Author: Edward L WinstonAdded: June 13, 2010Discuss: Discuss this article.

Over the last couple of months, mainly since Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) members began trekking to our forums, I've gotten a lot of emails from TZM members asking me various questions. This post is to outline the topics covered in my correspondence with said members.

I'll likely update this page as I get feedback from people.

Primarily the issues discussed are why I believe TZM will fail and why I think it's impossible to find common ground with TZM. I want to be clear that, given a different set of circumstances which I will discuss, maybe TZM could be successful and we could find common ground, but if things don't change, neither will my stance.

The leader of TZM, Peter Joseph, is far more damaging to his own movement than I imagine many of the hardcore members want to believe:

More could be said about Peter Joseph, and is said in later sections, but our forums are full of former TZM members who shed even more light on the emerging cult of personality around him.

The most important issue here is that Peter Joseph is the leader of TZM and his word is law, despite claiming that he doesn't consider himself the leader, he acts unilaterally to forbid members for talking to outsiders, for example banning members who post on our forums that aren't glorifying him.

Something that I never stop hearing is the phrase the movies aren't the movement. This referring to the fact that the movies promote conspiracy theories, but TZM is something else entirely, and exists separately from the movement. I would believe that if not for the following issues:

A lot of people don't like that I use foul language, but I needed to display the utter lack of compassion for other human beings TZM leadership seems to have, as well as some hardcore members. The situation in Haiti, again, is a great example of this -- reading many posts on the forums from members, it's quite clear that unless The Venus Project (TVP) is going to be the solution to the problems in Haiti, there's no use in helping them after the earthquake there.

I get asked "well, what are YOU doing to improve the world?" by TZM members a lot. I constantly bring up that I volunteer pretty much every weekend and I donate 10% of my income to charity, and a lot of time I will donate more than that. Most come back with the fact "charity doesn't fix the problem." While they're right that charity doesn't fix the problem permanently, sitting on a forum doesn't either -- though some members have the audacity to claim that TZM is a charity, despite never lifting a finger for anyone else.

The example I use when talking to TZM members about this is:

If you saw a starving/dying man in the street, would you do something to help him, or would you say "once our movement gets to 50 million members, I'll be able to help you, but until then, see you later!"?

That's essentially the logic behind the leadership of TZM and what many members parrot to me, just in a much nicer way. They love talking about how many children are starving to death today, but they refuse to help them today, and instead speak of some far off future that they can't figure out how to get to.

I know and understand that not all TZM members are like this. I've seen some wonderful generosity and so forth coming from members, but more often than not, these members also don't follow Peter Joseph blindly, because the ones that do refuse to help anyone else.

Here's a list of problems that I believe TZM has:

There could be more added here later.

I don't really see a future for TZM outside of degrading to hardcore members. Peter Joseph talks about a new movie coming out in October of 2010 that's going to get "millions" of new members, so essentially nearly 2 years of doing nothing but waiting for yet another film are what TZM has to show for.

I think it's all a shame, however, because getting all of those people together could have done something, could have lead to actual success in some way, but it's not even close to that. This hasn't stopped members from discussing the transition to the Resource Based Economy, despite the fact they're discussing step 10,000 when they haven't even reached step 1 and don't seem to want to.

At this point is essentially a way to stroke Peter Joseph's ego rather than accomplish any goals.

Sometimes I'm asked what I'd change about TZM, in order to make it more acceptable. Well, while I don't think most of these changes are possible due to the way TZM is run, I usually humor those who ask:

So, essentially my "5 point plan" is completely incompatible with a movement where Peter Joseph is the overlord.

Would you like to know more?

Original post:

The Zeitgeist Movement - Skeptic Project