Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
Directed by	Peter Joseph
Produced by	Peter Joseph
Edited by	Peter Joseph
Music by	Peter Joseph, Lili Haydn and Yes
Distributed by	GMP LLC
Release date	January 15, 2011 (2011-01-15)
Running time	161 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward is the third installment in Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist film trilogy. The film was launched for free on the internet starting January 26, 2011. As of August 2013, the film has over 21 million views on YouTube.

Content

The film is arranged into four parts. Each part is an amalgam of interviews, narration and animated sequences.

Part I: Human Nature

The film begins with an animated sequence narrated by Jacque Fresco. He describes his adolescent life and his discontinuation of public education at the age of 14. He continues to express that his radical views developed as a result of experiences during the Great Depression and World War II. Studying the social sciences, mechanical and social engineering, architecture among numerous other fields of study for 75 years have, Fresco states, failed to alter this initial, radical, disposition, which he continues to outline in greater detail later in the film.

The discussion turns to human behavior and the nature vs. nurture debate. This portion begins with a small clip with Robert Sapolsky summing up the nature vs. nurture debate in which he essentially refers to it as a "false dichotomy." After which he states that "it is virtually impossible to understand how biology works, outside the context of environment." The film goes on to describe that it is neither nature nor nurture that solely shapes human behavior, but the combination of both. The interviewed pundits state that even with genetic predispositions to diseases, the expression and manifestation of disease is largely determined by environmental stressors, including topics such as epigenetics and Gene–environment interactions. Disease, criminal activity and addictions are also discussed. A reference is made to unborn children who were in utero during the Dutch famine of 1944. The "Dutch Famine Birth Cohort Study" is mentioned to have shown that obesity and other health complications became common problems later in life, due to prolonged starvation of their mother during pregnancy.

Comparisons are made by sociologists of criminals in different parts of the world. An Anabaptist sect called the Hutterites are mentioned to have never reported a homicide in any of their societies. The overall conclusion of Part I is that social environment and cultural conditioning play a large part in shaping human behavior.

Part II: Social Pathology

The origins of our modern economic paradigm are explored, beginning with John Locke and Adam Smith. In Two Treatises of Government, John Locke lays out the fundamental principles of private ownership of land, labor and capital. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith uses the term invisible hand as a means to explain how an individual's self-interest benefits society as a whole. A critical view of economic theory is made by questioning the need for private property, money and the inherent inequality between agents in the system. Also seen critically is the need for cyclical consumption in order to maintain market share which results in wasted resources and Planned obsolescence.

The other component is the monetary economy. The monetary system regulates the money supply and interest rates by buying/selling treasuries. More critical views of the monetary system are explained. According to the movie, the current monetary system can only result in default or hyperinflation, because when money comes into existence it is created by loans at interest. The existing money supply is only the principal. The interest to pay the loan that created the money does not exist in the money supply and must be borrowed repetitively in order to service the debt. Due to this exponential money supply growth, Zeitgeist information says the value of money is destroyed as evidenced by the 96% devaluation of the U.S. money supply since the Federal Reserve was chartered in 1914 and 80% devaluation since the U.S. ended the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971.

Part III: Project Earth

As with Zeitgeist: Addendum, the film presents a "resource-based economy" as advocated by Jacque Fresco discussing how human civilization could start from a new beginning in relation to resource types, locations, quantities, to satisfy human demands; track the consumption and depletion of resources to regulate human demands and maintain the condition of the environment. Various technologies for improving civilization under the resource-based economy are discussed.

Part IV: Rise

The world state of affairs is described in a dire light. A case is presented that pollution, deforestation, climate change, overpopulation, and warfare are all created and perpetuated by the socioeconomic system. Various poverty statistics are shown that suggest a progressive worsening of world culture. According to the United Nations, currently 18,000 children a day die from starvation. Also according to the UN, global poverty rates have doubled since the 1970s.

The movie closes with a standoff between protesters on the streets of Times Square in New York City facing off against police in riot gear while in the midst of global economic depression. People withdraw trillions of dollars from the world’s central banks, then dump the money at the doors of the banks. The police stand down. The final scene of the film shows a partial view of earth from space, followed by a sequence of superimposed statements; "This is your world" which is repeated.

Interviewees

• Dr. Adrian Bowyer
• Dr. Colin J. Campbell
• Jacque Fresco
• Jeremy J. Gilbert
• Dr. James Gilligan
• Max Keiser
• Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis
• Dr. Gábor Máté
• Dr. John McMurtry
• Roxanne Meadows
• Michael Ruppert
• Dr. Robert Sapolsky
• Richard Wilkinson

Reception

Audience Reception

The movie video posting on YouTube surpassed 20,000,000 views by mid-2013.

Critical response

A review in the monthly publication The Socialist Standard criticizes several aspects of the film, suggesting that the analysis of the economic system was shaky, that Karl Marx has already undertaken a more scientific and thorough critique of capitalism, and that a strategy of how to get from our current system to the new system proposed in the film is lacking.

Fouad Al-Noor in Wessex Scene said that the film has more of a focus on solutions than the previous film. Calling it a modern phenomenon, he noted that while there are controversial elements, he challenged those using labels to describe the film to watch the films first.

In her article on the Zeitgeist Movement, published in Tablet, Michelle Goldberg felt that the film was silly enough that she suspected at times that the film was a satire about a technological utopia but noted the large following of the movement that produced the film, saying "it even seems like the world’s first Internet-based cult, with members who parrot the party line with cheerful, rote fidelity".

Andreas Exner in Social Innovation Network said, that global cooperation might be useful, even partly necessary, but it cannot and should not rely on people functioning like machines, obeying the allegedly natural constraint of resource management which might be enforced by a scientific steering committee.

See also

• Zeitgeist: The Movie
• Zeitgeist: Addendum
• The Zeitgeist Movement
• Sociocultural evolution
• World-systems theory
• Criticism of capitalism
• Ecological economics
• Sustainable development
• The Venus Project

External links

• Official website
• Zeitgeist: Moving Forward at IMDb