The text below the fold is adapted from a recent Facebook post about the first 45 minutes of the Zeitgeist Movement's new three-hour chunk of video entitled InterReflections. (Well, OK, a two and three-quarter hour chunk.) I bought the download and have now watched a little more than half of it. It's rather too intense to watch all in one sitting—and by "intense" I mean wonky in the philosophical extreme. Like reading the best work of CrimeThinc, it challenges boldly the narratives that we've been fed all our lives.
I hope to publish a complete review within a few days.
Over the past year & a half, a period of sporadic employment, I've been having anxiety about not being able to cover monthly bills. It has led me to question my own value, to feel obsolete, to wonder about and regret my past incidents of self-sabotage. Well-educated Americans my age with no addictive tendencies should be living in relative comfort, right?
The real problem is that I have never been interested in what our society considers success. It never occurred to me at Rice that the main reason for investing my parents' money in my education was to point me toward a six-figure salary or a prosperous business. I wanted to teach young people how to develop their vocabularies (via the Latin language) & their intellectual curiosity (via Classical history & mythology). That was my role in life; while I no longer teach for a living, I consider myself a teacher by disposition.
As the Zeitgeist Movement reminds us, modern Western society is built on over-consumption, exploitation, & violence. It is a sick and unsustainable social structure that is at odds with the way humans existed for millennia (& some still do): living cooperatively & without hierarchy, not walled off in McMansions & massaging our cerebra with TV waves.
45 minutes into the new Zeitgeist film InterReflections, there's a quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti—a quote of which Martin Luther King Jr. was fond, as am I: "It is no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society." Krishnamurti also said (according to the quotation sites, at least), “Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”
I'm just living in the wrong time. I'd be much more at home in the 22nd-century world depicted in the film.