Last of the long diatribes:
The elites are self-obsessed psycopaths, so attempting to persuade them with visions of how "good" the future could be for all of humanity (not just themselves) would have no more affect than the pleas of rape victims have on their attackers.
Thus, as with any other hardcore criminal, the only thing to do with these certifiable nutjobs is to arrest, prosecute and imprison them.
As I said above, but you've made the point well. Don't accept anything less than full justice and restitution.
I say a resource based society won't happen overnight as long as TPTB are around as an earlier poster said they would much rather kill us all off or have of the many religious extremists do it for them before we make that evolutionary or should I say revolutionary step is made.I'm also gonna join the Zeitgeist movement.
Generations who have awakened to the truth of their enslavement have died without seeing the joyful day. Many more will die, naturally and by their masters' hands, before we put an end to their despotism. It's a long road I've been on for half a century, and I don't expect I'll live long enough to see them brought before the bar of justice and the world freed from their cruelties. But what's more important than to take up the fight and pass the sword to the next generation.
A resource based society concept already exists, its called communism. Under communism there is no religion, everybody owns and shares everything, the community as a whole works for the betterment of everyone, no monetary system labor is exchanged for goods and modern technology makes communal production and distribution much easier, even on a global scale. This isn't some new and extreme idea, its an old idea repackaged. Maybe you should read Animal Farm by Orwell to see this Venus project in action. And since all Zeitgeist followers like to play the word games lets look at the word Venus and see what it means. Venus the lightbringer i think you guys can follow here. All you guys were set up in the end, they repackaged communism to appeal to todays people and you guys fell right in to it.
Animal Farm was written by a leftist and a student of Karl Marx who fought in the Partido Obero de Unificación Marxista (Workers' Party of Marxist Reunification, the P.O.U.M.), see ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Party_of_Marxist_Unification When Stalin and his followers in Spain declared the P.O.U.M. to be a subversive "Trotskyist" organization, the P.O.U.M. was outlawed and its members arrested. George Orwell (real name Erich Blair) became disillusioned with the political analysis of Marx and Lenin, seeing the lack of success in Russia and elsewhere; and, like some of the leading thinkers of the anti-Stalinist
Trotskyist Fourth International (notably James Burnham), he began to toy with the idea that neither capitalism nor proletarian socialism would be triumphant and a new system which he termed in his book
1984 "The Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism" after James Burnham's "Theory of Managerial Bureaucratism", which itself was based on the now-discredited Berle-Means thesis that capitalists were losing control of their industrial and financial assets to a growing managerial elite. Burnham turned against Marxist in the early 1940s, went to work in the U.S. State Department to carry out anti-communist activities, and became the godfather of the Straussian neo-conservative "movement". You can read George Orwell's reasons for accepting Burnham's theory of Managerial Bureaucratism online at ...
http://www.george-orwell.org/James_Burnham_and_the_Managerial_Revolution/0.html Please note that he talks of the "
sincere" leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, an assessment of these leaders that is reflected in his book
1984. However, this essay is a very misanthropic and pessimistic assessment of the state of the world from the pen of someone schooled in the Fabian falsification of socialism so common among "enlightened" British Imperialists, and just
dead wrong. But it's uncanny how someone can be carried along in the downward career of a once sincere friend of the working class, as was Burnham in his earlier days. Burnham's dossier is readable online at Wikipedia, along with the expected distortions of the facts and ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_BurnhamThere is a fairly good background of the political ideas in
1984 at ...
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/articles/1984-background-info.htmThe point is that
Animal Farm is a fable describing a
counter-revolution in which the leading counter-revolutionary bears a striking resemblance to Stalin.
So why trust Marx, "since his theories lead to totalitarianism". Why, I would reply, should you trust Thomas Jefferson: look where
his theories lead? The theory that all revolutions inevitably go bad earns a pretty penny for an intellectual prostitute of the ruling elite named Crane Brenton, who resides in the Political Science Department of Harvard University (or at least once did).
In my opinion, this film just suggests that their technocracy will be the new religion, the new cult of personality and freedom of religion will be done away with.
The constitution allows for freedom of religion and the founders had varying views of religion. George Washington was very specific, even to prisoners of war, that they always be allowed to practice their individual faiths.
The symtoms of our ailments are fraudulent monetary policy, tyrannical military might, hijacked religions, and corrupt corporatism. The disease is centralized power over individual freedom. The film does not address this disease, it simply attacks the hijacked pillars of society and proposes that a more centralized power stucture built on science and technology will give us everything we need. Without responsibility for ourselves, we will give up our freedoms (what is left of them) to others. I will repeat what Thomas Jefferson (a big believer in science, the statement on my signature are the last words he penned):
"Any government big enough to give you everything you need is powerful enough to take everything you have got."
The Constitution was authored by deists such as Madison and Jefferson, not mainline Christians. Incidentally, although Jefferson was an Epicurean (see my note on his letter to William Short above), that did not necessarily mean that he did not believe in God; Epicureans believe that God existed but has had no further interest in mankind beyond creating the first man and woman (a view common with the deists). George Washington was also a deist. That's why the
Constitution nowhere contains a reference to God and why the
Declaration of Independence uses the term "nature's God" rather than "the God of the Bible". Religious sectarian warfare had decimated Europe in the Thirty Years War, and no one in his right mind wanted that repeated in America.
As for government, all governance will be
local and under the control of everyone in the community once the system of class rule has been done away with. Anyone who proposes any form of government with a greater scope than that (except for a very limited transitional period) is stuck in the past, believing the myth that national governments can be controlled by the citizenry.
What it proposes is a transformation of society. What this film does is get us debating the root causes of our current situation and one possible solution. This is a new debate because technology is growing at such alarming rates.
Think back to when you were a kid. I distinctly remember wondering why every bottle and can was not being recycled. It made no sense as a kid that we would throw these items into a landfill if we had the technology to reuse them. Common sense. Believe it or not, this strikes at the heart of the issue. People don't care! All of our theology, consumerism, and patriotism does not solve the issue of not caring about our fellow man and the planet on which we live. This film suggests that we take that leap from "service to self" and move to "service to others" with technology allowing this change as greed is no longer needed in a world of abundance.
The spicket has been shut off from the world. It's time to get those who shut the spicket off out of power and debate a new way to go forward.
People don't care because they are being miseducated not to care. But what Loungin says is right, I think: the transition will require a leap. Such a leap is only made by way of a throroughgoing social revolution.
And this is especially to the point: "The spicket has been shut off from the world."
Completely inaccurate to what the film's message was.
Religion:1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
Using technology for the good of all mankind while at the same time letting the ancient ways go by the wayside in favor of an entirely new paradigm is NOT the worship of technology. What AJ showed in the final chapter of Endgame was the wore [he means 'worst'] case scenario with the elites ruling in classic society structures. ZA shows us that if we are willing to re-educate ourselves and do away with old superstitions, the world can be a better place.
I consider myself a true materialist and will hold up my interpretation of Marxism with anyone's, but I do think there will always be a place for religion. Religion is more than just superstition. It shares with art, music, and poetry the desire to see beyond our present grasp through the strictly rational. In its best moments it uses the emotions to free our imaginations. "A revolution without dancing is not worth having," as the character "V" says in the film bearing his name. And, as I once told someone who bemoaned the popularity of the images of leprechauns, an Ireland without leprechauns isn't really my idea of Ireland. Furthermore, religions are inextricably tied to national cultures: to kill the one risks the death of the other.
No this is not "new news" to me. I'm merely suggesting that what ZA presents is NOT technology as the new religion. People are still stuck in a thought process and paradigm that is thousands of years old and has gotten us no farther than modern tribalism, even with the introduction of technology over the past 100+ years. Many people in the truth movement dont want to hear anything like that because it does away with long held belief systems and to change that is threatening to them.
"I don't think science has improved on it very much," as William Jennings Bryan is made to say of the act of "begatting" in the film
Inherit the Wind. People will have to learn what is worth saving about their religious beliefs. Some religious concepts are just pre-scientific baggage and nothing more. But other concepts celebrate the infinite glory of nature and the unfathomable depths of the human spirit. Science is glorious, too; but let people find their own paths to the truth. On the other hand, it shouldn't bother an honest man or woman to know the facts of history even when it causes him or her to question some of things he or she has been taught, as the first part of Zeitgeist must undoubtedly do for many. Many will discover a resonance with the universe in religion's debt to early attempts to understand the physical heavens. Jesus - whether mythical figure or historical personage - spoke in parables and appealed directly to the conscience in a way that scientific theory cannot. Personally, I was never really that much moved by Carl Sagan when he told us that "we are all star stuff".
Yet, but advancing technology without first asserting our rightful control over government = putting the cart before the horse.
And we can't assert our rightful control over government so long as the masses insist on letting others do all their "thinking" for them.
[W]e must focus not just on the volume of our message, but on its clarity, its accuracy, and its ability to inspire people to do their own thinking and research, and to be their own leaders.
Unfortunately, this is a sorrowful fact of human nature. Most people are not moved by reason because they are not far-sighted enough. They learn more by doing. People will be revolutionized by participating in revolutionary acts. This will mean that many will suffer and die at the hands of reactionaries because they failed to learn from the struggles of the past through documents and through the teachings of experienced leaders. Eventually they will learn to be their
own leaders, but it will be a painful process.
And if we only believe in ourselves who needs the truth movement? You are your own truth and you can rape, plunder and pillage as much as you want because it doesn't matter. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"-Alister Crowley
People don't by nature rape, plunder, and pillage one another. That such things occur is the result of unreasoning fear and prejudice (in the case of rape, prejudice against women). Such undesirable qualities are learned, not inherited. And all the laws of Moses never stopped a Christian from killing his fellow Christian if he was taught to fear him.
God/Religion should be a companion not a crutch.
Well said. This is one of the fundamental messages of Jesus. That's why he taught that God is love and forgiveness.
Technology - could eliminate need for money (e.g. can manufacture all products, no sweat shops etc etc etc)
> But energy corporations' corruption and greed suppressing such technology, and the energy needed to power it.
> 90% of all jobs could be eliminated, freeing people from servitude
2.... > crimes could be stopped, because no financial incentive to do so [that is, to commit crimes]
3.... > education would no longer be suppressed (due to there being no financial incentive)
>> a smarter world would make everyone's lives better
4.... > the state no longer suppresses people (as said, no laws etc)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
myths (perpetrated by the establishment to support the financial system)
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Myth) People would just laze about all day and people would in the long run become completely stupid?
Truth) People would become hugely creative and start to give away stuff and help everyone else
>> in fact, education would thrive and everyone's world would be better (see pt3 above)
Under the rule of capital 90% of jobs are already being eliminated in some areas, freeing people to
starve. The Myth versus Truth statement by Sub-X gets to the point of how people are driven to unnatural acts (here their own self-enslavement) by fear and prejudice. We are taught by the system that we are lower than animals - having no natural sense of curiosity and no natural desire to express ourselves in creative work. Even animals enjoy learning new things and exploring new avenues. Even animals find pleasure in helping their companions. How much moreso human beings when freed of their fears and prejudices.
Robots were impied, what else would do our work for us? Slave labor maybe. Utopia's are a great dream but that is all they are, dreams. Again I push this issue, to see this society in action read Animal Farm. That was a pure resource based society, where everyone works together for the common good. But as in the book you still need leaders.
Robots aren't a dream for the thousands of factory workers who have been made
redundant by them: they're a
nightmare! Just imagine: a device that frees human beings from the drudgery of repetitious and uncreative work on the assembly line, and it's regarded as a
threat? What's wrong with this picture?
The point of
Animal Farm is that a liberated farmyard of animals is brought under the tyranny of an agent of the farmers. They are working indirectly for the farmers (Orwell's symbol for the capitalists of the unliberated "farms") under the usurped leadership of the pig named "Napoleon" (Orwell's symbol for Stalin, whom he characterized elsewhere as a Bonapartist). The analysis of Stalinist Russia, using the mechanism of a fable, parallels Leon Trotsky's characterization of the situation as a "Revolution Betrayed" (Trotsky appeared in Orwell's 1984 as Emmanuel Goldstein, exposing the betrayal of the "Ingsoc" revolution under Big Brother and hunted down there as "Snowball" is hunted in
Animal Farm). Orwell (real name Eric Blair) was not an anti-communist: he was an anti-
Stalinist, and clearly - if you assume that he sympathized with the majority of the farm animals and viewed the farmers as the outside enemy - an
anti-capitalist.
I think they are proposing a "Brave New World" kind of Utopia (which I also find highly disturbing). But the reality would seem to be some combination of Animal Farm, 1984, and Brazil (they all end up this way, just the nature of feudalistic control).
But I do recommend that everyone see this film.
We
already have a
Brave New World and a
Brazil, and Eastern Europe just lived through an
Animal Farm (which is alive and well in China). We are now all facing a tri-partite
1984 world, but that's if you agree with the Managerial Bureaucratism/Oligarchical Collectivism thesis of Burnham and Orwell. But it's not
feudalistic control: the bourgeois (i.e., capitalist) revolutions of Europe and Asia overthrew feudalism a century ago. By the way, Alex calls 'bourgeois' a "commie word", but ignores the fact that the American colonies were ruled at the time of the Revolution in each State by a "house of burgesses": 'burgess' being nothing more nor less that the English equivalent of the French word "bourgeois". The burgesses (Dutch and German word "burger") were the merchants and leading slaveholders who controlled the early American economy as stand-ins for the king of England and later led the revolt against him. A point could be made that slaveholding burgesses such as Jefferson and Washington
were, in fact, feudal lords; but the U.S. Civil War put an end to the last of those (at least in most respects).
Having free energy would be nice. And it would go along way to enhancing our life style. But having technology do our work for us was stated in the movie. They've arleady developed robot sweepers for your house that goes around and sweeps every couple of hours or so.
It wouldn't go
any way toward enhancing your life style, assuming you were still alive. You would be jobless and homeless along with all the maid-service workers who had been made redundant by the robot floor sweepers. Assuming you could get occasional day-labor work, it would take you twenty years of scrimping on meals to save enough money to buy a discount model of one of the robot floor sweepers that the super-rich could buy with pocket change. Sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings!
The technology stuff looked great and I am sure that part of the game is indeed to suppress these technologies playing a full part in our world bringing resources and freedom to people, and the maglev trains sound wonderful, i want that stuff in our world, way better than oil based transport.
really we needed more solutions for how we get on the road to there, how we end the control of the elites and their psycopathic rule and the film did not offer much in that respect.
Well said, Biggs. And it's true that the film did
not offer much in the way of getting from here to there and bringing the masses of ordinary people along. I don't think the capitalist masters have a great deal of interest in ordinary wageslaves' enjoying a technological paradise of luxury. Many people think that the capitalist ruling class is bound by some unwritten code to provide a safe and happy life for the multitude of ordinary, hard-working, and honest people who never have a bad thought about them. Mystics have searched the holy of holies of every church, synagogue, and mosque for this unwritten code and have failed so far to turn it up.
he says get rid of the monetary-ist system, not the medium of exchange. im a little bemused at how people came away from that believing we should just get rid of money all together, true, money as we know it might be obsolete, but it is communist dogma to suggest doing away with all money.
I'm equally bemused. But I challenge you to find in any writings of Karl Marx or his followers the suggestion that money should be done away with, any more than they suggest that boats can navigate without water.
... sounds like Marxism/Communism, and we all knew how well that worked, and that Marx's Communist Manifesto was a plagiarised version of Adam Weishaupt's doctrine, AKA the founder of the Illuminati)[/li]
[li]The old man badmouthing religion as the root of all evil. Again, I'm not religious, but I think that atheism is equally as destructive as religion.[/li][/list]
Adam Weishaupt's supposed doctrine (
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) was a production of the Czarist secret police and has long ago been proven to be such. It was manufactured to split the workers' movement by planting the seeds of anti-semitism. An old trick of the feudal monarchists.
Alex basically called Zeitgeist Addendum a communist propaganda film.
I think there may have been a tinge of that; but I think, more accurately, what Alex was saying was that it's a propaganda film of the global collectivists of the Rockefeller-Bilderburg variety. As the cunning scoundrel Napoleon once remarked, "From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step," meaning that some things may appear to be the same but the difference lies in the details. Global fraternity on a voluntary basis: good. Global totalitarianism under a banking hierarchy: bad. I've come to expect more enlightened analyses from Alex the longer I listen to him. Nuances that he may have missed in the past are hardly ever passed over in his recent offerings.
The bottom line, as I
mentioned previously, is that if we don't first reassert our rightful control over government, advances in technology will merely be used to
enslave us even further, not "free" us.
Technology is neutral, however, so if we did assert said control, and used that control to get urgently needed economic and electoral reforms implemented,
then technology would become a blessing to humanity rather than a curse, and the vision of Henry George would finally become a reality:
----------------------------------------But it may be said, to banish want and the fear of want, would be to destroy the stimulus to exertion; men would become simply idlers, and such a happy state of general comfort and content would be the death of progress. This is the old slaveholders' argument, that men can be driven to labor only with the lash. Nothing is more untrue.
Want might be banished, but desire would remain. Man is the unsatisfied animal. He has but begun to explore, and the universe lies before him. Each step that he takes opens new vistas and kindles new desires. He is the constructive animal; he builds, he improves, he invents, and puts together, and the greater the thing he does, the greater the thing he wants to do. He is more than an animal.
There is no such thing as the pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Our very amusements amuse only as they are, or simulate, the learning or the doing of something. The moment they cease to appeal either to our inquisitive or to our constructive powers, they cease to amuse. Shut a man up, and deny him employment, and he must either die or go mad.
It is not labor in itself that is repugnant to man; it is not the natural necessity for exertion which is a curse. It is only labor which produces nothing—exertion of which he cannot see the results. To toil day after day, and yet get but the necessaries of life, this is indeed hard; it is like the infernal punishment of compelling a man to pump lest he be drowned, or to trudge on a treadmill lest he be crushed. But, released from this necessity, men would but work the harder and the better, for then they would work as their inclinations led them; then would they seem to be really doing something for themselves or for others.
The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power, and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for its own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want was abolished, work of this sort would be enormously increased.
---------------------------------------------------- I'm 100% with what Geolibertarian is saying. I have a copy of Henry George's
Progress and Poverty in my library. To me, he sounds more like a Marxist than a libertarian. Marx's Capital was not published in English until the late 1880s, as I remember. The Wikipedia (too often serving the interests of the ruling class by disseminating false information) says that George and Marx were antagonists, but I found this article in the Irish press:
"The socialist movement in Belfast dates from the same period as that in Dublin. A Christian socialist Revd. J. Bruce Wallace was active in the 1880's and brought the radical USA flat taxer [sic] Henry George to the Ulster Hall in 1884. [Note: a correction by the editors stated that this term was incorrect: that George proposed a
single land tax and not a "flat tax"]
I found an actual polemic by Karl Marx against Henry George's land value tax. I was indeed on orthodox Marxist grounds in my earlier remarks in this long post, saying that the land value tax might serve as a transitional measure: Marx agreed with this idea. Here is some of what Marx said:
"Theoretically the man [Henry George*] is utterly backward! He understands nothing about the nature of surplus value and so wanders about in speculations which follow the English model but have now been superseded even among the English, about the different portions of surplus value to which independent existence is attributed - about the relations of profit, rent, interest, etc. His fundamental dogma is that everything would be all right if ground rent were paid to the state. (You will find payment of this kind among the transitional measures included in the
Communist Manifesto too.) This idea originally belonged to the bourgeois economists [as did a great deal of Marx's economics --vladimir]; it was first put forward (apart from a similar demand at the end of the eighteenth century) by the earliest radical followers of Ricardo [Ricardo's work is the source of Marx's a lot of economic theories --vladimir], soon after his death. ...This is a frank expression of the hatred which the industrial capitalist dedicates to the landed proprietor, who seems to him a useless and superfluous element in the general total of bourgeois production.'
"We ourselves, as I have already mentioned, adopted this appropriation of ground rent by the state among numerous other transitional measures, which, as we also remarked in the Manifesto, are and must be contradictory in themselves."
I think Marx, uncharacteristically, goes a bit overboard here. A transitional period is by its nature a period in which contradictions remain unresolved. And George's land tax is to some extent equally a tax on industrial property as on farming property. His objection to the idea that George's tax would still be paid to the state is well-taken, though. It is, in the end, a partial solution that does not move society beyond the rule of the bourgeois (i.e., the capitalists).
Final Word in this Posting
I apologize for making the posting so long. At the same time, I apologize to those who wrote later postings and that I had to stop at some point and address the very rich and fruitful debate that had already gone on. The discussion to this point, in my opinion, has served as a positive reflection on the Prison Planet Forum. I think the great majority have grasped the issues that surround the Zeitgeist Addendum. I was especially delighted to find that I share so many of the opinions of senior and hero members of the Forum. I hope that some of my remarks have broadened the outlooks of those with whom I generally agreed but have taken to task on minor points.
