Zeit. Studios presents Peter Joseph in 'The Summary'.
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 actually sustainable, for not just one nation or class, but all the world's people.
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, 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.
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 everyday 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 witihin a culture that's predicated on inferiority
and people with thinking that need more and 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.
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,of 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?
To organize a structure based on the intelligent management of the Earth's 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 were 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 you move to the next level.
How do we utilize the 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 things are 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.
www.thezeitgeistmovement.com www.zeitgeistmovie.com
fin.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community