I just watched the freely downloadable film Zeitgeist on my little laptop. It’s a very powerful, if deeply flawed film, that tries to tie together the ritualistic domination of religion, government, and corporations into one fell message: That the future will be theirs if we, as North Americans, don’t wake up. I won’t give away the semi-science fiction ending of the two-hour long semi-documentary. But I will say that the film makes a good case study for us to look at the hard reality of the world and not the one filtered for us by television, the media, the workplace, major corporations, tax and national regimes.
The film, with its retailored conspiracy theories and rehashing of religious history, doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but it does make me ask the bigger question of why we are in the state in which we are.
The film is immensely watchable and it make me really wonder if I should shut off my television for my family for one week or maybe two, look around, and read and love more deeply than ever before. It actively calls for a profound awakening among all of us to look at the world through the lenses of love and natural being rather than war and fear. As banal as that sounds, it reminds me of many of the messages of the early English Romantic poet, William Blake, who I studied and wrote about in college.
Here is just a sampling of quotes from the great Blake:
“The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.”
“To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.”
“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.”
And the most powerful of them all:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
If you want to see the movie the Googlopology, it starts here. More info about the movie and its critics can also be found, though, surprisingly, these seem few and far between.