The movie opens with the following quote:

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay.  And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable.  And help to change it.”  -Ernst Fisher

I’m not usually one to link to movies of this type, all to often, they easily fall into the same traps of the rhetoric of fear and start to sound like conspiracy theories.  A good example of this is found in the views on the current economic systems portrayed.  The people interviewed give a fairly one-sided view of the system as decaying like the quote suggests, which is to be expected, I guess.  I wish though that there were at least a couple of interviews of what some economists think of the views discussed inside and about the current model and where it is headed.  If the scientific method is used to come up with solutions I would also expect it to be used to paint as unbiased an opinion as possible.  I’m too easily reminded of propaganda when selective picking of people to support your argument is done while ignoring people who oppose it.  When you want to win people over to your cause, I do believe it’s essential to understand the opposition’s arguments and counter them. In this case, there is none of that.

Secondly, even if say the movie’s observations on the current economic and social systems would prove to be objectively accurate, it feels like it falls short not necessarily in the solutions it attempts to provide but mostly in painting a believable bridge between where we are now and where we should be.  While I have nothing against applying the scientific method to solve our current unsustainability problems, I can’t help but feel it to be naive to expect that people are just going to give up everything they’ve had and believed to be important to their lives until now and adopt this new system.  It would maybe take exactly what they talk about in the movie, a catastrophic global breakdown of the economy and social fabric to get people to change that fast.  Even then, if we take the Global Financial Crisis as an example, instead of widespread change and rebuilding of the model, what we saw was the system being bailed out so that it could continue where it left off.  I remember at Uni, one of our assignments had been to create a mock project for a non-profit organisation and one of the biggest challenges that I had encountered, was not that they people did not care about most of these issues affecting the world.  They simply had no idea what simple steps they could take towards changing towards something better.  Notice the word simple here, because between debt, mortgage, family, work and social activities, rare are the people that find time to actively seek ways to make meaningful changes in their society, let alone change the world.  And all of these things are not about to just disappear because we believe they shouldn’t exist as the movie suggests.

While this may seem like me bashing the movie to bits, it’s really not.  Overall this movie moved me enough that I thought it worthwhile to sit down and write this blog post.  I admire the effort to change a system that the author believes is fundamentally flawed, I would have liked though to see the other side of the coin as it currently is too easy to dismiss it as conspiracy theory by nay-sayers.  If any of you out there have watched the movie and have some good counter-arguments or links to some useful ideas to bridge the the two systems, feel free to add to the comments at the bottom to further this discussion.