Zeitgeist

an·o·mie – noun Sociology.

1. A state or condition of individuals or society characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values, as in the case of uprooted people.

2. Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals: “We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie and rage” (Charles Krauthammer).

[French, from Greek anomiā, lawlessness, from anomos, lawless :a-, without; see a-1 + nomos, law; see nem- in Indo-European roots.]

(Cobbled together from Dictionary.com entry)

Anomie is not uncommon, and it is not exclusive to woo by any means. Lots of people see no upside to their disconnection from the world of shared values. But woo-woos see through anomie, to the other side. They see hope precisely because things are so perilous, because all has gone awry. Nietzsche makes an important distinction:

Nihilism: it is ambiguous.

A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.

B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p.17 §22 (Kaufmann and Hollingdale trans.)

Woo-woos are, as far as I can tell, very active nihilists. Or rather, they are nihilists with regard to the standard values which society holds up. Their activity is constituted by their hope for a new order of meaning and value in the world. This hope is always deferred, as the apocalypse is always just over the horizon – but at least the believe in it. Watch this, and see if you see what I mean:

This video captures exactly the feeling, I think, that underwrites apocalyptic woo. The suburbs are full of hideous monstrosity, and even their ideals (the sunbathing babe) are horrific. Hope comes from an inverted sun, some radical upheaval of the normal spiritual order.

I said in the last post that I would look at the film Zeitgeist, so I’ll at least make a start of it here. It’s pretty good woo, nicely produced and something of a pop-culture phenomenon (and yes, that does make it suspicious to the woo community).

If you’ve got two hours to burn, here it is.

I’ll go through the basic structure of the movie for those of you who haven’t watched it lately, or don’t care to watch it.

The opening scene is a discourse on ‘nowness’. The rest of the movie is about conspiracy theories, which on the surface makes the opening strange, so let’s stop and think about it for a moment. I think my model of the opacity of the world makes sense of how these things are connected: it is a fairly common Buddhist doctrine that being present, being in the now, has the tendency to make the medium of your experience opaque to you. If you abide in nowness you can experience the world ‘directly’, seeing through your old illusions to the reality beneath. This sounds, phenomenologically, precisely like the breakdown of naive realism as I described it. This opening discourse would therefore serve to soften up the viewer’s grip on naive realism – a bit of Descartes may have had the same impact:

How sure are you that you’re not dreaming right now? Got the willies yet? Ok, good.

Then we get a short burst of repeated images of the planes crashing into the twin-towers. The rapid-fire, repetitive images recall flashbacks from a trauma – we the viewers are being asked to relive that trauma, that eruption into our worldviews. Nothing is said about the event at this point: we are simply meant to have our sense of the stability of the world softened.

We then move on to some comparative mythology, intended to show how all the particularities of the Jesus story are present in older cultures. The intent seems to be to cause the bottom to drop out of your trust in the old religious narratives.

Then, the film moves on to the 9/11 conspiracy theories. The arguments are fairly standard, and the point is clear: you cannot buy the political narrative being sold.

Finally, we get an overview of the Federal Reserve system, with some Jonesian style conspiracy theorizing about the collusion of bankers to exploit the rest of society.

So what is up here? To return to the beginning of the post, where is the active part of this breakdown of meaning? To answer that, we have to look briefly at who made the movie and why. Meet Jacque Fresco:

Jacque here is the man ultimately behind the movie. He is the creator of the Venus Project (their website here). Jacque is an architect, a designer and most importantly, a futurist. He has a vision for the total reorganization of society, and he wants to share it with you. Radical city design, the elimination of money as a means of exchange, and total social reform are but a few of his exciting proposals for a new and better future.

And so there you have it: after the picture of a society duped and misdirected since its inception, Fresco offers up a picture of a society completely transformed and rid of virtually all of its ills. But the way to get there, as always, is through the crucible of an apocalypse. For Fresco, it is an economic apocalypse, brought about by the coming advent of artificial intelligence, and the over-automation of everything:

The Venus Project can not be put into practice on a global scale until the economic systems of the world fail to provide for the needs of people.

What will bring about the collapse of the world’s monetary systems is the infusion of automation [ed. he says elsewhere this means AI] and the outsourcing of jobs. This includes not only assembly line workers but also doctors, engineers, architects, and the like. As workers and professionals lose their purchasing power, the industries that depend on them can no longer function. This will bring an end to the monetary system. It is not a question of owners giving up their industries so much as the fact that people will not have the purchasing power to sustain this system. Even the motion picture industry is generating computerized people who will replace many TV announcers and personalities.
[From here, question 14]

The story of Zeitgeist, which begins with the strange discourse on nowness, somehow ends with an economic apocalypse brought on by AI, followed by Utopia. To make sense of how it all hangs together, I can only suggest that it is a kind of anomie, which corresponds phenomenologically with the transparency of the medium of value, even of experience. But the woo response to this is not to shrink and wither, but to imagine something beyond it.