Writing on the Wall

I have just been very entertained.

Allen, my new Taiwanese-Canadian web-friend asked me to go look at the film Zeitgeist (Z)

So I did the unthinkable and threw myself into a conspiracy theory film. And I have to say it was really good fun, I was thoroughly gripped and entertained throughout, and learned some very interesting things, although verifying them is entirely another matter.

So I want to do a sort of film review of this web film. It is a film that attempts a global vision, and that is distributed on a global media, and so is probably worth debating as a form of emerging global public debate.

It is interesting how constructing myths these days so often takes the form of debunking other myths. Z takes this form, part I attacking Christianity, Part II attacking the official account of 9-11, part three turning explanatory and discussing the history and power of the federal reserve and of the banking elite that are standing behind it. The synthesis is that these banking groups have been triggering wars for profit for donkey’s years, that they are happily dumbing down the American public, and that they hope to produce a world government, totalitarian in its application of accounting standards.

The movie is such an interesting mix, of thought provoking evidence and what feels like paranoia, that I am going to trawl through it bit-by-bit.

Part I focuses on attacking the Christian story as a myth derived from astrology, and found as historically connected (via this astrological link to Sun Worship) to other mythology in the Judeo-Christian world, and closely related to the Sun-God myths of ancient Egypt.

This part I found plausible: Why should Christian myth have arisen out of the blue? As with most stories it is likely to have arisen in relation to historically pre-dating narratives. I also find it plausible that astrology and sun-worship could form a ground for a whole family of religious practices, which eventually fed into the Judeo-Christian religion.

This might not make me popular amongst my Christian friends (I am surprised by how many I have). But looking at it another way, it makes Christianity a set of values that reflects a broader worship of the sun and its warmth. It also makes Christianity a religion with a set of humanistic principles that have been shared amongst many cultures around the fertile crescent. So this version of events embeds Christianity more closely in human history, and so to my mind makes it more humanistic and sympathetic.

It also kicks fundamentalist and literal interpretations into touch, which I also like. I will have to try this out on my new American Christian Philosopher friend, who is a true believer, but also a lovely bright man.

Part II details the 9-11 controversy. This bit I am very unsure about, no doubt influenced by the arguments of the talented Mr Monbiot.

But the idea that the US elites are happy to use shocking events as an excuse to go to war, and also to use war as an excuse to implement foreign policy is really very plausible. Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine book talks about the latter. The point is that whilst they may try and orchestrate some things, they don’t have to orchestrate everything.

This is where the thesis comes a bit unstuck. It falls into the narrative fallacy, namely that everything has to fit into one big story. This means that effectively the world is driven by the unfolding of ideas. This is the zeitgeist myth in a nutshell, precisely Hegel’s big mistake, much attacked by Marx.

Now there are strong reasons to be suspicious of this, the best on is the idea of randomness. Taleb writes of this in the Black Swan, but in a nutshell, the unexpected makes non-sense of a world-view based exclusively on narrative.

People attempt to bring out order and stories amongst the unruly unpredictability of life. And it is partly a question of power as to how much success people have in this, clearly those with more power and resources have more potential to exert control, both over others as well in relation to unpredictable circumstances, but only to some extent: Total control is impossible.

Now, in practice probably the Bush regime took advantage of the terrorist attacks, and may have even aided them to some extent, but the salient point is that they desperately wanted to go to war in Iraq, and there were definitely financial interests driving this, even the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, admits this. So I remain agnostic on 9-11, because for me it doesn’t make much difference how these people got there, they still wanted to dominate the Middle East.

Part III about the federal reserve is deeply interesting. I had not looked at this history of the American Financial infrastructure before, and of course it is profoundly significant. These people undoubtedly do have some serious power, and it does seem to run against the interests of the American people at large and the rest of the world. This is a story of elite groups systematically attempting to capture all the resources by skewing the rules of the game, something I find entirely plausible, consistent with how the international financial institutions were founded, as well as with Lietaer’s account of the financial system in “The Future of Money.”

Now the next step is that these people in America want to found a world order based on everyone being tracked and controlled individually. The paranoid bit is our action being regulated by a system of personal identification, that would allow the bankers to switch them off or erase us if we caused trouble, by cutting off our account. This is a bit like the scenario in “Flow my tears the Policeman said” by Phillip K Dick. Except this is paranoid, because in Sweden you have a strong personal identity system, which is not abused, partly because the government is very socialist, and is also very concerned about democratic limits on power. The problem is more the politics than the system itself.
Now I find it plausible that American elite bankers might have such megalomaniac ideas, and that they would try and manipulate the international system to achieve this. But the idea that they will achieve it in practice is another matter, it might not be that easy. Also, whilst bankers travel in groups called wunches (a wunch of…), they do not all think alike. It is not clear that there is just one cabal bent on world domination. But hey, they are out to protect their interests, no doubt about that.

Now the ideas that are put forward at the end of the film are genuinely about zeitgeist, and seen in that light they are interesting. The idea of each person being individually accounted for and controlled is very much an implication of the current hegemony, which is quite strongly centered on ideas of information and information processing. If you see the world as a huge database, or as a huge set of accounts, then having a primary key or an index of numbered citizens makes sense.

And this is a huge vision of mechanical control. Information is a vision of knowledge built, in Shannon and Weaver’s paper, an a metaphor of communication between machines. The objective is to remove as much noise, or unpredictability, as is possible from the signal. Which is fine as far as clear connections between machines go, but is profoundly undemocratic. Edwin Black details how IBM leased machines to the Nazis to administrate their genocidal logistics. This illustrates the dangers of allowing information alone to become the lodestone of our social order, without strong democratic politics to watch for abuses of power.
A requirement for humanism is to involve the people at large in the creation of social order. Now people, with their ability to reflect on their situation and change their minds, are very unpredictable, and thus might count as “noise” or “risk” in a purely information-based system ( I also co-run an IT based project management firm. I also wrote an academic paper on the tensions between democratic ethics and an information-based view of the social.)

In short, the alienation that the film warns of, and the fascistic tendencies in today’s order are, to my mind, quite real risks. As are the attempts by the American financial community to control the world. John Perkins details these well in “Confessions of an Economic Hit-man.” Anybody who has ever played war or strategy games seriously will recognize this behavior (I like a game called Lux) - it is part of the common-sense of domination.

But how these trends play out in the partial, complex and un-predicatable ground of practice is another matter. The unexpected breaks us out of social narrative again and again. The current narrative of debt-based accumulation was not ready to meet with environmental limits: Climate change came out of the blue, and has upset the story.

I have spoken about this a lot, but suffice to say it is human action and democratic politics that will overturn the age of global accountancy, and expose the limitations of information economics, and usher in yet more interesting times.

Oh, and the sting in the tail is that the film is actually part of a right-wing American activism, trying to get rid of the central federal tax system, and thus make America “free”!

So sometimes it is hard to tell the stories of the right from the stories of the left. This is the candidate, Ron Paul, that the film site is backing for President in America, a free-tradist Republican, bless his cotton socks.