Don't worry, we didn't miss twelwe chapters. It's only that “Zeitgeist” chapter could be of exceptional interest, so we give it before its order. Is The Zeitgeist Movement really a path to human future, or is it a path to future “humanity”? What really hides behind the attempt to “secure freedom through technology”?
Ljubodrag Simonovic: The Last Revolution
Contents
- Life-creating mind against destructive mindlessness
- The nature of Marx’s critique of capitalism
- Marx’s conception of nature
- Capitalist exploitation of soil
- “Humanism-Naturalism”
- Marx and capitalist globalism
- The cosmic dimension of man
- “Alienation” and destruction
- Destruction of the body
- Homosexuality
- Capitalist nihilism
- Productive forces
- Dialectics and history
- The integration of people into capitalism
- Technique as myth: Zeitgeist fascism (Part 15a) •|• Technique as myth: Zeitgeist fascism (Part 15b)
- Contemporary bourgeois thought
- Politics as a fraud
- Contemporary critique of capitalism
- Bourgeoisie and proletariat
- October revolution
- Contemporary socialist revolution
- Revolutionary violence
- Vision of a future
- Notes
The Last Revolution -- Chapter Fifteen B
Technique as myth: Zeitgeist fascism
(Translated from Serbian by Vesna Todorović/Petrović)
<< • • • Continued from beginning << • • •
The project of the future advocated by Zeitgeist seeks to create an order superior to capitalism in existential terms, not in humanistic terms. It is an answer to the ever more dramatic existential threat to mankind and as such is an attempt to create a “rational alternative” to a destructive capitalist irrationalism. The problem is that it is not an answer based on the emancipatory potentials of mankind and the life-creating potentials of nature, but on a science and technique that are dehumanized and have become powers alienated from yet governing man. Zeitgeist does not seek to restore man’s creative powers, but to use them to create a new totalitarian order in which technique, as a function of a technocratic “elite”, will have an undisputed power over people. Managing technical processes, which is totalitarian in character, is a way of establishing a totalitarian power over people. The one who controls the processes that ensure the existence of society naturally becomes the master over people. Zeitgeist follows the expansionist spirit of monopolistic capitalism, which enables the new “master race” to establish a monopoly on science and technique and to globalize its power. Mastering the laws of nature becomes a means for the complete submission of man to the wilfulness of technocracy and for halting history.
Zeitgeist is a quasi-religion, which discards the cultural heritage of mankind. Scientific “enlightenment”, on which Zeitgeist insists, is not based on the emancipatory heritage of national cultures and civil society, especially not on the historical struggle of workers for a just society. As far as Zeitgeist‘s dealing with religion is concerned, it is not a combat with illusory worlds and illusory consciousness, but a combat with man as a spiritual being. A combat with the idea of transcendency, which carries within itself an idea for integrating mankind and the idea of equality, becomes one of the ways to destroy the humanistic imagination. Zeitgeist does not differentiate between emancipatory religious consciousness and the religion imposed by religious institutions, which is but a mask serving to deify private property and class order based on exploitation of workers. Religious consciousness is one of the most important historical forms of the development of man as a spiritual being. Without Hellenic spirituality, which is of a religious nature par excellence, modern civilization cannot be imagined. The same goes for Christianity and medieval civilization, as well as for the Renaissance. All that is in the spiritual “genetic code” of mankind, without which the future is not possible. Here, also, it can be seen that Zeitgeist does not differentiate between discarding and overcoming the past and does not respect the emancipatory heritage of mankind, which, above all else, means man as a historical being.
At the political and historical levels, Zeitgeist is, actually, a form in which technocracy acquires political self-consciousness and becomes a new class – one which strives to come out from the shadow of capitalism and take power. It discards private property and money, the main levers of capitalist power, since as a technical “elite”, holding the technical means with which to rule society, it has de facto undisputed power over people. What “The Leader” does with his “collaborators” is to shape the class self-consciousness of technocracy as the ruling class. In Marx's words, it is about technocracy turning from a class in itself into a class for itself. Science, deprived of evaluative judgement, is the new religion of the new class. The undisputable character of “objective” scientific knowledge replaces the undisputability of a “God”. In the center of the “future town” there is no university, theatre, museum, church, gallery or library, but only a technically produced deity: the omnipotent computer. It becomes “The Idol” behind which hide self-proclaimed shadow rulers who determine people's destiny without any responsibility for their actions. What gives Zeitgeist such significance is the fact that technique has become the chief driving force for social development and the most important means for securing power over working people. Zeitgeist, just as other similar political movements, uses humanistic rhetoric, but it is the product of capitalism, fed on the bloody milk that pours from capitalism's steel spigots.
Just as the nature of what is being criticized conditions the nature of the critique, the nature of the ruling order conditions the nature of the struggle against it. In order to prevent people from understanding the true nature of capitalism and plotting an appropriate strategy of struggle against it, Zeitgeist reduces capitalism to the qualities which do not indicate the necessity for a radical political struggle by the oppressed workers and other citizens against capitalism. In that context, the Zeitgeist propagandists conceal the fact that their analysis and critique of capitalism are based on a political project which discards the struggle of the oppressed workers for freedom. Under the guise of a “scientific objectivism”, it eliminates a political analysis of capitalism, indicating that it is a class society based on the power of capitalists over workers, ensured by the police, army, secret agencies (in the USA alone there are about 3200 (!) agencies employing almost 850,000 people), paramilitary, crime and mafia groups, public media, entertainment industries, churches… The Zeitgeist's combat with history is actually a combat with the historical struggle of the working people against the class movement and colonialism. The leaders of Zeitgeist do not even think about dealing with the American and French revolutions, as it is through them that the bourgeois class came to power, but they ruthlessly deal with the Russian and Chinese revolutions – since they helped workers and peasants overthrow capitalists and free themselves from the colonial yoke. Workers' and anti-colonial revolutions are reduced to a “crime”. Likewise, the leaders of Zeitgeist do not bother to speak about the monstrous crimes of capitalists and their colonial phalanges, since in the light of those crimes the peasants', workers' and anti-colonial revolutions acquire a true, emancipatory and existential dimension. They do not mention the monstrous campaign of eradication of tens of millions of Native Americans by American capitalists; bestial murders and death from exhaustion of tens of millions of Africans who worked as slaves on the plantations of American land owners; tens of millions of children who, at the time of the industrial revolution, died in mines and factories where they worked for 14 hours per day; tens of millions of workers and peasants who died in the First and Second World Wars, launched by European, American and Japanese capitalists; about atrocious crimes of European capitalists in China, India, Africa, Central and South America and the Middle East, and over 200 million killed, including millions of children; dozens of criminal “humanitarian interventions”, which were launched after the Second World War by the American capitalists in order to steal other people's territories and enable the development of a military-industrial complex which is the spine of a “new world order” and the biggest threat to the survival of mankind; the fact that, thanks to the economic fascism of the most powerful capitalist states in the world, over 30 000 children die every day from starvation; the “consumer society” with which capitalism seeks to “solve” the problem of hyper-production and ensure further development has brought about such ecological destruction of the Earth and such climate changes that the survival of mankind is being called into question… At the same time, the ideologues of Zeitgeist are concealing the destructive potential of the capitalist way of developing the productive forces and the fascist potential of capitalist “democracy” and, in that context, the monstrous plans of the most powerful capitalist groups in the West to kill, by technological and biological means, the “surplus” of over 6 billion people. They do not speak of the true nature of capitalism, since in view of the tendency of developing capitalism as a totalitarian order of destruction, the true nature and political reach of the Zeitgeist movement would be manifested, and this only means that it is but one of the detours in the struggle against capitalism and as such serves to buy time for capitalism and, thus, contribute to the destruction of mankind and life on the Earth.
Unlike Saint-Simon, Fourier and Marx, who see in conflicts between social groups (classes) the engine of social progress, the ideologues of Zeitgeist think, like Compte and Spencer, that political conflicts jeopardise the development of society – which should be an organic, harmoniously functioning, whole. Political pluralism is removed from the Zeitgeist project of the future. Zeitgeist is based on the “fact”, upon which the ideologues of capitalism insist and which is in the basis of Compte's social theory, that the history of class struggles is over. By fighting to establish an order based on the undisputed rule of technocracy, Zeitgeist sees in the struggle of the oppressed for freedom the worst form of social pathology. Not only are freedom and progress incompatible, they are opposed. Everything is eliminated from the legacy of mankind that can contribute to the development of the consciousness of the oppressed working “masses” that they are the creators of social goods and bearers of social progress. Hence Zeitgeist abolishes evaluative criteria and evaluative judgements. The ideals of the French Revolution (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité), on which modern humanism is based, do not exist in the Zeitgeist project of the future. The ultimate political goal of the Zeitgeist doctrine and practice is the elimination of the emancipatory heritage of mankind which offers the possibility of the creation of a new world and a complete and irrevocable blending of man with the ruling order. “Reconciliation” (Compte) of those deprived of their rights with the established order of non-freedom and inequality is conditio sine qua non of the “new order” in the development of society advocated by Zeitgeist. The world as a space where workers are dominated by an undisputed and eternal technocratic “elite”– this is the ultimate goal of Zeitgeist progress. It represents the end of the evolution of a society based on conflict. “Reconciliation” and “perfection” become the foundation of social life. The principle of competitiveness is abolished by the principle of totalitarian technocratic domination.
Zeitgeist is akin to Compte’s idea of order, which exists in society when there is a stability of ruling principles and when all members of society are of the same opinion. According to Compte, such a state existed in the feudal period, in places ruled by Catholicism. Following the Catholic counter-revolutionary thinkers Lois de Bonald and Joseph-Marie de Maistre, Compte deals with Protestantism as a “negative ideology” (Maistre), which only creates “intellectual anarchy”. With the development of the science of society, as its spiritual pillar, people will again think in the same way, ensuring the stability of society. Compte came to the idea that was to become the fundamental political principle of Zeitgeist: a new (scientist) religion should be created, as well as a new clergy, which would unite society like the Catholic Church did in the Middle Ages. Achieving one-mindedness based on undisputed “objective” scientific knowledge is the basis of both Compte’s and Zeitgeist’s political conception. Basically, Zeitgeist abolishes the right of people to have their own opinion, as well as a capacity to resolve, as rational beings, (inevitable) conflicts in a reasonable way, in the interests of society. By abolishing people’s capability to settle their disputes as rational beings, as well as their relation to nature and the future, Zeitgeist abolishes the most important potential of human society, making the rule of a technocratic “elite” unnecessary. By striving to establish a technocratic totalitarianism, Zeitgeist, in fact, strives to destroy man’s political being, which is his emancipated social being. Zeitgeist doctrine deals with Aristotle’s thesis that man is a zoon politikon, which is the alpha and omega of the political constitution of modern society. Zeitgeist abolishes the state as a political community of citizens and society as a community of free and rational people. There is no Rousseau’s “social contract”, according to which society is the result of mutual agreements between people, nor Compte’s sociability, which “results spontaneously from human nature itself”. Basically, Zeitgeist abolishes the citizen as a constitutive factor of society as a political community, and thus abolishes civil society.
Since it deals with history, Zeitgeist abolishes the idea of progress created in the New Age, which insists on scientific development being associated with the realization of man’s “natural rights”, social justice and overall social development (Jacques Turgot, Nicolas de Condorcet). Similarly, Zeitgeist discards Compte’s historical conception and thus the “theological” and “metaphysical” phase in the development of mankind. For Zeitgeist, mankind’s past is on the same temporal plane, which means that strivings to step out of the existing world are meaningless. The Zeitgeist ideology does away with the idea of progress, which involves not only quantitive shifts, but also qualitative leaps in the development of society and the creation of a novum. Here we should recall Vindelband’s warning that the transformation of society in itself does not necessarily mean progress and that we should differentiate between a “higher” and a “more valuable” social order. Zeitgeist has not advanced much from the old Roman progressus, which consists of progress without a novum. Only (endless) quantitative shifts are possible, progress in the given spatial and temporal dimensions – progressing without progress. What is “new” is that progressing is reduced to the eventual abolishment of any possibility of stepping out of the technical world.
The Zeitgeist conception of progress has an instrumental character and is based on the development of science and technology, which become the exclusive means for the new ruling class to establishing totalitarian power: man becomes the slave of his own productivistic (creative) practice. The Zeitgeist progress is based on a positivistic scientific mind, which departs from the maxim savoir pour prevoir, prevoir pour agir, which means that planning for the future, as an undisputed privilege of the ruling “elite”, is the alpha and omega of the Zeitgeist theory of progress. The instrumental character of the Zeitgeist doctrine comes from its endeavour to rationally plan the future, which involves the prediction of obstacles that can jeopardize established “progress”, as well as being the means for their efficient elimination. Zeitgeist is a peculiar service of the technocracy for “planning the future”. Its antidemocratic nature indicates the true (antidemocratic) nature of capitalism. While Compte insists on the “development” and “perfectioning” of society, in Zeitgeist, the dominant idea is that of a “new beginning”, based on the cult of “The Leader” and the scientific practice of the technocratic “elite”. The creation of a new world does not involve the realization of a particular evaluative ideal, but a complete integration of man into the new order. Instead of advocating a change in social relations and the development of productive forces and man’s creative powers, Zeitgeist advocates the creation of a new “master elite”, which will manage efficiently to do away with the emancipatory heritage of mankind and the libertarian movement. Zeitgeist is akin to Spencer: “perfectioning” is based on the dying out of the improper and the survival of the proper functions of the social organism. Zeitgeist also does not seek to preserve the world as it is, but to “perfect” it by eliminating all that can jeopardize the order on which it is based. It seeks to do away with the emancipatory heritage of mankind and thus its theory means calling on technocracy to embark upon a crusade against all that leads to stepping out of the existing world. Zeitgeist‘s activistic intention is based on the strivings of the technocratic elite to rearrange society to suit its own interests and to colonize the planet. The world as a technically perfected concentration camp where all hope for a true human world is gone – this is the ideal of the “perfect” world sought by Zeitgeist. Nothing can halt the pace of progress, which means the self-willingness of the ruling “elite”. The Zeitgeist conception, in the form of technocracy, “unites” an absolutized voluntarism and an absolutized progressism. The authoritarian establishment of Zeitgeist is, among other things, based on this: the leaders of Zeitgeist are not responsible to anyone. They are self-proclaimed guardians of the holy “scientific spirit” that rules the world and on which the survival and “perfectioning” of society is based. The creation of a “new world” involves the destruction of critical consciousness and the pacification of workers: the public (political) sphere is the privilege of the ruling “elite”. The struggle for a “new society” involves a pedagogical reform, which will bring about the creation of a uniform personal character and a uniform view of the world. The ultimate reach of this struggle is the complete elimination of the critical and a changing mind and the idea of the future, that is, the realization of the idea of “order” and of “progress” as the establishment of a complete and final domination by technocracy over man (mankind) and the planet (nature) – which is reduced to being the source of energy and raw material. Zeitgeist seeks to prevent the development of the productivistic (potentially creative) powers of workers from allowing them to appear on the political scene by challenging the undisputed power of the technocratic “elite”. Zeitgeist seeks to prevent man from acquiring, by way of a productivistic (creative) practice, consciousness of himself as a libertarian being and the creator of (his own) history. The “negative” starting point of the Zeitgeist doctrine is the truth that man is capable of creating a world in his own image.
The idea of progress advocated by Zeitgeist has a technocratic nature and does away with the progress which involves the realization of man’s humanistic potential and mankind’s humanistic ideals, both having a historical character. It is based on strivings to realize the manipulative possibilities of technique in the context of conquering nature and establishing control over people. Hence the future is a product of a technocratic rather than a humanistic imagination. Zeitgeist does not find the ideal of a perfect world in the past, but in some totalitarian technical world. By abolishing history, Zeitgeist deprived progress of purpose and meaning, which means that in a cultural time-frame, which is the “true space of history” (Marx), it turned progress into a physical, “purely mechanical passage of time” (Ernst Bloch) beyond history. Unlike the predecessors of modernity, who strove to be visionaries (Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier…), Zeitgeist seeks to destroy the vision of the future along with the visionary mind. It does away with the “fantasy” of overcoming the capitalist world, at the same time as it seeks to create with the Project Venus a fantastic manifestation of the principle on which the existing world is based. The pictures of a “future world” become the means for destroying the visionary imagination and the need to dream. Zeitgeist “overcomes” Leibniz’s theodicy: the designed world is not “the best of all possible worlds”, it is the only possible world. It is the only alternative to capitalism, and it is not reached by critical confrontation with other alternatives, but by imposing it on mankind through technical means and advertising methods used by the capitalist propaganda machine. Like Compte’s philosophy, the Zeitgeist project of the future heralds the “end of utopia”, the difference being that it does not do away only with the idea of utopia, but with the possibility of its realization as well. The Zeitgeist ideology is a means for preventing the objective possibilities of freedom from becoming realistic possibilities for man’s liberation through the destruction of critical consciousness and workers’ and citizens’ practices for (potentially revolutionary) change. This is what gives Zeitgeist a repressive character: the bigger the objective possibilities for man to step out of a repressive civilization into a civilization of freedom, the more aggressively the technocracy tries to destroy his libertarian dignity and visionary mind. Zeitgeist is one of the manifestations of the ruling principle of monopolistic capitalism, “Destroy the competition!”, which has a universal character and involves destruction of all those political ideas and movements which offer a humanistic alternative to capitalism. It is not a coincidence that the Zeitgeist propagandists do not speak of a libertarian history of mankind and human communities that lived in unity with nature. They do not want to incite people to fight for freedom, nor do they want to suggest that people could establish a rational and cultivating relation with nature, without becoming slaves of the technocratic order headed by the self-proclaimed “elite” of scientists.
Unlike the ideas of the future generated at the onset of capitalism, which are based on existential optimism, the Zeitgeist project of the future is a direct result of the ever more dramatic existential crisis into which mankind has been brought by capitalism. The truth is that capitalism brought the world to the edge of an abyss, enabling inhumane visions like the Zeitgeist project of the future to acquire legitimacy, public promotion and popularity in Western “democracies”. The same goes for Stephen Hawking's call to do away with “traditional mankind”, as well as for his claim that human beings must leave the Earth within the next 200 years; for the idea of a “man-cyborg”, “terminators”, “androids”, Hollywood “cosmic epopee“; for the “argument” that over 6 billion people must be killed in order for mankind to survive – which is gaining popularity in the West… Zeitgeist is one of the projects of the future that avers that capitalism cannot resolve the existential crisis it creates departing from its proclaimed “democratic principles”. The increasing ruthlessness with which capitalists abuse basic human and civil rights is the expression of an existential panic created by capitalism – which could turn into a political movement to destroy capitalism. At the same time, the increasingly inhumane projects of the future indicate the fascist potential of capitalism and its accumulated destructive powers, which at any moment could get out of control and destroy mankind.
The Zeitgeist idea of the future relies on the idea that science and technology are the means by which man conquers natural forces and becomes the “master and possessor of nature” (maître et possesseur de la nature – René Descartes). It deals with the notion that regards nature as man’s life-creating, aesthetic and historical space. In that context, the world is not a life-creating and spiritual whole, but the source of energy and raw material. The dominant logic is a primitive economic logic imposed by capitalism, which cuts the life-creating bond between nature and man, according to the North American chief of the Seattle tribe, the “spinning wheel of life”, of which man is an organic part. Zeitgeist abolishes the humanity and naturality of man’s living space, and, thus, his life-creating, historical, visionary and aesthetic potential, reducing his to a technically degenerated living environment. There is no creative spontaneity, nothing is unexpected, there is no openness to this living space of the future… The world is not a humane, but a technocratic whole. Cities do not reflect man’s life as a visionary, but as a technical being. Zeitgeist cities do not have an artistic, but a technical form. It is not man’s artistic being and creative spontaneity, but a dehumanised scientific mind and technocratic efficiency that are the integrative force of society. The living environment is reduced to a technically produced ghetto, in which man is forced to live as he has no other living space. The insistence on a technocratic existential principle, which is but an embodiment of the capitalist life style and a projection into the future of the capitalist way of life, abolishes the essential life principle. The Zeitgeist project of the future is the reincarnation of the capitalist world in a technically perfected form. That is why Zeitgeist discards the idea of the genuine sociability and the development of human relations as the most important precondition for the creation of a humane society.
The project of future cities created by the Zeitgeist designers is based on the notion that in a human settlement one sees not a humanized natural space and, as such, the realization of man as a historical, social, cultural, libertarian, life-creating, aesthetic and visionary being, but rather a technically organized life space. In them, people are deprived of unity with nature and natural living, and thus of their genuine natural being. A city as a concrete historical space is the embodiment of the ruling order and the ruling way of life in a direct material sense. It is a degenerated space taken from nature and thus is a violation of nature. It is the concentration of power by the ruling order in physical, spiritual and functional sense. At the same time, a city is a class creation and a form of class domination. The way of life, nature and structure of human relations – all this is conditioned by the nature of the ruling order and the mechanisms of its functioning. In the form of a “citizen”, man becomes a corporal, spiritual and functional member of the ruling order. Man's emancipation from being a “citizen” involves the abolishment of the city as a space alienated from nature and the creation of such human habitats as will enable man to realize himself as an emancipated natural being. Architecture should be based on the principle of humanized, and not technicized, natural surroundings. Instead of a humanized technical space, the world should become a humanized natural space. In fact, the world should become a global village, where man will live in direct unity with nature. At the same time, a living space should be open to the future, and not given by the manipulative powers of technique. Man's creative powers as a libertarian being and the life-creating potential of nature are the basis on which a living environment and man's life within it should be created and developed. Instead of a technical project, the living environment should be a work of art.
Zeitgeist does not only abolish history, but also the evolution of living beings. It creates a “new beginning” of the living world and man, which is based on scientific ideas and technical innovations. This is also the basis for the production of food. It creates technical gardens which will produce scientifically raised (artificial) plants in a scientifically produced (artificial) soil. In a biologically healthy soil, one cubic meter contains over 270 living species. Each species creates its own micro world, and all those worlds together create the quality of the soil based on the evolution of the living world over the last 3 billion years. The same goes for plants, which Zeitgeist deprives of natural surroundings and original naturality and creates their surrogates in an industrial way using computer regulation. There are no free natural surroundings, no multiculturality and, thus, no co-existence of plants, there is no renovation of the abundance of natural forms, no insects (bees, above all), birds nor hundreds of animal species, which means that there is no co-existence of plant and animal species on which the life-creating totality of nature is based. Zeitgeist does not strive for the naturalization of the living world and renewal of nature's life-creating force. Hence, there can be no historical character to the struggle for the preservation and humanization of nature and, in that context, no Paul-Henri Holbach, Claude Helvétius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Charles Fourier, Ludwig Feuerbach, nor Karl Marx with his principle “humanism-naturalism” and the thesis that nature is man's “anorganic body”. The starting point of the Zeitgeist project of the future is an ecologically barren land produced by capitalist “progress”.
The Zeitgeist anthropological model indicates the way in which existential reductionism, conditioned by the development of capitalism as a totalitarian order of destruction, conditions anthropological (and any other forms of) reductionism. The Zeitgeist project of the future appears in the form of a one-dimensional world deprived of historicity and limited by technical borders within which there is no room for naturality and humanity. A dehumanized and denaturalized world produces a dehumanized and denaturalized man. It is a “one-dimensional man” (Marcuse), whose one-dimensionality is conditioned by the technical world that reduces society to a mechanised ant hill. The Zeitgeist ideology is based on a mutilated notion of man. It is one of the curved mirrors created by capitalism in which man can see only his degenerated image. According to Zeitgeist, it is not capitalism that causes the destruction of the world, but the evil contained in man, which appears in the form of a class, national and religious consciousness. By way of the “objective” scientific mind, we can drive out the demons from people's heads and thus resolve conflicts threatening the survival of mankind. It is a peculiar scientistic exorcism by which an empty man is created, deprived of a cultural and libertarian self-consciousness, and, as such, is rendered a raw material for the making of a “new man”, suited to the technocratic project of the future that Zeitgeist seeks to realize.
The anthropological project of Zeitgeist can best be seen viewed against the humanistic ideas of man created through history. The ideal of man who lived in unity with nature, the antique kalokagathos, the Christian contemplative man, the Renaissance l'uomo universale, Rousseau's Emile, Nietzsche's “synthetical” man, Marx's man as a universal creative being of freedom – all these are ideas of man with an emancipatory nature and are as such superior to the idea of man offered by Zeitgeist. In its anti-humane potential, the anthropological project of Zeitgeist is akin to the Nazi project of a “Superman” (Übermensch). As did the Nazis, the ideologues of Zeitgeist discard the libertarian and cultural heritage of mankind and seek to create a “new man” according to scientific criteria and in a technical way, a man suited to the nature of a technical world. Unlike the Nazi “Superman”, whose self-consciousness is rooted in the mythological past of the German race (the myth of Siegfried and Nibelungs), the Zeitgeist “new man” is deprived of both historical and mythological consciousness. If we use historical analogies, the Zeitgeist “new man” is most akin to Compte's “positive man”, apart from the fact that Compte's is dominated by a positive scientific consciousness, while in Zeitgest he is genetically disfigured. The creation of a surrogate-man corresponds to the basic intention of modern capitalism – to destroy “traditional mankind” and create a “new man” (cyborg) suited to the technical world in which everything is produced in laboratories. We should bear in mind that the Zeitgeist movement sprouted from American soil, where the only (native) people with a history, who lived in unity with nature, were destroyed; in a world where nothing has an enduring value; in a world where anything can be “produced” and turned into money – including man.
The Zeitgeist project by itself is a technocratic phantasm, but the most important thing is the concrete social (political) effect it produces. Zeitgeist appeals to lonely young people who are lost in the destructive capitalist nothingness and who lack historical self-consciousness and social being. It does not seek to awaken in them humanity and motivate them to fight against capitalism and for a humane world, it rather seeks to instrumentalize their desolation. Zeitgeist offers young people, the victims of capitalism, a technically degenerated picture of the future, which is but one of the ideological forms in which the capitalist world appears. It is, in fact, about a technocratic illusion emanating from the capitalist propaganda sphere. The owners of the Zeitgeist movement have money and organisation and use the Internet as a means for imposing on young people the “vision of the future”, using the mechanisms of manipulation on which the advertising industry is based. The “vision of the future” becomes a commodity in the capitalist market place of illusions, one that is spectacularly packaged. Zeitgeist eliminates from people's heads the real world and creates a virtual one that destroys the humanistic and produces a technocratic imagination. Just as the capitalist propaganda machinery turns people's need for clear mountain water into a “need” for a tasteless Coca-Cola, so is their craving for a humane world turned into “craving” for a dehumanized and denaturalized world. The technocratic vision of the world becomes a modern illusion that appeals to young people stuck to computer screens, whose social, which means political, being has been destroyed. They live in a virtual world and their consciousness and imagination are but a reflexion of what is offered to them every day through their computer screens. Their mental activism is reduced to receiving and sending e-mails and to the creation of a computer phantom, who will represent them in a virtual Facebook world. Zeitgeist addresses the “computer generation”, which means technically degenerated young people who do not care for the cultural and libertarian heritage of mankind. To make matters worse, they personalize their relation to the computer, and it becomes everything they are missing: a friend, a lover, a brother… That is why many of them are confused by the critique of the Zeitgeist doctrine. It is a decoy for atomized people, which creates an illusion of sociability and engagement. Zeitgeist offers them the possibility to be “critical” and to continue to live in “their” world. It is an alibi for those who are not strong enough to leave their caves and to come, along with other young people, into the daylight. “The Leader” is a connection between the virtual world, on computer screens, and the real world where young people should be engaged. Their “engagement” is actually reduced to waiting for the “Messiah” to send them a message by way of the Internet, after which they will “change the world”. They are not people who live and act as social beings, but rather lonely people who respond to a button that will be pressed by the one who has the remote control. The “fans” of Zeitgeist are reduced to teledirected rats. By destroying people's historical and social self-consciousness, capitalism turns them into idiots who are willing to rely on a mystified power of technique and resigned to the loss of elementary human and civil rights, since these rights, in their desolate hopelessness, mean nothing to them. What does the right to fly the skies mean to a falcon, if its wings have been cut off and it is locked in a cage, condemned to death?
The Zeitgeist picture of a future world is, actually, a combat with man's humanistic potential and humanistic imagination. It is not the world of free people, but a technically perfected concentration camp, where technically degenerated people live their futile lives. The Zeitgeist project of the future is one of the manifestations of the idea of the end of history. We can only imagine today how people who manage to free themselves from the chains of capitalism and create a humane world will live, think and dream. We are all victims of capitalism and bear its stamp. Our vision of the future is not the vision of free people, but a vision created on the basis of and relative to capitalism, which means that it is conditioned by the capitalist civilisation. A struggle for the future cannot be based on designing plans in which future generations are given a way of living, but on a struggle to liberate mankind from the capitalist (technical) tyranny. Young people should become capable of taking over the management of the entire process of social reproduction. The basic precondition is to leave their lonely dams and to get organised for a struggle in the real world. Fighting sociability, with which all modes of mediation between man and (his) world will be abolished, is the only true force that can prevent the destruction of life on the Earth and create a humane world.
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