and do not necessarily reflect the views of the producers or its sponsors.

Orion Network Films LLP

In Association with PositiveTV

Directed by Mark Waters

Presents

The Summary

The Zeitgeist Movement

My name is Peter Joseph. I am currently the de facto founder

of an organization called The Zeitgeist Movement

which is seeking to alter the current cultural climate, if you will

into something that can be considered as actually sustainable

for not just one nation or class but all the world's people.

The Zeitgeist Movement

We live in a paradigm, now, where we have society operating

on the idea that we can grow infinitely.

Therefore, we keep buying and consuming

regardless of how many resources we have.

This creates a collision course with nature, which the world

is figuring out right about now on many levels,

that the Earth is essentialy a closed system.

It took billions of years to create the minerals we have.

It took many hundreds of millions of years

to create the fossil fuels which govern everything we have.

And, amazingly enough, we've created this system

where we're using all of our resources to create the economic growth

required to sustain employment and everything else.

And simultaneously, we're diminishing our resources

at a near exponential rate it seems, as population continues to grow

and no one seems to understand that it's an absolute clash

and that eventually we're going to run out of pivotal resources

and eventually you're going to see things, I don't know,

like the human population start to dwindle down.

My name is Jacque Fresco

and I'm going to present the concept of The Venus Project.

The Venus Project

If you don't want war

if you don't want poverty, hunger, unemployment

you have to declare all the Earth's resources

as the common heritage of all the world's people.

All the artificial boundaries have to be removed

so that people can travel anywhere.

It has to be a global society.

There are many people that feel "Well, let's develop each country."

You can't do that because if the Russians do experiments

with nuclear materials and the Chinese

that air goes all over the world.

So it's very hard to work independently.

So, I would say, if you want these things

you have to change the way your society operates.

We believe, here at The Venus Project, we are not civilized yet.

As long as you have armies, navies

prisions, police, we are not civilized.

No nation is civilized.

Being civilized is an ongoing process.

The more we learn, the more we know about the environment

and human relations, the more we're able to deal with the problems.

If we fail to do that, we won't be able to solve problems.

If we go with traditional values, we won't be able to solve problems.

All of these pump-primers do not work.

There's always been wars.

The wars have continued to get worse

even though the universities today

have the most sophisticated equipment

in the science labs, the architectural labs, all the labs

and the wars are getting worse. Explosions are getting worse.

Since the atom bomb, the explosive power is much worse.

So, there's something definitely wrong with all cultures.

When I say wrong, I mean that the system doesn't work.

Now, to talk about a system that does work

is a little foreign to our habits of thought.

I'm going to try to explain how we make decisions.

Actually, we don't make decisions. We arrive at them.

The only way a real society can operate

period, is in a steady-state economy

meaning you don't have the mechanism of constantly needing to do anything

other than being sustainable in your every day living

and having society recognize the attributes of sustainability

which are required. That's the value-system orientation

needed to create a stable society.

As a brief extension of this, we live in a materialistic culture.

We live in a culture that's predicated on inferiority

and people thinking that they need more and more

because of many reasons, because of someone else having more

status-oriented issues, so on and so forth.

And that fuels into this mechanism of the growth economy

of getting more and more. Holidays... People give each other gifts.

These are inventions for economics.

As long as we use money and the bottom line is profit

then those who control the money

are able to make the laws in their favor.

And that means that they really don't care about people.

They care about wealth, property and power

when that is the main incentive.

So, when we use the monetary system

there is no justice within this system.

There's no making this system equitable.

What we need is an entirely new system

that we call a Resource-Based Economy.

Resource-Based Economy

In regard to social operation and how to create a new society

or better yet just to say to create any society that would be

sustainable and efficient

there's really an empirical train of thought, if you will, on how to do that.

First of all, you have to think about what the human being actually needs.

We require resources at the bare minimum. We require food

water, etc. as we all know.

Therefore, resources become the most paramount subject.

Resources in fact should be the foundation of any economic structure.

So, what do you do? If you consider that the Earth is a closed finite system.

First thing you have to do is a survey of the Earth's resources

and the carrying capacity of the environment.

If you produce a population far in excess of the carrying capacity

of the environment, you're going to have trouble.

You're going to have malnutrition and all the problems that go with it.

So, first we have to find out

what can each successive environment carry

and maintain a population in accordance with the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Not what I like or somebody else likes

or some politician's notions.

It has to be based upon the carrying capacity of the Earth.

To organize a structure based on the intelligent management

of the Earth resources, you start from

essentially, the base level of where is everything.

So, you look at the planet and you say "Ok,

we see we have iron ore here. We have petroleum deposits here,"

if we're using petroleum at that point in time in the future.

Hopefully we will not be because it's damaging. "We have places

for great wind energy here." You get the point.

We can assess the entire environment of what we currently use

based on our technological facilities at that point

and we start to create a structure of analysis

maintenance and management

and basically monitor and understand what we have.

Then we can design the parameters for the new society.

Without a survey we couldn't do that.

Survey means physical disabilities, all the known diseases.

That tells us how many hospitals we have to build.

Of course, the survey would include available materials.

Otherwise, if you just sit down and turn out a hospital

or turn out a social plan not based on what you have

not based on what Fresco believes, only statistical evidence.

The end of "What's your opinion? What's your opinion?"

should have been gone in 1927.

Then you move to the next level. How do we utilize resources in the most efficient way?

Technology is the methodology to harness any type of resources we have.

Technology is the growing intellectual field that allows us to know

how to manipulate our environment for our betterment

and to be more sustainable, hopefully.

So what we do is we utilize our technical information

and then we analyze the planetary resources.

Then we build from the ground up an entire infrastructure, not based

on the whims of any type of ideology, capitalist, socialist

fascist, whatever, what have you, communist.

You do it based explicitly on the most efficient means to do it

with the most peak efficiency possible

based on the technology available at the time

the intellectual resource of the time.

You have peak efficiency and sustainability as your goal.

You just simply weigh all parameters when you analyze anything

and then you're going to build a society that is, essentially

for lack of a better expression, perfect.

It's not perfect at all because it's going to constantly change, but

it's the best you can do at that point in time

which I think would be a variance of perfection.

A Resource-Based Economy does not use money, barter or any form of servitude.

It just makes goods and services available to everybody

through intelligent use of technology.

Creative Director / Cinematographer / Director: Mark Waters

Producer: Frank Da Silva

Executive Producers: Dana Amma Day, Nicholas Pilbrow

Production Assistant: Simon G. Powell

Storyboard Artist: Alexander Ward

An Earth 2 Production for Orion Network Films LLP

In Association with Positive TV and JustLivinFilm

Filmed on Location: Venus, Florida / New York City, NY