The views expressed in these interviews are those of the participants alone
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the producers or its sponsors.
Orion Network Films LLP
In Association with PositiveTV
Directed by Mark Waters
Presents
The Summary
The Zeitgeist Movement
My name is Peter Joseph. I am currently the de facto founder
of an organization called The Zeitgeist Movement
which is seeking to alter the current cultural climate, if you will
into something that can be considered as actually sustainable
for not just one nation or class but all the world's people.
The Zeitgeist Movement
We live in a paradigm, now, where we have society operating
on the idea that we can grow infinitely.
Therefore, we keep buying and consuming
regardless of how many resources we have.
This creates a collision course with nature, which the world
is figuring out right about now on many levels,
that the Earth is essentially a closed system.
It took billions of years to create the minerals we have.
It took many hundreds of millions of years
to create the fossil fuels which govern everything we have.
And, amazingly enough, we've created this system
where we're using all of our resources to create the economic growth
required to sustain employment and everything else.
And simultaneously, we're diminishing our resources
at a near exponential rate it seems, as population continues to grow
and no one seems to understand that it's an absolute clash
and that eventually we're going to run out of pivotal resources
and eventually you're going to see things, I don't know,
like the human population start to dwindle down.
My name is Jacque Fresco
and I'm going to present the concept of The Venus Project.
The Venus Project
If you don't want war
if you don't want poverty, hunger, unemployment
you have to declare all the Earth's resources
as the common heritage of all the world's people.
All the artificial boundaries have to be removed
so that people can travel anywhere.
It has to be a global society.
There are many people that feel "Well, let's develop each country."
You can't do that because if the Russians do experiments
with nuclear materials and the Chinese
that air goes all over the world.
So it's very hard to work independently.
So, I would say, if you want these things
you have to change the way your society operates.
We believe, here at The Venus Project, we are not civilized yet.
As long as you have armies, navies
prisions, police, we are not civilized.
No nation is civilized.
Being civilized is an ongoing process.
The more we learn, the more we know about the environment
and human relations, the more we're able to deal with the problems.
If we fail to do that, we won't be able to solve problems.
If we go with traditional values, we won't be able to solve problems.
All of these pump-primers do not work.
There's always been wars.
The wars have continued to get worse
even though the universities today
have the most sophisticated equipment
in the science labs, the architectural labs, all the labs
and the wars are getting worse. Explosions are getting worse.
Since the atom bomb, the explosive power is much worse.
So, there's something definitely wrong with all cultures.
When I say wrong, I mean that the system doesn't work.
Now, to talk about a system that does work
is a little foreign to our habits of thought.
I'm going to try to explain how we make decisions.
Actually, we don't make decisions. We arrive at them.
The only way a real society can operate
period, is in a steady-state economy
meaning you don't have the mechanism of constantly needing to do anything
other than being sustainable in your every day living
and having society recognize the attributes of sustainability
which are required. That's the value-system orientation
needed to create a stable society.
As a brief extension of this, we live in a materialistic culture.
We live in a culture that's predicated on inferiority
and people thinking that they need more and more
because of many reasons, because of someone else having more
status-oriented issues, so on and so forth.
And that fuels into this mechanism of the growth economy
of getting more and more. Holidays... People give each other gifts.
These are inventions for economics.
As long as we use money and the bottom line is profit
then those who control the money
are able to make the laws in their favor.
And that means that they really don't care about people.
They care about wealth, property and power
when that is the main incentive.
So, when we use the monetary system
there is no justice within this system.
There's no making this system equitable.
What we need is an entirely new system
that we call a Resource-Based Economy.
Resource-Based Economy
In regard to social operation and how to create a new society
or better yet just to say to create any society that would be
sustainable and efficient
there's really an empirical train of thought, if you will, on how to do that.
First of all, you have to think about what the human being actually needs.
We require resources at the bare minimum. We require food
water, etc. as we all know.
Therefore, resources become the most paramount subject.
Resources in fact should be the foundation of any economic structure.
So, what do you do? If you consider that the Earth is a closed finite system.
First thing you have to do is a survey of the Earth's resources
and the carrying capacity of the environment.
If you produce a population far in excess of the carrying capacity
of the environment, you're going to have trouble.
You're going to have malnutrition and all the problems that go with it.
So, first we have to find out
what can each successive environment carry
and maintain a population in accordance with the carrying capacity of the Earth.
Not what I like or somebody else likes
or some politician's notions.
It has to be based upon the carrying capacity of the Earth.
To organize a structure based on the intelligent management
of the Earth resources, you start from
essentially, the base level of where is everything.
So, you look at the planet and you say "Ok,
we see we have iron ore here. We have petroleum deposits here,"
if we're using petroleum at that point in time in the future.
Hopefully we will not be because it's damaging. "We have places
for great wind energy here." You get the point.
We can assess the entire environment of what we currently use
based on our technological facilities at that point
and we start to create a structure of analysis
maintenance and management
and basically monitor and understand what we have.
Then we can design the parameters for the new society.
Without a survey we couldn't do that.
Survey means physical disabilities, all the known diseases.
That tells us how many hospitals we have to build.
Of course, the survey would include available materials.
Otherwise, if you just sit down and turn out a hospital
or turn out a social plan not based on what you have
not based on what Fresco believes, only statistical evidence.
The end of "What's your opinion? What's your opinion?"
should have been gone in 1927.
Then you move to the next level. How do we utilize resources in the most efficient way?
Technology is the methodology to harness any type of resources we have.
Technology is the growing intellectual field that allows us to know
how to manipulate our environment for our betterment
and to be more sustainable, hopefully.
So what we do is we utilize our technical information
and then we analyze the planetary resources.
Then we build from the ground up an entire infrastructure, not based
on the whims of any type of ideology, capitalist, socialist
fascist, whatever, what have you, communist.
You do it based explicitly on the most efficient means to do it
with the most peak efficiency possible
based on the technology available at the time
the intellectual resource of the time.
You have peak efficiency and sustainability as your goal.
You just simply weigh all parameters when you analyze anything
and then you're going to build a society that is, essentially
for lack of a better expression, perfect.
It's not perfect at all because it's going to constantly change, but
it's the best you can do at that point in time
which I think would be a variance of perfection.
A Resource-Based Economy does not use money, barter or any form of servitude.
It just makes goods and services available to everybody
through intelligent use of technology.
Creative Director / Cinematographer / Director: Mark Waters
Producer: Frank Da Silva
Executive Producers: Dana Amma Day, Nicholas Pilbrow
Production Assistant: Simon G. Powell
Storyboard Artist: Alexander Ward
An Earth 2 Production for Orion Network Films LLP
In Association with Positive TV and JustLivinFilm
Filmed on Location: Venus, Florida / New York City, NY