IDEAS MAGAZINE
May 28, 2010

http://www.ideasmagazine.eu/2010/05/28/the-zeitgeist-movement-%E2%80%93-a-journey-to-a-better-place/

THE ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT – A JOURNEY TO A BETTER PLACE
by Lee Ferguson

In a world that rests precariously on the edge of civil unrest it can sometimes seem that we have become forsaken. That our destiny lies in a no-mans land somewhere between now and the waste and refuse of a race hung-up on its own desire to consume as much, and whatever it can with an unbecoming levity.

It can be so easy for ‘us’ – the fortunate of the western world, out here on the crest of our first world “civilisation” - to look out over the violence and unrest around us, to see it as just another ‘thing’ tucked amongst the pixels of our screens. It can be so easy for us to take it all for granted.

We are so used to the information being fed to us, so capable of being aware of everything around us that, in the end, the important things seem to melt with the unimportant; to the point that we allow all of these things to quickly twist into tragedy. Until eventually, at some point, when we may have left it all a little to late, we turn to ask, how can we save ourselves?

What is important then? Well if you ask industrial designer and social engineer Jacque Fresco, he has a lot to say on the matter.

The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of The Venus Project, an organisation that works to publicise Jacque Fresco’s vision of the future. Fresco states that our profit-based economy is the cause of all unrest in the world. He states that crime, corruption, poverty and social barriers are the effect of a monetary system; a system that suffocates the true potential of a society that is more than capable, through the use of socially beneficial technology and science – used in a non-competitive, non-profit based society – to create a world where people can “live longer, healthier and more beneficial lives.”

Fresco is a ‘Futurist’. A man with a vision of a utopian world, a world that can seem so far away from our life time if we were to look at how far we have to go. But with Fresco and with the Zeitgeist Movement, you get the sense that they are taking those first important steps on that proverbial ‘Journey of a thousand miles’.