Also a huge financial burden which brings us now to the economy.
You know for a great many people it's become a system that is
in part, broken, in part a result of the 2008 financial collapse.
.
So how do we climb out and get to a place of progress?
Well, you know, big problems need big ideas
and here's one. Start with this: money
and throw it away. It sounds crazy, right?
Well, now we're going to talk to someone who thinks this might be
.
exactly what we need. Peter Joseph is a film maker
and also the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement.
Hey there Peter, I'm of course simplifying here.
It's not just get rid of money or currency. It's instead making
this monetary-based economy... you make it
a resource-based economy. Talk about what this actually means.
- Well actually, you're half right. A Resource-Based Economy explicitly
does want to remove the actual mechanics of exchange
and the market system itself, as radical as that may seem to most.
You have to understand, first of all, that the problem we're seeing
in the world is not the result of some bad policy
some legislation or some inflationary cycle boom and bust
phenomenon that we're typically taught in traditional economics.
The very foundation of the economic structure is intrinsically flawed.
We create money out of debt. We charge interest on it
which doesn't exist. We create the principal, but yet
the principal plus the interest is always outstanding.
People, it's a game of musical chairs to put into a singular phrase.
Everyone systematically suffers through this system and its offset.
So when you hear about debt collapse, sovereign debt defaults
these are inevitabilities of the system. They're not based on
just someone's rogue policy
or some flagrant activity of the stock market and derivatives
granted those are very important attributes of it.
But my point and my work with the movement is that the system
is intrinsically, inherently flawed.
And for us to get on a scale, on a pace, on a...
in a way to make our society sustainable and not suffer
all these economic consequences, we have to get down to the life-ground
.
and what actually supports human life, what we've learned
from the natural world, the systems that actually generate food.
When you realize this, we live in a technical reality
not a monetary one.
For example, one child dies every five seconds
from poverty and preventable diseases on this planet.
This is, of course, unnecessary technically.
We could easily feed everyone on this planet.
And when you extrapolate that train of thought, when you take
a technical perspective as opposed to a monetary perspective
we see we could resolve just about all the major human woes
.
on this planet by restructuring the entire economic phenomenon
to be truly economic, meaning preservation, sustainability.
- You were talking earlier and you said:
"Everyone suffers by the system." I think that maybe...
let's clarify a little bit. A lot of people suffer
but there are some people who want to keep this system
exactly how it is. Isn't that right?
- Yeah, I'd say the upper 1% [...] certainly has a prime interest
.
has a very easy way to justify the fruits that they've claimed.
We have 1% of the world's population owning 40% of the planet's wealth.
If that isn't a signpost to the intrinsic flaw of this system
that it's there to perpetuate one class
over another, I'm not sure what is.
So yes, the upper 1% has a very vested interest and naturally
that carries on to the governments which are essentially
funded and supported by the corporate institutions.
- And I know... - ...that continue this.
- You've written about this large gap between the rich and poor
and I know one point that you've made in your writings is that
America is one of the most socially immobile countries in the world.
I kind of had to stop and read that again when I saw that
but basically what you're saying, I think, is:
If you're born poor, chances are you will stay poor
other than of course a few exceptions.
How does this change under the "Zeitgeist system"?
- Well, it's not the "Zeitgeist system." This work builds upon
research by a man named Jacque Fresco
which builds upon researchers from the past 150 years
people that have continually thought about a different economic model
not based on monetary exchange
and all of the intrinsic problems that come out of that.
The Venus Project is something important to mention which I suggest
people look into that has a partnership with The Zeitgeist Movement
.
and it's a blueprint system based on referencing natural law.
What that means is you actually get to the life-ground
as I mentioned earlier. You look at what it means to make
a human being, what it means to meet the needs of human necessity
from obviously the bare necessities to all of the emotional
and biopsychosocial phenomenon
.
that actually generate our behaviour, well-being, and mental health.
When you put all this together which is a completely technical orientation
.
very limited when it comes to human opinion
this is what science has given us, by the way.
You see that the current economic model is stuck in time.
It's not actually representing what meets human needs
and the more you step back and look at how we could technically provide
for the human population, eliminate war, eliminate famine
eliminate poverty, eliminate 95% of most crime
which by the way is monetary related
you begin to see that an entirely new approach can be taken.
It's very difficult for me to describe that to you
in a very short little segment, but a Resource-Based Economy
is based upon resource management intrinsically.
Monetary relationships don't manage anything.
We have cost efficiency. We have all of these things
that inhibit our ability to create sustainable goods.
We have established institutions that are constantly trying
to preserve their market share. It's essentially a mafia orientation.
It's one group against another, everyone's battling,
and we have this illusion that somehow it's for the betterment of us
.
that we have this self-interest and it isn't.
It's provably not if you look through history
and what we're actually doing to ourselves, and we're on a train-wreck
to a complete environmental disaster and a social disaster.
- Peter, I want to interrupt you real quick.
I can just hear the bad election commercials in my head.
You know if this movement gains momentum
the people who this system does benefit are going to come back
and this is what they're going to say:
"He wants to bring us back to
...he wants to make us a communist society."
What do you say to that?
- That's all they know, that's their entire frame of reference.
You see, the propaganda of the West and the Free Market
or the Free-for-All-Market, as I call it
is to constantly assume back, orient back to these old structures
that were based on autocratic dictatorship
with no real communist attribute to it all. A true communist idea
is a family, something I think we can all relate to.
We are about intelligent resource management
learning about how to take care of ourselves technically
and creating a ground-up system that does that.
And the only way you can do that is by the elimination of this...
this supposed self-interest intrinsic attribute
of our system that we think is natural.
Obviously we all have self-interest, but
self-interest must become social-interest
if we expect to survive as a species, very simply.
- I think one of the questions people would have is
under this system, what's the incentive?
What's the incentive to contribute more, to try harder
if in the end, we're all gonna be equals?
- Well, first of all, no one is just equal in an arbitrary sense.
That's a loaded kind of concept.
[We're] equal in the ability to get the necessities of life
to get out of the materialism that we have, that fuels
this conspicuous consumption that's destroying the planet.
These values will change, so the incentive will be people
actually understanding that when they contribute to society
or do something real, not work in advertising or the stock market
.
when they do something, and they're educated to actually contribute
to society, it's for their own self-betterment themselves.
So if I was an inventor, I would invent something
not to make money off of it. That's a very sick, distorted idea.
I would invent something to better the world, knowing that
that would come back to me in my own betterment.
So it's a completely different value structure, and the best thing
I can relate to you is the idea of a family.
The idea of what it means to live in a family
and the respect that's mutual in a family, where you are not tipping
your mother every time she brings you something at the table.
It's an entirely new value system orientation, and unfortunately
we have to undo the tremendous psychological
distortion that has been created after, more or less
centuries of this despotic system that is failing right in front of us
and will lead to simply more war, more poverty.
So I don't really have to defend it, but the fact that
all you have to do is watch what's happening right now
and what's going to continue to happen, if you follow the trends.
And just real quick if you do look around at what's happening
especially right now, this is not a... I know your idea
and your Movement has followers all around the world
more than 200 countries have chapters.
Talk about why this is not just a national idea
but kind of an international one.
- Absolutely, well, sovereignty is essentially a mirror
of a corporate concept. It's a self-preserving idea.
.
The world is gonna have to learn to work together.
I'm sorry to say to all the politicians out there:
jingoistic, patriotic. In the words of Albert Einstein:
"Patriotism is a disease". It's one world.
It's a single round planet, and it's time we recognize it as such.
We have to manage the world in this way too, so there's a
firm technical reality, it's not just philosophical.
So the Zeitgeist Movement is about bridging the difference between
all races, all nationalities, all religions
everything that divides us
because we all have to come back to the basic necessities of life
and we can't even get that right within a monetary system.
The suffering is unacceptable and not necessary.
So it's not... It's a global movement, firmly global.
- Unfortunately, we're out of time Peter but certainly a big idea
in this time that is filled with some really big problems.
Peter Joseph filmmaker and also founder of The Zeitgeist Movement.