Feature: Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
"In the past, throughout nearly all of human history, the main threat to human survival was Nature. Today it is culture." Dr. James Gilligan from the movie Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
The central premise of Director Peter Joseph's documentary is that the time has come to abandon the socioeconomic paradigms that have governed our society for eons. The core problem, the movie argues, is that our current economic systems reward the wrong types of behaviours, and as result are steering us into dangerous waters. The time has come to use the rigors of scientific method to better drive social change.
The movie starts off with an examination of what forces really drive human behaviour. Dozens of academics from a wide range of disciplines discourse on the relative importance of nature vs. nurture, genetics vs. epi-genetics, and the true effects that social engineering and monetary policy can and should have on society.
Next the film delves deeply into a discussion of macroeconomic theory and what approaches can and should lead to the optimum results. The film ends with an imaginative envisioning of a utopian paradise we can all look forward to if we follow the filmmaker advice and let science lead the way.
Is the Zeitgeist movement prophetic, futuristic claptrap or a little bit of both? That’s for you to decide. In an article published in the New York Times, Alan Feuer admitted that his study of the Zeitgeist movement sure gave him a lot to think about calling it ”a wholesale reimagination of civilization, as if Karl Marx, and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his “Imagine” days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life.” You may not agree with all the ideas this film espouses, but our guess is that the after screening conversation is going to be lively.
