Zeitgeist - A Change In Cultural Climate

We live in a paradigm now where we have society operating on the idea that we can grow infinitely.

Therefore we keep buying and consuming regardless of how many resources we have.

This creates a collision course with nature, which the world is figuring out right about now on many levels, that the Earth is essentially a closed system. 

It took billions of years to create the minerals we have. It took many, many hundreds of millions of years to create the fossil fuels which govern everything we have.

Amazingly enough, we've created this system where we're using all of our resources to create the economic growth required to sustain employment and everything else; simultaneously, we're diminishing our resources at a near exponential rate it seems, as population continues to grow and no one seems to understand that it's an absolute clash and that eventually we're going to run out of pivotal resources, and eventually you're going to see things, I don't know, like the human population start to dwindle down.



The only way a real society can operate, period, is in a steady-state economy meaning you don't have the mechanism of constantly needing to do anything other than being sustainable in your everyday living, and having society recognize the attributes of sustainability which are required.

That's the value-system orientation needed to create a stable society. As a brief extension of this, we live in a materialistic culture. We live in a culture that's predicated on inferiority and people thinking that they need more and more and more, because of many reasons, because of someone else having more, status oriented issues, so on and so forth.

And that fuels into this mechanism of the growth economy; of getting more and more. Holidays... People give each other gifts.

These are inventions for economics.

In regard to social operation and how to create a new society or better yet just to say to create any society that would be sustainable and efficient, there's really an empirical train of thought, if you will, on how to do that.

First of all, you have to think about what the human being actually needs.

We require resources at the bare minimum.

We require food, water, etc., as we all know.

Therefore, resources become the most paramount subject.  Resources, in fact, should be the foundation of any economic structure.

So, what do you do?

If you consider that the Earth is a closed finite system.

To organize a structure based on the intelligent management of the Earth resources, you start from essentially the base level of "Where is everything?".

So, you look at the planet and you say "OK, we see, we have iron ore here. We have petroleum deposits here.", if we're using petroleum at that point in time in the future.  Hopefully we will not be, because it's damaging.

"We have places for great wind energy here."

You get the point.

We can assess the entire environment of what we currently use based on our technological facilities at that point, and we start to create a structure of analysis, maintenance and management and basically monitor and understand what we have.

Then you move to the next level:

"How do we utilize the resources in the most efficient way?"

Technology is the methodology to harness any type of resources we have. Technology is the growing intellectual field that allows us to know how to manipulate our environment for our betterment and to be more sustainable, hopefully.

So what we do is we utilize our technical information and then we analyze the planetary resources. 

Then we build from the ground up an entire infrastructure, not based on the whims of any type of ideology; capitalist, socialist, fascist, whatever, what have you, communist...

You do it based explicitly on the most efficient means to do it with the most peak efficiency possible based on the technology available at the time, the intellectual resource of the time.

You have peak efficiency and sustainability as your goal. You just simply weigh all parameters when you analyze anything and then you're going to build a society that is essentially, for lack of a better expression, 'perfect'.

It's not perfect at all because it's going to constantly change, but it's the best you can do at that point in time, which I think would be a variance of perfection. [source]

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The Zeitgeist Movement, is seeking to alter the current cultural climate, if you will, into something that can be considered as actually sustainable for not just one nation or class but all the world's people.