Introducing the Zeitgeist Movement from Adrian Wolfe on Vimeo.
Eugene Oregon Chapter of the Zeitgeist Movement
Transcript of My Zeitgeist Video
This video is to introduce The Zeitgeist Movement. It is a mostly
leaderless internet organization formed to promote a world scale
socio-economic vision first introduced and developed by a fellow named
Jacque Fresco several decades ago. Loosely the vision involves a world
economy arranged to have all large scale basic utilities and common
commodities managed in a manner similar to a publically owned utility
company, staffed entirely by volunteers and robotic equipment. Building and
land planning would likewise be done in a manner similar to present public
transit design committees, likewise all volunteer, and developed in city
sized chunks.
Mr. Fresco's plan does not involve any trade activity of any kind. There
would be no private ownership of land, buildings or vehicles, nor did he
design any enforcement arrangement to prevent a forced aquisition. He
presumed that any request for use would be permitted and that the world
resources of materials, land and volunteer labor are adequate to handle all
requests from everyone on the earth. The scheme relies in a fundamental
sense on the cooperation of all the nations of the world to permit their
natural resources of all kinds to be managed for the benefit of all people
on the earth, regardless of cultural traditions, industriousness, or
inheritance.
His theory includes the idea that inclination to criminal action is
almost entirely the result of wealth differential. This has been shown to
be true statistically for petty crime by individuals, though not for the
more common self-righteous entitlement ideas of individuals and not for big
scale military conquest.
Mr. Fresco has designed and built several models of cities, some
intended to be aquatic, several models of public transit devices, and some
models of modular building machines. He asserts that use of such large scale
systems would significantly increase the usable resource base through
avoiding idle vehicles, avoiding empty housing, and building modularly with
robots. His house construction designs are fireproof and indestructable. He
also anticipates widespread use of tidal and geothermal electricity,
hydroponic farming, and sea water desalinization.
He does not live communally, nor is communal living part of his
scenario. Sentimentality about existing buildings, some of them hundreds of
years old, does not figure in his program either due to their utility
inefficiency and fire danger. I believe that these two factors are game
killers, that will have to be faced.
In his presentations his emphasis is on his ideas being descriptions of
logical future trends, that are not so much a deliberate ambition of his as
an anticipation of what will happen anyway, based on past developments. My
own assessment mostly concurs with that. It is the society of the Star Trek
television program.
Mr. Fresco and his friend Peter Joseph have both stated publically that
they view the social challenges involved in their plan as the matter to
focus on for achieving a system without trade. Mr. Joseph suggested that
even a group of current Zeitgeist Movement members set suddenly into a
resourse based context would degenerate into a catfight.
It seems to me logical to in fact assess the present world economy as a
situation where that has happened; a resource based economy has digressed
into the catfight. The trade and military terror methods of damage control
are what has evolved so far to maintain friendly sanity and infrastructure
stability. There have been small scale historical incidents, such as the
Easter Island civilization and several reported shipboard mutinies, wherein
the social fabric dissolved completely into dog eat dog; and the arrival of
outsiders who present a united military style invasion shattered the
paranoid estrangement of the survivors. I believe that the trade system
tradition is forsaken quite often to varying degrees and the result is
always beligerence that resolves only when a deal is struck by the major
players.
Thus the mainstream logic is to advocate the present trade system as
being the rescuer, not the oppressor. I see the trade system as like a
flotilla of ferry boats on a very complex and enormous swamp. When a boat
arrives at an impassable place it sometimes becomes for a time a nuisance
to have, but it carries an otherwise fatiguing load in a very efficient way
most of the time, so every boat gets hauled on shouders to the next stretch
of free water.
But some people have come to the end of the swamp. Those of us who have
arrived safely at a vast expanse of dry ground, openning up a huge world of
new possibilities, can now continue to explore, but we must leave the ferry
boats behind, and risk a permanent loss of them.
The boats have ruled our social structure for so long that no-one
remembers a world without them. The open land allows solitude for the first
time. Many of us are in love with a particular boat, and cannot possibly be
parted. Many say to hell with the dry land, we should head back out into the
swamp.
The trade system has undisputable drawbacks. Like the use of boats, it
favors those with technical ability of a certain kind (and their close
associates) and leaves a huge majority, who are not adept and not lucky, in
a destitute condition. Mr. Fresco is the first to say that he is not one of
the adept at handling finance. He describes in his movie called Future by
Design, an incident as a young adult when all his personal effects were
brutally auctioned off by a creditor. His current artistically developed
residence is in fact up for sale even now, apparently due to cash flow
crunch, and a puzzling inability to arrange profitable sharing of a twenty
acre estate with five complete residences.
I am not one of the lucky. I started my adulthood with no parental
guidance, no money, no assets other than what I'd earned money for, and a
style of social expression that made me fairly unemployable. I had no
worries though, because I discovered right away that I could live just fine
on almost no money by engaging what for me was straightforward personal
management. My life focus turned entirely towards studying my culture and
establishing benevolent association of various sorts.
Fairly soon I met a fellow named Charles Gray in a political activist
group, who expressed what became an often expressed remorse about being one
of the lucky in a world with mostly unlucky people. He was deliberately
living poor as a sort of protest, though oddly more opulent than I was. He
was not up to the level of intimacy forced by fate onto the unlucky poor,
whereas I grew up that way.
Mr. Gray saw a need for greater lucky people awareness and discussion
about deliberately evening things out a bit. He noted that the international
helping agencies and United Nations efforts are clearly having trivial
impact on the stark statistics of economic destitution common to most of the
people in the world. The numbers for recent years look no better than what
he told of. An average full time worker in Bangladesh earns less than $40 a
month in current U.S. dollars. Though land and labor are very cheap there,
tragic starvation and misery are not uncommon. China, the country where I
thought the cheap labor was, is on the high side of average labor income at
$150 per month for a fulltime worker.
These statistics are in my view quite misleading though. I have been to
Ethiopia. Though it was 35 years ago, I know what poverty looks like. The
average monthy income in that country at the time was reported by Mr. Gray
to be about $25 a month in current U.S. dollars. No-one I saw was lonely or
grim about life. If anything, they looked sorry for me, because I couldn't
speak the language and I was generally alone walking around. The average
person visible in my home town looks to be under far more stress and far
more self-sorry than those I saw there.
What's more significant is that my life has evolved to where I live a
rather opulent American lifestyle spending about $150 a month for
everything, because I live communally with unambitious people and it's very
cheap. My share of electric consumption is contributed by photo-voltaics. I
shit and pee into a composting system that I built for nothing. I dress
indoors in warm layers in the winter and am barefoot half the year. I have
several bicycles and trailers, some of them exotic or bizarre. I am clever
with junk so I have plenty of devices and materials. I work for money or
trade about five hours a week doing odd jobs for friends, generally
accruing savings.
When I was younger, I also lived outdoors alot and homeless entirely
alot, even while working full time. I got really good at it, even in quite
inclimate weather. I've had a few bouts with devastating life threatening
illness, sometimes very painful, with no competent medical help. I've dealt
with violent insanity from associates, and condemnation by authorities.
So I'm hard to impress with a sob story or pathetic statistics, but I am
convinced that a comfortable healthy lifestyle can be afforded for all 6.5
billion people on the earth, without robbing the rich at all or even
getting their permission; and that in fact, such a development is
inevitable, solely on the initiative of those who will benefit. I think
that in the poorer parts of the world a person as resourceful as me is not
unusual, and a person who is self sorry or lonely is fairly rare. And more
the point, that they, and I, are poor because wealth is not a priorty, not
because it's out of reach.
I observe in the news stories that getting better food and technical
items is becoming more of a priority to the poor in poorer countries. The
affection that has always been paramount still is, but not to the exclusion
of production as before. Due I think, to the increased respect and
fascination about production, there is also less acceptance and interest in
military violence. The routine civil wars are getting less popular and less
common, and more publicized through the internet into countries that have
rich people who will vastly complicate the political strife, and who will
re-emphasize production, and wow everybody with their devices. The rich
foreign people try to get everybody to bargain and honor bargaining but
the poor country political systems are military coup oriented so progress
only happens through indirect maneuvering, as with the Nike invasion of
Siagon after the communists took it over.
My bias is determined largely by how I obtained my financial ability.
When I was a child in the late 60's, my family bought the game of Monopoly.
My two sisters and I got into playing it right away. We quickly discovered
that the rules as they stood discouraged any basic humanity towards
recipients of bad luck, represented by the roll of the dice. Going to jail
was never the result of committing a trespass in any way, and a mortgaged
property could not collect rent and lost all it's houses at half their
value.
This immorality seemed to all of us to be a mistake on the part of the
game designers. We right away established that a player was supposed to
take property at full price as part of rent that another player had to
pay. Thus the game's concept of mortgage virtually disappeared for us. We
also arranged for all fines to get paid into a jackpot in the center of the
board which was won by landing on the Free Parking corner. We also
completely ignored the auctioning part of the rules. The game became
endless, lasting several days, and ending when a player had established an
undisputed superiority of property ownership. Sometimes when we played it, a
bankruptsy would occur after rash sale of everything to the other players,
ending the game that way. We had little interest in playing the game after
one of us was out, and it always felt to me like some kind of a failure if
the game didn't resolve into stability, with no clear loser.
The point of the game for me became to win by the least difference
possible. If I was way ahead I deliberately let good purchases pass and let
my savings get huge without buying buildings. A balanced stalemate between
the three of us felt like a real achievment, far more so than forcing
someone into bankruptsy.
Given that the real money Monopoly game loomed as a permanent background
in my life, this experience settled my resolve to never take on a real
mortgage or play the game involving real money in a manner that risked a
cash flow crunch. It never occured to me to consider the immorality of the
Monopoly game to be an innate aspect of money. I took it merely as a warning
about how critical financial rules could be. To bankrupt all my associates
and win in the real Monopoly game would be a crushing horror, inevitably
faced with socially picking up the pieces afterwards. I resolved to always
win any financial challenge by the least amount possible, maximizing the
opportunities left for whoever else was involved.
Later as a teenager I discovered another ethical puzzle related to
competition. With my sisters I also learned to play chess. I was pretty
good at it but suffered terribly from humiliation if I lost, creating an
ethical dilemma: the other player nearly always faced a loss with me. I
noticed though that the winner could virtually cancel the pain of losing by
overtly giving the art of playing well the image of being a circus trick
that they had practiced a lot. It then became more like show and tell about
a novelty, rather than a loss of dignity and psychic energy for the loser. I
became inclined to describe the event that way to an opponent before the
game, for my own well-being as well as theirs given that I sometimes lost.
For added emotional security I made a secondary game of forbidding an
obvious bad move on the part of the opponent, totally muddying the purity of
a win on their part.
I also joined a school soccer team. The pagentry was wonderful to me and
I became a great cheerleader, but I was entirely unable to deliberately
thwart another player in their handling of the ball. My outlook towards
chess playing had rendered me unable to risk humiliating another person
ever, partly out of fear of encouraging them to humiliate me. My team
faired very well but the coach never called me on to the field in an actual
game against another school.
This in my view is what causes poverty in a trade economy. Not being
open to humiliating their associates, a lot of people deliberately avoid
establishing even moderate superiority of assets through management effort.
I didn't relate to money that simply though. As with chess, I could win in
Monopoly without using the superior position to hurt the feelings of the
other players. I could make it the role of the lead player to graciously
suggest bailout schemes for the less lucky player. Winning a challenge
involving money has thus never been in my mind an implied loss for anyone
else. The Monopoly game made me quite wary of the potential for that
though, and inspired me to establish clear financial ethics in my youth that
prevented any financial tragedy either to me or from me:
I always offer the regular price to someone selling out of desperation.
I maintain enough savings that there is no risk of me becoming a
nuisance or worry from my own financial desperation.
I demand a fair but not excessive wage, somewhat higher than the
minimum, and do the best work that I am able. If I'm not skilled enough or
am disliked I volunteer to exit.
If other people will be jealous of my asset situation then I don't tell
them about it. If someone seems worried about my poverty then I tell them
what I have.
If someone tells me they're broke, in a way implying it happens a lot, I
presume that being broke is okay for them, that financial flexibility
doesn't matter to them, and that they somehow would even rather be broke.
I only offer a loan as a convenience to myself for storing money, and
only to a financially stable person. I also keep very careful written
records.
If someone indicates reserve about sharing an asset of any kind then I
pretend that it's not there, regardless of my potential benefit. An offer
of rent I take as an implied preference not to share.
When ever possible, I make my refuse an opportunity for someone.
I also make a point of achieving whatever I'm after using the least
resources of every kind, that being better for everyone.
With these guidelines for myself I have been able to keep an endless
financial equilibrium my whole life, causing no worry or casualties and
never having a crunch. Nearly everyone I've ever known, though, routinely
has major financial disasters or running financial stress, and I have no
luck talking them out of it. My guidelines have little or no appeal to
other people. Of course, none of my ideas came consciously from someone
else, so I have little faith in verbal learning.
In my view these guidelines are an unavoidable first step in creating
Mr. Fresco's resource based society, because the continuous real Monopoly
game is a damage control device for the world economy, that will be
spontaneously replaced with the civil war insanity of the poor countries
if the game actually ends. Mr. Fresco and many others say that the game
originates the strife through restricting access, but I observe the
oppposite. Only management oriented people like me allow access to anything
they are touchy about. Almost everyone, rich or poor, goes way overkill
restricting access to their own personal effects and territory, with or
without trade arrangements.
Because I overtly play the financial game, I am able to be communal with
my territory and things. My bedspace is right inside the front door, in a
700 square foot house that I've shared with as many as twenty others without
significant strife. I couldn't do that without the emotional safety and
predictability of the real Monopoly game. The game is a complex challenge,
but the real world is an order of magnitude more so, with no way to avoid
multiple unanticipated feelings of terrible loss and unnoticed terrible
destitution. What's worse, the tendency that I've observed over and over is
that if things seem to some people to be very close to their ideal, but not
quite, then their tempers are at the maximum hair trigger.
Mr. Fresco's idea of a computer management system implies a whole
society that is able and willing to verbally declare all their
sensitivities and physical demands into the computer system. But I have
failed over and over pleading with well over a hundred different people to
make their criteria visible or readable, put it where I can incorporate it
into my influence on their life, but no-one has ever come across with
anything even feeble, let alone complete.
Thirty people a day visit the Zeitgeist Movement Social Innovations wiki
since it was created on the first of July, in 2009, without even a single
edit or contribution other than me. The interpersonal shakedown of
sensitivities and issues needing accountability from the Venus Project
computer management system has not begun yet. It is too much to ask.
Keeping the peace in America through mindless cooperation with the real
Monopoly game is clearly the real choice, not of a minority, but of
absolutely everybody. All are overwhelmed by the staggering complexity of
feelings in the real society.
The Sovereign Citizen outlook on this seems meaningful to me. They
define a genuine ownership as totally despotic control, so the present
societies offer no major assets that qualify, and thus can be described as
resource based societies that offer a veneer of trade structure. The purpose
of the trade arrangement is to limit resource access, so as to prevent
brutal chaos from all the competing self-centered people, many of whom are
focused on a hobby that they believe to be a divine mission worthy of
special resource access. Many people believe that the whole earth resource
base can meet every whim of 6.5 billion people, and they will personally
continue to take whatever they can until the system breaks.
The real capacity of the world resource base can be estimated. According
to a United Nations University study, the current world industrial
production can be estimated to have a cash value in the neighborhood of
$600US per month per person. There are some serious drawbacks to using a
trade value for estimating resources. An item or service in a rich country
can have a six to ten times higher trade value than the same thing in a
poorer country. This is especially misleading with regard to factors like
manufacture in China and hospital service in Thialand, where a significant
percentage of world production is involved. Based on that I would triple the
true trade value to $1800US.
And, nearly everyone in the poorer countries also depends heavily on
nonindustial infrastructure similar to my humanure composting system, that
inevitably won't show on an industrial analysis as production. Based on my
own life, the untracked infrastructure has a value in America of another
$600US per month.
Thus I estimate that current world production could support a lifestyle
cost equivalent to living in the United States with a paid for house and
$2400US per month to spend, or just under $30,000 per year. Overtly assessed
public infrastructure costs in America are in the neighborhood of 40 percent
of total costs, so the personal total would most likely be reduced to about
$1400US per month of available resource potential per individal. This is
including all the children, cripples and everybody.
Mr. Fresco's system assumes all labor being entirely voluntary though,
like a hobby. There is considerable debate about what kind of production can
be expected from volunteers and how much production increase could be
obtained with heavier use of robotics. From what I've seen living communally
most of my life, I would estimate a 90 percent loss of production capacity
in a volunteer system, with most people appearing to be quite busy with
something. Thus my own estimate reduces the spendable resource total per
person to $140 per month, or about the same level as I am at.
I may actually be too optimistic about volunteer production efficiency.
The present world industrial activity is nearly all based upon
heirarchically managed groups of workers. Communal work groups that I've
participated in were inevitably democratic in their management, reducing
their collective intelligence to the least common denominator. Any
management vision or understanding had to pass muster with the dingiest
member of the group. That was often a seriously crippling factor due to some
phenomena not being quite what one would intuitively expect or else due to
some members being committed to mindless tradition. Many members would also
focus a lot of their attention and effort on matters that were nice for
visual effect but contributed little to production efficiency.
Use of a management evolving wiki, wherein the most intellectually
confident and relentless contributor rules the conclusions, rather than use
of consensus meetings, has possibility for easing both the suffocation
of intelligent management, and also promoting awareness of actual
production results. All of my collective work experience predated computer
use. An encyclopedia or news program done through volunteers in a wiki can
easily replace any trade based organization for efficiency of effort and
quality of product. If business management could all be wiki based, with no
actual personality involvement, then I could be completely off base in my
pessimism.
This is already evolving in public attitude about wiki results. The
original dubiousness about the reliability and intelligence of wiki writing
has resulted in considerable careful analysis of wiki accuracy, partly from
businesses trying to compete with the wikis. Now the opposite attitude is
emerging of a significant number of people being automatically mistrustful
of a financially motivated source of information or advise. I can imagine a
world in which a majority is never easy with the guidance of a visible
leader, and will turn always to wiki generated policy and design.
I have also tested the idea of unconditional public access to property,
with a less hopeful result. In 1996 I made a formal declaration in the
county record making my front yard a public park regardless of subsequent
owners. I placed lawn furniture and a swing in places convenient to a
visitor, and put up a fairly official style sign with raised lettering that
says Gooble Dell Public Park.
For 13 years it was no big deal and mostly unnoticed. Technically the
inside of the house isn't in the park, but everyone getting to know the
place soon found out that it realistically is. One day this fall, a gang of
about ten teenagers discovered the possibilities and the pair of trampolines
in an enclosed porch-like area out the backside. Their presense became a
daily event, with other young people joining them. The vibe was quite harsh
in my view, of people belittling or picking on each other, and my kid burned
out on the game early on. Every day I had to repair at least two of the
trampoline springs and clean up the debris in the kitchen, and I couldn't
hang out with the combative vibe either.
One day a few of the boys were gaffawing in the alley next to the house
and one got the idea to raid my roommate's garden and smash a pumpkin by
throwing it. My roommate saw them and put a quick end to the matter, but
the incident broke my tolerance of the vibe. I evicted the whole gang and
have not been open to their return to the trampolines, despite several
polite appeals from some of them.
The teenagers were quite guileless in their discussions with me about
social politics. They had no inhibition about heartless self-indulgence and
overtly trashing the offerings of their parents or of the community. Having
witnessed the brutal humiliations of neighbrhood children by their parents
countless times, I was not inclined to wonder what could inspire that, but I
was still in disbelief that the teenagers found it so easy and normal to
vandalize, both physically and emotionally.
The stories I've read of industrial pollution in communist eastern
Europe give me the impression that this kind of outlook is normal for
people who have no sovereignty over anything. There is a basic denial of
human dignity in granting no sovereign personal territory, that seems to
inspire indifference to large scale vandalism. This is my image of what
inspired the people who destroyed the california trolley systems and
promoted the interstate highway construction. They saw far more admirable
life expression from car users than transit users, so they bought the
trolley systems and dismantled them.
Likewise, wikis are all managed by a few idealistic individuals who will
block the login of any overt vandals who join the editing. Sometimes the
managers freeze editing for a time, hoping that only sincere people will
wait it out. It seems that a resource based society will still have to have
clearly defined stewards or host people for each significant asset. This is
the way I think of regular capitalist ownership, as actually a stewardship
of something.
The ownership is a liability until sharing can be worked out, but too
often that sharing gets deranged by a vandal outlook on the part of the
owner, who may do alright financially but like for the kid who threw the
pumpkin, the curse on their life can have all sorts of subtle bad effects
socially and psychically, on the owner and everybody.
For example, one of my neighbors attempted to maximize the sale price of
his house by arranging, with two other neighbors, a major bust of my house,
right before posting it. The bust was a huge, expensive tragedy for my
household, but made no difference in what potential buyers saw. He got his
$20,000 profit eventually but burned his bridge and poisoned neighborhood
rapport seriously.
Unlike the other Zeitgeist Movement people, I don't attribute this kind
of spiritual vandalism to the monetary system, even though he was trying to
sell a house and the other two neighbors appear to have a similar plan. The
building department enforced rules against amateur construction and having
more than five people sharing a house. They speak for a culture.
Mr. Fresco not only proposes to eliminate all private vehicles and
properties, but he also wants to eliminate amateur and outdated stuff.
Everyone's house would be chosen from a catalog and built by robots, with a
sophistication eclipsing any one person. My house is an unheatable firetrap
with a decaying roof and knob and tube wiring. He would advocate bull-dozing
the house, sentimentality be damned. With the loss of the house, a lot of
what my friendly personal dignity is founded on would go also. For those
people whose dignity is expressed through paintings or preschool
choreography, a generic house may compromise nothing, but I would rather
sleep in a tarp in the bushes than in one of Mr. Fresco's extruded
buildings.
Ironically I've participated in a whole lot of ferro-cement house
building, very similar to the buildings where Mr. Fresco actually lives, so
one could say that in the real world I share some ideas. I'm building a
ferro-cement and drywall addition to my house, though with none of the
sophisticated look of his buildings. I build like one of the underground
houses in the Narnia movie.
I also have a car I remodeled. The one I used to use I just made minor
changes to, but I bought a second car many years ago to get more creative
with. I appreciated the older style low speed cars of 1910, so I wanted to
see what was possible with a modern car. I got the car from a neighbor for
$100, and for another $30, got it working well. Then I cut the body
completely off except for the dash and windshield and installed wooden
fenders and a wooden trunk. I put an old couch in for a seat and built a
folding canopy like the older cars had. I drove it up and down the alley
every now and then, til the neighbor that burned me pleaded with me to park
it where it wasn't in his view. I parked it in a less convenient place
where only people in my household could see it, but I can't get it out.
I bought a very large electric powered tricycle as well and remodeled it
with a roof and hood as an experiment. It stays dry enough in the rain and
is legal to use, but I still prefer simpler machines for real life. I have
several other very customized bicycles that I use also. I hog quite a bit
of vehicle storage space with unused machines, one of Mr. Fresco's ideas of
a terrible waste of a resource.
But in the real way people talk, resources is what other people have.
No-one talks of their own stuff as resources. Mr. Fresco has five houses,
but they're not a resource. What I have has character and stories to tell
about it. I don't have resources either. I have my heartsongs and my toy
box to dig in. A sea of featureless metal blobs in a parking lot looks
ridiculous to me also, but because it's not a sea of unique expressions.
The neighbor who burned me when he left, is what I refer to as a
domesticated predator. A wild cat will hunt only to eat, but a domesticated
one will hunt as a passtime. This is not a trade economy issue. The cat
does not trade anything with people. It's life is entirely resource based.
Mr. Joseph notes the crime increase with income gap, as a major issue
rather than as a political distraction from the far more significant white
collar crime and organized crime. I don't see the resource based society
inspiring less upperclass crime, just forcing those people to go back to
direct threats with weapons instead of con games and money scams. As one
fellow put it, "there are sheep and there are wolves". That fellow meant
domesticated wolves.
I need a plan for addressing the wolves on terms that they can embrace
without eating me. They are quite likely to veto a world scale Venus
Project as too great a loss to them, though they may encourage a few single
cities as a learning device. In the long run they may change, but not from
being mocked or ignored or technically sabotaged through a redirection in
culture. I think that the closet leadership holds onto the status quo
because they have put their hearts into the present choreography, as only
leaders do. Unfortunately, they may be planning the murder of countless
folks, like several other regimes have done. I don't want to inspire them
to get started.
Mr. Joseph expresses some vagueness about the process of change to a
resource based economy. We have though, plenty of precident to look at for
this. The normal telling of history leaves out discussion of these kinds of
changes, out of embarrassment perhaps, but they happen without fanfare or
government debate or even recognition.
For example, the worldwide introduction of the auto and the telephone
happened with no-one but the Amish saying a thing about it. The worldwide
attack on small pox was not a nationally based event. The striking
interactive speed increase worldwide happened without debate or even
recognition, though it's a serious major stress factor, and has left a
whole lot of older people like myself behind. A movie made from a camera on
the front of a San Francisco Market street street car shows a big city world
where a person jogging is the fastest visible object in the civilized world.
The internet is another resource based hotbed for real. A poliferation
of internet collaborations has become a major threat to government control
in every country. Freelance Chinese workers are assisting Americans and
Europeans with video game progress for a fee, and sharing cultural
information at the same time. Likewise the ordering of repair parts can now
bypass the local shop or even the company importing the item; the actual
factory in China gets a call and ships the part to the individual.
The English language has accomplished a world conquest with hardly a
squawk from Continental Europe, Africa, Asia or South America. The Brazilian
government has made a stink about it, restricting english written materials,
but with little effect. When a solar pulse destroyed part of Canada's
electric grid, the eastern United States was also affected, and people
worldwide are studying the vulnerability. More and more homes are grid-tied
and producing an unknown amount of electric power. Princess Diana of England
was a real figure in billions of people's lives. The cell phone has
encroached every country in the world, no matter how poor or dominated by a
government, and news reporting and distribution has likewise exploded into a
worldwide anarchical volunteer system.
My $150 a month lifestyle in America has the usual opulence of devices
and culture, and the average Korean has better internet service than the
cable I have. What matters for quality of life is actually absurdly cheap or
free and irrelevant to economics. Self pity, cold-heartedness and paranoid
isolation can still get expensive but it's losing it's appeal worldwide.
Exotic medical support of degenerative disease costs a fortune but actual
health is getting quite cheap worldwide. The third world indifference to
being shockingly poor still horrifies richer people but the real
unimportance of it is creeping into common consciousness, that loneliness
and lust for poisonous substances are the two most vital life struggles;
both of which are eased by poverty and by worldwide connectivity.
The Zeitgeist Movement still does not explicitly recognize those two
issues as primary in driving interest in their enterprise. The Venus
Project idea, wherein no-one is forced by cultural pressure to obtain an
expensive private infrastructure in order to qualify for social inclusion,
has an expensive look about it to the casual observer, but realistically it
isn't. Remove the need for isolated infrastructure and bad habits, and the
cost of living drops dramatically, even with very advanced technological
conveniences.
My guess is that the Zeitgeist Movement will have much easier
implimentation in places like China, India and Brazil than in America, due
to much less fear and loathing between regular people in those places.
China had a wake up call this way in the city of Ordos, Inner Mongolia.
Created in a mere five years, in a fairly advanced style of opulence, it
sits virtually empty, because it wasn't built with market criteria. It's
not set up for human sharing and it presumes focus on self-pity and drug
addiction. The Venus Project design is clearly the opposite, though oddly
the designers don't indicate a wish to live in such a place by the
arrangement of their own lives.
The Islamic fantasy of having license to rape a dozen women, and the
American fantasy of winning a lottery to obtain license to financially
enslave countless other people, are both actually hollow compared to a Venus
Project city. License to be a self-sorry criminal cannot compete ultimately
with license to be known and appreciated for being delightfully human. The
Venus Project offers discovery of true welcome, sexually, as a technical
associate, and as a spiritual presense.
The originators of the Venus Project theory believe that the monetary
cultural system draws people towards the criminal mindset that prohibits
genuine welcome, and must be entirely abandoned to obtain sanity. People
addicted to cigarettes or gambling report a similar need for all or nothing.
I think that the trade economy is not so expendable. In the movie called
"The God's Must Be Crazy" my view is expressed vividly in a bushman's
conviction that a single item of advanced technology, a glass bottle, must
be evicted from his world if his associates are to continue to get along
without a trade economy.
The evolution of the trade economy since the European renaissance has
been towards greater effectiveness in nonviolently resolving conflicts
about use of things and validation of initiative. To suggest that the trade
economy promotes conflict looks ridiculous to me, though it creates some
paradoxes that create that appearance. The socially unifying effect of the
trade economy is very seductive for lonely people with bad social habits
that in a bushman world would render them friendless. So some people will
stagnate the progress of their development in business, conjuring endless
reasons to stay busy, and getting into endless conflicts due to their own
social clumsiness.
The conflicts within the trade economy are a warning to me of people
using business to retain forced human association rather than developing
actual mutual rapport with specific people through genuinely caring about
how their day goes. Unlike the bushman, I honor the world of forced
association as another branch of human wonder that can be magical in it's
own way, creating advanced technology, if only the nature of fun can become
consciously understood, so that it can stay kind, as it is among the
bushman's people.
Fun is a word like love that is a real hot potato to define. Even
Wikipedia won't touch it. I wrote them an article but it's hopelessly
original, so it's on my own page, as "viewofun.htm". What I determined to
be the key point about fun that gets missed by Wikipedia and nearly all
other commentators about fun is that lively emotion ceases entirely outside
of interactive context. This is poorly understood because almost no-one
exits interactive context and lives to tell about it in a comprehendible
way, and those few who have haven't used the word fun in their story.
Nevertheless, fun can only be meaningfully described as a social
interaction, and a potentially highly poisonous one. A lot of what normal
people call fun has victims, creating a real need for recovery and for
psychic defense. In the modern world fun has evolved into some forms that
use psychic human sacrifice for convulsive stimulus, which leaves one
party rather numb and lifeless and the other party in need of recovery.
This is ridiculous, and partly a result, I think, of the word fun being
left undefined, so that people never look right at how ghastly this is. And
what I think people are going to discover is that for fun to be victimless
and low stress it has to happen within what I call a family, which means
people with a genuine intimacy going, whether or not there is a blood
relation. This is what the bushman has, but almost nobody in modern
civilization.
It doesn't require private property but it does require sacred property,
and several stable deeply familiar people who are at least open to being
nice to each other.
Almost everyone in the modern world has a lifetime of entrenched habits
that involve "getting a rise" out of their close associates many times a
day. It's a tragic disaster that keeps everybody estranged. But the
convulsive release of fun is as vital as breathing, so the game continues
no matter how mean it gets. Unprotected by the formalities of money and
private property, people cast into a role that traditionally includes
psychic human sacrifice, such as political leaders, entertainers or mothers,
will be driven quickly to complete burnout, wherein they turn sadistic,
wherein caring is forgotten.
It is critical to the stability of a resource based society for all the
dominant participants to grasp what this is about and be deliberately
harmless. Everyone will also need to be able to recover without sliding
into deranged engagement. That I know of, none of this can be understood
or handled without group living together similar to what the bushman has.
Without such a group, the mutual comprehension necessary to be actually
kind is hardly possible for even a very wise person.
So there will be no release of the trade economy controls anywhere until
a majority of dominant people in an area are linked to some other people in
this way, enough to become emotionally harmless. I'm saying that a society
of solitary couples and single people does not have a prayer of getting out
of the trade economy controls. Everyone within a resource based economy is
going to have to live communally; and not polite eco-villiage communally,
but the real thing, under each others skin enough to be certain of their
harmlessness, certain that they are having fun kindly.
The Zeitgeist Movement is thus completely outside of politics in my
mind. I believe if the Movement succeeds in redirecting the common sentiment
then normal politics will fade out like the horse and buggy. There will be
no revolution, there will be no-one to resist. And if it remains an internet
forum moshe pit, discussing stuff like renewable energy, it will go nowhere.
Ironically, the oppressive feeling of the trade economy appears to me to
orignate in feelings of loneliness rather than economic disrespect or lack.
So if the Movement does get it together emotionally, the presence or
absense of the trade economy may become completely trivial, a forgotten
issue, with trade used where conflict requires it, and not stressed about.
That's my explanation of the Zeitgeist Movement. The internet site is
TheZeitgeistMovement.com
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