My name is Henry Brade and I am from The Zeitgeist Movement in Finland.
I am from Helsinki, the capital of Finland.
I'm a co-founder of the movement in Finland.
I heard about the movement first time when I saw Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist:Addendum
In the end was a text suggesting to go to
www.TheZeitgeistMovement.com
I went there and there was a Finnish community
There was a forum in Finnish already
There I got to know other Finns who were excited about the idea.
Then we met and founded the movement in Finland.
That's how it started.
The reason why I joined is that
I've been generally interested in societal matters even before these
Zeitgeist films.
The Zeitgeist:Addendum was something that
somehow connected the dots
and gave reasons behind the
world gone mad.
That sunk in really nicely.
The awesome thing about the resource based
economy is that it's thinking outside the box.
I've been generally interested in political issues before this movement and
somehow the proposals that the politicians are suggesting as solutions
are ridiculously narrow and something that are not going to inflict real change
They focus on symptoms rather than causes of problems.
This resource based economy focuses namely on the root problems.
That's the starting point.
I find it wonderful that the starting point is human needs and well-being of the environment.
This kind of real and meaningful matters,
unlike in market economy
where we just follow the circulation of money and that kind of things. Human needs are disregarded.
Wants are more in the focus: how can we create new wants?
This doesn't exist in resource based economy.
The Finnish Zeitgeist Movement started a couple of months after Zeitgeist:Addendum was released.
It was January 2009.
It started from Helsinki.
We were about 15 people
and it spread out really quickly
The whole Southern Finland was covered
and even Oulu joined later.
We've had activities in more than 10 cities.
A big challenge has been
to figure out how to maintain the activities
while everyone is doing this on voluntary basis,
voluntary cooperation.
The work that people do for The Zeitgeist Movement
competes with rest of the life.
There might be a paid job, family life and the like,
which get prioritized, when for instance livelihood is needed.
There's a tiny motivation problem:
How to keep the people active?
It feels like old members are resigning at the same rate as
the new members join.
The net growth in the movement is fairly small.
That has been problematic.
On the other hand we've achieved a lot here in Finland.
We've had a lot of events.
We've had stunts on the street.
We have made a Finnish
Zeitgeist film and now
a Finnish Zeitgeist book came out.
So, in that sense, this has expanded and grown a lot.
So, all in all, during these past few years we've developed quite a bit.
We had the fourth annual meeting of
The Zeitgeist Movement in Finland and it went pretty well.
For the first time it was in the capital, in Helsinki.
Previously it has taken place in Tampere.
It was really well organized event.
There were all sorts of lectures, covering many topics and not much repetition.
All practicalities, such as catering, functioned perfectly.
Very nice event indeed.
These national meetings in general have been something that
brings together ther whole Zeitgeist Movement in Finland.
People come hundreds of kilometers, all over Finland, to meet others
who support the movement.
It has been just awesome.
These lectures were really well planned
in a sense that they brought up
many highly interesting topics.
For instance, we talked about time banks which is a very interesting topic
and food: the quality of contemporary food and organic food
this kind of things.
And one lecture addressed the power of the media
the way the agenda of the media guides people's opinions.
Then there was a really good lecture about communality and
of course I held one lecture
about the thoughts and solutions suggested by The Zeitgeist Movement.
Very diverse and
interesting lectures.
As for the participants:
we had - like in all national events - people from all over Finland.
We had one person from all the way in Rovaniemi and a bigger bunch from Oulu.
Most were from Southern Finland though.
The movement is focused in the cities in Southern Finland,
but it's good that we had people from the North as well.
The fact that they care to come all the way to Helsinki
is of course really nice.
We have had all kinds of meetings in
The Zeitgeist Movement in Finland.
Apart from the official national meetings
we've had more informal
get-together weekends.
For instance two summers ago we spent the whole weekend together on a cottage.
We were some 10-15 people there
convened in Central Finland from all over the country.
It was a very interesting weekend.
It was mainly getting to know each other and spending time together.
Then we had this extempore idea to go and spread out flyers and DVDs in
the centre of the small town.
It was really fun and nice,
we chatted with people and it was
more like physical contact and communication,
rather than just internet activism.
Last summer we visited an ecovillage.
We spent the whole weekend in the only
ecovillage in Finland
where they wish to live sustainably
It's a lifestyle there:
all the people long for more sustainable way of life.
In that sense our values were really close to one another and
they also digged the thoughts of The Zeitgeist Movement a lot.
The most rewarding thing in this activism is
probably the fact that you meet like-minded people
and you can have discussions at the same wawelength.
You don't have to talk about superficialities.
It's rare to have shallow discussions with the people from The Zeitgeist Movement.
It's good contrast to
every-day conversations that I have with my other friends.
You can go really deep in the conversations with these people.
That has been really rewarding
and also the fact that you see new people awaken to reality and
see that due to your work in the movement new people spring up and they say:
"Your work enabled me to even find out about the movement"
For sure that's rewarding.
It's great.
Probably the most challenging thing in the movement is to get people do things proactively.
We have tried to function so that
people would do everything on their own
but we've had to acknowledge the fact that in practice
people do need, not necessarily leading, but some sort of guidance
Some people are proactive and do things on their own and
some people won't do anything unless there is someone guiding them.
In the Finnish activities we have learned this the hard way:
we do need more guidance.
Many people who are more active might get frustrated
in the whole thing if it looks like that people are not
doing anything if you are not holding their hand.
It requires right kind of approach,
right methods,
to make it function properly.
Finland is, per capita, one of the most active Zeitgeist chapters
We have a big bunch of people taking into consideration how small the country is.
One reason for achievements like the film and the book is
that we have a lot of active people
who are both proactive and competent.
Ajan Henki (Spirit of the Times) film came about just because
The Finnish Zeitgeist Movement had a lot of competent
people in the field:
we found an editor
we found a director
we found the cameraman
Of course we couldn't find some things
for instance a script writer
so we had to learn it on our own.
But filmmaking is not rocket science. Not at all.
I hope that Ajan Henki film functions as a role model to other countries,
so they could do something similar.
It's completely possible.
It doesn't have to be that
everyone is a professional.
It only takes a bit of motivation and interest
to learn all the things that filmmaking requires.
Of course it helps if you have a few professionals in the crew.
Then this Zeitgeist book...
That is largely an individual triumph of the writer.
In reality there was no one else involved
apart from the author Jani Laasonen.
That's how it started.
It seems that the Finnish movement has a lot of people who are able to do things on their own.
Even if we've had troubles in organizing the work
I have to admit that we've had these great accomplishments as well.
In that sense I think we've done a pretty good job in the end.
This film process took about
half a year all in all,
to make the actual film.
We had planned this kind of video project for a long time already
It started out with the idea to make a 20-minute
introductory video of The Zeitgeist Movement
and then the whole thing just got out of hand.
It turned out that we are making a full-length feature film and
then it turned out that we are making a little bit too long full-length feature film
and the end result was a humongous 3-hour piece.
Indeed, it took us half a year.
We first structured the whole thing on a large flip chart.
That took us a few days.
It set the script writing in motion and
finding and contacting all the interviewees followed.
That sort of thing.
That took a long time.
Then we got to carry out the interviews,
while we were writing the script on the go.
Once that was done
- it took about 3-4 months -
we still had to use a couple more months only for editing
That was a big process:
editing, music, mixing, all these
It took us almost as long as the rest of the film
After all, we had tens of hours of material from the interviews
and we had to fit the film in three hours
or rather less.
That took a while.
We had seven people in our team.
We had a couple of editors, one cameraman,
a few scriptwriters,
one who kind of took the role of a director.
We all had our own roles,
but we all did pretty much everything.
Even if I was the main responsible for the script
I was also being interviewed and interviewing
as well as partly doing the editing.
I helped in that as well.
It wasn't just one person doing one thing but
everyone doing everything.
One of the problems with Ajan Henki was that
it took us ages to get it translated.
We had to get it translated into English
but the process was super slow.
Our translation tools were perhaps ill-equipped
and we didn't have enough people to do it.
It came as a bit of a surprise.
For two months nothing much happened.
We couldn't even get the transcription done.
Once it was transcribed it came to a halt again.
Two months later one of the
Ajan Henki team members wrote a pretty
nasty message in Facebook:
"Isn't this movement capable of doing ONE translation?"
That woke people up and they were like: "We can do this."
It took like couple of weeks to get the whole translation done.
People just needed a bit of guidance and encouragement
and that led to action.
That's a great example of the fact that sometimes
you need to offer guidance to people before they get anything done.
We always talk about critical mass:
How can this movement reach a critical mass?
How do we get enough people along to inflict real change?
That's really challenging.
I do see a bright future for The Zeitgeist Movement
but the growth is not going to be anything close to exponential
but what happens in the real world
largely dictates
how we can grow.
And of course the media attention we attract:
that also plays a significant role.
We have had some major media hype lately and
there have been for instance actors who've come out of the closet and said
"I support The Zeitgeist Movement".
That has been remarkable.
Then again, the way we've been portrayed
in the media is in the large part
that we are a cult of some sort
and we haven't been taken very seriously up till now.
Then we've had a few articles that do take it more seriously but
even those most people receive with suspicion:
that it's too futuristic or something.
Yet the issues that The Zeitgeist Movement deals with
are not going to go anywhere.
We talk about energy crises, technological unemployment, inequality
and environmental problems.
As long as these are in a
near-crisis or even crisis state
The Zeitgeist Movement will be in demand.
I see that it has to grow.
Of course what we internally do in the movement
and how we portray ourselves externally dictates
our possibilities for growth.
And there are quite a few other movements
who are concerned about similar topics.
Are all people going to join this very movement?
That I don't know.
That's why I'm really fond of for instance The Occupy Movement.
The Occupy Movement has been in the forefront also in Finland and
it could function, in a way, as a top-level organization for the smaller
organizaitons such as The Zeigeist Movement and
all sorts of movements could gather under its
umbrella and together drive the change forward.
That, in my mind, is one potential direction for development right at the moment.
The transition phase poses a problem:
If you think about what motivates people
to change the system
then one could say that Finnish people are too well off.
They don't want to change things.
My view is that as long as capitalism
works, to an extent, for the Finnish people
- as it seems to work currently,
most people here are not facing dire adversity -
so as long as it works it's hard to see that people would radically want to change it.
That's why, to encourage a system-level change
here in the Nordic countries
it does require a certain drop
that shit first hits the fan.
We can advance to an extent via
the harder situation.
How hard should it get?
What is too hard?
I don't think anyone wants that the
situation becomes really bad.
Where does the line go?
But some sort of disaster is needed
so that people want to have a change.
As for the time scale
I've figured that in 50-100 years
it would make sense to think about resource based economy, the global kind.
Perhaps the transition phase means that
we start implementing those thoughts:
resource-based thinking,
self-sufficiency, caring
and communality.
We begin to make it happen on a smaller scale and start networking.
If we think of it as some sort of global system that replaces exchange
and free trade globally
then we are talking about quite long-term transition.
But there are no obstacles for us to start implementing
that line of thinking on a smaller scale, right now.
It can start from here and slowly expand.
And once the value set changes
- once people start valuing different aspects than nowadays -
then even a larger system-level change becomes possible.
But the whole thing starts from
people's values.
The time has passed
when we look up to a leader
and listen obediently what media tells us.
We now have to take responsibility of
our own lives and lead the change through that.
We have been accustomed to
follow political leaders
and media and so foth
but now that time has passed.
It's time to take responsibility
of our lives and lead the change
through that.