Should I Even Write About Zeitgeist?

Okay straight up, I'm going to paraphrase Bill Hicks (original review on 'Basic Instinct' another supposed controversial film):

"Don't get sucked in by the phoney hype surrounding this movie. Quick capsule review: 'Piece a shit!' That's all it was, is a piece of shit."

So I'll just reiterate straight up - quick capsule review: Not even worth watching.

In a nutshell the narrative of Zeitgeist goes as follows:

1) Christianity is a lie, Jesus doesn't exist there's a conspiracy to cover up that Jesus is actually the sun.
2) The World Trade Center Attacks (911) were staged and executed by the US government (the Zeitgeist of the films title).
3) The World Bank, IMF, Federal Reserve are actually trying to create a global currency that will be implemented by implanting RDI (RDF?) satellite tracked microchips that will be used to control the people of the future.

This process is missing only two things in it's narrative: Step 4) ??? and Step 5) Profits!

There are two principles you need to know to watch Zeitgeist, the first being 'the narrative fallacy' in that human beings are excellent at retrospectively predicting the future by selecting evidence that confirms a particular story to explain events. The second is Occam's razor - mentioned prominently in Contact, albeit erroneously by all the characters that propose that 'God is the simplest explanation for existence' but basically it states that 'all else being equal the simplest explanation is most likely the right one.'

Before breaking down the various sections, the last thing I will say is about conspiracies in general (and the people who believe in them).

Conspiracy theories more often than not serve the opposite purpose of what their promoters believe. Genuine conspiracies do exist, such as the conspiracy of Catholics to assasinate Queen Elizabeth in the times of the Spanish Armada, or Guy Fawkes' Gun powder plot, the Bay of Pigs Disaster etc. But none on the level of complete control of society, control of society is as far as evidence suggests usually quite obvious and blatent, and reason suggests that subtle, anonymous control would be nearly impossible.
Conspiracy theories seek to explain why events that seem random and unpredictable are infact controlled and deliberate, whilst conspiracy nuts espouse they are trying to preserve civil liberties and question authority, behaviourally they are craving an authority that is reassuringly in control.
It is for most conspiracy promotors at least at a subconscious level, more comforting to think a group of evil men are pulling all the strings rather than blind participants colliding in a semi-random (and effectively random) environment to produce a spectrum of unforeseeable events. In other words, it is more comforting to believe somebody is in control, than to believe nobody is in control.
That is the general principle on which people should reject Zeitgeist.

Part 1: Jesus and Religion.

Where you should get information from: Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion. Or if you don't have timeto read a whole book just go here and have a browse.

This is probably the best and most credible section of the film. Again it suffers from allevating a few ideas to agrandizement, but it is a pretty neat little theory and entertaining for 10 or so minutes. However it's also the section that could most easily be cut from the film. It's inclusion in the context of the rest of the film that follows doesn't contribute to the narrative, but tells us something about the directors perception of the target audience - people who love to hate religion, government, economics etc. otherwise why bother angering the Christian faithful and maximising their chances that they will dismiss the rest of the film. These days Christianity has little to do with the economy and themes that follow.

The big drawback of the theory is that its entirely irrelevant whether Jesus is a reinvented Sun God or not. Applying Occams Razor to the Christianity yeilds much simpler explanations than a deliberate conspiracy to cover up the fact that Jesus is a metaphore for the sun.

Firstly the simplest explanation for moral codes is biological. Our moral codes are pretty universal in a general sense, excluding people born with disorders that inhibit their social abilities. This is covered at length in Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene' which in my opinion is a simpler explanation on how people can be selfish or altruistic in differing contexts. Basically it is an Evolutionary Stable System that gives way to morality - we occasionally will steal resources off a neighbour if we can get away with it because it advantages our genes and disadvantages theirs. But we will show loyalty to a partner in a manogomous relationship if it creates an advantage for our genes. Conversely if evolutionarily stable a small proportion may leave a partner 'holding the baby' to sew their seed elsewhere. After millions of years of refinements, the set of genes that effect behaviour come up with more or less 'The Golden Rule'.

Religion comes in as social behaviour, known as gangs, its a basis of membership and the religions that survive are the ones that have the 'memes' that are evolutionarily stable for rewarding the 'in-group' and punishing the 'out-group'. Once this is understood, all other debate about the specifics of religion is frankly irrelevant. To me, reason leads to one place - 'There is no god' because it is the simplest explanation given the evidence. Whether Jesus is a Sun-god or just the Jesus we know and love is irrelevant.

At any-rate this theory is worth questioning on the principle of not accepting ideas presented as facts.

There is at least scholarly agreement, that the collection known as 'the new testement' were written at least a hundred or so years after the facts, and the teachings of the various disciples contradict eachother, suggesting the inaccuricies arise from an ineffecient transmission of the different perceptions of the origins of the oral traditions. Or, simply the preservation of the teachings was not perfect over the generations.

Only one disciples teachings actually put a divine spin on both Jesus' virgin birth and his death and resurrection. There is no archealogical evidence to suggest the person of Jesus ever existed. However it is likely that somebody existed, and contrary to 'The Passion of the Christ' or 'Ben Hur' that melodramatically depict the whole of the Roman Empire, the Jews and citizens of the middle east waking up and realising Jesus was the big deal, mostly nobody cared much. Which is why Jesus could have been one of the many profits of the time, or a combination of a few of them.

The most significant figure in Christianity is not Christ, or St Peter, or Jon the Baptist but Emperor Constantine whose conversion to Christianity brought with it the law that every Roman citizen was required to convert from paganism to Christianity. Yes, Christianity didn't survive and flourish under 'freedom of religion' but under the exact opposite. Patronage of Roman Emporers better explains why Christianity became the dominant religion of Europe, rather than the efforts of the Christian Martyrs to persuade the masses. Like most decisions, it was a matter of reaching someone of influence, rather than a war of attrition against the mass market.

This happened in 300-347 AD or so. Before that Christianity was a phenomena like Scientology today. A small unimportant community, thus it is no surprise that the origins of Jesus are ambiguous.

The Jews if Exodus is to believed were a community that originated out of the African region of Egypt, thus it is no surprise if you can accept that religions in general are stories invented by human beings to form a basis of social cohesion in the foremost and explain natural phenomena on the side, that they might borrow ideas and narratives from a neighbouring community and vice versa. That's a simpler explanation than the suggestion that Christianity was actually pure astrology for 300 or so years then later a cover up was issued when someone felt it necessary for Jesus to be a person and not 'the sun'.

I mean overwhelmingly, why should anyone care? If christianity was working as sun worship, why turn it into an anthropomorphic religion at huge expense and edict laws that punish the followers for not accepting the change?

I mean, it is known that the Vatican picked and chose and censored what went into the Bible and what was out. Furthermore, just thinking objectively about the bible story (or watching the passion of the christ) fails to impress any significance at all. I mean why really should we care that a god impregnates a virgin, allows that child to grow, then allows that child to die, and that this sequence of events absolves humanity of its sins (temporarily) and then that that person comes back from the dead (miraculous yes, but to what effect?) and then dissappears again.

It's a story, but when I look at the progress of events I just fail to see any significance. Interpreted as astrological, it could be argued that this story makes more sense. But then it provides no real instruction and nothing (really) of any importance. Jesus' return from the dead was of some comfort to his buddies. Or that the Sun takes 3 days to complete some transition over the winter solstace, so what?

So fucking what?

This section of Zeitgeist is as I said, entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter where the Bible story drew its inspiration from, or was modelled on other religions, or that the world's religions share common features. The real debate is whether there is a 'devine creator sentience' and thus some external and universal moral code, which if there is means the debate is on what basis one should choose between the various theories (religions) that present themseves, or more compellingly, that the failure of all religions to substantiate any evidence for the existence of a creator might suggest that our default skeptical or rational position be to reject the existence of a divine being.

So read the God Delusion to get info on this debate, because YES there are rules to science and reason and logic that say that science and reason and logic must CATEGORICALLY reject religion s unscientific, unreasonable and illogical. Or as Bertrand Russell uberphilosopher puts it 'The world will only be saved by faith and courage. Faith in reason, and courage to speak what reason shows to be true'

Now the intrinsic problems of knowledge and Goedel's incompleteness theorem, there are problems to expend energy on.

Part 2: 911 & War.

Where you should get information from: Noam Chomsky - almost anything but 'Deterring Democracy' is a good starting point. And Kevin Mitnick - The Art of Deception. Also Penn & Teller Bullshit - Conspiracy Theories

For the record, this was when I switched off, and was sorely tempted to just turn off Zeitgeist, because it not just suggests but proclaims that 'the truth' is 911 was 'an inside job'. That it proclaims the truth based on 'Gap theory' or questions over the evidence to suggest it wasn't is where Zeitgeist loses all credibility as a source of information.

Put simply, this section suggests that because the official Commission has some questions surrounding it that these questions leave NO OTHER EXPLANATION possible than that The Government must have controlled it.

The movie hinges on this being the case, because September 11 is supposedly the 'Zeitgeist' by which the government creates the social unrest necessary to strip away the final civil liberties necessary for the evil men to control the world.

If you are going to use a concept like truth, I am going to assume you are adopting the generally accepted scientific definition of whether a statement is true or not. That is to say onus of proof. A theory is proven on the provision of incontrovertible evidence that something is true. Onus of proof dictates that 'you must substantiate a claim by providing proof' and NOT 'you must prove that my theory is not true'.

This is the logic of faith, ie. 'It is not up to me to prove my god exists, but up to you to prove he doesn't' which is why religion is categorically unscientific and cannot legally be taught as science in the US. Science is not democratic.

Yet after trying to debunk religion, Zeitgeist adopts this very mentality. So whether they provide evidence that the official explanation for 9/11 is not true, leaves us simply with no explanation, not a bogus dilemma where we must therefore accept that the government staged 9/11.

Which leaves us with Occams Razor to hack this section to pieces. Put simply to stage 9/11 the government had to:

Recruit 4 foreign nationals, willing to commit suicide.
Have them hijack the plane.
Issue a secret order for NORAD not to respond to the deviations from course.
Gag anyone involved in the secret orders to NORAD (permanently).
Conceal the 3rd plane which hit the pentagon, (presumably through wormhole technology) from radar so it dissappeared when the rocket hit the pentagon, killing Members of the US Defence force.
Dissappear the 4th plane and (inexplicably) fire a rocket into the ground in the countryside.
Hire at least 10 actors (and probably 40-100) to call their loved ones from the 4th plane and tell them they were going to attempt to overpower the hijackers and crash the plane before it could hit its target, then vanish all these actors permanantly OR hire families that vanished their own loved ones while putting on a convincing front of grief for the benefit of their neighbours and loved ones as they lived out the rest of their lives with the supposed dead relatives in permanent hiding as some of their partners even remarried to make sure the farce was convincing enough OR the government actually did kill civilians on the flight, whom were so convinced that the plane was hijacked and that they infact were going to overpower the hijackers and crash it into the ground that they communicated this impression to their relatives and loved ones before the government did whatever it is they did.
Sneak a 'suicide demolition crew' into WTC 1,2 & 7 to detonate explosives that brought down these 3 targets that the government decided were all necessary to create the appropriate 'Zeitgeist'.
Fly a plane into each of WTC 1 & 2 to provide pretext for the building falling down.
Have the demolition crew detonate the charges, then 'vanish' the demolition crew however large such that no member can ever come forward.
Successfully prevent any of the hundreds of people involved in the sheer logistics of such a conspiracy from ever coming forward and admitting/suggesting it was a conspiracy.

And when you look at it like that, Occams razor says - this is far from the simplest explanation and is infact the worst possible explanation.

So you have confirmation bias - we hear from 2 or 3 witnesses that recall feeling basement explosions detonating seconds before the plane impact. We don't hear from anyone that doesn't recall these impacts even though it is resonable to believe that these people might exist and have survived. The issue of silent evidence is always a big one in documentaries.

Furthermore, for the track record, as Chomsky (a notable abscence from this Documentary) puts it -

1) the government couldn't even pull off watergate which lead to the resignation of Nixon, a cakewalk compared to the elements necessary to control something like 9/11 attacks.
2) A remote failure to conceal the conspiracy would result in the death penalty for the entire existing 'evil men control group' meaning the end of the republican party, seizure of assets and probably 100-200 people being lined up against a wall and being shot. To assume such a risk for so little gain is suicidal.
3) The attacks happened in a real world environment, it would be difficult to pull off such a conspiracy in a controlled environment, where variables such as several thousand pedestrian witnesses of Manhatten island might spot a demolition crew.
4) Every single government in the world benefitted from 9/11 as a pretext to crackdown on terrorism, including Australia, China, Pakistan, India, Isreal, England, Holland, Germany, Italy, France, East Timor. This makes the US government no more likely to engineer such a plot as a group of rebels in the middle east. Terrorist groups also benefitted from the attacks and subsequent response of the US government through recruitment and so fourth.

The hardest element to explain though, remains the very real victims of 9/11 people that recieved the first hand descriptions of the hijackings from their loved ones on the plane. The fact that their loved ones are now dead.

The failure of the government to intervene and stop the attacks is most easily explanied by Kevin Mitnick, the most famous Social Engineer in history. He writes at great length to explain how the weak point common to all systems, no matter how robustly designed are people. This is why the biggest bank robbery in history was not a 'Oceans 11' type undertaking, but the result of a staff member allowing a service technician to see the days codes for wire transfers, and that technician then placing a call and having $100,000,000 or so transferred to his private account.

So too, NORAD, the Government, WTC security, Rescue Teams, and Airline staff all failed that day to prevent the attacks for the same reason. The people were the weak point in the system. Because the attacks were inconcievable to the average person, and all previous experience of hijacking had resulted in negotiations, is it not the simplest explanation that the Cabin Crew did not concieve that by letting the hijackers into the cockpit, they might fly that plane into buildings, something that had never been done before.

Occams razor says the most likely explanation is what happened. The evidence for it happening like it did, is actually compelling watch the Penn & Teller show on it I highly recommend it to free anyone from Conspiracy bullshit. They also go to the lengths of presenting evidence contrary to many of the sources Zeitgeist used, including the presence of thermite and the collapse times and so fourth.

In short, this section is just incredibly, incredibly poorly made and also in poor taste. It is disrespectful to everyone who lost friends and loved ones in the 9/11 attacks and I imagine causes them ongoing pain, whilst substantiating itself on flawed logic and ludicrously selective evidence.

And just quickly - Vietnam war was a political, ideological and financial disaster. Its repurcussions for strengthened civil liberties are still felt today, hence the unpopularity and dismal failure of the Iraq war. It is simply, getting harder and harder to wage war, not easier and easier. Vietnam was unpopular only very late in the war once almost every American citizen knew someone who had been effected adversely by the US's participation in it. The Iraq war was the first war in history to have protests against it, before it even began. Furthermore the Flower Power movement represented something like 10% of its generation. These days protestors represent more like 30% of Gen X & Y making it the most politically active generation of modern times. The US still tries to avoid ground troops. The Iraq war has bankrupted the country and crippled the republican party, the Afghanistan war also is a complete failure and the US is at it's least influential in world politics since WWII.

Part 3: Debt & Shit.

This section has some valid points, but is fluffy and just a plain bad source of information on what is happening in the world economy.

get your information from: Peter Schiff speech to Mortgage Bankers Association 2006 its hilarious because he predicted exactly how the Global Financial Crisis would fall out. Or Steve Keen with OzDebtwatch. Or Maynard Keynes! Or Warren Buffett! Or Benjamin Graham!

Best of all is Clive Hamilton's - Growth Fetish & Affluenza.

It may surprise people, but Money is an abstract concept, it has a number of qualities it must possess to be useful as 'Legal tender'

1. Relatively Scarce.
2. A store of wealth
3. Generally Acceptable
4. Easily Divisible
5. Transportable

A history of money is necessary to explain away the gold standard. If you look at everything but 1, seashells make a great currency. Except that they aren't relatively scarce, like say -- Gold! Gold became a medium of exchange to remove the problem of 'a double coincidence of wants' it is durable enough to act as a store of wealth, which meant you could sell your whole cow for 1 gold ducat, and then buy 2-dozen eggs for a piece of 8 the next week.

Soon though, people realised that when you got really rich, gold was suddenly not so number 5 - transportable. Ships were sinking, furthermore people were getting stabbed to death on the highway.

From which arose the promisory note, from someone credible that you could believe actually had the gold sitting in a vault somewhere to redeem the note for. Like a king or bank, making promisory notes suddenly fit the 5 above criteria.

Thus cheques were born, then later due to the popularity of promisory notes, banks started printing - bank notes redeemable in gold but in standardised divisions for large quantities of money, such as a dollar, 5 dollars or even 10!

Eventually somebody noticed that currency was merely confidence, and that if banks actually had to redeem all the notes they'd issue, they would go bankrupt. So the gold standard was established which said 'Banks have to carry 30% reserve of gold at all times'which was concievably safe.

the move to legal tender was simply the observation that much crime was surrounding the fact that the accepted currency was liable to exploitation, such as milling gold coins, and people murdering others, knowing that the actual money was 'as good as gold' so Banks stepped in and simply backed the currency, getting rid of the intrinsic value and just having even coins function as pure promisory notes.

This then is the best and simplest explanation for why the gold standard was dropped, because by and large the banks realised that they never had enough gold to actually honour their obligations if they all came in at once. So having 30% reserve or 1% reserve didn't matter much. Moreover, gold and other metals varied in price themselves, whereas the value of currency was determined by the negotiations in the market. Thus, instead of reflecting a gold standard, money actually reflects albeit inefficiently - the natural environment, a much broader, and harder to percieve standard than the gold standard.

Much of the fallout of the financial collapse owes itself to the abstract nature of money. Even if world governments fail to adopt true cost economics, sooner or later, reality will force it upon us.

So money broadly speaking is Inflation covered, the markets evaluation of what money is worth is what drives inflation. If we run low on natural resources like Petrol, money is worth less because the natural environment is diminished (the sum of resources we have access too) and inflation will spike. If however we can substitute hydrogen for petrol, petrol's scarcity is destroyed and money is worth more, and thus deflation will occur. It is all about our purchasing power of the dollar in the natural environment, the ultimate cap to our expenditure. When the natural environment expires, (or the parts of it that sustain life) so will we.

Interest rates, purely represent confidence. It goes like this, you want to do something risky with my money, so my confidence is low, because of the high risk. So I give you an interest rate of 20%. Your confidence may be high enough that you think you can make 21% on your investment so you accept the terms.

If you make 121% my confidence was too low, and I should have offered you say 107%. If you lose the money and declare bankruptcy, my confidence was infact too high and I should have offered you 1000% interest (which no doubt would have driven you off to find a more confident investor). Under capitalism, if I lend you money at interest and you lose it, that's my problem. Under the 'capatilism' that is practiced, if I lend you money and you lose it, thats your problem.

Or as Keynes aptly put it 'If you owe the bank $100 you have a problem, if you owe the bank $1,000,000 the bank has a problem'.

Interest rates are bastardised, so the government or reserve does the 'greenspan put' which is to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. In other words at times where the government should be least confident that someone can generate returns, they at as if the are most confident, lowering interest rates to 0% means the government is 100% confident people will make money.

Buffett says 'In Japan you can borrow $100,000,000 at less than 1%. To avoid currency risk, you'd want to invest in Japan's market. I figure I should be able to beat less than 1%, so I keep looking at Japan for a company that will make those returns. I'm still looking'

So inflations big problem is that its a very blunt instrument for manipulating an economy. Specific investment is much better, as well as fair and equitable taxes (taxes on resource usage, rather than income).

Despite what Zeitgeist claims, the best explanation for economic downturns, the depression and current global financial crisis, is not nefarious designs by evil bankers, but incompetence. Plain simple incompetence. Which is why, quite tellingly JP Morgan was aquired by Chase Manhatten and now needs bailouts from the US government, despite 'masterminding' the global financial conspiracy of bankers and 'quietly exiting the market before trouble hits'.

I'm sure J.P Morgan the man, felt like he was a master of the universe, like so many people do, and like any large corporation, benefit from 1st ammendment rights that were not intended and the embedded American fear of Nationalization of banks. But the US Economy looks more and more like Japan's, Obama's bailout strategy exactly the expression of shortterm interests conflicting with long term survival that will drive it's big 4 and others into the ground.

Put simply, it is far more likely that 'the men behind the curtain' will destroy themselves than succeed in forming a global world government.

The better explanations of all the bad stuff happening in the world is simply the disconnectedness of society in general (the result of unpredictable technological innovation) using a terrible measure of welfare such as GNP (the flimsy philosophy that economics is, rather than hard science) structural flaws in taxation (resulting in 10,000 page long taxation policy in Australia, and god knows how many pages in the US) and the general stupidity of human beings.

Once again the weak point common to all systems is human beings. And sadly (neoclassical) economics is founded on the single flawed assumption of human beings being 'rational economisers' that is they always make the decision that maximises their welfare. This is why people are taught Efficient Market Theory, when they should just be taught they cant predict shit. Why economists disregarded the role of debt completely because they assumed it was a rational decision to be offered and taken on, when they should be taught that morons will buy a house no matter what the relative cost of a mortgage is to renting because they are emotionally invested in the idea of a house, and will accept collassal debt believing the natural environment is inexhaustable and that house prices will alwasy go up. The problem is because people speculate on shit they don't understand. They follow eachother around like sheep, and the best and brightest minds more often than not, fail to outperform blind robotic market indexes.

Furthermore one might even consider biology, your son has half your genes, your son's son has a quarter, your great grandson has 1/8, your great great grandson is 1/16 you and after that considering that human beings are 99.95% identicle, 1/16th of 5/100ths is so insignificant they may as well be a complete stranger. JP Morgan is dead, is his living heirs are genetically about as similar to him as I am. Granted he may not have considered this at the time (1913)but at any rate, at that time the US was not foreseeably going to replace Britain as the World Superpower, it was just another colony, he would not have predicted nor planned in cahoots with Rockefeller and other bankers a multigenerational plot to take over the world that had any real chance of succeeding.

Part 4: The Men Behind The Curtain

So Zeitgeist predicts that there is a conspiracy of bankers plotting to microchip everyone to gain absolute despotic control over the planet. As such, if you are still watching (or for that matter still reading this) one should contemplate why you even bothered going to school if you are going to buy into this.

Consider -

Worlds Largest Empire - Mongolian conquered majority of Europe and Asia, lasted 100 years.
Most stable dictatorship - Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate, lasted 200 years
Duration of Roman Empire - 500 years (albeit changed in size almost constantly)
US reign as superpower - almost 60 years (and arguably already over)

For all it's bluster, the US controls less territory than the British did, and far less than the Mongolians and Romans, and is a mere flash in the pan compared to the Tokugawa Shogunate which is probably as close as anyone will ever get to total control.

The US is already one of many. The very institutions Zeitgeist fingers as 'the Men Behind the Curtains' are infact owned by the Chinese, Russians and Japanese. And I'm going to put it out there and say Japan actually has the nationaistic stones to survive the Mutually Assured Financial Destruction of a US dollar collapse where the US does not.

Infact it is interesting to note, that every world power was crushed by debt. And every form of government humans have thus far survived. The real threat is the collapse of the natural environment.

So in the end, because I'm so fucking sick of such a shit film being thought of as 'information' I come back to, this is nothing but the foetal urges of an anxious infant craving a safe world where all the problems can be laid at the feet of a bogey monster that is doing this to us. Rather than facing the fact that we are doing it to ourselves.

This is the irony of zeitgeist, instead of being properly skeptical and simply raising questions, it presents answers that are as bad or worse as those presented by the mass media.

It falls down on its valid points about governments inventing enemies to galvanize public opinion, it invents an enemy in a similarly poor attempt to galvanize public opinion.

And instead of focusing on the hurt caused to reason through religion, it tries to explain away the worlds problems in the exact same manner religion explains the failings of the 'all powerful god' by inventing the devil to ruin things for everyone.

So if you have read this far, congratulations, I'm dissapointed really that I wrote anything beyond: Piece of Shit.