First of all I want to make up for some false information provided by other reviewers by making two things absolutely clear: - the movie is not an advert for anything. there is no book to buy. believe it or not, the so called "book" is a PDF File available on www.thezeitgeistmovement.com and is absolutely free, just as are the Zeitgeist Movies.
- Zeitgeist Addendum never suggests that technology replacing human labour (automation) would be a bad thing, the movie only points out that businesses use this progress to save costs and therefore increase profit. Remember: Revenues - (minus) Costs = Profit (roughly).
(I have no intention of reviewing it, it is not a movie like another, its purpose is not to entertain or to transpose messages through known cinematic patters.The movie is free, meant to be spread and the messages in it are clear, there are no metaphors, comparisons or anything alike) To the point then of my movie comment:
This movie clearly intents to reshape the thinking process of intelligent human beings. Instead of absorbing the education and the values we are given as real, trustworthy and natural, and then merely registering them we should start to question the education, question the values of society, doubt them, check on them and only then decide if information is trustworthy or not; reject what is in doubt until there is absolute certainty about the trustworthiness.
In my opinion this movie should also be questioned, doubted. This is exactly why I said that the movie is for intelligent people; after watching this movie they change their thinking process and immediately start to doubt the monetary system but also the movie and the Venus Project.
It takes intelligent people to understand what this movie wants and about what it is and it is crucial to understand first. With watching the movie, the job is still not done, one should start researching on their own with any tools given if things are really that bad in and with the monetary system. We need to ask ourselves a thing or two: were the obvious long term consequences of the monetary system intended? Is the Venus Project socially possible? Haven't we gone too far already? There is no correct answer to such questions, the answers are arbitrary, the solutions are created by everyone. This tears us apart.
I personally find the Venus Project very appealing but I see many problems already.
First of all, it is very idealistic since the values we're given from the monetary system are so strongly inherent in our nature. Could you possibly imagine a world without money? Doing work to live on a good standard that everyone has. Maybe so. Maybe not.
There would be no competition then, would there? The technologies presented in the movie to harvest clean energy from natural inexhaustible sources are brilliant but I don't think for any second that the one who comes up with it would not ask for money. For profit. To distinguish himself from the others. to compete.
This leads me to the second point: the Venus Project asks us to lay down competition. However, isn't it competition and the thrive for profit that makes us evolute? Are newer and better Computers really produced to make us evolute, or is evolution just a side effect of the rush for profit? The latter I would say.
It is competition that makes some of us study in the best universities, to get better jobs, to earn more money and the side effect might really be some evolution. I don't think humanity and its instinctual nature would ever be ready to work to evolute instead to compete. As long as the human being is instinctively driven by competition, there will never be a Venus Project.
Reason on the highest scale and depth is what could bring the Venus Project to life: refusing to compete, refusing to get profits at any cost, refusing a strong elite position; refusing to value money.
We would need to value life. Compassion. Solidarity. Impossible? No.
But it needs time and work, some processing, too. The human mind needs to be reshaped, education needs to change, societal values need dramatic change as well. Just as the movie points out, tradition values need to be flushed away but this cannot happen over days or years.
I am sure that it will be reality someday. I am also sure that this process of changing values will take a lot of time, I'm thinking about hundreds of years; or when we run out of oil. We need to be forced to changed, preferably by nature.
Until that happens, a world where there is no money, no unemployment, no competition, no differentiation between a Ferrari and a Ford, and technology for everybody, such a world will remain a kids fantasy. I had that fantasy, too, this "idea".
But what would be a world where everybody has everything for nothing? It would be a world where the new values are love, family, fun. Which raises new competition (who gets the better family, the prettier wife/husband...)... right now, as intelligent as I might be I say: We live in a vicious circle of competition. Money is not the problem, competition is. As a conclusion I think that a world without competition would free us all, and yet leave us with nothing. I hope that hundreds of years after me there will be a near perfect world.
Probably without us, we are not made for such a world.
Thanks if you read this to the end :-)