TZM Lecture Team > Quotes

“Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that...it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on earth at a “higher standard of living than any have ever known”. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival. War is obsolete.4 -R. Buckminster Fuller”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“Dr. Gilligan states: “I am suggesting that the only way to explain the causes of violence, so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening pathology, which, like all form of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen.”160 In Dr. Gilligan's diagnosis he makes it very clear that the greatest cause of violent behavior is social inequality, highlighting the influence of shame and humiliation as an emotional characteristic of those who engage in violence.161 Thomas Scheff, a emeritus professor of sociology in California stated that “shame was the social emotion”.162 Shame and humiliation can be equated with the feelings of stupidity, inadequacy, embarrassment, foolishness, feeling exposed, insecurity and the like – all largely social or comparative in their origin. Needless to say, in a global society with not only growing income disparity but inevitably “self-worth” disparity - since status is touted as directly related to our “success” in our jobs, bank account levels and the like - it is no mystery that feelings of inferiority, shame and humiliation are staples of the culture today. The consequence of those feelings have very serious implications for public health, as noted before, including the epidemic of the behavioral violence we now see today in its various complex forms. Terrorism, local school and church shootings, along with other extreme acts that simply did not exist before in the abstractions they find context today, reveals a unique evolution of violence itself. Dr. Gilligan concludes: “If we wish to prevent violence, then, our agenda is political and economic reform.”163”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“the very fact of multiple corporations, working in the same genre of good production, producing nearly identical products with only mild variation, only adds to the sources of unnecessary waste.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“In the words of food waste researcher Valentin Thurn, “the number of calories that end up in the garbage in North America and Europe would be sufficient to feed the hungry of this world three times over.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“In the broad view, this theatre of multidimensional warfare - truly a world at war with itself – is wholly unsustainable.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“Observation, its assessment, documentation and integration with other knowledge, existing or pending, is the manner by which all distinguishable ideas come to evolve.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“Home construction today is one of the most resource intensive and wasteful industrial mediums in the world today and it doesn't need to be that way.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“believe”
― TZM Lecture Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“As a brief aside, nowhere in the writings of these thinkers, nor in the vast majority of works produced by later theorists in favor of free market capitalism, is the actual structure and process of production and distribution discussed. There is an explicit disconnect between “industry” and “business”, with the former related to the technical/scientific process of true economic unfolding; with the latter only pertaining to the codified market dynamics and pursuit of profit. As will be discussed more so in a moment, a central problem inherent to the capitalist mode of production is how advancements in the “industrial approach”, which can allow for increased problem resolution and the furthering of prosperity, have been blocked by the traditional, seemingly immutable tenets of the “business approach”. The latter has governed the actions of the former, to the disadvantage of the former's potential.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“A 2009 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology called “Life-Course Socioeconomic Position and Incidence of Coronary Heart Disease” found that the longer a person remains in poverty, the more likely he or she is to develop heart disease.133 People who were economically disadvantaged throughout life were more likely to smoke, be obese, and have poor diets and the like. In an earlier study by epidemiologist Dr. Ralph R. Frerichs, focusing specifically on the socioeconomic divide in the city of Los Angeles, CA, found that the death rate from heart disease was 40 percent higher for poor men over all than for wealthier ones.134”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“The one billion people starving on this planet are not doing so because of some immutable natural consequence of our physical reality. There is plenty of food to go around.53 It is the social system, which has its own outdated, contrived logic, that perpetuates this social atrocity, along with countless others.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“The ending of war, the resolution of poverty, the creation of a material abundance unseen in history to meet human needs, the removal of most crime as we know it, the empowerment of true personal freedom through the removal of pointless and/or monotonous labor, and the resolution of many environmental threats, are but a few of the calculated possibilities we have when we take our technical reality into account. However, again, these possibilities are not only largely unrecognized, they are also literally restricted by the current social order for the implementation of such problem solving efficiency and prosperity stands in direct opposition to the very mechanics of how our current social system is operating at the core level.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“In short, when it comes to market logic, the more turnover or sales, the better - and that is that - regardless if the item sold is credit, rocks, “hope” or flapjacks. Any pollution, instances of waste or other such detriments are, again, “external”. There is no consideration for the technical role of actual production processes, strategies for efficient distribution, design applications or the like. Such factors are assumed to culminate metaphysically in the best interest of the people and the habitat simply because that is what the “invisible hand”294 of the market implies.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“Debt is a misunderstood social practice in that most assume debt is an option in society today.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“This isn't about “utopia”. It is about truly practical improvements.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“It should be remembered that the core assumptions of our current socioeconomic system developed during periods with substantially less scientific awareness of both our habitat and ourselves.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought

“Overall, the more caring and empathic you are, the less likely you are to succeed financially - no different from a general sport where you are not going to help an opposing player achieve their goals for it means you are more likely to lose.”
― Tzm Team, The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought