The Venus Project
Today, entirely by chance, I was made aware of this project. It has been going on since the 1970’s and is inventend and (was) spearheaded by Jacque Fresco. There’s a YouTube video about it.
I know we can build a far better world, without war, without most crimes, without the need for prisons, and without the need for money. We can surpass that. We have the technical ability to make things available to everyone. All the wonders of technology have no meaning at all unless it enhances the lives of everyone.
The whole idea is fascinating to me, the video however has a focus too heavy on US-american culture for my taste. (Queue awkwardy scripted father/son talk) It also skips over crucial topics like religion quite a bit too casually. It’s understandable from the perpective of everything else being far more important, the reality of the world we currently live in is that religion is a major contributor to the conflicts this projects aims to end. You just cannot take the belief system away from people, even less so in a by any means reasonable time frame. In fact, the poorer and uneducated people are, the more likely they are to base their entire life around their belief — if only to explain to themselves why things are the way they are because the alternative is unthinkable. Namely that religion, like money, was largely invented to rig the system in favor of a powerful few. In a certain way the thinking of the videos’ authors assumes that humans are rational beings, which is demonstrably only true to a limited degree. You cannot separate the emotional from the rational. For most people they are more or less the same. The same applies to the concept of love and what it means. Don’t expect people to give up on their notions of what love means. From buddhist monks to hormonally charged teenagers, to parents, to shamanism, to dictatorships, they all have an idea about what love actually is and will not give up on it. The same forces postulated to be harnessed for the good of all are the ones that are preventing the paradigm shift in the first place. Simply because it would seemingly invalidate everything they have ever believed in. Being forced to accept that would quite literally drive many people insane.
I sincerely hope that we as a species are able to smarten up in what little time that’s left to us to implement large portions of what is proposed here. It’s certainly possible. The vision is admirable and coherent. There is little humans could not accomplish given the right set of circumstances. What’s missing is an answer to the most important step: how to get there, from here.