Post-viewing opinion:
I'll have to lead into my opinion with a brief anecdotal account.
Around fifteen to seventeen years ago, when I was fresh out of high school and pretty much wasting time in aimless youth, a number of friends and I would gather regularly at the local Denny's restaurant chain or a local coffee shop and wax poetically philosophical about the ills of the world and what the world needs to make it 'right'. We'd talk about how all religions have it wrong, how all governments have it wrong, and how the "system" is wrong and makes things worse for people. Inevitably, every conversation came back to the same types of conclusions within the group based on common tropes: money being the root of all evil, thus rich people being more evil than we were; power being a corrupting force, thus people more powerful than us being corrupt (and usually evil, because they had more money); the "system"-- or sometimes, when we got really complicated, "system
s"-- were made up by these corrupt and evil people as a means to keep the corrupt in power and the evil rich; finally, those three things accepted as a given, that people like us in the group who could see these wrongs for what they were would be able to devise a system and run things so that the corrupt would have no power and the evil would have no money. I say that the things were accepted as a given because, in all honesty and in retrospect, those weren't
conclusions we were coming to but instead
bases from which we devised our reasoning, which were then put into the context of being a conclusion to reinforce our views we began reasoning in the first place. Most of us were at least fairly well-read and could use common themes in literature as examples of what we meant-- though we'd consider invocations of stuff like Orwell to be a bit lame and trite-- so I certainly don't want to give the impression that I think I or my friends at the time were stupid or uneducated. However, what hindsight offers me that I didn't have at the time is
perspective and
experience, both things that are integral in coming up with a view of the world around us that colors what we think, how we think, and what we do about what we think.
Since that time in my late teens and early twenties sitting in coffee shops and bemoaning the ills of society, I've done things, gone places, and gained both experience and perspective. I've worked in menial, boring jobs where you really do little more than rote physical work and spend a lot of time pondering nonsense and 'stuff'. I've had jobs where I was making really good money. I've also
lost those jobs and the good money I was making. I've had my own place with a bank account and a car, and I've even spent time begging for spare change on a street near the boardwalk at the shore without a nickel to my name and without an automobile. I've had romances that would be interesting fare for books or television shows, and had heartbreaks to match them. I've taken serious ass-beatings, both when responding with non-violence and with overly aggressive bluster, and I've also held someone down as they were suffocating from an asthma attack while his friends pleaded for me to let him go (and being unable to stop me physically for fear of being shot by an acquaintance of mine). I've celebrated life just for the hell of it and I've also had the unfortunate experience of spending two weeks in a coma from coming within millimeters of death. I've had to move back into a parent's home ashamed, broke, and afraid, but I've more recently had the experience of taking all of my savings and moving halfway across the country for no other reason than to be with the woman I love (and am doing fairly well). I've gone from having a practically estranged relationship with some of my family to now being so dedicated to them that I'd do pretty much anything, even if it required bringing down the stars from the heavens, to ensure that they're safe and well. I've had all of these experiences that I can now use as perspective for my views on life, but I still recognize that I'm not exceptional in my breadth of experience but am instead just one individual among billions on this planet to whom life happens every single day. The difference between me now and me fifteen years ago is that through the
experience of life and the
perspective it's given me, I've been allowed the opportunity to learn from it and improve my point of view to one that's
informed and less self-centered, and it's a process that continues today and I hope will continue until the day I no longer draw breath.
In that three-part interview, Peter Joseph continually reminded me of my group of friends fifteen years ago. He continually talks about "the system" as if there's some monolithic unseen force controlling people. He makes gross (and somewhat insulting) generalizations, even when attempting to seem like he's being specific: his descriptions on the homeless and criminality are ridiculously uninformed, and his hand-waving generalization of "over in Africa" is downright ethnocentric. His naivete shows in his claim that if there were no soldiers that there would be no war. His statements regarding the Venus Project are basically pseudo-anarchist-communism using the conclusion as the basis for the reasons he gives, providing a convenient tautology for recruitment but little in the way of providing any indication that he understands the mechanisms behind how societies work in the first place. Between his pop-psychology analysis of homelessness and criminality and his statements regarding "astrotheology" as if it were in any way a valid school of sociological, historical, or scientific study, the entire interview was basically a modern-day replay of conversations I witnessed fifteen years ago by a group of people for whom practical life experience and perspective based from that were absent.
So, my opinion? He not only took the role of being a cipher for Aaron Russo and Dorothy Murdock, he's also proudly evangelizing for Jacque Fresco. I'm unconvinced that his video presentations and his cause are any different from those who evangelize by handing out Christian bible tracts by Jack Chick. If anything, the interview reinforced that opinion. The fact that the interview he's giving is to
this group, who are modern-day versions of paranormal hucksters, is amusing at best, and an example of how he's willing to play the lowest-common-denominator game for self-promotion (as I said he does in my pre-interview comments).
