Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

[Natebishop3]

But is it more earth shattering than the film about how Seattle lost the Sonics?

 

[PapaG]

Apparently it is a very influential movie.

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/01/17/jared-loughners-zeitgeist-obse

Jared Loughner's Zeitgeist Obsession
By Robert Stacy McCain on 1.17.11 @ 6:09AM

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner's friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult's most zealous converts. And many of Loughner's otherwise inexplicable obsessions -- from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of "mind control" -- parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.

The first disclosure of the movie's influence on the mass murder suspect's beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. "I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner's mindset and how he views the world that he lives in," Zach Osler, 22, told ABC's Ashleigh Banfield. Osler's father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. "He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time," George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. "It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do."

The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner's disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. By the time he latched onto the conspiracy-theory film, Loughner was already a very troubled young man. Described as quiet and awkward, Loughner had been a promising saxophonist, playing in a student jazz group, but began using drugs and alcohol in high school. Some friends have traced the start of his decline to his sophomore year of high school in 2005, when he broke up with a girlfriend. He dropped out of high school after his junior year and thereafter lost touch with many of his former friends, including Caitlyn Parker. On the day of the shooting which targeted Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, Parker was one of the first of the accused gunman's acquaintances to push back against speculation that the crime had been perpetrated by a right-winger. No, Parker said in a series of Twitter messages, the Jared Loughner she remembered was "quite liberal," even "radical" in his politics. But Parker hadn't been in contact with Loughner in more than four years. Could it be that, in the interval, Loughner's orientation had changed? After all, some observers said, his disjointed online messages about currency could reflect the kind of anti-Federal Reserve views of many free-market purists on the Right.

Loughner's Zeitgeist fixation help clears up that confusion. Zach Osler and Loughner remained friends after high school, until late 2008, and what Loughner absorbed from Zeitgeist certainly wasn't conservatism. Jesse Walker of Reason magazine has called the movie's worldview "New Age paranoia," a fringe that is also beyond the range of mainstream liberalism, but its assertion that the 9/11 attacks were conspiracy orchestrated by the U.S. government clearly makes it a
phenomenon of the Left. And while Zeitgeist has been associated with the so-called "Truther" movement -- like the 2005 movie Loose Change, of which Loughner was also reportedly a fan -- it adds other ideas that make it far more complex.

Divided into three parts, Zeitgeist begins with a half-hour assault on Christianity as a myth. The film asserts that Jesus is "a literary and astrological hybrid… a plagiarization of the Egyptian sun-god Horus." This is a thesis promoted in a series of books, including The Christ Conspiracy (1999), by author D.M. Murdock, who writes under the pen-name "Achyra S." Murdock served as an adviser on Zeitgeist, and the film's popularization of her "Christ-myth" ideas has brought it to the attention of Christian writer James Patrick Holding of Tektonics Ministry. He notes that many viewers of Zeitgeist claim it has "shown them the truth for the first time," and that it evidently appeals to those "disaffected with the status quo." Holding said Zietgeist "also seems to have appeal among what I call 'fundamentalist atheists' who are deeply hostile to Christianity."

Deeply hostile, indeed, as the film tells viewers: "Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age." This idea of fraudulent mythology is then carried over into the film's second segment, about the 9/11 attacks: "A myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false. In a deeper sense, in the religious sense, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people." That 35-minute segment ends with audio of a speech by John F. Kennedy talking about a "ruthless and monolithic conspiracy." Of course, JFK was talking about communism, but after a half-hour of claims that the U.S. government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, Kennedy's words about "infiltration" and "subversion" take on a different meaning for the intended audience. And that segment ends with scenes of Kennedy's 1963 assassination in Dallas.

What follows in the third segment of Zeitgeist is a mélange of conspiracy-theory stuff about "ruthless banking interests," in which such usual suspects as the Rothschilds make their appearance. The narrator declares the income tax "completely unconstitutional," despite the 16th Amendment, which specifically authorizes it. U.S. involvement in World War I, World War II and Vietnam are all denounced as the results of secret plots, and Prescott Bush -- father and grandfather of presidents -- is portrayed as a Nazi collaborator. Finally, Zeitgeist pushes fears of a government scheme to implant communications chips into people to track their whereabouts, and concludes by warning of a "surveillance society," a future "where everyone is tracked, everyone is on camera and everyone is subordinated." Indeed, the film's narrator tells viewers in the closing monologue, "social manipulation" has already "completely inhibited the culture," creating "a controlled population utterly malleable in the hands of the few."

This is the paranoid worldview that Jared Loughner absorbed as he watched Zeitgeist obsessively. He was not the only one obsessed with it. The film has created a worldwide "movement" with thousands of followers, in which the director, Peter Joseph, has joined forces with Jacque Fresco, promoter of the utopian "Venus Project" that promises a currency-free "resource-based" future.

"They do not want you to think too much.… You had better wake up and understand that there are people guiding your life, and you don't even know it," says one of the film's "experts," anti-Masonic conspiracy theorist Jordan Maxwell, near the end of Zeitgeist, after the narrator has denounced "the stupefying downward slide" of American education. A few minutes later, while images including Jesus Christ, Bill O'Reilly and Saddam Hussein flash across the screen, the narrator says: "The last thing the men behind the curtain want is a conscious, informed public, capable of critical thinking, which is why a continually fraudulent zeitgeist is output via religion, the mass media and the educational system."

Did Jared Loughner imagine himself part of that "conscious, informed public"? Did he believe his demented rantings represented "critical thinking"? These are questions that those trying to understand the carnage in Tucson may need to begin asking.

 

[Haakzilla]

Apparently it is a very influential movie.

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/01/17/jared-loughners-zeitgeist-obse

...this game again

All the evidence now tells us that Jared Lee Loughner was motivated by little else than his own inner demons. According to those who knew the gunman, he was largely disinterested in politics.

“He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right,” Loughner’s high school friend Zach Osler told ABC News.

Indeed, we now know that Loughner’s downward spiral began when he was dumped by his girlfriend and turned to drugs and alcohol, including the legal hallucinogenic drug Salvia Divinorum. The drug’s warping of Loughner’s perceptions, combined with his obsession with lucid dreaming and alternate realities, resulted in a lethal cocktail that undoubtedly contributed to him carrying out the massacre.

But even as the contrived ploy of blaming conservative talk radio for the shootings as a political ruse to clamp down on free speech was rejected, establishment media talking heads suddenly shifted to a new scapegoat – conspiracy documentaries and gold advocates.

The inference is as transparent as it is moronic – that anyone who advocates buying gold or the return of a gold standard, people like Congressman Ron Paul, are either potential mass killers themselves or are responsible for Saturday’s massacre. Or alternatively, anyone that has watched a conspiracy movie like Zeitgeist, which is now being cited as a primary influence on Loughner, is also in this category.

Zeitgeist has been watched by millions of people on You Tube alone (2 million on this one channel), not to mention DVD copies. Are we now supposed to swallow the idea that there are millions of mass killers out there waiting to strike as a result of watching this film?

Loughner also cited Donnie Darko as one of his favorite films, a massively popular 2001 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze which has been seen by literally tens of millions of people worldwide. Are we now supposed to fear an army of tens of millions of serial killers being turned loose as a result of this movie?

This is obviously another crude attempt on behalf of establishment talking heads at exploiting the deaths of six people to demonize those who they politically disagree with and wish to see demonized. The “right-wing rhetoric” hoax fell flat on its face so now they are moving on to another target that they perceive won’t be as proficient in being able to defend itself.

The corporate media clowns who unleash this drivel are the equivalent of immature toddlers who blame everyone else as a way out of taking responsibility for their actions. If anything besides Loughner’s mental instability and psychotropic drug use was responsible for Saturday’s massacre it was the establishment media’s constant invoking of the idea that Americans are going to get angry and kill people.

As Alex Jones writes, “What we have here is a clear case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The national and local media knew exactly what they were doing. They hyped to a pool of 300 million Americans over and over again that a deranged tea partier is going to gun politicians down. Then, a highly suggestible paranoid schizophrenic acts on the hype and the media instantly blames the tea party. If they continue to hype this, it will cause more deranged copycats to act.”

One wonders what the idiots who can’t seem to grasp fact that there are mentally ill people out there who will commit atrocious acts of evil for no particular reason will blame next for Loughner’s rampage.

Maybe Loughner was a fan of the Arizona Cardinals and, like hundreds of thousands of other people, occasionally watched a Cardinals game. Does that mean the Cardinals share some blame for the massacre?

Even when the President of the United States backs down on playing the blame game, and even when the father of the 9-year-old girl tragically killed in the shooting pleads that people not exploit her death for political grist, these vultures still persist in obsessing about every minutia of Loughner’s life in the hope that they can find some more dirt with which to throw in a crude effort to silence their political adversaries.

Unfortunately, there will be more Jared Loughner’s in the years to come because there will be more young people who succumb to drugs, depression and mental illness.

This doesn’t mean that people will stop making conspiracy documentaries, that they will stop speaking out against the Federal Reserve, or that they will stop advocating the private ownership of precious metals. But that won’t stop political hacks from hijacking the tragedy before the bodies are even buried as a vehicle through which to advance their own selfish, authoritarian and despotic agendas.

~Paul Joseph Watson

 

[PapaG]

...this game again

So, are you saying that the Oslers were lying about Loughner's fascination with Zeitgeist? What possible motivation would they have had to mention a movie that they had watched (on numerous occasions, apparently) with Loughner? Also, why didn't the author of your piece also mention Osler's comments about Zeitgeist?

I'm not sure what point you were trying to prove in your post, other than the author of your cut/paste omitted the Zeitgeist info from his commentary, while quoting Osler on other things. I'm not saying at all that the movie caused him to be a mass murderer, but when people who know him well say he was fascinated by a conspiracy movie, I have no reason to not believe what they are saying.

We know that Loughner was a heavy pothead who liked conspiracy theories. There is nothing wrong with that, IMO, and it certainly doesn't make a person a mass murderer. Just as 'targets' on a map doesn't either, but whatevs...

 

[GriLtCheeZ]

I've seen Zeitgeist 1&2 and I haven't went crazy. I'll probably watch the new one online at some point.

The first 30-40 minutes of Zeitgeist where dude explains where the myth of Jesus comes from makes it worth watching.

HAAK72 you should look up on youtube the interview Alex Jones did with Peter Joseph, it's freaking hilarious. They don't get along

 

[Haakzilla]

I've seen Zeitgeist 1&2 and I haven't went crazy. I'll probably watch the new one online at some point.

The first 30-40 minutes of Zeitgeist where dude explains where the myth of Jesus comes from makes it worth watching.

HAAK72 you should look up on youtube the interview Alex Jones did with Peter Joseph, it's freaking hilarious. They don't get along

...I've seen it.

The third Zeitgeist really does a good job of breaking down the Nature Vs. Nurture debate in Part I. It uses both empirical and analytical study to explain the biological and psychological basis for many of the negative human behaviors we see today including many types of addiction, violence, distrust, lack of empathy, and greed.

Part II is a devastating analysis of the monetary market system, which very clearly shows how the current system creates the perfect environment for nurturing the negative behaviors described in Part I.

Part III presents the ideal case for how humans should conduct themselves on this planet, as if we suddenly arrived here and had the option to design our society such that it provides for everyone and eliminates the causes of negative human behaviors. It contrasts these ideas with the current system showing why the negative aspects of today's society would not occur and how we could have the benefits of a modern first-world luxury lifestyle on a global scale.

Part IV re-assesses today's society in light for the first three parts, saying what will happen if we do nothing. This part also suggests that change will only occur after things get much worse...

 

[GriLtCheeZ]

...I've seen it. The third Zeitgeist really does a good job of breaking down the Nature Vs. Nurture debate in Part One. It uses both empirical and analytical study to explain the biological and psychological basis for many of the negative human behaviours we see today including many types of addiction, violence, distrust, lack of empathy, and greed.

Part Two is a devastating analysis of the monetary market system, which very clearly shows how the current system creates the perfect environment for nurturing the negative behaviours described in Part One.

Part Three presents the ideal case for how humans should conduct themselves on this planet, as if we suddenly arrived here and had the option to design our society such that it provides for everyone and eliminates the causes of negative human behaviours. It contrasts these ideas with the current system showing why the negative aspects of today's society would not occur and how we could have the benefits of a modern first-world luxury lifestyle on a global scale.

Part Four re-assesses today's society in light for the first three parts, saying what will happen if we do nothing. This part also suggests that change will only occur after things get much worse..

This is true

 

[barfo]

I've seen Zeitgeist 1&2 and I haven't went crazy.

Probably Loughner didn't think he was crazy either.

barfo

 

[Natebishop3]

Probably Loughner didn't think he was crazy either.

barfo

Two out of the three voices in his head would agree with you.

 

[huevonkiller]

If it is a conspiracy theory movie it doesn't sound that serious.