zeitgeist

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any thoughts on the movement here's a link
http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

Not really I do not have a opinion on the movement.

I think Peter Jospeh did the movement an enormous disservice with the first of the films. He presented patently absurd claims about the origins of Christianity that are predicated, in part, on an English homophone, he used shoddy research and presentation to align himself with 9/11 truthers and he presented specious and unfounded claims about a movement toward "one world government." In doing so, he invited rational people to be diverted by the ridiculousness of his claims, rather than seeing the underlying message. Much of what they presented in that film was sensational, and factually wrong, and that serves to focus attention on their inaccuracy, rather than where it should be, on the clandestine exercise of power.

We should be properly upset when the exercise of government power is bought up through the corruption of the political process. We should be properly upset when private corporations, accountable to no one but their own officers, are given authority to control vast amounts of power. We should be properly upset that the last 5 decades of growth have been fuelled on the back of consumer spending facilitated by credit.

To the extent that the Zeitgeist movement has us question how our society works, and who is in charge of it, I am perfectly content to see it play an important, critical role. But their first volley was so feeble that I have deliberately avoided Peter Joseph's second and third films. For all I know they might have returned to something reasonably resembling sanity--but after the first one, why should I bother to look?

it's a rather ridiculous movement. it seems to believe that the world will suddenly become some sort of technological utopia overnight, yet with apparently no strategy whatsover in place as to HOW it will get there.

i am also a tad sceptical about being governed by benevolent engineers and computers.

From what I've read, Peter Joseph originally made the first film for some art project (he was originally an artist/musician). But after people took it seriously, he embraced his status as a cult guru. I believe the same thing happened to Ayn Rand.

the zeitgeist movement is essentially a cult.

I completely concur, and I would go so far as to say that the Zeitgeisters also draw undue derision upon the more rational subset of the left wing, which often gets lumped in with them by more conservative critics. My personal opinion of them is that they (and the 9/11 truthers) are to the left what the birthers and deathers and Birch Society have become to the right-- the paranoid conspiracy-theorist fringe that (almost) no one takes seriously, and which gives opponents of the entire wing an easy target.

I visited the local iteration of the Occupy protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery on the weekend it started up, just to see what it was all about. I wasn't a participant so much as a bystander on the sidelines. As I watched the crowd of protesters conduct their business at their general assembly, I was struck by how orderly and levelheaded they seemed to be. There were, of course, some exceptions, but for the most part, I felt like the topics being discussed-- growing corporate control of the political system, environmental protection, First Nations' rights-- were things that needed to be addressed, and they were being addressed diplomatically. And then, right in the middle of it, I realized there was a Zeitgeist booth, which (for me, at least) seemed to completely shatter the atmosphere of rational discourse. I recognize Vancouver in particular has more than its fair share of left wing extremists, and by now I'm pretty much used to encountering them even if their liberalism is far more radical than my own-- but even here, I still think it scares off some of the more moderate or conservative people, and discourages them from talking over issues that would benefit greatly from an expanded discourse.

You can't teach compassion to a machine.

There's no way you can have a society where no one person is in power, and abusing that power to meet their own personal agenda. The concept of a utopia as stated by Peter Joseph is a pipe dream.

Ayn Rand started out as a Hollywood script writer and a novelist. She ended up being a den mother to a lot of weirdos. She essentially permitted a cult to form around her ideas, some of which are pretty good.

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 24 Oct 2011, 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Then we become slaves to the machine, computers are good example of this. I can only smile as I picture the chaos that would follow when machinery and technology fails.

i don't even know why they've gained this reputation as representing left wing ideas. their brave new world technocratic idealism is proto-fascist.

this seems like a bit of an extreme statement.

I gather my view just from looking at folks like Henry VIII, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, George Bush, Richard Nixion, Oral Roberts, Jim Jones, Mao Zedong, and Kim Jong-il. Thats just the tip the iceberg.

but wouldn't this sort of logic represent confirmation bias?

Technically, they're totalitarian rather than fascist. Fascism puts a lot of emphasis on national or ethnic identity, whereas the Zeitgeist movement tries to paint itself as a universalist ideology. Doesn't matter, though. Left wing totalitarianism is still totalitarianism.