Skeptic Project

I learned about Jacque Fresco in the early 1980's, I read his book "Looking Forward," and I even talked to him on the phone a few times in the 1980's and 1990's. He seemed like an interesting visionary, reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller; but I concluded that Fresco, like Fuller, lacked a sufficiently powerful set of ideas to revolutionize our lives for the better.

So imagine my surprise to learn that towards the end of Fresco's life, his ideas have received a lot of attention because of those Zeitgeist movies.

But why, exactly? Fresco's view of "the future" incorporates discredited or inadequate intellectual fads from the early 20th Century -- radical behaviorism, general semantics, technocracy. He came of age when environmentalist or "blank slate" views of human nature dominated intellectual life, views which current scientific thinking can no longer support. (Even leftists like George Lakoff have acknowledged that the mind thinks in biologically evolved metaphors which "frame" how we communicate ideas to one another.)

Fresco's denial of a refractory human nature makes the main goal of his Venus Project a nonstarter. Providing people with their material needs doesn't keep human males from forming dominance hierarchies, where the alpha males compete for the top spots and reproductively fit women offer themselves sexually to them at the expense of the beta males. A lot of human behavior, including violence, derives from quests for dominance and status to improve reproductive opportunities, even if these quests sometimes produce irrational situations; Fresco's operantly conditioned utopia wouldn't make human irrationality go away.

The Venus Project to me seems like the flip side of "Austrian economics." Both exaggerate the problems of reasonably functional societies and offer radical "solutions" for them based on dubious assumptions.

I slightly knew Fresco's friend F.M. Esfandiary, who later changed his named to FM-2030. He shared Fresco's blank slate view of human nature, which contributed to his similarly bad futurology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030</p>

http://www.box.net/shared/static/s1fli3qhxk.wmv</p>

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20239753/Alan-Brooks-on-FM-2030</p>

http://www.scribd.com/doc/10948503/Up-Wing-Priorities

I don't care about the astrotheology and 9/11 paranoia in Zeitgeist. The part about the Federal Reserve I've seen makes me laugh, however. Apparently these people have the Fed, a legal and mostly useful organization, confused with the Mafia. So what if some long-dead financiers met on Jekyll Island in 1913 to create the Federal Reserve? They can't tell us how to run it now. If the Fed in our far-future year 2009 generates problems, put it under better regulation and management to prevent these problems, just like how you'd straighten out any other legal business or organization.

Good analogy.

So what you're saying is that the problem isn't just the money system, but the way it's run.

What should be done to run it better. More rule/laws?

I like the idea of a new start to a certain extent, or at least a move away from such a one sided system. It's probably only a leaky pipe to you and me, for many of the really enslaved poor its hell on earth. Sweat shops, starvation, war, and the risk of losing everything you own or your life every single day.

The solution must be radical for these people. You and I are pacified to a certain extent by our standard of living. But we are also the ones that have the education, understanding and hopefully one day the ablilty to really change the system to work for all humanity.

If the Mars project is going to be apart of the solution, then could you accept that if the only option does end up being a complete renewal that it is not so much radical as necessary?

I really want to see open discussion, with no idea being seen as silly, radical or recieved with anger. Ultimately the final solution will be a combination of many ideas from all walks of life.

Lets talk!!

Maybe as a side note it could be a good idea to keep a record of offered solutions that can be ranked or the like by participants. Or even just a record so that we don't just end up going in circles.

Right,

Sorry I thought that was what this forum was for.

Look it's your site and your project. I guess I'm just trying, unsuccessfullly it seems, to get you to define your stance and objectives.

I'm starting to wonder if you are only looking for angry nuts to abuse you so others can laugh at them, rather than actually discussing real issues.

I'll go away and leave you to it.

Tchau

Sorry I didn't intend to come across as a victim. I have had a good look through your site now and its not for me thats all.

Best of luck for you enterprise