MovieChat Forums > Zeitgeist: Addendum (2008) Discussion > Some good points, but I disagree with a ...

Some good points, but I disagree with a lot of this movie, here's why.


This documentary suggests that corporations and other institutions are inherently evil and bad for humanity because of the profit motive (in the case of corporations) and self preservation (in the case of corporations, nations, religions and administrative bodies).
All institutions will tend to try and dominate, establish monopoly, kill competition. In addition, corporations will try and make profits off, in part, exploitation of people and environments. So far, so good. But concluding that all corporations and free markets are thus, "bad" , is a hasty conclusion and a vast generalization in my opinion. For one, even corporations are not free of the march of technology. For example, cars might have killed the horse and cart industry, air travel may have affected shipping to some extent, and so on. And the assumption that soon a few corporations will have control of the entire world, killing off competition and snuffing out challenging technologies seems a little far fetched to me. In fact, we are seeing more and faster innovation flowing out of different parts of the world since the collapse of communism, and the rise of Asia.
IMHO, no single country has a monopoly over corporations. It may seem like the US does right now, but this is by no means what the future looks like to me. I think there will be a lot of corporations from Asia, Latin America and Africa that will compete strongly with American and European corporations, and it is by no means clear who the winners and losers of the 21st century and beyond will be.
This competition in the meantime, as far as I can see, will continue to help drive innovation in critical areas such as energy generation, high tech, food and medicine, and ironically drive humanity toward the lofty goals set forth by the venus project. In fact I even see money and brutal competition being made eventually irrelevant by technological advance anyway in the next hundred years or so.

In fact this kind of suggested domination and monopoly is vastly more efficient for example in a comminustic or dictatorial or theocratic setup, where the monopoly institution, eg the government or the church can make decrees, control populations and hold back progress or focus science and tech in certain areas of its choosing for up to hundreds of years. Such institutions are not even regulated as strongly by things like public opinion and continued welfare of its constituents unlike corporations which need customers, markets, innovation and a positive image to survive as much as they need access to resources and energy.

Yes, the free market systems will create pockets of immense misery and areas of immense wealth. Sometimes these pockets will be as big as entire nations, but in my opinion, these will not be permanent and their success and prosperity will grow and ebb. The key resources in my opinion are future energy, land and water, and a key parameter is human population. These are far more likely to determine mankind's future than any monetary system or free market or other system.

By the way, governments and taxpayers, and institutions like the UN with all their flaws will also continue to play a key role in all of this, by funding research that corporations will not take on, funding small businesses and other such non-profitable ventures, negotiating international treaties, making international laws, keeping peace in warzones, providing aid and not least, putting a leash on capitalism, and so on. So I cannot agree with a completely unfettered, and uncontrolled capitalist system either.

Just my views, pardon the grammar, typed up in a hurry. Thoughts?

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I like llamas.

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We can talk all day but 1 thing was not touched by this movie is the human instinct: sex.

This venus project sounds fantastic like the communism until you put people in it... Even if we give everything to everyone people will not lay down with anyone which automatically drives people towards power as they want to be better in something like that hot guy... If he i not hot at least has money.

Etc. This is a basic instinct which will be impossible to eliminate and why paradise will never come to earth.

(now we could come up with the Bible. Adam and Eve and their sin comes down to all this and this is what made rotten the world... End of story)

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