The Zeitgeist Movement: Envisioning A Sustainable Future
So what exactly is The Zeitgeist Movement? Not even two years old, the movement declares itself as the activist arm of The Venus Project, an organization started in the 1970s by Fresco and his partner, Roxanne Meadows. The Venus Project distributes resources promoting Fresco's vision of an improved society, with the main component being a resource-based economy, rather than a monetary-based one. In Fresco's resource-based economy, the world's resources would be considered as the equal inheritance of all the world's peoples, and would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through focusing on the technological potential of sustainable development. It is toward this idea that The Zeitgeist Movement works to educate and inform people.
The movement's founder, Peter Joseph, came to notoriety with his 2007 internet film sensation, Zeitgeist, and it's 2008 successor, Zeitgeist: Addendum. While many people may find it hard to digest the idea of a world without currency, Joseph's argument that our economic system is the source of our greatest social problems was supported with valuable evidence.
From the maximization of resources and efficiency of automated labor, Fresco imagines a world of abundance, where everything is available to everyone. As idealistic as this may sound, keep in mind that there is currently enough food to feed everyone in the world, but not enough money to pay for it. One billion people (one-sixth of the world) are starving, yet American's throw out approximately 40% of their purchased food. Fresco says that in a world where everything is supplied, the majority of today's crimes would be non-existent, as they are primarily related to obtaining money and property, or born of social inequality. The crimes that still exist would be considered symptomatic of mental aberration, and these people would be given treatment and help, not punished, as no prisons would exist. People would be rewarded with an incentive system for contributions based on social relevance.
Celebrating his 94th birthday, Fresco was lively and animated as he guided the audience through a visual presentation of his conceptual ideas and models for sustainable technology. Wowing the crowd with images that seemed of science fiction, the audience was assured that nothing was unrealistic about his designs, and if science and technology were focused on progress instead of consumption, they would all be easily realized.
Check out The Zeitgeist Movement's website: I've been reading over Designing The Future (pdf).
Seems unrealistic to me, but it's a good topic to post. I looked it up on Wikipedia too and found these main points:
Concepts advocated by the Zeitgeist Movement
- The main concept advocated by the Zeitgeist Movement is that all the worlds resources, from needs such as food and shelter to desires such as vacations and cars should be the common heritage of all the worlds people.
- The entire human race is corrupt to one degree or another, and our system of ethics, which is seen as evil, leads to aberrant behavior.[3]
- The solutions to the world's problem's will not come about through logic or reason.[4]
- The current social order should be replaced with a military dictatorship, which will change culture and remove deviant and socially offensive behavior.[4]
- No Money/Barter or Trade: Money creates established institutions that are forced to protect themselves which inhibits progress. The fractional reserve system, usury/interest, and credit are all functions of this flawed system that creates debt, leading to the need for employment, for the purpose of paying off debts. A process known as 'cyclical consumption.(Zeitgeist Movement Orientation Guide, Page 7)
- Automation: automation is more productive than human labor and frees mankind from repetitive and tedious tasks.
- Artificial intelligence: machines are needed to make decisions objectively, unlike humans who are susceptible to personal projections, desires or bias. Machines are also needed to store and retrieve information because humans have a limited capacity for memory.
- Technological unification of the globe: globally shared technology is required to monitor planetary resources in real time, and make the most efficient use of them in solving planetary problems.
- Scientific methodology: planetary government is obligated to methodology not individuals. Governing decisions are arrived at through scientific method, not belief.
- No property: property is wasteful and unsustainable. It is done away with in favor of a system of universal access, which will be made possible through abundance of goods and services, thus eliminating the need for ownership.
- Sustainable City Systems: unified systems approach. Systems theory and a systemic approach for a self-sustaining globe and culture can be modeled on a smaller scale with a city-size system.
Sounds like Automated Communism to me - instead of all that Marxist analysis of Labor and Capital, this guy's vision is that machines will be doing all the labor and so that part of the old Communist argument, ie. "Workers of the world UNITE!", has been completely dropped. I talked briefly to the guy at the coffee shop and told him as much. He assured me that The Zeitgeist Movement was not Communism. I'm pretty sure it would be possible to control an economy using supercomputers though.
The last paragraph of the HP article summed it up well:
The members of The Zeitgeist Movement seem to face an intimidating wall of those who decree their goals as unattainable. But with 250 international chapters forming in just one year and the membership count rapidly growing, it's undeniable that many easily identify with the message. The evidence shows that our current system is leading us on a collision course; our present model of society cannot sustain itself. While some deny this, others ignore it, and there are those who still try to profit off of it. The Zeitgeist Movement highlights that there are individuals who believe in a sustainable future where humanity is not united by religious or political ideology, but by the scientific method, venerated as the savior that can develop a system of human equality, thriving from the cooperation and balance of technology and nature.
Honest to god, this is the first I've heard of it.
We'll leave it up to the dictatorship to decide who is a deviant and socially offensive, they will know best. Maybe it will be artists and intellectuals, maybe teachers and scientists, maybe people who look a bit different from good, decent folk. Who knows for sure? We'll let the quirks and obsessions of the guy that runs the military dictatorship decide those pesky little details. Hey, we could call it a "cultural revolution"! And the glorious day when the new system begins, well, we could call that "year zero"! I wouldn't be at all surprised if it lasted a thousand years. This is going to be neat.
