Can somebody please save me from Zeitgeist?

[Egalitarian Thug]

32. Conversations like this is why I come into this group. A couple of thing to help you cope.

First, I haven't seen the new Zeitgeist, I watched several versions of the first one as it was being produced and the financial parts are essentially correct. The parts about the Masons, Illuminati, etc., can be debated.

Here is a book you should definitely read, Debt: The First 5,000 Years by anthropologist David Graeber. It is enormously useful in explaining how all this came about. In addition to verifying everything you've recently learned, it brought to light some a couple of things I never realized, but are irrefutable since he has actually done the research to verify them.

First a bit of background, I didn't go into economics but was fascinated by it in college and took essentially all of the classes the econ majors did and I did very well in them. The career path I did choose was in IT and I concentrated on financials and accounting, so I have a pretty good understanding of how money works. The first thing I learned from Graeber's book is that the whole reason for money, the very foundation upon which all of this is built, that all of us has been taught going back to the very beginning of economics is a flat-out lie. In the first chapter, usually the first page, of every economics textbook has something along the lines of, "Money was initially created to ease the difficulties in transactions in a barter economy". Problem is, not one has ever existed anywhere at any time. The barter economy is a myth, an erroneous theory made up to explain the origins of currency long after the fact.

Once you wrap your head around the fact that money and the entirety of economics exist only because we all agree that they do, the rest gets easier and, since the whole thing is the creation of human imagination, solutions become possible. The key is to get enough people to understand that first part, that this exists for no other reason than we say so.