Critique of Zeitgeist Movement and Venus Project
The Venus Project has merged with The Zeitgiest Movement: How are their aims, ideals, and intentions different from what the Evolver Social Movement proposes? (I know we haven't made a clear statement of principles yet, but I am curious of people's intuitions about this).From what I have seen so far, I don't personally resonate that deeply with the Venus Project. Their vision of a technologically driven future - skyscraper cities on the oceans etc - already seems oddly old-fashioned to me. I also don't think I agree with an approach to human society that is entirely based on resources and how they are allocated. This seems a bit depersonalizing. Visiting Z Day in NYC, I was struck with how the Zeitgest Movement seems to revive elements of original 19th Century European Communism, with a kind of materialist fundamentalism and a bit of naivete about human nature.
Personally I believe that a meaningful transformation of civilization can only begin with a deep paradigm shift that includes an acceptance of the dimensions of psychic reality suppressed by modern civilization, and integration of consciousness as the primary element in our experience. The shift is from quantity - any purely material or statistical yardsticks - to quality, to values of a different sort. The concept that indigenous cultures are poor, for instance, is entirely the imposition of a certain mindset that has become fixated on quantities and types of possessions as how you determine the wealth or the value of any particular community. Read Robert Lawlor's Voices of the First Day, Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Claustres' Society Against the State, Bookchin's Ecology of Freedom, etc, etc, for a different realization.
This doesn't mean that I don't think "resources" need to be protected or held as a sacred trust for future generations (though I wouldn't use that word as it still presupposes the weird and wrong idea that they are "resources" for us humans to use, rightly or wrongly, but as we see fit). I believe that Buckminster Fulller's approach is a huge part of the solution - minimizing and eventually (quickly) eliminating all waste (since nature doesn't produce waste, there is no reason we should either), maximizing efficiency, doing less with more until finally we can do all with nothing (what all of the hubbub around "free energy" or drawing upon the structure of the vacuum points toward). ...
The Venus Project, from what I have gathered, looks at the religious impulse in a condescending and negative way, as something a truly "rational" society would overcome. I actually think the opposite. I think we will instead access the aboriginal understanding of the sacred nature of every aspect of our life and our being, "the ever-present origin" that is available to us forever now. Whether our future realization of this sacred nature of being takes new institutional forms or not does not concern me at present - the old religious forms have become obsolete and dangerous as they keep people in separation. Sometimes I wonder if a new religion, perhaps something without need of form or uncodifiable as it is a felt awareness rather than a set of precepts, of creative freedom in alignment with source -- the pure creative freedom of the free-willing consciousness that is at play with the cosmos, that is us as we discover ourselves in it - is what is on our horizon.
Anyway, drifted off topic perhaps, but I believe The Zeitgeist Venus amalgam is important as it is opening a lot of people to gaps in our civilization's paradigm, while it has real gaps of its own.
Re-Energized like a corpse becoming a zombie
— Frank🦁F (@Lightrider) January 20, 2022
TZM decentralized long ago and exists as a shell of its prior formal structure, by necessity - typical of such a movement after 13+ yrs. Fracturing has led to various offshoots which is also part of the evolution. We did have about 10,000 global events overall. Quite the ride...
— Peter Joseph (@ZeitgeistFilm) January 20, 2022
