Zeitgeist: Moving Forward [2011] by director Peter Joseph is a 162 minute film work which continues what the prior two films of the Zeitgeist Film Series started: a critical look at the “Zeitgeist” or ‘Spirit /Awareness of the Time’. A prominent underlying thesis of the Film Series is that a great many notions, beliefs and practices currently engaged in today and assumed as “presupposed”, “given” or seemingly empirical to our societal approaches and values are not only intellectually/historically incorrect but highly detrimental to our personal and social progress and sustainability.
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward focuses on the very fabric of the social order: Monetary-Market Economics. While the majority of the world today have slowly come to see some basic flaws in the economic system we share, as large scale debt defaults, inflation, industrial pollution, resource depletion, rising cancer rates and other signposts emerge to bring the concern into the realm of “public health” overall, very few however consider the economic paradigm as a whole as the source. The tendency is to demand reform in one area or another, avoiding the possibility that perhaps the entire system is intrinsically flawed at the foundational level. ZMF presents the case that it is, indeed, the very foundational mechanics of this system that generates the patterns of behavior and unsustainable methods of conduct that are leading to the vast spectrum of detrimental consequences both personal, social, and environmental and the longer they go on, the worse things will become.
For example, here are four of the more dominant points with respect to the current system:
-The Market System is based on “Cyclical Consumption” and in order for society to continue it’s economic operation through “labor” as the basic starting point there must be perpetual turnover of goods and services and the rate of this turnover cannot be inhibited beyond a certain level. The consequence is that strategic conservation and efficiency (the true measures of the quality of an “economy”) in the ecological, technological and hence/scientific sense become detrimental factors to perpetuating the artificial need for Cyclical Consumption. In other words the less efficient the goods and services produced, the more eventual demand and the more turnover will occur in general to meet those needs. This is the exact opposite of what logic demands for a true economic system, which would need to be based on preservation and maximum sustainability/strategic longevity. The reduction of consumption and waste is a central need for ongoing human survival on a finite planet. We live in an “anti-economy,” in fact.
