philosophy and goals of The Zeitgeist Movement.

This orientation has been extracted from the more expansive "Activist Orientation Guide"

which is available for free PDF download at thezeitgeistmovement.com

All source references for material in this video presentation can be found in that document.

The Zeitgeist Movement - Activist Orientation www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

www.thevenusproject.com

The Zeitgeist movement is not a political movement.

It does not recognize divisionary notions such as nations

governments, races, religions, creeds or class.

Rather, we see the world as one organism

with the human species as a singular family.

Simultaneously, we acknowledge that we depend entirely on our environment,

not only in regard to the necessities of life such as food, air and water,

but also for influence and guidance in regard to life's processes.

We recognize and understand that aligning ourselves with natural processes

is the most progressive and productive disposition we can have.

The Zeitgeist movement in fact, is the activist arm of The Venus Project

an organization which constitutes the lifelong work

of industrial designer and social engineer Jacque Fresco.

Simply put, what The Venus Project represents

and what the Zeitgeist movement hence condones, could be summarized

as the application of the scientific method for social concern.

One of the greatest discoveries of humankind

which has allowed for tremendous advancement in our abilities on this planet,

has been the understanding and application of science.

Through the humane application of science and technology

to social design and decision making

we have the means to transform our environment

into something exceedingly more balanced

organized, humane, productive and most importantly, sustainable.

As many are aware at this time, both our societal integrity

and ecological integrity are in serious question.

The current economic system is falling apart at an accelerating rate

with the prospect of worldwide unemployment and destabilization

occuring possibly on the largest scale ever seen.

Simultaneously, we are courting the point of no return

in regard to the destruction of the environment.

Given the current state of affairs, many of which

will be addressed in the first part of this presentation

the viewer should find that we not only need to move in another direction

we have to.

In order to understand where we are and how we have gotten

to this point in history, we need to address those societal attributes

which have greatly affected our social conduct.

The most important observation in this regard

is our use of a monetary system.

In this section, we are going to address the mechanisms

of our world monetary system, pointing out the consequences

this type of organizational structure has produced.

These consequences include: 1. The Need for Cyclical Consumption

denoting the economic requirement that products and services

are perpetually bought and sold regardless of quality and waste.

2. The Abundance of Scarcity

denoting how resources, goods and services

are deliberately made scarce to ensure profitability

within the supply and demand equation.

3. The Priority of Profit

denoting the vast corruption commonplace in the world

due to the need to generate income.

4. Fiscal Manipulation

denoting how the central banking systems of the world

work to control the economy for the benefit of their corporate constituents

and establishment power.

1. The Need for Cyclical Consumption

The roles of people on a monetary system

are basically broken into three distinctions:

the employee, the employer and the consumer.

The employee performs tasks for the employer

in exchange for a wage, or monetary payment

while the employer sells a good or service to the consumer for a profit,

another classification of monetary payment.

In turn, both the employer and the employee function as consumers,

for the monetary payments they obtain

are used to purchase goods and services relevant to their survival.

This act of purchasing goods and services

is what allows the entire system to perpetuate

thus allowing for the employer and employee to make money

and thus continue consuming.

In other words, it is the requirement of perpetual or cyclical consumption

that keeps the entire economy going.

If consumption was ever to stop, the whole system would collapse.

This produces two severe consequences for society:

1. Nothing physically produced can ever maintain a lifespan

longer than what can be endured in order to maintain

the needed 'cyclical consumption'.

In other words, everything must break down

in a respective amount of time

in order to continue the financial circulation

needed to power the economy.

This characteristic could be defined as 'planned obsolescence'.

Planned obsolescence is essentially

the deliberate withholding of efficiency

so the product in question breaks down respectively fast.

This happens both intentionally, with manufacturers timing their products

for breakdown, often as soon as the warranty runs out;

and indirectly, where profit-based shortcuts taken in production

usually in the form of cheap materials and poor design

translates into an inferior product immediately

with the failure of the product simply a matter of time.

The second consequence is that new products and services

must be constantly introduced regardless of functional utility

generating endless waste.

The result of these two issues are nothing but unacceptable

for not only are resources being neglectfully used in products

that are designed not to last, wasting human energy and materials

the amount of frivilous waste and pollution that results is staggering.

In other words, waste is a deliberate byproduct of industry's need

to keep 'cyclical consumption' going.

The obsolete or expired product is trashed,

often to landfills, polluting the environment

while the constant multiplicity accelerates this pollution.

To express this from a different angle

imagine the economic ramifications of production methods

that strategically maximize the efficiency

and sustainability of every product, using the best known materials

and techniques available at the time.

Imagine products so well designed

that they didn't need maintenance for say, 100 years.

Imagine a house that was built from fireproof materials

where all appliances, electrical operations, plumbing and the like,

were made from the most impermeable

highest integrity resources available on Earth.

In such a saner world, where we actually created things to last

minimizing pollution and waste, a monetary system would be impossible

for cyclical consumption would slow tremendously

forever weakening the so called economic growth.

Mechanism two: The Abundance of Scarcity

In monetary economics, supply and demand

is partly how goods and services obtain value.

The more there is of something, the less it is worth in respect to itself.

If we woke up one day and for some reason, hypothetically speaking,

there were only 100 oranges left in existence

with no possibility to grow more,

the value of those oranges would skyrocket,

for they are now extremely scarce.

In other words, it is profitable for resources to be scarce.

If a company can convince the public that their product is rare

the more they can charge for that product.

This provides a strong motivation to keep items and resources scarce.

The ramifications of this are psychologically profound;

for if companies know that they can make more money

by having their items scarce, the propensity to deliberately

limit production or be dishonest about available resources is high.

This means that the monetary system rewards mechanisms

that inherently discourage abundance and equality.

Even more offensively, profit can actually be made

as a result of scarcity generated by environmental pollution,

such as what is now happening with our water supplies.

This creates a perverse reinforcement of indifference

to environmental concern by industry, for the more damage there is

the more profit that can be obtained by offering solutions.

And this leads us to: 3. The Priority of Profit.

A monetary system's foremost motivating principle

is profit, or more generally, income.

All people must seek out a strategy to acquire money.

A wage earner seeks out the best possible pay

he can get for his services, while the employer

seeks to constantly reduce costs in order to maximize their profit.

This competitive mentality extends into all facets of society,

and it should be no surprise that those who are in positions

of great wealth are often the most ruthless and indifferent.

Now, before we move any further into the negative consequences

of the profit priority, let's first consider

what many think to be the good side of this system: incentive.

As the theory goes, the need for profit provides a person or organization

with motivation to work on new ideas and products

that might sell in the market place.

In other words, the assumption is that if people were not motivated

by their need to obtain money, nothing would be invented

and little social progress would be achieved.

First of all, the most powerful contributions to society

did not come from people seeking profit.

Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin, the Wright brothers, Albert Einstein

and Isaac Newton did not make their massive contributions

to society because of material self interest.

While it is true that useful inventions and methods

do come from the motivation for personal gain,

the intent behind those creations typically have nothing to do

with human or social concerns and everything to do

with detached self interest and blind personal gain.

The pursuit of profit almost always comes before human concern

and a simple glance at the cancer causing preservatives in our foods,

the planned obsolescence of nearly everything manufactured

along with the health care industry that charges 300 dollars

for a single antibiotic pill, will indicate

that the profit incentive is actually a detriment.

Problems in our monetary-based society will only have resolution

if money can be made from solving those problems.

Now, more specifically, to put the spectrum

of monetary derived corruption into a workable perspective,

we will divide these behaviors into three classifications:

general crime, corporate crime and government crime.

General crime in a monetary system ranges from petty theft

to illegal sales, to fraud, to violent robbery.

This by-product of the system is often not given

the thought needed to understand its source

for many tend to dismiss these so called criminals

as some kind of social anomaly.

The reality is that the stress, conflict,

poverty and thus deprivation generated by the monetary system itself

is the foundational cause.

In the 1990's, a research project

called the Merva-Fowles study was conducted

which found powerful connections between unemployment and crime.

They based their research on 30 major metropolitan areas

with a total population of over 80 million.

Their findings found that a 1% rise in unemployment resulted in:

a 6.7% increase in homicides

a 3.4% increase in violent crimes,

a 2.4% increase in property crime.

During the period from 1990 to 1992, this translated into:

1459 additional homicides,

62,607 additional violent crimes

and 223,500 additional property crimes.

This is very revealing.

A person living in a deprived environment, with little resources,

poor education and few opportunities for work

will simply do what they need to in order to survive.

While the neuroses generated from the stress of the situation

often leads to violent and socially offensive acts.

In other words, the environment is creating the behavior.

Corporate Crime

Corporate crime, which is almost exclusively profit related

takes many forms: planned obsolescence,

monopolistic collusion, market manipulation

outsourcing, price fixing, labor exploitation

and governmental collusion are just a few to note.

From Enron's deliberate shutting down of California's power plants

to boost its energy stocks to the Bayer Corporation's

knowing distribution of HIV-tainted drugs,

it should be clear to most people that corporate crime is constant

and oftentimes much more insidious than general crime

for the repercussions tend to affect very large groups of people.

The corporate criminal's need to secure profitability

is no different in basis than the general criminal's need to survive.

While the latter typically commits crimes to live