The “pulse” or activity-level of any movement can best be measured by looking at its events calendar, since that is likely to give you information about organizational capability, scale, frequency of events, intra-movement networks and external connections. Zero State (ZS) is a young community, part of the wider Social Futurist movement, and this article outlines the outline of the “ZS Year”, circa 12018 HE.

While we’re talking about dates and calendars… no, “12018” wasn’t a typo. ZS uses the Holocene Calendar, which is to say a year-count which counts years from the approximate beginning of human civilization, rather than on any religious basis. Years HE (Holocene Era) are simply calculated by adding a “1” to the beginning of the Gregorian year to represent the 10,000 years of human development prior to Christianity.

Why does a Futurist movement need its own calendar or holidays?

The simple fact is that mythos – a sense of historical narrative, importance and focus – is critical to our ability to build mass momentum toward our goal. Our goal is nothing short of the total redemption of humanity long promised by the world’s religions, and so any claim those religions had to organizing societal activity (including our calendar and celebrations) goes double for a global movement which – with exponentially advancing technology as its basis – can actually deliver on those promises.

Two core ZS celebrations are listed below, plus a third section on the incorporation of other celebrations into the ZS calendar.

May 1st:  May Day   

Celebrates:
Official founding of ZS on 1 May 12011.
Publication of the Social Futurist Principles that same day.

May Day is historically a pagan Spring festival (e.g. Beltane), only much later being adopted as a Socialist workers’ day. The international distress call “May Day” was not adopted until later again, but also seems apt as humanity approaches a period of deep collective crisis.

We draw upon all three of these earlier traditions, celebrating May Day as a time of united rebirth, and also as the start of the ZS year because it commemorates the official founding of ZS on 1st May 12011, when the Principles of Social Futurism were first published.

The pre-celebratory period known as the Dekapentad (Greek for “15”), is the period of fifteen days from April 17th to May 1st, inclusive. The full-length celebration thus starts two weeks before May Day itself.

November 9th:  

Celebrates:
xxx

Other Celebrations (& the success of Catholicism)

The extraordinary historical success of Christianity (in the form of the Catholic Church) was largely due to the way the Church incorporated pagan traditions and holidays into its own mythos and structure. Rather than attempting to ban pagan practices from the outset – something the early Church was in no position to do – priests simply co-opted pagan practices, put a Christian gloss on them, and as older generations passed away young people were only taught the Christian explanations for these things.

This is essentially the conscious, strategic application of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift; i.e. that people don’t so much change their minds, as eventually die and make way for people who were educated into the new paradigm. In that spirit, the “ZS Calendar” begins with the two core celebrations already outlined – which as mentioned already roughly map on to the Celtic festivals of Beltane and Samhain – but is intended to later expand/develop into a full interpretive framework for contemporary holidays of various types.

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