And how large were they? How developed? How relatively wealthy and comfortable? Do you think we could do that with 7 billion?
Small, not very, and we probably couldn’t. I was just being nitpicky. 
[QUOTE=Scotty Mo]
I mean look at patents. We pay money to own information for the well-being of a few. When it could be shared and built upon for the benefit of everybody.
[/QUOTE]
To paraphrase: It’s got huge, sharp … er … it can leap about […] Well look at the the patents, man!!
I’m expecting this horrible oryctolagus cuniculus with a vicious streak a mile wide and a bad temper to boot, and instead…well, you know, it’s just a rabbit, sadly. 
Even assuming you could lay all this stuff at the feet of ‘capitalism’, how will the Zeitgeist soul train fix all this stuff? And more importantly, what’s in it for me? Do I get those sun god robes, pickles and scantily clad love muffins?? Plus peeled grapes and palm frond fans of course…
Where it should be…grounded in realism and a realistic appraisal of the world as it is, instead of a fantasy world where I ACTUALLY stand on top of a pyramid in sun god robes while mostly naked women throw small pickles at me with adoring looks on their innocent though lascivious faces. Like I said earlier in this thread, you should really avoid trying to fix something you obviously don’t understand or have a lot of knowledge about. You end up looking silly…except perhaps to someone equally clueless. These Zeitgeist folks, assuming you are accurately portraying their thinking, such as it is, rely on folks who understand this stuff less than they do in order to get anyone to listen to them at all. Just like 9/11 Truthers, unfortunately. Learn a bit about the subjects you’ve tried to discuss here and you’ll see why folks are mocking your position.
Or don’t, brave sir knight … death really MIGHT awaits ye with nasty, big, pointy teeth. nom nom
D’ohh!
Riiiiiiight. 'Cause people don’t take advantage of stuff. Nope.
Many. Most, I expect. I don’t believe anyone has declared capitalism to be perfect. In general, I think people are just skeptical of claims to the effect “something different would be better”.
'The market can fix everything style capitalism generally gets a fairly rough ride here. Most recently, I believe, in a thread about whether a free market alone could fix inequalities arising from racism.
Nothing’s perfect. Perfection probably isn’t even possible, in a general sense, and so the human race has settled on a mixture of market capitalism, regulated where necessary, with the occasional monopoly for things like infrastructure.
What would be a reasonable first step towards realising your vision? (in addition to moving us toward utopia, it needs to not trigger massive or cascading collapse of the status quo, BTW - there’s no point trying to make things better, if one of the middle steps is to destroy everything)
That’s because the Zeitgeist folks *are *9/11 Truthers; the similarities are not just a coincidence.
If you can’t summarize it, can Peter Joseph do so? If he can, why didn’t you post a link? Color me old-fashioned, but I don’t bother with economic or political ideas that can be described via Youtube, but not via English text.
I did take the trouble to Google and found a “Mission statement”. An interesting high school project would be to contrast it with the Communist Manifesto or with Unibomber’s philosophy. I skimmed the platitudes to find that “Monetary Reform” was a key idea; Googled that to discover that debt is bad, apparently because the new money for interest haas to be created out of thin air. :smack: I don’t think even the Gold Bugs or Austrians go that far!
What’s sad is that there is some underlying truths behind such screeds. We do live in a society where free-rein capitalism has distorted our values, and where economic reforms are urgent.
If OP wants to steer our country along a better economic route, I’d recommend he read Stiglitz or Krugman – two Nobel-prize winning economists. Just because the American right-wing has been taken over by psychopaths is no reason to turn the left-wing as well over to lunatics.
Bear in mind that a significant proportion of world hunger is being deliberately imposed on one group by another as a weapon of war. In many cases (Somalia being a notable one) the issue isn’t so much lack of food as “distribution problems,” which is a polite fiction for “armed men won’t let us feed these people.” And the reason for that is one ethnic or political group’s intention to use starvation to kill, or drive off the land, another group perceived as a rival (usually to take their land).
There’s no way to prevent this without a military (and, to date, we’ve shied away from using the one we have.) If one group is utterly determined to starve out a weaker group, and willing to back up that intention with armed force, ultimately we would have to overawe them with greater armed force, or kill them pre-emptively. The alternative is simply to “feel bad about it” while they kill off or displace their victims, which is what we’ve mostly been doing so far.
One of these days, if we’re lucky enough, this discussion will move from the abstract to the concrete. Maybe then we’ll get somewhere. And we need to get lucky, because in all likelyhood these issue are going to be dealt with in a far more extreme and unfortunate manner.
Our evolution and technology has brought us to a point where our influence and actions have profound impact on our environment. We are slowly unraveling the system that enabled lifeforms to get to this point. But at the same time we are also changing small parts of this complex system.
But the thing I find most important in discussions like these, is to remember that this is all long term thinking. One lifetime is just a short period, many have been here before us. And we owe alot to these people, they are the main reason why we are here today. The least we could do is making sure that there will be future generations to honor us.
Maybe it sounds corny, but it’s all I got. For me it’s the ultimate meaning of life. In nature you only need to breed, but we’ve added a whole new game called human society. And we need to smart up, because as it stands with regards to the future; this is going nowhere.
I’ll come out and deny that. I’m not a 9/11 truther.
I just want to say I appreciate the comments so far. They’ve definitely helped me understand the zeitgeist concept a bit more. I guess I’m just a sucker for provocative films.
One thing I’ve taken away from this is a deeper understanding of how money and property conflicts with our values. Also, just how big of an impact environment plays on our psyche. I’m still of the opinion that money corrupts us morally and that property shouldn’t be allowed. We were born into this earth, we should inherit what has been given to us and not have to pay to live in it. Notice I said pay, not work. I still think everyone has to pull their weight.
So basically am I a communist? And if so what are your thoughts on this theory?
No, your not a communist. You’d actually need a theory to be a communist, and you don’t actually have a coherent theory. You have a bunch of unsupported statements that are loosely tied together.
But what I think has been better stated earlier in the thread:
Kinda hard to say, as your ideas seem to be all over the place, but you might be a communitarian.
Property shouldn’t be allowed? OK, turn your computer in to your local library. That alone should relieve you of some of the corruption of property.
This right here is, I think, what you need to figure out better. How do you get everyone to pull his weight? What if someone wants to sit around all day and loaf? What does the rest of his society do about that?
By coincidence I’ve been researching this and I have to add my two cents here.
You ask who has considered the implications of capitalism. The answer, of course, is everybody. The shortcomings of capitalism have been well recognized for over a century. Marx is sorta famous for it, but while Marxist critiques of capitalism are often sharp as knives, they are merely one point in a constellation of critiques.
Just to stick to American critiques we need to start with Edward Bellamy’s utopia, Looking Backward: 2000-1887. If you read that summary you’ll see that it’s an almost uncanny predecessor to the Zeitgeist movement. It’s claimed to be one of three best-selling books of the 19th century in America. And it spawned a huge following with 160 Nationalist Clubs forming in the next couple of years.
Dozens of other but less popular utopian books were written until World War I made that sort of idealism unfashionable. However, the war also represented a failure of the entire society it was built on, so a different type of revisionist thinking grew in its place, one based on reforming the basis of money and removing the irrationalities from the global economy.
This became known as the Technocracy movement. It traces back to Bellamy, but picks up a theoretical base from the writings of Thorstein Veblen. Instead of bankers and capitalists striving to make money on the backs of workers, engineers would guide resources efficiently and dispassionately to the benefit of all. The movement peaked in 1932 at the depth of the Depression because capitalism itself was widely thought to have failed and been discredited.
Both movements fell apart quickly, but the ideas behind them never went away. Libertarianism picked up on some pieces of it. The Golden Age science fiction writers incorporated the notion that engineers were the most fit members of society in many of their works. The hippie and Green movements took up the remade human nature side of the utopia.
The Zeitgeist movement is merely this same utopia popping up again, in modern dress. It shares all the same flaws: it requires a complete change in human nature; the change has to be instant and simultaneous (half the world can’t stop spending on the military if the other half will use their weapons right afterward); there is no middle ground or pathway to get from here to there; it assumes omniscient understanding of every world problem, issue, and interconnection; it assumes infinite resources; and - the most important one of all - it ignores that CAPITALISM HAS DONE A FREAKING FANTASTIC JOB. Seriously, we live in a technological utopia better than anybody in the 19th century could have imagined. China has more middle-class citizens that the U.S. has people. Instead of a downtrodden working class, 90% of the U.S. considers themselves middle class. Fewer people starve or live in abject poverty than ever, both in the U.S. and everywhere in the entire world. The world is profoundly imperfect still but you need to be anti-historical not to see how improved everything is and gets more so every single year.
So please don’t make idiotic comments like nobody criticizing capitalism. Everybody does everyday. But your alternative has been suggested over and over and over again and has been abandoned because it is a nutty religious vision. You’re trying to replace reality with a fairy tale. That can inspire people to work to better the world, but it is not a substitute for the world we live in.
I remember reading Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” in college. Also Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Herland.” Oh, toss in Skinner’s “Walden II.” All of these are definitely worth reading…but, alas, mostly as an intellectual exercise in logical rebuttal.
I think one of the most important questions here is what do you value more: freedom or community?
I believe that freedom is inherent. We all make our own choices even in the most dire of circumstances, people still have freedom to choose their own thinking and attitude. There are some things that just cannot be taken away from us. Also, a lot of people have commented on the fact that people have their self interest at heart and it is only natural. I can agree with that too. Preservation of yourself is always going to be of the utmost concern. There is no taking away that.
Community, however, is something that must be built. Community provides a structure for all of us and we are all dependent on it. Look at what makes our society run – Infrastructure, schools, hospitals, etc… It is essential for all of us to build this community as strong as we can but I find that this idea of capitalism runs contrary to that.
I think a lot of you fail to realize just how big of an impact environment plays on your psyche. Capitalism seems to magnify the idea of self-interest and severly discredit community. Everyone keeps asking, “But what do you do about human nature?” and “what about people who will just be lazy?” A strong community based on the correct values will take care of these problems naturally.
I’m not going to come out and say capitalism is absolutely evil because it certainly has brought a lot of progress. But for who? If we ask the people all around the world who are suffering what they think of capitalism what do you think they will say? Put yourself in their shoes.
What about the problems that are arising because of capitalism? Climate change, pollution, GMO’s in our food among other things, war on a mass scale. Not to mention that nearly everyone is completely dependent on the system and wouldn’t survive more than a week without it. And the fact that all this wealth is not bringing more happiness to us. We are in serious danger of completely destroying ourselves and every living being on the planet and yet everyones talking about all the “comfort” that capitalism is bringing.
Also, a lot of people here are saying I just don’t understand economics. Which is true. But to that I say, so what? Money is not real. It’s only a human invention and has no basis in science or natural law.
The first step in this theory is awareness.
Are you familiar with Robert Owen and his attempt at community idealism with New Harmony ?
*By 1828 New Harmony had been reorganized five times and Owen had lost four-fifths of his fortune, including that which he had received from the sale of the mill at Lanark. He disbanded New Harmony, blaming the failure on people not having acquired “those moral characteristics of forbearance and charity necessary for confidence and harmony” – virtues that he had hoped would develop at New Harmony.
*
Money has science basis is human biology. Any 2 human beings with the memory cells in their brains will “create money” between them. It’s right there embedded in the neurons of each person. Person X owes Person Y “something” for catching fish or getting coconuts. That “tally” can be held in each person’s memory (depends on honesty) or transferred out to real atoms such as paper currency, and further transferred to something ethereal such as zeros and ones in an electronic bank account.
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