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| File:Zeitgeist Movement globe.jpgThe Zeitgeist Movement logo | |
| Abbreviation | TZM or ZM |
|---|---|
| Formation | August 18, 2008; 16 years ago (2008-08-18) |
| Type | Social movement |
| Region served | Global |
| Key people | Peter Joseph, Ben McLeish |
| Website | TheZeitgeistMovement.com |
The Zeitgeist Movement (Zeitgeist is 'the spirit of the times' in German) is a global, nonviolent, sustainability and social equality advocacy organization founded in 2008.
The movement seeks to provide education concerning their belief that the "monetary-market" economy should be replaced with a holistic global system in which all resources become the common heritage of all the inhabitants of the planet.
In the movement's view, this system would be a classless, moneyless, and stateless global system in which money, debt, credit, exchange, barter, wage labor, private property and the profit motive would be eliminated. Human needs would be supplied for everyone. Resources would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through the technological potential of sustainable development (economic development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.)
This global socio-economic system is based on the movement's belief that the intelligent application of highly advanced science and technology can provide a high standard of living for all of the Earth's inhabitants. The movement believes the current general practice around the globe is based on rationing resources through monetary methods; thus, in the movement's view, this practice is irrelevant and counterproductive to humanity's survival. The movement believes that their proposed system is based on the cooperation and balance of technology and nature, capable of creating, in the movement's view, a sustainable future.
The Zeitgeist Movement was inspired by Peter Joseph's film Zeitgeist: Addendum. The film described The Venus Project as a possible solution.
Mission
Until a split in 2011, the movement acted as the activist arm of The Venus Project, and still advocates for a global society where resources are sustainably shared among all the people on the planet, because they view the current economic system as the cause of the greatest social problems.
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| Robotics and robots |
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The movement says its mission is “the application of the scientific method for social change.” That is, the movement believes the money-based economy is unsustainable, due to issues such as cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and resource waste, and that the system of monetary exchange is — in the face of advancing technology — completely obsolete and harmful to humanity, and thus should be discarded. Some of the movement's basic themes: modern economics is a fraud; global debt is a serious problem; the profit motive is harmful to society; and more than legislation — or governments — need to change. The movement believes that it would take a grassroots movement and a remodeling of our social values, starting with education based on sustainability to actually put such a program into action to change the world into a new global society that has given up money and property in favor of a shared, sustainable, technology- and science-driven community. The movement believes that getting rid of money, ownership and even government is necessary in order to create a peaceful society that provides a high standard of living for everyone.
In the movement's view, the vast majority of crimes in the world are the product of the system itself. The movement says that in a world where everything is supplied, the majority of today's crimes would not exist, as they are primarily related to obtaining money and property, or born of social inequality. The movement believes that the crimes that still exist would be considered symptomatic of mental aberration, and these people would be given treatment and help, not punished, as no prisons would exist. The movement believes that the social system is based on an old, obsolete way of thinking - 'survival of the fittest' - which is based on the assumption that there are not enough resources. The view of the movement is that there are sufficient resources and have always been, but in the past (prior to the Second Industrial Revolution) we did not have the required technology to realize this. For example, the movement says that there is currently enough food to feed everyone in the world, but not enough money to pay for it, and as a result, many people are under-nourished. The movement believes that its conceptual ideas and models for sustainable technology, that may seem of science fiction, are not unrealistic, and if science and technology were focused on progress instead of consumption, these ideas would be realized. For example, the movement believes we can employ renewable energy systems on a massive global scale, and that we can design cities where food production would be organic and local, using semi- or fully automatic systems which will take care that no one would go hungry. Thus, in the movement's view, today we can feed all the people in the world, but, in the movement's view, we do not do it because of the artificial limits imposed by the monetary-market system. That is, the movement believes the current global socio-economic system cannot become more efficient, because efficiency is expensive and it will hurt GDP growth; the movement believes our current system operates on inefficiency, because efficiency is the opposite of what leads to GDP growth, new jobs and the movement of cash. In other words, the movement believes the system is fighting efficiency.
The Zeitgeist movement advocates for a global economy in which the world's resources would be considered the equal inheritance of all the world's peoples, and would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through focusing on the technological potential of sustainable development (economic growth in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come.) It is toward this idea that The Zeitgeist Movement works to educate and inform people. The movement believes that resource preservation is key to human survival, and all the social ideologies that currently exist are inadequate because they don't address resources as a part of their fundamental principles. The ideal society proposed by the movement would have a worldwide automated computer system actively monitoring the levels of the world's surveyed resources and ranking them according to factors such as their potential, renewability, and pollution. The movement believes that this computer would intelligently make objective decisions as to the uses of these resources based on empirical fact, not biased legislation. In the movement's view, automated labor would be perfected on a mass scale, eliminating all mundane jobs that insult human capacity when they can instead be relegated to machines that will act more precisely and productively. The machines will do almost all of the work and humans would oversee the process and supervise the machines. The movement holds the view that even without a monetary reward, people would still want to work, and would still develop new innovations because the incentive to work would be internal - for example, similar to today's open-source software. From the maximization of efficient use of resources and automated labor, the movement imagines a future world where work and success are determined by a novel set of criteria compared to the main criteria in wide use today; for example, competition would not be a driving force. According to the movement, the answer for a corrected, civilized society lies in science and technology which would enable abundance - and then there will be no more poverty or wars.
Activities
The movement aims to provide information about why a new global system is needed. The members of the movement are engaged in raising awareness on the issues discussed in the films (Zeitgeist: The Movie, Zeitgeist: Addendum and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward) regarding what is, in their view, the inherent structural corruption of the current socio-economic system.
Z-Day
The Zeitgeist Movement stages an annual event called "Z-Day" in March, to raise awareness of the movement's goals. The first Z-Day was on March 15, 2009. The main event in New York City had a sold-out crowd of around 900 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. The 2010 event took place on March 13. "While 337 sympathetic events occurred in over 70 countries worldwide, NYC was home to the main event, a 6-hour live web cast presentation with lectures from the movement's key figures, and 30 different countries represented in the audience." The 2011 main event was held in London, and the 2012 main event was held in Vancouver.
Criticism of the Zeitgeist movement
The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Palm Beach Post, Globes, TheMarker, The Orlando Sentinel, RT TV and TheMarker TV discussed various aspects of criticism of the Zeitgeist movement, for example allegations of utopianism, reduced work incentives in the proposed future global socio-economic system and practical difficulties in a transition to that system. In each case, members of the movement were given an opportunity to respond to the criticism.
The original documentary that launched the Zeitgeist movement has been criticized as being ant-Jewish. In 2009 a German social networking site, studiVZ, banned Zeitgeist groups because of what they characterized as their implicit anti-Semitism.
The Austrian economist Robert P. Murphy, in his article "Venus Needs Some Austrians", argued that several of the project's foundational premises, such as the notion that human productivity is not dependent on monetary wealth or property rights, are fundamentally flawed. He writes, "these idealists are wrong to blame our current, dysfunctional world on capitalism or money per se. On the contrary, if everyone respected each other's property rights — meaning there would be no more petty crime, but also no more taxation, military conscription, or drug prohibition — then humanity would become fantastically wealthy, in material terms." His basic thesis is that unjustified governmental imposition into the economic freedom of democratic citizens results in decreased productivity and diminished prosperity, and that only a capitalistically predicated, free market economy based on libertarian principles of individual freedom will result in improved products and an enhanced society.
See also
- L. Susan Brown — essay Does work really work?
- Ecological economics
- Ecotopia
- Technological utopianism
- Technorealism
- Utopian socialism
- Technocracy movement
- Eco-communalism
- Technogaianism
- Singularitarianism
- Sustainable development
References
- ^ "The Zeitgeist Movement: Envisioning A Sustainable Future". Huffington Post. Mar 16, 2010.
{{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|publisher=(help) - ^ "The Venus Project". The Venus Project.
- ^ A dream worth having, Rhonda Swan, The Palm Beach Post, April 30, 2009
- ^ "They've Seen the Future and Dislike the Present". New York Times. 2009-03-16.
- ^ Quotations and citations in this Misplaced Pages article are based on the translation from Hebrew to English of The Filmmaker Who Helped Recruit Millions for the Global Protests of the Bottom 99%, original Hebrew article by Asher Schechter, TheMarker (Israel), January 19, 2012.
- ^ Quotations and citations in this Misplaced Pages article are based on the translation from Hebrew to English of Imagine, original Hebrew article by Tzaela Kotler, Globes (Israel), March 18, 2010.
- ^ "He's A Dreamer From Venus", Mike Thomas, Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 12, 1995.
- Bill Stamets (February 15, 2011). "Art-house films: 'Marwencol,' 'Zeitgeist'". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved March 7, 2011.
- "The Zeitgeist Movement – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)".
- ^ World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics, World Hunger Education Service (WHES)
- "Brockwood at Zeitgeist-Day in London – March 13th, 2011". Brockwood Park School. 2011-04-11.
- "Zeitgeist Day 2012 - Vogue Theatre in Vancouver, BC". voguetheatre.com.
- Zeitgeist Solutions: New World Re-Order, RT, Sept. 14, 2011
- Zeitgeist Solutions: Money and Debt, RT, Dec. 2, 2011
- Discussion of the Zeitgeist movement with Peter Joseph, TheMarkerTV, Jan. 19, 2012. Interview conducted in English, following a brief introduction in Hebrew. The brief Hebrew introduction states: "Hello, Peter Joseph is with us, he is the filmmaker and director who created the Zeitgeist film series and The Zeitgeist movement, which advances for a global socio-economic change. The Zeitgeist films were among the most popular films in the history of the Internet, and Peter is here to answer a few questions regarding the nature of the Zeitgeist movement."
- http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/57732/brave-new-world Retrieval June-2-2012
- http://www.zeitgeistaustralia.org/studivznet-shut-down-zeitgeist-groups/ Retrieval June-2-2012
- ^ Murphy, Robert P. Venus Needs Some Austrians, "The Ludwig Von Mises Institute," 30 Aug. 2010
External links
| Works by Peter Joseph | |
|---|---|
| Films | |
| See also | |
