Skeptic Project

In response to my descriptions of Zeitgeist — the conspiracy-cult movie that Jared Loughner’s friend says had a “profound impact” on the Tucson massacre gunman — I today received an e-mail from a British follower of the Zeitgeist Movement. He repeated the cult’s own mantras about substituting an egalitarian global redistributionist “resource-based economy” for the “monetary-based economy.” He repeated these things in such a way as to indicate to me that he did not recognize that he was the victim of a scam. Therefore I replied by e-mail:

You understand, don’t you, that the abolition of private property (and of prices) has already been attempted, and failed disastrously? Merely substituting the term “resources” for “property” in the old socialist dogma does not change the nature of the proposition. Neither does denouncing “monetary-based economy” differ in meaning from denouncing “capitalism” (as did Marx). A thing is what it is, no matter what you choose to call it.
There is nothing new or different in the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project. It is merely a word-game, wherein some clever sophists have used a lot of up-to-date “green” language for some very old (red) formulations. Your failure to recognize the bogusness of their scheme — it is not innovative and honest, but derivative and deceptive — does not speak well of your supposed skepticism. Your problem is not that you lack intelligence, but that you lack knowledge. You might begin to remedy this deficiency by reading Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism and F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, which expose the fundamental and inescapable errors to which you seem to have succumbed. I would further recommend Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed lest, having disabused yourself of the errors of socialism (for that is what the Zeitgeist Movement advocates, no matter what they call it), you should then fall prey to the errors of liberalism.
God bless you. Please don’t go on a murder spree.

Sincerely,
Robert Stacy McCain

Harsh words are necessary to rouse the dreamers from their dangerous trance. The delusions of these people deserve to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.

The perpetrators of the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project scam are preying on the naïveté of gullible people who haven’t studied the history of socialism. As I say, it isn’t that such people lack intelligence. They are merely ignorant. Once they realize that they have been deceived and played for suckers, once they have taken time to educate themselves about the nature of the flimflam by which they have been duped, the ex-cultists will become the cult’s most powerful critics.

Remember: I used to be a Democrat. Talk about a phony scam . . .

UPDATE: Commenting on a post by Greg Hansom at the Ludwig von Mises Institute blog, I wrote:

It is my experience that, once cured of the socialist delusion, people’s disagreements about religion and other matters tend to be less disagreeable. Once we can agree what the answer to humanity’s problems is not, our arguments about the what the answer is become less contentious. And I would point out that the quest for an answer to humanity’s problems depends upon the question of what those problems are, and whether any “answer” to them is actually possible.

Because I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh’s discussion of the topic, I don’t know what source he cited. I’ll check his “Stack of Stuff” later. The point is, he mentioned it. Three days of hammering this Zeitgeist angle on one little blog may have sent ripples out across the Internet, and somehow the wave reached El Rushbo. His millions of readers are now aware of this phenomenon and they will begin to ask the key question: “Why is this important clue to the killer’s motives being ignored by major news organizations?”

UPDATE III: Hans Palmstierna at Save Capitalism has proposed using the number of Zeitgeist Movement followers as a metric of a nation’s economic kookiness:

The most interesting thing we can take away from this little calculation is that people are indeed wacko-conspiratory in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Most of the Eastern european countries sport more than 500 of these nutters per million inhabitants.

http://theothermccain.com/2011/01/14/how-to-talk-to-a-follower-of-the-zeitgeist-cult-if-you-must/

That's not my blog. While I don't adhere to the ideology of RBE or socialism, I also don't adhere to the ideology of the Austrian school of economics.

I'm not sure I'm really that liberal any more. I was when I was younger, but that's fairly normal.

I'm pretty much a standard Yellow Dog Democrat these days.