On Zeitgeist

My answer to the question, "Have you seen Zeitgeist?"

Yes, I have now seen Zeitgeist, after having put it off for a long time because I had read the transcript. But it was important to see the effects of the whole sound and visual deal to find out why this movie seems to be so persuasive to so many people.

While I agree with many of the basic sentiments, like how we are all connected, and greed and war and war-profiteering are evil, and organized religion is little more than a power trip, I have to say that this movie is completely misguided. It really bothers me that most people are uninformed about Egyptian mythology, and so they will simply accept the assertions that Horus was born to a virgin mother, was the sun god, died and was resurrected three days later, and on and on. But all you have to do is look up Horus on any internet source you like (other than those connected with the movie - don't be a lazy sourcer!), and you will find that he was the god of the sky, that Isis was by no stretch of the imagination a virgin, and that nearly all of the other connections made in the opening segment are tenuous, at best.

You don't even have to look on the internet - just watch for the three stars of Orion's belt in the night sky (you will have to be up before dawn in the southern hemisphere to see it at this time of year (the end of May), while up north, you people with your long summer days will have to wait for a few months to see it at all). Or better yet, do yourself the favor of purchasing a star chart, so you can connect with the big wide wonderful universe. You will not find a constellation named "The Tree Kings," but you will see that Orion's belt ALWAYS points to Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in the sky. (This star is useful, if it is visible, for figuring out if another bright star is really a planet. If the "star" in question is brighter than Sirius, which is easy to find - those three stars are ALWAYS pointing at it - then, by golly, that ain't no star! This would all be so much easier if the little buggers would stop moving around all the time.) Then, once you have become a junior astronomer, you might reconsider the meaning of statements like this:

"The star in the east is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which, on December 24th, aligns with the 3 brightest stars in Orion's Belt. These 3 bright stars are called today what they were called in ancient times: The Three Kings. The Three Kings and the brightest star, Sirius, all point to the place of the sunrise on December 25th. This is why the Three Kings "follow" the star in the east, in order to locate the sunrise -- the birth of the sun."

Really - when it is Canis Major, the Big Dog that follows Orion, the Hunter in their continual march from east to west across the night sky - are they Sirius?!


I am in complete agreement that Christianity is a myth-based belief system that borrows many ideas from other belief systems. Joseph Campbell wrote about this decades ago, without diminishing the power of these myths to enhance people's lives in positive ways. Unfortunately, the movie develops its own set of myths, presented as facts, to establish another belief system: that because Christianity has been used as an instrument of control, is based on myths that some claim to be "truths," and often demands blind submission to its authority, so, too, is the government doing the same thing in regard to 9/11 and to the banking system and the education system and the secret North American Union, and so on.

As to the 9/11 stuff - the Bush administration had a lot of shit to cover up, but pulling off the 9/11 attacks was not one of them. What they covered up was their total incompetence and/or having allowed the attacks to happen to fit their agenda. But that's all the credit that I am willing to give those douche bags. All of the supposed proof that the official story is false can be explained by regular old physics, from the way that the Twin Towers, building 7, and the Pentagon were constructed and affected, to the crash site in Pennsylvania, to the capacity of the amateur pilots to pull off the maneuvers, to the fact that airplane aluminum melts...

The 9/11 conspiracies are not just a matter of not understanding physics, but also of ignoring all of the eye-witness accounts that disagree with their assertions, especially all of the people who saw the airplane strike the Pentagon, and all of the people who immediately went to the crash sites in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon to try to help in whatever rescue operation there might have been, who saw mangled airplane parts and the devastating horrors of these unusually high-speed impacts.

The eye-witness accounts that they do focus on, which are used for emotional emphasis in the movie, are the accounts of explosions being heard by people in and near the World Trade Center. But the trauma, anxiety, and stress, in addition to what is referred to as "reconstructive memory," which is the brain's mechanism for trying to put things into context, can greatly affect memories of an event witnessed at close-range. Add to these factors the power of suggestion and the probability that there were some huge explosions involved in the chaotic catastrophic failure of these humongous towers, and the jump to the conclusion that there must have been explosives planted in the basement must be further questioned.

Then, the third section goes back to just making stuff up out of thin air - misquoting, taking things out of context, failing to point out that Nazis and other antisemitic types believed that the Jews ran a secret international banking cartel, which was their basis for fear and loathing of "international bankers," and flat out getting it wrong that the gold standard was abolished in 1933, when this didn't happen until 1971, for just a few examples.

I am really concerned about all of this because I keep meeting people who believe every word of this movie. It is so strange because I wrote a book, long before I ever heard of Zeitgeist, that I have been trying to get published, which begins with the idea that fear-mongering can be so persuasive, and ends up grappling with how our understandings, or rather, misunderstandings, of cause and effect are at the base of our belief systems - and here is this movie that takes the same ideas and uses them to create fear of the government as an agent of a secret cabal (so secret that it can't be proven to exist) and a whole cause-and-effect scenario of its own. What really bothers me is that anyone who disagrees with any of it is considered to be under the influence of the evil powers that be - it's exactly like how Christians will argue that ideas that oppose their belief system are the work of the devil, who is just trying to confuse us and turn us away from God.

HERE is a good debunking website, if you want to get another opinion. And HERE is an awesome article about real corporate greed by Matt Taibbi, who is also the author of The Great Derangement, and he has debated Griffith, who is in the movie. Additionally, I wrote a long essay titled, Secrecy, Democracy, and Fascism: Lessons from History, that, in part, looks into how fascism came to be in Germany, with frightening similarities to what is happening in the United States right now. Racism (which is at the base of this North American Union myth, and is very similar to how the Jewish banking cabal conspiracy was at the base of the Holocaust), fear-mongering, and a crisis of confidence in the government were all major factors, all of which this movie plays right into.

I also write a lot about how different societies deal with complexity, and how Latin American culture deals with this so much better than US culture, due to complex histories and other sensibilities. They know what real tyranny is, and have often had very personal experience with US-sponsored greed and hypocrisy. We just found out the other day that our landlord was imprisoned and tortured with electric probes during the dictatorship - and it is well documented that the US supported all of the dictatorships in Latin America, due to fear of socialism, plain and simple. He is very skeptical of his government as well as of the US government, yet he is still a patriotic Argentine. He said simply that every experience in life has its lessons to teach. He is not a bitter man. He is the opposite - very kind and gentle and thoughtful. Life goes on, and he is still a socialist, in the spirit of the self-sufficient individualist that so defines Patagonian heritage. And this is my whole point: that he can be an individualist AND a socialist. He can be an atheist AND a spiritual person. He can see things in terms that are more complicated than "You're either with us or against us." This is what I mean when I speak of dealing with complexity, and I'm afraid that this Zeitgeist movie encourages people to fall right into George Bush's simplistic thinking pattern in a world that is far from black and white.

So do not think that just because I do not agree with what the movie promotes I therefore believe all of the lies of the US government or that it is somehow inherently good. It isn't that simple. Nothing is ever simple. I don't believe what the movie says, AND I don't believe everything the US government says. I even believe that the Bush administration might like for people to think that they were involved in 9/11 in order to distract from their real crimes and muddy the waters of what issues citizens should really be concerned about. And if the "logic" of this movie is followed through, it points to the existence of a One World Order, to which the response is so often to run away and hide, giving up on the democratic process on the premise that individuals can have no effect, whatsoever, against the secret uber-rulers. It's called "silent consent," and the powers that actually do exist are diggin' it.

One of the things that I love most about Latin America is that people do not take their democracy for granted - they get out on the street and make their voices heard and struggle for what they believe in, instead of accepting that they have no power against huge financial and military interests, which is what this movie basically comes down to. Just live your life, and don't pay any attention to the men behind the curtain. It is supposedly a wake-up call, but to what effect? And if their concerns are so legitimate, why do they lie and make shit up - including that they don't make any money selling their DVD - to make their point? Inquiring minds want to know!