My name is Peter Joseph. I live in Brooklyn, New York. I'm 31 years old. I am an independant film maker and I suppose the de facto founder of an organisation called; "The Zeitgeist Movement" As far as my background, I was born to what I consider to be a middle class family. My father was a... is now a retired postal employee, and my mother is a retired Child Protective Services employee. In fact, a lot of my social dispositions on society I think might come from the experiences I had listening to the stories coming from my mother. I started getting interested in music I think at about eight or nine. I seemed to fall into a love of percussion and drums and rhythm. I was very lucky to be accepted to a school in North Carolina, an art school in a university, which allowed me to grow up in a very different upbringing than I think most people grow up into in a rural town in a place in the south such as North Carolina. And I was exposed to a lot of different cultures, a lot of different interests, a lot of things that you wouldn't find in a typical highschool, say, in the south. I was exposed to a large variety of people and artistic and creative people, specifically, which I think imprinted on me, so to speak, and I continue those trends today. Music and percussion are coupled straight into my identity. People say to me: "Well, you know, you work with this social organisation, but yet, you're just a musician". You know, "just a musician". There is the credentialism tendency that comes up a lot with anyone that talks about the issues that we talk about in the movement or that have been talked about in the films. And, we can talk about that a little bit later as well. But, what I'd like to say is that, I look at music now as a form of meditation. It's something that's an outlet, it maintains my balance. So I continue to practice in a very personal sense, it's not that I go out and perform that much anymore, I don't have time to anymore. After my second year of college, I dropped out realizing that the debt that I was accruing was absolutely not worth it. Even then I knew there was something wrong with going to school, getting a ridiculous amount of debt, $80 to $100,000 and then being thrown into the work force, automatically in a position of indentured servitude, if you will. Automatically having to give yourself to the system because you're already in so much debt. My original interest was to be a solo classical marimbist, a laughable concept when I think about it now, but we all have our bouts of naivety as we grow. Once music became difficult for me to pursue as a career choice, I started to get into video and editing, and I got a job in New York, many jobs in New York, doing various freelance video editing, shooting, whatever related to video work, film work. You have to do whatever pays you in this society, and I couldn't really find the niche to make money in music so, I ended up in advertising. I always had a problem with people telling me what to do in the labor force, and I did not like advertising, obviously. I did not like the nonsensical manipulation of peoples' perceptions so corporations can sell their crap. So I began to pursue work in the financial arena. I began to do day trading, pattern training. I was moderately succesful. I never had a big capital base, which you really do have to have. I pulled some change out of the market, and I continued to do it on and off for many, many years. I don't do it anymore because I despise the market system. The way I justified this was it was the only job I could come up with, that didn't have a boss or a client, so it represented freedom to me. Granted, trading the stock market has absolutely no social relevance, it contributes nothing to society. You could blow up Wall Street tomorrow and it wouldn't make a damn difference to anything in regard to the natural order of affairs on this planet. So at that stage in my life, I just wanted a way out. I wanted to not have to deal with being a slave to the corporate system anymore. So anyway, that's when I started first investigating economics, and we can... I'm sure you have other questions about that, so I'll stop there. Zeitgeist began as a public performance, an attempt at a vaudevillian concept. What I did was I set up two screens, and I had a huge percussion setup in the middle where I performed, with the videos that were on the two screens. Some of the equipment you see here was used. I've actually sold off most of my equipment. But regardless... I think I have some photographs I can give you. There's only a few that actually were captured, believe it or not, at the original event. I wish I had documented the original event, because people keep asking me about it. But never the less, it started off as a creative work, a variation on an early vaudevillian concept. Film and live music. Live performance. And once it was over, you know there was a... it was a free event. I did it for six nights, I believe. And people came, I advertised it like crazy. I spent thousands and thousands of dollars. I did it mainly because I had been stuck in the corporate reality, and I just wanted to do something for myself to make myself feel better about a world that's going to shit, essentially. A world that's being dominated by finance, a world that's sick and distorted, through religious processes, financial oligarchs. It was just an expression, it was in fact a very angry, but solemn expression. I never expected it to turn out to be what it was, at all. After it was over, I just found myself in a little bit more debt. And I took the work which, by the way, I had no clearance for, I didn't clear any of the aspects with it. But, since the internet is what it is, tossed it up online to see what would happen. Maybe some people would like it, they'd download it, I'd get some feedback. Whatever. What happened completely blew my mind. I posted it on one website, and from there, a chain reaction occured, and I... It's pretty much all history from that point on, I couldn't even tell you how it unfolded. All I know is that, I got wind of the fact that it was getting a tremendous amount of hits, and talked about a lot, so I built a website for it: www.zeitgeistmovie.com And I just had it up there for free.Then I realized that people wanted it on DVD. Like ok, I guess I should try to do that. So I was forced into a very difficult position of getting clearance from all the participants involved, which was very difficult, by the way because, everyone saw dollar-signs, because it's an internet film that's getting millions of views. So I had to pay out a lot of money to a set number of people to get it going. But there were also people that were just happy to see this information get out there, and didn't have any problems with me doing what I call a "non-commercial distribution". A $5 DVD, for it to be released, in some capacity. From there I got an email from an organization called the Artivist Film Festival. And, to my amazement, they wanted to show the film in their festival, which was a packed audience, sold out audience. At this stage it was still utterly bewildering to me. This was the same organization of course that showed Zeitgeist: Addendum the next year. "In a world where media is often used to keep us a little dumbed down more than anything else, as far as my opinion is concerned." (Applause) I've often said, art without conscience is meaningless, and I think action without conscience is futile. So, I think it's so great to have a festival that represents these types of ideas. As far as the film itself, I guess all I can really say is that the whole point of the film is for people to start looking at the very fundamental root causes of all of these problems that we see in society. So, that's a general run down of what happened. The Zeitgeist Movement. The Zeitgeist movement was a very difficult decision for me. I could have just made Zeitgeist: Addendum like other socially conscious film makers do in the sense that I could have just said: "Oh, well here's a bunch of stuff, here's a bunch of problems. Hey, here are some possible solutions. Take what you will with it, and just roll with it and see what happens." I really was on the fence about putting at the very end; "Join the movement www.thezeitgeistmovement.com" And 6) Join the movement. Go to thezeitgeistmovement.com and help us create the largest mass movement for social change the world has ever seen. I knew that the moment that it became something more than just a film phenomenon, that my life would likely change dramatically, which it has. Zeitgeist: Addendum was sparked out of people emailing me saying, "Well, what do we do about all of these cultural problems? What do we do about a corrupt banking system? What do we do about people that are locked into establishment social programs, if you will?" I consider the trains of thought and mind to be a program. I consider society itself to be a program that's running. And the programing locks people into a specific frame of reference. How do we deal with these issues? How do we do, what do we do? And Zeitgeist: Addendum was an attempt at answering that question. After Zeitgeist 1 was released, it got into the hands of Jacque and Roxanne. And after reading Jacques book, which they sent me, I realized that this was really important information. I realized that, even I was backwards on a lot of issues that needed to be corrected. And in order to get society in line, we have to think about the fundamental problems. This was something that I was attempting to do in part, I had a notion of, but it wasn't until I met Jacque Fresco that the lense became focused. It was like all these things that I sort of had an inkling of, Jacque's experience, life experience, what he had talked about for so long, just focused me in the right direction, as far as I'm concerned. So I made a whole section with him in Zeitgeist: Addendum, and that's how it took off. ATTACKS Anyone that chooses to challenge establishment orthodoxy, traditional world views, not to mention the system that we live in, sets themself up for vehement attacks. I'm well aware of this. If you look back at the history of anyone that has chosen to challenge the establishment, it's a very dark history. There are a great number of people out there that know that something is wrong. But, they do not understand the source of that wrongness, because they are in the box of indoctrination. Socrates. Socrates never speculated on the slavery that was existing during his time. That was normality to him. This goes with every type of political philosopher that's ever existed, whether it's Carl Marx, whether it's Plato. They're all locked into an established paradigm, and their thought processes can only go so far. And this includes, probably, myself. People are locked into a box. They see the box around them, they see the leaks and the holes and the cracks and they go up to the cracks and they try to fix them; they try to patch the holes. But they don't stop to think that maybe there's something wrong with the box, itself. Maybe the integrity of the box that they exist in is inherently invalid, it's inherently void. The economic system that we live in is a parasitic paradigm, that is only going to lead to self-destruction. But people don't see that. So if you attack the economic system for what it actually is, everyones' feathers go up. Everyone says: "Well, wait a minute. This is the world we all live. We live in a profit-based, labor-for-income world, cyclical consumption. This is what we're used to. We understand we have division of classes." You know, they throw in human nature, they throw in everything that will try to make it seem like it's apart of the natural order of reality when, in fact, it's not. If I was to summarize the attacks that typically happen towards myself and the people I work with, the first one would be credentialism. Credentialism is an annotation for the priesthood of those in the know. Now, bear in mind, this is a gradient of relevance. Obviously, I'm not going to go to a doctor, if I can help it, that has absolutely no credentials in the surgery that I might need performed. They require instruction and experience to do so. But when it comes to the other side of the spectrum. When it comes to the simple analysis of information. When it comes to the analysis of history. When it comes to economics, because it is a contrived system, and has no basis in anything else in general operations. It's not based on laws of physics; it's not based on any aspect of scientific law that has any relationship to planetary operation. Then, suddenly, it becomes very relevant to speculate as to what these things actually mean to society. It's a double-edged sword when you get a Masters, Bachelors, PhD in a particular medium because think about what you're actually doing. You're going through a curriculum that's been completely established for you by the institutions that have existed prior. When it comes to social things that have a great deal of subjective variance, you lose objectivity, in that sense. Because you're literally indoctrinated into the beliefs that are presented. To get a degree in Economics, which is probably the most wasteful thing you can possibly do, is to be completely indoctrinated into the idea that what you're studying is actually a science that actually has some type of relevance to anything. So, when I get emails from PhDs in Economics that try to debunk the aspects that we talk about, it becomes quite clear to me, that the reason they have such an objection is really an emotional one. It isn't an objective aspect. They have culminated an identity to themselves, because of their belief-system. And for me to take that away from them, to debunk their ideas about economics, is to take away their identity. It's easy to point out, that some of the greatest minds that have contributed some of the most powerful inventions to our world, have come from non-establishment institutions, have worked on their own, they've done their own studies, they've guided their own direction of information. They didn't just sit in a classroom and take in the rote information, do the step by step processes as oriented by the establishment, and then grab their diploma and degree and; "Hey, now I'm an expert in a given field." The most tremendous minds, the most tremendous contributions, comes from those, from those that are outside of the box. I don't even need to give examples of that to make that known. So, back to my point, when it comes to social theory, if you will, credentialism, I give zero weight to. Academia is a detriment to advancing the social progress. Another form of attack simply comes from the cultural nuance, comes from the social programming. What we call the "self-appointed guardians of the status quo." People that are suffering in the system just like anyone else, but their social identification is so powerful, they are so locked into the box, that they find it infuriating to think that what they're living is actually wrong, paradoxically. I get this all the time from people. The self-appointed guardians of the status quo are birthed in religion, birthed in economics, birthed in the illusion of democracy that we see today across the world. Birthed in the various "isms" that are entirely pointless: Capitalism, Communism, Facism, Socialism. You have the priesthood of the monetary system, the capitalists if you will, you can give it that rhetoric, I don't use that word, it's meaningless. The monetaryism is the word I use. The pretense for acquisition of money is based on differential advantage, which is based on dishonesty. Period. Then you have the priesthood of religious concepts, religious identification, and the idea that somehow we know everything already, and there's a God, and he's looking down on us, controlling everything. I won't even go into the paradoxes that come from that extremely narrow notion. So, in other words, the biggest crutch to the evolution of human thought, is breaking your own indoctrination. It's very, very difficult to overcome emotional elements that have become so ingrained in you, that you have an immediate reaction, an immediate suffering and pain when anything interferes with that. It's a very, very complex problem. But I'll say it again: We have to learn how to break... excuse me, we have to learn how to identify and break our own indoctrination, if we expect to move forward at all, as a civilization. My name was put forward because I wanted to protect my friends and family from the association. People say to me: "Well, you should come out with everything. If you're gonna talk about any of this stuff, then you've got to be prepared to deal with all of this and that, that you've set up for yourself." I had an email that said that to me, criticizing me for not releasing my last name. And, I thought to myself, you know what? What they're actually saying, anyone who actually says that, is actually saying that Martin Luther King deserved to die, or that Gandhi deserved to die, for making themselves known. I've gotten many death threaths from the religious community. We live in a very fucked up, sick culture. We really do. Society is mentally ill. To be normal is to be messed up in this culture. So, my name "Peter Joseph". You know... At what point does my identity become absolutely transparent? Should I give people my social security number? Should I give them my tax returns? And just to throw it in there, there are plenty of people throughout history that have gone by their first and middle name, excluding their last name from their general communication and walks in their society. Just like people often use their middle name and their last name. Those that have something against me for the things that I talk about, want to find anything they can to try and to make me look like I'm hiding something, or I have ulterior motives. And I expect that. But, you know, whatever. It doesn't mean anything to me. I go by Peter Joseph. People can call me whatever the hell they want to call me. I'm constantly interacting, putting myself out there. I have nothing to hide. And even if someone finds out my real identity, where I live, who my parents are, who everyone and my friends are, it's not gonna change a damn thing. The unfortunate reality is, that I am given a controversial title, and people do have a lot of problems with me, of a more traditional-minded upbringing, and I don't like to see other people suffer because of what I do. But most of my friends and family are very much aware and they accept this. So, this is something that I just deal with. Anyone who thinks that I do what I do for notoriety reasons or monetary reasons, or anything associated with self-interest, has a lot to learn. First of all, I operate the movement site and the movement itself on a deficit. I do pay people to run and program things. I have a lot of volunteers, which I'm extremely indebted to. But to get things done quickly, very often, I have to get people that work in the industries to do things. I sell a t-shirt to do that. It's the only thing that I sell that is designated for the movement. As far as the DVD sales, if people can't respect the fact that I charge $5 for DVD's that could be charged $20 for, that I did spend a great deal of money to make those films. The DVD sale's obviously are part of my income. I denote that they are not for profit, meaning that the money does go back into other projects, which it has. I've had to shut down bulk selling, in fact, because people were buying the discs from me in bulk at about $2 a piece and re-selling them for $20 on the Internet. It's very frustrating. I've hurt myself a lot financially, because of all of this. The double standard is quite fascinating to me. You have all these social organizations that take in millions of dollars of money for donations. They sell tons of crap. And suddenly we get attacked because we sell anything, because of our interest to in fact remove the monetary paradigm, entirely. I'm sorry. We have to survive to do something. So, just to make it clear: the Zeitgeist Movement is predicated on making information free. I put all of my films up for free. I allow downloads of them, for free. Anyone wants to help me out by buying a $5 DVD, I could charge $20 for easily commercially, that helps. But I don't push it. I will continue to work in advertising, or anything else I have to do to keep things going while maintaining the integrity of the movement itself, by walking the line of non-profitability. The only time that we'll ever ask for donations as the movement, is when we have a big project that needs to move forward. We have no projects like that now. We're in a period of, we're in a period of collecting people and streamlining functionality. ECONOMICS If you read economics, they present it as though it's a science. I've read through much of the curriculum of what bachelor's and master's degree Harvard University students would read for their degrees in economics. Economics is not a science. It's an invention. It's a contrivance. It's funny, you look at economics books and they have graphs and charts and they make complex novel equations. It's all contrived. It doesn't have any relationship to the natural order of things. It is based upon and folkway of orienting production and distribution, and we've established this massive structure that makes it seem valid. There's really nothing anyone needs to know about economics, than the fact that the entire global economic system is based upon people constantly consuming, regardless of the state of affairs in natural orders of energy, planetary materials and anything else. It is blind, narrow consumption with absolutely no regard for the environment. SCIENCE We have to recognize that we're all scientists. And we all have to start thinking about things in a scientific manner, which most of us do to a certain extent. Even the most religiously-minded individuals, use science all the time when they evaluate buying a car, when they evaluate their general life. They use these things constantly. We all do. We're all scientists. That is the discovery, the epiphany that needs to come out. Science is not a cold, heartless thing. It is what has given us everything that comprises our well-being. Now, you can argue philosophy, as far as I'm concerned, any form of philosophy, any form of notions of morality, are absolutely meaningless unless they are sprouted from the natural world using what I would consider to be, analysis known as the scientific method. I am nothing but bored to tears by philosophical dispositions and verbal hobbies, that do absolutely nothing. Religion is a verbal hobby. RELIGION One of the age old scams of the establishment is to hand religion to the populous, so they feel like there's something positive waiting for them as they suffer because of this perpetual, constant, oligarchical evolution that has emerged since, I believe, the hunter-gatherer society. When we culminated agriculture, we altered everything. We created social stratification; we began to control the environment. Before the Neolithic Revolution, it's been well documented by anthropologists that there was a natural balance to the planet. Population was in balance because we could only do what the Earth provided for us naturally. Once we started to control the planet through agriculture, and now through many different means, we began to create dis- imbalance; we began to create uneven supplies. We began to generate scarcity, deliberately, for the sake of self-preservation and profit. So, as society became more and more imbalanced, as the concept of property emerged. As the great pirates started to travel the oceans, bringing back goods to different continents, to different kingdoms, creating power structures of resources, certain tools were used to control humanity to keep those that were not "deserving the right of life" or "deserving the fruits"... To keep the stratification going, they were given various tools to subdue them. Religion is one of the age old tools to subdue the masses. Now by the way, I'm not saying that's where the origin of religion came from. That's a whole different subject if you want to talk about it, because it was covered in the first part of my film. I'm simply talking about the political usage of religion which carries on to this day. How many times do you hear the president of the United States say: "God bless America"? What an offensive, insulting thing to say to the American people. First of all, it's offensive to every other country in the world. Why would God just bless America? God would bless the planet if we lived in a sane society. If there was a God, of course. Anyway, I won't even go on that tangent. Religion to me, has two sides. On one side you have the dogma, the indoctrination. You have resurrections, you have all the fantasy notions, that have come, excuse me, that exist in the literary books that are there. On the other side there's a brilliant philosophical disposition. I happen to love a lot of the things that the Jesus character had stated. I see beautiful notions in almost every major religious figure. There are time tested values that exist in religious thought, that do need to be adhered to. Some of the most brilliant and beautiful people I've met are, in fact, Christians, or Islamic, or Hindus,or Jewish. They know were to draw the line, where to stop at the fanaticism. Because that's where the religious danger goes to. Once you believe something dogmatically enough where you say, "Jesus existed. That's that. Anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of mine." Then you have some very serious neurosis to deal with. Whether Jesus existed or not doesn't mean anything. I think Jacque Fresco put it best on Larry King. When Larry King asked him "What do you think about Christianity", he said, "I think it's great. When are they going to put it into practice?" So, my religious disposition is that I wish that those that have religious inclinations, would really dig deep into their beliefs and ask themselves what is it about their religion that they actually use? What is it about the reciprocation notions that you can find in all religions, that you see actually materialize in most people's behavior? "The Golden Rule" and all those things which exist in all religions, I think we have a list in our PDF for The Zeitgeist Movement Orientation Guide. If you review these ideas, no one puts them into practice. In the end, my disposition on religion is very, very simple: it's nothing but a bunch of stories. They are allegories that have meaning. They get distorted through interpretations because that's the nature of semantics. But I don't want to rule out religion. I don't think religion should be outlawed or anything like that. I think it should be understood for what it is. The problem with humanity is we're ripped apart. There are far too many ideologies out there that have no basis on anything tangible. I want this, I wanna make this very, very clear: all orthodox religions, at least Western religions... there might be a few elements of Hinduism and Buddhism that are an exception... but let's just say the Judeo-Christian Islamic system of belief, to me, is no different than the isms of state associations that we see in our political sphere, meaning communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism. These are ideas that have been created that have no relevance to nature whatsoever. In other words, they have absolutely no relevance to the carrying capacity of the Earth, to our ability to support ourselves; to our ability to produce, to the methods of production, to the methods of distribution; to the way we orient society and keep ourselves alive and keep ourselves healthy and prosper, and for the betterment of the... what I consider to be the organism of the human species, as a single organism. None of those beliefs have anything to do with any of that, and that's a problem to me. For example, the Catholic church, and a lot of other religions that feed off of those early old testament ideologies, they advocate this illusion that we can just procreate constantly, and everyone's going to be fine. God will take care of everyone. As of right now, with the future of energy, established energy, the future of the way we are orienting ourselves on this planet through depletion, I'm not having any children. While I try to be as optimistic as possible with The Zeitgeist Movement and what we could do, which is phenomenal, what we could do. As of right now we have some powerful barriers. I'm not having children. Why? Why would I say that? First of all, I wouldn't feel good. I would feel utterly negligent and irresponsible at this point in time, to bring in another human being. Most people when they give birth to children, it's a traditionalized self-serving, established notion where, "We are going to have kids and a family. To hell with the carrying capacity of the Earth, to hell with the fact that we might be impoverished." I mean, you see this in trailer parks all the time. I used to live in a trailer park. I've seen this countless, countless times. People don't have any relationship to anything. They have no education, as far as what makes society work, as far as what the processes are that feed them. So, they continue to have kids over and over and over again, or do many, many things that have no relationship to anything. But let's focus on the children aspect. For me to bring in a child, is for me to actually say: "I believe the world will be in good shape for the duration of my child's life." And then it becomes: "What if my child has a grand child? Should the world have the integrity to maintain stability for that child as well?" This is the question. This is what all parents out there should be asking themselves. They shouldn't be having children for their own self serving needs so they can have "a family" and be traditional and show up at church and have their two kids. It has to relate to something real. Humanity has to start thinking about its relationship to the Earth. Until it does so, we're fucking doomed. We have created a economic structure, a religious-philosophical structure, that is absolutely de-coupled from anything tangible and real, and these ideologies are what will destroy the human species and destroy the planet. DEBUNKERS It has become a cottage industry for people to sell books and DVDs debunking Zeitgeist. There are people that have full websites that use advertising, sponsorship to make money, and I find the whole thing just to be amusing frankly. Zeitgeist 1 is based on pre-existing information. There isn't one thing in that film that doesn't come from a source. The most grand debunking aspect is part one, the religion section. Comparative religion. It's no mystery. It's been talked about for decades and centuries: religions have been borrowing from each other. Religions have to borrow from each other. Why? Because all information is serial. All knowledge is serial. It is illogical to think that any information of any religion is of a novel origin. And that's the beauty of it in fact, when you trace the source of most established religions, because they all come back to nature. They all come back from primitive ideas about natural unfoldings of nature- storms, the sun obviously. It's nothing metaphysical. It's nothing esoteric. It's just absolutely obvious. Is it any mystery that the sun has been idolized as a source of life? Which it is. Is it any mystery, for any of that? Obviously not. PRESENT As of right now, we are running out of oil. We are going to be running out of natural gas. In fact, very simply, all fosil fuels, which is the governance of all society; our entire society is completely created based on fossil fuels, from the plastics, everything. I'm not even going to go into it. Anyone that questions that, just take a moment to think about what oil powers, what fosil fuels power. From the lights that we all use, from the coal or natural gas power plants, to what runs your car, to what comprises the fabric of industrial civilization, is fossil fuels. And we are provably using them at the rate far exceeding their renewability, which takes hundreds of millions of years. No one's thinking about this. No one is thinking about it because the economic paradigm will not allow it. The core value of our Western Society today... I mean, in America, the central motivating value now is nothing but blind consumption. "Saturdays are for shopping", I heard someone once say. You know, there's a reason why I used Times Square in Zeitgeist Addendum as the noise, if you remember there's all the noise on the screens because, Times Square is the epitome of absolute waste. The most disgusting angles of humanity. Materialistic noise. Humanity cannot survive in a paradigm that requires infinite growth, which again, is what it's based on. If you're not familiar with that, think about it. All we do is buy and consume, and consume, and consume. That's what makes the economy go. If people stop buying, the GDP of all countries goes down. Well, the more we buy, consume and waste our resources, the faster we extinguish ourselves. What do you do? What do you do? How do you stop this? This is why The Zeitgeist Movement exists. We have to; one, get a philosophical disposition under our belts that says; "You know what? We're all on the same page." "We all have to survive on this planet." "We are faced with some tremendous problems, and the only way they are going to be resolved is to begin to work together." Everyone needs to shed their religious ideas, and to shed their capitalist, socialist, fascist, communist preconstructs. They need to shed everything that they have been taught and ask themselves one simple question: "What the fuck do we need to continue our survival on this planet without horrors and wars and continuing the patterns of all the things that continue to happen?" RESOURCE-BASED ECONOMY You know, The Zeitgeist Movement as it's been denoted in all of our materials is the, quote; "Activist arm of The Venus Project", pushing forward to what we call a "resource-based economy". A resource-based economy is very, very simple. It's simply a system that is structured in a, quote;"systems theory approach". To explain the systems theory approach, all you have to do is to look at the planet itself. The planet is a holistic system. So, the first step is very, very simple: we recognize it as a system and we treat it as such. We have to start measuring and monitoring all the Earthly resources. We cannot be so stupid as to give corporations the ability to control, for their own little clique's betterment, resources that we all should have an inherent, inherent... deserving err... Every resource on the planet should be common heritage to all human beings. There's no way to create a stable society otherwise. So, we are born on this planet, you inherit the planet. The planet is your home. Not some plot of land that has the illusion of property. Not some house that you think you own. There's no such thing as ownership. The idea of ownership is controlled restriction. Ownership is simply there really for those at the top to make sure no one can interfere with the fact that they control mostly everything. So, we have to monitor the planet's resources. We have to begin to construct a system of production and distribution that is not based on the whims of profit. It's based on what is the most efficient means to do that. There are resources all over the planet obviously. We have to begin to understand what we have. We have to use science and technology to begin to orient our use of these resources in the most efficient way possible. And that's why we advocate the systems approach that we do. If you motivated our resources right now to change the face of the Earth, to create a resource-based economy, we could do it very, very quickly. The problem is, again, the established orthodoxies and self-preserving mechanisms that are in place, which will be our death. The free market is what will kill everything on this planet. It's not the "free market", it's actually the monetary system. Monetary acquisition and exchange through labor for income, and the motivation of profit, will be what destroys humanity. Because all it does is pull everything in the direction of those that have the most power. Right now we are faced with an ecological collapse, an energy collapse, specifically. We're faced with an economic collapse which is very much tied into the energy collapse. We're faced with a labor collapse, which of course is very much tied to the economic collapse. And we're faced with what I call the "criminal meltdown". The breakdown of society is occurring. People say, "Well, we're gonna have a recovery of the economy." The most dangerous thing that we can have right now, is a recovery of the US economy. The most dangerous thing that we can have right now, is the use of more resources, because all it's going to do is speed up the inevitable destruction. If more people go out and buy lots of automobiles to help the economy, all that's going to do is get more fuel into the tanks, taken from the resources of the planet. More gasoline's used. More energy is going to be wasted on the idea of consumption. And this is what, again, will kill us. So, a resouce-based economy attempts to remove all of the insustainable practices that we have now, and create a holistic system of resource management, of priority of labor- that's a big one. Think about how much time is wasted in most people's lives in jobs that do absolutely nothing. Think about how much energy is wasted by someone who works at Wall Street, driving from Pennsylvania every single day from their home, so they can be a trader on Wall Street, wasting energy on something that means nothing, that wastes even more electricity and energy. When you begin to think like that, when you begin to see how much energy and resources are wasted on actions that have no return whatsoever, except the self-interest and consumeristic monetary values of particular individuals, but return nothing to society. Think about how beautiful society would be when we start to educate people on natural processes of the environment- on science, technology and resource conservation. And when people can gauge society in a, excuse me, on a professional level, if you will, they do so on things that actually matter. (pheew) That would be cataclysmic. That would be unbelievable. To see people doing stuff that actually has a relevance. That will enable them to have so much more freedom, too. To put it in a gestural sense, the way I see human survival and the human self-interest mechanism, which does exist, but it's accelerated by our system, is... making a psychological trick to what it means to umm... be self-servent. Social interest needs to become self-interest. In other words when I invent something, that is given to everyone for them to improve upon and to utilize. That invention isn't hoarded through patents and trademarks, it's given to everyone. In turn, what that means is that every time anyone else invents something, or creates something or has an idea, that comes to me too. Suddenly humanity becomes a singular organism. It becomes a working system. SPIRITUALITY People ask me a lot about spirituality. They say, "Well, if you don't like any of the established religions, are you spiritual in any other way?" Or something like that. The only type of spirituality that is actually relevant, is a understanding of natural processes and the natural order of the universe, to give it annoying venacular. The way natural laws work, gravity, the way the world actually works: God is in the laws of nature and nothing more. I believe that a true spiritual awakening will be when people start to realize that they have to begin to work together, they have to share their resources. They have to begin to understand that they live off of this planet, that they get their light from the sun, that there are energy sources that are natural and abundant, that could be made available to all; that we share everything, and we work together, because that's what the system demands. The Earth demands this. The species demands this for our survival. And that will be a spiritual awakening, if you want to give it that type of term. FUTURE We live in a world of tremendous possibility, positive possibility. However, all indicators point to what I consider to be self-destruction, given our current, established economic and ideological structures. Once again: Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Judeo, Islamic, Christian belief systems... They have no relationship to what actually makes, creates, survival of the species. The real sad thing is, is that, humanity is going to have to be smacked around quite a bit, before they really understand what The Zeitgeist Movement, a resource-based economy and The Venus Project, Jacque Fresco... is talking about. We are driven by bio-social pressures. Meaning that it takes problems for us to wake up and want to change things. I don't want to see humanity suffer. I don't want to see the population start to shrink because of our lack of energy and food. I don't want to see these things happen. But I know, sadly, that a good portion of it is going to happen. Until people start to wake up and recognize a new paradigm that's on the horizon, that we must drive forward to as fast as humanly possible. All you have to do is look at the current economic implosion. The US government's in 12 trillion dollars worth of debt. It becomes comical after a while. What's going to happen when the US government hits 20 trillion? 30 trillion? I mean, once the US government can't pay its interest on all the bonds that have been sold overseas, and all of the outstanding debt that it has, then we're theoretically bankrupt. What do you think is going to happen when China can't get its money from the United States? What do you think is going to happen when the United States, because we use 25% of the world's energy, starts to run out of oil in Iraq and starts to invade other Middle Eastern countries, which it will probably do beforehand... but starts to do that? And China, of course, who gets oil from Iran says, "You know what, I think we're going to have to stop you guys from taking Iran's oil. Because we need that too, and you owe us a lot of money. It's kind of pissing us off." Do you think war between these super powers might be possible? Hmm... I think World War III could be very, very possible. And this war will be for real. This will not be a contrivance war like WW I and WW II, based on geopolitical realigning and various resource grabs. This will be war for survival of different countries. And, I hope that doesn't happen. I sincerely hope, all of these things I talk about are erroneous and false but, all you have to do is look at the trends. One way or another, we will end up in a system that's not based on money as we know it today. Why? Because that will be realized in the future by historians, as the total and pivotal cause of the destruction of civilization as we know it. That will be understood in the future. Historians will look back and say, "Holy shit! They were making materials, selling them for corporation profit, over and over and over and over again, with absolutely no reference to what the planet had and recycling protocols and everything else. They were burning fossil fuels at a million times the rate of their actual renewability?" They're going to laugh at us, wondering what the hell kind of primitive dumbass species we actually were. If we even survive to reach that point. So, I hate to sound condescending and negative. I hate to throw out all this rhetoric, but, I'm fairly irritated at this point, and I try not to be. I just want to make it understood that, the entire system that we live in is a sham. It's a false system, falsivity defined by the fact that it cannot be sustained. It's that simple. And we propose a resource-based economy. I hope everyone watching this film will go to www.thezeitgeistmovement.com and understand what we're doing. I hope everyone out there will understand that, either we change or we die. Thank you for all you do, Peter. A film by Charles Robinson Please duplicate as you see fit. (without monetary gain, of course) There is no DVD for sale. Download: www.whoispeterjoseph.com www.thezeitgeistmovement.com www.thevenusproject.com www.zeitgeistmovie.com The Revolution is Now [place you chapter site here or leave it blank]