Imagine a world without war, poverty, misery or money. Imagine a world where all people work together in a spirit of cooperation and not competition. Imagine this safer saner world and you are closer to understanding what the Zeitgeist Movement is about.

A close look at our present social systems which are built upon fundamentals which produce war, poverty, murder, crime, violence, compromised healthcare, media monopoly, corporate corruption and indifference for the environment, greed, apathetic self interest and desensitisation from others suffering, obsolete and archaic political systems based on subjective opinion (guesswork) and not on scientific and empirical certainty.

Its abundantly clear that we need to adapt our thinking because it will definitely be to our collective detriment if we do not. If we carry on so carelessly and wastefully into future, our future generations will pay the price for our mistakes. The Venus Project has the solutions.

(Excerpt from The Zeitgeist Movement UK Website)

www.thevenusproject.com

www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

www.thevenusprojectdesign.com

Waking Knowledge’s Thoughts:

Jacque Fresco & Roxanne Meadows, who run The Venus Project, have an idea for a sustainable future which is not based far off into the distant future, but offers solutions to our chaotic systems which govern our day to day lives today.

Sustainable development is about managing waste and creating some kind of equilibrium between nature and ourselves. Sounds New Age, but really it is just a few steps ahead of the ‘political agendas ‘now being presented to us in 2009 gone, and now into 2010.

I think we all have a deeper understanding of the economics involved in human living (mainly due to the global recession recently) and we now possess the knowledge, collectively, to understand how the mechanics of social structures and manipulation help to create the powerful wealth archetypes’ in the system, whom we so despise. As suggested, taking the steps to eliminate waste would also relieve the stresses of competition in manufacturing of the goods we consume, ultimately leading to the non-existence of a monetary system, so heavily relied upon in today’s material world.

Whether or not this view represents a communistic state, I do believe that these thoughts and ideas on how to create a sustainable future can only be a good thing for species living here on Earth.

It is a fine line we walk between existence in balance, or extinction out of balance.

Filmed and Narrated by Ben Stewart, Talismanic Idols

“Nothing goes through an evolutionary process alone, or without direct benefit to the whole. So when you begin to think that there’s this controlling elite, this controlling hand behind the curtains leading the planet to destruction, when you think the end is near, the apocalypse, Armageddon, and when you think we as a species are doomed, it is not ‘they’, it is you that brought this about.”

Waking Knowledge’s Thoughts:

Kymatica and its ability to connect the dots across vast topics is what makes this film such an important one to watch. Ben Stewart has done a great job at narrating his way through the many theories and thoughts which are now being made more open for discussion again in society.

The first half of this film deals primarily with the spiritual aspect of the whole, which is without doubt one of the more interesting features. Dipping in and out of real science also gives this film the edge over other independent research documentaries created by the youthful minds. The second half starts to pick up where most other conspiracy theories have been before, but again utilizing evidence to backup claims and support those theories.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are all connected to a single consciousness, this is why, as Ben points out, we are all now searching for some kind of answer to the feelings we have in today’s world, not realizing that together as group and as individuals, we have brought about this state of affairs.

As tensions continue to rise between the players at the top and those people at our level who are willing to stand and take notice of the corruption and deceit throughout common history, it will become more evident that these types of films will play a crucial role in bringing about a collective evolution of the mind, if not already doing so.

Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people’s inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products.

Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.

The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn’t realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

(Excerpt from BBC Site)

Follow the series here:

Part 1 – Happiness Machine

Part 2 – The Engineering of Consent

Part 3 – There is a Policeman inside all of our heads; He must be destroyed

Part 4 – Eight people sipping wine in Kettering

Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people’s minds by business and politics.

This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard’s Erhard Seminar Training – into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.

But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.

(Excerpt from BBC Site)

Follow the series here:

Part 1 – Happiness Machine

Part 2 – The Engineering of Consent

Part 3 – There is a Policeman inside all of our heads; He must be destroyed

Part 4 – Eight people sipping wine in Kettering

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud’s underlying premise – that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany.

To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind. Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

(Excerpt from BBC Site)

Follow the series here:

Part 1 – Happiness Machine

Part 2 – The Engineering of Consent

Part 3 – There is a Policeman inside all of our heads; He must be destroyed

Part 4 – Eight people sipping wine in Kettering

He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today’s world.

(Excerpt from BBC Site)

Follow the series here:

Part 1 – Happiness Machine

Part 2 – The Engineering of Consent

Part 3 – There is a Policeman inside all of our heads; He must be destroyed

Part 4 – Eight people sipping wine in Kettering