Summary of The Zeitgeist Movement

‭ [The views expressed in these interviews are those of the participants alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the producers or its sponsors [ORION NETWORK FILMS] [IN ASSOCIATION WITH POSITIVE TV] [DIRECTED BY MARK WATERS] [PRESENTS] [THE SUMMARY] [THE ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT] My name is Peter Joseph, I am currently the de facto founder of an organisation called the Zeitgeist Movement, which is seeking to alter the current cultural climate if you will, into something that can be considered actually sustainable for not just one nation or class but all the world's people. [THE ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT] We live in a paradigm now where we have society operating on the idea that we can grow infinitely. Therefore we keep buying and consuming regardless of how many resources we have. This creates a collision course with nature which the world is figuring out right about now, on many levels, that the Earth is essentially a closed system. It took billions of years to create the minerals we have. It took many, many hundreds of millions of years to create the fossil fuels which govern everything we have. And amazingly enough we've created this system where we're using all of our resources to create the economic growth required to sustain employment and everything else, and simultaneously we're diminishing our resources at a near exponential rate it seems as population continues to grow and no one seem to understand that it's an absolute clash, and that eventually we're gonna run out of pivotal resources and eventually you're gonna see things, I don't know, like the human population start to dwindle down. [Jacque Fresco, 2441] [THE VENUS PROJECT, 21 Valley Lane, Jacque Fresco & Roxanne Meadows] My name is Jacque Fresco and I'm going to present the concept of The Venus Project. If you don't want war, if you don't want poverty, hunger, unemployment you have to declare all the Earth's resources as the common heritage of all the world's people. All the artificial boundaries have to be removed, so that people can travel anywhere. It has to be a global society. There are many people who feel: "Well, let's develop each country." You can't do that because if the Russians do experiments with nuclear materials, and the Chinese, that air goes all over the world. So, it's very hard to work independently. So, I would say, if you want these things you have to change the way your society operates. We believe here at the Venus Project that we are not civilized yet. As long as you have armies, navies, prisons, police, we are not civilized. No nation is civilized. Being civilized is an ongoing process. The more we learn, the more we know about the environment, and human relations, the more we're able to deal with the problems. If we fail to do that we won't be able to solve problems. If we go with traditional values we won't be able to solve problems. All of these pump-primers do not work. There's always been wars. The wars have continued to get worse, even though the universities today have the most sophisticated equipment, In the science labs the architectural labs, all the labs, and the wars are getting worse. The explosives are getting worse. Since the atom bomb, the explosive power is much worse. So, there's something definitely wrong with all cultures. When I say wrong, I mean that the system doesn't work. Now, to talk about a system that does work is a little foreign to our habits of thought, though I'm going to try and explain how we make decisions. Actually, we don't make decisions, we arrive at them. The only way a real society can operate, period, is in a steady-state economy. Meaning you don't have the mechanism of constantly needing to do anything, other than being sustainable in your everyday living, and having society recognize the attributes of sustainability which are required. That's the value system orientation needed to create a stable society. As a brief extension of this, we live in a materialistic culture. A culture that's predicated on inferiority and people thinking that they need more and more and more, because of many reasons, because of someone else having more, status oriented issues and so on and so forth. And that fuels into this mechanism of the growth economy, of getting more and more holidays, people giving each other gifts. These are inventions for economics. As long as we use money and the bottom-line is profit then those who control the money are able to make the laws in their favour. And that means that they really don't care about people. They care about wealth, property and power, when that is the main incentive. So, when we use the monetary system there is no justice within this system. There is no making this system equitable. What we need is an entirely new system, that we call a resource-based economy. In regard to social operation and how to create a new society, or better yet, just say to create any society that would be sustainable and efficient, there's really an empirical train of thought, if you will, of how to do that. First of all, you have to think about what the human being actually needs. We require resources. At the bare minimum we require food, water etc., as we all know. Therefore, resources become the most paramount subject. Resources, in fact, should be the foundation of any economic structure. So, what do you do, if you consider that the Earth is a closed, finite system? The first thing you have to do is do a survey of the Earth's resources. And the carrying capacity of the environment. If you produce a population far in excess of the carrying capacity of the environment, you're going to have trouble. You're going to have malnutrition, and all the problems that go with it. So, first we have to find out what can each successive environment carry? And maintain a population in accordance with the carrying capacity of the Earth. Not what I like, or somebody else like, or on some politician's notions, it has to be based upon the carrying capacity of the Earth. To organize a structure based on the intelligent management of the Earth's resources, you start from, essentially the base level of: "Where is everything?" So, you look at the planet, you say: "Ok, we see we have iron ore here, we have petroleum deposits here, (if we're using petroleum at that point in time in the future hopefully we'll not be, because it's damaging) we have places for great wind energy here, you get the point. We can assess the entire environment of what we currently use based on our technological facilities at that point and we start to create a structure of analysis, maintenance and management and, basically, monitor and understand what we have. Then we can redesign the parameters for the new society. Without a survey, we couldn't do that. Survey means, physical disabilities, all the known diseases that tells us how many hospitals we have to build. Of course, the survey would include available materials. Otherwise, if you just sit down and turn out a hospital or turn out a social plan, not based on what you have, not based on what Fresco believes, only statistical evidence. The end of "what's your opinion?", should have been gone in 1927. Then you move to the next level. How do we utilize resources in the most efficient way? Technology is the methodology to harness any type of resources we have. Technology is the growing intellectual field that allows us to know how to manipulate our environment for our betterment, and to be more sustainable, hopefully. So, what we do is we utilise our technical information and then we analyse the planetary resources. Then we build from the ground up, an entire infrastructure, not based on the whims of any type of ideology, capitalist, socialist, fascist, or whatever have you, communist, you do it based explicitly on the most efficient means to do it, with the most peak efficiency possible, based on the technology available at the time, the intellectual resource of the time. You have peak efficiency and sustainability as your goal, you just simply weigh all parameters when you analyse anything, and then you're gonna build a society that is essentially, for lack of better expression, perfect. It's not perfect at all, because things are gonna constantly change, but it's the best that you can do at that point in time, which I think would be a variance of perfection. [A RESOURCE BASED ECONOMY DOES NOT USE MONEY, BARTER OR ANY FORM OF SERVITUDE... IT JUST MAKES GOODS AND SERVICES AVAILABLE TO EVERYBODY, THROUGH INTELLIGENT USE OF TECHNOLOGY.] [CREATIVE DIRECTOR/CINEMATOGRAPHER/EDITOR - MARK WATERS] [PRODUCER - FRANK DA SILVA] [EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS - DANA AMMA DAY, NICHOLAS PILBROW] [PRODUCTION ASSISTANT - SIMON G. POWELL] [STORYBOARD ARTIST - ALEXANDER WARD] [AN EARTH 2 PRODUCTION FOR ORION NETWORK FILMS LLP] [IN ASSOCIATION WITH POSITIVE TV AND JUSTLIVINFILM] [FILMED ON LOCATION - VENUS; FLORIDA | NEW YORK CITY, NY] [WWW.MARKWATERSFILM.COM] [WWW.POSITIVETV.TV] [CREATE A POSITIVE WORLD]