Peter Joseph - End Speech - L.A., CA Z-Day 2013

We are running a little bit behind now. We're going to have a Q&А starting at 7 o'clock. I believe we are about 20 minutes behind so I want to make this conclusion very brief. Before we move to questions, I want to thank everyone who has come from around the world to be here along with the tech team, the speakers, everyone listening on the webcasts and everyone obviously generally who has the courage to go out and promote what are very difficult ideas on a certain level, not to mention the cultural strife you get immediately from this sort of value system disorder that keeps persisting in the world. We've tried our best in this presentation to present the train-of-thought (this was the design of this particular program) and we hope that you walk out of this event with a decent understanding of how this works, the components of it, and how to relay it to others as efficiently as you can; and of course as Eva said, there's a lot of material that's being produced right now, a roughly 200-page guide text called 'The Zeitgeist Movement - Defined' which should be out hopefully in a couple of months, long overdue, that will be freely available; and it should serve as the Bible, of sorts, for what this Movement is about. [Applause] As was mentioned earlier, the zeitgeist moves on in one direction or another, and we can choose to orient it, or not. We are all in The Zeitgeist Movement one way or another. The question is: how aware and responsible are you when it comes to the inevitable unfolding of the change you are invariably a part of? Now, it's usually at this point in a program as such, in the general kind of activism/sustainability movements, that someone comes out, puts up a screen and tells you where to donate all your money. [Laughter] We don't work that way. The Zeitgeist Movement has no offices, it has no employees, it takes no donations and our events are strategically designed, usually badly, to break even which they usually don't. [More laughter] This movement is about personal effort. You don't give to The Zeitgeist Movement. You become a part of it by your actions. You learn, you communicate, you become part of the process of social transformation; and as tedious as it may seem, there is a tipping point that can occur. Before the age of the Internet it's hard to fathom how mass social revolutions ever happened at all. Imagine without a telephone, but yet we go back in history; these things did occur. And we have a vast amount of tools now that was never possible before, which makes this possibility that much more, possible! So it's also important to understand that there's a gradual shift that is inevitable in any type of evolution; and again, it's going to be tipping in one direction or another, and every time you engage people, you need to remember that all of your actions regardless if it's relating to The Zeitgeist Movement's specific content or not is going to have an effect. What I mean by that is every time you engage people in an unselfish way, you plant the seed for them to be unselfish as well. Every time you give to somebody instead of exploiting them you plant the seed for them to give to other people and to not look at exploitation of personal gain as a virtue as we have unfortunately in the world today. So behavior is viral, and values are viral, and in this kind of train-of-thought that The Zeitgeist Movement promotes, the best method of approach is to realize that your communicative tactics are every day, every moment, every time you facilitate anything: you try your best. I know it's hard. It's very hard when we all have these pressures around us to behave in ways that are actually, kind of, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt (if I can say it in that way) and trying not to impose negativity. I fall victim to this all the time: for anyone that's followed any of my work I can get really angry, and that's a victimization of culture that I have, and I'm sure that many of you share sympathetically. Apart from that, it's also important to realize that this train-of-thought is extremely self-evident, and the goal is not to convince anyone of these understandings but to set up the condition for them to realize it for themselves. That is probably the most profound thing that I've ever realized: you don't impose; you set it up, and if anything is really true, then we all should have the capacity to realize it on our own without feeling imposition. So this concludes the presentation. I thank all the speakers, and everyone that's come. We're going to have a Q&A right now. I thank you all, and thank you all on the webcast. [Sustained applause] TZM: The Zeitgeist Movement