Tag: Video

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Zeitgeist: Moving Forward [Film]

Through the voices of scientists, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward stresses the central, vast role social and environmental influence plays in shaping people’s lives, how today’s Western society’s influence leads individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis, and the need to change the values permeating society in order to set the conditions for a healthy, balanced society.

Social Influence Makes Or Breaks You

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward raises current scientific views that challenge age-old views that diseases of all kinds – mental, heart, cancer, strokes, rheumatoid, autoimmune, addictions – and inclinations toward violence, are not genetically determined, but acquired through the social and environmental influences a person experiences, from as early as one’s fetal development, emphasizing the considerable sensitivity toward a person’s development through fetal stages, infancy and childhood.

Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward thus uses this basis to show how the values that shape Western society – self-interest values that measure people and countries’ well-being based on how much money and assets they have – create an unsustainable feedback loop that continues leading the world deeper into myriad crises.

If Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You, What Kind Of Social Influence Would Be Needed To Remake You?

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward very clearly brings the problem and its approach to the surface:

  • People are products of their societies
  • Society’s current self-interest values lead individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis
  • To undergo a positive change, each person individually and society as a whole, needs to perpetuate different values into the society that would bring about personal and social well-being

It’s clear that we’re on the verge of a great transition in human life. That what we face now is this fundamental change of the life we’ve known over the last century.”

–Dr. Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of social epidemiology, University of Nottingham

Watch Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward official sites:

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Blind Spot [Film]

Blind Spot

Blind Spot

Blind Spot analyzes the problem of peak oil, that:

  • Oil and fossil fuel energy is finite, and coming to its end in the near future
  • Human population is constantly increasing
  • Society is not preparing for the end of oil and fossil fuels, but instead self-interest values, which encourage the direct and indirect use of fossil fuels, continue being perpetuated in the media.

The Problem Of Peak Oil – That It Connects In A Complex Web Of Other Problems

Blind Spot presents the complications in dealing with the problem of peak oil, by showing how it connects to many other current and future problems: inflation, stagflation, pollution, climate change, global warming, overconsumption and overpopulation.

Through interviews with scientists and experts in ecology, economy and sociology, Blind Spot proposes some approaches to these problems, including population control, policies for using less energy and implementing different kinds of energy.

Peak Oil’s Central Problem – Challenging The Strong Influence Of Self-Interest Values Upon Society

However, central to the problems that the film’s experts’ mentioned is the issue of social influence. There is an in-built threat in challenging generations of self-interest values at the center of society’s beliefs and assumptions, or “The American Way,” as people in Americanized societies are used to relying on cheap oil and energy, living in big houses, being highly individualized, and traveling long distances.

The cultural constraint on change becomes very dangerous, because when it is challenged, it is challenging generations of belief and assumptions. … There are people who have to study raw data, who are trained as scientists to have their belief system based upon evidence, and when that contradicts generations of belief, then they become cultural outcasts. That became incredibly frustrating to me. I have kids, I want peace on earth, I want all good things, and yet, I found that people that also want those things unable to realize that we’re all a huge part of this problem.”

–Jason Bradford, PhD, ecological scientist and expert in sustainability and local food systems

Watch Blind Spot Trailer

For more info about the movie & to purchase a DVD copy, visit: blindspotdoc.com

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Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Film]

Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]

Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse paints a picture of the 2008-to-2010 global socio-economic sphere. It follows the banking bubble’s burst in September 2008, and the worldwide domino effect of troubles and uprisings that followed.

The Financial Crisis Forced People To Recognize Global Interconnectedness

Most notably, Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse presents how the 2008-to-2010 financial crash and its effects stamped an imprint of global interconnectedness into people’s worldviews, especially those of bankers, economists and politicians, forcing a revision on issues of global-scale responsibility and interdependence.

Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse takes the viewer through the times before the 2008 financial crash, when there was little acknowledgement or concern about the vast reaching implications of global interconnectedness, as New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin points out in the first part of the movie, about how people in New York did not take the English bank Northern Rock’s crash as a warning sign:

People in New York saw the crash of the Northern Rock bank in England as ‘that’s happening over there, that’s not happening here.’ The sense of interconnectedness was not realized until the very last moment.”

… to 2010, a time when the change in people’s sensitivities to globally connected relationships became felt, as IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde mentions in the film’s final part:

Everyone has changed in this crisis. When the real estate and financial bubbles burst, it caused an examination of conscience about the creation of wealth, how resources should be allocated, the sharing of wealth, how countries relate to each other, what defined well-being. On those issues, we have all evolved, the President included.”

Watch Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse

[myyoutubeplaylist ZWU65Zbka4E, pqBlVBhv0ag, JBhAvUTW5ZE, bZwMIIJLWOw]

  1. Episode One: The Men Who Crashed The World
  2. Episode Two: A Global Tsunami
  3. Episode Three: Paying The Price
  4. Episode Four: After The Fall
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Is The Global Economic Crisis An Example Of The Prisoner’s Dilemma?

When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities – locally, nationally and globally – that share the characteristics of all successful communities.”

Bill Clinton, former President of the United States.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Although it is a simple mathematical idea, it turns out to be an enchanted trap that has ensnared some of the brightest minds for decades.”

The above and following quotes on the Prisoner’s Dilemma are taken from, Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed, by Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield.

Imagine that you and your accomplice are both held prisoner, having been captured by the police and charged with a serious crime. The prosecutor interrogates you separately and offers each of you a deal. This offer lies at the heart of the Dilemma and goes as follows:

  • If one of you, the defector, incriminates the other, while the partner remains silent, then the defector will be convicted of a lesser crime and his sentence cut to one year for providing enough information to jail his partner. Meanwhile, his silent confederate will be convicted of a more serious crime and burdened with a four-year sentence.
  • If you both remain silent, and thus cooperate with each other, there will be insufficient evidence to convict either of you of the more serious crime, and you will each receive a sentence of two years for a lesser offense. If, on the other hand, you both defect by incriminating each other, you will both be convicted of the more serious crime, but given reduced sentences of three years for at least being willing to provide information.
  • … there is a simple central idea that can be represented by a table of options, known as a payoff matrix. This can sum up all four possible outcomes of the game, written down as two entries on each of the two lines of the matrix.”

The image at the top details this payoff matrix. It varies from the above description slightly: If one of the prisoners incriminates his fellow prisoner, and the incriminated prisoner does not likewise reciprocate this defection, then the incriminated prisoner will receive a five year sentence instead of a four year one.

The Global Economic Crisis

In the face of this tension between increasing interdependence and uncoordinated actions, we need shared visions of the future. These visions can motivate leading decision makers to contribute voluntarily to the global good, out of a sense of shared responsibility and enlightened self-interest.”

–  Global Economic Symposium

The Prisoner’s Dilemma works on the basis that two parties are interdependent. In economics the global economy is interconnected and thus interdependent. The global economic crisis can therefore be viewed as a form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where many participants are each charged with a serious crime (the crisis) and each must then choose how to conduct themselves to exit it, with each player’s decisions affecting all the other participants.

However, unlike the classic example above, one market cannot simply defect from the rest of the global economy. Regardless of the decisions the players make, they still remain interconnected and interdependent.

The Eurozone debt crisis has fallen into a classic prisoner’s dilemma. One party does not cooperate because it would expose itself to the potential non cooperative decision of the other party, the latter of which would be able to extract a greater payoff than the cooperative solution would yield in the short-term.

Fear of losing control over the political decisions taken by the euro area is triggering a series of rational (but sub-optimal) choices incapable of dealing with the core issues of the crisis and so leading to an outcome/equilibrium that no one really wants (and everyone will regret ex post), i.e. the total or partial break-up of the euro area.”

– ECMI Commentaries

The following video gives an example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma with arms proliferation between nations:

What Do You Think?

Is the global economic crisis an example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma? And if so, how can the best outcome (sustainable equilibrium) be achieved?

Image: gametheory by Student Computing Support.

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Author Charles Eisenstein Says Occupy Wall St. Is A Different Type Of Revolution

The system isn’t working for the 1% either. You know, if you were a CEO, you would be making the same choices they do. Institutions have their own logic. Life is pretty bleak at the top too; and all the baubles of the rich – they’re kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what is really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning.”

That statement was made by Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, in the below video, which was made as part of a documentary film project in the works titled Occupy Love. The film asks the question: “how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story?”

Watch Occupy Wall St – The Revolution Is Love [5 min.]:

Highlighted quotes from the video:

As More People Wake Up, The Easier It Is To Change

I think now, as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we’re here to give, and wake up to that desire, and wake up to the fact that the other way isn’t working anyway; the more reinforcement we have from people around us that this isn’t crazy, this makes sense, this is how to live.

And as we get that reinforcement, our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service. This shift of consciousness which inspires such things is universal in everybody – the 99% and the 1%. And it’s awakening in different people in different ways.”

The Felt Experience Of Connection

An economist says that the more for you is essentially less for me, but the lover knows that the more for you is more for me, too. If you love somebody then their happiness is your happiness; their pain is your pain.

Your sense of self expands to include other beings. That’s love. Love is expansion of the self to include the other. And that’s a different kind of revolution: there’s no one to fight, there’s no ‘other’ in this revolution.

Everyone has a unique calling and it’s really time to listen to that. That’s what the future is going to be. It’s time to get ready for it, help contribute to it and make it happen.”

Click here for more information about the film Occupy Love

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Embryo

Embryo Screenshot

Embryo Screenshot

EMBRYO HD from Vladek Zankovsky on Vimeo.

A very powerful clip paralleling the development of one human embryo to that of human civilization

Humans within this planet now are the newest experience of the universe in what, biologically, always seems to come down to cycles: of unity to individuation, through which arises conflict, negotiations happen, cooperation is arrived at; and we go to unity again at the next higher level.

And that’s why the story of evolution is so important today, to help us understand where humanity is, and what is our next step.” 

– Elisabet Sahtouris, taken from Biologist Elisabet Sahtouris Finds Evolutionary Purpose In Crisis