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  • October 21st, 2009:

  • I send an email to Peter Joseph requesting an on-camera interview...

  • ...No Response

  • November 3rd, 2009:

  • I send another email to Peter Joseph...

  • Response!

  • Response! (November 10th)

  • "Charles, I am very busy at this time... I will be in and out of town this month.

  • Try me in early Dec. thx, Peter"

  • December 1st, 2009:

  • December 1st, 2009: I send another email to Peter Joseph requesting the interview...

  • ...(waiting)

  • December 5th: "...fine- I'll give you 2 hrs. I'm in Bushwick..." P

  • Who is Peter Joseph?

  • A Mini-Doc by Charles Robinson

  • www.whoispeterjoseph.com

  • Background

  • My name is Peter Joseph. I live in Brooklyn, New York. I'm 31 years old.

  • I am an independant film maker and I suppose the de facto founder of an organisation called;

  • "The Zeitgeist Movement"

  • As far as my background, I was born to what I consider to be a middle class family.

  • My father was a... is now a retired postal employee,

  • and my mother is a retired Child Protective Services employee.

  • In fact, a lot of my social dispositions on society I think might come from

  • the experiences I had listening to the stories coming from my mother.

  • I started getting interested in music I think at about eight or nine.

  • I seemed to fall into a love of percussion and drums and rhythm.

  • I was very lucky to be accepted to a school in North Carolina,

  • an art school in a university,

  • which allowed me to grow up in a very different upbringing

  • than I think most people grow up into

  • in a rural town in a place in the south such as North Carolina.

  • And I was exposed to a lot of different cultures, a lot of different interests,

  • a lot of things that you wouldn't find in a typical highschool, say, in the south.

  • I was exposed to a large variety of people

  • and artistic and creative people, specifically,

  • which I think imprinted on me, so to speak,

  • and I continue those trends today.

  • Music and percussion are coupled straight into my identity.

  • People say to me: "Well, you know, you work with this social organisation,

  • but yet, you're just a musician". You know, "just a musician".

  • There is the credentialism tendency that comes up a lot

  • with anyone that talks about the issues that we talk about in the movement

  • or that have been talked about in the films.

  • And, we can talk about that a little bit later as well.

  • But, what I'd like to say is that, I look at music now as a form of meditation.

  • It's something that's an outlet, it maintains my balance.

  • So I continue to practice in a very personal sense,

  • it's not that I go out and perform that much anymore,

  • I don't have time to anymore.

  • After my second year of college, I dropped out

  • realizing that the debt that I was accruing was absolutely not worth it.

  • Even then I knew there was something wrong with going to school,

  • getting a ridiculous amount of debt, $80 to $100,000

  • and then being thrown into the work force,

  • automatically in a position of indentured servitude, if you will.

  • Automatically having to give yourself to the system because you're already in so much debt.

  • My original interest was to be a solo classical marimbist,

  • a laughable concept when I think about it now,

  • but we all have our bouts of naivety as we grow.

  • Once music became difficult for me to pursue as a career choice,

  • I started to get into video and editing, and I got a job in New York,

  • many jobs in New York, doing various freelance video editing,

  • shooting, whatever related to video work, film work.

  • You have to do whatever pays you in this society,

  • and I couldn't really find the niche to make money in music so, I ended up in advertising.

  • I always had a problem with people telling me what to do in the labor force,

  • and I did not like advertising, obviously.

  • I did not like the nonsensical manipulation of peoples' perceptions so corporations can sell their crap.

  • So I began to pursue work in the financial arena.

  • I began to do day trading, pattern training.

  • I was moderately succesful. I never had a big capital base, which you really do have to have.

  • I pulled some change out of the market,

  • and I continued to do it on and off for many, many years.

  • I don't do it anymore because I despise the market system.

  • The way I justified this was it was the only job I could come up with,

  • that didn't have a boss or a client, so it represented freedom to me.

  • Granted, trading the stock market has absolutely no social relevance,

  • it contributes nothing to society.

  • You could blow up Wall Street tomorrow and it wouldn't make a damn difference to anything

  • in regard to the natural order of affairs on this planet.

  • So at that stage in my life, I just wanted a way out.

  • I wanted to not have to deal with being a slave to the corporate system anymore.

  • So anyway, that's when I started first investigating economics,

  • and we can... I'm sure you have other questions about that, so I'll stop there.

  • Zeitgeist began as a public performance,

  • an attempt at a vaudevillian concept.

  • What I did was I set up two screens,

  • and I had a huge percussion setup in the middle where I performed,

  • with the videos that were on the two screens.

  • Some of the equipment you see here was used.

  • I've actually sold off most of my equipment.

  • But regardless... I think I have some photographs I can give you.

  • There's only a few that actually were captured, believe it or not, at the original event.

  • I wish I had documented the original event,

  • because people keep asking me about it.

  • But never the less, it started off as a creative work,

  • a variation on an early vaudevillian concept.

  • Film and live music. Live performance.

  • And once it was over, you know there was a...

  • it was a free event. I did it for six nights, I believe.

  • And people came, I advertised it like crazy.

  • I spent thousands and thousands of dollars.

  • I did it mainly because I had been stuck in the corporate reality,

  • and I just wanted to do something for myself to make myself feel better

  • about a world that's going to shit, essentially.

  • A world that's being dominated by finance, a world that's sick and distorted,

  • through religious processes, financial oligarchs.

  • It was just an expression, it was in fact a very angry, but solemn expression.

  • I never expected it to turn out to be what it was, at all.

  • After it was over, I just found myself in a little bit more debt.

  • And I took the work which, by the way, I had no clearance for,

  • I didn't clear any of the aspects with it.

  • But, since the internet is what it is, tossed it up online to see what would happen.

  • Maybe some people would like it, they'd download it, I'd get some feedback.

  • Whatever.

  • What happened completely blew my mind.

  • I posted it on one website, and from there, a chain reaction occured, and I...

  • It's pretty much all history from that point on, I couldn't even tell you how it unfolded.

  • All I know is that,

  • I got wind of the fact that it was getting a tremendous amount of hits,

  • and talked about a lot, so I built a website for it:

  • www.zeitgeistmovie.com

  • And I just had it up there for free.Then I realized that people wanted it on DVD.

  • Like ok, I guess I should try to do that.

  • So I was forced into a very difficult position of getting clearance from all the participants involved,

  • which was very difficult, by the way because,

  • everyone saw dollar-signs,

  • because it's an internet film that's getting millions of views.

  • So I had to pay out a lot of money to a set number of people to get it going.

  • But there were also people that were just happy to see this information get out there,

  • and didn't have any problems with me doing

  • what I call a "non-commercial distribution".

  • A $5 DVD, for it to be released, in some capacity.

  • From there I got an email from an organization called the Artivist Film Festival.

  • And, to my amazement, they wanted to show the film in their festival,

  • which was a packed audience, sold out audience.

  • At this stage it was still utterly bewildering to me.

  • This was the same organization of course that showed Zeitgeist: Addendum the next year.

  • "In a world where media is often used to keep us a little dumbed down

  • more than anything else, as far as my opinion is concerned."

  • (Applause)

  • I've often said, art without conscience is meaningless,

  • and I think action without conscience is futile.

  • So, I think it's so great to have a festival that represents these types of ideas.

  • As far as the film itself,

  • I guess all I can really say is that the whole point of the film

  • is for people to start looking at the very fundamental root causes

  • of all of these problems that we see in society.

  • So, that's a general run down of what happened.

  • The Zeitgeist Movement.

  • The Zeitgeist movement was a very difficult decision for me.

  • I could have just made Zeitgeist: Addendum like other socially conscious film makers do

  • in the sense that I could have just said: "Oh, well here's a bunch of stuff,

  • here's a bunch of problems. Hey, here are some possible solutions.

  • Take what you will with it, and just roll with it and see what happens."

  • I really was on the fence about putting at the very end;

  • "Join the movement www.thezeitgeistmovement.com"

  • And 6) Join the movement.

  • Go to thezeitgeistmovement.com and help us create

  • the largest mass movement for social change the world has ever seen.

  • I knew that the moment that it became something more than just a film phenomenon,

  • that my life would likely change dramatically, which it has.

  • Zeitgeist: Addendum was sparked out of people emailing me saying,

  • "Well, what do we do about all of these cultural problems?

  • What do we do about a corrupt banking system?

  • What do we do about people that are locked into establishment social programs, if you will?"

  • I consider the trains of thought and mind to be a program.

  • I consider society itself to be a program that's running.

  • And the programing locks people into a specific frame of reference.

  • How do we deal with these issues?

  • How do we do, what do we do?

  • And Zeitgeist: Addendum was an attempt at answering that question.

  • After Zeitgeist 1 was released, it got into the hands of Jacque and Roxanne.

  • And after reading Jacques book, which they sent me,

  • I realized that this was really important information.

  • I realized that, even I was backwards on a lot of issues that needed to be corrected.

  • And in order to get society in line,

  • we have to think about the fundamental problems.

  • This was something that I was attempting to do in part, I had a notion of,

  • but it wasn't until I met Jacque Fresco that the lense became focused.

  • It was like all these things that I sort of had an inkling of,

  • Jacque's experience, life experience, what he had talked about for so long,

  • just focused me in the right direction, as far as I'm concerned.

  • So I made a whole section with him in Zeitgeist: Addendum,

  • and that's how it took off.

  • ATTACKS

  • Anyone that chooses to challenge establishment orthodoxy,

  • traditional world views, not to mention the system that we live in,

  • sets themself up for vehement attacks.

  • I'm well aware of this.

  • If you look back at the history of anyone that has chosen to challenge the establishment,

  • it's a very dark history.

  • There are a great number of people out there that know that something is wrong.

  • But, they do not understand the source of that wrongness,

  • because they are in the box of indoctrination.

  • Socrates. Socrates never speculated on the slavery that was existing during his time.

  • That was normality to him.

  • This goes with every type of political philosopher that's ever existed,

  • whether it's Carl Marx, whether it's Plato.

  • They're all locked into an established paradigm,

  • and their thought processes can only go so far.

  • And this includes, probably, myself.

  • People are locked into a box.

  • They see the box around them,

  • they see the leaks and the holes and the cracks and they go up to the cracks

  • and they try to fix them; they try to patch the holes.

  • But they don't stop to think that maybe there's something wrong with the box, itself.

  • Maybe the integrity of the box that they exist in is inherently invalid, it's inherently void.

  • The economic system that we live in is a parasitic paradigm,

  • that is only going to lead to self-destruction.

  • But people don't see that.

  • So if you attack the economic system for what it actually is, everyones' feathers go up.

  • Everyone says: "Well, wait a minute. This is the world we all live.

  • We live in a profit-based, labor-for-income world, cyclical consumption.

  • This is what we're used to.

  • We understand we have division of classes."

  • You know, they throw in human nature,

  • they throw in everything that will try to make it seem like it's apart of the natural order of reality

  • when, in fact, it's not.

  • If I was to summarize the attacks that typically happen towards myself and the people I work with,

  • the first one would be credentialism.

  • Credentialism is an annotation for the priesthood of those in the know.

  • Now, bear in mind, this is a gradient of relevance.

  • Obviously, I'm not going to go to a doctor, if I can help it,

  • that has absolutely no credentials in the surgery that I might need performed.

  • They require instruction and experience to do so.

  • But when it comes to the other side of the spectrum.

  • When it comes to the simple analysis of information.

  • When it comes to the analysis of history.

  • When it comes to economics, because it is a contrived system,

  • and has no basis in anything else in general operations.

  • It's not based on laws of physics;

  • it's not based on any aspect of scientific law that has any relationship to planetary operation.

  • Then, suddenly, it becomes very relevant to speculate as to what these things actually mean to society.

  • It's a double-edged sword when you get a Masters, Bachelors, PhD in a particular medium

  • because think about what you're actually doing.

  • You're going through a curriculum that's been completely established for you

  • by the institutions that have existed prior.

  • When it comes to social things

  • that have a great deal of subjective variance,

  • you lose objectivity, in that sense.

  • Because you're literally indoctrinated into the beliefs that are presented.

  • To get a degree in Economics, which is probably the most wasteful thing you can possibly do,

  • is to be completely indoctrinated into the idea

  • that what you're studying is actually a science that actually has some type of relevance to anything.

  • So, when I get emails from PhDs in Economics

  • that try to debunk the aspects that we talk about,

  • it becomes quite clear to me, that the reason they have such an objection is really an emotional one.

  • It isn't an objective aspect.

  • They have culminated an identity to themselves, because of their belief-system.

  • And for me to take that away from them,

  • to debunk their ideas about economics, is to take away their identity.

  • It's easy to point out, that some of the greatest minds that have contributed

  • some of the most powerful inventions to our world,

  • have come from non-establishment institutions,

  • have worked on their own, they've done their own studies,

  • they've guided their own direction of information.

  • They didn't just sit in a classroom and take in the rote information,

  • do the step by step processes as oriented by the establishment,

  • and then grab their diploma and degree and;

  • "Hey, now I'm an expert in a given field."

  • The most tremendous minds, the most tremendous contributions,

  • comes from those, from those that are outside of the box.

  • I don't even need to give examples of that to make that known.

  • So, back to my point,

  • when it comes to social theory, if you will, credentialism, I give zero weight to.

  • Academia is a detriment to advancing the social progress.

  • Another form of attack simply comes from the cultural nuance,

  • comes from the social programming.

  • What we call the "self-appointed guardians of the status quo."

  • People that are suffering in the system just like anyone else,

  • but their social identification is so powerful, they are so locked into the box,

  • that they find it infuriating to think that what they're living is actually wrong, paradoxically.

  • I get this all the time from people.

  • The self-appointed guardians of the status quo

  • are birthed in religion, birthed in economics,

  • birthed in the illusion of democracy that we see today across the world.

  • Birthed in the various "isms" that are entirely pointless:

  • Capitalism, Communism, Facism, Socialism.

  • You have the priesthood of the monetary system, the capitalists if you will,

  • you can give it that rhetoric, I don't use that word, it's meaningless.

  • The monetaryism is the word I use.

  • The pretense for acquisition of money is based on differential advantage,

  • which is based on dishonesty. Period.

  • Then you have the priesthood of religious concepts, religious identification,

  • and the idea that somehow we know everything already, and there's a God,

  • and he's looking down on us, controlling everything.

  • I won't even go into the paradoxes that come from that extremely narrow notion.

  • So, in other words, the biggest crutch to the evolution of human thought,

  • is breaking your own indoctrination.

  • It's very, very difficult to overcome emotional elements that have become so ingrained in you,

  • that you have an immediate reaction, an immediate suffering and pain when anything interferes with that.

  • It's a very, very complex problem.

  • But I'll say it again: We have to learn how to break...

  • excuse me, we have to learn how to identify and break our own indoctrination,

  • if we expect to move forward at all, as a civilization.

  • My name was put forward because I wanted to protect my friends and family from the association.

  • People say to me: "Well, you should come out with everything. If you're gonna talk about any of this stuff,

  • then you've got to be prepared to deal with all of this and that, that you've set up for yourself."

  • I had an email that said that to me,

  • criticizing me for not releasing my last name.

  • And, I thought to myself, you know what? What they're actually saying, anyone who actually says that,

  • is actually saying that Martin Luther King deserved to die,

  • or that Gandhi deserved to die,

  • for making themselves known.

  • I've gotten many death threaths from the religious community.

  • We live in a very fucked up, sick culture.

  • We really do. Society is mentally ill.

  • To be normal is to be messed up in this culture.

  • So, my name "Peter Joseph". You know...

  • At what point does my identity become absolutely transparent?

  • Should I give people my social security number?

  • Should I give them my tax returns?

  • And just to throw it in there,

  • there are plenty of people throughout history that have gone by their first and middle name,

  • excluding their last name from their general communication and walks in their society.

  • Just like people often use their middle name and their last name.

  • Those that have something against me for the things that I talk about,

  • want to find anything they can to try and to make me look like I'm hiding something,

  • or I have ulterior motives. And I expect that.

  • But, you know, whatever. It doesn't mean anything to me.

  • I go by Peter Joseph. People can call me whatever the hell they want to call me.

  • I'm constantly interacting, putting myself out there. I have nothing to hide.

  • And even if someone finds out my real identity, where I live,

  • who my parents are, who everyone and my friends are,

  • it's not gonna change a damn thing.

  • The unfortunate reality is, that I am given a controversial title,

  • and people do have a lot of problems with me, of a more traditional-minded upbringing,

  • and I don't like to see other people suffer because of what I do.

  • But most of my friends and family are very much aware and they accept this.

  • So, this is something that I just deal with.

  • Anyone who thinks that I do what I do for notoriety reasons or monetary reasons,

  • or anything associated with self-interest,

  • has a lot to learn.

  • First of all, I operate the movement site and the movement itself on a deficit.

  • I do pay people to run and program things.

  • I have a lot of volunteers, which I'm extremely indebted to.

  • But to get things done quickly, very often, I have to get people that work in the industries to do things.

  • I sell a t-shirt to do that.

  • It's the only thing that I sell that is designated for the movement.

  • As far as the DVD sales,

  • if people can't respect the fact that I charge $5 for DVD's that could be charged $20 for,

  • that I did spend a great deal of money to make those films.

  • The DVD sale's obviously are part of my income.

  • I denote that they are not for profit,

  • meaning that the money does go back into other projects, which it has.

  • I've had to shut down bulk selling, in fact, because people were buying the discs from me in bulk

  • at about $2 a piece and re-selling them for $20 on the Internet.

  • It's very frustrating.

  • I've hurt myself a lot financially, because of all of this.

  • The double standard is quite fascinating to me.

  • You have all these social organizations that take in millions of dollars of money for donations.

  • They sell tons of crap.

  • And suddenly we get attacked because we sell anything,

  • because of our interest to in fact remove the monetary paradigm, entirely.

  • I'm sorry. We have to survive to do something.

  • So, just to make it clear:

  • the Zeitgeist Movement is predicated on making information free.

  • I put all of my films up for free. I allow downloads of them, for free.

  • Anyone wants to help me out by buying a $5 DVD,

  • I could charge $20 for easily commercially, that helps.

  • But I don't push it.

  • I will continue to work in advertising, or anything else I have to do

  • to keep things going while maintaining the integrity of the movement itself,

  • by walking the line of non-profitability.

  • The only time that we'll ever ask for donations as the movement,

  • is when we have a big project that needs to move forward.

  • We have no projects like that now.

  • We're in a period of, we're in a period of collecting people

  • and streamlining functionality.

  • ECONOMICS

  • If you read economics,

  • they present it as though it's a science.

  • I've read through much of the curriculum

  • of what bachelor's and master's degree Harvard University students

  • would read for their degrees in economics.

  • Economics is not a science.

  • It's an invention. It's a contrivance.

  • It's funny, you look at economics books

  • and they have graphs and charts and they make complex novel equations.

  • It's all contrived.

  • It doesn't have any relationship to the natural order of things.

  • It is based upon and folkway of orienting production and distribution,

  • and we've established this massive structure that makes it seem valid.

  • There's really nothing anyone needs to know about economics, than the fact that

  • the entire global economic system is based upon people constantly consuming,

  • regardless of the state of affairs in natural orders of energy,

  • planetary materials and anything else.

  • It is blind, narrow consumption with absolutely no regard for the environment.

  • SCIENCE

  • We have to recognize that we're all scientists.

  • And we all have to start thinking about things in a scientific manner,

  • which most of us do to a certain extent.

  • Even the most religiously-minded individuals,

  • use science all the time when they evaluate buying a car,

  • when they evaluate their general life.

  • They use these things constantly. We all do. We're all scientists.

  • That is the discovery, the epiphany that needs to come out.

  • Science is not a cold, heartless thing.

  • It is what has given us everything that comprises our well-being.

  • Now, you can argue philosophy,

  • as far as I'm concerned,

  • any form of philosophy, any form of notions of morality,

  • are absolutely meaningless unless they are sprouted from the natural world using

  • what I would consider to be, analysis known as the scientific method.

  • I am nothing but bored to tears by philosophical dispositions and verbal hobbies,

  • that do absolutely nothing.

  • Religion is a verbal hobby.

  • RELIGION

  • One of the age old scams of the establishment

  • is to hand religion to the populous,

  • so they feel like there's something positive waiting for them

  • as they suffer because of this perpetual, constant, oligarchical evolution

  • that has emerged since, I believe, the hunter-gatherer society.

  • When we culminated agriculture, we altered everything.

  • We created social stratification; we began to control the environment.

  • Before the Neolithic Revolution, it's been well documented by anthropologists

  • that there was a natural balance to the planet.

  • Population was in balance because we could only do what the Earth provided for us naturally.

  • Once we started to control the planet through agriculture, and now through many different means,

  • we began to create dis- imbalance; we began to create uneven supplies.

  • We began to generate scarcity, deliberately,

  • for the sake of self-preservation and profit.

  • So, as society became more and more imbalanced,

  • as the concept of property emerged.

  • As the great pirates started to travel the oceans,

  • bringing back goods to different continents, to different kingdoms, creating power structures of resources,

  • certain tools were used to control humanity to keep those

  • that were not "deserving the right of life" or "deserving the fruits"...

  • To keep the stratification going, they were given various tools to subdue them.

  • Religion is one of the age old tools to subdue the masses.

  • Now by the way, I'm not saying that's where the origin of religion came from.

  • That's a whole different subject if you want to talk about it,

  • because it was covered in the first part of my film.

  • I'm simply talking about the political usage of religion which carries on to this day.

  • How many times do you hear the president of the United States say:

  • "God bless America"?

  • What an offensive, insulting thing to say to the American people.

  • First of all, it's offensive to every other country in the world.

  • Why would God just bless America?

  • God would bless the planet if we lived in a sane society.

  • If there was a God, of course.

  • Anyway, I won't even go on that tangent.

  • Religion to me, has two sides.

  • On one side you have the dogma, the indoctrination.

  • You have resurrections, you have all the fantasy notions, that have come, excuse me,

  • that exist in the literary books that are there.

  • On the other side there's a brilliant philosophical disposition.

  • I happen to love a lot of the things that the Jesus character had stated.

  • I see beautiful notions in almost every major religious figure.

  • There are time tested values that exist in religious thought,

  • that do need to be adhered to.

  • Some of the most brilliant and beautiful people I've met are, in fact, Christians,

  • or Islamic, or Hindus,or Jewish.

  • They know were to draw the line,

  • where to stop at the fanaticism.

  • Because that's where the religious danger goes to.

  • Once you believe something dogmatically enough where you say,

  • "Jesus existed. That's that. Anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of mine."

  • Then you have some very serious neurosis to deal with.

  • Whether Jesus existed or not doesn't mean anything.

  • I think Jacque Fresco put it best on Larry King.

  • When Larry King asked him "What do you think about Christianity", he said,

  • "I think it's great. When are they going to put it into practice?"

  • So, my religious disposition is that I wish that those that have religious inclinations,

  • would really dig deep into their beliefs and ask themselves

  • what is it about their religion that they actually use?

  • What is it about the reciprocation notions that you can find in all religions,

  • that you see actually materialize in most people's behavior?

  • "The Golden Rule" and all those things which exist in all religions,

  • I think we have a list in our PDF for The Zeitgeist Movement Orientation Guide.

  • If you review these ideas, no one puts them into practice.

  • In the end, my disposition on religion is very, very simple:

  • it's nothing but a bunch of stories. They are allegories that have meaning.

  • They get distorted through interpretations because that's the nature of semantics.

  • But I don't want to rule out religion.

  • I don't think religion should be outlawed or anything like that.

  • I think it should be understood for what it is.

  • The problem with humanity is we're ripped apart.

  • There are far too many ideologies out there that have no basis on anything tangible.

  • I want this, I wanna make this very, very clear:

  • all orthodox religions, at least Western religions...

  • there might be a few elements of Hinduism and Buddhism that are an exception...

  • but let's just say the Judeo-Christian Islamic system of belief, to me, is no different

  • than the isms of state associations that we see in our political sphere,

  • meaning communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism.

  • These are ideas that have been created that have no relevance to nature whatsoever.

  • In other words, they have absolutely no relevance to the carrying capacity of the Earth,

  • to our ability to support ourselves;

  • to our ability to produce, to the methods of production,

  • to the methods of distribution;

  • to the way we orient society and keep ourselves alive and keep ourselves healthy

  • and prosper, and for the betterment of the...

  • what I consider to be the organism of the human species, as a single organism.

  • None of those beliefs have anything to do with any of that,

  • and that's a problem to me.

  • For example, the Catholic church, and a lot of other religions

  • that feed off of those early old testament ideologies,

  • they advocate this illusion that we can just procreate constantly,

  • and everyone's going to be fine.

  • God will take care of everyone.

  • As of right now, with the future of energy, established energy,

  • the future of the way we are orienting ourselves on this planet through depletion,

  • I'm not having any children.

  • While I try to be as optimistic as possible

  • with The Zeitgeist Movement and what we could do,

  • which is phenomenal, what we could do.

  • As of right now we have some powerful barriers.

  • I'm not having children. Why?

  • Why would I say that?

  • First of all, I wouldn't feel good.

  • I would feel utterly negligent and irresponsible at this point in time,

  • to bring in another human being.

  • Most people when they give birth to children, it's a traditionalized self-serving, established notion where,

  • "We are going to have kids and a family. To hell with the carrying capacity of the Earth,

  • to hell with the fact that we might be impoverished."

  • I mean, you see this in trailer parks all the time.

  • I used to live in a trailer park. I've seen this countless, countless times.

  • People don't have any relationship to anything. They have no education,

  • as far as what makes society work, as far as what the processes are that feed them.

  • So, they continue to have kids over and over and over again,

  • or do many, many things that have no relationship to anything.

  • But let's focus on the children aspect.

  • For me to bring in a child, is for me to actually say:

  • "I believe the world will be in good shape for the duration of my child's life."

  • And then it becomes: "What if my child has a grand child?

  • Should the world have the integrity to maintain stability for that child as well?"

  • This is the question.

  • This is what all parents out there should be asking themselves.

  • They shouldn't be having children for their own self serving needs

  • so they can have "a family" and be traditional and show up at church

  • and have their two kids.

  • It has to relate to something real.

  • Humanity has to start thinking about its relationship to the Earth.

  • Until it does so, we're fucking doomed.

  • We have created a economic structure,

  • a religious-philosophical structure,

  • that is absolutely de-coupled from anything tangible and real,

  • and these ideologies are what will destroy the human species and destroy the planet.

  • DEBUNKERS

  • It has become a cottage industry

  • for people to sell books and DVDs debunking Zeitgeist.

  • There are people that have full websites that use advertising, sponsorship to make money,

  • and I find the whole thing just to be amusing frankly.

  • Zeitgeist 1 is based on pre-existing information.

  • There isn't one thing in that film that doesn't come from a source.

  • The most grand debunking aspect is part one, the religion section.

  • Comparative religion.

  • It's no mystery. It's been talked about for decades and centuries:

  • religions have been borrowing from each other.

  • Religions have to borrow from each other.

  • Why? Because all information is serial.

  • All knowledge is serial.

  • It is illogical to think that any information of any religion is of a novel origin.

  • And that's the beauty of it in fact, when you trace the source of most established religions,

  • because they all come back to nature.

  • They all come back from primitive ideas about natural unfoldings of nature-

  • storms, the sun obviously.

  • It's nothing metaphysical. It's nothing esoteric. It's just absolutely obvious.

  • Is it any mystery that the sun has been idolized as a source of life?

  • Which it is.

  • Is it any mystery, for any of that? Obviously not.

  • PRESENT

  • As of right now,

  • we are running out of oil.

  • We are going to be running out of natural gas.

  • In fact, very simply, all fosil fuels,

  • which is the governance of all society;

  • our entire society is completely created based on fossil fuels,

  • from the plastics, everything.

  • I'm not even going to go into it.

  • Anyone that questions that, just take a moment to think about what oil powers, what fosil fuels power.

  • From the lights that we all use,

  • from the coal or natural gas power plants, to what runs your car,

  • to what comprises the fabric of industrial civilization, is fossil fuels.

  • And we are provably using them at the rate far exceeding their renewability,

  • which takes hundreds of millions of years.

  • No one's thinking about this.

  • No one is thinking about it because the economic paradigm will not allow it.

  • The core value of our Western Society today...

  • I mean, in America, the central motivating value now is nothing but blind consumption.

  • "Saturdays are for shopping", I heard someone once say.

  • You know, there's a reason why I used Times Square in Zeitgeist Addendum as the noise,

  • if you remember there's all the noise on the screens because,

  • Times Square is the epitome of absolute waste.

  • The most disgusting angles of humanity.

  • Materialistic noise.

  • Humanity cannot survive in a paradigm that requires infinite growth,

  • which again, is what it's based on.

  • If you're not familiar with that, think about it.

  • All we do is buy and consume, and consume, and consume.

  • That's what makes the economy go.

  • If people stop buying, the GDP of all countries goes down.

  • Well, the more we buy, consume and waste our resources,

  • the faster we extinguish ourselves.

  • What do you do?

  • What do you do? How do you stop this?

  • This is why The Zeitgeist Movement exists.

  • We have to; one, get a philosophical disposition under our belts that says;

  • "You know what? We're all on the same page."

  • "We all have to survive on this planet."

  • "We are faced with some tremendous problems,

  • and the only way they are going to be resolved is to begin to work together."

  • Everyone needs to shed their religious ideas,

  • and to shed their capitalist, socialist, fascist, communist preconstructs.

  • They need to shed everything that they have been taught

  • and ask themselves one simple question:

  • "What the fuck do we need to continue our survival on this planet

  • without horrors and wars and continuing the patterns of all the things that continue to happen?"

  • RESOURCE-BASED ECONOMY

  • You know, The Zeitgeist Movement as it's been denoted in all of our materials is the, quote;

  • "Activist arm of The Venus Project", pushing forward to what we call a "resource-based economy".

  • A resource-based economy is very, very simple.

  • It's simply a system that is structured in a, quote;"systems theory approach".

  • To explain the systems theory approach, all you have to do is to look at the planet itself.

  • The planet is a holistic system.

  • So, the first step is very, very simple:

  • we recognize it as a system and we treat it as such.

  • We have to start measuring and monitoring all the Earthly resources.

  • We cannot be so stupid as to give corporations the ability to control,

  • for their own little clique's betterment,

  • resources that we all should have an inherent, inherent... deserving err...

  • Every resource on the planet should be common heritage to all human beings.

  • There's no way to create a stable society otherwise.

  • So, we are born on this planet, you inherit the planet. The planet is your home.

  • Not some plot of land that has the illusion of property.

  • Not some house that you think you own. There's no such thing as ownership.

  • The idea of ownership is controlled restriction.

  • Ownership is simply there really for those at the top

  • to make sure no one can interfere with the fact that they control mostly everything.

  • So, we have to monitor the planet's resources.

  • We have to begin to construct a system of production and distribution

  • that is not based on the whims of profit.

  • It's based on what is the most efficient means to do that.

  • There are resources all over the planet obviously.

  • We have to begin to understand what we have.

  • We have to use science and technology to begin to orient

  • our use of these resources in the most efficient way possible.

  • And that's why we advocate the systems approach that we do.

  • If you motivated our resources right now to change the face of the Earth,

  • to create a resource-based economy, we could do it very, very quickly.

  • The problem is, again,

  • the established orthodoxies and self-preserving mechanisms that are in place,

  • which will be our death.

  • The free market is what will kill everything on this planet.

  • It's not the "free market", it's actually the monetary system.

  • Monetary acquisition and exchange through labor for income, and the motivation of profit,

  • will be what destroys humanity.

  • Because all it does is pull everything in the direction of those that have the most power.

  • Right now we are faced with an ecological collapse, an energy collapse, specifically.

  • We're faced with an economic collapse which is very much tied into the energy collapse.

  • We're faced with a labor collapse, which of course is very much tied to the economic collapse.

  • And we're faced with what I call the "criminal meltdown".

  • The breakdown of society is occurring. People say,

  • "Well, we're gonna have a recovery of the economy."

  • The most dangerous thing that we can have right now, is a recovery of the US economy.

  • The most dangerous thing that we can have right now, is the use of more resources,

  • because all it's going to do is speed up the inevitable destruction.

  • If more people go out and buy lots of automobiles to help the economy,

  • all that's going to do is get more fuel into the tanks,

  • taken from the resources of the planet.

  • More gasoline's used. More energy is going to be wasted on the idea of consumption.

  • And this is what, again, will kill us.

  • So, a resouce-based economy

  • attempts to remove all of the insustainable practices that we have now,

  • and create a holistic system of resource management,

  • of priority of labor- that's a big one.

  • Think about how much time is wasted in most people's lives in jobs that do absolutely nothing.

  • Think about how much energy is wasted by someone who works at Wall Street,

  • driving from Pennsylvania every single day from their home,

  • so they can be a trader on Wall Street,

  • wasting energy on something that means nothing,

  • that wastes even more electricity and energy.

  • When you begin to think like that,

  • when you begin to see how much energy and resources are wasted

  • on actions that have no return whatsoever,

  • except the self-interest and consumeristic monetary values of particular individuals,

  • but return nothing to society.

  • Think about how beautiful society would be

  • when we start to educate people on natural processes of the environment-

  • on science, technology and resource conservation.

  • And when people can gauge society in a, excuse me, on a professional level, if you will,

  • they do so on things that actually matter.

  • (pheew)

  • That would be cataclysmic.

  • That would be unbelievable.

  • To see people doing stuff that actually has a relevance.

  • That will enable them to have so much more freedom, too.

  • To put it in a gestural sense,

  • the way I see human survival and the human self-interest mechanism, which does exist,

  • but it's accelerated by our system,

  • is... making a psychological trick to what it means to umm... be self-servent.

  • Social interest needs to become self-interest.

  • In other words when I invent something,

  • that is given to everyone

  • for them to improve upon and to utilize.

  • That invention isn't hoarded through patents and trademarks, it's given to everyone.

  • In turn, what that means is that every time anyone else invents something,

  • or creates something or has an idea,

  • that comes to me too.

  • Suddenly humanity becomes a singular organism. It becomes a working system.

  • SPIRITUALITY

  • People ask me a lot about spirituality.

  • They say, "Well, if you don't like any of the established religions,

  • are you spiritual in any other way?"

  • Or something like that.

  • The only type of spirituality that is actually relevant,

  • is a understanding of natural processes and the natural order of the universe,

  • to give it annoying venacular.

  • The way natural laws work, gravity, the way the world actually works:

  • God is in the laws of nature and nothing more.

  • I believe that a true spiritual awakening

  • will be when people start to realize that

  • they have to begin to work together,

  • they have to share their resources.

  • They have to begin to understand that they live off of this planet,

  • that they get their light from the sun,

  • that there are energy sources that are natural and abundant,

  • that could be made available to all;

  • that we share everything, and we work together,

  • because that's what the system demands.

  • The Earth demands this.

  • The species demands this for our survival.

  • And that will be a spiritual awakening, if you want to give it that type of term.

  • FUTURE

  • We live in a world of tremendous possibility,

  • positive possibility.

  • However, all indicators point to what I consider to be self-destruction,

  • given our current, established economic and ideological structures.

  • Once again: Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism,

  • Judeo, Islamic, Christian belief systems...

  • They have no relationship to what actually makes, creates, survival of the species.

  • The real sad thing is, is that,

  • humanity is going to have to be smacked around quite a bit,

  • before they really understand what The Zeitgeist Movement,

  • a resource-based economy and The Venus Project,

  • Jacque Fresco... is talking about.

  • We are driven by bio-social pressures.

  • Meaning that it takes problems for us to wake up and want to change things.

  • I don't want to see humanity suffer.

  • I don't want to see the population start to shrink because of our lack of energy and food.

  • I don't want to see these things happen.

  • But I know, sadly, that a good portion of it is going to happen.

  • Until people start to wake up and recognize a new paradigm that's on the horizon,

  • that we must drive forward to as fast as humanly possible.

  • All you have to do is look at the current economic implosion.

  • The US government's in 12 trillion dollars worth of debt.

  • It becomes comical after a while.

  • What's going to happen when the US government hits 20 trillion? 30 trillion?

  • I mean, once the US government can't pay its interest on all the bonds that have been sold overseas,

  • and all of the outstanding debt that it has, then we're theoretically bankrupt.

  • What do you think is going to happen when China can't get its money from the United States?

  • What do you think is going to happen when the United States,

  • because we use 25% of the world's energy,

  • starts to run out of oil in Iraq and starts to invade other Middle Eastern countries,

  • which it will probably do beforehand... but starts to do that?

  • And China, of course, who gets oil from Iran says,

  • "You know what, I think we're going to have to stop you guys from taking Iran's oil.

  • Because we need that too, and you owe us a lot of money. It's kind of pissing us off."

  • Do you think war between these super powers might be possible?

  • Hmm... I think World War III

  • could be very, very possible.

  • And this war will be for real.

  • This will not be a contrivance war like WW I and WW II,

  • based on geopolitical realigning and various resource grabs.

  • This will be war for survival of different countries.

  • And, I hope that doesn't happen.

  • I sincerely hope, all of these things I talk about are erroneous and false but,

  • all you have to do is look at the trends.

  • One way or another, we will end up in a system that's not based on money as we know it today.

  • Why? Because that will be realized in the future by historians,

  • as the total and pivotal cause of the destruction of civilization as we know it.

  • That will be understood in the future.

  • Historians will look back and say,

  • "Holy shit! They were making materials,

  • selling them for corporation profit,

  • over and over and over and over again,

  • with absolutely no reference to what the planet had and recycling protocols and everything else.

  • They were burning fossil fuels at a million times the rate of their actual renewability?"

  • They're going to laugh at us,

  • wondering what the hell kind of primitive dumbass species we actually were.

  • If we even survive to reach that point.

  • So, I hate to sound condescending and negative. I hate to throw out all this rhetoric,

  • but, I'm fairly irritated at this point, and I try not to be.

  • I just want to make it understood that,

  • the entire system that we live in is a sham.

  • It's a false system, falsivity defined by the fact that it cannot be sustained.

  • It's that simple.

  • And we propose a resource-based economy. I hope everyone watching this film will go to

  • www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

  • and understand what we're doing.

  • I hope everyone out there will understand that,

  • either we change or we die.

  • Thank you for all you do, Peter.

  • A film by Charles Robinson

  • Please duplicate as you see fit.

  • (without monetary gain, of course)

  • There is no DVD for sale.

  • Download: www.whoispeterjoseph.com

  • www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

  • www.thevenusproject.com

  • www.zeitgeistmovie.com

  • The Revolution is Now

  • [place you chapter site here or leave it blank]

October 21st, 2009:

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