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What’s ironic is that all of this actually makes me entertain the idea of a Christian God – because all of these people are so thoroughly Anti-Christian, anti-Jesus’s message, that they are in a way fulfilling prophecy. It’s eerie.

Because I like mixing up right wing Christianity and the UFO issue, this video also caught my attention, and it’s troubling for similar reasons.

It’s the same message: anyone putting forth ideas to improve society should be feared. Progress is enslavement. It’s what was so ridiculous about Alex Jones’s freakout about DMT. Psychedelics, UFOs, technology – they’re all part of the plan to enslave us. The only way to be free of the plan, then, is to sit still and do nothing. But wait – that actually sounds like a kind of enslavement.

So there is no difference between right wing Christian conspiracy theorizing and New World Order conspiracy theorizing. One of the guys in the Maddow video actually mentions the Illuminati. I guess the main difference is that NWO conspiracy theorists do hate the entire system, Republican and Democrat, whereas the Christian right sides with one party. But they both encourage orthodoxy and fear progress. If conspiracy theorists were really free thinkers, they’d be as afraid of the theory as they are of the conspiracy.

There is “Zeigeist,” too, which questions the origin of Christianity AND talks about NWO paranoia. So it’s possible to have a very reasonable paranoia about government, secrecy, corporate welfare, and everything else that’s broken in the system. But Alex Jones criticizes “Zeitgeist” for being “part of the conspiracy” too. The moral: stay away from Alex Jones, there’s limited breathing room between him and the Christian right.

I found the Disclosure video on the Secret Sun Facebook page. Christopher Knowles captions:

Nice art disguising rank stupidity in the text. If conspiranoia is so rebel and UFOs are just NWO agitprop why is UFO Hunters off the air but Alex Jones and Glenn Beck and Conspiracy Theory still on? Why are we seeing nothing but evil alien stuff on TV and in the movies? People get brainwashed by alt-media and pretend they’re free thinkers- it would funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

An argument can be made that the evil alien stuff is actually playing into the whole message of the video. When aliens come, people will be scared to death because that’s all they’ve seen in popular media. Therefore they’ll need to be easily controlled. Trouble is, people are so reactionary that even if an alien race was 100% benevolent, a large faction of people would see them as the Anti-Christ – and probably a lot of non-religious people might be jarred enough to entertain that thought as well.

So disclosure just isn’t going to happen: people are too crazy. So crazy that if disclosure happened, there would likely have to be some kind of advanced control system in place to avoid a total planetary meltdown.

Wait, that means Alex Jones might be right. Dammit.

Watched this. Strangely, it made me lighten up a bit about our current situation, even if it’s pointing out that we’re heading towards collapse. I let the regressive elements in the country get under my skin – but in a country that’s regressing, this sort of behavior is inevitable. Don’t be surprised by the unsurprising. Still, it has some of the same problems I had with Daniel Pinchbeck’s latest book – pinpointing how fucked up our system is without covering exactly how a new system could be put in place. Halfway through, Peter Joseph says (paraphrasing), “Imagine a planet Earth with nothing on it.” Trouble is we have an Earth with a lot on it. He shows a picture of New York City and then the more-workable circular city of the Venus Project.

That’s fine – but New York City exists. 12 million people exist in that city, and they’re not going away. The challenge is not to create new cities out of thin air, but to fix the infrastructure we’ve already got – and “Moving Forward” doesn’t mention how this might be accomplished. I was hoping the title “Moving Forward” suggested that the new film was going to offer practical ideas about how to transition out of the current system, but it doesn’t – it mainly rehashes the resource-based economy ideas of “Addendum,” which are laudable, but only half the story.

Yes, it may be an impossible task to blueprint how to transition 8 billion people to a new system – or even 300 million people in the U.S. – but at least broach the subject. Otherwise, it really seems like a blueprint for a city after the collapse, when people finally say, “This shit has to end.” Pinchbeck’s book had the same problem – how do you deal with the Tea Party, for example, who see a Democratic administration as “tyranny,” only to want to replace it with a more-tyrannical version of free market fundamentalism. You can point to Egypt as an example of mostly non-violent resistance that topples a government, but if the Tea Party was in charge of such a thing, we’d get a Michelle Bachmann government. The jury’s still out on Egypt, which could be replaced by a military junta or religious regime. Revolution in a regressive society could just lead to more regression.

Later, Joseph says that the banks could be dismantled “with no recourse.” I’m not an economist – I can barely get it together to do my taxes – but my guess is that there is some truth to “too big to fail.” Even if we suddenly declared money meaningless and all debts absolved, there would be unbelievable turmoil unless there was a very strict apparatus in place. And unfortunately, that “strict apparatus” would probably have to mean military enforcement – because how do you quell the millions of people who think Obama is a tyrant and Sarah Palin isn’t.

Again, this is an impossible task – and Joseph’s doing his part by making a movie such as this, which has a million views a week after it was released. But people will continue to call this “Utopianism” (as he mentions in the movie) if it doesn’t cover these very real-world concerns. It’s a movie on the one hand about our dystopia, and on the other a possible utopia, without exactly covering how you transition from one to the other, short of saying, “This needs to be done.”

It has come to my attention that various mainstream news organizations are beginning to run an association between my 2007 performance piece/film, “Zeitgeist: The Movie” and the tragic murders conducted by an extremely troubled young man in Tucson, Arizona. They are also slowly beginning to bleed the obvious line between my 2007 documentary work, my film series as a whole and The Zeitgeist Movement, which I am the founder. Frankly, I find this isolating, growing association tremendously irresponsible on the part of ABC, NBC and their affiliates – further reflecting the disingenuous nature of the America Media Establishment today.

Make no mistake: The Social System is to blame for the rampage of Jared Loughner – not some famous online documentary which is known as the most viewed documentary of all time in internet history. Are the other 200 million people who have seen the film also preparing for murder sprees? I think not.

Really, it’s a similar argument being made be Sarah Palin and the right.  Her rhetoric didn’t cause the shootings.  Except there’s a distinct difference between speculation in a viral video and the rhetoric of a former vice presidential candidate who has a much different kind of influence.   In short, it’s more dangerous and needs to be called out.

Andrew Sullivan, who’s been pretty right on about this whole affair, I think gets it wrong on this issue:

9/11 Truthers are as ubiquitous on the far right as the far left, where government conspiracy theories thrive. But to a great extent, only the far right is obsessed with the central banking system.

The problem here is that it is lumping all conspiratorial rhetoric into the same boat – the mainstream right isn’t exactly calling out the Fed, except for the Ron Paul fringe.  However, Kucinich has also called out the Fed, as has Michael Moore in “Capitalism: A Love Story.”  But what Sullivan is doing is equating people who question the central banking system on the same level as those who call Obama a Marxist, and this just isn’t the case.

Paranoia about our currency (or the debt system as outlined in “Zeitgeist”)  isn’t really part of the mainstream dialogue.  And regardless, there is a difference between something that is conveyed in an underground movie like “Zeitgeist” and conspiratorial language coming out of the mouth of a major politician.  If a conspiracy theory is spouted by the likes of Glenn Beck and others in the mainstream media, this is far more legitimized than a video that’s spread virally on Youtube.  Just as Glenn Beck’s lunacy is justified by the millions of dollars he’s making, his listeners own paranoia is legitimized by Glenn Beck’s success.

Before you think I’m making an equivalency between Beck and “Zeitgeist,” I’m not.  The problem with the right’s rhetoric is how inaccurate it’s been – such as calling a drive to improve health care “tyranny.”  It’s this kind of overstatement that can be the most damaging, as it’s totally unhinged and will speak particularly to unhinged people.  And “socialism,” “tyranny”, etc. is the Republican party line. There’s a danger in making such broad inaccurate proclamations, especially since it deflects from very real problems we do have – such as the pervasive influence of corporate industry over government: something that Republicans enable while decrying “tyranny.”

This type of rhetoric on the right is separate from the message of a film like “Zeitgeist” – which has the major message: question the government, question dominant thought.  At its core, it’s an anti-fundamentalist movie, unlike the hard right, which encourages fundamentalism.  There are certainly some dubious things in the series, but really it’s a documentary, a work of art, which has different criteria than someone who’s running for office. On balance, “question the government” is a good message, even if it paints a scary portrait of where we’ve come.

But these are scary times – there’s no getting around that.  Republican hysteria is a reaction to that, but they’re just obsessing about the wrong things and very often outright lying.  When this lying becomes part of the political establishment, there’s a problem.  But it would also be progress if politicians were more open about the dangers of our current financial system, environmental damage, the military industrial complex, etc.  Because mainstream politicians will not talk about the true state of affairs there’s an opening for a movie like”Zeitgeist.”  Unfortunately, there’s also an opening for liars like Beck to stir people up based on the premise that the Democrats are at fault – as if our problems are that one-sided.

“Zeitgeist” too is full of hyperbole – I wish it would totally excise the section where it talks about people being microchipped for the New World Order.  This part just seems like total baseless paranoia.  But again, paranoia from an independent filmmaker is far different from Sarah Palin suddenly saying “Obama wants to implant microchips.”  For one thing, it’s sending paranoia only towards the Democratic party – but more importantly, everything Sarah Palin says is amplified by the mainstream, thereby legitimizing it.

Equating the influence of far right conspiracy theory with general hysteria in the political spectrum – as Andrew Sullivan has done – is to suggest we can never ask these questions about government, as if fringe ideas are all equally unhinged.  In other words, all conspiracy theorizing is as stupid and dangerous as Sarah Palin’s gun sight map.  It’s not – conspiracies happen and don’t often get the attention they deserve.  Just as – ironically – Sarah Palin’s map or Sharron Angle’s “second amendment remedies” comment didn’t get enough attention at the time.  The mainstream media ignores these very real dangers in the quest to maintain the status quo.  To be status-quo questioning is not to be a lunatic.

I guess I’m sort of feeling the heat, as I was grateful that Palin was being called on her bullshit as this story first unfolded, and now see the light being shone on things like “Zeitgeist” or Philip K. Dick – as if anyone who questions reality is crazy rather than a visionary.  It’s not unstable to question reality, it’s unstable to have no empathy, as is the case with Loughner – clearly a total lunatic.

This madness is only going to continue if we keep operating like this.  Really, there does need to be a “revolution” to change how society and government operates.  Unfortunately, an actual revolution would just look like a bunch of Loughners over and over again – a bunch of random, senseless killings.  A revolution of ideas needs to happen.  If you look at how “Zeitgeist” is portrayed in the Daily Beast, they refer to the movie as “attacking” Christianity.  That’s one perspective, but “questioning” would be just as accurate.  There’s justifiable anger in how one religion has dominated this country.  One does not have to be overly aggressive to think that – in fact, it’s healthy.

But so long as the mainstream is so intent on avoiding questioning itself, and instead replaces it with the baseless anger of the Tea Party, it’ll just amount to people screaming at each other, and, occasionally, killing each other.  The Tea Party are totally justified in their anger, they’re just directing it towards the wrong issues.  Anger is not the problem, violence is the problem, as well as rage based on misinformation. The Loughner story is only half about the shootings – the other half is the reaction to the shootings and how people went into their corners as if we’re in the middle of an ideological war.

Put that all together, and this isn’t an indictment of “Zeitgeist” or Dickian fiction – but of the mainstream: the news and politicians who don’t address the state of affairs with sobriety, or even rationality.  In that climate, it should come as no great surprise that the country is slowly losing its mind.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward | Official Trailer- [ Extended ] from ZeitgeistMovie.com on Vimeo.

SYNOPSIS: Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy.”

Watched this. Sort of another “Zeitgeist,” except it’s fairly right wing (as opposed to Libertarian) and full of contradictions. The elite are pagans out to create a world that worships the earth so the answer is…paganism. A strange mixture of New Age spirituality and right wing rhetoric. Has this alarmingly stupid sentence: “Global Warming is a fallacy.” Has a Glenn Beck voice over. Pro-gun to save us from “tyranny.”

Put all that together and it sounds fairly stupid. But it does have some interesting quotes and footage and I’m always impressed by people who put together these comprehensive anti-establishment docs. Just need to be able to sift through it.

I couldn’t make it through the sequel.

Signs of looming trouble began in New York in mid-March. We were there to meet up again with Jacque Fresco (director of The Venus Project) along with his partner Roxanne Meadows. They were appearing at the annual Z-Day event (part of the Zeitgeist Movement). Now, up until this point we had been working very closely with Jacque. Indeed, we had lined him up to be the first main ‘actor’ in Earth 2.0. We wanted to him to delineate the core principles of The Venus Project such as the sharing of the Earth’s resources. In fact, the idea has been to focus one section of Earth 2.0 on the notion of sharing and all that this implies.

The trouble began one morning over breakfast. As we sat and talked in a 71^st Street restaurant, a background ‘issue’ came to the fore once more. Basically, Jacque and Roxanne do not like metaphysics. Anything spiritual or pertaining to the expansion of consciousness is anathema to The Venus Project. They even refer to popular spiritual ideas as “verbal masturbation”.

I’m part of a Zeitgeist email list and I wrote this:

This is disappointing and stupidly self-defeating.  You want to invite in people with reality-changing ideas, and abolishing spirituality sounds more like a fascist state than progress.

A comment there says: “That sucks. Now you guys will be lucky to get Zeitgeist Movement support. Too bad you felt you had to depart from science onto some new-age tangent. Be advised: Discussing non-falsifiable hypotheses of consciousness as “spirit” removes credulity from the entire premise. Also, it appears that you speak with unqualified authority on subjective topics of “self-knowledge(information)” which cannot be considered knowledge or truth in a scientific sense. No wonder TVP cut you off.”

This isn’t about being “true to what you think” it’s about telling people what to think and what’s permissible.  The “new age tangent” is not valueless – and I’m not a person who’s sitting here clutching my crystals, I just think ideas about spirituality and science are open-ended, given our current limited perception.  Science is changing and evolving so basing the VP purely on today’s science is myopic.  Psychedelic research, for one, could be used as a different kind of microscope – the potential to make the “spirit world” empirically validated.  Not saying that’s a given, but to close the door on the possibility of these ideas shuts the door on the potential for knowledge – and if Zeitgeist is about anything, it’s about opening your mind to new ideas.

Who wants to live in a world like they propose… it’s f***** up!!

I’ve written here before that these two movements seem weirdly and unnecessarily at odds with each other.  One group wants to elevate consciousness via spiritual means, one wants to elevate society via technological means.  Really, the latter could lead to the former: “This is what The Venus Project is all about – directing our technology and resources toward the positive, for the maximum benefit of people and planet and seeking out new ways of thinking and living that emphasize and celebrate the vast potential of the human spirit. We have the tools at hand to design – and build – a future that is worthy of the human potential.”  Great idea, doubtlessly.  Trouble is, people being as fucked up as they are, the Venus Project could very well lead to a fascistic Brave New World, and it does tend to overlook the human capacity to mess with each other.

Here’s the banner for the Venus Project, which has some problems:

Perhaps the reason some people don’t take something like the Venus Project seriously is because it does seem heavily quixotic, a little too good to be true.  Saying there will be “no crime” is a bit like saying there will be “no sexual frustration.”  While it’s of course true that crime goes up due to economic factors, those aren’t the only factors.  Humans are born with aggression, so it is beyond unrealistic to think that suddenly humans are going to shed all of their destructive tendencies just because they don’t have to slave at a 40-hour job, or suffer through unemployment.  People mess with each other out of boredom as much as out of economic necessity.

Short of creating a new Soma which anesthetizes people’s darker instincts, people will more than likely find ways to combat each other.  Aggression is normal.  To say otherwise may be fostering repression.

Recently, I linked to a quote by David Foster Wallace that I don’t entirely agree with:

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

I agree with it, I just don’t think it’s a problem.  Many a progress has been made out of this sense of self-loathing.  You can never strive to be better if you don’t in some way hate the part of you that’s incomplete.  In short – our darker instincts sometimes lead to progress.  What’s missing from something like the Venus Project is this very natural part of human nature.  Though Zeitgeist and the Venus Project are right about how the profit motive is a destructive force, it does not cover human’s natural desire for competition that’s not built merely into a capitalist system.  It’s who we are and it’s a large part of how we succeed.  Self-hate might be a destructive impulse, but it can also be the root of creativity.

Jacque Fresco, the VP’s designer, says he’s not a Utopian, but I don’t see how, that’s what it is:

Manly P. Hall writes in The Secret Destiny of America:

Our world is ruled by inflexible laws which con­trol not only the motions of the heavenly bodies, but the consequences of human conduct.  These Uni­versal motions, interpreted politically, are impelling human society out of a state of autocracy and tyran­ny to democracy and freedom.  This motion is inevitable, for the growth of humans is a gradual development of mind over matter, and the motion itself represents the natural and reasonable unfold­ment of the potentials within human character.

Those who attempt to resist this motion destroy themselves.  To cooperate with this motion, and to assist Nature in every possible way to the accom­plishment of its inevitable purpose, is to survive.

Our nature is dark as well as light – until we become the eternal light beings wished for by the Evolver Project.  Not to be overly dismissive, but it’s more likely that we remake society along the lines of something like the Venus Project than we all collectively evolve – as much as I’d like that to be true.  But the Venus Project would at least have to be a hybridization of what we have now, not some sudden jolt into peaceful coexistence.  Over time, there would be social conditioning in the sense that people’s incessant aggravation wouldn’t be passed on to their children year after year.  Eventually, people would mellow out – but that would take many generations, and mellowing out doesn’t mean being totally devoid of passion.

There’s also the unresolved issue that it would take billions of dollars to build something like the Venus utopia – the very thing the Venus Project wants to alleviate.  That’s a tragic part of this – if there really was going to be a future city, a Bill Gates would have to get involved.  That, or today’s cities would have to crumble to dust and be rebuilt as something better.  Once again, that’s probably even more likely than our sudden world-saving evolution.

More on the Venus Project:

To sum up the video – it’s saying that Zeitgeist, which is anti-Christian, advocates a New Age New World Order in which Christianity is supplanted, even as the film attacks the New World Order which is coming through globalization. So Peter Joseph is an agent of the New Age agenda, even if he also warns against the NWO. God, I love this stuff. The New World Order is the new apocalypse, with everyone having a theory about how and when it’s going to arise (including myself, albeit in fiction).

In a recent video, Darryl Sloan talks about the occult symbolism in the U.S. and the U.K., such as the dollar bill and the MI5 logo, and wonders if that means there’s an occult influence in government.  It should be mentioned that just because MI5 or the Information Awareness Office uses occult symbolism does not mean they’re run on occult principles.  It’s just that occult symbolism has become a common motif.  Even so, the Information Awareness Office symbol is absurd:

I heard more than one person say, “Wait, that’s real? I thought it was a joke.”  The symbol is ridiculous on so many levels. If they are not really occult practitioners, how could they be so stupid as to not know what sort of paranoia this would inspire?  The fact is they had to know, which is enough to make you paranoid for other reasons – even if they aren’t practicing occultists, they are at least in the practice of inspiring paranoia.  They’ve discontinued the logo, with this explanation:

DARPA offices have traditionally designed and adopted logos. However. because the IAO logo has become a lightning rod and is needlessly diverting time and attention from the critical tasks of executing that office’s mission effectively and openly, we have decided to discontinue the use of the original logo.

For the record, the IAO logo was designed to convey the mission of that office; i.e., to imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate, and transition information technologies, components, and prototype, closed-loop information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption, national security warning, and national security decision making. On an elemental level, the logo is the representation of the office acronym (IAO) the eye above the pyramid represents “I” the pyramid represents “A,” and the globe represents “O.” In the detail, the eye scans the globe for evidence of terrorist planning and is focused on the part of the world that was the source of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “Scientia est polentia” means “Knowledge is power.” With the enabling technologies being developed by the office, the United States will be empowered to implement operational systems to thwart terrorist attacks like those of September 11, 2001.

The unfinished pyramid and the eye depicted in the logo were taken directly from the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States of America (for a history of the seal, see http://www.heraldica.org/topics/usa/usheroff.htm). Both sides of the seal also appear on the back of the U.S. $1 bill.

It may just be that the person who designed the logo is a total idiot with no sense of perspective or history.  When considering the human race, that explanation is just as likely as something nefarious.

Meanwhile, there’s outrage about the Missile Defense logo looking like the Obama symbol from the election and the crescent and star of the flag of Islam:

People on the left are mocking this – which it deserves – but also there’s no denying that it looks similar to the Obama symbol.  And if anything it’s probably better politics if they don’t look alike, given the right’s proclivity for total paranoia.  There’s nothing to infer about the Information Awareness Office logo – that’s occult symbolism without having to interpret it.  More evidence that the justified paranoia about the Bush administration has morphed into the less justified paranoia of the right.   It points out, though, that if Obama was running an Islamist plot inside the American government, why would he be so obvious about it?  He wouldn’t – and the same concept could hold true for the Information Awareness Office.   In the end, it turns out that the Missile Defense logo was designed during the Bush Administration. Of course, that’s what they would want you to think.

I responded to Darryl Sloan’s post by saying,

Here’s the Secret Teaching of All Ages:

Manly Palmer Hall – The Secret Teachings of All Ages

The retreat idea fell apart due to financial problems and there’s a long discussion on the site between Rob from the Chimbre retreat, Reality Sandwichers, and Daniel Pinchbeck about the mix between spirituality and commerce.  Really, think this thread is going to be referenced down the line regarding the problems of mixing God and money in any form – it’s not just a problem for Christian mega-churches. After a lot of back and forth and suspicion, Pinchbeck weighs in:

Since starting Evolver, we have been struggling with the question of how to finance this operation. Somebody like Rob, who comes out of the Wall Street world but discovered his soul through ayahuasca, is exactly our dream candidate for an investor and ally. We dearly wanted to work with him because we could see that he brought in a business force and acumen that we, who started this venture, tend to lack….

I still really love Rob and believe he means to do good for the world. However I also believe that the new spirit he discovered through ayahuasca is currently warring with the old Rob who made a fortune through the Wall Street vulture-fest. During our negotiations, I felt that he betrayed my trust and went back on his word. I asked him in emails if he felt I had betrayed his trust, and he admitted he did not. For me, I kind of agree with Don Juan that a man’s word is the only thing he really has. When I felt Rob was reneging in his initial offer to us about Chimbre, at the same time he seemed to be using all sorts of cunning and nasty negotiating tactics around Evolver, I felt that we also shouldn’t be involved with retreats supported by such an energy.

As a friend says, “It’s tragicomic. A psychedelia pillow-fight showdown. These are the progenitors of a ‘new consciousness’? Henry, we’re so screwed.”

Really fascinating to see people who are looking for enlightenment devolve into bickering and infighting.  I found this on Youtube, which is fairly enlightening about Rob, the guy behind the disagreement. At 1:35, there’s a pretty revealing anecdote about his volatility. Don’t want to denigrate him totally, as I don’t know the guy, but Pinchbeck’s made a recent comment about how people can have their mind opened by something like Ayahuasca and think the work’s over – they’re enlightened, they’ve been to the other side, they’re priests. But real-world human instincts aren’t shed that easily.

The two most compelling movements I see right now are the Zeitgeist Movement and Evolver & Daniel Pinchbeck’s work regarding a possible change in consciousness.  The Zeitgeist movement is anti-religion, and even anti-God, as the purpose of part one of Zeitgeist is to show how Christianity and other religions have a basis in sun worship, and that’s it, just worship of this object that leads to photosynthesis and creates life on the planet.  Pinchbeck would argue, I imagine, that the sun’s relationship to the earth is as spiritual as it is physical – ala his essay in Toward 2012 about Cosmos and Psyche.

A merging of the two movements would be interesting.  Zeitgeist’s plan seems to be to start a test society somewhere to prove a new economy could work – on his radio show, Peter Joseph, the filmmaker, mentions Finland as a possible starting point. An aside – he calls the integration of Zeitgeist into a real-world framework “Phase III,” which is what I call “The New City” in The American Book of the Dead, when a new community starts after WW III is over.

Could the two movements co-exist – a community of psychonauts and a community of atheistic libertarians?  The real question is how successful any new community could be, given the proclivity for power grabs even by people who are supposedly enlightened.  Not to be too pessimistic, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work to make any new revolution effective.  If a planet of 8 billion people is already not on board with these sorts of ideas, how is it going to work if even the “believers” are fighting with each other?  Making these grievances public is useful in order to iron them out, but it’s as if the human system is built to make the transition difficult.

There’s also the potential for demagoguery, especially among revolutionaries.  That seemed to be people’s fear about Pinchbeck and Chimbre – that he was trying to profit off his celebrity.  But that doesn’t really seem to be the case.  I don’t know if Peter Joseph has it in him to be a cult leader, but my fear is that the Zeitgeist movement could devolve into that if the movement started an isolated society somewhere. Not saying that’s the case, but the Reality Sandwich debacle shows just how hard it is to create these sorts of forward-thinking movements.  Zeitgeist is all about how power corrupts, and that’s true even for people who are fighting the power.

Yeah, it’s hard.  But at least they’re trying.

Two interesting interviews found recently.  One via Futurismic with the founder of Paypal and principle investor in Facebook who has a sci-fi vision of the future.

Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects?

Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static.

Wired: You’re worried about economic stagnation, but you’re optimistic about artificial intelligence and space?

Thiel: I think we have to make those things happen. We should be looking at technologies that might lead to really big breakthroughs. As a starting point, let’s just go back to the science fiction novels of the 1950s and ’60s and try to run the past 40 years again.

Wired: We need underwater cities and flying cars, otherwise we’re going bankrupt?

Thiel: We go bankrupt if radical progress doesn’t happen and we don’t realize it’s not happening. That’s a dangerous combination.

Next, via Dangerous Minds, a piece from Of Two Minds called “Why I am Optimistic”:

I am optimistic for the reasons laid out in Survival+: voluntary, transparent, non-privileged parallel organizations and productive structures are self-assembling under the leadership-by-example of The Remnant. Once 20% of the populace is permanently unemployed and permanently lost to the consumerist corporatocracy/Savior State status quo, then the Pareto principle suggests The Remant’s influence will grow rapidly.

Many people expect some sort of rapid implosion of social order into violent chaos. While anything is possible, my research into the devolution of the Roman Empire persuaded me that the Roman Empire remains the best available the model for our future: a slow decline and unwinding of Empire and the Savior State.

Why might it be slow? As I have explained at length in Survival+, various feedback loops are actively resisting collapse. History is not a vector so much as a slowly orbiting mass of complex feedback loops.

Devolution is not a chaotic mob of armed thugs rampaging. Such a concentration is relatively easy to control or simply liquidate by force. The State excels at violence and control, so rampaging mobs would be the State’s preferred “domestic enemy.”

Devolution is this: half the toilets in the Chemistry building no longer work, and they aren’t being fixed nor will they be fixed. The city/county/state can’t print money, and as the public unions demand higher taxes to fund their Protected Fiefdoms, then the compliant State and its parallel shadow structures of privilege will comply, raising junk fees and taxes on the dwindling class of still-productive citizenry…

Many people moan that the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” I say, good; life is better in a well-ordered Third World country than in a debt-serf Empire. Not all Third World countries are equal; those hobbled by corruption, dictatorship, poor infrastructure and education, etc. are truly wretched. But those “developing nations” with lesser shares of these burdens can actually be better places to live than crumbling empires based on killing commutes, endlessly higher debts and a mindlessly self-destructive culture seeking ever-higher doses of self-medication.

Maybe not that optimistic, because it still relies on things falling apart before being reborn as something less manifestly stupid. I was at the doctor’s office where I picked up a copy of Time Magazine and this article by Kurt Anderson called The End of Excess:

We cannot just hunker down, cross our fingers, hysterically pinch our pennies, wait for the crises to pass, blame the bankers and then go back to business as usual. All that conventional wisdom about 2008 being a “change” year? We had no idea. Recently Rush Limbaugh appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, panicking not so much about the economy but about how the political winds are blowing as a result. If we finally manage to achieve something like universal health care, Limbaugh warned, it would mean “the end of America as we know it.” He’s right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is the end of the world as we’ve known it. But it isn’t the end of the world.

In a mainstream magazine, it’s basically making the exact same point.  This system needs to die because it doesn’t work.  While anti-government/corporation hysteria makes sense, the trouble is that this sort of rallying cry has been taken over by the fanatical right-wing.  Timothy McVeigh was “anti-government,” and there’s no sense that the pro-militia right have any answer about how to run this very complex system except to burn it all down.  And the right-leaning anti-government types usually have the wrong targets, when it’s the “small government” right wing that enables a further devolution of our system.  From The Economist:

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Libertarians, though, want to do away with the tax system altogether.  Though it would be great to have a Venus Project style Utopia ala Zeitgeist, it’s less feasible than reforming our current system (even if a reformed system is unsustainable).  What’s so striking about Joe Stack’s suicide note is that he’s no right wing teabagger – he references Communism as being potentially preferable (while decrying the tax system, which makes limited sense).  The guy’s no hero – he tried to kill his wife and daughter, so he’s a mentally ill fuckwit.  But it’s not going to be entirely surprising if things like this happen with more and more regularity.  The Economist article concludes, “It’s a massive populist backlash waiting to explode.”

A Second American Revolution is not entirely implausible (or at least an attempt) because imagine a time when oil has peaked, jobs are scarcer due to digital automation, and the planet seems to be killing itself with our help, people would actually need to “take it to the streets” in order to change the system – a form of self-preservation.  This isn’t a right-wing idea – it’s the basis of the hippie movement, or anyone who’s been anti-establishment.  It’s just with Obama in power, the right have lost their collective minds with the incredibly stupid mantra “I want my country back.”  Which country – the one that led to the state we’re in right now?

The idea that this is “Barack Obama’s economy” is myopic bordering on insane – hear that, media?  You’re insane.  There is no way Obama is responsible for our current economy any more than he’s responsible for our oil-based economy or rampant obesity.  Our civilization is systemically fucked-up and if anything, you can fault Obama for zombifying a system that needs to die.  He’s keeping it alive, not killing it, and it needs to be dead and buried. So when people decry “socialism” over the health care debate, when reform is (ideally) meant to benefit people and take power away from the corporations, they are hardly the people to lead a populist revolution against the status quo.  They’re too fucking stupid.

The interview on Of Two Minds led me to the book Operation Serf, which I’m going to check out, though on his blog he refers to the Socialist agenda, which makes me nervous.  That novel in turn led me to the book American Apocalypse – interestingly, both self-published via CreateSpace.  Not sure about the political affiliation of that one.  Most end of the world scenario diatribes tend to be Libertarian.

Pretty volatile and interesting time we’re living in. Or at least an interesting time to be a writer.