De The Zeitgeist Movement.
This page is for posting notes from meetings or presentations so as to originate policy wikis for each major issue related to resource based society.
From wolfe: What I wish people would do with the Nonsense page is add or edit it with their own Social Innovation ideas, using a link to a new page if they have more than a paragraph of explanation to lay out. The red colored text is already turned into potential new pages but any other text can be by editing in double square brackets around the idea. The Venus Project FAQ and the main website philosophy completely sidestep the topic of social innovation. The wiki also stood completely empty for many many months and still has not seen one edit from anyone else in nearly 3000 visits. I view these topics as deal breakers; I cannot imagine the Venus Project having a prayer if they are not presented and shaken down to some kind of logical inspiring sanity, because the Venus Project is not introducing unproven technology, it's introducing unproven sociality. I have a tandem bicycle that I have only ridden on three occasions in ten years, because of so rarely going the same place with that tight of rapport. I'm hoping The Venus Project won't sit idle like that!
To return to the Table of Contents for Social Innovations take this link: http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/wiki/index.php?title=Social_Innovations_Sub-team
Any part of it or it's subpages ought to be edited without the slightest inhibition, to improve clarity or remove narrow-mindedness or whatever. The intent here is to describe policy, but where facts are helpful they can be included, hopefully with a reference in the text or an http address. To create another idea title page, put a set of double square brackets to the left and right of the title words in the text below. After you save it, the text will be in red and be a link to a new page. After someone initiates the page with writing then the link will be other colors.
Mr. Joseph made a speech in mid November in Iowa that he has uploaded to Vimeo.com, from which the following notes were inspired:
scarcity is not something that business is motivated to end, only consumers.
Business is motivated to obtain monopoly through creative instability
and is rewarded for creating scarcity and for buying
influence in the government. A ferry boat is only a blessing on a river,
not for the rest of the journey so the ferryman is motivated to prolong
the river crossing or make many crossings necessary. The monopoly game models true unregulated free market capitalism.
Ethics is directly opposed to competition as in soccer.
We are in a system full of prostituted people and we are compelled to likewise be prostitutes. We all leech and exploit rather than promote social progress. The success of the Duck football team requires promoting failure for a greater number of others. To purchase a lottery ticket is to express the same wish for relative advantage. If a ticket cost one penny and the prize were five dollars no-one would buy a ticket because the relative advantage of winning is trivial.
Everyone is pressed by the monetary system to seek relative advantage or monopoly, particularly those in positions of greatest social influence. Theft is considered ethical on the part of a desperate person, and so is somewhat more forgiven. Murder in battle is forgiven. Injury in a brutal game is forgiven. Laws are to promote acceptance of these tragedies. We are taught by our elders to admire successful competitors. Security through threat of violence can be bought but it doesn't work to fight terrorist action.
Particularly criminal acts to express the competitive interest are more motivated where wealth difference is greatest.
operating global energy supply like a local electric co-op. Food from desalinization and hydroponics. Government in the transit district model of technical and emotional research by technicians All issues are technical? as opposed to spiritual or emotional or aesthetic? Education of regular people is a threat to leadership to some degree, a technically oriented system would have more to gain by more informed participants, as in wikipedia. Specialization contributes to poor intelligence and is only required for income.
Property is solely a security device, and not for emotional stability preventing hurt feelings?
On Wednesday December 2nd, 2009, a friendly banter at the Wandering Goat
coffee house produced the following ideas and notes from Wolfe:
Wolfe, Draxdred, Prince Demitri, and Twilite were there. All of the ideas are inspired from what Prince Demitri and Twilite said, but they don't claim any.
Law of attraction, validation of one's own conjecture from a collective spirit.
Resource Based Economy evolving from natural social evolution, without deliberate choreography.
Open source stuff of a physical kind encroaching naturally.
People writing into the forums with vivid word pictures of issues that no-one would actually want wished into reality, such as people getting into widespread panic hoarding of food.
Erasing the thread to prevent attracting the disaster to all of us, similar to heading off a child playing with matches in a barn.
The wish for evil as a kind of disease, like measles, potentially contagious and serious, even though at root illusory.
Fantasy of a hoarding person being given a huge additional supply by neighbors, attempting to Create faith that others care and will share and help, but actually threatening the hoarder with an attack in a crisis.
Wondering if the present world really has enough material and human generosity to permit reliance on resource based relating.
Noting how an apparent drive for personal dignity can compel a person to take generous initiative, independent of profit, perhaps from loneliness.
Resource Based Economy seen as like a pyramid scam, with ample wealth in the area where the originators live but relying on the dubious generosity of the gigantic majority in Asia and South America working 22 to 86 cent per hour with cutting edge machinery.
How to draw interest, on the part of someone else, in having an ethically based lifestyle.
What phenomenon is needed to promote resource based economy or ethical development?
The widespread fear of homelessness on the part of people who have never been homeless.
Proud victors in economic battle or competition that leaves the losers destitute. Is the pride for real?
Imagining somebody actually evil or predatory within a trust based economy.
Pathological people and resolution technology.
Money as an effective tool that people are used to and want to keep for it's familiarity.
Computer network programmed to assess and recommend use of local resources.
Use of a blank but labeled wiki question sheet to inspire answers.
Generosity management, channeling inspired initiative overload.
Meeting at Fifth Street Public Market, December 18, 2009
Prince Demitri, Twilite, Wolfe, and Draxdred met in the Community room, just inside the old front door, where the minicafes are, in the former smoking section. The ideas that follow are from Wolfe.
Sea of opinion exchange, speaking into the din
Permanent home, a kind of ownership
Creative commons as an Resource Based Economy
Keeping sovereignty on a computer file
Self-righteous being equal to criminal
Presenting solutions along with tragic issues
Use of security threat to evict from a meeting
Tracking device on a shared bike or similar item
Emphasizing the negative in a presentation
Shorter version of Zeitgeist and Addendum
Getting to the point quickly
Postponing the Venus Project for a resource based context
Scheme for large scale social control
Preventing a criminal anarchy like Guatemala
The fading of choreographed employment due to robotics
Issues from the Orientation Guide that opponents of the Zeitgeist Movement will demand answers about:
Even used merchandise cannot be made usefully available without shipping costs and handling labor. A system that can work towards free access could be harmless, but one that involves denying the value of human initiative and stewarded resources is criminal.
Scarcity is rarely artificially created, and is only possible for a very large organization, like the Zeitgeist Movement is proposing to create. Scarcity is simple logic, that even a world with plenty of air has to charge for it at the bottom of the sea.
Planned obsolescence is a very minor factor in actual business planning, and only by a few very gigantic organizations on the scale of the Zeitgeist Movement (which proposes to scrap a huge number of existing but outdated buildings and materials) can actual promote that. In reality, the average 286 computer is still usable, though not on the Zeitgeist Website. Only a minority of consumers are willing and able to pay extra for durability. The monetary system would not lose usefulness in a world with equipment that needed no maintenance or replacement, any more than piped water has. People have endless imagination for desired stuff and services.
Survival through economic activity drives only a tiny idiotic minority. Likewise for the motivation to obtain profit for it's own sake. Nearly all economic motivation originates in wishing to participate in a shared activity and wishing for nonessential services and things. Even the starving poor in Ethiopia cannot be motivated to work by offering survival, and almost no-one can be motivated in business by the prospect of profit alone. To the degree that social concern is in fad it has become a major factor in both business activity and individual life planning. Almost everyone views money and the monetary system around them as a tool like a screwdriver, completely forgotten most of the time, and not a life direction determinant.
Differential advantage is not required for the monetary system to work, and it actually handicaps it somewhat by inspiring criminal activity. Many cities in America have strikingly reduced petty crime by prohibiting new residents who are satisfied with very little wealth, with no compromise to their monetary system.
War is not created by industry desire for it any more than is college football. The public everywhere promotes vanquishing of worthy opponents, or legitimately demonized groups of people, and seeks out the spectacle to watch and read about. Some political leaders deliberately use public war interest and industry avarice for criminal purpose, but war is actually no more financially essential than the state lottery, it's just another racket, no more vital than any other.
The general disregard for the well-being of others is not a psychological side affect of the pursuit of "profit". Even groups of people whose lives are nearly entirely focused on video games or gossip or the like can fall into even greater indifference to suffering of others than working people or business leaders. Significantly, most families that blast apart from unrest are in a resource based relation with each other. This crassness is actually the source of the monetary conquest culture, not the other way around.
Economic growth is not illusion. The total amount of infrastructure has been increasing even faster than population. The fiat money has proved to be far more socially stable than the previous commodity based money. The debt con game is a trick to pursue world conquest without using actual warfare to conquer. In recent years War has been used only to rob and weaken all sides. It is bad-hearted but the heartlessness involved is no more a product of the use of the monetary system than what the Vikings did or the civil wars in Rwanda. The people focused on conquest invented the money. Interest is a trick to rob people in the long run by giving them an apparent gift in the short run. As long as the total economic infrastructure is expanding the robbery goes unnoticed by the majority.
The monetary system was not invented to manage distribution of goods and services, it was invented to referee conflict about constructive initiative. In it's absence there must be a new equally effective referee method.
The world cannot afford an easy life for everybody living today. The present world production level, comparable to $600US per month, does not support a conjecture that even an American minimum level of opulence is possible for all the current world's people.
A political system or idea that proposes to centrally control world resource use 100%, and enforce that, looks quite terrifying to be around. Regular ownership seems far more diplomatic from an American viewpoint, though maybe not from the Bangladesh viewpoint.
"technological unemployment" is just as illusory as the idea that computers would reduce paper use.
"We", implying the reader is included, is a major disrespect, presuming that a genuine agreement about social goals is not difficult.
No-one can trust the integrity of the scientific community. Lately the scientific community has been showing more and more tendency towards politically motivated corruption, so it's not necessarily any more sane as a government controller.
The 911 event and white collar criminality in general is not done by poor people, is not motivated by need, causes more tragedy than all the petty thieves and muggers put together, and is usually not prosecuted at all, so it cannot be made less likely by eliminating poverty. The motive is conquest, manifest destiny, achievement for it's own sake, going for the Rose Bowl of life.
Conquest does not appear to be human nature, but it appears to be universally admired by rich and poor alike, and is thus encouraged. Relatively few have the nerve to lead it, but they get massive encouragement. From the Zeitgeist Forum writings one would think that it is the conquest aura of the Zeitgeist Movement that is it's main appeal to those doing it and the main concern of those who oppose it.
Constructive economic activity worldwide is currently done mostly by
women, a substantial percentage of whom are in a resource based relation
to their social environment, and nearly all Zeitgeist Movement
discussion is done by men, most of whom make no remark indicating a
resource based context in their current life.
From the ZDay group second meeting in PAC room 11 at the U of O:
Masdar City: www.masdarcity.ae/en/index.aspx
www.rmi.org/rmi/Videos
www.oilendgame.com/pdfs/WtOEg_Presentation.pdf
Take care of everyone for one's own benefit
Carbon fiber cars
Buying negabarrels (of oil)
Things with no money factor already, such as parks
Being self-centered is not so cost effective
Motivating people to build infrastructure without use of self-centered image, like on a spacecraft.
Exit promise, sweat equity, a shared home without a trade factor or $
Contributing to the wealth of other people directly
Time on a clock retained solely as data.
Do you want to be thought of as a generous and noble person?
Are you inclined to offer part of your lunch or money at hand randomly?
Are you inclined to offer managerial effort randomly?
Are you shy of incurring debt through another person being generous?
Trade is a relation to the natural world, wherein an effort creates a benefit.
This is the root of the payment idea, as opposed to theft, management instead of pillaging.
Thus even within the economy of one person there is trade and payment, the two root elements of the monetary system.
A generosity based economy must face and incorporate this, to avoid confusion and emotional conflict from this.
First level generosity is someone making a payment of effort to create a benefit and making the result accessible to someone else
Second level generosity is someone making someone else's existing benefit accessible to someone new
Formal trade is a system to limit the damage done by a deliberately predatory person. American culture respects predatory people and encourages that outlook, so a household or city must address the difference and redirect predatory interest appropriately.
Formal trade also copes with belittling of a gift or overt disregard for infrastructural issues. Choreographic socialism, particularly relating to a stalker or coping with cohabitation or coping with responsibility for a child's presence in public, can motivate denial of technical support, but, that being an act of war, it creates different problems. Having seduced a feral animal through technical support, a reversal is quite different from initial denial of support. Thus normal policy is to deny technical support, especially if intimacy is possible.