Commentary from Adrian Wolfe, wolfe on the Zeitgeist Movement website


   
   
                     Peter Joseph in Iowa



   Peter Joseph got filmed in a Zeitgeist Movement meeting in Iowa, giving
a notably thorough presentation of his own outlook. While the questions that
he raises have enormous and lasting value to me, I think that his answers
greviously need a balancing discussion. In the following account I address
the topics he raises in the order he uses, omitting for the most part my
impressions of his fairly elegant audio visual offerrings. Though his voice
shows more grimness than in his original movies, and the relentless focus
on him standing at the lectern is a bit tedious, the result is more to
inspire compassion for his noble confusion rather than wish he would shut up
and go away.
   In the first lecture, Peter Joseph restates his belief that organized
institutions determine public policy to promote their own benefit of some
unspoken sort. I observe in my life the opposite, that institutions are
totally at the mercy of the public for their survival, and those who lose
track of the pulse of their constituent base lose their position in a hurry.
The public around me demands contradictory, illogical and criminal policies
on my part and on the part of the building officials and police who relate
to me. My experience with the people representing actual authorities and
institutions has consistently been good-hearted confusion at worst, wherein
they fear me or my expressions based on statistical anecdotes they've been
taught in a formal setting by similarly good-hearted but confused people.
   My impression about the emergence of voting tradition world-wide is that
major political players have advocated the practice in an attempt to better
track public sentiment, given that actual government practice and choice of
nominees for office is all administratively decided based on guessing what
will be most successful. Major hoaxes like the 911 event, and the invention
of AIDS, ADD and the like, look likewise like attempts to cope with
contradictory demands from the public, demands for babysitting and economic
growth without having to face the real limits of their own personal
emotional responsibility and the limits of resource availability. Mr.
Joseph observes the disrespect expressed by institutional leaders about the
intelligence of the public and presumes that it is unwarranted, though
being now a leader his forum posts suggest to me that he is getting plenty
of direct data about how innane and opportunistic the average person is.
   He completely misses the idea that money and trade originated as a means
to prevent or reduce warfare, and is still in use for that. He notes the
high profile military greed of the U.S. and British governments and misses
noting the widespread violence in the Iraq, Afganistan, the Congo, Rwanda,
and similar places where lack of trade activity between competing cultural
groups has fueled petty violence for millenia. Rather than managing
scarcity, money is a device to use better organizing as a means to reduce
scarcity through reducing spoilage losses and jealousy inspired warfare,
resulting in easily provable greater wealth in countries that trade more.
   He completely misses also that the gross childish self-centeredness and
idiocy of the majority of people is the root crisis driving the world
culture towards ruining the planet. Given his clear high intelligence, it
may be that he recognizes all this and is using the institutional images as
a strawman to redirect blame away from his audience in a bid to get them to
think about the managerial logic that he's interested in getting them to
advocate. He doesn't need them to act, and there appears to be little risk
of that, he just needs them to cooperate with a saner and more constructive
political direction currently being pursued by world leaders against the
self-destructive cultural tide. He sees a need to make it politically
realistic for leaders of all sorts to successfully stay in power without
the predatory and belligerent focus that the public in the past has
required of them.
   He states that abundance, sustainability and efficiency are the enemies
of profit, citing the foot dragging on electric car development and the
logical presumption of significant extra costs to existing businesses from
dealing with mothballing outdated equipment and learning new markets. I
cite the computer industry as proof of the opposite, that large businesses
are dealing with incredibly huge markets that make relatively little money
per sale and are potentially catastrophically expensive if the company is
forced to interact with a large percentage of customers. Hense a niche
market like electric cars threatens to become a public relations boat
anchor with little sales to support it and a new computer with lots of
unavoidable new problems will nevertheless inspire lots of free advice from
other users and generate reliable huge markets that buy and don't talk to
the company. In the last several years, billions of venture capital
dollars have been spent on photovoltaic development with no clear return
yet for any of the investors. The big companies and most investors at all
economic levels want no part in such a dubious enterprise that is quite
likely to incur only a loss. I doubt that any of the Zeitgeist Movement
people have invested in any such wonderful but risky ventures. Certainly I
haven't.
   He also points out that current economic theory emphasizes that faster
cycling of the money supply, churning resources and keeping people busier,
creates an endlessly increasing total wealth, or what is refered to as
economic growth. He says that the result is unnecessary production and
creation of waste, due to the impossibility of arranging cash valuation and
natural limitation on collateral damage from economic activity. He suggests
that abandoning the trade system would ease this damage, but nearly all my
friends and neighbors do as much or more damage per capita in their spare
time as in their employed time. The regular people around me, in my
completely institution free culture, continually press me to replace
dillapidated but adequate materials and look on me as pathetic or weird for
using a bicycle or shitting in a duff bucket. Over and over I am pressed to
define what to me are nonissues, like ragged landscape, as being matters in
dire neglect or evidence of my being a lesser human. I see the result of
this in other people's lives as a huge waste in every sense, and most of it
involving very little trade or commercial engagement.
   In my life I have seen countless examples of businesses and government
nimbly embracing new efficiency possibilities or cultural innovations that I
and other regular people would rather avoid, both due to the learning
challenges and the expense. At best an individual will have one or two
narrow fields of cultural innovation and brutally resist all others. Only
children and some institutions are more open.
   He describes a local monopoly or cartel as a bad thing, limited only by
government regulation. I have seen the corporate monopoly development thing
happen, destroying or absorbing smaller enterprises, always with a net
reduction in prices, an increase in normal wage expectation, and an
increase in variety of products and services available; all due I believe
to the economy of bigger scale and less duplication of infrastructure.
   He insists that lobbying and influence buying in government are an
unavoidable evil innately part of the free market. My recent reading about
the destruction of the indigenous cultures in Yosemite and Yellowstone
parks suggests to me that he is right, but that the matter is only evil to
those looking at a narrow field of view. If my neighbors and roommates are
representitive, and I believe they are, then the current government
lobbiests are far more broadminded and far less evil in the policies they
promote.
   He asserts that war and empire building are at root a financial
enterprise. My reading of history and my observation of small scale empire
building in my community suggests that trade and financial focus is
provoked as a means to defend against attack or incursion, and that the
financial talk of the warriors is evidence of lobbiest influence on their
thinking, promoting a focus on material acquizition rather than the
massacre style warring that happens otherwise. When the culture being
attacked is nonproductive then only an appeal to force exile can prevent
massacre. All of the warrior oriented people I've met are strikingly bad at
personal resource management and not at all good at recognizing something
with economic value in a victim's effects. Thus I agree with Mr. Joseph and
General Butler that war has evolved into being a racket instead of an
apocalypse, but I see that as a hopeful trend that I would like to see
encouraged towards war becoming a planned and anticipated technical event
involving only virtual and political losses, and no economic or medical
losses.
   Mr. Joseph remarks "how anyone in their right mind could ever rationalize
that a balanced peaceful sustainable and productive world could come out of
open competition, hense open warfare, from individuals competing against
each other for work, from corporations battling each other for market share,
to governments competing against each other for global economic dominance is
beyond me."
   Mr. Joseph thus states mockingly that he cannot imagine how any
intelligent person can theorize that a peaceful orderly society can arise
from people and organizations continually seeking differential advantage
over each other, motivated thus to deceive and sabotage each other. He
appears to sincerely believe that the deception and sabotage result from
trade focus, rather that they are appeased through development of trade
focus. I agree with him that warriors that I have gotten to know will still
wreck the vibe even within a trade structure, but I note that the trade
structure opens a verbal channel to the warriors that suggests hope that
further taming is possible, given a sane clearheaded assessment of what is
motivating the warriors, and a deliberate redirection of their delinquency
into socially benign activity.
   Given that the warriors clearly missunderstand the nature of wealth, and
delight only in equipment that destroys wealth and causes tragedy, to
suggest that they are motivated by wealth acquisition is ridiculous to me.
I note though, that war inspires considerable market activity in the
general public. Many non-military people promote war as a way to get richer,
not through actual military risk but through exploiting the spoils of what
the military oriented men will facilitate. I have observed huge public
interest in the possibility of getting some sort of technical benefit
without having to relate constructively to what is involved. Something for
nothing is likewise appealing in simpler non-trade oriented societies as
well.
   Mr. Joseph and many others are quick to scapegoat the business people
who promote military choreography politically. My impression is that the
war encouraging entrepenuers are responding to huge naturally occurring
market pressure from regular people towards an exciting competitive
choreography, as with a sports contest. As a child I had little luck
seeking playmates, due to my aversion to the heartless "exciting"
choreography common to nearly every culture with or without a trade system.
   This affection for heartless drama is still an issue for me, not with
institutions of any sort but with my direct associates. Both men and women
in my real life want no part of a choreography in which nothing is
destroyed, invaded, mocked or dominated heartlessly. And three times I have
been apprehended in public with my kid, in citizen arrests, for having no
identifiable maliciousness towards him, based on the logic that malice must
actually be there and simply be invisible, in the form of a kidnapping;
somehow many people are sure that no-one in the entire world actually
honors the emotional ease of their own child.
   Significantly, Mr. Joseph's subsequent remarks about addressing petty
crime, political violence by underdogs and social tragedies is fairly
helpful and he places his appeal directly to his listeners rather than
suggesting that they hold some institutional leaders to account. He
unfortunately misuses the Merva-Fowles Study, wherein a sudden loss of
conventional dependent (infantile) employment in a large socially anonymous
city context resulted in a temporary sharp rise in delinquent behavior on
the part of adults who had grown dependent on access to mindless employment
opportunity.
   He later expands on this with a beautiful graphic display of the
worldwide evolution of income and life expectency over the last 200 years,
and a graph of the parallel rise in the U.S. prison population. He draws
the same conclusion, that this represents cause and effect, an increase in
disparity of differential advantage inspiring more delinquency. But I live
among delinquents so I hear what a lot of them actually say to each other.
I observe that those who are poor and delinquent overtly abhor any kind of
resource management and have personal values that delight in pillaging as a
kind of practical joke that they don't take seriously at all. They
appreciate legitimized targets or victims and many of them overtly admire
skill at being violent. From what I've read, these values are overtly
recognized and accepted in established black cultures, and the U.S. prison
population is predominantly black. I imagine that the progressive
emancipation of black people, and the progressive increase in the quantity
of cultural style laws being enforced, are much more likely causitive
factors than the increase in income gap.
   The Zeitgeist Movement promises to be an even more pervasive babysitting
program than trade based socialism, resulting in potentially more intense
delinquent backlash if some important part of the system goes temporarily
haywire. I am highly wary of this and believe that some form of preparation
for that kind of infantile response must be designed, for the Zeitgeist
Movement to survive temporary setbacks.
   His take on police includes also the usual misleading statement from the
Simpsons comic, that the police are defending a stable social order in
behalf of the very wealthy people. While I have observed that police do
seem to focus unduly on the activities of working class people, that I can
tell it is with an overwhelming mandate from the entire culture, including
the same people, among them my associates, who are being harrassed. My
impression from internet reading and listening to TED talks is that some
wealthier people are actually more open to social innovation than my
neighbors, and some are far more inclined to have real compassion for the
fates of other people.
   Inclined as I am to politically abhor modern industrial overkill, I have
little warmth for the material lusts of my low budget associates, or anyone
similar. I've never had delinquent aspirations of the sort that involve a
target or victim, and I take offense that Mr. Joseph would expect it of me,
as so many other middle class people have. I don't doubt that there are
just as many victim seeking delinquents among his associates, but clever
enough not to be a legal issue. I would suggest that the people who did or
who supported the 911 event were all quite wealthy, and likewise those who
promote religious or financial illusion.
   He states later his proposed spiritual commandment that "Thou shalt
continually reorient thyself and society to reduce reactionary propensities
that lead to abberated consequences such as stealing and murder."
   He goes on to describe paper proclamations, voting, political activism
and participation in government as not being examples of constructive
reorientation in this sense. Then he states my view, that Exxon, the
Masonic tradition and the Patriot Act are symptoms of the failure of our
society rather than evidence of evil doers who must be vanquished. He says
that the evil behavior must be credited to the structure of our society; as
I would describe it, a heartless and humiliating social structure that
forces people to chose between having no dignity and having no compassion,
or forcing realistically a compromise of both.
   That is the end of Part one of his talk. For Part two he commences with
an image of colonizing the earth as if it were devoid of people, as if the
only culture is that being imported by those doing the assessment, and
limited to people fit and sophisticated enough for a major expedition using
modern equipment; a sort of Gilligan's island. By implication he can thus
exclude my entire white trash American subculture and all the cultural
inertia of the third world people whom he moments later uses as evidence of
current poor management practice.
   He also makes no mention of current American management practice of
electrical generation, fresh water, and arable land, all of which in my area
are publically managed by elected technician led organizations involving no
competitive structure, and no current cultural invasion. People like the
original inhabitants of Yosemite and Yellowstone get no respect in current
practice or in his discussion. Certainly those people's forty year life
expectency would inspire scrapping of their management practice.
   Mr. Joseph's discussion of energy production excludes nearly all sources
and capacity in current use, and he assumes that the present level of
achievement in my area of Oregon is lame due to profit seeking and
unexploritory management rather than the major technical struggle I have
observed in the local news over the last decade or so involving wind,
solar, and ocean energy development. I cannot attribute the feeble results
to lack of trying.
   He also completely omits any mention of human effort as a resource in
need of management. The present use of money to manage human effort is to
be entirely abandoned, but he doesn't indicate an expectation of the feeble
economic ambition of nonmonetary cultures being what he expects to work
with for human resource. In my thirty years of group household management
experience I have had no luck inspiring efficient useful work without some
form of compensating differential advantage, even with ideal politically
correct personnel. No amount of discussion of embarrassing neglect has been
remedial. I have observed, instead, a huge human capacity to adapt to
degeneracy of personal maintenance. The present sixty percent of American
adults that are overweight and the thirty percent of consumed calories in
America being refined sweetener is what I expect of management of human
resources without direct linking to personal consequences.
   He puts up on the screen the remark that everything in regard to social
organization is a technical process, as opposed to some matters being to
some degree an interpersonal challenge involving spells and manipulation of
belief. His viewpoint seems all the more puzzling in the face of the present
Zeitgeist Movement challenge that is almost entirely interpersonal.
   He makes the same puzzling logical break with regard to intelligent
machines. My impression of his theory, that monetary tradition has
programmed people to become monsters with each other, is that it presumes
that the shared economy is a technical apparatus or intelligent machine
made up of people trapped inside of verbal agreements invented and honed by
lawyers acting in competition with each other (in a likewise blinkering
context), with the result that no one person is a genuinely free agent in
their expressions and in operating the cultural machinery around them.
   I am concerned that a world of people ruled by or trapped within the
present social machines must be first transformed into free agents, before
they can safely engage in designing even more formidable social machines
that may decide to destroy them, like the present one is destroying the
Kalihari desert natives. Especially I imagine my own style of nonindustrial
culture to become even more a target of eratication.
   The present senseless management of manure and urine was arrived at with
no relation to profit motive, only to minimizing social stress, but the
result is an intelligent formidable social machine that will arrest and
punish anyone caught properly handling their own urine. Likewise for anyone
studying their own consciousness with hallucinatory drugs or exploring
sexuality to cope with menstrual cramping or wet dreams at puberty. The
intelligent machine of culture keeps the use of the monetary system without
any voting opportunity for living participants. I view these beehive
effects of culture as examples of artificial intelligence of the same class
that Mr. Joseph is proposing as a means to improve social management, and
clear proof that serious risk is involved.
   I believe that all leaders have had to take into account these cultural
tidal forces, as I have had to, including Adolf Hitler and Ghandi and the
people who organized the 911 event. I think a Zeitgeist Movement artificial
intelligence could very well create a war choreography, given the enormous
number of people who believe that violent social control is constructive.
Even if none of the originating members of the Zeitgeist Movement hold that
view, in the long run the movement must include everyone on the earth, with
all their cultural momemtum, experience and aesthetics.
   I observe a progressive increase in the general cultural sanity of the
human race over the course of recorded history, so I am actually hopeful
about a Zeitgeist Movement, but it seems critical to me not to introduce
illogical faith in the harmlessness of artificial intelligence, no matter
how benign and friendly the designers are.
   Mr. Joseph defines the roles of government as resource and environmental
management, production and service management, and facilitation of
research, invention and decision making. I view the historic role of
government as having been entirely that of referee between different
visionary human expressions that are crowding or compromising each other.
Technical management in the past has often been a grotesque failure when
delegated to a government organization, as in various communist experiments.
As a result, China and Vietnam, and perhaps other communist countries I
haven't read about, have incorporated freelance business into their
economies.
   I imagine that management by government is mechanically equivalent to
programming a computer to write poetry. One of the first programs I ever
wrote did that, and the verse was quite intriging superficially. But it
lacked some kind of soul. The meaning it evoked arose entirely within the
reader. A successful poetry program would have to begin with a program that
emulated a genuine spiritual experience of being alive, a highly formidable
challenge. My experience of business that addresses creative market pressure
has been that, to be effective in relating to market needs and wants, the
managers must be like astrologers, similar to how a rock and roll song gets
famous. I have seen more failures than successes. Only unconscious demands,
as for electricity, can be managed by formula or logic. Most of the economy
is not of that sort though, especially in the present culture of riotous
invention.
   For example, in 1978 or so, I purchased a used photo-typesetting machine
to set up a business offering layup service to small newsletters. I had been
employed in college as a computer programmer, but that experience had me
convinced that computers were an expensive passing fad. I heard about
computer typesetting but I didn't pursue the matter, convinced that it would
never match the cost and quality of my machine. The business lasted only a
single year and the machine sold for a fraction of what I had paid for it.
Logic has always been my strong suit, but if I had been setting up the
printing department of a large school district I could have made a far
larger mess.
   Mr. Joseph strikes me as someone with a far clearer crystal ball than
what I have, and though I scold his logic, I'm carefully studying what he
has to say. I intuit that he is appealling to people like me to manifest
some kind of social device that he is unable to. He may not be entirely
sure what it is mechanically, but he has great confidence about what it
looks like in action.
   He has a description of outsourcing personal property that, though it
leaves out completely my own relationship to things, does nevertheless hint
at a trend that I observe already happening. The Quickbooks bookkeeping
company has discovered that it makes more sense to charge people a fee to
use the company's hardware instead of the sale of a program copy to each
individual for use on their hardware. Likewise, nearly all public libraries
now have a room full of online computers, networked to a printer and running
the latest programming, releasing the vast majority, who cannot do maintenance
on a computer system, to use the latest incredibly complex system without
being faced with any hardware issues.
   Mr. Joseph suggests a similar use of cars, wherein a person obtains a
timeshare on a vehicle that is personalized only by what they put in it, and
only theirs til they arrive where they are going. Since the vehicle can
drive itself safely, it can pick someone up at any location, like a taxi. In
widespread use, the demand would be so heavy that the next assignment for
each vehicle would likely be quite close, wasting very little energy in
trips without a useful payload. The Better Place car company is setting up
infrastructure to head this direction, with customers who subscribe rather
than buy. Rental agencies offer lawn mowers now, and party equipment,
making possible less stuff stored in each house and less need for each
person to understand mowers or find space for things they use once or twice
a year.
   It is still cheaper to own one's own equipment, but primarily due to
labor costs. In a world that is increasingly automated, subscription
service will potentially get cheap enough that the cost of storage and the
extra worries of private property will drive people away from owning
equipment or buildings. Thus demand will get less and less conscious
through being driven more by the momentary need for a thing rather than a
decision about what to own and become symbolically identified with.
   And thus more and more economic apparatus will become like electricity,
managable through straightforward logic rather than study of cultural
hysterias.
   His ommision of the use of private property in creating cultural roots and
social continuity is highly disappointing to me. He undoubtedly has faith
that a Zeitgeist community would recognize and honor someone's artistic and
social development, but even many of my own friends tolerate my ragged
hippie culture solely due to an overriding cultural agreement honoring
capital development, not out of any inclination to honor my feelings about
my land based cultural expression.
   I am still stumped about how to obtain a genuine welcome, in the
cultural environment I actually live in, without the license granted
through the monetary system to be as idle and chaotic as I am. In the
present market system, those who despise adults who play like children all
the time can define me as tragically unfortunate or condemn me to be outcast
from expensive culture, instead of hounding me to join their industrial
nightmare or arranging my arrest. Living in squallor and messiness and
contributing little to the collective wealth retains a fragile legality.
   Mr. Joseph presumes everyone will become a reasonable industrial
contributor as the means to anchor their self respect. I view
industriousness as a disease or addiction, to tolerate, not admire. I
contributed massively to the social innovations wiki, but from my own bias.
There is still no collaboration in that wiki, so my effort may actually be a
detriment to Mr. Joseph and a silent majority of Zeitgeist Movement people;
and not a contribution at all, in their view.
   Mr. Joseph briefly addresses the idea of human nature, suggesting that,
in an appropriate environment, people collaborate rather than compete. I
consider the current world market system as a clear proof of this. For
example, the Chinese government is organizing construction of the largest
scale utility infrastructure ever attempted and yet has taken no apparent
regard for preventing sabotage by the U.S. military. And the U.S. war in
Afganistan appears to be primarily motivated by a hamstrung oil pipeline
project through that country into China. China has also invested heavily in
U.S. treasury bonds. The monetary system appears to have made allies of the
U.S. and China without any direct public recognition in the normal
political sense, or any cultural belief shakedown.
   My neighbors likewise, in their expressions of cultural demand, stick to
the conventions of property lines, and they attack directed through a
referee, who enforces rules that at least theoretically apply to everyone.
Since no one is open to authorizing the bullying of their own cultural
expression, from a referee or anyone, the administratively created rules
have avoided cultural limits for the most part, coaxing neighborhood
collaboration against serious odds.
   To me, the central challenge of the Zeitgeist Movement is to end the use
of economic activity as a means to address enotional stress. Obtaining
encouragement from a teacher or counselor, validation and attention from a
waitress, excitement from a casino game or spectacle, motivation and
confidence from a cup of expresso and a pastry, relaxation from a beer and
a television show, rage expression from barking at a salesman, or vengence
from assessing and completing an entitlement, can be viewed as infantile by
those not using that means. That I have seen, personal emotional issues are
far more effectively addressed through actual emotional engagement. I view
this as the root of spiritual or religious interest, the drive to replace
addiction or neurotic activity with human involvement in some visionary way.
   Peter Joseph counts on this as the main source of community wealth,
through people expressing curiosity, loneliness, nervousness, rage, or
nameless anxiety, through useful visionary activity with people they like.
He counts on robot technology to do labor that fails to win enough
volunteers.
   While I am similarly hopeful, I view him as counting the chickens before
they've hatched. To me, the regular economy is like a world of animals; a
world of people who have agreed to operate within a scheme that temporarily
renders them emotionally shallow, short sighted and cruelly territorial. I
believe that, given a clearly visible alternative life scheme that can
coexist with that world, but lacks the drawbacks, people will gradually
discover more constructive and interactive ways to relate emotionally, and
become less inclined to be animal-like.
   Thus I imagine the trade economy as a permanent feature of human
expression, as much as diapers on old people, or training wheels on a kids
bike, recognized as less than ideal but not a crime; or something to
eraticate, as Jacque Fresco puts it. While I can empathize with Mr. Fresco
wanting to eraticate the trade economy from his own life, he also has no
children or nearby neighbors pressing for exploration of trade ideas
involving him personally, as I do.
   The role of feminine hopes has yet to show in the Zeitgeist Movement.
The actual activity of the constructive economy, excluding the work of
lawyers, insurance salespeople and the like, appears to me to be largely
the activity of women, worldwide. The actual activity of the nonfinancial
economy appears also largely the activity of women, worldwide. The present
Zeitgeist Movement discussion is primarily the activity of men, worldwide,
and does not appear to include any who represent current Alpha Farm style
economic focus, that is none describe currently living in a resource based
economic context or even being open to that. Given my past major conflicts
with feminine esthetics and workaholic idealists, I am wary.
  

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