Zeitgeist Addendum: Truth mixed with lies

There is some serious talent behind the Zeitgeist movies. They may present the current top standard of the propaganda genre so it is perhaps somewhat comforting that what it propagates is not all lies and that what it presents does have the capability to make people rethink their beliefs and positions. Even to only make people start thinking about them at all is already some progress made. That’s what I would expect from anti-establishment propaganda after all.

However, Zeitgeist is still a terribly mixed bag of a lot of truth and just enough lies to make the whole thing seem dubious for recommendation. The important thing is to do your own thinking and your own research in order to discern fact from fiction. If you are capable of doing that and resisting the emotional appeals to acceptance of the author’s message, then I can recommend Zeitgeist, especially Zeitgeist Addendum.

What I based on my previous thinking and research consider as true in Zeitgeist Addendum are the claims presented with regards to how money is created and what money in fact represents - nothing but debt. It very clearly explains the inherent flaw of the system that is its complete dependence on perpetual and growing debt. It also, in my opinion, rightly concludes that monetary system as it has been set up leads to an illusion of scarcity that people believe as real. The result is this great and growing divide between the poor and the rich.

Inflation, as probably the most dangerous hidden tax, caused by the absurd fractional reserve banking system, combined with the fraud of interest and ignorance of the masses towards what money actually is, in fact makes most people living today in this ignorance into a modern form of slaves.

They work to get money because money is seen as the only means by which to purchase what they need, but money itself is a debt that must be repaid. In effect, even if you personally do not owe anybody any money, even if you never bought anything on credit or took a loan, you having the money that you have relies on somebody else owing that same amount of money to the banks. Basically, all money in existence is owed to the banks and if it were all repaid, money would cease to exist, and if it is not repaid it means that the banks will take the supposedly physical equivalent. Therefore, you effectively end up working to create wealth on which the banks already have a claim to, through the very money you earn by creating this wealth.

The theory further proposed is that all of the previous and current political and economic systems have been used in service of the minority of powerful people at the expense of the majority. The states were effectively never at the very top of the food chain, but the private interests. A system that actually seemed to enable the richest among us to gain the most power ever was the so called “free market capitalism” that originated in USA. The key reason may be the fact that freer markets tend to be more productive and more innovative and therefore creating more wealth and the fact that it’s expansive nature and tendency to cross borders led to its extension, in some form, across all of the world: globalization.

Of course, since the US version of free market capitalism had a state and therefore americans and the rest of the people in the world legitimized some forms of violence as moral, the profit motive that drives private interests combined with this legitimization of violence as good in some cases led to private interests quite willingly abusing the governments of the world to force their interests on others.

And this is where Zeitgeist Addendum authors make a key mistake. Zeitgeist describe all of the coercive ways in which governments operate in the interest of their private overlords’ profits, yet the only thing they blame is the profit motive and not these coercive ways.

And that’s where it all breaks loose. They begin with a tirade against the profit motive and self interest, completely and blindly dismissing the fact that without mass legitimization of violence through government, big profit driven private interests would not be able to do what they blame them to do. The monetary-ism they are describing cannot exist without legitimization of violence through government. Yet instead of portraying coercion as the problem they portray self-interest as the culprit, thus yet again making the same mistake pretty much all revolutionaries before them have made, and are now basing a movement on it.

Their solution seems very attractive, but considering the above also very misguided or at best vague. They speak of lack of scarcity caused by the technology. They speak of laws not being necessary as technological solutions are found to problems that laws would face. And they almost seem voluntaryist. They seem unwilling to force people into anything and even their method of persuasion, completely apolitical in nature, seems very in line with voluntaryism - the change being in the mind - order being emergent rather than established (forced) and so on. But unfortunately, they mix these noble intentions with false collectivist concepts such as common good.

It’s almost like some form of voluntaryist communism. I can sympathize, but everything that bases itself on unreal concepts may in some way be doomed to fail.

I believe it is not the profit motive that is the main culprit. It is the legitimization of coercion. To deny self interest is to deny self. Even if all humans were on some level one with others and the universe (and in some way I can see how that can be), on another level differences emerge which allow for different entities having different properties and therefore being distinct as what they are. We recognize human species as distinct from other species based on things by which we are different from others, yet common to each other. The same way we can recognize each human individual by what differs him from other human individuals.

If it weren’t so we would not be human individuals. Therefore to use this philosophy of oneness is to mistake the forest for the trees or from another perspective, the matter and energy we are all consisted off for the distinct individuals that these same matter and energy make us into. It is to see only a part of the picture. To deny self-interest is to deny the existence of self, but for a human individual to deny the existence of self would be immediately self-contradictory, because it is the self that made that denial.

Once the Venus Project and people behind Zeitgeist realize this and modify their message and strategy to include the recognition of individual self and his or her right to choose for self and consequently realizes that it is the coercion that is fundamental to the problems observed in the world today, I can join their movement. Otherwise I can only recommend you to tread carefully. They have some good practical ideas and they may motivate you to oppose the establishment, but keep in mind that you do not have to give up your self-interest for the vision of the world similar to the one they propose, or better, to become true.

You only need to reject coercion as a moral thing, in all instances in which it occurs.

Tags: liberty, worldchanging