The Zeitgeist Cult

The Zeitgeist films and the Venus Project have captivated the children of the information age. They have played right into a demographic who has been reared on the internet and knows little else but. They have attempted to claim science without the benefit of hindsight, for every movement that has ever attempted to claim science has led to atrocity. They have toured too long in the foreign land of history without the benefit of a guidebook and have lost themselves to fitting together its disparate themes into neat and orderly conspiracies. They worship the guru they see in Jacques Fresco, rather than apply the principles of evidential argumentation to his bold-faced assertions. They have become drunk on their own propaganda of flying cars and futuristic city plans and have yet to sober up to the oppression inherent in the technocratic, totalitarian globalist, machine-driven superstructure they envision with utopian simplicity.

Given all this, every cult has its kernels of truth. The Zeitgeist films are best described as propaganda vehicles to assert a political agenda that is anti-free market, anti-democracy (as we know it), anti-human nature, and anti-freedom of religion. They fabricate the lore and mythology of human antiquity to fit their schema for the baselessness of religious ideas, and build upon those outright fabrications intricate truths about the state of the planet and humanity. We are lead to believe these various pathways and narratives are somehow related when they are not--the Egyptian god Horus was never considered to be a Christ figure, and even if he were, it would have nothing to do with how consumerism is destroying our global ecology. The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line, and that's the only line the filmmakers wish to present, because it's the only line they want their audience to know about. In Nietzsche's terms, these are but castles built on spider webs.

We are, once again, led against scientific rigor. There is a contempt for science which is all too predictable in movements that stress absolute certainty--perhaps it is because science stresses no such certainty, merely, beliefs based on evidence. It is not as if the claims being made are of the same degree of fabrication as was the case with their historical narratives, it's just that in their presentation of genetics and behavior, of environmental science, of sociology..etc., they present information as if they alone are the ones busting the lid off this information--as if none of what they say hasn't already been the main argument of researchers in the scientific realms for decades. They then use that presentation to make it seem like they alone are telling the truth while suggesting that all of science is make believe consumer-driven hocus-pocus.

When the scientific community is invoked, we see images of outdated 19th century dioramas with the implication that they are still accepted beliefs, and then when they bring up what 21st century science has uncovered, it is always in the context of their movement (once again, as if they are responsible for the progress science has made in the past 50 years). It is effective propaganda for the masses, but unconvincing for those who know how propaganda works. For instance, they would be hard pressed to find a developmental psychologist who disagrees with their supposed "claim" that nature vs. nurture is a simplistic view of development, but that doesn't stop them from touting it as if they've just stumbled onto this discovery for the first time, and that they'd be decried as heretics for even suggesting it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not to say that science is not corrupted, or that corporations are not corrupted, or that governments are not corrupted. They make these points and they are valid points, but what they desire to do is utterly destroy our current civilization and rebuild it along their own half-baked principles (vehemently opposing all perspectives and evidence that is contrary to their assumptions). Just as the Marxists, just as the Bolsheviks, they believe that only after society has been dismantled and reconstituted to match with their ideal, that we might finally see Utopia--that all the disparate people of the earth will somehow unite around their vision and we'll finally all be free from the grip of [whatever we distrust in the present]. These are fantasies, illusions, flights of incomprehensible naïveté  no matter how genuine they may be felt.

It is not freedom, or even the rights of human beings they are after though, for they treat human beings as secondary to their technological and environmental pursuits--and one can only imagine the atrocities that would be rendered if their contempt for human vice were brought to full-scale fruition. One has only look at the history of uncompromising extremism to see where this thinking leads ('extermination' always factors in). There is absolutely nothing new about any claim or statement made in the Zeitgeist films, they are simply dressed up to look as if they are presenting a new ideology. One could even argue that another term for the political ideology being espoused in these films is a technological National Socialism, only on a global scale rather than within a country, where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the "world citizens." It seeks to subjugate human interest and channel those energies toward perpetuating the utopian vision, carried out by machine-driven enforcement. The individual comes second to the centralized global state. The undesirables (those who might disagree to living under this system and lash out at it) would naturally have to be eliminated.

It's a cult because it fails to subject itself to the same standards of critique it reserves for society. Instead of working to create solutions out of the system, it diverts attention towards formulating some grandioise vision for a utopia where no one is allowed to work, no one is allowed to practice faith, no one is allowed to be evil, or good, or even human. This is a sad distraction, but such seems to be the case with the information age--the age of distraction--which is why solutions are so tough to come by to begin with. Progress can only come from that which allows all things, and promises little. The Venus Project and its propaganda is a cult because it allows so little, and promises everything.