Zeitgeist
Addendum
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Zeitgeist: Addendum - Part Three - Page 4
This is the fourth page of part three in my series of articles on Zeitgeist: Addendum. Please refer to the introduction if you were lead to this page.
What is technology? Technology is a pencil, which allows one to solidify ideas on paper for communication. Technology is an automobile, which allows one to travel faster than feet would allow. Technology is a pair of eyeglasses, which enables sight for those who need it.
Applied technology itself is merely an extension of human attributes, which reduces human effort, freeing humans from a particular chore or problem. Imagine what your life would be like today without a telephone, or an oven, or a computer, or an airplane. Everything in your home, which you take for granted, from a doorbell to a table to a dishwasher, is technology, generated from the creative, scientific ingenuity of human technicians, not money, politics or religion.
These are false institutions.
Many would argue that competition via free enterprise helped spur the creation and/or further development of the items above. While fairly true in some cases, overall I believe that progress is inevitable, even it's slower without a Research and Development division.
[Jacque Fresco]
And writing your congressman is fantastic. They tell you to write your congressman if you want something done. The men in Washington should be at the forefront of technology. The forefront of human study, the forefront of crime, all the factors that shape human behavior. You don't have to write your congressman. What kind of people are they that are appointed to do that job?
I was pretty young when I realized that there was a logical problem with "writing your representative" and that it basically didn't do jack shit.
The future will have great difficulty.
And the question that's raised by politicians is, "How much will a project cost?" The question is not, "How much will it cost?" "Do we have the resources?" And we have the resources today, to house everyone, build hospitals all over the world, build schools all over the world, the finest equipment in labs for teaching and doing medical research. So you see, we have all that, but we are in a monetary system, and in a monetary system there's profit.
Most Americans will tell you this is "the speed of democracy", but that's ridiculous due to what the movie and I have already said up to this point.
[Narration]
And what is the fundamental mechanism that drives the profit system, besides self-interest? What is it exactly that maintains that competitive edge at its core? Is it high efficiency and sustainability? No, that isn't part of their design. Nothing produced in our profit based society is even remotely sustainable or efficient. If it was there wouldn't be a multi-million dollar a year service industry for automobiles, nor would the average life span for most electronics be less than three months before they are obsolete.
Is it abundance? Absolutely not. Abundance, as based on the laws of supply and demand, is actually a negative thing. If a diamond company finds 10 times the usual amount of diamonds during their mining, it means the supply of diamonds has increased, which means the cost and profit per diamond, drops.
The fact is, efficiency, sustainability and abundance are enemies of profit. To put it into a word, it is the mechanism of scarcity that increases profits.
What's most interesting about diamonds, other than they're usually dug up with what are essentially slaves, is that regardless of how many there are there's always an artificial scarcity. Diamonds are not that rare, but the companies would have you believe so.