The Zeitgeist Movement - unitesociety.com article

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The Zeitgeist Movement
Without money, we'd all be rich

To anyone thinking outside of the tunnel-vision of just themselves and their own survival, the atmosphere of change is electric. We've never in the history of our lives seen such a peak of global dissent and such an outpouring of citizenry coming together - a reaction against the growing elephant in the room: the inequality and unfairness of our social system.

Through the unprecedented display of the Occupy Movement, members of society from the whole demographic spread have created an open forum throughout the media and the streets of the whole globe, to educate each other as to how the world works and to discuss what to do about it. Factoring in the preceding 'Arab spring' protests adds up to a viral discontent with society that numbers a massive amount of people, and to anyone paying attention to the outcome of these conversations it's obvious that too many people now know too much about the workings of the system for things to ever be the same as before.

Before and during the above-mentioned happenings a phenomenon galvanic in it's creation, but organic in its manifestation, has been learning ravenously from and charitably feeding the global conversation: The Zeitgeist Movement. Initiated by online documentaries that collectively exceeded 150 million views before breaking the limits of online counting, these films analyse society's problems at large with a view to identifying the root cause of the financial collapse, ecological degradation, unemployment and energy crises, culminating in the release of Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, an extraordinarily focused and science-minded presentation whose end scene practically prophesied Occupy before it happened, short of us all throwing our money back at the banks.

The tangible solution The Zeitgeist Movement proposes is to focus on the fact that we have the technical capabilities to solve the biggest problems in the world, and therefore all that's stopping such action is adherence to the monetary-market system, which, is incapable of providing equality, due to it's reliance on human competition and the preservation of differential advantage that allows more opportunity for some than than others - providing the grounds for criminal behaviour. The monetary-market system itself is the root cause of social inequality, and until we encourage the move to a co-operative social model, via educating each other to show that contribution to society is the real measure of life success (regardless of whether it comes from paid employment or not) and decide to establish a resource-based economic model where everyone's needs are provided for free, how will we ever see an end to the downward spiral of countless examples of unacceptable suffering spewed out by a social system that doesn't work for the majority?

It's an inspired push to unite the world and unite our species into a state of global co-operation, utilising technology in an open-source collaborative manner to create an economy of abundance of access to the things we need, rather than fighting with each other to survive in a state of manufactured scarcity where optimal efficiency is the enemy of profit, forcing us to produce goods and services in a cycle for the sake of it, as we get closer to the year 2030 when we'll need two Earths to handle our over-consumption.

The movement holds that social decisions should be made using the unbiased approach of the scientific method rather than traditional political whim, in a social model where people contribute to society based upon their technical and learned capacity to do so. Such an open-source, free education, non-monetary approach liberates human potential for individuals to orient their lives around well-being and social progress rather than diehard financial survival, which, it could be argued, has become a religion in itself. The scientific evidence of the examples of communities like Gaviotas in Columbia, the island of Anuta, the Kibbutzhim in Israel and the Amish show that when communities work with each other to provide each others' needs, their behaviour doesn't in any way match the murderous extremes seen in environments of scarcity. The only sustainable economic model that can work must be oriented around the hard physical resources available on our planet, rather than what could be called a resource-exploitation economy which we have now, or as author and philosophy professor John McMurtry calls it, an "anti-economy". The amount of waste produced by our inefficient management of Earth's resources in the name of globalisation, rather than localised production in a steady-state economic format, will not be addressed if profit can't be made doing so. The monetary system fundamentally acts as a barrier to solving social problems; In a resource-based economy, money is outdated and unnecessary.

The work of author/journalist Dan Pink, popularised in his TED Talk, 'Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us', reports that scientific study shows "over and over and over again" that work gets done less effectively if done for money. Only if a job is purely mechanical will it be performed better for financial reward, which is grounds for automating such work to free humans from drudgery. In Dan Pink's words about his book Drive, 'Carrots & Sticks are so Last Century', Drive it says, "For 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery and purpose." Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff also made waves in the blogosphere with an article titled 'Are Jobs Obsolete?'

Such change requires a critical mass who wants it. We're on the way to that, but it's hard to say how far down the road we are. To reach this, we need to replace speculation about what will happen with our own contributions toward the goal. We're living dangerously out of line with nature and we have a natural desire to maximise happiness, which requires interaction with other people. We can't be happy on our own.

One billion people are starving, which is, technically, an obselete problem; We have the technology and resources to grow the food. All most people are asking for is to be able to survive. Why should that be turned into a game where we have to earn our right to live? We clearly have the ability to come together and co-operate to take care of each other's needs, and through creativity, our wants as well. The Zeitgeist Movement isn't anti-anyone, it's pro-everyone. We recognise every person is merely a product of their conditioning and we advocate this direction for the benefit of the unemployed, common workers, police, soldiers, politicians, bankers and oligarchs alike in the present. If we can all recognise our enormous individual creative potentials to contribute to and shape our world, whether through ideas or technical demonstration, we can exceed survival and grant an environment in which to thrive, in line with biology and neurology professor Robert Sapolsky's prediction of human convergence being a natural scientific tendency.

Want to know more?
The Zeitgeist movies are available to view for free at thezeitgeistmovement.com and zeitgeistmovie.com.