The New Harmony of Zeitgeist

      

Robert Owen’s envisioned New Harmony

“Dialectical Materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx which he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel and joining it to the Materialism of Feuerbach, extracting from it a concept of progress in terms of the contradictory, interacting forces called the thesis and antithesis, culminating at a critical nodal point where one overthrows the other, giving rise to the synthesis, and applying it to the history of social development and deriving therefrom an essentially revolutionary concept of social change.”*     

Scientific and Utopian Socialism     

In the Marxian school of thought all socialism not based on dialectical materialism falls within the category of utopian socialism.  Referring to their political aims as, scientific socialism, Marxists believe in the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism due to the inherent flaws (antitheses) within free market socio-economies.  It is ‘scientific’ because it is claimed it is a predictable, foreseen, and natural outcome – it has the color of science.  Despite Marxism-Leninism, and its theoretical addition of the necessity of human action in the form of revolutionary parties to nursemaid the process, Marxists believe that history’s inexorable march to a socialist future is beyond and outside of human aims and desires.  ‘Social developement’, itself, has a chemical evolutionary life of its own.      

Utopian socialism, however, openly starts with human desires regardless of objective reality.  Essentially idealist, utopian socialism is identified by an attempt to impose a subjective ideal on outside reality.  It begins with a personal value system and ends with a codified society reflecting the way things should be.  In varying degrees of collectivization, ‘intentional communities’, communes, and Robert Owen’s 19th century utopian experiment in New Harmony, Indiana, are examples.  Because it is the product of subjective will, it is necessarily a top-down authoritarian system, as well.  Although some communities have thrived based on voluntary association, its members must be of like-mind.  For those not in the mind-hive it follows that conformity must be enforced.      

In our global village of today ‘revolutionry socialism’ is becoming passe’.  No longer necessary as the antithesis to free market systems and ideology, it has served its purpose.  Laissez-faire socio-economies have been synthesized into mixed economies – a form of state/corporate partnerships reflecting a maturation of the fascist model and agenda.  Much of the population is  comfortably acclimated to life regulated by faceless bureaucrats.  A new breed of collectivist propagandists, serving the globalist agenda, are now rushing in to complete the Orwellian dream.  Gaia utopianism is one such offering.  One such organizational vehicle for this is ‘The Zeitgeist Movement’.     

Eco-totalitarianism with hugs all around.

In 2007 this movement introduced itself with a well-researched, megapopular film, Zeitgeist, The Movie.  Exposing the 911 terrorist attack as a false flag event and uncovering the fraud of the Federal Reserve banking system were masterfully brought to millions of viewers.  Interestingly, the film also includes a scathing attack on Christianity declaring it a primitive, patriarchal, and violent false religion.  It concludes with a sales pitch for a global Gaia-esque type of spirituality.  The message is clear.  The old order must be torn down along with its corrupted ideology and religion before we are to embrace Earth as the new god and live happily ever after in an eco-utopia.     

Today, the leaders of the Zeitgeist Movement are busy designing models for a cybernated technocracy to run the world with a “resource based economy”.  They call it, “The Venus Project”.  From the Zeitgeist website:     

An important association, upon which many of the ideas of this movement are derived come from an organization called ” The Venus Project” directed by social engineer and industrial designer, Jacque Fresco. He has worked nearly his entire life to create the tools needed to assist a design of the world which could eventually eradicate war, poverty, crime, social stratification and corruption.     

Implied is a global control grid run by computers overseen by a few geeks who have read Plato and Marx.  Supposedly, this will appeal to the masses that are fed up with war and poverty.     

Merriam-Webster defines ‘Zeitgeist’ as: “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era”.  As a philosophical concept it first gained currency in 18th century German Romanticism.  Roughly translated as ‘spirit of the time’, Zeitgeist, is also connected to the ‘collective unconscious’ and was considered an element of Volk.  Promoted by German nationalists of the time, ‘Volk’ (folk) was a call for a classless, yet hierarchical, system of nationhood.  As a side note, the occultism, eco-paganism, and Aryan nationalism, of Volk heavily influenced the German Nazi Party that later appeared.         

Of course, in this virtual classless society, a hierarchy of intellectuals are needed for administration.  But first the masses need to be won over to this scheme using effective propaganda.  As one German patriot* of that time boasted:  “A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.”     

Notes:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
Robert Owen and New Harmony, IN: http://faculty.evansville.edu/ck6/bstud/robtowen.html
Intentional communities: http://www.ic.org/
The Zeitgeist Movement: http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18&Itemid=52
Zeitgeist, The Movie: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/
The Venus Project: http://thevenusproject.com/a-new-social-design/essay
*Zeitgeist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist
*Johann Gottfried Herder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder#Works_and_ideas