【轉貼】Criticism of the Zeitgeist Movement
發表於 : 2014-04-29, 00:25
聽聽不同的聲音,特此轉貼。很有心的一個人,寫了很長,可以仔細研讀一下。
Criticism of the Zeitgeist Movement
http://antispirituality.net/venus-zeitgeist-movement
Criticism of the Zeitgeist Movement
Who am I
This should not matter, as only the core of the arguments should matter, but for the few whose problem would be their desire to invent something else about who I am, you can see my presentation video here.
A few more details not developed in that video:
There were periods when I got interested in the phenomenon of pseudo-science and crackpots, that is people seeing themselves as geniuses discovering new theories or refuting established theories (such as the Relativity theory or the quantum theory for their paradoxes which they cannot accept, as if it was a pleasure for scientists to accept paradoxical results without careful checking), in paranoid ways, pretending to criticize a knowledge which they in fact do not understand. They may have made some understanding efforts, and even been "good at school", ignoring that, in fact, the true content of established scientific knowledge is much bigger and deeper than what school can reflect. I am not dogmatically supporting any "official view", the "establishment" against poor marginal challengers ; I am not working for any administration or company, and I dislike the current institutions and world order in many ways. I am totally free-thinker, I reject any political correctness and widespread assumptions and I care to check every idea in details. Even if some teaching from any social group roughly seems true, I still don't accept it without dissecting it into hundreds of elementary conceptual pieces and checking each piece one by one, then rebuilding my own view out of only and exactly those logical pieces that proved true while rejecting others (unless, of course, I have good reasons to trust others, especially the scientific conclusions in fields others than my own such as climatology). If I support the free market principles, this is purely motivated by logic and mathematical elegance, not by any sort of greed or self-interest, nor any social trust or conditioning. While I happen to agree with libertarians on many issues, this does not come from their influence, and I also strongly disagree with their usual views on other issues, such as their conception of a free monetary system, their climato-skepticism, and their general disdain towards ecological issues. I do support green taxes, while they would reject me as a "statist" for this.
As I explained there, I found in different ways that, in many cases, bullshit can be much better at convincing the ignorant public of its scientificity, than genunine science is. Because for this, the bullshit only has to adapt to one requirement : to seem scientific in the eyes of the ignorant. They are free to tell any bullshit that can serve this purpose. While those who try to say the truth, have another requirement to follow : that of sticking to the scientific truth. Which can be a serious handicap in their attempts to give stupid people the best impression that it is what they are doing.
So, at the stupid game of trying to seem the most rational and scientific in the eyes of the mindless ignorant public, the bullshit propagandists are often much better players with better chances to win, than real scientists. Because it is in the nature of the public to rather believe bullshit than truly rational claims ; and of course, to call "scientific" what they believe in. As it has been since millenia, which is why the world was dominated by religions, while science was only recently "discovered" by a tiny minority, that remains poorly understood by the many.
Despite of all this, when trying to express my views (somewhere in French) the Zeitgeist supporter who answered, still found a way to dismiss my arguments by treating me as a mentally ill person, not taking me seriously (probably that my position is just so far from his which he assumes so confidently to be the obvious truth, that it is natural for him to dismiss it as an expression of mental illness). He "justified" his accusation by telling how he thought I made a stupid error when comparing the Zeitgeist movement with Marxism, which he sees as absolutely incomparable with Zeitgeist. Sorry, they are extremely similar, this is a fact. The only difference is that the Zeitgeist supporters now see Marxism "from the outside" (with historical perspective on the real effects, ignoring the doctrinal content), while they see their own view "from the inside" (doctrinal content only). So they are the same, with the same discrepancy (fooling power) between how they taste from inside and what they objectively are. So he was the one doing a stupid error in the way he claimed to see a fundamental difference.
Well I don't worry as I'm not the only one to be treated as "mentally ill" by the Zeitgeist movement for presenting arguments against their views which they cannot answer. But, what about the overwhelming majority of people who were convinced after debate that my project is the right one ? Are they mentally ill too ? Well, treating the large number of those who disagree (when they cannot be accused of greed or of being manipulated by the current powers) as "mentally ill" is an important similarity with the Soviet Union, isn't it ???
Why a criticism ???
Because I partially agree with them
It would make no sense to criticize one's complete "enemies", as who would be interested ? It can only make sense to explain what is wrong in a position where there is something true, to show that its truths that would attract some people sensitive to these truth, do not imply the truth of the other claims, and that another view is possible. It would be hopeless to try making useful allies out of radical enemies, as the explaining work would be too heavy, and with no hope to succeed, as the people will go away too early anyway.
So I agree with the following of their claims:
The economic and political system we live in is deeply flawed, and the world is going very bad because of this (rather than from the human nature, while there are some problems there but we cannot change it anyway so we need to focus on other aspects). A radically new system is needed. For this new system, a scientific design is needed. Why few people had in mind to use scientific methods to redesign the political and economic system, is just because this was never tried yet. And this new scientifically designed system, would work using new software on the internet.
Okay, but apart from this, I disagree with almost all of their other claims.
They have a wonderful project for a better world. Why be against them ?
Are you for or against Santa Claus ?
There is nothing good at all in their movement. Of course they have the best intentions, but no clue on how to do anything good in reality.
I'm not afraid of any change, and I indeed want the world to change for the collective good.
But I am against waste and bullshit, and I don't like to see thousands of people waste their energy for an absurd ideology that cannot bring any effective good to mankind. It's not a matter of being for or against a goal, since we all have somehow the same goal: the common good. The disagreement is about beliefs on which method can indeed help to this goal. And as we agree that the best method is the scientific one, the disagreement is about which views/methods really are scientific, and which are not. And this is the huge disagreement, by which our ways are, finally, totally opposed to each other. (They might be surprised by this claim, thinking that they only expressed their desire to follow scientific ways and thus did not have the chance yet to reject one yet, however in fact their doctrine is already full of irrational, unjustified and wrong claims - see below)
Why post it in this Antispirituality site
Because the Zeitgeist movement is just a religion among others. It is no more different from other religions, than the different other religions are different from each other. It is especially extremely similar to the religion of Marxism, and only stupidly ignores the comparison. Its claim to support the scientific method, is just as meaningless as many other religions'claim that they are scientific, or that their truth or divine origin is proven by science. Its claims are exactly no different from religious faith, in the following sense:
What is the difference between faith and reason ?
The difference between faith and reason, is that
People of faith have (often) faith that their faith is compatible with (or : proven by) reason/science.
But people of reason, have reasons to disagree.
In fact there is nothing scientific in their theories. But they can't see this, because they have no clue of what science really is. So, first of all they would need to learn what is science.
Namely, there is a big problem of making the difference between : having faith in reason, and being rational.
If someone wants to worship science and reason, this can be easy... as long as he does not care what it means.
But if he wants to learn how to start thinking in a truly rational way, this is a very different and much harder problem.
Though I thought I disagreed too much for caring to criticize
Why bother criticizing the Zeitgeist Movement ? For several years I did not consider it worth wasting my time doing so much honor to these idiots of the Venus project, so as dedicate any time caring for their nonsense, while I had so much more important and meaningful thoughts to develop, in mathematics, philosophy, and the design of my own solution to the world's problems.
Indeed, I thought, a person is either an idiot or not, and if someone is stupid enough to take this Venus nonsense seriously, then he is hopelessly unable to do any right work for a better world anyway, so he isn't worth my time caring to teach him how much is 2+2 and why the Venus propaganda is wrong....
And I saw no point in caring for what the large masses of idiots think, because, indeed, anyway, it does not really matter what they think, since anyway their action is hopelessly sterile no matter what one may try to do about it.
While, to develop the true solution to many the world's problem, there is no need to convince large numbers of idiots. Instead, just the work of a few serious people would suffice, in the form of the development of a new free software for web servers.
Also another reason to not waste time criticizing them, is that their errors are obvious and many other people surely already pointed them out.
So, of 2 things one: either they are ready to read and understand criticism, and thus change their mind because the criticism against them is valid, or they aren't. In any case, since valid criticism must exist, and must already have convinced any sane people, I see no reason why my own addition would add anything.
But, while genuine criticism exists, the Venus fools still believe it does not exist, because when they see it they systematically censor it away from their attention, pretending that it is not genuine argument but only "insults", things "offensive", "irrelevant", "misrepresenting" their views, and so on.
Indeed looking at the Wikipedia article on their movement, I indeed see a section "criticism" but it hardly contains anything significant (for example it proudly links to an article that cannot be read without paying, well at least it's a chance that the Zeitgeist movement departed from the Venus copyrighters). Indeed, the Venus zealots are so much motivated that they regularly censor away and mock any criticism that it addressed to them, and since Wikipedia is just like the streets, a space where those who are the maniest and cry the loudest are right (who edit articles more often - like democracy, a law of the stupidest where the stupidest are right because they are the maniest and cry the loudest), there is no chance to see any significant objective view and criticism there. It is necessary to explore the abundant history of the article in order to find attempts at expressing criticism. For example in this old version there was a link to this criticism, which was then censored in later versions. It's a pity I have no time to dedicate on searching for all the genuine criticism that has been similarly added at some time to the article and then censored away.
Other criticism directly found by google from different sources
Happy atheism
The swash
Vermont Commons
⇾ Skeptic project : the zeitgeist movement with a detailed critical analysis of each film in a separate page ⇽
"The Problem with Zeitgeist" article copies on The Anarchist Library and on Infoshop
Several forums : INTP forum - David Icke - Online philosophy club
Jay Kinney reviews Zeitgeist, the Movie
Atheist Nexus
Skeptoid
Smashing Telly : zeitgeist – the greatest lie ever told
Confronting Canned Responses to Criticisms of the Zeitgeist Movement
...
In French:
Alain Kern
Some quotations of other criticism
So, I hardly see any sense in bothering to criticize what is obviously ridiculous nonsense.
However, since then, time passed, and the most absurd, unexpectable, unthinkable situation turned out to the be, in fact, the most massive reality and the biggest problem of the world :
That, while the solution that I have found to the world's problems, whenever I have the chance to explain and debate it in a room of rational people (usually economics students), usually all of them go out convinced that this is the solution, and many even said they are proud to have met me (and this indeed happened with thousands of people that went out convinced in this way)... finally none of them ever did anything about it, so that finally, no matter that I have all the arguments and my project is the best and is relatively very easy to implement, and my arguments could convince nearly everybody, I finally remain nobody, with no reputation at all, with nobody to help me, while the help of just a few people would have sufficed to change the world. Instead, they are many thousands of people who support the Venus project, so that this project is now largely more "notable" than mine. Not that they have any project at all (in fact they don't have any project except trying to reach their mythical "critical mass", the hell knows for what) nor any convincing argument on their side.
No. They are much more "notable" and "popular" just because when one of them tries spread his nonsense to 100 other people, he is not convincing... to anybody except to one idiot... but that will be an activist too and will keep spreading the message to 200 other people.
Alas, it's an incredible but sad and real fact, that in the world there are mainly 2 kinds of people: there are those who are able to think, and there are those motivated by good intentions. So that those who could be able to understand the truth, do not care nor do anything about it, while those with "good intentions", the activists who spread ideas, only want to spread bullshit and reject the truth.
Stupidities are much more popular than intelligent solutions, for the following reason - beyond the mere fact that most people are stupid and want to believe this is good for judging things, yeah.
Spreading stupidities is easy : you just need to repeat a slogan. But spreading intelligent ideas is much harder as you cannot catch someone's attention with something that requires him to learn some new concepts for 1-2 hours, express his objections (every expression of lack of understanding in front of the presentation of each component of a big system that requires to understand a lot of things about its many components for the whole of it to properly work as needed) and have the author/presenter respond to each objection one by one... in order to finally discover how convincing it feels. Usually everybody only gives a few minutes to look at a proposition before judging it.
If only this was not exactly the case, if only a few more people with both sane thinking and good motivations existed, then the world would be going so much better ! and many problems would be solved.
Sad truth. What can I do ? I don't know. Just desperately try to report the situation. I have no solution to this problem.
So, they have thousands and thousands of activists on their side - from this article, in 2009 “We already have a quarter-million members,”. But all happens as if they did not want the world to change. To change the world would be easy : just give me 0.004% of their followers (assuming they are 250,000, this would be 10 of them - or even, just a half of this) to work on my project, and the global revolution solving much of the wold's problems will follow.
(But such a calculation might be vain, as it might just be a ridiculously hopeless dream to expect any one of these "scientific method" fanatics to ever give respect and a voice to genuine reason).
Instead of this, they prefer dedicating their life to pose as martyrs and pretend that all problems come from the fact that not more people follow them. Do they have a sense of efficiency ? of intelligence ? it seems not. They are very many. And they have been even more one century ago. They were called Marxists. They were the dominant voice worldwide. Not only in the Soviet Union but also in large parts of Western Europe (particularly France where I lived). But they keep posing as martyrs, proud of challenging the "dominant" economic view. Well, if the free market is popular, isn't it by the force of necessity, because history selected it as the only working system under hand ? just by the force of facts and pragmatism while it has not much been so popular as an ideology, while it is in fact their socialist and anti-monetary ideas that were the dominating ideological orthodoxy in many places... where they thought their idiocies were the unquestionable truth because they had not actual responders but only the mute and impersonal force of facts to contradict them.
So, not only they have no sense of logic (as their ideology isn't logical) but no sense of pragmatism either, since the implementation has already been tried (with the Soviet union)... as some say "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". Which of course they will dismiss by pretending that their solution has never been tried (just like Marxists tried to do when questioned during the fall of the Soviet Union : that it was not the "true" communism). Although they are thousands and nothing technically prevents them from all gathering in one place and trying to experiment their "solution" to see if it works, they still pose as victims and passively remain mindless followers blaming the rest of people for their own inability to implement their mythical "solution".
Long analysis of many points would be needed... I will try to do this later
Where are their arguments ????
They make a lot of bold claims but give no rational justifications for them. I mean, no genuinely rational justifications, in the true sense of "rational", that is, accurate and careful enough to avoid any risk of radical, terrible mistakes. They have their "arguments" of course, but these are much too fuzzy and uncareful to have any rational value.
For example, they don't make any serious analysis of the causes of problems, but make a big fuzzy pack of all of them and attribute them to the big unanalyzed thing that roughly seems the main way things currently go on: "free market" which they claim to be the cause of problems. They are blind to the way in which free market indeed remarkably succeeded to provide prosperity in the world, since, of course, there are some remaining big problems worth complaining of. So they focus on the fact not all things work and decide that we must get rid of everything how things now work.
They don't understand that the problems don't mainly come from any sort of big bad wolf (either personal or impersonal) that would just need to be killed, but from the lack of good structures. That problems often come from the consequences of partial solutions which have gaps, and that the bad effects often reflect real problems that are not resolved by these partial solutions but go out as visible troubles through these gaps, and need to be positively addressed; and that just destroying the partial solutions (free market mechanisms) whose gaps have let these troubles appear, would not help to resolve the source of the problems which often come from real technical difficulties in how to organize real economic activity no matter the political, conventional system.
For example here is my rational argumentation why some sort of money and free market is a necessary aspect of any working economic system.
See also : about the invisible hand
I challenge those who dream of abolishing money, to understand this argument and try to provide any genuine argument on their side that can stand the debate.
Apart from their absence of rational argument, I notice that: they talk about "experts" and "scientists" but they don't name any one of them. And they don't effectively refer to any specific scientific work. Instead, they put forward their views as those of a collective and impersonal "we". Are they all experts and scientists ? Do they just all happen to independently reach the same conclusions out of each member's free and independent scientific research ? Or are they all mindless followers of some leaders ? If they all follow each other's beliefs like a flock of birds or fish all go the same way as they follow each other, does anyone of them have an idea of whether there would be in fact one or several people among them who are the true authors of their collective convictions ? (I once saw a scientific article explaining the possibility to lead a large group of fish to some destination by sending a fish-like robot among them that would silently play the role of leader). In these conditions, any one that could successfully spread the rumor among them that he is the scientific expert, based on absolutely nothing but mindless rumor and mediatic accidents, can very easily abuse them all.
The Venus Project
I first had a look on the Venus Project a few years ago. In its web site, I followed what was put forward as a presentation of this project : it was presented in the form of videos.
So I looked at the video. The video was showing a vision of futurist buildings and towns building themselves like toys, defying the laws of gravity.
So what do I think about it ? I think that, since Jesus multiplied breads, walked on the water, and healed the paralyzed by telling him "Get up and walk", there is hardly anything new here.
See the above link to the INTP forum where someone commented on the Venus project = the very definition of absolute dictatorship, with no place for freedom, and no reason at all to expect that such a system wouldn't immediately turn into the wrong hands that will massively exploit the world for their own profit.
What an irony to see that the biggest and most absolute conspiracies are those set up by the stupidity of people motivated by their fear of conspiracies, who insist that they cannot trust anything because everything around is probably a conspiracy, with the only exception of this source which makes this warning... but is actually the one biggest and most ridiculous conspiracy, that invites people to imagine an "alternative" world free from the coming new world order (world government) that the big bad wolves around us are conspiring to set up. And so the "only solution" they come up with to protect us from this new world and the bad world government, is more precisely in some shape.... which is in fact the very exact shape of the most total and absolute world dictatorship and conspiracy ever (well, the absolute conspiracy and absolute dictatorship that we absolutely need to follow in order to protect ourselves from any other real or imaginary risk of dictatorship and conspiracy, of course). And all these people didn't notice but they love this...
How can all these people be that stupid ? Really amazing indeed.
Analysis of the statements on the site thezeitgeistmovement.com
Mission Statement
This text is very vague and general, with no sufficiently specific claim for a significant criticism to be possible. Just a little remark:
"This "Resource-Based Economic Model" is about taking a direct technical approach to social management as opposed to a Monetary or even Political one. It is about updating the workings of society to the most advanced and proven methods Science has to offer, leaving behind the damaging consequences and limiting inhibitions which are generated by our current system of monetary exchange, profits, corporations and other structural and motivational components."
The problem here is : who can say which methods are scientifically the most advanced and proven ? While there are indeed natural ways for many (uh, not all...) other branches of science to naturally converge to the truth, since their contents are free to develop by debates of true experts (the few people who have enough abilities to study the subjects properly as otherwise they would not even be interested to come there, and who co-opt their circles of peers with whom discussions can be useful) without any significant pressures from either the ignorant public or political/financial powers, these conditions are not met here. There needs to be a specific meta-mechanism with the virtue to properly select and spread the methods/rules which are really the optimal ones from a scientific viewpoint, and naturally eliminate any attempt at hijacking the whole movement by any class of people that just wants to abuse a population and use its own set of rules, by means of propaganda pretending that their solution is the "scientifically optimal" one, to steal large portions of the economic resources to its own profit.
Unless of course these methods would be already specified and their virtues clear.
As for my own project, the meta-mechanism so required is clear : as the solution takes the form of a free software for web servers working in network with any other independent servers, ifever it contains anything wrong, anyone will be free to make modifications and release modified versions, and anyone will be free to use their preferred version (still able to work in connection with other versions). This way, it will really be in the hands of the people (or the logical necessities of some "invisible hand" of which version of the software will be preferred by users), and cannot become the tool for a ruling class to exploit the rest of people; and this makes it not something that will destroy things or possibilities but will offer additional useful opportunities to the people. (Sorry that I did not yet write full explanations why this meta-mechanism will work very well as I think it will... I have so many other things to write).
And the problem is not only the risk of there big bad wolves that would want to hijack the movement, but also the natural desire of the general public to rather believe bullshit that the truth. Even if nobody wants to make a conspiracy of misleading the people, there are high risks for the people to mislead themselves.
An advantage with my solution is that even if many people make a mistake about which version of the software should be used, this still lets other, wiser people free to use their better version instead. There needs not be a universal choice of a common system by everybody. Then different groups of people can experiment the use of different systems in parallel, and the advantages of the best will appear by experience, to finally attract the rest of users to join.
Criticism of the Zeitgeist Movement
http://antispirituality.net/venus-zeitgeist-movement
Criticism of the Zeitgeist Movement
Who am I
This should not matter, as only the core of the arguments should matter, but for the few whose problem would be their desire to invent something else about who I am, you can see my presentation video here.
A few more details not developed in that video:
There were periods when I got interested in the phenomenon of pseudo-science and crackpots, that is people seeing themselves as geniuses discovering new theories or refuting established theories (such as the Relativity theory or the quantum theory for their paradoxes which they cannot accept, as if it was a pleasure for scientists to accept paradoxical results without careful checking), in paranoid ways, pretending to criticize a knowledge which they in fact do not understand. They may have made some understanding efforts, and even been "good at school", ignoring that, in fact, the true content of established scientific knowledge is much bigger and deeper than what school can reflect. I am not dogmatically supporting any "official view", the "establishment" against poor marginal challengers ; I am not working for any administration or company, and I dislike the current institutions and world order in many ways. I am totally free-thinker, I reject any political correctness and widespread assumptions and I care to check every idea in details. Even if some teaching from any social group roughly seems true, I still don't accept it without dissecting it into hundreds of elementary conceptual pieces and checking each piece one by one, then rebuilding my own view out of only and exactly those logical pieces that proved true while rejecting others (unless, of course, I have good reasons to trust others, especially the scientific conclusions in fields others than my own such as climatology). If I support the free market principles, this is purely motivated by logic and mathematical elegance, not by any sort of greed or self-interest, nor any social trust or conditioning. While I happen to agree with libertarians on many issues, this does not come from their influence, and I also strongly disagree with their usual views on other issues, such as their conception of a free monetary system, their climato-skepticism, and their general disdain towards ecological issues. I do support green taxes, while they would reject me as a "statist" for this.
As I explained there, I found in different ways that, in many cases, bullshit can be much better at convincing the ignorant public of its scientificity, than genunine science is. Because for this, the bullshit only has to adapt to one requirement : to seem scientific in the eyes of the ignorant. They are free to tell any bullshit that can serve this purpose. While those who try to say the truth, have another requirement to follow : that of sticking to the scientific truth. Which can be a serious handicap in their attempts to give stupid people the best impression that it is what they are doing.
So, at the stupid game of trying to seem the most rational and scientific in the eyes of the mindless ignorant public, the bullshit propagandists are often much better players with better chances to win, than real scientists. Because it is in the nature of the public to rather believe bullshit than truly rational claims ; and of course, to call "scientific" what they believe in. As it has been since millenia, which is why the world was dominated by religions, while science was only recently "discovered" by a tiny minority, that remains poorly understood by the many.
Despite of all this, when trying to express my views (somewhere in French) the Zeitgeist supporter who answered, still found a way to dismiss my arguments by treating me as a mentally ill person, not taking me seriously (probably that my position is just so far from his which he assumes so confidently to be the obvious truth, that it is natural for him to dismiss it as an expression of mental illness). He "justified" his accusation by telling how he thought I made a stupid error when comparing the Zeitgeist movement with Marxism, which he sees as absolutely incomparable with Zeitgeist. Sorry, they are extremely similar, this is a fact. The only difference is that the Zeitgeist supporters now see Marxism "from the outside" (with historical perspective on the real effects, ignoring the doctrinal content), while they see their own view "from the inside" (doctrinal content only). So they are the same, with the same discrepancy (fooling power) between how they taste from inside and what they objectively are. So he was the one doing a stupid error in the way he claimed to see a fundamental difference.
Well I don't worry as I'm not the only one to be treated as "mentally ill" by the Zeitgeist movement for presenting arguments against their views which they cannot answer. But, what about the overwhelming majority of people who were convinced after debate that my project is the right one ? Are they mentally ill too ? Well, treating the large number of those who disagree (when they cannot be accused of greed or of being manipulated by the current powers) as "mentally ill" is an important similarity with the Soviet Union, isn't it ???
Why a criticism ???
Because I partially agree with them
It would make no sense to criticize one's complete "enemies", as who would be interested ? It can only make sense to explain what is wrong in a position where there is something true, to show that its truths that would attract some people sensitive to these truth, do not imply the truth of the other claims, and that another view is possible. It would be hopeless to try making useful allies out of radical enemies, as the explaining work would be too heavy, and with no hope to succeed, as the people will go away too early anyway.
So I agree with the following of their claims:
The economic and political system we live in is deeply flawed, and the world is going very bad because of this (rather than from the human nature, while there are some problems there but we cannot change it anyway so we need to focus on other aspects). A radically new system is needed. For this new system, a scientific design is needed. Why few people had in mind to use scientific methods to redesign the political and economic system, is just because this was never tried yet. And this new scientifically designed system, would work using new software on the internet.
Okay, but apart from this, I disagree with almost all of their other claims.
They have a wonderful project for a better world. Why be against them ?
Are you for or against Santa Claus ?
There is nothing good at all in their movement. Of course they have the best intentions, but no clue on how to do anything good in reality.
I'm not afraid of any change, and I indeed want the world to change for the collective good.
But I am against waste and bullshit, and I don't like to see thousands of people waste their energy for an absurd ideology that cannot bring any effective good to mankind. It's not a matter of being for or against a goal, since we all have somehow the same goal: the common good. The disagreement is about beliefs on which method can indeed help to this goal. And as we agree that the best method is the scientific one, the disagreement is about which views/methods really are scientific, and which are not. And this is the huge disagreement, by which our ways are, finally, totally opposed to each other. (They might be surprised by this claim, thinking that they only expressed their desire to follow scientific ways and thus did not have the chance yet to reject one yet, however in fact their doctrine is already full of irrational, unjustified and wrong claims - see below)
Why post it in this Antispirituality site
Because the Zeitgeist movement is just a religion among others. It is no more different from other religions, than the different other religions are different from each other. It is especially extremely similar to the religion of Marxism, and only stupidly ignores the comparison. Its claim to support the scientific method, is just as meaningless as many other religions'claim that they are scientific, or that their truth or divine origin is proven by science. Its claims are exactly no different from religious faith, in the following sense:
What is the difference between faith and reason ?
The difference between faith and reason, is that
People of faith have (often) faith that their faith is compatible with (or : proven by) reason/science.
But people of reason, have reasons to disagree.
In fact there is nothing scientific in their theories. But they can't see this, because they have no clue of what science really is. So, first of all they would need to learn what is science.
Namely, there is a big problem of making the difference between : having faith in reason, and being rational.
If someone wants to worship science and reason, this can be easy... as long as he does not care what it means.
But if he wants to learn how to start thinking in a truly rational way, this is a very different and much harder problem.
Though I thought I disagreed too much for caring to criticize
Why bother criticizing the Zeitgeist Movement ? For several years I did not consider it worth wasting my time doing so much honor to these idiots of the Venus project, so as dedicate any time caring for their nonsense, while I had so much more important and meaningful thoughts to develop, in mathematics, philosophy, and the design of my own solution to the world's problems.
Indeed, I thought, a person is either an idiot or not, and if someone is stupid enough to take this Venus nonsense seriously, then he is hopelessly unable to do any right work for a better world anyway, so he isn't worth my time caring to teach him how much is 2+2 and why the Venus propaganda is wrong....
And I saw no point in caring for what the large masses of idiots think, because, indeed, anyway, it does not really matter what they think, since anyway their action is hopelessly sterile no matter what one may try to do about it.
While, to develop the true solution to many the world's problem, there is no need to convince large numbers of idiots. Instead, just the work of a few serious people would suffice, in the form of the development of a new free software for web servers.
Also another reason to not waste time criticizing them, is that their errors are obvious and many other people surely already pointed them out.
So, of 2 things one: either they are ready to read and understand criticism, and thus change their mind because the criticism against them is valid, or they aren't. In any case, since valid criticism must exist, and must already have convinced any sane people, I see no reason why my own addition would add anything.
But, while genuine criticism exists, the Venus fools still believe it does not exist, because when they see it they systematically censor it away from their attention, pretending that it is not genuine argument but only "insults", things "offensive", "irrelevant", "misrepresenting" their views, and so on.
Indeed looking at the Wikipedia article on their movement, I indeed see a section "criticism" but it hardly contains anything significant (for example it proudly links to an article that cannot be read without paying, well at least it's a chance that the Zeitgeist movement departed from the Venus copyrighters). Indeed, the Venus zealots are so much motivated that they regularly censor away and mock any criticism that it addressed to them, and since Wikipedia is just like the streets, a space where those who are the maniest and cry the loudest are right (who edit articles more often - like democracy, a law of the stupidest where the stupidest are right because they are the maniest and cry the loudest), there is no chance to see any significant objective view and criticism there. It is necessary to explore the abundant history of the article in order to find attempts at expressing criticism. For example in this old version there was a link to this criticism, which was then censored in later versions. It's a pity I have no time to dedicate on searching for all the genuine criticism that has been similarly added at some time to the article and then censored away.
Other criticism directly found by google from different sources
Happy atheism
The swash
Vermont Commons
⇾ Skeptic project : the zeitgeist movement with a detailed critical analysis of each film in a separate page ⇽
"The Problem with Zeitgeist" article copies on The Anarchist Library and on Infoshop
Several forums : INTP forum - David Icke - Online philosophy club
Jay Kinney reviews Zeitgeist, the Movie
Atheist Nexus
Skeptoid
Smashing Telly : zeitgeist – the greatest lie ever told
Confronting Canned Responses to Criticisms of the Zeitgeist Movement
...
In French:
Alain Kern
Some quotations of other criticism
So, I hardly see any sense in bothering to criticize what is obviously ridiculous nonsense.
However, since then, time passed, and the most absurd, unexpectable, unthinkable situation turned out to the be, in fact, the most massive reality and the biggest problem of the world :
That, while the solution that I have found to the world's problems, whenever I have the chance to explain and debate it in a room of rational people (usually economics students), usually all of them go out convinced that this is the solution, and many even said they are proud to have met me (and this indeed happened with thousands of people that went out convinced in this way)... finally none of them ever did anything about it, so that finally, no matter that I have all the arguments and my project is the best and is relatively very easy to implement, and my arguments could convince nearly everybody, I finally remain nobody, with no reputation at all, with nobody to help me, while the help of just a few people would have sufficed to change the world. Instead, they are many thousands of people who support the Venus project, so that this project is now largely more "notable" than mine. Not that they have any project at all (in fact they don't have any project except trying to reach their mythical "critical mass", the hell knows for what) nor any convincing argument on their side.
No. They are much more "notable" and "popular" just because when one of them tries spread his nonsense to 100 other people, he is not convincing... to anybody except to one idiot... but that will be an activist too and will keep spreading the message to 200 other people.
Alas, it's an incredible but sad and real fact, that in the world there are mainly 2 kinds of people: there are those who are able to think, and there are those motivated by good intentions. So that those who could be able to understand the truth, do not care nor do anything about it, while those with "good intentions", the activists who spread ideas, only want to spread bullshit and reject the truth.
Stupidities are much more popular than intelligent solutions, for the following reason - beyond the mere fact that most people are stupid and want to believe this is good for judging things, yeah.
Spreading stupidities is easy : you just need to repeat a slogan. But spreading intelligent ideas is much harder as you cannot catch someone's attention with something that requires him to learn some new concepts for 1-2 hours, express his objections (every expression of lack of understanding in front of the presentation of each component of a big system that requires to understand a lot of things about its many components for the whole of it to properly work as needed) and have the author/presenter respond to each objection one by one... in order to finally discover how convincing it feels. Usually everybody only gives a few minutes to look at a proposition before judging it.
If only this was not exactly the case, if only a few more people with both sane thinking and good motivations existed, then the world would be going so much better ! and many problems would be solved.
Sad truth. What can I do ? I don't know. Just desperately try to report the situation. I have no solution to this problem.
So, they have thousands and thousands of activists on their side - from this article, in 2009 “We already have a quarter-million members,”. But all happens as if they did not want the world to change. To change the world would be easy : just give me 0.004% of their followers (assuming they are 250,000, this would be 10 of them - or even, just a half of this) to work on my project, and the global revolution solving much of the wold's problems will follow.
(But such a calculation might be vain, as it might just be a ridiculously hopeless dream to expect any one of these "scientific method" fanatics to ever give respect and a voice to genuine reason).
Instead of this, they prefer dedicating their life to pose as martyrs and pretend that all problems come from the fact that not more people follow them. Do they have a sense of efficiency ? of intelligence ? it seems not. They are very many. And they have been even more one century ago. They were called Marxists. They were the dominant voice worldwide. Not only in the Soviet Union but also in large parts of Western Europe (particularly France where I lived). But they keep posing as martyrs, proud of challenging the "dominant" economic view. Well, if the free market is popular, isn't it by the force of necessity, because history selected it as the only working system under hand ? just by the force of facts and pragmatism while it has not much been so popular as an ideology, while it is in fact their socialist and anti-monetary ideas that were the dominating ideological orthodoxy in many places... where they thought their idiocies were the unquestionable truth because they had not actual responders but only the mute and impersonal force of facts to contradict them.
So, not only they have no sense of logic (as their ideology isn't logical) but no sense of pragmatism either, since the implementation has already been tried (with the Soviet union)... as some say "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". Which of course they will dismiss by pretending that their solution has never been tried (just like Marxists tried to do when questioned during the fall of the Soviet Union : that it was not the "true" communism). Although they are thousands and nothing technically prevents them from all gathering in one place and trying to experiment their "solution" to see if it works, they still pose as victims and passively remain mindless followers blaming the rest of people for their own inability to implement their mythical "solution".
Long analysis of many points would be needed... I will try to do this later
Where are their arguments ????
They make a lot of bold claims but give no rational justifications for them. I mean, no genuinely rational justifications, in the true sense of "rational", that is, accurate and careful enough to avoid any risk of radical, terrible mistakes. They have their "arguments" of course, but these are much too fuzzy and uncareful to have any rational value.
For example, they don't make any serious analysis of the causes of problems, but make a big fuzzy pack of all of them and attribute them to the big unanalyzed thing that roughly seems the main way things currently go on: "free market" which they claim to be the cause of problems. They are blind to the way in which free market indeed remarkably succeeded to provide prosperity in the world, since, of course, there are some remaining big problems worth complaining of. So they focus on the fact not all things work and decide that we must get rid of everything how things now work.
They don't understand that the problems don't mainly come from any sort of big bad wolf (either personal or impersonal) that would just need to be killed, but from the lack of good structures. That problems often come from the consequences of partial solutions which have gaps, and that the bad effects often reflect real problems that are not resolved by these partial solutions but go out as visible troubles through these gaps, and need to be positively addressed; and that just destroying the partial solutions (free market mechanisms) whose gaps have let these troubles appear, would not help to resolve the source of the problems which often come from real technical difficulties in how to organize real economic activity no matter the political, conventional system.
For example here is my rational argumentation why some sort of money and free market is a necessary aspect of any working economic system.
See also : about the invisible hand
I challenge those who dream of abolishing money, to understand this argument and try to provide any genuine argument on their side that can stand the debate.
Apart from their absence of rational argument, I notice that: they talk about "experts" and "scientists" but they don't name any one of them. And they don't effectively refer to any specific scientific work. Instead, they put forward their views as those of a collective and impersonal "we". Are they all experts and scientists ? Do they just all happen to independently reach the same conclusions out of each member's free and independent scientific research ? Or are they all mindless followers of some leaders ? If they all follow each other's beliefs like a flock of birds or fish all go the same way as they follow each other, does anyone of them have an idea of whether there would be in fact one or several people among them who are the true authors of their collective convictions ? (I once saw a scientific article explaining the possibility to lead a large group of fish to some destination by sending a fish-like robot among them that would silently play the role of leader). In these conditions, any one that could successfully spread the rumor among them that he is the scientific expert, based on absolutely nothing but mindless rumor and mediatic accidents, can very easily abuse them all.
The Venus Project
I first had a look on the Venus Project a few years ago. In its web site, I followed what was put forward as a presentation of this project : it was presented in the form of videos.
So I looked at the video. The video was showing a vision of futurist buildings and towns building themselves like toys, defying the laws of gravity.
So what do I think about it ? I think that, since Jesus multiplied breads, walked on the water, and healed the paralyzed by telling him "Get up and walk", there is hardly anything new here.
See the above link to the INTP forum where someone commented on the Venus project = the very definition of absolute dictatorship, with no place for freedom, and no reason at all to expect that such a system wouldn't immediately turn into the wrong hands that will massively exploit the world for their own profit.
What an irony to see that the biggest and most absolute conspiracies are those set up by the stupidity of people motivated by their fear of conspiracies, who insist that they cannot trust anything because everything around is probably a conspiracy, with the only exception of this source which makes this warning... but is actually the one biggest and most ridiculous conspiracy, that invites people to imagine an "alternative" world free from the coming new world order (world government) that the big bad wolves around us are conspiring to set up. And so the "only solution" they come up with to protect us from this new world and the bad world government, is more precisely in some shape.... which is in fact the very exact shape of the most total and absolute world dictatorship and conspiracy ever (well, the absolute conspiracy and absolute dictatorship that we absolutely need to follow in order to protect ourselves from any other real or imaginary risk of dictatorship and conspiracy, of course). And all these people didn't notice but they love this...
How can all these people be that stupid ? Really amazing indeed.
Analysis of the statements on the site thezeitgeistmovement.com
Mission Statement
This text is very vague and general, with no sufficiently specific claim for a significant criticism to be possible. Just a little remark:
"This "Resource-Based Economic Model" is about taking a direct technical approach to social management as opposed to a Monetary or even Political one. It is about updating the workings of society to the most advanced and proven methods Science has to offer, leaving behind the damaging consequences and limiting inhibitions which are generated by our current system of monetary exchange, profits, corporations and other structural and motivational components."
The problem here is : who can say which methods are scientifically the most advanced and proven ? While there are indeed natural ways for many (uh, not all...) other branches of science to naturally converge to the truth, since their contents are free to develop by debates of true experts (the few people who have enough abilities to study the subjects properly as otherwise they would not even be interested to come there, and who co-opt their circles of peers with whom discussions can be useful) without any significant pressures from either the ignorant public or political/financial powers, these conditions are not met here. There needs to be a specific meta-mechanism with the virtue to properly select and spread the methods/rules which are really the optimal ones from a scientific viewpoint, and naturally eliminate any attempt at hijacking the whole movement by any class of people that just wants to abuse a population and use its own set of rules, by means of propaganda pretending that their solution is the "scientifically optimal" one, to steal large portions of the economic resources to its own profit.
Unless of course these methods would be already specified and their virtues clear.
As for my own project, the meta-mechanism so required is clear : as the solution takes the form of a free software for web servers working in network with any other independent servers, ifever it contains anything wrong, anyone will be free to make modifications and release modified versions, and anyone will be free to use their preferred version (still able to work in connection with other versions). This way, it will really be in the hands of the people (or the logical necessities of some "invisible hand" of which version of the software will be preferred by users), and cannot become the tool for a ruling class to exploit the rest of people; and this makes it not something that will destroy things or possibilities but will offer additional useful opportunities to the people. (Sorry that I did not yet write full explanations why this meta-mechanism will work very well as I think it will... I have so many other things to write).
And the problem is not only the risk of there big bad wolves that would want to hijack the movement, but also the natural desire of the general public to rather believe bullshit that the truth. Even if nobody wants to make a conspiracy of misleading the people, there are high risks for the people to mislead themselves.
An advantage with my solution is that even if many people make a mistake about which version of the software should be used, this still lets other, wiser people free to use their better version instead. There needs not be a universal choice of a common system by everybody. Then different groups of people can experiment the use of different systems in parallel, and the advantages of the best will appear by experience, to finally attract the rest of users to join.