I found this article on the main ZM global forums. "Published in Bass Musician Magazine".
An Introduction to The Zeitgeist Movement:The term "Zeitgeist" is typically defined as "The general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era." The term "Movement" very simply implies motion and change. Therefore, The Zeitgeist Movement is essentially an organization which advocates change in the dominant intellectual, moral and cultural climate of the time, specifically to values and practices which would better serve the well being of the whole of humanity, regardless of race, religion, creed, or any other form of contrived social status.
The Zeitgeist Movement, in function, exists as a partnership and communicative representative of an organization called The Venus Project. The Venus Project has been working for decades to establish the technical methods and educational imperatives which can transition society away from its current cycles of war, perpetual poverty and pervasive corruption, into an improved social design based on environmental alignment, practicality, efficiency, resource management, and most critically, a heightened standard of living, personal freedom and well being for not one nation or class... but for the entire human family, not one person excluded.
In the world today, with one billion people in a perpetual state of starvation, seemingly unbreakable cycles of wars and conflict across many borders, growing environmental problems, along with the ever growing wealth gap and social fragmentation, many conscious people and social organizations are doing what they can to try and bring our species back into some form of balance. Sadly, if you examine the pace of change and improvement at hand, one is left rather disheartened by the persistence of the atrocities and inequality still dominant in the world today. Why is this?
Well, it appears that most today respond to social issues in a way that does not often address the root source of problems in any true form. Instead they engage in what could be called social "patchwork". Just as a person might put a patch over a hole to temporarily fix it, society today constantly works to subdue the "effects" of a particular problem and not address the actual "cause". For example, police and prisons are, indeed, "patches". They do nothing to address the reasons behind so called criminal acts. When a person robs a store owner at gun point, he is never reviewed upon his arrest as to the environmental conditions which have led him to such an act. Rather, he is locked away and superstitiously deemed "bad"... as though words like "good" and "bad" ever had a universal operational meaning when it comes to human behavior.
The new sociological understanding is that the true solution to alleviating socially offensive acts does not reside in apprehension and punishment, but rather in finding and eliminating the reason(s) for the motivation to begin with. Human beings have reasons for their actions and those reasons are derived from a complex array of environmental influences.
Therefore, the goal of true social reformation is to reduce any and all influences, or pressures, that might lead a person or group to offensive acts. This is the key and, sadly, little progress has been made in this area, for when everything is objectively broken down, we find that the central problem for most of the world's woes has to do with something very inconvenient to consider - the social system at large. In simplistic terms, it is our monetary based, scarcity driven social system that is generating the destructive practices, which are plaguing our world.
All social systems, regardless of political philosophy, religious beliefs or social customs, ultimately depend upon natural resources as the initial first step towards social functionality. Concurrently, society itself is a "culture machine". In other words, it is a natural consequence of a social order for the supporting values integral to the functioning of that order to maintain dominance, regardless of the true benefit of those values. In other words, the society "reaps what it sows". If your society's foundation inherently supports and rewards self-interest based gain, elitism, greed and dishonestly, then no one should ever be surprised when certain members of society continuously fall into the extremity of murder, financial corruption, resource exploitation or narrow selfish gain. In other words, society is not only a product of the sum of its member's values- paradoxically; it is also a generator of them.
Regardless, when it comes to cultural influence, nothing can hold a candle to the vast psychological implications that have developed due to the system of monetary finance and competitive trade. Money, contrary to the attitudes of most of the world's population today, is not a natural resource, nor does it represent resources. In fact, by all standards of logic, money is only functionally relevant in a society when certain natural resources are scarce and must be rationed, and thus a system has emerged where people are given an arbitrary value for their labor, in exchange for servitude, which can thus be used as a medium of exchange for those scarce resources.Sadly, the culture is now fully indoctrinated into this artificial frame of reference and, like the sun rising, most cannot even consider another possibility for social functionality. In fact, some have even redefined the relevance of money itself, by being conditioned to think that money represents "choice." That money, somehow, has something to do with democracy and the greatest illusion...that money is a tool of liberty. The reality is that the opposite runs true: Money is a tool of social control, not liberty. You are only as free as your purchasing power will allow you to be.
While money has, indeed, served a positive role overall in the course of our social evolution, adaptation and change and hence improvement is unstoppable. The fact is, most of the original problems, which required the development of the economic system we see today, are no longer pressing, due to the dramatic advancement of science and technology. We now have the means to move into a new paradigm, one where the inherent negative byproducts of our current social establishment- perpetual war/ poverty / human exploitation- environmental destruction no longer requires tolerance. What is advocated here is merely the next step in our social evolution as dictated not by a person or group's opinion, but by statistics, trends, basic inference and extrapolation, as deduced through the methods of Science.
The ultimate materialization of these ideas comes in the form of a new social design updated to modern day knowledge. This design could be termed a "Resource Based Economy".
In the words of Jaqcue Fresco, the founder of The Venus Project:
"We call for a straightforward redesign of our culture, in which the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable, but also as totally unacceptable. Anything less simply results in a continuation of the same catalog of problems inherent in the present system." - Jacque Fresco
In summary, a Resource-Based Economy utilizes existing resources rather than commerce. All goods and services are available without the use of currency, credit, barter or any form of debt or servitude. The aim of this new social design is to free humanity from the repetitive, mundane and arbitrary occupational roles which hold no true relevance for social development, while also encouraging a new incentive system that is focused on self fulfillment, education, social awareness and creativity, as opposed to the contrived, shallow, self-centered, corruption generating goals of wealth, property and power, which are dominant today.
The enabling foundation of this concept is the realization that through the intelligent management of the earth's resources, along with the liberal application of modern technology and science, we have the ability to create a near global abundance on this planet and thus escape the detrimental consequences generated by the real and artificial scarcity and waste which is still dominant today. This reality can provably create a high quality of life for the entire world population, many times over if we apply a systems approach to the world's methods. [For more information on this issue in detail, please see our Orientation PDF, downloadable at http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com
In fact, it really isn't the technical understandings and implementation of the physical attributes that comprise a Resource Based Economy, which is the problem. It is the outdated cultural values, erroneous identifications and vast ignorance of the conditioned culture, which is the most difficult aspect to consider.
And this is where The Zeitgeist Movement comes in. We are here to spread statistical information and value identifications about this direction, in the hope of bringing people into an awareness of the incredibly positive possibilities the future can hold. Once these understandings are fully realized, I think most people will never be able to look at the world in the same way again and the problems we find as commonplace today will become simply unacceptable, motivating change.In summary, there are countless well-intentioned people and activist organizations yelling at the top of their lungs about the rampant problems and injustices in our world... yet, as you tend to find, very few actually offer any real solutions. Those that do offer solutions, however, almost universally tend to frame those ideas within the preset guidelines of the preexisting social establishment. Very little regard is given to the structural or methodical roots of our system. The Venus Project and hence the Zeitgeist Movement is different. Our fundamental focus is finding the foundational sources of our social problems and working from that lowest common denominator to create solutions. And when it comes to social corruption, poverty, environmental disregard, human exploitation and most personal and social turmoil in the world today, the grand realization is that most of these problems are not the result of a particular company, some nefarious elite group, or destructive legislation. Those are merely more symptoms of the foundational sources. Human behavior is largely created and reinforced by the social patterns required for survival, as necessitated by the social system of that period in time. We are products of our society. And the fact of the matter is that it is the very foundation of our socio-economic system and hence our environmental condition, which has created the sick cultural climate you see around you. Our current system is based almost exclusively upon human exploitation, resource abuse and redundant waste. It is what simply what our system does.
We can spend the rest of existences stomping on the ants that mysteriously wander out from under neither the refrigerator...setting traps... or "laws"... or we can get rid of the spoiled food behind it that is causing the infestation to begin with.
http://www.facebook.com/TZMAU
Good to see the word getting out.
