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Those that have something against me for the things that I talk about,
want to find anything they can to try and to make me look like I'm hiding something,
or I have ulterior motives. And I expect that.
But, you know, whatever. It doesn't mean anything to me.
I go by Peter Joseph. People can call me whatever the hell they want to call me.
I'm constantly interacting, putting myself out there. I have nothing to hide.
And even if someone finds out my real identity, where I live,
who my parents are, who everyone and my friends are,
it's not gonna change a damn thing.
The unfortunate reality is, that I am given a controversial title,
and people do have a lot of problems with me, of a more traditional-minded upbringing,
and I don't like to see other people suffer because of what I do.
But most of my friends and family are very much aware and they accept this.
So, this is something that I just deal with.
Anyone who thinks that I do what I do for notoriety reasons or monetary reasons,
or anything associated with self-interest,
has a lot to learn.
First of all, I operate the movement site and the movement itself on a deficit.
I do pay people to run and program things.
I have a lot of volunteers, which I'm extremely indebted to.
But to get things done quickly, very often, I have to get people that work in the industries to do things.
I sell a t-shirt to do that.
It's the only thing that I sell that is designated for the movement.
As far as the DVD sales,
if people can't respect the fact that I charge $5 for DVD's that could be charged $20 for,
that I did spend a great deal of money to make those films.
The DVD sale's obviously are part of my income.
I denote that they are not for profit,
meaning that the money does go back into other projects, which it has.
I've had to shut down bulk selling, in fact, because people were buying the discs from me in bulk
at about $2 a piece and re-selling them for $20 on the Internet.
It's very frustrating.
I've hurt myself a lot financially, because of all of this.
The double standard is quite fascinating to me.
You have all these social organizations that take in millions of dollars of money for donations.
They sell tons of crap.
And suddenly we get attacked because we sell anything,
because of our interest to in fact remove the monetary paradigm, entirely.
I'm sorry. We have to survive to do something.
So, just to make it clear:
the Zeitgeist Movement is predicated on making information free.
I put all of my films up for free. I allow downloads of them, for free.
Anyone wants to help me out by buying a $5 DVD,
I could charge $20 for easily commercially, that helps.
But I don't push it.
I will continue to work in advertising, or anything else I have to do
to keep things going while maintaining the integrity of the movement itself,
by walking the line of non-profitability.
The only time that we'll ever ask for donations as the movement,
is when we have a big project that needs to move forward.
We have no projects like that now.
We're in a period of, we're in a period of collecting people
and streamlining functionality.
ECONOMICS
If you read economics,
they present it as though it's a science.
I've read through much of the curriculum
of what bachelor's and master's degree Harvard University students
would read for their degrees in economics.
Economics is not a science.
It's an invention. It's a contrivance.
It's funny, you look at economics books
and they have graphs and charts and they make complex novel equations.
It's all contrived.
It doesn't have any relationship to the natural order of things.
It is based upon and folkway of orienting production and distribution,
and we've established this massive structure that makes it seem valid.
There's really nothing anyone needs to know about economics, than the fact that
the entire global economic system is based upon people constantly consuming,
regardless of the state of affairs in natural orders of energy,
planetary materials and anything else.
It is blind, narrow consumption with absolutely no regard for the environment.
SCIENCE
We have to recognize that we're all scientists.
And we all have to start thinking about things in a scientific manner,
which most of us do to a certain extent.
Even the most religiously-minded individuals,
use science all the time when they evaluate buying a car,
when they evaluate their general life.
They use these things constantly. We all do. We're all scientists.
That is the discovery, the epiphany that needs to come out.
Science is not a cold, heartless thing.
It is what has given us everything that comprises our well-being.
Now, you can argue philosophy,
as far as I'm concerned,
any form of philosophy, any form of notions of morality,
are absolutely meaningless unless they are sprouted from the natural world using
what I would consider to be, analysis known as the scientific method.
I am nothing but bored to tears by philosophical dispositions and verbal hobbies,
that do absolutely nothing.
Religion is a verbal hobby.
RELIGION
One of the age old scams of the establishment
is to hand religion to the populous,
so they feel like there's something positive waiting for them
as they suffer because of this perpetual, constant, oligarchical evolution
that has emerged since, I believe, the hunter-gatherer society.
When we culminated agriculture, we altered everything.
We created social stratification; we began to control the environment.
Before the Neolithic Revolution, it's been well documented by anthropologists
that there was a natural balance to the planet.
Population was in balance because we could only do what the Earth provided for us naturally.
Once we started to control the planet through agriculture, and now through many different means,
we began to create dis- imbalance; we began to create uneven supplies.
We began to generate scarcity, deliberately,
for the sake of self-preservation and profit.
So, as society became more and more imbalanced,
as the concept of property emerged.
As the great pirates started to travel the oceans,
bringing back goods to different continents, to different kingdoms, creating power structures of resources,
certain tools were used to control humanity to keep those
that were not "deserving the right of life" or "deserving the fruits"...
To keep the stratification going, they were given various tools to subdue them.
Religion is one of the age old tools to subdue the masses.
Now by the way, I'm not saying that's where the origin of religion came from.
That's a whole different subject if you want to talk about it,
because it was covered in the first part of my film.
I'm simply talking about the political usage of religion which carries on to this day.
How many times do you hear the president of the United States say:
"God bless America"?
What an offensive, insulting thing to say to the American people.
First of all, it's offensive to every other country in the world.
Why would God just bless America?
God would bless the planet if we lived in a sane society.
If there was a God, of course.
Anyway, I won't even go on that tangent.
Religion to me, has two sides.
On one side you have the dogma, the indoctrination.
You have resurrections, you have all the fantasy notions, that have come, excuse me,
that exist in the literary books that are there.
On the other side there's a brilliant philosophical disposition.
I happen to love a lot of the things that the Jesus character had stated.
I see beautiful notions in almost every major religious figure.
There are time tested values that exist in religious thought,
that do need to be adhered to.
Some of the most brilliant and beautiful people I've met are, in fact, Christians,
or Islamic, or Hindus,or Jewish.
They know were to draw the line,
where to stop at the fanaticism.
Because that's where the religious danger goes to.
Once you believe something dogmatically enough where you say,
"Jesus existed. That's that. Anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of mine."
Then you have some very serious neurosis to deal with.
Whether Jesus existed or not doesn't mean anything.
I think Jacque Fresco put it best on Larry King.
When Larry King asked him "What do you think about Christianity", he said,
"I think it's great. When are they going to put it into practice?"
So, my religious disposition is that I wish that those that have religious inclinations,
would really dig deep into their beliefs and ask themselves
what is it about their religion that they actually use?
What is it about the reciprocation notions that you can find in all religions,
that you see actually materialize in most people's behavior?
"The Golden Rule" and all those things which exist in all religions,
I think we have a list in our PDF for The Zeitgeist Movement Orientation Guide.