Peter Joseph - Interview with Free Speech TV

Hi, this is Caroline Briggs sitting here right now for Free Speech TV with Peter Joseph, the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement. Thank you so much for joining us today, Peter. Oh, it's my pleasure, thank you for having me. Great. So, 2012's passing of the national defense authorization act where the military can indefinitely detain american citizens. It was certaintly a consequence of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. So, dealing with the zeitgeist moving forward, how have you been affected by this large-scale surveillance by the government as well as an outspoken and known critic of those who hold power in the U.S.? Well, fortunately I'm not alone in my broad criticism and, you know, the national defense authorization act is one of many legislations that have happened periodically for decades, if not centuries, now if you look at the broad scheme, with the general repression or oppression of the citizenry that has any kind of outcry against what the state is doing. Here you can go back to the patriot act a lot of this stuff has been seeded in there but the national defense authorization act is a way to kind of force it through a little bit more and in a lot of ways it serves to scare the activists more than anything else but to answer your question, you know, surveillance through the internet, surveillance in general, is so easy. It's plug and play. So, personally, I don't worry about it. I have, you know, I do what I do. I don't do anything illegal. So if someone wants to come down on me, something could happen but I don't worry about it. I move forward and do what I do and that's that. I like your views of moving forward on that. Alright, so in the film 'Zeitgeist: Moving Forward' you show really specific solutions to the intrinsic problems in our system from economics to education to resources. What do you think are the major barriers to enacting the solutions that you put forward in this? Well, there's a reinforcement psychology, if you want to use a phrase like that, that keeps pushing this ethic of self-preservation with the general public. So people that might have a really deep concern about society. They know that we are being unsustainable. They know that we are breeding corruption at every turn and abuse and dehumanization. They are forced into a psychological decision where they have to either give up so much for their own survival in order to pursue some type of activism or they are just gonna be re-concentrated into these acts of same competitive patterns. We have a green revolution now in the world; everyone wants to be green. We talk about a green economy, green corporations. The fact of the matter is, it's technically impossible to be green in the current social order based on profit, planned obsolescence, intrinsic obsolescence, waste, cost efficiency. From a very fundamental, technical level everything that pushes forward our profit economy is against everything that could possibly be green. There's no work around it. So how do you deal with that? So people do the best they can, you know, they try to improve. We see some general improvements on, say, an ecological level which is great, but until we get past this entire barrier which is the market monetary system, creation of scarcity deliberately, preservation of things that really do not lead to sustainability, whatsoever. We have a very long road ahead of us. So, really quickly, this is the first national broadcast of your film and we are really excited at Free Speech TV to you have the opportunity; quickly what is independent media? Why is that so important to you, Peter? Well, you know, as you know we have a very small concert of corporate control over media, it's been there, and I often use the example: imagine if you went back a hundred fifty years and the only media you had was one newspaper coming from maybe two corporations that produce the news at your doorstep. It was very easy to control people and control the news, control things like war and the interest of war. Today is very different, today is actually the opposite which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. The corporate structure that has kept the zeitgeist in order for so long, the media structure, I use the... you know, we have this term state media which you find other countries where the state controls the media. What we have in america, in the west, is a corporate state media which is pretty much the exact same thing because they are going to support the Status Quo at all costs. So independent media is where it's at. I do all of my work independently. I use the internet almost exclusively. I produce everything and put it online for free because I'm about the message not about money and this is what I hope will inspire others to do the exact same thing, and I believe that there is a tipping point about to emerge in the entire walk of communication across the world where people are just going to turn off the corporate media, they are going to turn off the mainstream and they are going to move to the internet and they are going to start to evaluate things in a much more free way, rather than being imposed upon by the corporate institution, they are going to make their own decisions about what they want to view and why, and I think there is great merit to that. Alright, thank you so much, Peter Joseph, for joining us. Thank you very much, I really appreciate you having me.