Zeitgeist Addendum

Posted 26 October 2010 | Movies

Zeitgeist was created in the hope that it will inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective, and to relay the understanding that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The true understanding of events, both historical and modern, are crucial to the development, awareness and spirituality of the human condition.

Zeitgeist (released on June 18, 2007) and its sequel, Zeitgeist Addendum, were created as not-for-profit expressions to communicate important social understandings which most humans are generally not aware of,” explains filmmaker Peter Joseph. Zeitgeist earned the “Artivist Spirit” honors for Best Feature Film at the 2007 Artivist Awards. Zeitgeist Addendum opened this year’s Artivist Film Festival on October 2nd in Hollywood, CA, and won the 2008 Best Feature award.

While Zeitgeist challenged our perspectives on religion, the attacks of September 11th, and the formation and function of the Federal Reserve Bank, Zeitgeist Addendum dives deeply into our debt-based monetary system. It also comments on the media, corporations, energy use, consumerism, government, as well as religion.

More importantly, perhaps, it also offers solutions, featuring speeches by spiritualist Jiddu Krishnamurti and conversations with futurist Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project, with its resource-based economy, smart cities, maglev transportation, intelligent housing, and use of renewable energy. Where the Venus Project website is bright, exciting, fun and hopeful, the Zeitgeist II film (and website) is dark, foreboding, and dire. Its appeal will be most effective with the disaffected who recognize the problems and yearn for positive direction.

Zeitgeist II spends the first half of the film explaining the monetary system then takes the instruction further moving into an interconnected exposé of corporations and capitalism. The film acknowledges the complaints of anti-civilizationists, but differs in its solutions. Instead of rejecting civilization with anger and destruction, Zeitgeist II rejects today’s form of civilization, offering a beautiful vision of what is possible without government, banks and corporations based in a profit-driven monetary system. It then offers concrete steps toward achieving this vision and suggests that in order to achieve global sustainability, we need to develop “Weapons of Mass Creation.” The survival of the biosphere depends on “outgrowing” the dominant institutions that rule us through the fictitious creation of a monetary system.

Zeitgeist Addendum

Leave a Reply