Zeitgeist Moving Forward
 
 


   Mr. Joseph's new movie is a huge step forward in clarity about the
vision represented by the Zeitgeist Movement. Though many people will be
struck by it being more of a juvenile rant than a valid proposal, I view
this film as a great declaration of divine social possibilities that are
apparently evolving into world society by other means (through unrelated
social activity of people who have no spokesperson).
   The movie begins with a grim demand that true art must feel rotten, and
then 30 seconds of chaotic broken clips from commercial television. Then
comes a voice over that sounds like George Carlin, describing getting good
at the game of Monopoly and eventually facing that the virtual battle
ground of the game achieves no actual conquest achievement. The voice
continues with expression of a presumption that the genuine world is inately
locked into the same rule structure as the game and likewise actually
illusory, without long term cultural or biological significance. The scene
shows a city street with no evidence of protected personal initiative
showing to lighten the mood. This seems straight up sinister to me, but
perhaps true for the people I've known who establish no emotionally
protected areas of their life, where they won't feel oppressed when engaging
personal initiative (filling the inevitable feeling of creative void with
endless predatory obsession). This could very well be true of Peter Joseph's
life, since the film advocates an end to all recognition of personal
sovereignty. But I imagine that he ruled production of the film absolutely,
as he does with the Zeitgeist Movement public statements, so I think he may
not actually be open to the same lack of protected creativity for himself.
   Later in the film he demonstrates that the emotional perception of power
or access inequality between people is a major poison or maybe the major
poison of social sanity. He focuses attention on monetary income
inequality, with a series of graphs that are quite convincing, but of a
different conclusion then he arrives at. All of the data points are
countries using stock markets and private property. I have seen massive
social angst among people all my life that had no relation to trade but
everything to do with perceived gross inequality of access, when someone
lost a chess game or a person they were in love with coupled with someone
else. In my youth, me and my sisters redefined the rules of Monopoly to
have the game end with an equilibrium of all property held by someone and
someone in the lead by the least possible amount. The goal was to be just
barely richer than all other players.
   Having written all of the clearly identifiable social policy on the
Zeitgeist Movement website, I am particularly vulnerable this way. If my
material becomes a topic of viral discussion, then he is fairly sure to
erase all of it, to force focus back where he has expertise and charismatic
power, as he did with two other groups who became interesting.
   He ends the discussion of Monopoly playing with an appeal to the viewer
to answer the idealistic theme question for the movie, what matters?
Inevitably my inner voice asks, in an absolute sense?, about what?, related
to what?, and to who? In my perception of the rest of the movie, the
question became something roughly worded as: what absolutely matters to
Peter Joseph about economic involvement (related to what many people get
obsessed or jealous about)? His answer is that what matters is jealosy;
that everything that can conceivably evoke jealosy (including the work of
individuals) must be absolutely owned and managed by a worldwide collective
organization. An individual can do any sort of practical contribution they
are inspired to among the specific requests of the collective machine, but
they are forbidden to directly assist themselves or another individual in
any manner that feels significant to a third party. Likewise no-one may
retain exclusive access or possession in any way (regardless of purpose),
unless requested to by the machine, and all acquisition (for any purpose)
must come through a request to the machine.
   I'm not at all sure how I would adapt my normal prolific creativity to
such an arrangement. It would be somewhat like a return to permanent public
school, an environment I've grown horrified by, more and more as I get
older. My present life is a riot of material and devices and access to
expression that inevitably evokes jealosy and less comprehendable bad
feeling in some people.
   I would focus on inequality, if I am to answer that question, what
matters? But I would give no monetary referent. I would say that what
matters is that the superior player in any emotional dynamic that life
presents must do whatever is neccesary to minimize the emotional intensity
of their position, to minimize the crush of defeat on the more marginalized
participants. I view the monetary system as a noble and successful
redirection of competitive insanity into a relatively harmless game that
can just be put back in the box after a win. It's invention didn't put an
end to strife over emotional loss, but it created a symbolic field to study
and act out the matter in. The next step isn't to scrap it, but to render
it unnecessary and irrelevant by seeking communion instead of victory; with
seeking to ease the life of the person who failed to get my spouse, or whose
heartfelt videos were ignored in favor of mine, or who struggle to maintain
minimal physical fitness in the face of my effortless vitality. What matters
is that we open up to hearing the anguish of those who strived and failed,
and deliberately make it not so bad. The tradition of so many people, to
look for any opportunity to be triumphant and rave upon discovering it,
must get general recognition of being as evil as it is.
   After the question, Jacque Fresco tells a brief life story of his
struggle with culturally fitting in to America. He describes being driven
out of the creative suffocation of public school, but still obsessed with
learning the abstract sort of material focused on by schools. Lacking any
familiarity with interpersonal management, the great depression strikes him
him as absurd, due to being a pure management failure, with all of the
factories and resources still present but left in chaos. He decides then
that the none of the present economic management tradition is valid or
sane. Then world war two began, and failing to note the mechanics of
managerial challenge involved in both the war situation and the stock
market bubble, he becomes an evangelist for his own collectist ideal,
proposing forced moderation on a public getting drunk on industrial
obsession. He ends his story remarking "this shit's gota go".
   The movie then formally begins, and commences a long and very friendly
presentation, by four fellows named Robert Sapolsky, Gabor Mate, Richard
Wilkinson, and James Gilligan. They lecture on some of the biology of child
development correlating to various forms of behavior and physical vitality.
Gabor Mate notes that each person is in a potentially lifelong development,
affected by genetic predisposition and environmentally induced genetic
changes. Mr. Joseph later uses this to conclude a need for top down force
fitting of the entire earth to a logically derived ideal developmental
environment. My hope is for internet collaboration advice development
assisting voluntary local level environmental optimisation by individuals
and neighborhood areas. I have been doing that kind of experimenting for
years, with fairly hopeful progress, and my impression is that virtually all
women do the same, though generally without giving it analytic recognition,
like I do, or discussing details with any but their closest friends.
   Mr. Mate also lectures about addiction, refering to any obsessive
behavior as being an addiction. Thus shopping and athletics and a regular
job can be classed as addictions, and assessed as detriments to society
based on ecological and social impact. He especially considers that
business activity is often far more significantly destructive and quite as
pointless as endless drug inebriation. The film though, employs a brief
image of a happy woman with packages, suggesting that none of the fellows
making the film recognize the woman's implied emotional stewardship of a
social network, using the actual process of her shopping event (using the
stuff in the bags symbolically). This is a fairly dire warning to me, of the
threat that these fellows, clueless of what they are destroying, will
recommend a top down erratication of all emotional stewardship activity that
involves invoking economically linked emotions, a modern inquisition.
   Mr. Mate reports that prenatal and childhood stress has been shown to
lead to addictive behavior. I presume then that stress from the subtle loss
of direct social networking magic may be a major contributor to the current
proliferation of addictive obsessions, suggesting even more need to
encourage emotional stewardship activity.
   Significantly, later in the film, Mr. Joseph notes that drug enforcement
would cease entirely as part of his vision, with drug use redefined as a
mental illness rather than a crime. How the society would relate to private
manufacture of addictive drugs doesn't get mentioned, but inevitably the
same question arises related to marketing addiction, whether or not to
overtly enforce against the access to the apparatus and materials involved
or develop some sort of forced counseling policy. My hope is that the new
system would allow addictive focus to run unimpeded but publicly defined as
illness, with an easy standing offer of counseling; implying that the
present paradym can be coexisted with and be upstaged instead of verbally
harassed for decades.
   James Gilligan notes a complete lack of murder among some pacifist
religious communities, though Mr. Joseph insists later that no religious
tradition offers useable social design models for his purpose. My
experience with Quakers suggest that pacifist religion could very well
offer some useful models for social mechanics, such as negotiative meetings
that have a formal silence between each presentation.
   Robert Sapolsky describes the status and achievement focus of capitalist
society as alienating due to having few people to relate to as peers and so
having far less tendency to develop altruism. Mr. Mate adds that people
secure in their basic needs for food and friendly contact will tend to
develop more compassion, suggesting that a society that can guarantee those
sorts of consideration will have nicer Citizens. My experience in Ethiopia
and with street people in America showed a different picture though.
Desperate chronic lack of food does not appear to compromise tendency
towards compassion at all, whereas the alienation of being chronically
inebriated in any sense appears to eclipse compassion considerably, even
where wealth is prolific.
   The movie next presents some of the basic ideas of Adam Smith and John
Locke and related thinkers. John Mcmurty lectures in the film about them,
noting that Mr. Locke established a concept of private property
specifically requiring someone claiming it to have put their own initiative
labor into it in some sense. He and Mr. Mcmurty note that the introduction
of money creates noninitiative ownership, and the emotional vacancy of the
Monopoly game story at the beginning of the movie.
   Adam Smith suggested that the invisible hand of the Market can be
trusted to maintain social and technical sanity in spite of this, if we can
accept the triage involving terrible fiscal disaster for poor or unlucky
subcultures. Mr. Smith classes this tragedy as being how nature achieves
balance. He lived in a relatively brutal social environment that was
accepting of people falling into tragedy due to numerous social crises, so
economic chaos did not stand out. Mr. Smith also believed that the invisible
hand would only permit waste and pollution in moderation. When he was
writing, only manure was a significant waste issue, and people walked in it
all day in cities. Pollution was not even a concept. Thus going with his
philosophy today represents unconditional license to accept horrible tragedy
and to waste and pollute.
   The invention of money marketing hadn't happened either, so appeals
to his moral compass on that are equally loose. The development of paid
medical assistance and many other forms of paid remediation was quite
primitive then, so Smith was able to use total value of marketed product as
a fairly good indication of a quality life, and a basis for promoting
policy that would increase total production, presuming social benefit.
As the film points out later, nowadays total value of production includes
a lot of remedial and parasitic services that actually represent lower
quality of life. Some sort of meaningful measure of general cheerfulness in
the public is really needed for realistic political oversight.
   Mr. Locke and Mr. Smith both presumed an ethic validating what imagine
that Mr. Mate would think of as work addiction. In Europe at the time no-one
ever suggested that working or destructive military play could be considered
a social detriment, and almost everyone today is inclined likewise to block
that suggestion (from me at least). Both are generally praised in my
household conversations as noble kinds of focus. Even Mr. Joseph, later in
the film, presents a circle of arrow linking the words employee, employer
and consumer, discussing cyclical consumption, with no suggestion that all
three roles should play a trivial part in a society.
   Working one to five hours a week myself and shopping only for simple
food, generally wholesale, it seems to me like potentially a petty nonissue
in what I would consider a sane society. But, though most discussion in the
Zeitgeist Movement appears to be done by other goofs like me, the talk is
generally of doing endless highly ambitious building, utility and factory
construction. Even Zeitgeist Movement outreach gets discussed as if it is to
be done as a grim chore rather than as a side effect of goofing around with
nonmembers.
   The film's introduction of the concept of money management comes in the
usual way, with no mention of any constructive social function for the
activity. Peter Joseph says in explicit voice over that big scale money
management and trading shakedown of privately held infrastructure valuation
produces nothing of value for our society. I think he genuinely believes
that economic management literally serves no useful purpose, let alone
warrants the higher pay. His own overwhelming managerial stress in the
Zeitgeist Movement somehow fails to clue him in about the reality and value
of managerial effort.
   From my own experience of managing delinquent confused adults, I am very
impressed at the ability of the current big scale money management people
to get a substantial amount of constructive and well organized production to
happen at all. The careful tracking (in the stock markets) of the varying
value of different parts of the larger physical economic apparatus looks
essential, and nearly impossible to me. Though the stock markets appear
suboptimal to me also, due to being easily turned into a heartless and
addictive gambling operation, the issues of marketability and effectiveness,
in the genuine world of the infrastructure being managed, is a success,
compared to the Roman Empire style of management or that of the current
Mayan indians. To say it serves no constructive social function seems
ridiculous to me, a tragic philosophical disaster for the Zeitgeist
Movement.
   Mr. Joseph and many others are horrified by the development in the last
century of effective (and completely fiat) money that has become a commodity
focus in the same class as food and water. To them this is ludicrous and even
evil. To me it looks like a redesign of warlike focus into an arena where
nothing real and sentimental is at risk. As with a card game, the deck can
be reshuffled and is good as new, and the long hours of physical
reconstruction demanded in the real economy can be minimized.
   The wars in Iraq and Afganistan and in the Congo look to me to be
directly related to the unwillingness of the major leadership people in
those areas to take the economic brawling into the stock market
environment. Those leadership people overtly demanded a physical
confrontation style shakedown of economic issues, the classic juvenile gang
encounter, at terrible human and infrastructure cost. Given the willingness
on the part of the Americans and the other warlike cultures to do this, I
much prefer to support the insanity to be relocated into a virtual
environment. Significantly, later in the film a fellow notes research
showing that the narrowing of empathy necessary to be a warrior is also
true of those who work well in the stock markets.
   The "money sequence of value" and "life sequence of value" ideas
presented in the film are then used to go completely into the realm of
abstraction, with no further reference to premises. Something I would call a
"physical sequence of value" that actually motivates and steers real human
activity gets completely ignored and forgotten, forcing me as the viewer to
subliminate something basic in my emotional makeup, that I have to face and
handle daily. By denying validity to any discussion of personal avarice or
choreographic ambition, the film opens the naive viewer to predation by
group avarice, as evidenced in the behavior of users of the Zeitgeist
Movement website; what would have remained as personal avarice morphs into
petty entitlement and juvenile snideness, lacking any accountability to
actual structure or actual resources or actual shared enthusiasm in the real
social environment.
   The result in the Zeitgeist Movement appears to me to be technical
paralysis. This is not an actual hazard or threat to anything, so I am
hopeful that it can be a springboard into constructive theorizing without
having ruined anything.
   Mr. Joseph suggests at this point in the movie that a greater Gross
Domestic Product or GDP value of a country may actually correlate to a lower
quality of life, given that it suggests more economic focus on ill health
and more industrial damage to the environment. This has been in fact my own
impression of classic personal overhead, that a significant turnover in
personal money indicates grimness and stress rather than ease and focus on
casual creative expression (hense I minimize money oriented events in my
life). But Mr. Joseph uses this idea to recommend a top down strangling of
market controlled economic activity, rather than a personal management
change of reduced participation by individuals seeking a higher quality
life. My experience with volunteering has been that whenever a specific
result is necessary, the absense of accounting doesn't reduce this grimness
factor; single-minded focus appears to usually cause unintended collateral
damage or be inspired by trying to remediate previous damage. Given that
the main purpose of activities is usually to psychically link people, this
seems really ridiculous.
   He and Mike Ruppert focus discussion on the absense of a useful profit
motivation for providing actual health improvement or a cleaner water
table. I perceive this to be due to a public that would rather focus their
purchasing power more mindlessly and with more obvious immediate benefit. As
with the classic liberal rhetoric, both men speak with an implied premise
that responsibility for choice of commercial focus lies with the producers
rather than the consumers in a market. I am appaulled by this kind of
willingness to exempt regular adults from culpability for the effects of
their lifestyle choices. I see a need to overtly scold the public for
promoting senseless industrial activity with their purchasing power
(imploring them to reason carefully first). I view the market focus as the
exhale of the public, not the result of a few top management people. Though
conceivably some very clever top management people could trick the public
into being more constructive than they presently are, I see a vital need to
declare the real enemy accurately, and as I see it they are my roommates and
neighbors, deliberately creating an environment for us to share and be
emotionally ruined by.
   Mr. Joseph is a video producer by profession, so he quite possibly has
seen considerable success in efforts to encourage self-destructive public
sentiment in behalf of what an individual company is producing. But Mr.
Joseph fails to note that the underlying emotional outlook that the
advertising validates preceded the company, that the company is validating
the bad-hearted insanity of the customer in order to win their business (as
with a business that declares sponsorship of a football team). The business
can maybe succeed at directing the details, of paper vs plastic for
example.
   I have noted this as a stress in my life also, that advertising feels
bad-hearted in this way, and that I am psychically much better off to
minimize my exposure through removing labels from items I bring home, using
a text based web browser or reducing webpage windows to show only the text
I'm reading, deciding all my purchases before I leave home to go obtain
them, and using no commercial media of any kind. But I view the ads and
labels and sound bite presentations as expressing the root feelings of the
customer majority, not the businesses.
   What's worse, my own business experience with being a producer that
attempts morally motivated industrial limitation has been that those
affected cry out in indignation or anguish and express an entitlement view
that demands a renewal of industrial activity and environmental
irresponsibility. And I note no important difference in this behavior among
the liberal oriented people. They all want clorinated sewers that dump into
the ocean, an unsorted limitless garbage landfill, a new phone to replace
their working old one, overprocessed food that promotes illness, and
heedless use of motor vehicles. And they willingly say so.
   Mr. Joseph notes in the film that the word economize means to reduce
waste and unnecessary damage, and that the present world economy seem to do
the opposite. Matt Ridley, in his recent book called the Rational Optimist,
offerred the old but unused word catallaxy to refer to a self-regulating
market and an economy to refer to a single household or topdown managed
group of people (the original Greek use of the term). Using those terms, I
theorize that the catallaxy will control itself into a sane form if we can
successfully appeal to the management policy of it's constituent economies
(or households). Mr. Joseph's proposal is to make the entire world a single
economy, implying top down management on a world scale, panicking all those
who imagine another humiliating collectivist experiment.
   John Mcmurtry, in the movie, notes that every peer reviewed journal
worldwide describes a natural world in crisis or vitality decline. He and
Mr. Joseph attribute this to human industrial overkill, but I suspect that
this is the nature of the natural world, unrelated to industrial society;
that catastrophe is normal in nature. Nearly all businesses fail in the
first year, nearly all baby sea turtles get eaten in their first week of
life, and almost no-one grows up guided to run for President. That good news
is not newsworthy makes me suspect about the grim data as well. Mr. Ridley
remarks in his book that he is quite appaulled at the gross ignoring of
positive trends by the peer reviewed media. For example the developed world
pollution levels have consistantly been going down the last forty years, in
spite of increasing production, population and fuel use; but that has gotten
virtualy no media coverage. He wrote a fat book about similar examples.
   Mr. Joseph next discusses planned obsolescence as an example showing that
the market mechanism inately motivates creation of waste. I believe the
true source of waste creation is local tradition, independent of economics.
I have been directly pressing my associates and neighbors about this, all
my life. I am personally not inclined to promote disposal, even of inferior
or disassembled material in my personal life, and this is a consequence of
my feeling, not my intellect. Artificial material evokes my awe; broken
glass looks astounding.
   So I presume that the company that makes the party favors is just being
realistically responsive to social convention, doing as they're told. My
neighbors condemn my trash fetish, demanding that the government force me to
replace with new material or do without. My girlfriend told me that a house
she was offering for rent near Tacoma, Washington was being rejected by
every visitor based on concerns like the outdated color of the flawless
kitchen counter. I imagine if it had been made of feebler material it would
have been easier to excuse replacing it, saying it was because of
shabbiness.
   I don't doubt that companies plan for obsolescence, but I am certain
that they will cheerfully respond to a demand otherwise from real consumers.
Mr. Joseph would have the economic system force responsible maintenance on
the public through top down shame and lack of market alternatives. That may
in fact be necessary, but I insist on calling the real nature of the problem
and anticipating who will actually resist remediation.
   Working on small family farms quite a bit in my life, I have seen many
examples of deliberate escalation of the workload for no apparent motive
other than pride and having something to do. That an economic unit on any
scale will involve arrangements deliberately adding to life stress, without
recognizable value resulting, is pretty real for me, and appaulling, and I
have seen no success resisting it with the individuals or groups involved.
   Almost no-one but me finds pride in how much unclaimed time they have,
and how little resources they have made use of. I view the same pattern in
the larger market as an echo of this, not a cause of it; that the war in
Iraq was partly inspired to keep a bunch of people busy; as with a quilting
bee on the smaller scale. The people around me cry for mindless employment
and competitive pride activities, and the civic and family leaders comply
or get replaced by others who will comply.
   Mike Ruppert insists that more acquisition is worthless for greater life
satisfaction. He is, of course, very wealthy and very consumptive compared
to me and nearly everyone on the earth. So I would say his life indicates
that he agrees with me and nearly everyone else, that greater acquisition
is a meaningful goal for quality of life improvement, that the real issue
is buyers remorse in making improper choices due to confusing or missing
data. Mr. Joseph cruelly mocks a woman who willing pays $4000 for a high
profile handbag that has been successfully socially engineered to get her
$4000 worth of social impact with a lightweight handy object. I think that
denying the genuine emotional benefit of acquiring socially engineered
stuff is a serious flaw in the movie.
   I have noted the use, in child care, of hypnotic stuff; of parents using
stuff that companies have deliberately designed for that use, as a means to
dodge actual emotional engagement with their children. Growing up prior to
the invention of this, I am quite appaulled, not at the companies that
design the stuff, but at the parents that buy it, and the grown ups that
grew up thus conditioned to be addicted to a river of bloodless novelty.
   Mr. Joseph attributes the increase of this to market leadership rather
than cultural sloth, but I grew up with the homemade versions, of photo
scrapbooks and ragdolls, that got used for the same emotional dodging and
that the markets got their ideas from.
   I am also very impressed at the low cost of today's products, especially
since advertising is often more than the assembly cost. More recently also,
the trend appears to be into doing the same thing with virtual material,
involving next to no production at all, such as this movie. I see a trend
towards greater and greater employment in social presentation of all sorts,
to the point that physical manipulation of stuff (and the attendant
industrial tragedy) can get moderate enough to be sustainable, even with
everyone who wants to working a forty hour week and playing in the economy
all weekend.
   Milton Friedman responds, in the movie, to the story of a old man's
addiction to heated space as being a responsibility of his social
environment (his neighbors) rather than the top management of his economic
environment. The old man froze to death, unable to emotionally cope with
inviting in roommates to share his overhead. Mr. Joseph heartlessly mocks
this as a heartless position of the utility company rather than of the old
man and his society, as if Mr. Friedman's triage was his own choice. To me
it is equivalent to claiming that the 74 million brutally castrated women
worldwide are the result of economic mismanagement by world leaders. In my
view it is a serious mistake to suggest that anyone can cope with either
cultural issue from a topdown management position.
   The people who are poor that I have gotten to know are nearly all in
misery from their poverty and overtly delinquent in the obvious simple
remediation that is part of my daily habit. They and I don't lack money or
natural resources. They trash what they have access to and I don't. That is
what Mr. Friedman is struggling to say. The old man was too emotionally
immature to share his heatable space with some younger people who would
burgle the neighbors and cover the utility bill with the proceeds. In the
sense that I define things, most adults avoid maturity, and it shows.
   I think the economic leaders are getting hung by their arrogance. They
fail to admit that they are powerless to address these issues, that they
are just keeping their own heads above the water, and are just as confused
and powerless as the next guy. Some of them will say that they think that
some marketing policy ideas can help with economic failure of poor people,
but it is to me like trying to use a normal exit after someone has shouted
fire in a crowded theatre. A sane person seeks a way out that most of the
people have not noticed and then leaves that way quietly with a few friends.
I don't call that heartlessness because the alternative is suicidal.
   Mr. Joseph is slimy in his mocking of me (as the viewer) for my view of
this. He converts Mr. Friedman's suggestion (that people who emotionally
knew and valued the old man should address his issue) into the idea that
strangers should be conned out of their money with a generic sob story and
a morally questionable charity bureaucracy. Mr. Friedman and I are saying
that an autonomous economy (or household) must honor the legitimate claims
of all other autonomous economies, as a cost of keeping autonomy. I would
go on to say that everyone needs to get a grip on the emotional challenge
of losing that autonomy in their direct personal life, well in advance of a
crisis such as this. Mr. Joseph appears to have the same idea, but through
a topdown ending of everyone's autonomy into a mechanized babysitting
system that exempts everyone from facing the real emotional challenge. That
may be the only practical choice, but I have no wish for exemption myself.
   Mr. Joseph reports that, worldwide, one child dies of hunger every five
seconds. Mr. Friedman and I define that as an improper assignment of
resources by the parents; having children that their sloppily managed
autonomy prohibits. Mr. Joseph thinks us cold-hearted and that our economies
should force unity with theirs, and keep the children. I have personally
known too many mindless irresponsible poor people. I say they have made
their bed, they can sleep in it.
   John Mcmurtry calls my outlook one having no "life coordinate", with all
parties being self-maximizing independents. He says this as if this is
illusion, but nearly everyone I know is blatantly so. If I knew him
personally, I would probably see his lifestyle as likewise implying a demand
of autonomy from me personally. My lack of autonomy is a landuse violation
that I have been busted for many times by my neighbors. I do not lack a
"life coordinate", the individual members of my local society demand it,
vehemently. Mr. Friedman is just recognizing my dilemma as real.
   Mr. Mcmurtry suggests that satisfying worldwide human need is supposed
to be a premise of having a society at all. He describes my view as bizarre
thinking, as if he is any different in his own life, about the several girls
who will be castrated this week. The economist who sees the present cultural
triage as hopeless to remediate, is only admitting their helplessness in
the face of a school yard full of delinquents; they are not monsters who
don't care. They will get their gold toilet seat and not cry about the
insanity of cultures of poverty.
   Bill Gates decided to remediate some of this kind of concern, and with
unbelievably ample resources he still describes his organization as feeble
in the face of this kind of struggle, and he casually accepts that. I think
of myself as far more heedless than he, given that I am his age and have
earned less than $100,000 in my whole life, with similar ability and
opportunity as he had, and thus offer nothing to those in desperation. In a
world of people as unambitious as me there would be no shocking difference
in the fortunes of our cultures, and the same starvation would happen
unreported and not an issue, as it did until about a hundred years ago.
   Mike Ruppert states in the movie that the present world economy is a
ponzi scheme that must fail at some point, due to running out of new people
and material to escalate using. I see this as naive, a result of the
confusing psychobabble of the economists. I'm a very clever manager, so I
presume the same of them. Public statements are not meant to inform, they
must be used to appease, to protect the speaker's vulnerable assets from
mob disrespect, by avoiding an upfront declaration that the speaker
recognizes the hysterical brutal avarice of their listeners, who will only
cooperate if they are seduced or bullied or tricked into it.
   I think they speak of infinite physical growth because it carries the
crowd, not because they are fooled. When it no longer carries the crowd,
they will quit saying it, and the fiat money economy will look as stable as
it really is, with interest paid in a cyclic pattern as it already is
between the wealthy people. It may become a loan or investment requirement
that the borrower or business be fiscally responsible about their
non-financial assets, and willing to establish an equivalent rentable asset,
prior to getting the money; that in effect, only mature adults will be able
to borrow. The microfinance banks are already making these changes, loaning
small sums mostly to women, and only to those whose personal economy is not
in chaos.
   Mr. Joseph describes his confusion about the modern use of debt
contracts as a trading commodity. He fails to note that any commodity that
is in storage rather than current use can be described as a debt, as stored
work that will be paid when the item gets usefully used. Thus the whole
trade economy is a trading of debts, with most gold, and collectables, and
fiat money, never resolving into being "paid" into actual use. Stored
merchandise often in fact loses value faster than fiat money, due to decay
or newer models, so nature in effect charges interest. In an ideal world,
interest or dividends would be like rent on a rototiller, never offered
except as a lowkey balancing gesture in a system in which every participant
is very wealthy.
   Mr. Joseph's concern about the unsustainability of people paying
interest or rent without collecting the same somewhere else is probably
true. The ridiculous poverty and degeneracy that I see resulting may be
become so abhorrant that people will be required by their communities to
either unify with a responsible adult or else live within the means made
possible by their own management of what they already possess. Charity will
take the form of coaching, and only to those who are overtly listening, as
with the microfinance banks.
   Partly this issue of interest has been confused by the practice of
governments using expansion of the fiat money supply to tax whoever is
holding savings. Governments are pretty greedy this way, because it's much
more politically excusable than straight taxation. I think in moderation it
is in fact infinitely sustainable. Some world currencies are already
routinely traded in ludicous amounts of 10,000 or more units to a U.S.
dollar. In the modern world sneaky taxation may no longer be politically
possible, with too many voters recognizing how it works.
   Lessons from the brain-damaged investor was a great story, from a
cheerful highly informed financial analyst named Max Keiser. He notes that
lack of empathy makes for a superior functioning player in the stock market.
I've noted that this is also true in the more dangerous industrial jobs I've
had, that, in a job requiring intense logical and perceptual attention,
emotional accountability has to be at least temporarily forsaken, both for
safety and to be a competent participant. For example, to safely throw a
twenty pound bailed christmas tree into a truck with several fellows inside
stacking the trees, I have to objectify them in order to accurately
anticipate where they will move next, in order to be able to throw safely
over and over without pausing to make eye contact with all of them and get
them to stop moving. I got so good at this that one crew one day refused to
load a truck at all til I was in the lead throwing position.
   This is what I consider to be an innate liability of the male sex
identity, if someone does it to an ideal degree. I see no way around it and
so I see it as something that everyone must pro-actively adapt to, in all
dealings with male dominated activity. Mr. Joseph in the Zeitgeist Movement
forum is a prime example. His failure of empathy there needs to be called
that and choreographed more deliberately into the forum.
   He asks what will happen with the 60% of nations worldwide that have
reached a national debt position that is realistically bankruptsy, defined
as having the interest on their government debt exceding their taxation
income and asset rental income combined. This is pretty simple to me. A
democratic group that borrows from an investor is then accountable to that
investor. If the group borrows to the point of insolvency then they become
no longer in authority over their remaining assets, and thus cease to be
sovereign over those assets. This implies an end of a major aspect of
representative government, but maybe for the better.
   The commercially useable assets of all those governments will become
privately held and investors will no longer be willing to invest in those
governments at all; they will have to become responsible about paying as
they go, and they will retain authority only over civil matters such as
abortion or traffic laws. Warfare, police protection, road maintenance,
public parks and the like will all be privately managed by the same people
who presently handle petroleum, recreational drugs, and heavy industry. The
monetary system will not even burp, let alone collapse.
   I believe that this is the real origin of the Federal Reserve Bank. Some
American investment people decided that they would arrange to never have a
war in North America ever again, converting all warlike interest in America
into business matters to be handled financially; and to eventually include
the whole world.
   They arranged at first to conquer actual political control of America
through buying or murdering candidates. They arranged all wars to be fought
other places, and where necessary they got the American society to be
proactive about insuring that, using further fiat debt to the Federal
Reserve Bank to pay for it. The plan is to either militarily or financially
conquer all other countries, until the original investor clique owns the
land and major infrastructure of the entire world, so that all of the normal
basis for war will be converted into business issues with those private
owners, handled by the IMF and similar agencies. War will be done solely by
private companies in defense of their own assets, as in the Congo, with no
mixing of civic political policy and military outcome anymore.
   Mr. Joseph introduces a term "structural classism", which results from
some people with low net worth attempting to make a show of participation
in the social presenting style of someone with a high net worth. This is
made complicated by the financial patronizing of some people rather than
others, particularly by parents. The present market system overtly
encourages people to do this through companies advertising offers to sell
the pretense of acquisition and by the tendency of people to artificially
bootstrap someone they like into their financial class. This sort of
pretense of wealth can be useful for obtaining better employment or more
desirable mates, or just exploring experiences sooner rather than later, so
many people get suckered into forfeiting future earnings, and actually
getting poorer; or accepting gifts without any clue how to maintain them or
properly honor the results. I think that in a sane world this would be
looked at as entrapment of naive people. I observe a major failing in
nearly all modern cultures, that many young people have little or no
coaching or examples to follow of how to effectively present and participate
socially, and how to manage resources; and many adults and organizations set
an example of ridiculous selling or trashing of their own future.
   Social equality is hopeless though, for me. The main emotional strain
involved has no relation to economics. Some of the women I adore want to
spend their days in ways that leave me completely cold. In some of the
job situations that I could really appreciate, I am a serious drag for the
others involved, in unresolveable ways. The resources are not available to
put everyone in orbit who wants to go, so should no-one go? Is it evil that
the Olympics shut out most contestants before they even go? Is it evil that
some of my friends were born to really kind and wise parents and that my
child has access to my numerous inventions? Does jealousy warrant destroying
all exceptional experience? Cannot we just accept that only a few will be
John Lennon?
   Mr. Joseph shows several charts comparing social sanity statistics of
various countries and comparing them based on economic equality, but he
makes no attempt to do a similar comparison over the past 1000 years. The
potential for huge differences in social inequality are far more massive
now and he showed in his Iowa speech that the same measures have gotten
better over time. It is my theory that, rather than inequality, it is
improved reporting of inequality and improved reporting of terrible news in
general that results in less social sanity. As the film points out, it
appears to be the perception of inequality, even if not true, that makes
for trouble. Thus a cultural tendency to focus on differences of how many
hits your YouTube videos got or how many other people want your spouse may
be the actual issue, and the money focus may be just a fairly unimportant
example that's easy to blame but only a symptom. My theory is that a society
with a high level of social sanity will tend to get less financially
stratified from people sponsoring and coaching each other, so perhaps his
correlation is true but backwards.
   As in his Iowa speech, Mr. Joseph proposes a fantasy of colonizing an
earthlike planet that has no life forms capable of negotiation. He
establishs a premise that everyone participating in the enterprise will
easily agree to maximizing stewardship of the planet, with an undisputed top
down development strategy into which personal imagination like mine will
be force fit. Such collective understanding is what created the present
concept of sewage treatment, residential density and public schooling that I
find totally appauling and destructive. It creates fear of HIV and
recreational drug users and a man who is too in love with his kid. I view
his proposal as one of homogenizing the human race, reducing social sanity
by attempting to manage a living system as if it were a device.
   At this point in the film Mr. Joseph launches into a brutal mocking
voice that is sure to end further viewing by any but the most ardent
supporter of his outlook. This is a major tragedy to me. His original film
called Zeitgeist was perhaps such a major success because of how kind and
magical his voice was for that entire two hours, though discussing serious
gross social corruption.
   He dismisses political theorists and religious people of all kinds as
presenting no useable schemes for social development. I think of Steve
Gaskin's farm, the Amish and the Mormons as being full of specific
suggestions, shown by example as well as overt friendly advice. He dismisses
the Christian Bible as lacking in any concrete description of social
management, and I agree with that. I used a Bible index many years ago to
thoroughly search likewise, also without result. But what got me searching
was being puzzled by the huge complex array of choreographic and social
arrangement traditions practiced by the members of most Christian religions.
I presumed that they had a scriptural basis, but they didn't. The pageantry
and specific values of religion had apparently evolved entirely from
naturally evolving social expressions of regular people, mostly unnamed
women. My involvement in the Quaker, Unitarian and Baptist religions showed
that this feminine development was still well under way, and is easy to
copy social development ideas from.
   My reading and video viewing of political theorists has been as
disappointing to me as to him; including the Zeitgeist Movement material.
None of the deliberate presenters have one word to say about the pageantry
of a normal day. Their discussion of supply and demand is completely
bloodless, as if socially conjured desire (like the $4000 handbag) and
choreographed interpersonal striving (such as dating) play no important
part in a normal economic life.
   He begins his proposed colonization with a premise that the activity
there would need a verbally defined goal of some sort. I have never heard
of such an idea related to Captain Cook or the exploration of Antarctica,
but the goal he suggests is ridiculous, merely to survive and avoid a bad
time. I imagine he means minimizing the unplanned factors of the sort like
nearly everything I do with a normal day.
   My own goals, when I have any, are always related to finding out what I
can discover, and I don't doubt the famous explorers would have had some
similar notion to offer if they had to say something. If I just wanted to
survive and avoid a bad time I'd stay home, not engage in a world scale
development involving top down planning. Thus I'd say that in this part of
the film, just past half way, his presentation completely fails, perhaps
fatally, unrelated to the Zeitgeist Movement ideas. He becomes a mean
whining liberal who cannot share a pocket knife with a friendly voice, let
alone a whole undeveloped world.
   In his new acidic cynical voice he says that politics is the means of
social operations on earth. He gave ample evidence in his first film of
deliberate social operations using large scale symbolic triggering,
choreographic displays or group events, military attack, commercial
offerings, catallaxy and unguided social darwinism. Now he says that
politics actually controls things; not an idea I find convincing. Having
been a leader quite a bit, and having observed intense fundamental chaos in
the Zeitgeist Movement, I think he and I have ample evidence that political
leadership is only vaguely directive of outcome.
   Then he suggests that logically derived answers from scientific
experiment should direct a social planning leadership whose origin and
nature he leaves undefined. He says science has no ego and holds onto
nothing, though I've read accounts of many people who've determined that
major scientific shifts seem to only occur after the death of the oldest
holders of the previous view, as if science is even more dogmatic than
politics. He then goes into a listing of resource labels and a material
cataloging proposal that suggest that economics can be run like an engine,
rather than recognized as a highly complex, barely comprehendable living
system. He presumes a sociality in the exploration society that would want
to participate in such a tedious and bloodless carving up of the new area,
and by implication a marginalizing of people like me who take exception to
it. He offers no ideas for negotiating conflicting scientific viewpoints,
and appears to believe no such conflict ever happens.
   He presents an idea of a Global Resource Management System, to offer
management people feedback about potential trouble coming in the global
ecosytem. As the global warming scientists have demonstrated, this implies
a huge degree of educated guesswork, especially when new technology is a
major player, and thus politically very volatile. He suggests that
pollution issues, what he terms strategic safety, and production design
standards, what he terms strategic efficiency, will inspire no nasty
political activity and that all production will be handled from requests to
a central authority, or else rejected for being contrary to central policy,
with no-one getting too upset. He insists that there will be no conflict of
opinion about what is strategic. My own commune management effort,
involving a dozen people and a single house, has a potentially explosive
range of opinion about such strategy that I keep barely resolved through
study of each persons remarks, clever choreographic gestures and timely
remarks of my own. I don't think that I would be capable of effectively
preventing open hysterical beligerence in the computer assisted social
planning context that he describes.
   He notes that similar systems are already in use, and I have read about
them being used very successfully at utility companies and corporations
like Wal-Mart, within systems of materials and apparatus that have no living
or human feeling components, and a completely faceless arms length consumer
base with very simple gross criteria. I have read about or observed attempts
at regulation of food production, mining, housing, school management, or
medical help this way with results that look tragically flawed to me, though
not to most of the participants. I think he is right that the present
world culture is headed into this form of governing, though calling it a
business model of governing rather than a scientific one. The Gates
Foundation could be looked at either way.
   He describes handling consumer demand in this way also, but with minimal
individualized ownership, as with a tool library or cloud computing. He
peppers his presentation with mean mocking remarks, as if trying to insure
that anyone with a questioning mind will not finish watching the movie. He
insists that no part of economic activity has a Republican aspect; not
compulsory public school, not abortion services, not location of nude
beaches, not anything; that nature sets all the relevant laws and implies a
one party system for all forms of management. He insists that cultural
relevatism is false, that human desire only appears to vary, that those who
appreciate violence wouldn't if they had been treated humanely (that is,
not aclimated to it in a culture that admires it) as children, that the
Amish will embrace technology if it is managed humanely; and that even more
essentially that the horrible poverty of two thirds of humanity is too
unthinkable an emotional cost for the limited extra flexibility and dignity
of the market system.
   He shows a topic concluding screen declaring that production and
distribution are the only actual economic variables to be considered. His
glaring omission, at this point, of how the listener and other Citizens are
going to get inspired to work and participate in the new system, seems also
a jab at anyone still wanting to think this stuff through. While Mr. Joseph
remarks later in the film that people will in the long run be motivated to
be significant contributors in appropriate ways, enough to handle everything
that the system begs to have accomplished, his silence about it at this
point in the film strikes me as another major fatality. His horrible
patronizing voice suggests also that the system will tolerate no questions
about such concerns. Certainly he won't.
   He then goes into describing Jacque Fresco's circular integrated city
design, with built in delivery utilities as well as the familiar electric
and sewage apparatus. It's not clear to me why no such places have already
been constructed, and why the new planned city going up in the United Arab
Emirates is rectangular, has no vertical farms and is designed for normal
delivery methods. He describes vertical farming, machine integrated solar
power, and the current widespread mechanization of manufacture that is
eliminating conventional labor activity. Particularly he describes the
building construction automation that is in current development. He
estimates that 75% of current employment could be replaced with current
machine designs.
   After presenting that, he addresses work incentive. First he notes that
the nature of current job offerings is mostly uninspiring except for the
money it offers. He suggests that a system that genuinely takes care of
people will inspire them to want to contribute to it, and due to automation,
will have little enough need for labor that contributing can take new forms
that people invent just to feel worthy of Citizenship. Particularly he
notes that an MIT study showed that only repetitive labor, such as what
machines do better anyway, is well motivated by differential advantage;
whereas design and management work is better motivated by emotional effects
like pleasing other people or seeing magical results, and actually sabotaged
by monetary offering.
   He then goes into discussing police concerns. Given no avaricious
motivation and no drug enforcement, he focuses on violent crime as the only
true policing issue. He has a violent crime researcher named Dr. James
Gilligan describe his view, that defining violence as a collective
pathology instead of an independent prosecutable action has proved far more
useful for remediation. Jacque Fresco speaks next saying mostly the same,
that he sees little real difference between a serial killer and a soldier in
how they are motivated to kill. He suggests that true free choice is
actually impossible, that everyone is subject to too much social influence
to be meaningfully described that way.
    Mr. Joseph does a great theatric introduction, at this point in the
film, of the inevitable debate accusing the Zeitgeist Movement of being one
of the already coined term ending in ism. Some of his speakers describe
their personal struggles with getting labeled communist or similar. But the
system they each advocate I think can be safely summarized as a nonfinancial
collectivist one, an opposite of catallaxy, in which there are no
recognized separate economies of any kind. Mr. Mcmurtry calls it life value
analysis, leaving unstated, but implied, that he recognizes no boundary
definition between economies, households or individuals. He and the others
are committed to being simplistic about resource allocation and sovereignty
feelings. For me, the absurd lack of business common sense and undefined
anger among the people of the Soviet Union after it became noncommunist was
a warning about long term collectivist society, that it makes people feeble
in a way, like people who take a 40 mile drive in the winter without
adequate clothes to survive a vehicle breakdown.
   Gabor Mate presents the idea that mainstream philosophical discourse is
forced politically to validate the root interests of the dominant social
forces in our society or in any society, so that success and status are
measured by the way that those who politically control things view the
matter. Though in past ages this was through military violence and ability,
nowadays ruthless financial ability and sly political manipulation are the
ways people conquer, so to have hope of entering the realm of economic
dominance, a person has to cooperate with those values. Mr. Joseph
suggests that social contribution should be valued as the measure of a
desirable leader or philosophically influential person.
    He calls this a value system disorder. Limitless growth is spoken of as
superior to social contribution, with projected dualities about sensible vs
utopian or capitalist vs against freedom and democracy. He notes that
current politics is a business, not a civic government, offering the
illusion of meaningless choice, but having sold the countries assets to
investors, with debate preset to marginalize anyone proposing real
addressing of root values. He does not suggest a separation of the civic
government from physical assets, as a first step; but that's what I
recommend.
   Mr. Joseph suggests that the market system is not actually the cause of
the present amazing wealth and ease in the world today, but is instead a
combination of nonfinancially motivated innovators and the discovery of
petroleum. He says that this success has been stolen by market system
promoters as being something they produced. I would say instead that my
neighbors want to stay drunk on mindless consumption and so they will only
validate leaders and marketers that promise endless escalation of
consumption. I think the leaders are in fact slowing the economy
deliberately but saying they aren't in order to keep their position. I've
had to do the same thing with my household. In the face of gross mob
avarice there is no way to avoid this. Almost no-one is willing to think
about stuff like this enough to play a responsible part. Even the makers of
this film are part of their own avaricious oil dependent disaster.
   A book called Winning the Oil Endgame describes how the industrial
leaders can and probably will arrange a transition to other energy sources
and petroleum-like manufacturing supplies. Some oppulence may have to be
forsaken and there will continue to be financially arranged heartless
political conquest. Most important, the book shows how profit will steer
and drive the transition. Mr. Joseph says people are not investing in
renewable energy due to lack of clear profit incentive, but more than half
the new power installation in America is wind power, and it installs very
quick and cheap compared to any other choices, so as fuel gets troublesome
or expensive the windmills will go in, without severe financial loss.
   An unknown voice over says that the monetary system will not let go til
it has killed the last human being, and Jacque Fresco does voice over saying
that the controling people will do whatever military or political lying
measures are necessary to maintain their position. But then the movie shows
a silent but hopeful looking story of world demonstrations against the use
of trade orientation by unarmed dour looking people, apparently succeeding
due to winning rapport with the police and military regulars.
   My own vision avoids this demonizing. I have known personally, quite a
few heroin and speed users, and view the demonizing of their addictions the
same as the demonizing of addiction to trade activity. The war on some
drugs began in my early adulthood and only seemed to cause intense tragedy,
inspiring users to be far more nasty than they would have been, with no
reduction in actual drug use. I imagine a Zeitgeist Movement black market
will be likewise far more sinister than the present economy.
   I would rather see a general discussion and public recognition that
heroin and speed and marketing obsession are socially poisonous, not to
validate bullying or character assassination, but to counter the admiration
of those kind of culture. Everyone engaging in those things can feel the
spiritual vacancy involved, and they speak to me about those feelings. All
that is needed is to validate that, and encourage everyone to have a nice
life.



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