Hello, I'm Peter Joseph and welcome to the "Why I Advocate" campaign.
You can learn more about this at thezeitgeistmovement.com
where we're basically trying to get people from around the world
to discuss why, in a very concise manner
they advocate The Zeitgeist Movement,
The Venus Project and, of course, a Resource-Based Economy.
So, for me, to make this concise
which is very difficult for me at times
I'll give three basic overlaying points.
The first I think is best summarized by Saint Timothy,
and that is, "For the love of money is the root of all evil."
And I think, historically speaking, you'll find that to be the case.
Even in many things that tend to be aberrated
for the sake of aberrated, seemingly unrelated to finance
you'll tend to find that underneath the surface
there's something causal ocurring within the system itself. For example
there's a great deal of violence ocurring in the United States.
One of the most unique things that's been discovered
recently by social scientists is that
the degree of inequality in the current society
excuse me, in a society
is directly proportional to the rates of violence
across the whole spectrum of violent behavior.
So, it's economic attributes
that can relate to seemingly aberrated acts of violence.
Even random shootings and things as such.
So, these are important factors to take into account
there's a lot of evidence regarding this information.
The stress of this society is underlying, based economically,
it leads to all sorts of social distortions and neurosis,
addictions and problematic behaviors,
not to mention physical illnesses and everything else.
So, the love of money is the root of all evil on multiple levels.
The second point I would like to make
is that, well, very simply money isn't needed.
Money is not neccesary anymore.
The values that we have, permeating in this culture are distorted
and they generate more sickness than anything positive.
More sickness than progress.
People function essentially in
two different capacities in the modern world,
they're either parasites or they're prostitutes.
Sorry to be blunt about it, but that is the
firm reality across the entire spectrum,
regardless of how you look at it.
There's a subservience attribute to what this system demands and it
always blows my mind when people think that there's something free
about the world that we live in.
Freedom is not even a nuance of the system
that we current live in. It's not based on freedom whatsoever.
If it was, it would be completely different.
In fact, much closer to a Resource-Based Economy.
But that's an aside.
So, money is not needed, not only the values need to be changed,
where people don't have the acquisitive materialistic values,
they don't have to be brainwashed into constant, conspicuous consumption
to keep GDP up, to keep employment up
and everything else that keeps this machine going.
Those can be resolved in a new system. And new values can be created
as they always had been throughout time.
A second part to that, which I think is important to bring up,
is that the efficiency that we're capable of doing, capable of having,
the ability to create excess abundance,
the ability to take care of the basic needs of all the world's people,
the ability to elevate our technology to levels
that we probably can't even imagine,
is intrinsically stiffled by this very system
because of the cost-efficiency mechanisms
and all the profit attributes that make it virtually impossible
for the best of anything to be created.
We could raise society to the state of present day knowledge, which
if you analyze today, we're probably about a hundred years behind,
to be perfectly frank.
Maybe I'm little extreme on that note,
maybe more to the effect of sixty years behind
but I think somewhere between sixty and a hundred years behind
is where we exist today.
If we wanted to take modern knowledge and apply it
towards renewable energies, production
and anything that we think is socially viable,
you would see a cataclysmic change, if that knowledge would
simply be applied and not hindered by the profit mechanism
and the things that are required to
make anything come to fruition in this culture.
If you can't make money off of something, it's not going to happen.
And the world you see around you is the result of that.
Third point, to cut off my posible long winded tangents.
The third point was very simple to the effect that
the system has ran its course, the entropy has kicked in.
That's stated incorrectly.
The system is breaking down, excuse me.
And there's nothing that's going to stop that break down
if the mechanisms of the monetary system are adhered to.
It's only if the mechanisms are bypassed and, say,
gigantic amounts of debt relief is assumed or...
Things of that nature or, you know
Manhattan Projects, if you will, for say, renewable energies...
Those are the only things that are going to
slow the decline of the current system
which has been breaking down for at least seventy years now.
We don't see it because we live in it. We are in the box, remember.
So, as this system continues to fail,
as the wars increase, as the social stresses increase,
as the divisions of society increases,
you're going to see a lot of social instability and
it's about time that people realize that
there's no solution anymore within the current order.
We're going to have to do something different.
We have to change our way of thinking
if we expect to resolve this and to create a stable society,
a steady-state society that can actually
take care of the 7 to 8 billion people
that are on this planet or are going to be on this planet.
So, I'm going to leave it at that.
On a loose distinction, I hope everyone would
go the thezeitgeistmovement.com and look into these points.
And thank you for your time, and I hope to see
a flood of such testimonials from all of you
in the near future. Thank you.