Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Addendum – Good and Bad (December 29, 2008)
I thought the movie Zeitgeist was amazing. I can’t say I agree with all of the philosophy presented in it, but mostly I have good things to say about it. It starts off with an intense critique of religion which many will find difficult. It covers the connection between the banking cartels and war. It has a thorough-going antiwar message and documents the U.S. government’s systematic assaults on civil liberties.
It also provides a concentrated explanation of the problems with the official 9/11 story and shoots it full of holes. 9/11 investigator, David Ray Griffin is one of the many personalities featured in Zeitgeist.
Zeitgeist Addendum, on the other hand, was a horrible disappointment, a mixture of good and bad.
On the positive side, most of the material from John Perkins is valuable.
Also, the movie starts off with an explanation of the U.S Federal Reserve and monetary system that is very powerful. How completely correct it is I’m not sure, but the explanation is presented effectively, and concludes we are living in a system of slavery.
Although I certainly wouldn’t dismiss all of the philosophical issues raised about work and life, we need to insist on the importance of individuality. In Addendum, I could have sworn I heard the word “individuation” used as if it’s a bad thing. I was kind of shocked, since the lack of individuation and independence in this world is the basic problem.
Interdependence and the positive interactions depend on the strength of each person’s individuality. Yes, we are obviously connected to others – we are part of a whole community in different senses – this is important and how we relate to others is important – this is what the concept of the free market ideal is all about – it’s a system of voluntary cooperation that allows differences and competition. But we are also individuals and relating to others in a libertarian sense means respecting autonomy and personal choice.
We need freedom. My response to the corrupt monetary system is that we need diversity and competition and new currencies based on commodities of actual value. We need a real free market, not the false “free market system” that is lined up in parallel with communism, socialism and fascism.
This false “capitalist” system is another fraud and the most powerful of them all, because more and more it is revealed to have all the elements of the other three while it refuses to respect property rights and individual autonomy and insists on enslaving us through taxes, regulations and the central bank / fiat monetary system. It is not “free market” and it never was. It was always mercantilism, plutocracy, cartels, social engineering and imperialism mixed with a small amount of classical liberalism. It’s also a system that gives us a false belief that we have a say over how things are run.
Governments started destroying property rights and legal rights a long time ago in the name of centrally planned objectives and they continue to destroy and ignore these rights. If you want endless examples of this, by the way, read The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson.
Creating a truly free rights-protecting society – free markets and free lives – is my answer to the current system, but the conclusion of Zeitgeist Addendum on the other hand is the wrong one. It ends up recommending what I would call a technocracy, some kind of utopian technocratic hive society as we’ve seen in so many science fiction movies.
Crime will be solved and prevented technologically!? Technology and science will supposedly solve all problems without a monetary system!? They won’t let you crash your car because your car will be designed to not crash. Why would anyone want (or be allowed) to have any other kind of car? You can drive drunk without consequences. There is no good or evil in their utopia! So no need for responsibility or judgment. They say there is only behavior – and inappropriate human behavior is just a technological problem that science will supposedly solve! Really? I suspect if a society like that is attempted, and it probably will be again and again, the technological “solutions” would be applied by force, by withholding food or other supposedly plentiful resources in order to force compliance.
The message is that we have all the resources we need. Food just pops out of the ground. Wood falls off the trees and arranges itself into houses. Seriously, what will motivate people to extract those resources? Peer pressure? This is also the problem with the moneyless society portrayed in Star Trek. No means of exchange, not even barter, no currency at all – this means no voluntary exchange. Even competition is supposed to be bad also – one size fits all. But competition is actually a good thing and part of the way we function.
One of the representatives of the Venus Project says that the smarter a person is, the more they can “contribute” to the other members of the society and therefore a supposed system of individually-tailored education will be very important. I found this attitude disturbing and not much different from the present-day attitude of forcing the educational system on everyone as a tool of social engineering. The type of education should be freely chosen by each individual (or their parents).
What kind of incentive or pressure will be applied to help each individual “contribute” and find their place in the hive? How do you get people to do things for you without trade? Some kind of performance-based regime would likely be placed on people. What happens to the not-so-“smart”? I imagine that some are “more equal than others” as in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Less scraps for the non-compliant and more scraps for the compliant (the “smart”).
To denigrate trade as materialism is to not understand what freedom means and to miss what trade allows us to do with our lives. In a free society with competing voluntary currencies, you would have all sorts of options – you could barter all you like, or you would just present your money (acquired through exchanging trade or services) for what you want – could be your kind of education, could be someone else’s kind of education, could be a new pair of pants. No emotional or other kind of bullying or denigration or categorization is required for the transaction! Thankfully we see some of that in limited areas now in our society and we are familiar with the idea when we go shopping – but along with freedom-destroying measures that prevent or interfere with many transactions, such as sales tax.
What Addendum presents, whether intentional or not, is a sci-fi idea of an internationalist utopian order that could unfortunately function as a sales tool to lure people into an actual scientific dictatorship – the kind governments are likely to adopt in the real world – the system some of us can see developing and which is actually attacked and exposed, ironically, in Zeitgeist.
Abolishing currencies – again, it implies a penalty for trading. It implies the use of coercion to force people to stop trading! A free market monetary system – if the world could allow it – if enough people want it – would allow voluntary exchange. That means *freedom*. Freedom means choice about education, choice about use of resources, property rights, contracts, etc. It means positive non-violent competition and it means the right of self-defense and personal sovereignty.
To many people I’m afraid this technological utopia in Addendum will sound more realistic than what I’m proposing, which is a voluntary society with a rights-protecting framework in which all services are paid non-coercively. That’s the real ideal and what’s important is the principle of freedom. Since we are headed in the opposite direction and there is less freedom and less empowerment for individuals as every day goes by, I’m not so sure sometimes about the value of describing an ideal society of any kind. It becomes more important to find ways to stop supporting tyranny, to stop complying with tyranny, to warn others and try to change their hearts and minds. In that respect, I have to give credit to Zeitgeist Addendum for trying to present practical strategies for protesting the current society. But all of this is overshadowed by presenting another version of the problem as a solution – the same false scientific utopia the establishment is working towards – and I’m not sure which is worse.
Also, the “free market” concept has been contaminated and misused and abused so much by “conservative” war-mongering frauds in politics. And there is so much globalist climate change propaganda coming out of the “left-wing” of the same charade, that I’m afraid people will find it easier to buy into the scientific-management “resource-based” world order presented in Zeitgeist Addendum, where resources we are to believe are well-managed (a lot like now, comrades?)
The political elites with their anti-property rights, “smart growth”, “green”, “climate change”, carbon tax and central planning agendas may find much that resonates with them in the movie’s agenda to downplay individuality and eliminate the means of exchange from the world.
On the other hand, individual empowerment and assertion of the individual rights philosophy – the libertarian non-aggression principle – this is the only way to discredit the current political system.
People who buy into the collectivist component to this movie – because of the hatchet-job that Bush and others have done to the word “freedom” – are just going to be working for the problem.
And I guess I’m thinking especially of a lot of well-meaning people, some of whom consider themselves “left-wing” or “socialist libertarians”, and others who will be suckered by the false philosophy in this movie.
We need morality – we need to recognize that theft is wrong, fraud is wrong, violence is wrong – whether done by individuals or by collectives or by governments – “democracies”, technocracies or plutocracies. Forcing people to pay for wars is wrong. Forcing people to comply with “universal” communist style health care – which threatens patients and doctors with prison if they don’t comply – is wrong. This is the nature of the system that has to be condemned. Don’t defend it! Why are you defending a system that attacks our natural rights, our basic rights to freedom?
Why do people care about these political parties that run Canada? Aren’t they all involved in and propping up and continuing the destruction of freedom? When they’re putting on their political puppet show for your entertainment, why do you get suckered into that and ignore their common agenda which keeps rolling along!? Day after day we just go along with it. Law upon law, tax upon tax, control upon control. And yes, the corporations fit right in to the system because they don’t even have opinions. “Pay and obey”. And they’ll do fine and we’ll all fit right into in as we stack the bricks for our own prison.
We have the right to individual identity and the right to hold property – justly acquired. And I reject all of those ideologies who seek to continue to limit our economic or personal freedoms and “manage” our lives. You’re just wrong. You’re wrong to dismiss the idea of property rights. You’re wrong to think your system is anything but a variation on the current system of control. You’re wrong about economics and profit and trade.
Don’t promote half-baked and dangerous ideas as “solutions” for other human beings. They’re already being imposed on us! Our natural rights are already being violated. There is a need for tolerance of different ideas in the freedom movement, but don’t screw up the freedom movement with your blanket prejudices against economic freedom. Where do you think you learned your hatred of economic freedom? From the system that rules our lives of course, the one described in Zeitgeist, from crony capitalists and other socialists who protect their interests using government power!! Get it?
You can learn about the true free market ideal (in which there is no manipulation of currency) at the Mises Institute and from these libertarian authors for example: Bastiat, Mises, Hazlitt, Ron Paul, Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, Mary Ruwart.
Zeitgeist, The Movie – Remastered / Final Edition (good)
Zeitgeist: Addendum (bad)
December 29th, 2008
Comments for Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Addendum – Good and Bad
- Stu
January 11th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
You make some real powerful points and this should be an article everyone should read after watching the film to dispell any illusions and be skeptical.
I do want to point out, however, that they do not claim their idea or solution is perfect. Their true intention is to get society and humanity discussing the issue by questioning the very system itself because this is how we truly discover the next level of our evolution as a society. We need to educate ourselves since we now have the greatest gift source humanity has ever created, the internet.
Our future will probably be more wars and as weapons become more and more powerful the outcome is predictable. If we are to become a species that can reach out and travel the universe and colonize other worlds to spread life then we need to achieve harmony here first. We need to achieve ONE. That is impossible with our current religious and government institutions. If this idea is science fiction then explain why alot of things we humans have already achieved was perceived as science fiction at an earlier time. Science fiction drives reality. We learn from time to time that what we thought was impossible at one time we find possible in the future.
There are tons of holes in the Venus Project that is for sure, but they don’t have it all figured out either.
With that said this movie still has some valuable thoughts and contains many moments that speak to the heart and conscious that we can learn from.
What I would like to know is how accurate their model of how the monetary system works.
I do feel the idea of scarcity and abundance is true. When they say we have enough resources they actually mean we have the technology to generate the abundance of resources.
But I ask if we had an abundance of anything and if that was renewable and sustainable would it be more profitable? Is it not true the more there is of something the less valuable it is? Take energy, oil and diamonds as an example. Do our providers not control supply to control prices? If we print more money does that not devalue the dollar?
The movie does one thing for me. Gets me thinking and seeking others who scrutinize it.
- Mc Ahan
January 14th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
My Goodness!!Thank for pointing out those differences! I was desperately looking for someone putting this kind of points out there! Seems to me, someone(s) given the filmakers an unresistable ultimatum or hijacked them!
- Jesse Smith
March 13th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Watched The Zeitgeist Movement movie yesterday. Have also seen Youtube shorts on Zeitgeist Conventions. My question: Are these connected? Who funds the Zeitgeist Movement? The conferences are sponsored by Google and there is a Google-type earth spinning on the bottom left hand corner of the movie. There is also overlap in the topic and issues covered.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:41 am
The Google conference looks like it is not connected. Maybe they’re just using the same word:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/google-zeitgeist/
The creator of the movies, Peter Joseph, has a Q&A page here: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/q&a.htm and says he funded Zeitgeist personally. It addresses some other questions of interest too.
“Zeitgeist” means the “the spirit of the time”. I think it means, instead of being individuals who think for ourselves and follow our own spirits, we let ourselves be herded along by foundations and well-funded think-tanks and “experts” who magically become “social forces” or “progress” or “science”.
I have mixed feelings about Zeitgeist, because I know the swamp of the system we’re living in is trapping all of us in entertainment, belief systems and plain denial.
People who are familiar with the libertarian movement for example might know that it is rife with division, because it’s basically just the philosophy of non-coercion or non-aggression, which is great, but to understand the actual world we live in is a bigger task.
The free market economics I mentioned above that Ron Paul talks about is a good idea, but it’s not going to cut it either.
Alan Watt at cuttingthroughthematrix.com fills in a lot of the picture I think, as frightening as it is.
People have to wake up to the fact that the system we live in is completely in the hands of people who have no respect for human life, that governments are completely unresponsive to the people. They’re creating – in the open – a global government of scientific management, stripping us of natural liberties, in every law they pass and every program they fund. And very few of us are doing anything about it even if we are aware of it.
Look at the 20th century, look at all the deaths, look at what “happened”. It’s not over either. It was the people at the top who orchestrated the tax-funded wars by creating opposing systems of so-called “left” and “right”, not mindless accidental forces and ordinary people going about their daily lives. Part of this can be seen in the BBC documentary “Power of Nightmares” by Adam Curtis. Also I think the movie, “The Good Shepherd” portrays some of the truth about the fake Cold War and the nature of those who ruled the West.
April 6th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Great post, thanks for the info
May 3rd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I liked the movie. It introduced some compelling points that are eye-openers, for me!! thanks for the insight as well.
- With No Allegiance To Empire
May 13th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
The Great Turning From Empire To Earth Community
by David C. Korten
I suggest anyone who is on the path to truth, as well as personal discovery, read this Amazing book
It covers all the points of Zeitgeist and so much more, human sociological/phycological, historical facts.
The Book takes the reader on a journey through the pathways of our species.
Extremely well reverenced and supported.
ad me on facebook for a small library of amazing documenteries and other great books.
Films available from facebook group.
Withno Allegiancetoempire “Facebook”
Peace, Love
Cooperation and Compassion will save us.
To achieve these we must transition from Empire to Earth Community.
May 15th, 2009 at 12:33 am
When I originally wrote this article, I explained the problems with Zeitgeist Addendum (especially) and really, I didn’t realize how serious those problems were potentially, basically that a huge part of the freedom movement may be co-opted by globalist schemers.
If by “Earth Community” you mean a collectivized controlled world where people all live the same way and follow all sorts of political correctness – the one we’re already headed towards – count me out.
I didn’t have time to read through these articles entirely about “Earth Community” but I get the gist.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1463
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2640
As an off the cuff response, I want to make it as clear as possible. The left-right spectrum is a phony paradigm in order to keep people arguing between false choices handed to them by a global elite.
The neocon imperialists were the crazy kooks – the “bad cop” – the blatant liars – in order to contrast with and sell the “good cop” – Obama – the white knight “saviors” – of the old regime, the interventionists of the Cold War, the “liberal” technocrats who really run the show anyway, who keep the war in Iraq going, who kept the war in Vietnam going, who built up the nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
Now they call themselves “environmentalists”, and they really really hate human consumption. We’re so bad for being consumers. Humans “take up space” – that’s their attitude. It’s all just a bunch of elitists at the top, heavily funding environmentalist groups AND wars, weaponry, advanced technology, all kinds of propaganda – funding all sides! In order to create a world where we have no more individual rights. That is the nature of true socialism – total control of our lives by an elite. And Orwell warned about it in his books, because he had direct experience of it.
During the Bush years, all the churches were suckered into worshiping government and many more were fooled by “the war on terror” (which the Democrats just supported) – and now the rest are being suckered into the “man-made global warming” totalitarian scam. Even worse when even more people who might be involved in promoting true freedom philosophies get suckered by the Zeitgeist crowd and globalist totalitarian agendas.
Here are some quotes from the not so friendly environmental “community” on their agenda of taking away wealth, taking away freedom, and depopulating the planet:
http://www.peopleforwesternheritage.com/PFWHRMAdditionalQuotes.htm
- Ivan
June 5th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Hi Alan,
I saw the movie, I read the Zeitgeist Movement’s articles, heard Peter Joseph radio talks, and I can say that your article shows that you didn’t understand the Venus Project goal. Technology will do all the unnecessary and boring jobs that currently we are doing and people will be free to do whatever they like, nobody will be forced to do anything as you mention. Their survival and comfort will be assured.
June 7th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Actually, I do understand the goal – I don’t agree with it, I’m not fooled by it. The globalists offer utopias just like the empire-builders always have, and I don’t buy in.
“Their survival and comfort will be assured” is a paternalistic message, a false promise, the same old same old mantra of socialism.
Anyone can tell that Peter Joseph is backed heavily with plenty of resources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/nyregion/17zeitgeist.html
“…the second annual meeting of the Worldwide Zeitgeist Movement, which, its organizers said, held 450 sister events in 70 countries around the globe”
Real socialism – created by “capitalist” bankers on behalf of a global elite – already governs us, and they are busy working working away on creating a total global government, which is all about “scientific” control just like the Zeitgeist movement:
“The mission of the movement is the application of the scientific method for social change,” Mr. Joseph announced by way of introduction.”
The people who followed Zeitgeist because of its exposure of 9/11 have been suckered also:
“The former may be most famous for alleging that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an “inside job” perpetrated by a power-hungry government on its witless population, a point of view that Mr. Joseph said he has recently “moved away from.””
There is plenty of room for criticizing the monetary and banking system, and I don’t want to defend it at all.
But my heart sunk into my stomach when I saw the Venus Project presentation in “Zeitgeist Addendum”.
It’s really an incredible job of subverting the freedom movement.
Taking over “boring and unnecessary jobs” is nothing to do with freedom. The problems in the current society have nothing to engineering. They are not technical problems. We are living in a form of slavery.
Going along with the Zeitgeist message means going along with the next stage of global dictatorship. The following should resonate with “Terminator: Salvation” – science gone bad – and it deserves to:
“…the Venus Project, a futuristic society where (adjust your seatbelts, now) machines would control government and industry and safeguard the planet’s fragile resources by means of an artificially intelligent “earthwide autonomic sensor system” — a super-brain of sorts connected to, yes, all human knowledge.”
And I’ll remind everybody that the ruling class always play at supposed opposites – “left and right” – and this is why they fool so many people. People look at their false fake “free market” system when there is no free market, and think that’s what needs to “change”. No, the system is a cartel run by monopolists who use government to control everything and they are always *changing* it – yes – in the direction of more control. The “left” politicians keep the wars going just as much as the “right”. The “left” are put in by Wall Street even more than the “right”. They just take turns destroying their old system so they can bring in their new system.
The real struggle is between individualism and collectivism. Those who buy in to collectivism and political “one-ness” – at the expense of individualism and true freedom – are lost and might as well sign up with Darth Vader.
And I’ll just throw in some other points of view that deserve consideration:
Stefan Molyneux on Zeitgeist Addendum
