If Peter Joseph isn't a visionary thinker, I don't know who is… Exclusive Interview

[MrMickeysMom]

I know there are questions about the Zeitgeist movement (Who will produce the resources?) but, a resource based economy seems a better idea than the over-consumption and role reversals between government and business under capitalism.

Good interview...

[DeSwiss]

1. K&R

- It is time now not to think outside the box, but to create a new box.......

In the Bill of Rights of the United States, there is an attempt to secure certain freedoms and protections by way of mere text on paper. Now while I understand the value of this document and the temporal brilliance of it in the context of the period of its creation, that does not excuse the fact that it is a product of social inefficiency and nothing more.

In other words, declarations of laws and rights are actually an acknowledgment of the failures of the social design. There is no such thing as 'rights' - as the reference can be altered at will. The fourth amendment is an attempt to protect against state power abuse, that is clear. But it avoids the real issue, and that is: Why would the state have an interest to search and seize to begin with? How do you remove the mechanisms that generate such behavior? We need to focus on the real cause.

We have to understand that government as we know it today, is not in place for the well being of the public, but rather for the perpetuation of their establishment and their power. Just like every other institution within a monetary system. Government is a monetary invention for the sake of economic and social control and its methods are based upon self-preservation, first and foremost. All a government can really do is to create laws to compensate for an inherent lack of integrity within the social order.

In society today the public is essentially kept distracted and uninformed. This is the way that governments maintain control. If you review history, power is maintained through ignorance.

~Peter Joseph

http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/

[MrMickeysMom]

2. Yeah, I recall this video after watching the movie(s)

It's a bit much to initially take in. Like a lot of things I've read and seen, some of them I have to come back to for meaning… It's like we have to evolve to that level, and the brain intakes so much, it's overwhelming.

The interview was good to ask those basic questions (again), because as each day passes on this earth, there is more and more evidence that the old system, ingrained in oh, so many ways, is not working.

[Enthusiast]

3. K&R! I was enjoying this until 21 minutes when it started buffering.

I get that a lot.

[raindaddy]

4. This is brilliant!

Thanks for posting this!

[uhnope]

5. RT+Abby Martin=LOL. Zeitgeist is an amateurishly-produced made-for-the-Internet conspiracy-mo

Zeitgeist[1] is an amateurishly-produced made-for-the-Internet conspiracy-mongering film. It combines some discussion of Jesus mythicism (the position that Jesus was a myth forged from the ideas of previous religions and Gods like Isis, Osiris etc.) with a double-barreled shotgun blast of crazy: income tax denial, the Federal Reserve being an elaborate plot by the international bankers to take over the world, 9/11 being a conspiracy, and we are all going to have barcodes tattooed onto us and get chipped with RFID tags. All fairly standard conspiracy stuff put together in an ultimately disjointed way. The whole movie is a ripoff of Jordan Maxwell's research.[2]

If you enjoy watching other people's paranoid delusions with cheap CGI graphics interspersed, you can watch the whole thing online.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Zeitgeist

The organization is based on undirected whining about capitalism, accompanied by a belief that somehow computers should be used excessively to do all future resource planning for the purpose of maximum efficiency and sustainability, and that shortly robots will be doing most work - in summary something one could call techno-utopianism.

[RufusTFirefly]

6. Everything old is new again

This appears to be an intriguing updating of the Technocracy Movement, which was popular during the 1930s.

Members of the Technocracy Movement were supporters of the dark-horse California gubernatorial candidacy of muckraker Upton Sinclair in 1934.

Among those groups who had almost a ready-made affinity for the Sinclair campaign were the members of the Technocracy Movement, a group that believed engineers and technicians should run the economy along scientific grounds. Technocrats believed that reason could solve almost any problem. Sinclair made his first campaign appearance before the Santa Barbara Technocracy Club. Many of the group's members were brought into his campaign. Like Sinclair, Technocrats supported the notion of “production for use.” Technocracy's selling point – reason – was also its greatest weakness, as the group failed to establish an emotional connection with its audience. (Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York: Random House, 2006, p. 256)

Other supporters of Technocracy included Thorstein Veblen ("Theory of the Leisure Class&quot , H.G. Wells ("War of the Worlds&quot , Theodore Dreiser ("Sister Carrie&quot , and H. King Hubbert, best known for the curve that predicted "peak oil."

[MrMickeysMom]

7. Thanks for that, Rufus...

Perhaps the ideas build upon earlier notions of how one can't continue to over-consume a la unfettered capitalism ??

[RufusTFirefly]

8. You're welcome. And yes, absolutely!

By the way, if you're not familiar with Upton Sinclair (best known as a muckraking author) as a politician, in 1934 he was the surprise, decisive winner of the Democratic Gubernatorial primary in California. A lifelong socialist, Sinclair had re-registered as a Democrat (sound familiar?) and then captured the imagination of Democratic voters in California with EPIC, his program for Ending Poverty In California. Unfortunately, by the time the general elections arrived, big business (led by Hollywood, which produced shameful anti-Sinclair faux documentaries that showed the state overrun by "hoboes&quot launched a gigantic smear campaign and Sinclair lost to Republican Frank Merriam. Commonwealth-Progressive Raymond Haight (as in San Francisco's famous Haight Street) made things tougher for Sinclair by running slightly to his right as a third-party candidate. (There were actually five parties running in the election: Republican, Democratic, Commonwealth-Progressive, Socialist, and Communist.)

[MrMickeysMom]

10. Very interesting!

No, I haven't read that part of history, but knew some of Upton Sinclair's work.

[jalan48]

9. Leap of Faith

It seems the TZM requires a leap of faith. As he mentions in the interview, humans would attack one another in prehistoric times to gain access to a watering hole. The system he describes would still require some type of police/army to protect citizens from groups who do not share the TMZ sustainability vision-groups who want to inhabit a particular geographical area for the benefit of their own group. Maybe he's proposing that all humans can learn to see themselves as members of one global group. Thanks for posting the interview-I'm going to check out their website. Change from our current system is inevitable and forward thinkers such as Joseph are invaluable in showing us new ways to approach our problems.

[MrMickeysMom]

11. Yeah, it's that, too...

I also refer to this the "new paradigm", which is an evolution of thought for the species to survive! As in all of biological evolution, it happens over time.

Hope we have that time…

[jalan48]

12. I do too. That's why I enjoyed watching these videos. Have to start somewhere.

Thanks for posting it!

[Shankapotomus]

13. I wasn't even following TZM

closely or really knew anything about Peter Joseph when I rec'ed this back in January, so it is a pleasant surprise to discover I did rec this thread back then, considering how into and well versed of this movement I am now.

Now I can't get enough of Zeitgeist material. It's like Joseph started to singlehandly disprove the validity of Capitalism and the movement just formed around it.

[MrMickeysMom]

14. I think that's the way it goes in movements...

Goodness knows capitalism has been failing for quite some time now. Amazing how it's kicked alive by those with the most to loose.