You may wonder why it’s been more than two months since my last blog about the Zeitgeist Movement, the online cult that promotes conspiracy theories and markets itself through a series of fraudulent Internet movies. The simple answer is that the Zeitgeist Movement is basically dead. As I predicted last April when it divorced from the Venus Project in a messy public row, the movement seems to have shriveled down to a burnt-out nub of hardcore supporters who are finding it increasingly difficult to command any sort of public attention. Their forum has been shut down, replaced with a blog that isn’t exactly lighting the blogosphere on fire. Their “media event” was a total failure. Their ham-handed attempts to insinuate themselves into a position of leadership in the Occupy movement have resulted in them being totally ostracized and excluded from all organized Occupy events. Even some of Zeitgeist’s most vociferous critics haven’t updated their blogs in months. With as bleak as their fortunes have become, there’s honestly not much more I could do that would have any utility. (Incidentally, the other conspiracy cult I have written about, Desteni, is more or less dead too, but that’s another issue).
It is nice, however, to know that my efforts to expose the truth about the nefarious and troubling organization known as Zeitgeist have had an effect. And they have. I cannot and do not take any credit for the decline and eventual extinction of the Zeitgeist Movement. Peter Merola’s conspiracy cult is quite capable of committing seppuku on its own without any help from critics, though I do believe critics have been crucial in making sure that the debunkings of the films and the very legitimate criticisms of the movement they spawned are highly visible to anyone searching for information on Zeitgeist. But I seem to have helped individual people realize the truth about Zeitgeist. One of them emailed me today. He gave me permission to post his words here, and they speak for themselves–an eloquent testament to the power of reason to overcome the irrational thought that seems to be choking the life out of our public discourse.
“My name is ______________ and I read your article the other day on that e-mail the ConspiracyScience guys received. I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time actually that I went through a similar experience with the Zeitgeist movies. It was reading the ConspiracyScience blog and yours that made me stop believing in them.
The thing that really hooked me about it was the Christ Conspiracy stuff at the start. I used to be a really devout Catholic, but lost my faith around 2004, 2005. I was really getting disgusted by the behaviour of the religious right in America, or the Magdalene Laundries and other stuff that happened in Irish history (I’m from Ireland btw). So I was becoming more & more anti-religious over the years and by the time I saw Zeitgeist I was blown away by the idea that Jesus didn’t even exist in the first place. What great validation for someone like me, who was anti-religious, right?
But I was uneasy about the other parts of the movie. As much as I hated George Bush I never really bought the 9/11 thing, although I imagine that’s the reason many people did. I started to think “Surely if one part of the movie is complete bollocks, that calls the rest of it into judgement?” Ironically, I then started seeing debunkings of Zeitgeist Part One on the internet. JUST dealing with the religion part. These were almost invariably done by devoutly religious people which made me dismissive of them and many of them would actually end their critiques by saying “No the other two parts of the movie are fine! Just don’t spread Zeitgeist around! Use Alex Jones or ‘America: Freedom to Fascism’ or whatever.” That wasn’t too far from a verbatim quote. There were people who were focusing solely on the religious part, while fully accepting Parts Two & Three. Again, the question was begged, “Surely if one part of the movie is complete bollocks, that calls the rest of it into judgement?”
But ‘Zeitgeist Addendum’ came out then I felt GREAT! I totally bought the RBE idea and thought it would be a great thing to move towards. I particularly liked the green energy aspects of it, as it’s an area of interest of mine, and I put a clip of that part on YouTube. Studying more about renewable energy though, I’d read Prof. David MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air” (which I’d thoroughly recommend btw – it’s available as a free PDF here http://withouthotair.com ) which was a painstakingly scientifically accurate assessment of the potential of different energy sources from a PhD physicist. In it, MacKay really downplayed the potential of geothermal energy which PJ Merola LOVES and called into question other info he used. I eventually felt bad about having the video on YouTube, knowing it wasn’t scientifically accurate, so I decided to take it down.
But it was still a long time before I saw any rebuttal of Zeitgeist that didn’t focus solely on the religion part. Then I saw a link to ConspiracyScience’s full point-by-point rebuttal in a conversation about it. Now there were a lot of things that appealed to me about Zeitgeist and the RBE vision for the future. And there was philosophy towards the end of Addendum that I found really relatable. I dunno if it was you or another ConspiracyScience writer who pointed out the irony that PJ’s claim in the movie that “we should be open to new information at all times, even it conflicts with our current worldview” was completely at odds with TZM’s refusal to engage with any criticism. But it was something that rung true for me, so in the interest of scepticism, I read the rebuttal. And man, it really took it apart for me.
Specifically the religion part had been presented with such a tone of authority I don’t blame myself for buying into it. But it’s kind of hard not to when there was such obvious bollocks as “seeing the Sun in front of the Southern Crux – a constellation visible only from the Southern hemisphere where the Bible wasn’t written” or “God’s Son is God’s Sun – a word that sounds the same in English, in spite of it being written in a different language initially”.
I kept reading through the rebuttals anyway, particularly of Addendum. Cuz like many TZMers I’m sure you’ve come across, I would have embraced Addendum while distancing myself from the first movie for a while. The ending was the most crushing critique of all though: something along the lines of “How do you get a single mother working two jobs to spend 4 hours watching your movie only to tell her all we’re going to be doing right now is ‘spreading the word’ over the internet? How selfish is that?” Ouch.
I dunno if I can pinpoint the exact moment I lost faith in TZM but it is mostly to do with reading that blog and yours. That interview where PJ actually compares himself to Martin Luther King AND Socrates, of all people, was probably when alarm bells were ringing for me (to his credit, he can play a mean xylophone though). With hindsight I don’t understand why he didn’t use that more as a marketing tool? Something like:
“The Zeitgeist Movement is not a political movement. It is does not recognise boundaries of race, gender, class, religion or nationality. It is a social movement dedicated to raising global awareness of a ‘resource-based economy’, a global, nationless society where everyone’s means are provided for, based upon the measured carrying capacity of the Earth’s resources and the improvement of human living standards through the application of the scientific method. ……Also, I am the new Socrates.”
LOL
Another development I suppose was increasing disgust for conspiracy theorists. Particularly climate change deniers, to whom I’m glad you don’t give the special treatment they demand; you see them as they are, idiot conspiracy theorists with a retarded worldview just like the rest of them. It becomes a lot easier to engage with them once you remember that. But I guess that tendency and conspiracy theorists in general, are just anti-intellectualist which I hate. It’s such a closed worldview, but at least I understand it. It gives them comfort to think that all of the world’s problems are being caused by a few bad people and once you kill them the world will be paradise. But in order to do this, they cannot afford to be wrong because any evidence that contradicts the theory must be propaganda, just look at how much else the NWO are capable of. So if they admit they’re wrong, it’s like they’re giving up on humanity, which they can’t afford to do. This arrogance & blindness really is exactly like religious behaviour and it’s painfully ironic that it goes against the stated rhetoric within “Zeitgeist Addendum” that I really responded to.
So of course I lost interest in whatever TZM were (not) doing and I was only proven right when I saw the trailer for “Zeitgeist Moving Forward” was 5 minutes long. How indulgent is that? Are you expecting people to watch a 5-minute long trailer, let alone the whole movie? The movie naturally ended up being almost 3 hours long. There’s already 4 hours before that! And another hour & a half if you count that TZM Presentation video. I very quickly skipped through it in the space of 10 minutes and found that it was repeating information already in the other films, its interviewees were mostly white and with the exception of Roxanne Meadows, were all male (for some reason I don’t think white men have had great ideas about how to run the world so far) and the ending had a cringe-inducingly melodramatic song. (And I actually liked the music of the first two movies!) It would have been WAY more accurate to have called it “Zeitgeist: Going Nowhere”.
And I didn’t even HEAR about the TZM/TVP split for months until after it happened. I read about it on your blog. I just love your blog in general, it really articulately captures all the issues around conspiracist thinking and that movement. And I can see how combating that thinking does produce a positive social good. It certainly had an impact on me. All I did was read information that contradicted my strongly held beliefs, like the movie told me to do and I ended up freeing myself from its delusions, hypocrisy and egomaniacal creator. So I really do want to thank you for the work you and the other guys put into that blog. I want to add my thanks to the other thanks you’ve received. Not only do I appreciate it, I just happen to enjoy your writing very much.
Kind regards.”
