Skeptic Project

Zeitgeist Debunked and the Venus Project Debunked
Preface

Both Gottfriend Wilhelm Leibniz and Benjamin Franklin advocated moderation in language, and balance in the presentation of any argument. We do not have that luxury. In any case, this credo has not been uniformly adhered to by great thinkers who should be the guide of us lesser souls. For example, consider Plato's dialogues including The Republic and Meno. Even Leibniz himself lapses at times, such as when discussing Descartes' pronouncements on for which curves a general expression for the tangent (i.e. "derivative") can and cannot be found.

Moreover, we do not have that luxury because, today, ideologies are created, thrown about and actively promoted to accelerate the destruction of civilisation. Once an ideology has been identified as a weapon of the enemy, the open-minded will hopefully forgive us for treating it as such. The enemy does not have many ideologies. Once we remove the cover story packaging, usually there can be found one of just a few brands of steak knife.
Introduction

Many are involved in the Zeitgeist movement due to genuine concern for humanity. They are being misled and are being used to promote an agenda that they probably think that they, by being involved in the Zeitgeist movement, are fighting against.

Zeitgeist is not the grand conspiracy nor is it even a grand conspiracy. It is simply one of a raft of programmatic propaganda weapons being used to muddy the waters, promote a particular ideology that is both incorrect and evil, and to achieve precisely some of Zeitgeist's explicitly and unashamedly-stated goals.

Zeitgeist presents itself as a largely grassroots movement set up by a couple of alternative thinkers to move beyond the monetarist system that we have today, characterised by warring nation states and environmental destruction. Yet its proposed model is a stark cybernetic dystopia in which despite the lip service there is no role for humans and humanity, as such, being the quality of being human, doesn't even get a look in. What does it mean to be human? What distinguishes humans from the beasts? That will be touched on in this essay but not addressed in detail.

In Zeitgeist, George Orwell's H.G. Wells'ian blueprint 1984 meets The Twilight Zone episode "Obsolete Man".
It's Fabian
The Zeitgeist model is extraordinarily closely aligned to the globalist socialist, eugenicist ideology of Fabianism. The Fabian Society was established in the 19th Century as the political arm of the Fellowship of the New Life. The Fellowship promoted anti-industrial, and even pro-primitive "tribal", ideas. Look up the writings of Edward Carpenter and Henry Salt who were leading early members of the Fellowship. Edward Carpenter wrote Civilisation: Its cause and cure for he regarded civilisation as a disease. Henry Salt was also of a "back to nature" persuasion. Fabian Society members included Bertrand Russell (briefly) and H. G. Wells (briefly), and at the time of writing include Tony Blair and Kevin Rudd. In the early 20th Century, there was overlap between the Fabians and the Coefficients Club which brings us into the circles of "Milner's Kindergarten".

You can research these groups yourself if you're interested. All were focussed on achieving/perpetuating global empire and, indeed, were largely set up for that purpose. Differences within and between them were simply on how to achieve that purpose. They acted much as thinktanks do today, providing a forum for circulating ideas amongst leading or influential members of the oligarchy as well as grooming promising talent for future roles "in the world" to carry, overtly or otherwise, the standard of empire.

The Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project bear the ideological signature of the Fabians.
Incorrect foundations

Central to the Zeitgeist thesis are the ideas:

1. That human thought, including both reason and creativity, can be replicated in a machine;
2. That environmental preservation and conservation are foremost priorities;
3. That the institution of government and of the nation state must be removed.

Any one of these on its own would be sufficient to establish a global empire in a position of unassailable dominance. Zeitgeist proposes all three in a form both pure and extreme.

It proposes to establish a global society of human beings living in harmony with nature, without governments and without nations, with control given to a computer that has complete information on the world's resources via a database that contains all available knowledge. Humans will not make decisions but, rather, they will reach conclusions based on what the computer advises. Who could be so naive as to trust that the machination of empire would not work behind the facade of that "impartial computer".

The Zeitgeist addendum DVD starts out with "our philosophy does not recognise divisive concepts such as nations and governments; we are one humanity that must live in harmony with nature". It makes several references to the fact that our current system is destroying the environment and putting ecological systems out of balance.

At the foundation of Zeitgeist is its objection to government or, at least, the current notion of government. What Zeitgeist does not mention is that the purpose of government is to promote the general welfare. Contrarily, says Zeitgeist, government is inherently corrupt, government is aligned with war, government can only pursue economic growth via the acquisition of money, and it is inherent in the nature of government that to please private corporations is a basic driver of policy formulation.

Because Zeitgeist does not distinguish the financial from the physical economy, it makes some insupportable assertions. Zeitgeist does not acknowledge the concept of physical economy. Thus, Zeitgeist concludes, there is no true economic growth complete in itself and there can only be apparent "economic growth" with the illusion being created by monetary growth. Zeitgeist does not discuss credit systems or national banking even though these are also opposed to the current monetarist system. This is quite an omission.

The current, globalist monetary system is bankrupt. The current global financial collapse is the overt series of symptoms of that bankruptcy. Fresco, though, pins the blame for current economic catastrophe on the institution of the nation state and national governments, even implying that the current collapse is somehow an inevitable consequence of the existence of nations.

Zeitgeist critiques money supply growth via fractional reserve banking. Yet such would exist even in a non-monetarist dirigistic credit system, and is not inherently an undesirable phenomenon in the context of a nation's development of its physical economy.
Key tenets and proposals

In brief, Zeitgeist:

1. Proposes a global system without money.
2. Compares human cognition with a computer, and says that advanced computers can do everything that the human mind can do. This is proveably false. Zeitgeist says that every profession, from heart surgeon to motor mechanic, is nothing but a processor of information which could be bettered by a computer with larger memory, access to a larger database and faster processing capability. Computers so equipped are better at making decisions because they are so equipped and also because they lack bias.
3. Regards thought as the logical processing of information, in the spirit of von Neumann.
4. Proposes a "global survey" of all the world's resources with all that data being fed into a computer. This is the beginning of the "Venus Project".
5. Recommends that an "autonomic sensor system" be set up worldwide so that the central computer is always aware of the status of all resources at all times, and otherwise has complete information about the earth.
6. Proposes that, in the future, humans not make decisions but "come to conclusions" based on the advice of the most advanced technology available. Most likely, a person will go to a website, type in the question, and the computer will access its complete database of "all knowledge available" and provide the best possible answer.
7. Says that the computer will decide how to achieve human goals of food, water and shelter. Zeitgeist includes entertainment in human goals but omits culture and discovery of new scientific, or universal physical, principles.
8. Reminds one of Thomas More's Utopia. It is all very H.G. Wells'ian. It adopts a similar characterisation of computers to that of Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems. You could dub Zeitgeist "Cyber Fabianism" and not be far wrong.
9. Is reminiscent of communist centralised planning but with the planning being done by a computer.
10. Opines that governments should not exist. Because, after all, Zeitgeist says, government is nothing but a "by-product of environmental scarcity" and, further, governments are really monetary system creations. Sadly, laments Zeitgeist, history is one constant chain of governmental corruption, from genocide in war to governments' oppression of their own peoples to maintain the established order.
11. Does not mention the problem of empire.

Discussion of the Zeitgeist and Venus Project agenda
Abundance

Zeitgeist says that we can have abundance provided our resources are managed properly. Yet Zeitgeist assumes fixed resources. With fixed resources, "resource management" will always involve stringent behavioural control, which leads to or is an essential part of fascism, and a population control (if not population reduction) policy. This is neither natural nor consistent with a normal definition of "abundance".
Monetarism versus the profit motive

Yet our monetarist system creates artificial scarcity. Zeitgeist sometimes conflates the profit motive, i.e. the seeking of money, with monetarism. However, monetarism is the control of the economy by private bankers whereas the profit motive is an element of capitalist endeavour and would exist, and be encouraged, even in a dirigistic credit system. At the same time, government can regulate and create the conditions wherein the pursuit of profit is salutary for society. Government can also be involved in economic endevaour by building basic economic infrastructure, not for profit but the general welfare and to improve the economic conditions for private entrepreneurs. At the same time, there is no necessity for hegemony by a private banking system.
What is a resource?

Zeitgeist omits mention of the fact that resources are created by humans. What is valuable is only valuable because human science and industry has made it so. In the 19th Century, neither uranium nor thorium was a resource. In Athens, natural gas was not a resource. Today, helium-3 is not a particularly sought-after resource, though when thermonuclear fusion has been developed to an advanced enough level, it will be.
Population "management"

Resources are neither fixed nor finite but are a product of human ingenuity. Humans can green deserts with irrigation projects and large-scale nuclear desalination, creating an abundance of agricultural capacity. Zeitgeist does not mention this and, rather, pushes the line that humans are as cows in a paddock of fixed resources with a fixed population carrying capacity. Thus, population control and dramatic population reduction are policies whose necessity is easily argued under a philosophy such as Zeitgeist's.

Who else promotes population reduction? Why, the likes of Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Tim Flannery, of course. So whose side is the Zeitgeist movement on and whose wheelbarrow are they pushing?
Ceding the human race to a computer

By handing control to the computer, humans are supposedly freed up for leisure. But what value is leisure, and what is the meaning of leisure other than a depraved decadence, when humans have ceded all decisionmaking and when the computer runs human society globally according to a list of entirely utilitarian goals. Yet clearly there must be a clique of humans behind the computer, its programming and maintenance, and behind the implementation and maintenance of the global autonomic resource sensor system.

Critics cannot accept that there would be no hidden hand behind this centralised planning infrastructure when the overall ideology of the Zeitgeist movement is so similar to that of the Fabian global imperialists. A rat is smelt.
Artificial intelligence without the intelligence

The writers of the Zeitgeist model would have to be aware that the state of computer technology and so-called "artificial intelligence" is so primitive compared with even the goals listed by Zeitgeist for human society that the model they are proposing would not work. Therefore, one can only conclude that the apparently secondary or tertiary goals of removing the institution of the nation state, enshrining environmentalism in the principles of a global power structure or regime of some kind promoting the ideology that the human mind is little more than a primitive computer, promoting the ideology of pure utilitarianism, and placing all of human society in the hands of a global decisionmaker (which is cybernetic or otherwise) are in fact the main purposes of Zeitgeist.
Space exploration and colonisation

Earth is regarded as the "home" of humans, without mention of exploring space and colonising other bodies such as the Moon, Mars or beyond. Yet the Apollo project was one of the greatest creators of technological know-how in history.

It is projects like space exploration and colonising space that create new technologies through human creativity which, paradoxically, better position humanity to solve the issues here on earth. Humanity is more naturally of the scientifically and technologically optimistic frame of mind, in which not only is there an entire solar system but an entire galaxy to explore and inhabit, not just a single planet.

Having said that, while solutions for earth exist today, such as nuclear energy and desert-greening, yet the Venus Project is not proposing such solutions.

So - it may be perplexing that Zeitgeist purports to elevate technology to governor of the human race. This is not so perplexing when we regard Zeitgeist as being selective in its use of technology and its methods of development of technology.

"There are more pressing problem to be addressed on earth first"

The problems we need to solve to get to Mars and to colonise Mars must be solved in order to address the problems we have on earth. Nuclear fusion is key to getting to Mars with humans in a state that they can land there and be ready to do real work, and to then return.

Densities of creativity only arise from the crash science driver programmes associated with Apollo-like projects. The technologies that arise from that are needed to power up Africa and Asia with high flux dense energy sources, like nuclear. Such a science driver programme is needed today. This is precisely why the LaRouche movement is proposing the project to colonise and industrialise the Moon and Mars.
Tying monetarism with the nation state

The fact that the globalist oligarchs, who are behind the global monetarist system that is currently dying, have been trying to kill the institution of the nation state for the last three centuries is not mentioned.

Zeitgeist says that governments are a creature of monetarism, whereas monetarism in fact does its best to make governments impotent.

Monetarism is not responsible for the genesis of the nation state, though we would be pleased to consider any actual historical examples the Zeitgeist people present. The institution of the nation state as enunciated in such documents as Plato's The Republic, the Treaty of Westphalia, the American Declaration of Indepedence, and the U.S. Constitution is not only non-monetarist but decidedly anti-monetarist.
Ignoring national credit

National credit systems, such as that of Alexander Hamilton in the USA and that which briefly and incompletely existed in Australia under the Commonwealth Bank, are done away with without explicit mention by saying that giving the power over money to governments would do nothing but transfer the power to print money from a central bank to a government. As if a national credit system involved nothing but a license to print money. Anyway, Zeitgeist has already done away with governments as inherently undesirable if not evil.
Globalism: ignoring Westphalia

Like many of those who propose globalist systems to remove the nation state, mention is not made of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The fact that they are trying to destroy the Westphalian system is implicit. Nonetheless, Tony Blair, as an arch Fabian globalist, is on record as saying that he hates the Westphalian system. Any description of the sovereign nation state includes the fact that it has its roots in the Treaty of Westphalia.

John Rawls, a high-profile academic and architect of a globalist order that lacks a one world government which he acknowledges that the public is unlikely to accept, has also said that his target is the Westphalian system. Rawls proposes a network of specialist global institutions, one of finance, another for health, another still for the environment, and so on. This network will run the world rather than nation states. At the same time, the world may be divided into "peoples" which are simply groups of people with certain things in common and certain understandings between them. Charles Beitz' widely-studied interpretation of Rawls is that Rawls' "peoples" emphatically do not include nations and, indeed, that the institution of the nation state is at odds with the concept of "people" for the purposes of implementing the Rawlsian model of a global "Society of Peoples" governed by a network of global bodies.
History as a series of unfortunate accidents

Zeitgeist presents history as without a driving reason or intention with the only "continuity" being in the mindless repetition of the tragedy of the rise and fall of institutions that are inherently corrupt or unsuitable for organising humans or humans society.
Environmentalism

Zeitgeist is brazenly environmentalist. In simplified terms, the lineage of environmentalism starts no later than with eugenics which then, post-WWII, becomes conservation which becomes environmentalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and today stands at "sustainability". All of these preached population control and the evils of industry. Today's "sustainability" ideology rails against high flux density energy sources including coal, oil, gas and nuclear. Again, eugenics and environmentalism were actively promoted by the Fellowship of the New Life and Fabians from their inception, and leading Fabians such as Kevin Rudd and Tony Blair aggressively promoted anthropogenic "climate change" and other environmental frauds today as a way of winding back industry, restraining the creative mind of humankind in industrialising the earth, improving the earth, conducting scientific discovery and space colonisation, and implementing global imperial control measures and structures.

In the Zeitgeist addendum DVD, environmental destruction is repeatedly referred to by the narrator's voice. It says that clean water is becoming scarce due to pollution of rivers and waterways, with emotive images of bodies of water filled with black refuse presented on the screen while the calm voice monotonously churns out its on-first-listening-reasonable-sounding proposals.

The recommendations of Zeitgeist focus on managing existing water resources rather than creating new water resources, such as:

* Water capture/dam projects as proposed, for example, for the massive rainwater resources of northern Australia;
* River direction as proposed, for example, for the Brahmaputra river system of India;
* Nuclear desalination using mobile modular plans, or coastal plants that are land-based or floating.

None of these are proposed or recommended by Zeitgeist despite the exhalted position it purports to give to the wonders of technology.

Hydroponic agriculture is presented as a way of allowing agriculture to be undertaken even in the desert, perhaps using groundwater as the water supply. If they want to do agriculture in the desert, why are they not proposing desert-greening projects? Further, using groundwater is not "sustainable" either in the environmentalist sense or in the dictionary sense that it "cannot be sustained".
A word from Jacque Fresco

Jacque Fresco is the "official" founder of the Venus Project though, as explained in this essay, its ideology did not start with him.

In his "The Future and Beyond" essay, Jacque Fresco says:

As the amount of scientific information grows, nations and people are coming to realize that even in today's divided world there are, in fact, many common threats that transcend national boundaries. These include overpopulation, energy shortages, pollution, water shortages, economic catastrophe, the spread of uncontrollable disease and so forth. However, faced even with threats of this magnitude, which are common to all nations, the direction of human action will not be altered so long as powerful nations are able to maintain control of the limited resources available.

This essay has sought to explain why Fresco's "limited resources" and nations-as-inherently-undesirable theses are incorrect. Fresco does not address the problem of Empire which does so much to create, catalyse and exarcerbate the division to which he refers. It is not in nations' interests to be divided.

Nations and people are not coming to realise what Fresco suggests. Fresco is claiming to be providing what the grassroots want when he is actually invoking "astro-turf" for support. In fact, Fresco is simply proclaiming what Fabians and other brands of global imperialist want.

Addressing some of Fresco's specific points, perhaps repeating what has been said elsewhere in this essay:
# overpopulation: The problem is not overpopulation but, rather, under-technologisation. E.g. Where are the nuclear power plants and transcontinental railway lines in Africa and Asia? There are far fewer than are necessary.
# energy shortages: Easy answer - build nuclear power plants, worldwide. Even the USA needs many dozens if not hundreds of nuclear power plants today. Uranium and thorium are not in short supply. Beyond fission, where is the funding for thermonuclear fusion research?
# pollution: This problem is exaggerated. But, by moving to a nuclear/hydrogen-based economy, we will dramatically reduce pollution.
# water shortages: Easy answer - undertake the massive water projects that have been waiting decades to be done. E.g. The PLHINO project for Mexico, the others listed in this essay, and many others. And what about nuclear desalination? The Venus Project does not advocate it.
# economic catastrophe: This is not due to nations, but due to anti-nation globalist financial interests and, again, the issue of empire which Fresco does not address. Attempts by national governments to regulate private finance and/or to create national system of public credit are resisted by global financial interests. Indeed, they have killed national leaders particularly to prevent the latter from occurring.
# spread of uncontrollable disease: Is this the uncontrollable spread of disease or the spread of uncontrollable disease, or both? Thomas Malthus advocated designing neighbourhoods in which the poor reside to make conditions as amenable as possible to the spreadh of disease, including the denying of sanitation, to promote population reduction. Like most who preach the "dangers" of overpopulation, Malthus was a wolf in sheep's clothing and he worked for the empire. Again, whose barrow is Fresco pushing? The spread of disease is exarcebated by economic breakdown. Promote the physical economy as this essay explains, and you go a long way towards controlling disease. You don't create a utopia, though, nor should that be anyone's goal. Of course, healthcare needs to be widely available, and not cut or privatised. However, effective healthcare systems rely just as much on power, transport and water infrastructure as any other activity undertaken universally and systematically in an industrial civilisation. Build those nuclear power plants and transcontinental railway lines across Africa, Asia and South America, and you'll create conditions highly favourable to health, unfavourable to disease and unfavourable to the spread of disease.

Fresco talks about shortages, but does not talk about creation of that which is supposedly in short supply. Then, Fresco blames scarcity on nations and environmental destruction.

Yet there are existing technologies and projects that are waiting to be undertaken that will create abundance of precisely that which Fresco says is scarce. Nations are the best institutions available to implement the existing technologies mentioned (nuclear, etc) and to undertake the projects mentioned and on a massive scale. In fact, the tendency to do such is inherent in the institution of the nation state. Why are today's nations not doing it? That returns us to the problem of empire which includes globalist anti-nation financial and other interests.
Response?

Responses to any and all of the above are welcome. It is difficult to see how Zeitgeist can address the above without resorting to the same arguments used by the globalists, the anti-nation statists and the environmentalists. Indeed, Zeitgeist is nothing but all of these movements combined with some added decorations.

Email: zeitgeist [at] austi.org
Want solutions?

To be sure, there are serious problems in the world. Indeed, we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest crisis of, at least, modern history.

The solutions lie with the proposals of Lyndon H. LaRouche. There are plenty of online resources. Rather than starting with Wikipedia, how about starting with:

* www.larouchepac.com Larouche PAC ("Political Action Committee")
* www.larouchepub.com Executive Intelligence Review journal
* www.21stcenturysciencetech.com 21st Century Science and Technology magazine
* www.schillerinstitute.com The Schiller Institute and Fidelio journal of Poetry, Art and Statecraft
* www.cecaust.com.au The Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Last updated: 11 Oct 2009

http://www.austi.org/debunkingzeitgeist/

"The solutions lie with the proposals of Lyndon H. LaRouche. There are plenty of online resources. Rather than starting with Wikipedia, how about starting with"

I like how it tells people to stay away from Wikipedia, wouldn't want them to find out about that mail fraud!

DAMNIT ALMOST A SUCCESSFUL TROLL

Ah well.