The propensity for humans to be tribal – to look for different ways to build community based on shared interests, values, or fashion – is, for me, a given. But is our propensity towards tribalism damaging, unavoidably fostering prejudice and intolerance? What if the community we built was to include every member of the human race, rejecting any differences between us as trivial theatre? Could we use our desire to socialise and form community to create a better world? If your answer to all of the above is ‘yes’, you might want to consider looking into the Zeitgeist Movement (TZM).
That’s how easy it is to get lulled into the movement, but something you should also be aware of is that if you do decide to pledge your allegiance to TZM, you will also have to accept a whole lot more… erm… fringe beliefs, for example, that 9/11 was an inside job, that a cabal of bankers controls the global financial system, and that a cure for cancer actually exists but is being covered up by big pharma.
Two months after googling ‘subcultures beginning with Z’, I find myself sitting on a broken plastic chair in a tiny room full to bursting point, surrounded by an unusual combination of pierced flesh and suits. Some look like lifelong squatters, others like bankers on their lunch break. I nervously wait for the meeting to start, trying to blend into the crowd around me, as always, wearing my New Look leather jacket, a baseball cap and ripped jeans (‘Hey, Siri, what do activists wear?’).
‘Change will come, don’t be in any doubt about that.’ Ross stares at us intently as if we are a group of pupils he has just scolded.
This is the first meeting of the year of the London Zeitgeist Movement, set up to prepare for ‘Z Day’, an internationally co-ordinated day of presentations, films, exhibitions and the coming together of social change activists to raise awareness. The event will take place in a 400-seater auditorium, and there is no doubt in this room that it will sell out.
TZM calls for radical social change based on the belief that our current modus operandi – i.e. constantly consuming and striving for growth within a planet of finite resources (aka capitalism, or what they term ‘the market system’) – is the result of a distorted value system that is immoral and should be replaced by a technologically advanced system that scientifically plans the social sphere ‘in the interest of all’. If you are lost already, don’t worry, so was I, until I spent an entire day watching all three of the Zeitgeist movies on YouTube. To be honest, even after watching them, I was still very confused.
The movement was the brainchild of Peter Joseph, creator of the Zeitgeist movie series, a documentary-style art project that went viral, reaching millions of viewers. The first movie, released in 2007, focused on the learned human tendency to obey authority through the proliferation of some fundamentally dangerous conspiracy theories, and what happens when this is taken to extremes. It also poses the question of ‘Who is really in control?’ (hint: the banks – ‘a century-long pyramid scheme’). The follow-up, Zeitgeist Addendum, introduced the foundational idea that sustainability and science – not money – should be the guiding forces of the ‘system’ we live in, and the most recent movie, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, questions the need for private property and money, highlighting the current worldwide situation as ‘disastrous’ and calling for a global revolution.
According to TZM, there is a lot more that science and technology can do for humanity than it is currently able to because the shackles of capitalism limit its potential. The movement firmly believes that we have the resources to feed the entire planet, provide everyone with clean drinking water, build cutting-edge hospitals all over the world, and create clean energy for all, but money invariably gets in the way of these things because scarcity is ‘built into the system’ to keep prices high, only serving to encourage corruption and greed.
‘What’s the point of voting in the system as it is?’ Ross asks, his face reddening. ‘It’s like saying, “Would you like to vote for me smacking you in the face or poking you in the eye?” Yes, it’s democratic, because I get to vote on it, but I don’t like any of the options, so it is irrational for me to vote for either.’
Zeitgeist, literally translated, means ‘time ghost,’ or ‘spirit of the age’, the foundational paradigm of a given society. TZM advocates moving from our current model – a monetary-based economy – to a resource-based economy (RBE), in which the resources are controlled by society as a whole, rather than governments. Hmm. Sounds like communism, I hear you say. Well, yes and no. TZM would argue that while the idealised end state of utopian communism and an RBE are very similar, a key difference is a focus on utilising technology and science (for example, through automation, using technologies like FarmBot, aquaponics and permaculture) to increase the quality of living for all, removing the monotonous physical labour that characterises the dystopic communist states of China and North Korea.
‘It’s all this bloody “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” bullshit,’ Ross says, now the colour of a London bus. ‘No, they’re fucking not! The doctor doesn’t need your opinion on how to treat your child. The engineer doesn’t need your opinion on how to build a bridge. That is why we have experts. Science is not subjective.’
A hand goes into the air. ‘Why don’t we turn this into a bit of a business? We can all put money in and fundraise. Then we can really go somewhere, sell out arenas, make sure everybody knows about the movement?’
‘Hmmm’ – Ross screws up his face – ‘we have talked about this a lot, and I think the consensus is that it feels a bit hypocritical. Everything money touches turns to shit.’
Like Findhorn, although the techno-utopian world of TZM feels a million miles away from that gentle, otherworldly place, the movement seems to be in a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to money. After the meeting, I pick this issue up with Alex, a restaurant manager and long-term member of the London TZM community.
‘We have this problem with money,’ he explains. ‘We need it, but we don’t trust each other. As a movement, we tend to attract fringe members of society, which is OK, but these people inevitably have no real power. It’s nice to think that revolution can happen from the bottom up, but, in reality, it never works like that. We need to attract people with power in this system if we are going to make a difference. We can’t just ask people nicely to change. People will read our leaflets and they might think it’s a good idea, but then they have bills to pay and kids to feed, so they forget.’
Alex was right. During each of the TZM talks, meetings and film screenings I attend, I can’t help but notice a lot of supporters of the movement are towards the bottom end of the financial system.
Take Adam, for example. In his thirties, with an orange beard and long dreadlocks, Adam spends much of his free time holding up a ‘free hugs’ sign and shouting through a megaphone at pedestrians in the shopping district of Maidstone. I agree to accompany him to a performance he is due to give in Brighton, shortly after Z Day. We meet in the pouring rain under the awning of Boots the chemist and huddle under my umbrella for the walk to the venue.
‘That’s the good thing about you women,’ he says. ‘You always remember stuff like umbrellas.’
Arriving just in time for the soundcheck, we are greeted by a chap wearing a floppy flower hat with a beard flowing down into his lap, a woman with a shaved head, a man dressed as a pirate with a corset, and two Staffie dogs running laps of the performance space. I sit on one of the wooden chairs positioned in front of the stage while Adam prepares for his performance and the audience settle on to various wooden chairs and scattered floor cushions. After twenty minutes arranging an on-set chair and table, taping his megaphone to a microphone stand and obsessing about the camera angles, the audience is in place and Adam is asked to begin.
But he has disappeared.
‘Is he ready?’ a bald-headed man with a camera asks me five minutes later.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, leaning my head around the stage flats to look for him. Adam is standing in the wings wearing a straitjacket.
‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes, should I start?’ He looks confused.
‘Should he start?’ I turn back to the man.
‘Of course he should,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what he’s waiting for… erm… action?’
Adam fumbles out in his straitjacket, looking panicked, and begins his skit by talking to an onstage camera about how he is being chased by agents of ‘the system’, but has managed to hide from them by having himself sectioned.
‘This might be the last thing you ever hear from me,’ he says dramatically, before exiting stage right.
So far, so good.
He returns moments later, sans straitjacket, and wanders over to the megaphone to begin the next stage of his performance – a rally speech.
‘How can you bring kids into a world like this?’ he asks the audience. ‘It’s so selfish. The system is based on infinite resources. And do we have infinite resources?’
‘Yeah, the sun!’ someone shouts out from the audience.
Adam looks annoyed. ‘This is a performance!’ he says. ‘It’s not an interactive presentation. You’re being like someone who goes and shouts at the actors while they’re filming Coronation Street.’
‘Free Deirdre Rachid,’ someone else shouts from the audience.
Adam puts his serious face on. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘back into character now. No more interruptions.’
A member of the audience lights up a spliff.
‘We go on consuming our host planet, taking all of its resources and suffocating it… and what else behaves like that?’ He leaves a silence. ‘CANCER.’ The word cuts through the hall like a knife as Adam is given a signal by the cameraman to wind up his performance.
He continues talking for the next few minutes with admirable passion about how screwed up our system is, before leaving the stage to a ripple of applause.
As I juggle with my conflicting emotions of respect for his tenacity and offence that he thinks I am an awful person for wanting to have kids, Adam suddenly realises he has to run for his bus, ‘So we won’t have time for that drink.’ The bus, he tells me, takes three hours to make a one-hour train journey, but he can’t afford the train. He explained during an earlier interview with me that he works two hours a day moving horse muck from one place to another and spends his spare time making podcasts. He lives in a boarded-off part of his mum and dad’s living room; they call it the ‘rabbit hutch’.
I know I am painting a bit of a depressing picture of Adam, but I should probably note here that I didn’t find him a depressing person at all. I think the ‘you women’ comment about remembering the umbrella was probably a misjudged compliment, and he was largely very kind to me and welcoming of my foray into his world. Earlier this year I had watched him give a speech at the Pagan Pride festival and spent a few hours with him at a Nottingham pub afterwards, where we discussed far-ranging philosophical questions over a beer. I am genuinely inspired by the dedication he has to his activism and admire his level of certainty and commitment to what he genuinely believes would create a better world, whether this certainty is misplaced or not. I suppose all I am trying to convey in describing his living situation is that it’s not difficult to wonder why Adam might want to change the status quo.
It made convenient sense to me that most people I had met in this community had done badly out of the system and were unhappy with their lot, so I am glad to be proved wrong when I meet Barney Fleming (not his real name) on a summer’s evening in Blackheath. I was introduced to Barney after offering to write an article about the TZM London chapter meeting for them to publish on their website, as a way of trying to build rapport with the group. They weren’t interested in my article, but Barney did agree to meet with me on the proviso that I change his name and share his story as one of the early and integral members of the UK TZM community. We meet at an organic food shop promising ‘healthy, delicious smoothies’, and for some reason I decide to pretend I’m really trendy by ordering the ‘Green Cleanser’. Don’t ever be fooled into doing this. It was a mistake of gargantuan proportion. I think it was mainly algae. Nevertheless, I gulp it down with masked horror as Barney tells me his story on the benches outside.
‘My wife and I do great out of the system,’ he begins, his face and general downbeat demeanour reminding me of Badger from The Wind in the Willows. ‘We own our house in London outright, and we have no debt whatsoever. But you can’t be truly happy, not when you see what is going on around you. Ultimately, the question is where are we going on this planet? How are we gonna manage it properly? It all begins when we realise we are going to have to work together as a species.’
He takes a sip of his health drink, leaving me with my thoughts for a moment. Is it true that no one can be happy so long as there is suffering in the world? The thought makes me feel suddenly guilty, and lacking.
I tune back in to Barney. ‘When you break it down to people, it’s amazing how much they say, “Ah, but they are different from us.” So, I say, let’s find the common ground and work up. We all eat, drink, go to the toilet, need shelter. That’s the important stuff. Everything else is just made up by humans.’
I lean back and forward in a full body nod, remembering how intimidated I was by the High King of Albion, and my realisation that the real world is just as made up by humans as my weekend of LARPing in Teutonia.
‘I don’t wanna hear about the countries, the nations… It’s all gang culture gone mad. The Jews and the Muslims are no different than the Crips and the Bloods in LA. Everybody is just fighting for self-preservation. Kids don’t care about culture, about race, about “pride of a nation” – they just want to be warm, fed and loved. All of that other stuff is just conditioning.’
Although I can see the logic of what Barney is saying – of course kids want to be warm, fed and loved – the thought that going to the toilet and eating food is the major thing that binds us as a species is utterly depressing. I think about the romance of the battle re-enactment, the pagan rituals at Stonehenge, the joy at being part of such an ancient tradition.
‘But surely we lose something when we do away with tradition?’ I protest. ‘What about our culture? I mean…’ – I raise my eyebrows and gesticulate wildly – ‘where does that leave Morris dancing?’
He laughs, and I can’t help but join him, surprising myself with my own suddenly expressed passion for Morris dancing.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘to me that’s just theatre. It’s acting out a romanticised idea of the past. We forget that things were fucking hard back then. I used to sit and talk to my grandma as a kid, and she would say, “Never let anyone tell you about how great the past was. It was really, really hard, especially for working people.” She would have loved a washing machine, but instead she had an ice-cold tub and a stone. For me, all tradition is theatre – it’s harmless, but we need to accept it for what it is. When it comes to making the important decisions about how we should organise ourselves as human beings, in the real world, we have to base them on the here and now; on science, not tradition.’
I like the idea of one nation, of humanity coming together as one enormous tribe. It’s a beautiful image. But is this realistic? How can everybody in the world be part of my tribe when I haven’t even met them all? How can I connect with them and build relationships with them? And if I can’t, then how else will I fulfil my human desire to build community, and to surround myself with a warm and supportive group of people I love and trust? How will my tribe build its identity if there aren’t any other tribes? How can there be like-mindedness if there is no one who has a different perspective, no one who has a different personal taste? The questions flash before me like a stock-market ticker.
‘Don’t speak to me about nationalism,’ Barney goes on, impassioned by his train of thought. ‘We were originally immigrants from Ireland, yet my mum still says things like, “It’s these bleedin’ Eastern Europeans,” and I’m like, “Mum, we’re immigrants!” And she’s like, “Well, it was different then.” No, it wasn’t! How do you have the right to tell anyone else on this planet where they can and cannot live? You are becoming the very people who spat on you when you opened your mouth back in the seventies, because we were the “terrorists” then. People forget these things so quickly.’
Both energised by where our conversation is headed, we decide that it’s time to progress onto the hard stuff and wander through Blackheath village towards the common in search of a pub. As we walk and make small talk, I explain my thoughts on the movement so far. Summarised as follows.
I agree that the negative effect our current ‘system’ of consumption is having on our planet, and on our fellow human beings, is unsustainable, and that here we should take a lesson from the pagans and recognise that we are symbiotically related to this planet. I also agree that we need to do more to address the horrendous gap between this planet’s haves and have-nots; that some starve while others pay to have their stomachs stapled is simply absurd. But I’m not sure that addressing either of these requires a complete overhaul of our system. For example, although their business models may need some work, the popularity of businesses like Getaround, Freecycle and Airbnb suggest that the public sentiment supports a movement that makes better use of what we have, as opposed to the constant loop of making, consuming and discarding that keeps the economy chugging along to the detriment of our planet. A drive for sustainability has also firmly implanted itself into our national conscience, as we begin to hold our fashion industry and the companies that produce our energy and food to an increasingly higher standard when it comes to environmental issues. So perhaps the evolution has already started, and perhaps evolution is better than revolution.
We find our quarry, order two pints, and carry them out onto the grass to continue our discussion.
‘The deaths of Morrison and Hendrix weren’t accidents,’ Barney says. I have no memory of how we got onto this subject, as my Dictaphone was switched off during the wander. ‘They wanted control, so they arranged the deaths.’
‘Who’s they?’ I ask.
‘Oh, the CIA, the government, the people who run the show.’
I am frustrated that we have ended up back here after such an interesting conversation. ‘But they are just human beings like you and me,’ I say, exasperated.
‘No, but they’re not. They work for a system with sociopathic tendencies. I’m not paranoid. It happens. Now “conspiracy theory” is a dismissive term for those who question the official line. But we have to! I mean, look at what’s come out about the paedophile rings and the Catholic Church. Things get covered up all the time. You can’t just blindly accept and obey.’
‘But how do you know Hendrix and Morrison were assassinated by “them”? I don’t understand where you get your information from.’
‘It’s all on files in—’
‘But have you seen these files?’
‘Me personally? I’ve seen copies of them, yeah. But there are interviews with people who work for the FBI, the CIA. All legit, traceable guys, telling us that these were set-ups.’
‘But they could be lying to you, and manipulating you just as much as you presume the government are.’
‘They could well be, and then you have to follow the story. Where does it fit? Who benefited? Follow the money, all the time. That’s the secret of this system: if you follow the money, you’ll get the answer.’
I wonder if Barney sees himself as a Morpheus character, trying to explain to me that we are all in The Matrix. But who is Agent Smith? Who is ‘the system’? I can’t help but think that some people just need to invent an enemy, an outside actor to blame it all on, because that would be much easier, wouldn’t it, to abstract a villain, a ‘cabal’ to pin it all on rather than wrestle with the complexities and nuance of the way the real world operates. Money has become the new dirty word, but I don’t buy into the idea that human beings are all entirely good until corrupted by the evil, malevolent system of capitalism.
‘OK, we’ve talked about tribalism,’ I say, trying to stifle my frustration, ‘and how we need to move on from this. But a lot of the people I’ve met from TZM still use this concept of “them” as being separate; of “the system” as if it is this external malevolent force.’
Barney looks at me and shrugs. ‘Well, a lot of people have gone crackers through this. People on the edge emotionally. They are looking for something, and they think they’ve found it, the answer to everything. But it’s not. You have to draw back from that and realise that it’s just a way of thinking about something.’
Ouch. That feels like a real betrayal of those who follow this movement as a prospective saviour of all humankind, the people who devote their lives to it, dismissing them as being ‘crackers’ and ‘on the edge emotionally’. Is Barney just saying that TZM is effectively a thought experiment that challenges our assumptions? It is easier to buy into this way of looking at it, I suppose, far easier than to believe that, as the Zeitgeist movies suggest, the US will eventually merge with Canada and Mexico (the currency will be the ‘Amero’) and later with all of Europe, Africa and Asia, microchipping citizens along the way to suppress dissent against this new One World Government. Can you really unravel the mission of TZM from the conspiracy theories that underpin its very creation as a movement? I don’t think so.
I decide it’s time to wrap up the interview and sit with my thoughts on the train ride home. Human beings have preference, personality, and yes, maybe this is merely the result of social conditioning, but does anyone want to live in a world of biological drones with no culture, no differentiators? For me, this is what makes life so rich, so dynamic, so interesting. It would feel like an act of betrayal for me to trivialise all I’ve experienced this year as theatre. There is more heart to it than that. If I were to have written this book backwards, I might have had a different experience with TZM – I may have been drawn into it more, been less cynical – but the reignited occultist/hippie/geek in me can’t help but rail against it.
God, I’ve changed. Someone bring me my bespoke suit. Quickly.