The Zeitgeist Movement

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Founded in 2008, The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) is a sustainability advocacy organization, which conducts community based activism and awareness actions through a network of global/regional chapters, project teams, annual events, media and charity work.

The movement's principle focus includes the recognition that the majority of the social problems that plague the human species at this time are not the sole result of some institutional corruption, absolute scarcity, a political policy, a flaw of "human nature" or other commonly held assumptions of causality. Rather, the movement recognizes that issues such as poverty, corruption, pollution, homelessness, war, starvation and the like appear to be "symptoms" born out of an outdated social structure.

While intermediate reform steps and temporal community support are of interest to the movement, the defining goal is the installation of a new socioeconomic model based upon technically responsible resource management, allocation and design through what would be considered the scientific method of reasoning problems and finding optimized solutions.

This “Natural Law/Resource-Based Economy" (NLRBE) is about taking a direct technical approach to social management as opposed to a monetary or even political one. It is about updating the workings of society to the most advanced and proven methods known, leaving behind the damaging consequences and limiting inhibitions. which are generated by our current system of monetary exchange, profit, business and other structural and motivational issues.

The movement is loyal to a train of thought, not figures or institutions. The view held is that through the use of socially targeted research and tested understandings in science and technology, we are now able to logically arrive at societal applications that could be profoundly more effective in meeting the needs of the human population, increasing public health. There is little reason to assume war, poverty, most crime and many other monetarily-based scarcity effects common in our current model cannot be resolved over time. The range of the movement's activism and awareness campaigns extend from short to long term, with methods based explicitly on non-violent methods of communication.

The Zeitgeist Movement has no allegiance to country or traditional political platforms. It views the world as a single system and the human species as a single family and recognizes that all countries must disarm and learn to share resources and ideas if we expect to survive in the long run. Hence, the solutions arrived at and promoted are in the interest to help everyone on Earth, not a select group.

Excerpts

The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) is not interested in the poetic, subjective and arbitrary notions of “a fair society”, ”guaranteed freedom”, “world peace”, or “making a better world” simply because it sounds “right”, “humane” or “good”. Without a technical framework that has a direct physical referent to such terms, such moral relativism serves little to no long-term purpose. Rather, TZM is interested in scientific application, as applied to societal sustainability, both physical and cultural. (page 32)

TZM's advocated train of thought sources advancements in human studies. It finds, for example, that social stratification, which is inherent to the capitalist/market model, to actually be a form of indirect violence against the vast majority as a result of the evolutionary psychology we humans naturally posses. It generates an unnecessary form of human suffering on many levels, which is destabilizing and, by implication, technically unsustainable.

Another example is TZM's interest in removing universal property and setting up a system of “shared access”. This is often quickly condemned to the Marxist idea of “abolishing private property”. However, generally speaking, the Marxist logic relates the existence of private property to the perpetuation of the “bourgeois” and their ongoing exploitation of the “proletariat”. He states in the Manifesto: “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.” TZM's advocated logic, on the other hand, relates the fact that the practice of universal, individual ownership of goods is environmentally inefficient, wasteful and ultimately unsustainable as a practice. This supports a restrictive system behaviour and a great deal of unnecessary deprivation, and hence crime is common in societies with an unequal distribution of resources. (page 33)

Interviews

Another look at Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist's come a long way in the last few years. It's a far more mature, complete and clearly defined system than it was last time I looked at it deeply. The main problem I had with it was that seemed to be "anti-spiritual". In the first version of the doco they dedicated a full third of it to debunking religions as myths that damage society and hinder positive progress for society. It seemed to be so intense in this aspect as to be almost anti-spiritual.

He still has this same perspective now, but he now articulates his meaning far better and I understand and agree with it. What he's basically saying is that sustainability is more fundamental and assessable than ethics (even the golden rule), and that having a sustainability-based bottom line will inherently include an ethical bottom line anyway.

I agree with all this, I think a resource-based economy is the only real sustainable way to go, and that a free market just cannot avoid plunder since it's a concept that's only applicable within the context of scarcity, which doesn't resolve the economic bottom-line problem and leads to the separation of the population into economic classes and many other problems.

Resource-based economy

Peter Joseph debates Stefan Moleneaux

I felt really sorry for Peter Joseph in this interview. Stefan reveals that he actually has an extremely simplistic view about how an ideal society could work, believing that a free market could effectively solve everything, and the state is responsible for all the problems in society. Peter tries to explain that it's actually the problem of the scarcity of money that's the real problem, and that there really isn't any possibility of voluntary exchange since it can only occur within a context which itself leads to selfish and violent outcomes. Stefan just can't understand Peter's perspective, and in fact it appears that he's not actually comprehending Peter's sentences, he even at one point accused Peter of not presenting an argument but rather just giving him a "word salad". Actually that "word salad" was explaining clearly the fundamental problems with Stefan's argument but he totally missed it, repeatedly falling back to his superficial and simplistic arguments.

Here's Peter Joseph apologising for getting angry with Stefan and explaining more clearly (i.e. trying to avoid any "word salads") his arguments in the interview.

Zeitgeist splits with Venus

The group discussion about the split

Official sites & resources

See also

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