I'm becoming fascinated with this movement. I wanted to see if anyone here was part of it or wanted to discuss it. The way it is presented, the Zeitgeist Movement addresses the biggest flaw of Communism. Communism says: You will get that which you need in return for your labor. But it makes no promise that everyone will get everything that they want. All that is promised by Communism is that everyone will have their needs equally addressed. It is merely a different system of government and economics that is still based on forced drudgery. Which is why it is rejected, not only by the investor class, but also by workers who desire to have more than what they need in order to exist. By contrast, the Zeitgeist Movement says: You will get that which you need but not necessarily everything that you want in the form that you want it in. For example, you might have to share a train instead of driving your own car. You might have access to a shared resource center rather than having an item in your home permanently. But in return you do not have to labor, ever, at any task that you do not wish to perform. You do not have to sell a single moment of your life in return for that which sustains your life. That is why the Zeitgeist Movement may well succeed where other movements have failed. Very few people will balk at sharing luxuries if it means being free from the drudgery of forced labor. For example, I am reluctant to give up private ownership of my computer in exchange for a center I can go to in order to borrow a computer. However my reluctance vanishes entirely if I am told that in exchange for giving up my computer I will never again have to perform the detested drudge work that I am told I must do simply in order to live. The questions remaining are, is such a world possible now and if so, how exactly will we create it?
With all due respect, this concept ( at least as its presented here) is RIDICULOUS. Who is going to produce anything?
This is exactly my concern. Zeitgeists seem to be saying that it is possible to free humanity from much of our drudgery now through technology and creating a more organized, egalitarian, and efficient system. I have no quarrel with that, people labor for far more than we need to sustain ourselves now in order that some may either not labor at all or may have far more than their own labor can provide them. However I foresee not only difficulties with getting everyone to agree and cooperate in implementing such a system, I also foresee a transition period in which technology cannot completely eradicate drudgery and who will willingly perform the necessary drudge work during that transition? This goes to property and the laws surrounding it, tragedy of the commons, freeloaders, and so forth.
What you are proposing is a "laziocracy" or "atriphocracy." A society in which the people all live lives free of work or toil. Imagining - that because they've never been there - that this will result in some kind of utopian experience. What this does not anticipate is the inevitable boredom and perpetual unfulfillment that comes from having all of one's basic needs met with no effort. An idle mind is the devil's workshop and idle hands are the devil's playthings. What you don't realize now is that the society you envision is nothing more than a grass-is-greener complex. There will be problems there that will far surpass those of the timeless system of working to sustain oneself. But sometimes people have to see this for themselves in order to fully understand it. Sometimes you have to give people what they want for them to realize they don't really want it. Which is perhaps unwittingly what you are proposing to do here.
Heavens Gate Cult members also said that salvation lies behind Haley's comet. That doesn't mean they are correct.
Yeah, I always felt the Zeit's were more new-age than practical in their approach. Anyone can point out the problems in a society, but then they try to bridge it to their Utopian view of the future. I watched one of the video's and almost laughed at the end where they showed this techno garden of Eden. It's about as bad as those people who claim all our problems will be solved if we go back to religion. We already tried that one though...
This is why all collectivism is ultimately doomed to fail. It's rooted in idealism and lacks pragmatism. But you can't show this to most people because pragmatism wasn't what got them enamored with collectivism in the first place. It was that utopian dream of a perfect world. It was feelings. Not reason.
I refuse to dismiss this movement just because I see a gap from what is to what is possible. And the reason I refuse is because it does address what I consider to be the biggest problem of our current system and the state of our species in general which is tedious and forced drudge work. I approve of wanting to eliminate that problem, I agree that even if it can't be completely eliminated it could be greatly reduced for the vast majority by a system that concentrates on rational distribution rather than concentration of wealth, but I won't pretend I'm not seeing the gap, either. It isn't for me a question of abandoning the hope of a better system, it's how to get from this one to the better one.
The problem isn't that the current system forces anyone to do anything. The problem is that most people just make a lot of bonehead decisions or have poor priorities. They don't realize that their own circumstances are a direct result of the choices that they, themselves, are making. The system works fine. The people are simply broken. The reason all that wealth is concentrated in one place isn't because there is some kind of orchestrated effort to keep anyone down. It's simply because the vast majority of the populace is profoundly unenlightened and tragically uninterested in changing their perspective because they would rather be right than happy. So they can't learn anything new that would actually benefit them because doing so would first require them to let go of their current excuses and accept being wrong.
The technology to start off is probably already available if not pretty close to it. The problem would be reconditioning people away from the current monetary-based economies to resource-based economies. That's an incredibly difficult thing to do because a majority of people won't be willing to take that first step necessary to actually break down our current society without something more substantial than a nice vision of the future.
