the endless wars and the burgeoning homelessness?

What if rather these are just symptoms born out of an outdated social structure?

That's the revolutionary idea behind the explosive Zeitgeist documentary trilogy.

Since the first movie's release in 2007,

these documentaries have been translated into 40 different languages,

and have been seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

But the ideas brought forward by the documentaries quickly transcended film

and spawned The Zeitgeist Movement: a global-sustainability, advocacy organization

that's revolutionizing the way people think and act.

Now, the filmmaker will be re-energizing the movement

with yet another series entitled 'Interreflections'.

Here to talk about the 'Culture In Decline',

The Zeitgeist Movement and where there may be a glimmer of hope,

I'm joined by the filmmaker himself, Peter Joseph.

Peter, thanks so much for coming on. - It's my pleasure, Abby, thank you for having me.

- First of all, I think that these movies should be essential viewing

for everyone on the planet because you really present these concepts

that are not so much new or revolutionary as they are just glaringly obvious truths

in the way you articulate them, Peter, but I wanted to get into how you got started.

As someone who worked in Wall Street and advertising, when did you step back

and analyze your own role in society and decide to radically change course?

- Great question; it was a slow evolution really.

Like many people brought up in this culture, you end up with

a self-interest driven mechanism.

I came from a middle class family; we had no real wealth.

I came into the world, I went to school, I dropped out

due to debt problems like many do today

in the educational college/career problem that we have

(most college debt is the peak of bankruptcy

coupled with medical debts, in aggregate),

and I began to realize that there's something going on with this system.

I did stuff with Wall Street and advertising trying to keep my self-preservation going,

and finally it dawned on me when I made this catharsis film in 2007

just called 'Zeitgeist', which became 'Zeitgeist: The Movie'.

It was a frustration piece that I made, it just sort of exploded in my mind

to the extent that I don't even know where it came from to be frank.

It was a big catharsis that I did which I threw up online.

It became viral because I think people identified with the same issues and themes,

and then that triggered where I am today. I continue to move forward

with representative media that is both entertaining

and value-shifting in the quality that it pursues,

but also extremely educational and ultimately activist-oriented,

and that's the whole purpose of my existence at this point.

- Thanks for explaining that; let's get right into this. With the elections

coming up in less than two weeks, let's talk about the two-party system

which you explore a little bit in a recent video that you made, called 'What Democracy?'.

What purpose does this system serve to control the population?

Do you advocate people to completely remove themselves

from the electoral process, or do you see some merit in supporting

third party candidates and local politics?

- I think we have to deal with what we have at the moment.

People should be supporting referendums

because that's a form of direct democracy.

But the aristocracy game that has emerged,

which is an outgrowth of basically the economic system

which inherently generates hierarchy, is completely misunderstood.

We think we're in a different paradigm today than we were

during the age of kings and queens, but we're really not.

The kings and queens are behind the scenes and operate within the business/

industrial enterprise, which is the driving mechanism

of all the values and institutions we have.

The figureheads: the elections, the presidents, the Congress,

they serve as 'tools' to perpetuate

the real driver of our economic system

which is the monetary market economy itself.

Those values that are there confuse people,

and they think that when they go into a voting booth and elect somebody

that they're going to change something. But if you look at the historical record

(which many have not, especially since the beginning of America),

very little change has occurred.

Really, when it comes to the election of any single individual,

or the conglomerate actions of the Congress or whatever parliament institution,

this statistical element is lost unfortunately.

This isn't projection to say that "Oh it's just to be cynical

and say it doesn't matter if you vote," this is proven.

The effect of these elections is not given the correct gravity

because it's very small. I'd say maybe 10%

is how effective the election of a new president really may be.

- Exactly, and it also serves to disempower

and disillusion people into thinking that they do have a choice,

and every 4 years nothing changes.

It really is stifling humanity in that sense.

When people look at the current trajectory of the world,

it's obvious that we're pretty much on a crash course

based on a model of unsustainable growth, Peter.

When people look at global capitalism

some argue that "It's not a free and fair market,

if cronyism were removed from the equation, capitalism would work."

But is the two-tiered, just in that we're seeing today, the plutocratic governance

and endless war for resources, an inevitability of the capitalist model?

- Unfortunately, I would have to declare that it is.

I know it's a heated subject and people love to argue with me.

I've had endless debates with people who say that the state is the problem,

or regulation, and that the market should just be 'free' to do whatever it wants.

I argue back that the market is as free as it ever was,

in fact it's more free I would say.

At least, in the past, there were restrictions on the market economy

and how it could influence the aristocracy's decision

to basically rule everything through war.

Nothing has changed in this regard.

You go back to feudalism and you have the same tendency.

But the idea that something can be regulated

in a system that is inherently corrupt, in my view,

a system that clearly says that you can get money

and have the freedom to do whatever you want with it,

hence the Supreme Court decision that says that

spending money for political campaigns is equated to free speech.

This delusion that we've come up with,

to say that we can spend money for whatever purpose possible

and influence anything, is at the core of the vast corruption we see.

You can go back to Marx and Thorstein Veblen, you can go back

to all sorts of thinkers in the early 20th century who,

despite their criticisms, were on to something with this.

It is unfortunate how fast people are to shut down this idea.

My friend Lee Camp has a famous joke:

"We applaud politicians now,

that come and tell us that they're not going to give us health insurance in America,"

or universal healthcare in America.

Why? Because this delusion of socialism has come forward.

Any type of communal attribute which isn't related to money,

and the 'freedom' of money, now is being misconstrued

as something that will lead to tyranny or oppression.

We have F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises,

and all these economic philosophers that have compounded this notion,

and that's one of the core 'religious rituals'

of the political establishment to reinforce this idea that freedom

and democracy is equated to money.

This has justified the vast majority of wars;

it justified the disregard for the growing homeless

and poverty population in America, and across the world.

It has also brainwashed people to disregard humanity on a global scale.

We have 1 - 3 billion people either starving to death or in abject poverty,

and we don't care about them because our psychology now is so perverted

that we can just dismiss them as some anomaly

in this social-darwinistic view that we've concocted for ourselves,

which unfortunately goes back to Adam Smith.

- Absolutely, it does seem we are indoctrinated

with this line of thinking. Anything alternative to that is bad,

as we've learned through pretty much every institution

that I've experienced growing up in this country, and I'm sure around the world.

Why is it that people adhere so strongly

to these archaic, political and religious institutions

in the light of the 21st century advancements in technology,

the vast knowledge available to expand humanity's collective consciousness?

It seems that we constantly regress back to what we're comfortable with

even though they've been proven, historically, to have monumental failures.

- Yes. I call it a move from superstition to science.

If you look at the social structure,

it really goes back so far,

and it discludes so many modern advancements

that people's traditional values are so caught up

in the voting process, in the delegation of authority,

and in the general subservience patterns of the peasants,

which is what the majority of humanity unfortunately is.

They accept it because it's what they've always known and seen.

Naturally, people fear change (it's no psychological anomaly),

but I think the big issue here is education.

People need to understand what's possible and the root causes

of all the problems out there. They don't understand

the prosperity-driven effects that can come from science and technology,

and not just from the gadgets, etc. , but if we actually applied

these basic, near empirical principles to social governance,

we would end up with a completely new social order.

You can call it Natural Law, Resource-Based Economy,

basically taking this construct of what works.