Summary of The Zeitgeist Movement

The views expressed in these interviews are those of the participants alone and not necessarily reflect the views of the producers or its sponsors. Orion Network Films LLP In association with PositiveTV Directed by Mark Waters Presents The Summary The Zeitgeist Movement My name is Peter Joseph. I'm currently the de facto founder of an organization called The Zeitgeist Movement, which is seeking to alter the current cultural climate, if you will, into something that can be considered as 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 essentialy a close system. It took billions of years to create the minerals we have. It took many many hundreds of millions of years to create the fosil 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 simultaneasly, 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 going to run out of pivotal resources, and eventually you're going to see things, I don't know, like the human population start to dwindle down. My name is Jacque Fresco and I'm going to present the concepts of The Venus Project. The Venus Project If you don't want war, if you don't want poverty, hunger, unemployment, you have to declare all the world'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 that 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, we are not civilized yet. As long as you have armies, navies, prisions, 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 relation, 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 sofisticated equipment in the science labs, the arquitectural labs, all the labs... and the wars are getting worse. Explosions 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. I'm going to try to 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 every day living, and having society recognize the attributes of sustainability which are required. That's the value system orientarion needed to create a stable society. As a brief extension of this, we live in a materialistic culture, we live in 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, so on and so forth. And that fuels into this mechanism of the growth economy, of getting more and more. Holidays... people give 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 favor. 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's no making this system equitable. What we need is an entirely new system that we call a Resource Based Economy. Resource Based Economy In regard to social operation and how to create a new society, or better yet just to say, to create any society that would be sustainable and efficient, there's really empirical train of thought, if you will, on how to do that. First of all, you have to think about what the human being actually needs. We requiere resources at the bare minimum, we requiere food, water, etcétera, 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 close finite system. First thing you have to do is 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 succesive enviroment carry and maintain a population in accordance with the carrying capacity of the Earth. Not what I like or somebody else likes, or some politician 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 resources you start from, essentialy, the base level of where is everything. So, you look at the planet and 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, which we won't be 'cause it's damaging. "We have places for great wind energy here..." You get the point. We can assess the entire environment and what we currently use based in our technological facilities at that point. And we start to create a structure of analysis, maintaince, and management, and basically monitor and understand what we have. Then we can design 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 will 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? 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 intelectual 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 utilize our technical information, and then we analyze the planetary resources. Then we build from the ground up an entire infrastructure not based on the wims of any type of ideology, capitalist, socialist, fascist, whatever, what have you, communist. You do it based explicitly on the most efficient means to do it, with the most peak efficiency posible based on the technology available at the time, the intelectual resource of the time. You have peak efficiency and sustainability as your goal, you just simply weigh all parameters when you analyze anything, and then you're going to build a society that is, essentially, for lack of a better expresion, perfect. It's not perfect at all, because it's going to constantly change, but it's the best 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 / Director: 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