When I was invited to see a rough cut of THRIVE, to review the crop circle content, I was concerned about the movie taking positions that people who were interviewed for it would object to. I said I thought it was urgent to confirm with them that indeed they would be all right being in the movie. That never happened, and this statement that just was issued is the other shoe dropping:

Disassociation From Thrive Statement

We are a group of people who were interviewed for and appear in the movie Thrive, and who hereby publicly disassociate ourselves from the film.

Thrive is a very different film from what we were led to expect when we agreed to be interviewed. We are dismayed that we were not given a chance to know its content until the time of its public release. We are equally dismayed that our participation is being used to give credibility to ideas and agendas that we see as dangerously misguided.

We stand by what each of us said when we were interviewed. But we have grave disagreements with some of the film’s content and feel the need to make this public statement to avoid the appearance that our presence in the film constitutes any kind of endorsement.

Signatories (in alphabetical order)

Deepak Chopra
Duane Elgin
Amy Goodman
Paul Hawken
Edgar Mitchell
John Robbins
Elisabet Sahtouris
Vandana Shiva

The internet is buzzing about this statement. Here’s a piece that will tell you more: Author John Robbins, Other Progressives Denounce ‘Thrive’: The Santa Cruz–based author is joined by Deepak Chopra and others in a statement distancing themselves from the film

Some quotes:

In issuing their statement distancing themselves from Thrive, Robbins and his colleagues point out that they are “dismayed” that the Gambles refused to let them know what the film was about until the time of its public release. In interviews with the Weekly several weeks ago, Paul Hawken and Elisabet Sahtouris both said Foster Gamble misrepresented the film when he asked them to participate.

Robbins says it’s clear that Gamble used him and the others to draw people to Thrive. He is distressed that the film weaves progressive ideas into its paranoid, radical libertarian narrative. But he stops short of accusing Gamble of deliberately deceiving his audience.

“Foster is extremely naïve about the political consequences of his film,” Robbins concludes.

Where to from here? Could a win/win come out of this? Here’s what I’d said, early on, to Foster Gamble, who comes from the deep Proctor & Gamble pockets that got this movie made and widely seen. It’s his fortune and he can spend it as he wishes, but my thought is to join forces for the greater good to where the message and the campaign for change can be widely acceptable. Here’s what I’ve said to Foster:

It would be great to work together. We clearly have the same passion and desires about life!

The film is a done deal, but it is bothersome to me that its good intentions are sullied by extremist claims. In your zeal to make the world work, see Charles Eisenstein: Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order. It’s a perspective that seems credible to me. I could see you building on THRIVE as the first of a pair or maybe a trilogy of films, where you go from humanity being oppositional and adversarial to promoting a higher stand about raising each person’s consciousness as the answer to the world’s ills.

Or maybe something else. There is so much that is “outside the box” that would force us to re-think our story about who we are and what we are doing here. Unless we change our worldview, it’s fingers in the dike to deal with all the challenges we face, which of course is what the movie is getting at. But you don’t need the global elite as the enemy — in a way “science” is a culprit, keeping us fixated on observable reality so that the bigger picture, where consciousness and spirit reside, gets marginalized. I’d love to see an event – a conference perhaps — that brought out so much contradiction to our story that we would have to deal with changing it. Something like that could make the movie, as the sponsor, into something even bigger than the movie, which would go a ways to toward making its shortcomings somewhat irrelevant.