Is this Utopian?

It’s not a utopian project; there’s no such thing as a utopian society. We’re not under the illusion that we can create a perfect world; there’s no such thing as “perfect”, it’s not possible in a practical world.

What we are proposing is that it can be a whole lot better than what we have now. There will always be problems, but a global emergent system with innovation, change, and development will be center stage; rather than being hamstrung by the profit system and interests of established power structures of any kind. It’s going to be able to meet and solve these problems better than our current established societies.

Forty years ago, people would have said talking to robots instead of people when you phone a business is utopian, or accessing all the world’s information in the palm of your hand is utopian, yet these things are commonplace today.

Is this Communism or Socialism?

No, it’s not any of the ism’s out there. Or any combination of real world versions of them.

Communism was based on money, profit, various degrees of quality of life and thus: social stratification.

Communism also presupposes, “property”. Property as you may recall is an outgrowth of scarcity, because there may not be enough to go around, you need to “own” things to deter their use by others, to reserve, or guarantee the things you need and have been conditioned to want.

Communism also didn’t have access to the technologies to create abundance, or certainly didn’t envision or strive for a world to deliver abundance and didn’t imagine one where all labor is automated and all necessities are supplied free of charge and where the structure of society is a global integrated system.

Marx never considered a global economy based on resources, it’s just a monetary system more or less government controlled, coupled with varying degrees of romanticism of labor, of the labor class, of which ironically- they don’t want to get rid of.

The fundamentals are the same as any other monetary system, what we propose is a life outside the logical referent box of monetary-ism. We feel the box itself is structurally unsound.

TZM Defined says:

p29. Root foundation. Communism is based on moral philosophy. TZM is based on the technical framework of the scientific method applied to societal sustainability.

p30. Classless society. Both want it, but reasons differ. Communism sees exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class and judges it inhumane. TZM uses data (sourced from The Spirit Level) to identify many types of structural violence and their singular cause: class-based social stratification.

p30. Private property. “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois [capitalist class] property.” – Communist Manifesto. TZM identifies private property as environmentally inefficient, wasteful and ultimately unsustainable. This, however, does not rule out the possibility of a sort of temporary ownership or “protected access” say for the duration of a camera “rental”.

Is this a Commune or Intentional Community?

A commune is defined by the deliberate artificial separation from the societal majority. We cannot separate ourselves from society and build a resource based economy. An efficient use of our finite planetary resources, cannot be anything other than a global, all-encompassing single system. The logic and efficiency demands it. It’s multiple societies trying to operate separately would require redundancy of effort, resources and waste as we see in the current system. It would also create competition, which would ultimately lead to war, as we fight for resources, space.

Everything that divides us, whether it be race, religion, economic stratification, political affiliations or national identity, are devised to distract and control the masses. Divide and conquer is a common method of maintaining control and power over the majority of a group.  Why? It’s to maintain group economy and stability in the face of scarcity, real or artificial. Even geographic boundaries, which are at least based in spatial reality, are fading fast as we improve our transport technologies. WE are and always have been one global human race. We must live such to ensure our survival and maintain the maximum quality of life possible. Climbing into a forest sharing all the benefits of technology and advances, then reviving esoteric English witchcraft religions, isn’t going to do anything; except devolve us and only temporarily before necessity forces us that separatist society back into long-term contact with other human civilizations. There isn’t really anywhere left for people to do that anyway.

Life on this planet tends to sophistication and complexity, communes are isolated, artificial, unstable and achieve nothing but to stave off large-scale social interaction for brief periods, mostly due to protests and diversionary beliefs based on inherited notions.

But Isn’t Competition Good?

The concept of the resource based economy, is based on the same logic as the human body. What if your brain decided that one part of your body demanded more oxygen resources than the rest say the liver or the left lung is more important than the right, you’d rot away in moments. Animals live in harmony in with their environment, not in competition. Nature has examples of competition within it, but in areas where resources are abundant for animals you find they don’t fight over food. Nature is symbiotic, you must become symbiotic too. To be in competition with each other and attempt to dominate nature is to ensure our own demise. Nature however, will carry on just fine without us.

What Would I Do, since there’s no conditional work?

Why do we have hobbies, art? Why did you come here today? You didn’t come here to make money. How much more could you do without the monetary restrictions you have now? In which you work in spite of…

In underdeveloped countries, where people walk for hours to get water, one could imagine, “If I could just turn on a tap and get water instantly and not spend 4 or 5 hours walking, what would I do with my spare time?” It’s a bit like being in a 5’x5′ cell all your life and then having freedom and saying to the prisoner next to you “What do I do now?”.

What Will Motivate Us?

It’s like recycling, it’s not profit driven, you’re not forced to do it. But you choose to do it anyway for the benefit of society and the environment.

Take Nikola Tesla in his motivation to make global wireless power a reality. His motivation was not for profit, J.P. Morgan and his backer had to shut Tesla down because of their inability to profit from it. Because if electricity is wireless then, “Where do we put the meter?”.

Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors have written a compendium of over 15 million articles from around the world, in 72 languages in 9 years. Money has nothing to do with it except when they run out of it and have to ask you for more. Imagine what Wikipedia would look like if they didn’t have monetary restrictions to limit it. If money were literally no object. Imagine how the world would look if money were no object. We already have the motivation and it’s more than money. What we are suggesting is where this is placed center stage.

Who Runs the Infrastructure? Could they take it over?

Staying with the Wiki example…

At its core a resource based economy is very much like Wikipedia, you’d need very few people to service the parts of the system that are not already self-repairing, it’s essentially systems maintenance. Are those people more powerful than those who live and thrive on the system throughout the world. Could they take it over? There’s nothing to gain by overtaking or controlling Wikipedia, it’s a social system running in spite of the profit systems of power. What benefits us all, including aspects of the infrastructure, would only hinder us, including those within Wikipedia, were it compromised. The question of people taking over a society seems a rather moot point. Right now we live in a society that can be taken over, and regularly is by corporate capitalism, political powers and groups of wealthy people. Dominance is absent from a resource based economy in the same way it is absent from Wikipedia or any other similar non-monetary resource.

Who Makes the Decisions? How are Decisions Arrived At?

The processes aren’t even decided upon by you now, did you decide on how the structural attribute of the bridge was built, or the materials used to construct houses, do you vote on the internal designs of an MRI machine. No; because most of us certainly don’t have the knowledge or the means to make those specific intelligent decisions.

What About Lazy People?

If I’m busy in a contributory role wont others just live off the fat of the land? If you know a lazy person, when did they become lazy? Was it on their 20th birthday? It happened over time, slowly creeping, it sets in- you get home, slap on the TV and drink a beer. We’re conditioned to sit and consume or by social inflexibility unable to go out and do the things you want to do. In a world with far greater flexibility: these tendencies towards laziness will drop off hugely. And even if it didn’t, a world automated to maximum efficiency would not suffer the way it does from laziness today.

The Pixar film WALL-E, imagined a world in which everything was done for you and people became hapless overindulgent consumers. They left earth to become massively inefficient and non-productive. If the people themselves don’t change, the societal mechanisms wont change. As technology does take over, more and more of our jobs will be replaced, so we must adapt to new times. Not to simply replace the old tasks with a complete void, it’s a change we’re advocating, coupled with the advancing technologies of artificial intelligence, the updating of our behavior, the abandoning of the passive, consumptive behavior so over-emphasized by WALL-E.

What About Crime?

There’s no such thing as a bad or evil person, we are products of our surroundings, people who commit crimes, violence, corporate crime are examples of a sick society. They either necessitate, encourage or reward those actions. If you don’t believe this, why is it that some countries have much higher crime rates than others? Are there more bad people in that land mass? Surely if it’s human nature to blame they’d have identical crime figures across the world. We don’t, because the environmental conditions are different in each locale. Everything from: the wealth gap, pollution levels, positive and negative media influences, even the weather, influences our behavior. It is the ultimate litmus test of society if higher crime rates are not simply flaws in the system. Yet, when we react to crime we look at the abhorrent behavior as a symptom of our social mechanism, but by blaming the individual and locking them up and creating more laws. This drives us to a less flexible and more oppressed society which, in-turn, feeds more crime. Mental health issues also stem from the inequality of wealth and education and have direct correlations back to the environmental and economical inequalities. It directly affects everyone in the community including rich people. Studies have suggested that if we halved the inequality then we could halve the murder rates, mental illness reduced by 2/3, obesity would be halved, prison would be reduced by 80%, teen births reduced by 80%, levels of trust would increase by 85%.

Imagine how little crime there would be if we put true equality into practice in this country, and if we extended that to global equality, how quickly war would disappear.

What About the Law?

Legal restrictions are present in our society to avert problems we’ve not been able to resolve by technical means. WE have drunk driving laws cause our cars will crash if we’re drunk behind the wheel. But if we built cars that can’t crash because we use GPS guidance systems and built-in pendulum systems, drunk driving laws become irrelevant. We’ve already flown things to the moon by remote control. But we don’t do so, cause it’s too expensive. A society structured around resources, equality, and efficiencies will mean the automatic redundancy of laws in finance, property, crime, and socially offensive behaviors.

Having a lot of laws is not a sign of a well-adjusted society. It is a demonstration of the flaws that society has. Laws are the attempt to patch up inabilities to function correctly within that society.

Is this a Political Movement?

We’re not a political movement. Politics is economics by another means. To be elected you need large amounts of money. You are supported by special interests and your first allegiances are to those interests.

Most cannot solve the technical problems that confound us; they’re not technical experts, how could they solve society’s problems because their backgrounds are legalese? Which is semantic manipulation and nothing else. They aren’t qualified to make changes. You cannot create lasting and real meaningful change through politics. We need to move beyond politics. The simple fact politicians are not there to affect change, to the underlying root causes of society, constrained by special interest, short voting cycles, even the best leaders have to operate within the contrived system.

What’s The Next Step?

It’s time to take the next step in our evolution. It’s time to evolve along the only path that is relevant one that is rooted in the real world. One that is truly possible. We’ve outgrown the needs to manage scarcity, we’ve outgrown scarcity itself, we’ve outgrown the need for war, poverty and profit at all cost. It’s time to ditch the false diversionary notions based on belief, opinion and hearsay surmised and any and all inherited assumptions.

Human beings are amazing. From this tiny pale blue dot, we have evolved from the simplest of creatures against all odds to our present state of sophistication and consciousness. We’ve put to task to produce astonishing results, it is only money now that is holding us back, we must not allow our failings to continue to destroy the most valuable thing that we have: ….ourselves.

You don’t join us by voting for us. You don’t join us by canvassing support. You don’t join us by signing up for a mailing list, and you don’t joining us by buying a book or a t-shirt or DVD. As mentioned before, any and all information is offered completely free of charge. And you certainly don’t join us by giving us donations. You join us up here in your head and in your actions.

You join us by realizing the current logical limitations of our lifestyle, and calling for a new global model. By breaking down the barriers we have imposed on ourselves and had imposed on us, to join the other members of the human race waiting on the other side. Join The Zeitgeist Movement.