an anachronist variant of Le Corbusier. While Le Corbusier loved right angles, Fresco adores the circle. Well, a matter of taste, not of emancipation, isn’t it. As long as the Corbusiers and Frescos of this world do not compel anyone to adopt their visions and suffer their consequences, this might be okay. (Brasilía, which was built according to Corbusiers ideology turned out to be a very unfriendly place that exists only because itis supported by informal life and unplanned outskirts.) Yet, to make the great solution out of it is simply wrong and potentially authoritarian." (http://www.social-innovation.org/?p=1800)

The Movement

Quote by Peter Joseph:

"The Zeitgeist Movement is a grass roots campaign to unify the world through a common ideology based on the fundamentals of life and nature. "

Discussion

Dante Monson

Dante is personally concerned, after watching one of the movies, that the Zeitgeist movement does not seem to offer much governance alternatives. Dante would like to understand better what these governance proposals could be, and its approach. Currently Dante is concerned that with its current approach, ideas of the Zeitgeist movement could lead to a centrally planned, technocratic mode of governance built on its use of technology. In other words, not towards a peer governance, peer property and peer production approach.

Dante says : "I remember that there is some criticism of the monetary system, which I personally understand and share what concerns a central bank, debt and interest based fiat currency. I remember and notice through a web search that some people relating themselves to the movement seem to prone a "moneyless society", yet at the same time prone a resource based management system for allocation of resources.

From my own point of view, the use of measurement units as vectors in resource allocation information systems, can correspond to certain kinds of currencies.

I yet need to understand in the latest Zeitgeist Movie ( 2011 ) what their proposals are for such information systems, information systems which can use measurement units which from my point of view can be understood as a form of currency. Who would control or choose what metrics to use ? Can each individual choose and enable its own choices for participation in transactions ? "

Further comments by Dante in a message to S. regarding the third movie of the Zeitgeist Movement ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w ) :

I would say I would like to go further then what I currently decipher and seem to understand from the Zeitgeist and Venus project movements.

In my view the video aptly questions what I perceive as current mainstream vector systems maximizing addicted control.

( control of interdependencies through , for example, centrally controlled vector protocols such as fiat central bank debt with compound interest , and various so called "Free Markets" using such vector protocols )

YET...

I do not hear a distributed alternative in their discourse. No, what I hear in the discourse of the movie is some suggestion for a technocratic, centrally planned and controlled set of vector protocols.

This third official Zeitgeist Movement documentary seems to suggest some "central control / Mainframe" ( 2h03min ), and also suggests ( at 1:49:12 ) that " nature is a dictatorship " ... They also make an emphasis on "science". Does their suggestions mean that "science" can help better go along living with such dictatorship ? Who ultimately defines the vectors used in the resource based management ? To my knowledge, Science still requires humans to think about it, and decisions for metrics in the management of our resources can still be defined by humans. My impression from the video at some point was that they seem to suggest that "because science can take care of it", there is no more need for politics or economics... ? ( note : there is a specific excerpt I remember and which which I try to relocate underlining this point )

I am not sure how they define dictatorship in this context ? In terms of "human societies", I view "dictatorship" as defined by one agent having control on all the others. I do not see "dictatorship" as synonymous with fully distributed, networked systems at every levels of abstraction , including at the level of the vectors whom agents may choose to use or create when wishing or needing to participate into interdependencies - hence enabling networks of individuals to freely join or leave systems, create systems, create specifically defined alliances or synergies between parts of systems, or avoid interactions with other systems if they wish to.

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Hence, my own personal and hopefully shared alternative aim for defining "Transaction Contract Networks" , aims at facilitating the implementation and use of distributed libre/free and open source set of tools/architectures, which themselves can empower for every agents to choose or create its meta-protocols, which themselves aim at enabling every peer agent / every individual human being to be included equipotentially ( http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality ) , based on its own preferences and potential for agreements with other peers, even if these preferences would be socio-culturally induced. ( note : the video seems to suggests that there is no freedom, because of the influence of socio culture on our choices ? )

By enabling a potential for open data ( or private encrypted data within transaction networks who choose for it ), I want to enable for each peer a broader overview, from which to build new choices, access and contribute to potential collective emergent intelligence.

With the aim of such broader overview enabling the access for each peer to make choices beyond the restrictions of our socio cultural conditioning, through the abilities of our combined capacity for imagination and creation - which is one of the human traits.

Hence "ReQuest" ( http://cashwiki.org/en/ReQuest ), or as we mentioned more recently in some conversation, some kind of "semantic operating system" - with hopefully such distributed meta-protocol, ontology creation for each human peer to choose and create from, is for me an important way of expressing an alternative to centralized planned protocols.

I look forward to continue promoting and hopefully using such ever evolving tools together.