Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Zeitgeist confronts its "Paid" Critics
The Nadir of Paranoia: Zeitgeist Confronts its Paid Critics. (UPDATED!)
This blog, originally published August 23, 2011, was updated September 8, 2011, and again on September 19, 2011. Scroll to the end for the updates.
I did not want to do another Zeitgeist blog, which will be my second in a week. I would really rather move on to other things. But once in a while the Zeitgeist Movement says something so outrageous, bizarre and extreme that it’s difficult to let it pass without comment. Thus, here we are again.
This time the statement comes directly from the top: the cult’s leader and director of the Zeitgeist films, arch-conspiracy theorist Peter Joseph Merola. I’m assuming you’re familiar with the fracas that occurred last week regarding a Zeitgeist Movement member who posted a topic on their forum that unmistakably and unequivocally advocated acts of wanton violence and terrorism, especially against an undefined “elite” that the member believes is in control of the world. That topic was eventually deleted. The deletion caused some controversy on the Zeitgeist forums. As he sometimes does, the movement’s leader, Merola, stepped in to add his “final word” and to lock the topic. Merola states:
“Keep moving forward and stop paying attention to these trolls. Remember, they have a job to do and will seek anything to exploit. So the more you all talk about it, the more they get paid and have to run with. (yes, I have inside info that the major trolls are paid to do what they do which explains why they are able to blog everyday, monitoring almost everything from this Forum to our Facebook pages to Youtube. It is nothing new. Just watch. Every word I say here will end up twisted on one of the blogs. Timing tests have been run by a few of us to see how fast these guys can catch things that are posted and removed and they seem to be working almost in real time meaning there are likely many of them working in shifts, hiding behind one name/blog.)the original thread noted should not have been deleted- it should have been addressed and corrected.”
As you can see I havent twisted any of his words; this is exactly what he said. We can even set aside, for the purposes of this blog, the last sentence which expresses support for the original pro-violence post. Merola is employing the fallacy that whatever the trolls think is bad, he is going to praise. Thats quite poor judgment for him, but thats neither here nor there.
The topic in which this statement appears directly refers to my previous blog, so when they refer to trolls they are clearly talking about me. In case the import of this statement escapes you, here is the leader of the Zeitgeist Movement directly asserting that I am being paid to write anti-Zeitgeist blogs. In simpler terms used more often by conspiracy theorists, I am accused—by the leader of the Zeitgeist Movement—of being a “paid disinformation agent.”
The “Disinformation Agent” Trope in Context
This is not the first time such an accusation has been leveled against me. In fact it happens pretty frequently, as the “paid disinformation agent” trope (sometimes referred to as a “shill”) is an extremely common one among conspiracy theorists. It was used against me only last week on a Facebook group I occasionally post on which was flooded by 9/11 Truthers. Among the most paranoid of paranoid conspiracy theorists, any person who disagrees with conspiracy theories in any way is probably a “paid disinformation agent.” The charge is leveled against people, as it was in this case by Mr. Merola, without a single shred of proof. It comes about as a result of a convergence of two factors: first, disagreement with conspiracy theories; and second, an arrogant certainty on the part of the person making the charge that no one could disagree with conspiracy theories unless they were being paid to do so.
Several things fascinate me about the statement as it was made here. First, it comes directly from Merola himself, speaking for and with the voice of the Zeitgeist Movement. Secondly, it illustrates the deep thrall of conspiracy theorist thinking and conspiracy theorist ideology that emanates from the very top of the Zeitgeist Movement and the primacy of such ideology to the group. Thirdly, it demonstrates, far better than I can do with my own words, how and why members of the Zeitgeist Movement fundamentally misunderstand the criticisms made against them. Merola’s statement is so illuminating as to speak volumes about what this organization really is, what it believes in and why it will never be taken seriously.
Okay, Who’s Paying Me, And How Do You Know?
First things first, Merola’s charge is so ludicrous on its face as to be actually funny. I mean, does he really believe I get paid to do this? By who? The government? I assume that must be what he and other Zeitgeisters are thinking, though in this topic they don’t specifically identify the source of my supposed salary. It’s clear that many of them are thinking the same thing, though. One user comments, following Merola’s initial statement:
“Wouldnt it be interesting, Peter, to trace their salaries back to the source; we both probably know very well where it would lead.”
Yes, in their delusional fantasies it would, of course, lead to THE GUBBERMINT, the evil powers-that-be who are so terrified of the Zeitgeist Movement that they would use taxpayer’s money to pay me to write blogs trashing them. This demonstrates the astonishing arrogance of Zeitgeist members, and one they share with conspiracy theorists at large. They believe that their ideology and ideas are so airtight that no one could or would legitimately disagree with them—and because of this certainty, they assume that anyone who does so must be proceeding from some ulterior motive.
This type of thinking is common among Zeitgeisters. One prominent pro-Zeitgeist blogger has been searching for over a year to discern my “true motivation” for opposing Zeitgeist, since he refuses to believe it is because I oppose the Movement’s emphasis on conspiracy theories. No; he’s sure there’s some other ulterior motivation that must explain my intransigence. Well, Merola seems to have figured that one out: he thinks I oppose Zeitgeist because somebody, most likely the government, is paying me to oppose it.
That’s a very easy out for Zeitgeisters, isn’t it? “Oh, no one really disagrees with the Zeitgeist Movement. The ones who say they do are just being paid to!” This absolves them from dealing with the true reasons why people criticize them. It is also deeply and incorrigibly paranoid.
This is what they think? Really? They think the evil gubbermint, in the guise of hobbyist bloggers, is out to get them in some sort of grand shadowy conspiracy? As astounding as a fairy tale like that is to rational eyes and ears, in actuality it’s not too far from the fairy tales that most Zeitgeisters fervently believe—like “9/11 was an inside job,” one of the most notorious false conspiracy theories pushed by Merola in the Zeitgeist movies.
After this statement, it is impossible to maintain that Zeitgeist is not a movement based upon conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking, appealing mostly to conspiracy theorists, and which filters its entire worldview through a conspiratorial mindset.
I also find it interesting that Merola says he has “inside info that the major trolls are paid to do what they do.” Oh, really? I’d be interested to see this “info.” In fact, in this blog I call upon him to make this “info” public. How does he know I’m being paid? Is it, as I suspect, simply more innuendo and broad leaps of intuition, to which conspiracy theorists are especially prone?
The Truth About This Blog (And Its Relationship To Others)
In all fairness Merola is not referring to me alone. Although anyone anywhere who voices any criticism of the Zeitgeist Movement is subject to being called a “troll,” when Merola refers to “the blogs” I suspect he means this one as well as James Kush’s, which is specifically devoted to criticism of Zeitgeist. Another prominent anti-Zeitgeist blogger is “MarioBrotha,” but he has been on hiatus both on his blog regarding the Zeitgeist Movement and his other blog about Desteni, another notorious cult that uses conspiracy theories as a recruiting tool.
I do not know James Kush. I’ve replied to him a few times on Twitter or on web forums but we don’t correspond or collaborate. Not long ago he posted something on his blog referencing one of my blog entries. I messaged him on Facebook (he is not a friend of mine on Facebook) asking him to correct a typo, which he did. That’s the total extent of coordination I’ve ever had with James Kush. I don’t agree with everything on James Kush’s blog; he uses a lot of hyperbole and dramatic language that I think overstates the case against Zeitgeist. I feel the same way about “MarioBrotha,” who I also don’t know and have never collaborated with. We are not “in cahoots” in any way. My blog is my own. I alone make the decisions about what I’m going to write about and when.
There is a person who is active on YouTube who also criticizes the Zeitgeist Movement. His handle is “RonaldoDeLosMuertos.” On at least one occasion Merola has mistaken me for him. I guess that’s understandable; it’s a pretty wild coincidence that two different guys out there, who have never met each other, are both known on the net by handles incorporating the words “Los Muertos” and who are both critical of the Zeitgeist Movement, and as we know, conspiracy theorists are loath to believe in coincidence. But I’m not Ronaldo. We have no working relationship and no collaboration on blogs.
If you’ll notice, at least since mid-2010 my blogs about Zeitgeist have been largely reactive: responding to things Zeitgeisters say and do. Kush, Mario and Ronaldo often work on the same basis. If, for instance, a Zeitgeister makes statements directly advocating violence, it’s likely several people working independently of each other will choose to comment on that incident. If the Zeitgeist Movement splits from the Venus Project—which is the single most important thing that’s happened to the Movement in the past year, with the possible exception of the Loughner shooting—you can also expect more than one comment on that incident. Furthermore, various bloggers who are critical of Zeitgeist are active on Twitter, and as you know, on Twitter it’s very easy to re-tweet the content posted by others. People who share viewpoints about anything—politics, music, movies, celebrities, etc.do that. It’s the essence, in fact, of social networking.
Merola seems to read a lot into the fact that “troll” blogs are updated frequently—and this may be the source of his evident delusion that criticizing Zeitgeist is some sort of “full time job” which is possible only if it earns a dedicated salary. This too is ridiculous. Yes, I have posted many articles this summer. That’s not surprising, considering my work deals with education and summer is my off-season. Would it surprise you to know that I’ve also written two novels this summer? Or that I covered a music festival and wrote a 30+ page review, which in fact is beginning its run on a music website on the very day I’m writing this blog? Would it surprise you to know that I own and operate three other blogs in addition to this one, none of which have anything to do with Zeitgeist or conspiracy theories? Would it surprise you to know that I’m doing research for a book on American history? Or that I have a significant other and family members with whom I spend a great deal of time?
Would it surprise you to know that this article, from inception to publication, took a little more than an hour to write, edit, polish and upload—and that I spent more time on this particular article than I usually do?
What’s also amusing is the fact that criticizing Zeitgeist is not the point of this blog. I don’t do blogs on Zeitgeist alone. I blog about movies. I blog about technology and communications. I blog about history. I blog about politics. I blog about books. And yes, I’ve blogged about Desteni. In another ironic twist, I once had a Zeitgeister claim that my investigation of Desteni was just a sham, and that it was really about Zeitgeist—that I’m making stuff up about Desteni and trying to use it to make Zeitgeist look worse than it is.
Are you beginning to understand the unwarranted sense of self-importance that these people have?
Do you want to know the single most popular article, in terms of page views, in the history of this blog? Here it is. It has nothing to do with Zeitgeist, Desteni, or conspiracy theories. It’s about the Wacken Open Air festival. I originally wrote it years ago and republished it here when I opened this blog on Blog.com (which costs nothing to use, by the way). Looking at the hit statistics, month after month it is that article that’s most read, by a wide margin. So for Merola to claim that “the more you all talk about it, the more they get paid” is asinine. Since my most all-time popular blog article is about Wacken, are the Zeitgeisters going to claim that perhaps Im being paid by the organizers of the Wacken festival?
Merola’s claim that not only am I paid by the government, but that I must be more than one person—or have a dedicated staff that monitors Zeitgeist 24/7 and works in “shifts”—is so far in the realm of delusion that it constitutes science fiction. I’m not sure how his “timing tests” prove that I have a staff. Again, if there is any evidence of these bizarre and paranoid claims, let him present it. Somehow I don’t think he will.
The Bottom Line
Just to be very clearly on record I will make a number of clear and unequivocal statements. Not because I feel the charge of “paid disinformation agent” has any validity, but because if I don’t, the Zeitgeist conspiracy theorists will read some oblique admission of guilt into my failure to make them. So, here they are.
- I am not paid by any person, agency, group, board, bureau, business interest, coalition, cartel or any other entity to write this blog.
- I make no money whatsoever from this blog. Even the ads on the page don’t inure to my benefit; they go (I suppose) to support the webservers of Blog.com.
- Writing this blog is not my job, my occupation or the central/most important thing in my life. Far from it. In fact, if you asked me to make a list of the 100 most important things in my day-to-day life, this blog might be about number 90.
- I oppose Zeitgeist because it is the source of a great deal of belief in conspiracy theories. If you ask a believer in conspiracy theories how he or she began believing in them, it’s very likely they’ll tell you their interest was sparked by one of two things: Alex Jones or Zeitgeist: The Movie. All of my criticisms of the Zeitgeist Movement—its promotion and advancement of conspiracy thinking and conspiracist ideology, its weird worldview, its advocacy of violence, its cult characteristics—are tied in one way or another to the central truth that Zeitgeist is a conspiracy movement.
- Every criticism of the Zeitgeist Movement that I’ve ever made on this blog is one that I genuinely believe on the basis of reliable evidence and cogent reasoning. I am not “making stuff up.”
- I believe that pushing back against conspiracy theories, debunking them and shedding light on their deceptions is a positive social good that has positive real-world consequences.
- I do not oppose Zeitgeist because I am paid to do so.
- I am not a Christian. I do not oppose Zeitgeist because of any religious “bigotry” or any other religious reason.
- I do not support unfettered free market capitalism. I do not oppose Zeitgeist because it supposedly threatens a capitalistic world order. Although I think Zeitgeist’s economic ideas are ridiculous, I do not oppose Zeitgeist out of economic ideology.
- I have never been a member of the Zeitgeist Movement, have never posted on their forum and have never been in any way associated with them. (The charge is occasionally made against me that I’m a “disgruntled former member,” or that I employ “sock puppet accounts”).
- I do not believe Zeitgeist is “occult,” or is part of the “New World Order” or any such rubbish.
- I am not Ronaldo DeLosMuertos, James Kush or MarioBrotha. I do not collaborate with any of these people and I do not coordinate any content that appears on this blog with any other person.
- I do not have a staff working for me.
I believe this is as exhaustive a reply to a bizarrely paranoid idea as is warranted—in fact, it’s probably extreme overkill. Ideally I’d like to say that this will serve as my final words on this blog regarding the Zeitgeist Movement. But every time I think this organization can’t top their latest blunder, they seem to find a way to surprise me. Perhaps next time I should merely let their incompetence, stupidity and paranoia speak for itself; those qualities are becoming so prominent and unmistakable that they are beginning to eclipse Zeitgeist’s critics’ capacity to interpret them.
Thanks for reading.
Update 8 September 2011
Yesterday, September 7, Peter Merola gave a podcast/web broadcast in which he addressed, among other things, the subject of anti-Zeitgeist disinformation campaigns. You can hear his broadcast here. I listened in, curious if he would perhaps present the information he claims he has that I am paid to write this blog and to criticize the Zeitgeist Movement.
He did not. That doesn't surprise me, because of course there is no such evidence; Merola just made it up. He did, however, elaborate on his own delusion of persecution by making some remarks about the disinformation phenomenon. Although Merola was as unclear and deliberately verbose as he usually is, near as I can tell he seems to believe that I and other bloggers who comment negatively on Zeitgeist are employed by some sort of for-profit entity whose business is to smear people and organizations on the Internet. Merola got there by stating the existence of reputation companies, which help you rehabilitate your image on the Internet for a fee, and then supposing that there are also companies that do the exact opposite, to smear somebody for a fee.
This is, of course, absurd. Yes, there are reputation companies that help you rehabilitate your image on the Internet. That is true. But the opposite does not exist. Any company that had that as a business model is asking for trouble, because theyre opening themselves up to liability for defamation; no one would write insurance for such a company. Furthermore, how are you supposed to find such a firm, even if one exists? The Yellow Pages? Switchboard.com?
Its also interesting that Merola never identified precisely who is supposed to have hired the nonexistent company that I supposedly work for. He said nothing about that. He merely droned on about COINTELPRO, which is a favorite conspiracy theorist meme; Merola did acknowledge that COINTELPRO no longer exists, but this went by so quickly that you could barely catch it. No, he went on to compare the supposed persecution of the Zeitgeist Movement to the FBI campaign against Martin Luther King in the 1960's.
Yes, you read that right. Merola invited a comparison between himself and Martin Luther King. Because I write blogs criticizing Zeitgeist, I am as evil as the FBI was in the 1960's by trying to impede civil rights.
Obviously this whole thing is ridiculous. I need not state again, as I did in the main part of this blog, that I'm not paid by anyone to write this blog, and the idea that someone disagrees with Zeitgeist only because they're paid to is ludicrous, arrogant and delusional. This is, I believe, nothing short of a concerted strategy of criticism avoidance. Merola is telling his foll owers that they need not even consider any criticism leveled at the movement, because those who criticize it are being paid to, so naturally all their points are completely irrelevant and made-up. This is another example of cult-like behavior: theyre being paid to criticize Zeitgeist is a thought-ending cliché, which is a tactic commonly used by cult leaders to short-circuit any possibility that their followers might think critically about the indoctrination to which they have been exposed.
Aside from flogging the disinformation horse, Merola did say, offhandedly, one thing that was very encouraging. In talking about the redesign of the Zeitgeist Movement website, he told his followers that there will no longer be a centralized web forum. Essentially, Zeitgeists forum will eventually be shut down. I guess Merola and his moderators are tired of Movement members saying embarrassing things that result in frenzied attempts at spin control. Individual chapters, supposedly, can institute forums on their own websites if they want to, Merola said, but the big show is off as soon as the new site goes up, whenever that is.
This will probably mean the effective end of the Zeitgeist Movement. As an organization that exists almost entirely on the Internet, the lack of any central communicative function within the cult will effectively kill it. The Zeitgeist chapters are, for the most part, pretty irrelevant to the cult; from what I've been able to observe most of them exist only on paper, or at least their real-world presence is not very significant. If the cult is reduced to a website providing one-way communication, I don't really see how the movement uses that as a base for growth. Zeitgeists numbers are declining anyway. According to Alexa.com, which I check now and again to see how many people are surfing onto various Zeitgeist-related sites, considerably fewer people are interested in the Zeitgeist Movement now than were at the beginning of 2011. That does not bode well for a movement that insisted its third movie, the interminable Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, would bring in millions of new members.
Now if youll excuse me, I must go collect my paycheck from COINTELPRO.
Update 19 September 2011
The pro-Zeitgeist blogger to whom I linked above did another blog on me recently clarifying his position. He now pronounces that the reason I oppose Zeitgeist is because my father was in the military, and therefore I must be acting out of patriotic motives and opposing Zeitgeist because it threatens my beloved country. He got there by churning through my Twitter posts for hints of my personal life and family background, and happily seized upon something he thought he could sell as a reason why someone like me is so thick-headed as to not immediately accept the Zeitgeist Movement and Peter Joseph Merola as the savior of all mankind.
This supposition itself is so ridiculous as to be beneath substantive comment. At least he didn't jump on the paid disinformation agent bandwagon, as his leader Merola has done. I remark only that its yet another example of precisely the effect I describe in this blog: refusal by Zeitgeist members to believe that there are legitimate reasons for opposing their group and their ideology, and that those reasons are not, and never have been, concealed from anyone. It also illustrates, again, the depth of conspiracist thinking at the core of Zeitgeist ideology. In a conspiracist worldview, all motives are hidden, and all truths must be revealed through detective work. There's no such thing as taking someone at face value. If someone says they oppose Zeitgeist because it pushes conspiracy theories, they must be lying; indeed, that person must be a conspiracy theorist themselves! The nadir of paranoia at which the Zeitgeist Movement exists can have no more eloquent demonstration.
Another TZMer says SP members get paid by the guberment! http://t.co/69ffTm8M8R— Alt-Universe (@TVPMovieTracker) July 10, 2013
No I'm serious, checks stopped so I stopped. #TZM #Zeitgeist pic.twitter.com/TTs425MH
— The Most Goodest JimJesus🤘🏴💰🍕 (@JimJesus) October 7, 2012
Another TZMer says SP members get paid by the guberment!
https://conspiracies.skepticproject.com/forum/5549/another-tzmer-says-sp-members-get-paid-by-the-guberment/
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
The Zeitgeist Movement wants to kill a thousand people
The #Zeitgeist Movement = Terrorist organization. #TVP #TZM #RBE
— The JimJesus (@JimJesus) August 17, 2011
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Jacque Fresco really wants you to "Shut Up"
TVP may have a pretty good vision of the future but you completely fail at listening to others' vision of the transition to get there. Try engaging comments and listening to the ways we offer to bring this to reality.— Todd McKissick🧢 (@ToddMcKissick) March 24, 2020
You DON'T know it all.
I, and some others, have followed since your early days and pitched a workable transition every now and then, only to be ignored.— Todd McKissick🧢 (@ToddMcKissick) March 24, 2020
After more than a decade of this, I have my solution fairly refined. We could do it with very little help.
PS: I'm far MORE motivated than you. DM?
How about you read the F-ing room, huh? I'm trying to help TVP get implemented by offering a workable transition plan, not just a final picture. And I don't have 70 yrs in it because I'm not that old but I do have nearly 30 in 'whole system'. And you? I'm betting you got nothing.— Todd McKissick🧢 (@ToddMcKissick) March 25, 2020
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
The last word on Utopia by Corbett
Against Utopia
Welcome. This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com with the last word on utopia.
Those with evil intent are seldom courteous enough to announce their intentions openly. As history has shown us time and again, oppressive tyrants seldom come to power campaigning on oppression. Quite the contrary. The most pernicious evil always presents itself as something necessary, something transitory, a mere waypoint on the road to the land of milk and honey. In this way the masses can be led to not only tolerate the most intolerable conditions, but actually to support those who would seek to rule over them.
In the early days, even the most ruthless dictators are wildly popular. By the time the public realizes it’s been had and the blood starts flowing in the streets, it’s too late: the regime is in place and the promises that the tyrant used to gain power are already replaced with the yoke of repression.
In France the revolutionaries rallied under the banner of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Within a few short years their revolution had morphed into the Reign of Terror, a bloody dictatorship of the guillotine in the name of securing the utopia that the public had been promised. Even at the height of the campaign, as the blood of the people flowed in the streets, Robespierre argued that the bloodshed was a virtuous outgrowth of democracy and even wrote that it represented “the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
In Russia the Bolsheviks came to power under the slogan “Land, peace, and bread.” Within just five years, however, Lenin had insured a smooth transition from tsarist dictatorship to Soviet dictatorship: he dissolved the Constituent Assembly, which the Bolsheviks did not control, after its first meeting; he disbanded the factory committees which promised to give industrial workers democratic control over their own operations; and he vastly expanded the state security services which imprisoned tens of thousands of anti-Bolsheviks and summarily executed thousands more.
In Cambodia, the communist movement grew in strength and size on the back of the promise to “restart civilization” and return to “Year Zero,” a mythical paradise in which agrarian peasants would become rulers of their own destiny. On his rise to power, Saloth Sar, the leader of the Communist party, stopped living with and consulting with the party leadership. Once he had attained control of the country he changed his name to Pol Pot and began an extermination of two million of his own people, a full quarter of the country’s population. One out of every four people in Cambodia died in Pol Pot’s delusional pursuit of his imagined utopia.
Nor are these by any means the only example of this phenomenon. The English Roundheads overthrew the king just to find they had replaced him with a Lord Protector of artistocratic pretensions. Mussolini marched on Rome on the back of mass public support and proceeded to set up a prototypical fascist dictatorship. The Chinese were promised a Great Leap Forward and ended up bathing in the blood of 60 million of their countrymen. Time after time, the masses have been whipped into a revolutionary fervour by leaders promising a perfect system of governance. And time after time, they have paid for that fervour with their lives.
The term ‘utopia’ itself was coined by Sir Thomas More in a tract written in the early 1500s. The name contains a play on words between the Greek term for nowhere, ou, and the prefix eu-, meaning good. Utopia, then is both an imaginary world, a nowhere land, and a good place, an ideal that we can strive toward in thinking of a good or just system of rule.
More’s utopia was distinctly socialist in nature: there is no money or private property; the economy and the work day are centrally planned to benefit the state; the community eats together in a common dining hall; children are separated from their parents to be raised by nurses. In many ways, this depiction of a perfectly harmonious, perfectly regimented society laid the foundation for the last 500 years of utopian socialism. Time and again utopian revolutionaries have returned to these ideas, whether from a misguided attempt to create an ideal society or a cynical understanding that the utopian urge can be commandeered by an unscrupulous dictator for his own advantage. In the end, the results are always the same: the promised “worker’s paradise” never seems to come, and the few at the top reap all the benefits.
In modern times, a technological idealism has been grafted on to this utopian socialism to create an even more enticing strain of thought with which to capture the imagination of the masses. As the mechanization of the industrial era increased productivity beyond what could ever have been dreamed in the pre-industrial era, a group of technocrats emerged promising a world in which technology itself would make possible a world of plenty. In this technological utopia, the machines would do the work and the workers would be freed from the mundane jobs that had always defined their existence.
The Bolsheviks especially latched on to the promise of technology in the early days of the Soviet Union. Aware of the enormous task before them, the Soviets hoped to create a modern, industrial, centrally-planned economy out of the poor, feudal, agricultural Russian state they had taken over. The centrepiece of this technological transformation of Russia was to be Magnitogorsk, a steel manufacturing city in the Urals that was mandated into existence by Stalin’s first Five Year Plan of 1929. The city was to be built from scratch and serve as an example of a technological utopia. The public was shown propaganda films depicting a modern paradise, a testament to the wonders of industry and the technocratic method.
The reality, of course, turned out to be exactly the opposite of what the public had been promised. Today, Magnitogorsk is as dilapidated as the American industrial cities it was based on. The city is dirty and run down, residential areas awash in the noxious fumes of the factories that were supposed to be the marvels of this modern age. The residents, far from delighting in a world of plenty, long suffered under the yoke of Soviet repression and struggled to get their daily needs fulfilled.
Ironically, Magnitogorsk did serve as the showcase of the Soviet’s promised technological utopia. Unfortunately for the technocrats, what it showed was not how the machinery of the modern age would magically free those who had never been free, but how the very system of technological planning was fundamentally flawed, unable to provide even for the most basic needs of the citizenry.
[VIDEO CLIP]
Remarkably, even now, long after the 20th century technocrats and their vision of the industrial nirvana have been so thoroughly discredited, after hundreds of years of utopian socialist fantasies have shown to lead to nothing but suffering and bloodshed, there is a new class of technocrats who are rising up to once again offer the masses a technological utopia which will provide for all their needs.
Once again we are being told that in this coming utopia an army of benevolent machines will provide for all our needs. There will be no need for money or property, no need for violence or coercion of any kind ever again. In fact, we are told, this technological revolution will not only transform our society, but human nature itself. Freed from the shackles of want by the machines that will provide for all our needs, humans will no longer be violent or selfish or greedy.
This system, we are told, will be “rational” and “logical.” The machines will know what resources are needed, how to acquire them, and how to distribute them. The machines will be able to calculate our needs and provide for them better than we ever could. The machines will be programmed by scientists, and, we are led to believe, they will always know how many toothbrushes to make.
There is no need to worry about who owns the machines, we are told, no cause for concern about how they are programmed or how they make calculations about things we don’t know. In this utopia, the proponents of this movement tell us, there will be no evil people, no elite class that tries to control others, no one at all who tries to control the system, because human nature itself will no longer allow for it.
Ultimately, perhaps it is not surprising that such utopian fantasies can still attract acolytes. The masses have always wanted the quick fix, the wave of the magic wand that will free them from this world of work, toil and strife forever. How appealing it is to be offered the promise of a perfect system, a way to organize our society that will allow us to live in peace and harmony forever. After all, if such a system were really possible, who wouldn’t want to attain it?
But that, then, is the danger of the utopian ideal. The fact that it is always just out of reach, always just one step further down the path of good intentions, means that those who are willing to use this unattainable fantasy to lead society in a dictatorial direction can dangle it before the public like a carrot to lead them further down the garden path. It is, in short, nothing but a tool to enslave the public in the name of creating the perfect society. Indeed, not just to enslave them, but to get them to work toward their own enslavement.
Until this is realized, utopia will always be a powerful motivating force for shaping our society. Those who promise us a world of plenty, where we will receive everything for nothing, will always be popular with a public looking for an easy solution to all their problems. And those who warn against the dangers of utopian thinking will never be popular. They will always be cast as obstacles in the path to the ideal society, and dismissed as charlatans by the masses who are swept into revolutionary fervour, their judgement clouded by the comforting fog of utopian visions.
No, it is never a popular thing to warn against utopia. But it is nonetheless necessary.
For The Corbett Report in western Japan, I am James Corbett.