Parallel development for The Zeitgeist Movement
Today I was reading The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought, again. I did so because I feel the need to express certain frustration on this/my social movement but haven’t found the right words. Also I didn’t want to make any false assumptions on its architecture, so I went straight to the source with a pen on my hand.
I went through the 9 pages that constitute the overview and extracted some notes I would like to post in here:
TZM defines itself as an awareness movement which is explicitly based on non-violent methods of communication to the public, in order to “set in motion a train of thought” which is explained later in the book. It’s most broad imperative? changing the social system.
It explores the structural flaws of the system compared to the humanity improving potential allowed by modern science and technology. Because of this, they consider the movement to be a new civil rights movement. Therefore we could say also that their main goal is based on human rights (not necessarily those defined by the UN) and social sustainability, which made me think on nature rights as a prerrequisite for this to be fulfilled.
The book summarizes TZM’s actions as to diagnose, educate and create. Here is where I detect potential improvements to the text. It says:
A true diagnosis must seek out the lowest causal denominator possible and work that level for resolution.
I fully agree with this concept, the root cause of any problem must be finally addressed. It should be noted that you can’t expect to address every problem directly always, since sometimes it takes a long and ellaborated strategy to finally reach the tiping point where you can “fix” the final problem, as when you have to stabilize a patient before trying a surgery. It is not explicitly stated that they won’t accept lateral approaches but I wonder if this definition of diagnosis and treatment is preventing activists from taking certain paths towards the goal.
When TZM’s book talks about education as the most powerful tool for social change, I also wonder: what kind of education? Since this is what defines our activism. Education by merely intellectual exercises, or also couple with dual education while trying to change the system? If you analize the activities organized by the zeitgeist movement the are mainly focused on keynotes, Q&A’s, movie projections, debates sometimes, even books but there isn’t such thing as learning by doing it. A few members had started enterprises gaining support from the members but they have dettached themselves from the movement in order to do such thing.
The third action, to create, is the one I’m less confortable with:
TZM works to consider how a new social system, based on optimum economic efficiency, would appear and operate in detail, given our current state of technical ability.
My critic here is that this “create” is more an “imagine” which I’m totally fine with, but I do think we are failing to answer some questions on actually creating sustainable stuff. Peter Joseph, the founder of the movement, has addressed these critics saying that if you are sick but you don’t know the cure is still acceptable to explain to the general public what healthy is. But I’m not sure we are describing healthy, I think we are describing perfect and even a super-smart inmortal human being.
Using the same metaphore I wonder what would happen if you go to a dying man ignorant of his condition and you explain to him that he’s dying but restrain yourself of exploring further. Is the zeitgeist movement doing such thing due to psychological confort? I hope not, I do think it was necessary that we take enough time to describe the desirable but I also think it’s time to move forward finding a cure for this dude. Does TZM? It seems the answer is no:
Until the socioeconomic tradition and its resulting social values are challenged and updated to present day understandings; until the majority of the human population understands the basic, underlying train of thought technically needed to support human sustainability and public health, as derived from the rigor of objective scientific investigation and validation; until much of the baggage of prior false assumptions, superstition, divisive loyalties and other socially unsustainable, conflict generating, cultural hindrances are overcome — all the life improving and problem resolving possibilities we now have at hand will remain largely dormant.
Where is the evidence? I do agree that we need critical mass for social change but that is not the same as to say the majority, to begin with. Second, I hardly doubt that critical mass could be reached without any actions whatsoever, this is a positive feedback loop.
Second, if you are going to actually create a new system without violence it should be understood that both systems (The emergent NL/RBE and our system in its many forms) will coexist during a long time. Can we counter-balance this forces in order to gain more space for any alternative? Yes, we can.
Previously, we have heard that critics about not doing enough are usually either patchs to the system or hidden agendas trying to gain money or people to different causes. But this isn’t always the case. If you are going to fight political persuasion you have digital democracy. If you are against market economics, demercantilization is key to this process (for instance, every new signed trade agreement is a step backwards). Labor-for-income? There is a hack for that. Why aren’t we pushing for less working hours or an unconditional basic income? That also would allow regular people to engage in what we call activism and others political participation. Finally, if we want to declare all Earth resources as the common heritage of all the world’s people, why aren’t we fighting at least for knowledge? Intellectual property regimes are completely outdated and people knows, why wouldn’t we push for a new Bern Convention or more flexible regimes within every country? I’d like to see everything publically funded available for free, at least.
What I’d like to suggest to TZM is to adopt a parallel development process for its new civilization. This approach is what groups like Open Source Ecology use in order to advance with few resources. This is specially useful once you understand people within the movement have different levels of awareness and skills. Not everyone should be learning or teaching excusivelly. Actually, some activists are dealing with “real world” stuff but can’t be mentioned as examples of what activism is within the zeitgeist movement. Why? Denying this reality has made a lot of good people not to work along with TZM anymore while a bunch of people feel lost ‘cause they do not know “how to” change the world.
Parallel development allows OSE to complete their tractor while having zero development for the spader. They don’t lack of a holistic vision, but they understood they should lower the barrier for the volunteers if they wanted to move forward. Our goal is more complex and we don’t have the blueprints yet, but we know what we don’t want to and how to debilitate the current system. Liberating both resources and time is paramount if we want to create a feasible alternative to capitalism. Once we have established some strategies to achieve this, what is preventing TZM activists to take action?
People are most likely to accept small changes than a complete substitution of the economy, so are governments. We could approach those in power with new knowledge while also redistributing power to the people in the way and I don’t see a reason why all activists are not doing that right now.
If we don’t create the space for alternatives, it’s less likely that projects like the Global Redesing Institute, Localized Solutions Project or the Collaborative Design System (which already exists to some extent within the open-source community) thrive. These projects could also benefit from a parallel development methodology, by the way.
Last day I was checking my chapter’s facebook fan page, and I was wondering why no one is sharing the posts (we just published nine really thoughtfull talks ) so I asked my girlfriend, who is supportive to the movement. She said:
Once I realized you don’t have a plan, I decided not to follow you guys anymore.
For real, where are we going?
