In the meanwhile, here’s a snippet from PJ’s email:

“The best thing is for everyone to do their homework to fully understand what it is we are working towards. The complexity of the issues lend to some very erroneous assumptions, as it touches the very nature of who we “are” and what a society means.” – Peter Joseph

I too would love to meet Mr Fresco in person. I just hope that he has some young disciples that he is teaching his philosophies too so that they may continue his work. I’m sure he is a very busy man, but I will see if I can get anyone at the Venus Project (if not Jacque Fresco himself) to get involved in this discussion. You never know until you try! But I shall do my best to respond below.

Your first point on population is a sociological issue. If you consider populations across the globe it is currently the poorer nations/families that have the largest numbers of children, while ‘wealthier’ families have fewer. This is due to a few reasons – the major ones being that there is a higher infant mortality rate in poorer countries, so having more children insures that not all of them will die. It is also more economically beneficial in some countries to have more children as this allows for a greater division of labour. It’s a sad reality, but hopefully if we do end up living in a Venus-Project-Utopia most people will be more educated and therefore more sensible over the number of children they have.

The biggest fears that most people experience on a global scale are based on war and poverty – which in my opinion go hand-in-hand. Nearly every war that has been fought has been over resources. If there were an abundance of resources – evenly distributed – there would be nothing to fight over. There would be no need for war and therefore no reason to fear it.

Fair distribution of resources would be the central issue and an effective method of doing this is yet to be found. This is the central idea of Communism, which has failed again and again.

Your last question is a good one. It would be obviously impossible for everyone to live in the most ideal areas in the world. This is currently determined by how wealthy people are, and if monetary wealth were eradicated, then who would be considered as the most deserving or important and have their pick of where to live in the world?

However, it is of my opinion that this is a secondary concern for the time-being. What is of primary importance is meeting every individual’s basic needs. This is the first, major step that the world needs to take before we can reach the utopian goal that the Venus Project proposes.

I hope that you find my responses useful, but I will attempt to see if we can get someone from the Venus Project to get involved and comment. I will keep you and everyone who has commented here posted if I am successful.

Kind Regards,
Galen Schultz

•I was wondering if he has thought about if people are provided with their needs and lose fear of scarcity then wont the population increase immensely? Basically now the population is in check because families only have a certain number of children based on what they can afford to provide a good life for their kids BUT if humans wouldn’t feel that pressure what is to stop them from having a large family and thus increase the population to overgrow the carrying capacity of resources per person?

•My next point is that so much of our behavior is based on FEAR. We are afraid of everything and that is why our defense spending is so high and the military industrial complex is such a huge business. Has Jacque come up with a way to overcome that fear and change the way we think? I think the only way we are going to be working as a unit and be working collectively instead of competition is to remove that fear.

•How will resources be divided in the future? Lets say that some scientists is studying this and some other scientists is studying this but he/she feels that their project is more important then who gets priority?

•Lastly, I have thought about location of living areas. How will you divide the best locations and views to people? Won’t most people want to live in the warm climates with beach side property? Isn’t beach side property scarce by its very nature and that location provides scarcity?

Anyways, those paragraphs have been my thoughts and I was just wondering if Jacque or you could let me know what you think. Take care.

However, once these tasks are completed and payed for, how can you possibly charge people for power they are getting from the sun? Who owns the sun? Hypothetically, we would have to pay no one. Imagine not having to pay for electricity! Electric cars would truly be practical – it would pave a new way for our world as a whole. Maybe everyone else would start to adopt this method for harnessing energy as well.

Free energy is what everyone should be working towards. Nothing else.

We could be doing that, but of course you wouldn’t be able to make much money off of energy from the sun. The sun’s not exactly going to be a scarce resource anytime soon.

In fact everything you’ve said here points to ‘money’ being the central problem. A step in the right direction is implementing an alternative to a monetary-system, which is exactly what my post is all about.

Thanks for the movie links. I’m sure The Invasion, Equilibrium and Aeon Flux will shed a whole new light on this issue …

The problem here is that any given individual makes mistakes. Power magnifies those mistakes. Therefore, placing people in power will inevitably lead to very big mistakes – war, poverty, etc.

All that’s changed in the last few thousand years is how power was defined and wielded. In ancient Egypt, power was granted/handed down by the gods/priesthoods. In Israel, God directly chose His leaders. In the feudal ages, power was won by conquest. And in the 21st century, power is defined by wealth.

The issue of “money” is largely irrelevant here. The concept of currency goes back pretty much to the beginning of time. It’s only now that money is a factor, since it’s used to define power.

So take a look at modern democracy. It’s actually more money-driven than most people think. Firstly, you need money to register, then you need funding to compete in the elections – and finally, you need tax money in order to effect any real change. This means that whoever has the money, has the power, and presidents/parliaments being bought is no new concept – it happens all the time in SA.

All of this – democracy, money – does one thing: Put the dominant in power. And some people are just naturally more dominant than others. Upbringing doesn’t create dominance, it just amplifies what’s already there – the will to survive. Millions of children go through similar upbringings every year worldwide, but not all of them go on to create powerful corporations.

To alter the world system, you need to start at the foundations, and the foundation is people, and their desires. You can’t start at any higher level and expect to get anywhere. Communism failed in Russia for this reason. China became totalitarian for this reason.

Here’s a few movies you might find interesting (as they deal with this subject to some degree):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427392/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402022/

Please let it be clear that these are not my ideas but a few proposed by the Venus Project that I support and have added commentary on.

I agree that monetary-systems emerged as a more efficient form of allocating resources than barter trade, however, just as the practice of barter trade came to an end the above proposes our current monetary-system is now outdated and becoming less practical on a global scale.

A system based on perpetual debt that can never be re-paid will inevitably collapse. The above proposes that this system is outdated and no longer relevant to our survival as a global society. It is not the most efficient way of allocating resources as it certainly does not benefit all human beings.

This IS a highly humanitarian approach which I believe the majority of our world leaders are capable of fathoming.

I am not suggesting that resources are more plentiful today than they were 5 000 years ago. That would be bizarre. I am suggesting that we have more efficient technological methods of harvesting and utilising resources and producing energy. See the first part to this post: The power of our planet

He thinks that flashy dollar bills and bling make people want to be selfish, when the overwhelming consensus out there – based on both direct empirical data in psychology and economics, and empirically validated theory in sociobiology – is that malevolence, or at least a certain level of malevolence, is a fundamental human precondition. In other words, it’s not the money that makes us selfish, it’s the selfishness that makes money a necessity.

Given that his founding assumption is wrong, it follows that the rest of the piece is just nonsense. If getting rid of money flicked the benevolence switch, then it would indeed follow that doing so would help us to rid the world of poverty, tackle environmental degradation and so on. But it doesn’t, so it won’t.

Unfortunately the piece is also littered with inaccuracies – there is, for instance, no evidence that money emerged as a “device to control human behaviour”, or that money has a “rationing” effect. In fact, it emerged as a more efficient form of allocating resources than barter trade, which in turn is a better form of exchanging resources than beating each other on the head with clubs. And these are not matters of historical contention, so the author is just ignorant of the facts. He also, bizarrely, thinks that resources are more plentiful now than they were 5,000 years ago, when money was first invented. Again, just nonsense.