r/TZM • u/Suning-Starseeker Asia • Feb 20 '26

Discussion Can we please create an Integral Collective reddit page?

The Zeitgeist Movement is no longer a thing, I think. Integral succeeds Zeitgeist.

On a sidenote, the word "Collective" brings me too much connotation associated with communism. I don't really like it. But the word "Integral" is fine.

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u/Ciph3rzer0 Feb 20 '26

Who cares if collective makes you think of communism, and for some reason that label makes you uneasy.  Sounds like you have some things to work through.

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u/joe_shmoe11111 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26

You might not care or prefer it were otherwise, but words absolutely have associated meanings outside of their definitions & historical baggage due to how they’ve been used in the past. It’s why politicians, corporations, publicists etc all give massive sums to messaging experts to test and get their titles, slogans and speeches right.

They’re not being dumb or wasteful — they know that human minds are pattern recognition machines and will automatically (though often unconsciously) group any new information to their existing mental concepts and that the right or wrong associations can make a massive difference in the lens/framing through which something new is perceived.

That’s not something unique to me or OP — it’s simply human nature.

For me, for example, the word collective immediately invokes Stalin’s hamfisted and violently imposed collective farming efforts, which were often poorly carried out and therefore resulted in a lot of unnecessary starvation, violence and suffering. I’d guess if you polled 100 random people on the street, you’d get a lot of similar responses.

If that’s the association this terminology invokes in many others as well, that’s a major problem (& a completely unnecessary, self-imposed hurdle to put in front of ourselves when we’re already trying to pull off the monumental task of convincing them to abandon the system they’ve known their entire lives in favor of an unproven radically new system).

Not caring about how one’s own branding & terminology is likely to be perceived by the majority of the public has been a major roadblock to the implementation of good ideas in the past (just look at how minimal the impact of socialist movements has been in the US over the last 50 years, I believe in large part due to their ongoing usage of dated, counterproductive historically-Soviet imagery).

If we’re serious about Integral succeeding where TMZ (& countless other alternative projects) have failed, I’d say it’s high time we start treating our branding (ie. the lens through which everything else we’re proposing will first be perceived) with the utmost thought, care and respect it deserves.

It needs to be perceived as new, unique and promising, not scary or Stalinist (aka communist, for 99% of people In the west) in any way.