History

The Zeitgeist Movement was founded in 2008 by award-winning film director and social activist, Peter Joseph, who produced the world-famous documentaries that later became the movement's namesake. The term "Zeitgeist" is German for "Spirit of the Age." Shortly following the release of Peter's second film, Zeitgeist Addendum, the film's following compelled Peter to found an activist movement in support of the Venus Project, an organization supported heavily in the film.

As of April 2010, the movement boasts a worldwide support of over 380,000 members in the meager two years it has been around.

As of April 18, 2011, The Venus Project opted to disassociate from the Zeitgeist Movement. No verifiable reasons were stated as to the reason for this decision. The Zeitgeist Movement now pursues a Resource Based Economy as its own activism and research arm.

Monetary Economics

The Zeitgeist Movement purposes that advances in production, manufacturing, and resource management technologies have, in recent decades, made the traditional monetary based economy unsustainable. Monetary systems require scarcity and growth in order to be sustainable. In recent decades, growth has stabilized globally and scarcity has been eliminated with the advent of technology. Any amount of research would conclude that machines are capable of producing more goods than we could ever readily consume, especially necessary resources. According to the most fundamental tenets of supply and demand, using automation to create such abundance causes the monetary value of all produced goods to decline. Unfortunately, automation and high volumes of production also leads to declining man hours for employees who need purchasing power (money) to acquire access to the necessities they need to live. The more we expand our ability to produce, the more we suffer a diminishing ability to consume. But this would not be the case if not for the failing monetary system. Knowing this, you begin to understand that we, the people, can never see an age of abundant prosperity. It is simply not part of our system.

We have also come to understand that any monetary system amounts to a system of economic slavery as it inherently transfers true wealth to banks where money is created. At the end of the day, we must all work for the banks in order to settle the debts needed to maintain the monetary economy. We work for the banks to settle our staggering loans for education. We must work for the banks to settle loans needed to keep our private enterprises alive. Such a system inherently leads to corruption, poverty, and even crime as people are forced to steal in order to survive.

It is also worth pointing out that the greed, profit-based money structures that maintain the economy in our world also depend heavily on competitive free markets. This leads to poor merchandise produced with low cost to the manufacturer in mind, rather than quality or safety. It also leads to waste, production redundancy, environmental damage, and planned obsolescence. Furthermore, it causes our society to become drowned in competitive advertising and sciences meant to influence public opinion.

The monetary system, born of an age of hand tools and manual labor, is unfit for managing affairs in high energy society. We must evolve to a new system. Fortunately, there is a solution.

Resource Based Economy

The Resource Based Economy (RBE) is a new social system unlike any other that has ever been tried before because it utilizes present day knowledge and acknowledges that civilization is emergent and ever changing. It purposes an adaptable society that encourages progress, rather than hindering it with outdated institutions.

Our Capitalist society wastes valuable energy and resources propping up the failing monetary system that struggles to maintain monetary value on all resources for distribution (to give consumers access). In other known social systems, such as Communism and Socialism, manufacturing and marketing of products for distribution is much more government regulated, but these models still live within a monetary society, depend on banks, capital, and politics. The monetary system is the system we wish to eradicate from the world.

In a RBE, everything society needs would be manufactured via automation in such high abundance (eliminating scarcity) that nothing would have monetary value (note supply and demand). All jobs and labor that can be automated, will be automated in order to maintain the smallest possible human workforce. The distribution system would be one of free access to all resources without the need to trade anything in return. Everyone is free to take everything they can physically manage.

"If resources and technology applicable to creating everything in our society were in high enough abundance, there would be no reason to sell anything. Likewise, if automation and machinery were so technologically advanced as to relieve human beings of labor, there would be no reason to have a job. And with these social aspects taken care of, there would no reason to have money at all." ~Peter Joseph

The ramifications of this concept are immense. With a free distribution system in place, there would be no need to steal anything. With that, 95% of all crime is gone forever. Alongside crime would be all of the jobs and careers that produce nothing and do nothing to advance society such as bankers, stock brokers, advertising, much of your police, military, clerks and cashiers, and too many more to name. Also, with our most serious social issues taken care of, there would be no need for politicians.

With the monetary based society gone, we will not longer need to deceive each other in order to survive, stay in business, and defend our institutions. Honesty and integrity would once again be tenets of society. Man would work truly for progress and for the benefit of us all.

Universal Abundance

It is difficult to get one's head around if raised in a monetary system under real or contrived scarcity. Let's examine some of our primary resources for such abundant technologies. Some of the primary resources that build society are: Energy, Water, Food, Transportation, and Housing. These are produced by business and corporation and sold to the public at cost in our monetary society. The public tends to acknowledge that these resources are produced as fast as they can and that the scarcity around these resources, which encourages its monetary value, is just a natural phenomenon.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that these resources are produced just fast enough to maintain scarcity of them, and thus their monetary value. If current technology is intentionally applied, each resource would become overwhelmingly abundant. The monetary value of each of these resources would collapse to nothing, resulting in a society where everything is free simply because there is too much and money is utterly without a purpose.

Do we have such technology right now? Yes, we do. Right now, we produce most of our electricity via nuclear power, hydro-electric dams, and predominantly the burning of fossil fuels. If we applied solar power, wind turbines, wave and tide power, the bloom box, powersat, and (most importantly) geothermal power, the price of electricity would certainly collapse to nothing. According to a 2006 MIT report, current technology can produce up to 2,000 zettajoules of power while the planet uses barely a half a zettajoule per year. That's 4,000 years of electricity from just geothermal alone. So why are we still paying electric bills for coal-produced power? Because it's profitable for the rich who provide it and they have convinced the public that these other forms of power are not efficient enough. This is simply not true.

For water, we have desalinization technology that is used on every military and cruise ship to turn ocean water into fresh potable water, but we still use ground water from finite sources (i.e. aquafers) everywhere else. At the same time, the plastic industry (who makes bottles for bottled water, by the way) pollutes the rivers and lakes in order to make drinkable water scarce and more valuable to sell. If we lined our coasts with desalinization plants and piped the water inland, water would be in complete abundance.

For food production, we have permaculturing and hydroponics. Hydroponics is a newly discovered method of soilless agriculture that allows plants to grow in water that is saturated with naturally produced botanic mix (plant food). This method has proven to produce larger food more than twice as fast as traditional agriculture and has no need for petroleum based fertilizers or damaging topsoil. Plans exist right now for the building of skyscraper-like vertical farms which use only hydroponics and automation for producing food.

For housing, we have contour crafting and other fabrication technologies. A contour crafting rig is essentially a frame built around a site where a building is to be places. A series of robotic arms move along the frame and construct a home based on computerized designs. This has proven to be capable of building a complete concrete home with plumbing, electrical wiring, and even wall paper in less than a single day, requiring far less human labor and producing far less waste.

Transportation is a deep topic, because it's a shining example of how crooked Capitalist business can be. In 1996, General Motors produced a 100% electric car, called the EV1. This car had no combustion engine and ran over 70 mph. Earlier battery systems could operate the vehicle for 75-150 miles between charges. The lithium-ion battery system later patented by Chevron/Texaco (suspicious much?) would have increased the range of the vehicle to over 300 miles per charge. GM produced and leased only 1,100 units before realizing this highly efficient product would cripple their combustion engine line, the marketing of spare parts, and the education of mechanics to repair the units. They rounded up almost every model and had them destroyed in 1999 despite massive protesting by drivers who absolutely loved the EV1. Then GM endorsed the giant, gas-guzzling Hummer. There is utterly no reason why our cars cannot be electric except for sheer corporate greed.

Aside from electric cars, there is also the MagLev train. This is an electric train that runs suspended on magnetic rails. There are no wheels or moving parts, so nothing can wear out. In Japan, MagLevs are currently being used and clock over 200 mph on dated technology. Current plans by an organization called ET3 for an intercontinental MagLev system include a train that can travel over 4,000 mph on less than 2% of the power required to fly an airplane the same distance. This is the future of travel.

Conclusion

The Zeitgeist Movement advocates the use of the scientific method for social concerns, not for the monetary profit of corporate business that keeps our society paralyzed in a system where nothing is done if the rich cannot profit from it. We must free ourselves from the economic slavery of the current system before we can evolve to the next level.