"dRM healthily contributes to my obsessions yet again" OR "Zeitgeist: moving forward."

My sister, dRM, and I like to sit around, smoke cigarettes, drink wine and talk about changing the world.  Those may seem like highly uncorrelated activities, and they pretty much are.  We started off just sitting around for about 10 years.  Then I started smoking (long, idiotic story).  dRM already has smoked for some time, so we started smoking with each other.  Boxed wine was a natural element to include, and while I drink it in about 90% of our chat sessions, she only drinks about 1/2 the time.

We went through a phase where we also ate Ramen noodles with cheese, sour cream, garlic and cayenne with my other sister Xrad too.  But we've cut down on the Ramen since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Anyway (that wasn't a digression, it was an artistic "setting of the scene")...

When I got back into school in Jan of 2010, I'd be so obsessed with everything I was learning that I'd talk about it to pretty much everyone.  Most people aren't interested in me explaining to them how in classical economic theory the goofballs believed the supply curve was vertical (those nuts!) ... except dRM was.  She was intensely interested.  So we started chatting about it, and everything else sisters chat about.  Now she's studying Philosophy and so we go back and forth with our compulsive socialistic dreamings.

Years ago it was, in fact, dRM who recommended the first Zeitgeist movie to me.  I watched it, thought there were some interesting tidbits, and then wrote it off altogether as an annoying conspiracy theory fear-mongering type film.  Then, about 3.5 years ago, a friend of mine recommended I watch the 2nd Zeitgeist movie, "Addendum."  That was a little more interesting, because I'd just shut down my business due to the recession.

Then, I got involved in all of the charity shenanigans that have shaped my life, and got a degree in Economics and admitted to Columbia's MPA-DP program.  (Enter the all-night conversations over wine with dRM.)

So, this post now begins.  (ROFL)

dRM is obessed with documentaries (see TopDocumentaryFilms.com), and saw the 3rd Zeitgeist movie promoted there, and decided to watch it.  ALL 2 HOURS AND 40 MINUTES OF IT.  (Lord of the Rings, anyone?)  Then she told me about 1 bajillion times that I NEEDED, absolutely NEEDED to watch it (she only watched it a week ago.)

It took me about a week and I did.

And last night, at about 3 am, I was laying in my bed, crying like a baby, because of this damn, beautiful conspiracy theory movie, which - having now a few years of better real-world experience under my belt - I believe is dead-on.

This post is already too long for anyone to want to read, so I'm just going to post a couple of the notes I took during the movie, without editing them much.  Items in quotation marks are direct quotes from the film:

• "Health: it’s not about being poor, it’s about feeling poor."
• Studies show that a competitive environment is a strong cause of poor health in humans
• "Taking into account the materials needs of all the world’s people while trying to remove anything that could hurt us in the long-run."
• This is like the most obvious statement ever - we should take care of ourselves and everyone else, without doing anything that will harm us.  Sadly, though, it isn't how we roll.
• So how DO we roll?  What is our methodology for social operations?  "Politics are the methods of social operation" but don't address "a damn thing about social operations."
• So instead of Politics, what do we turn to?  The movie recommends science, because "science is falsifiable:  Unlike politics and religion, science has no ego, and everything it suggests accepts the possibility of being proved wrong eventually."
• "A good itself is only as important as its utility"
• Once again, a stupidly obvious statement but oddly profound in our materialistic day.
• Resource-based economy: "food, clothing, shelter, water, love – everything needed for a healthy human being."  
• This statement takes me to dRM’s commune idea.  Why has it always failed in the past?  Because of the environment in which the communes were formed (i.e. Amish have to pay property taxes)?  Are human beings naturally competitive?  Is it our nature or our nurture?  As social as we are, we’re not like fish, happy to dissolve as a member of the school … or are we (i.e. Facebook)?  It really comes down to the social nature of mankind.  Are we naturally capable of allowing for equality?  Is it a gene, the essence of humanity, or our environment that makes us competitive?  And how will we innovate without competition?
• OMG!!  3-D printing!?!?!?  Google this.
• “The labor-for-income game is slowly coming to an end.” 
• Take out competition and will we all become "fat, lazy, blobs?"  The movie argues that we won't.  
• So they are concluding that man is not inherently competitive, but IS inherently productive.  Interesting assertation…  
• Here's their argument: Scientific studies can show that “people are, in fact, not motivated by monetary reward when it comes to ingenuity and creation itself; that the creation itself is the reward.  Money appears, in fact, as an incentive only in mundane and repetitive roles.  …The monetary incentive has proven to be a hindrance, interfering and detracting from creative thought.  Money is, in fact, a false incentive and causes 100 times more distortion than it does contribution.”
• “What good is a social system if, in the end, it doesn’t produce happiness and peaceful co-existence?”

I wonder how much this type of documentary only falls on ears like The Holy Man’s – never reaching the RoFs of the world.  Reaching only those people who don’t understand it – who haven’t taken the time to learn the tenets of “the system” and then to have questioned, carefully, “the system,” thus reaching them as a source of thought-provoking information/possibilitites.  

The hope doesn’t lie in the proles – because the proles don’t have any idea of what they’re up against – the hope lies in the normal, everyday Party members, the ones most injured by the Party; the hope lies in the middle class – educated enough to understand the system they are slaves to, but too numerous to be loyal or rewarded specially by the system.

Gandhi quoted in the movie: “The deadliest form of violence is poverty.”

All of the comments about oil seem very Malthusian – which begs the question: are we doomspeakers like Malthus, or has Malthus’ prediction finally come true?  Has the scarcity of natural resources finally overpowered technology because of our rampant, irresponsibly consumption?  Or are we just predicting the end of the world like any other kook?