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.

The Venus Project clearly separates the Zeitgeist movement from other conspiracy theorizing from the likes of Alex Jones or David Icke – who seem mainly to be fear peddlers without any real answer to moving on from that fear. That’s what disturbs me about them. Obama may be a disappointment who is tasked with rescuing an unsustainable system, but he is not equal to the Bush legacy. The sheer fact that he’s a black man with the name Barack Obama shows that we’re inching closer to a more open society. I don’t think you can underestimate that, even if his promise of change is not really arriving – and most likely can’t because “rescuing banks” is the process of rescuing something that caused the problem. But Jones and Icke want to see totalitarianism everywhere and then sell that fear, so they will look for evidence wherever they can. Their terror alert level doesn’t seem much more honest than the one perpetrated by the Bush administration.

The Venus Project is in part what makes Zeitgeist so convincing, because it offers a level-headed alternative amidst some very far out claims. What this vision of utopia doesn’t see to emphasize is our potential for spiritual evolution, as well as economic and technological progress.  Daniel Pinchbeck, in 2012, rails against the concept of the Singularity, as it sees technology as solving all our problems, when his more-New Age stance is that a kind of mind technology is more important for our progress than literal technology.  If we see technology as the savior, we’ll be less inclined to explore and expand consciousness and tap into the greater world of outer and inner space.  There’s something to this.

Perhaps the Venus Project could usher that in because only until we become less warlike we’d be given access to other worlds.  Otherwise we might abuse the privilege, as we abuse everything.  What’s attractive to me about a techno utopia is that it satisfies both needs – technological and spiritual, as the technological would free us to spend more time with spiritual and creative pursuits.  And it’s more practical and feasible to create a sustainable environment than waiting for an evolution that never comes.

The Maya, after all, were technologically advanced, and going “back to nature” doesn’t necessarily mean being free from technology.  The Na’vi from Avatar are nice and all, but I don’t want to sleep in a hammock in a tree – I like my computer and the copy of Logic that allows me to record music.  That’s not a distraction like TV, it enhances the potential for creativity. So on that front I agree with the Venus Project and its aim to use technology to create an environmentally sustainable world that frees people from the mindless and unnecessary work that makes up most people’s workdays.  If a true Theory of Everything incorporates both the religious and the scientific (determining the “why” as well as the “how”), then it would seem an advanced society would incorporate both as well.  My worry is that our entire structure needs to fall apart first in order for it to be rebuilt as something better.

I’m currently reading (among other things) A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, which makes the supposition that people are at their best amid total catastrophe.  Most people have no doubt seen this, even if they’ve never been part of a disaster, as the collective support after 9-11 shows how disaster can inspire goodwill.  That’s not entirely a positive prospect, as it may just be the case that the world system needs to collapse in order for us to start over with a better blank slate.  The environment might go to war with us before we go to war with each other as a form of self-protection.  Either way, we seem to be headed in that direction, and troubling as it may be, how else do you reform a world of 8 billion people that needs instant reforming?  I suppose everyone could take Ayahuasca at once, and blow everyone’s heads open, but somehow I don’t see that happening.

Whatever the case, Zeitgeist and the Venus Project are literal manifestations of my novel and the soundtrack so I’ve been glued to finding out new information about these two developments – “The New City is my home and I love all I know.”  Cool to me too that the filmmaker writes and records his own music.

More: Who is Peter Joseph?

Powerful, effective.  If the issue of 9-11 truth gives you jitters, you might be put off by part 2, but you should at least investigate it before dismissing it out of hand.  But part one makes an enormously compelling case for the cross-pollination of world myths and how Jesus’s death and resurrection is nothing more than the death and resurrection of the sun during winter.  I had hints of this – Christmas is a pagan holiday – but never entirely knew what this signified.  “Oh my God,” I said out loud a few times.  At the same time, there’s always a part of you that doesn’t want to believe this – it hurts almost.  Because to find out that the entire basis of Western civilization is actually false is pretty shattering.  Even if parts of this idea are up for debate – the movie no doubt has its detractors – the connection between Christian and pagan rituals is undeniable.

The film is along the lines of a book I recently reviewed by Darryl Sloan, called Reality Check, which is more of a personal story of one person coming to terms with his Christian upbringing and the incongruities in that religion, as well as how vilified he was for his break with the church.  It’s most important message is that one must investigate something fully before decrying it as bullshit.  If you watch the movie or read Darryl’s book and still have your worldview, then fine: you’ve done the work.  But do the work.  Darryl Sloan’s book is highly recommended and can be read and downloaded for free on Scribd.

I recently did an interview with Alterati, where I get into how 9-11 was the impetus behind my writing The American Book of the Dead.  I sort of cop out when it come to the question of 9-11 truth.  I say I’ve “entertained” the idea.  Mainly because it’s fairly embarrassing – because it’s so vilified.  It’s not fun to be vilified.  On Daily Kos, if you didn’t know, they censor any mention of 9-11 truth.  This does make some sense because it would affect the credibility of the site if it the site devolved into conspiracy theory – no matter how convincing that theory might be.  But that’s the zeitgeist for the moment – the mainstream story about 9-11.

The movie could be more convincing about proving the thermite theory and the impossibility of the building’s falling how they did.  Beyond WTC 1 and 2, Building 7 really makes no fucking sense.  Nor does the fact that there’s no evidence of a plane having crashed at the Pentagon.  Those two things alone are enough to reasonably ask: What the hell? without being shouted down as a delusional idiot.  That Daily Kos can despise every act perpetrated by the Bush administration, from the Iraq war to the economy and beyond, but not think they’re capable of 9-11 is puzzling – the same vitriolic hatred for Dick Cheney is given to truthers.  Somehow, the administration was evil enough to lie their way to go to war in Iraq, but not evil enough to basically do the same thing in New York City.

I find it interesting as well that on Daily Kos (a place where I spend a fair amount of time, by the way, because I do enjoy following mainstream political debate in the same way I like following trades in baseball) that it’s mainly peopled by atheists.  As if you have to be open a bit more to something else being behind the spiritual curtain to entertain the thought of a 9-11 conspiracy.  If you don’t then you demand an impossible amount of proof for each, even if there is a lot of available proof, or at least compelling research.  Enough to say, “What if?” without condemning it out of hand.  So perhaps I should own up to what I believe: in the possibility of God and that the government is capable of terrible things.  The government, after all, goes to war.

The Fed

Part 3 gets into the Federal Reserve – something that I’ve glossed over in relation to the Ron Paul movement, mainly because he’s a Republican and Libertarian, and I’m not an advocate that small government is the answer.  In many ways what we need is more government, more regulation, more social programs.  Anarchy would be, well, anarchy.  I’m not a New World Order fanatic who sees all government as an attempt to take control of our lives.  Or, rather, I don’t think all control is necessarily a negative, because the world is a disaster area and creating a new system with a one world government and one world religion could potentially be seen as progress – if done correctly.  So the North American Union doesn’t automatically strike me as a bad idea.

Now to tie this together with other demented leanings I have.  I mention this in the interview with Alterati – I believe in the possibility that Cheney orchestrated the 9-11 attacks, or at least let them happen.  Even if he didn’t, the Iraq war was waged under false pretenses and has all the hallmarks of a perpetual war meant to enrich certain people.  What I don’t get is why they need all this money – just “to be rich” makes very little sense.  After hitting a certain level of wealth, money stops mattering.  “To be powerful” seems a little weak as well.  I’ve always been puzzled about how ties together with my other main pet belief: UFOs.  If anyone knows the secrets behind the UFO conspiracy it’s families like the Bush’s, and men like Dick Cheney.  So what on earth does the UFO phenomenon have to do with this raping the planet for profit and creating perpetual war?  What on earth does the UFO phenomenon have to do with right wing ideology?

What I came up with in my novel is that all of this degradation is by design: to lead up to the Big One, World War III, that will diminish the population to such a degree that first contact could be possible, and we could then start a technological utopia.  They want control over this uncontrollable world so that humanity can graduate to whatever’s ahead.  The plan is not necessarily 100% nefarious.  And if – as my novel pontificates – death does not exist and there is an afterlife, then war has less consequence, even if it causes so much immense pain.

Just a theory of course, and the movie doesn’t touch on it.  I wish the movie didn’t quote from LaRouche or Lou Dobbs or Alex Jones, who’s pretty deeply conservative – and if you’re talking about peddling fear for profit, that’s his M.O.  I remember a piece he did about going behind the scenes at Bohemian Grove and decrying how everyone there worships the “occult.”  If we go back to part one of this piece, an occult “perennial philosophy” in which all religions are different versions of the same idea, is a more honest spiritual disposition.  Jones’s point was that it’s “un-Christian,” which doesn’t strike me as a bad pose to take.

Now if all this is true, and they’re doing this to eventually instigate a NWO, why all the secrecy, why all the murder?  Seems like there’s a better way of going about this than unleashing so much pain – which then makes the NWO nefarious, because the events leading up to the NWO are so destructive and anti-human.  It’s like they’re fucking things up on purpose – why would corporatists want to live in a raped, climate-changed world?  It seems to have a purpose beyond just carelessness, or even the lust for money and power. Again, this was the major impetus behind The American Book - that they’re after some kind of progress.

Maybe I’m holding on to a naive faith in people – as well as a belief that we need some order in a disordered world. The movie ends with words about how “we’re all the same,” and “one planet” which is why a one world government – absent implanting microchips in all of us, which is where the movie really lost me – could potentially be a manifestation of this idea.  Seems a pretty roundabout way of going about it, though. If industry stressed sustainability, this could have positive potential without destroying everything first.

Zeitgeist: Addendum

Also fascinating, and worth watching.  Eye-opening material on the failures of our monetary system, offering an actual solution with discussion of the Venus Project.  Ironically, it’s my theory (one possible theory) that perhaps the one world government scenario is to lay the foundation for a Venus Project type of utopia.  Otherwise, upending our current monetary system could possibly lead to its own type of apocalypse.  In this sense, you need “control” of people in order to usher in the next stage.  This system needs to fail, which may be why the current system seems almost masochisticly bent on failure, perhaps to usher in a new system.

Really, that’s the underlying hope behind all conspiracy theory – even theory that ramps up the fear: that there’s a purpose to all this, and the “elite” are out there planning something.  Nothing is just arbitrary and meaningless.  It’s the same reason that some people, including myself, want to believe in God.  A purposeless existence in which there’s more pain than light is fairly depressing.  It’s in fact more depressing than worrying about a New World Order.  At least with the NWO you feel like you’re in on a great secret, like a priest who knows what the Gods are working on.  That’s pretty exciting, and easily clouds judgment.

If you think all of this is ludicrous, please watch the movies, and then we’ll talk.  It makes me sort of nauseous to be this naked about these types of beliefs, but if this sort of fuel is still with me nine years after I got into this type of info, post 9-11 when I started doing a lot of research in the run-up to writing my novel, I may as well own up to it.

More

Zeitgeist – Orientation Presentation: more info along these lines – mostly centered around the collapse of our financial institution.  If you want to take issue with the movie’s stance on religion or 9-11, do so, but it’s hard to deny our current economic system is unsustainable.

The Zeitgeist Movement – Frankly, this creeps me out a bit. I know if things are to change dramatically, there needs to be a revolution of like-minded thinkers. But I also think this movement could inspire a religious-like cult following. Though the evidence around 9-11 is compelling, it’s not incontrovertible, so it has to be taken in part on faith. As always, faith can lead to bad motivation.  NWO paranoia seems more than a little faith-based, and tends to see connections everywhere with limited evidence, which is why I don’t find it especially interesting.  And taking the movie as irrefutable truth doesn’t make sense, especially when there are inaccuracies in the movie. It would be ironic to take everything in a movie like Zeitgeist as gospel.  The purpose of the movie is to challenge some of your current assumptions – it does that.  There’s plenty in the movie worth considering.  But check out:

A site debunking Zeitgeist. Another one at Conspiracy Science.

A video debunking the debunking (Part 1).

The Reality Sandwich review, which is pretty dead-on:

Zeitgeist may have sacrificed a measure of precision for a greater degree of suggestion, but through that act it ripped open a hole in the mythological framework of American society. Millions of minds are at this very moment pouring through the fissure. This is why Zeitgeist simply is what It Is, a reflection of this particular moment in time and space, while at the same time serving as a tool of cultural, and potentially social, transformation.

Finally, Blog Talk Radio with filmmaker Peter Joseph.  Yes, I got a little obsessed, but I think this is an important development, even if you disagree with it.