The "zeitgeist critique" (my term, they would use "the movement" but I find this term irritating) of our current political and economic situation is rather unsophisticated. It iterates an ideological position that has already been widely problematized and rejected numerous times over the last few decades. The zeitgeist narrator makes the same mistakes Corbusier and the modernists did. They imagined a kind of "techo-socialism" (IKEA meets torrents) in which technology would be harnessed to produce "the best" product or tool for the job, Corbusiers "machines for X". The conception in zeitgeist as well as the conception of the modernists was a criminal oversimplification of the problems of industrial design and manufacturing and is a woefully inadequate model for anything resembling "economy". There is a strange type of cultural imperialism at work here, a kind of "back door" social engineering that though intriguing is ultimately unfulfilling. Variously throughout the film we hear that the so called ideas of "strategic preservation" "strategic safety" and "strategic efficiency" are "NOT OPINION!". Not opinion!? Yet again, ideology at its purest. Ideology concealing the fact that it exists. Its most true function. This is the same mistake the modernists made. They imagined we might have a "perfect" chair for example. "A machine for sitting". A chair that fulfilled all of the social, cultural, functional, and aesthetic requirements and then we could just mass produce them for everyone. That would be it, that whole "chair" question would be solved forever. Modernists referred to it as designing "for the year zero". The year zero never happened of course, and it never will, there is no zero year, the implication that once we solved the problem of "the chair" or "the shoe" or whatever, that it would be solved forever, mission accomplished, rationality and objective fact would of won over mere aesthetic.
Although I completely sympathize with this notion of rationality, it is after all very comforting, we need only probe the question a bit further to uncover the flaws within this seemingly rational scoring of thing. It has at this point I believe been made quite obvious by our contemporary society of conspicuous consumption that individuals do not acquire or desire products for the want of any function of the product itself but instead for any of a variety of complex social and cultural reasons. I do not value a lexus because it moves me from point A to point B but instead because of social and cultural symbolism associated with the object itself. Indeed the revolution in industrial design, and further, society at large, brought about by post-modernism has been the realization that the symbolic social and cultural value of an object or institution not only outstrips and overrides its "functional" value, but that the symbolic value is almost entirely the only value of an object or institution people recognize. And that moreover we might apply this teaching to almost everything humans conceive. It is not the function of the institution, say, our economy, that is important, indeed all rational and objective observations are subsumed in the symbolic value of these institutions and their behaviors. Indeed the very system we live within exemplifies this as outlined in the zeitgeist critique itself. Our current economic reality is fundamentally absurd, inefficient, self destructive and completely out of control! And yet this realty, no matter how objectively correct, is completely disconnected from our conception of the system and therein the system functions and thrives.
Moreover recent economic crises and the endless stream of criticism of this economic model over the decades has further complicated the dialog, we are stuck, and im paraphrasing zizek again, in a mode of discussion in which the response is "Yes, I know very well that our capitalist free market system is creating an increasing income gap and is destroying the environment and whatever else, but what other way could the system work!?" Simply, as they do in the zeitgeist criticism, reiterating the absurdity of fractional reserve banking, if anyone even can sit through the boring retelling of the thing, is not enough. Simply "getting the word out" is not enough. From the very beginning of its conception free market principles have been criticized for not accounting for externalities, inequalities, and the inhumanity of man (amongst other things). Even the proponents of capitalism acknowledge these problems but the response then and now has always been "yes but what other system would we have and how would it be implemented?" This free market system works very much not because it is rational but because it is natural. An outgrowth of the interaction between human biology and its environment. Economics is I believe very much a ecology of humanity. Like art or architecture or language. The zeitgeist movement seeks to engineer society and economy at entirely the wrong level. Making more efficient cars, redistributing wealth, these seemingly rational answers in fact "solve" nothing.
To truly understand the mechanism of this system we must understand the biology of the system that brings it into existence. The ecology of the ecology you might say. I would contend, and here is where everyone really will tune out, that what we need is, to turn Corbusiers phrase, a "machine for economy". Economic engineering. In our current state we barely can divine the behaviors of markets and we are only just starting to understand the workings of the human mind. This is for me, no coincidence. If an honest attack was made with the "science" of economics we might be able to finesse the ecology of the world economy into some sort of system we could at least stand to look at the morning after. I imagine our current attitudes to world economy like a primitive hunter gatherer might of treated the first sheep or goats or wolf. Some kind of strange untamed beast fleeing through the woods. We are only just beginning to even conceive of what might be possible with true economic engineering, with an "agriculture" of economy. The slash and burn techniques of old that have sustained us for some time are obviously flawed and failing. We now must imagine a sustainable ecology of economy. In which we actively plan for our economic future and harness these natural forces rather than sitting idly and being assailed at their whim. Ham-fisted attempts at authoritarian control, say for instance a computer organizing all production and consumption in the entire world in order to create orders of efficiency and precision unheard of, as of yet, seems patently absurd to me. This answer lacks all subtlety, like replacing a leg with a wooden stick. The answer to the zeitgeist critique should not be a distancing of ourselves from our current economic model but instead a intensity of familiarization. A complete reevaluation of the way in which we engage economy on all levels. Governmental, social, etc.
