Rebuking RBE Myths

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." – C. S. Lewis NOTE TO FIRST TIME READERS:THIS IS THE LAST PART OF A SERIES, SO I ENCOURAGE YOU TO EXPLORE THE SITE. MIGHT APPEAR LIKE IM COMING ON HARD FOR NO REASON, OTHERWISE. Now, i wanted this to be brought up later, but it should serve as a good wake-up call. So, you hear it a lot on how a Resource Based Economy won't punish criminals, since it's fault of the environment, and they wanna change people, not take out our vengeance on them. Which sounds pretty nice, but you should ask yourself "what does it mean, and how did Jacques come up with this stuff?" Well, looking over his recommended reading list 1 might provide us some clues. You might see a little guy called B.F. Skinner, which i mentioned before, keeps popping up. You might see his books, like "Verbal Behavior" or Walden Two, Skinner’s science fiction book, on that lis

'Wanting something to be does not make it so,' he murmured. Calliphone nodded. 'You are weak. Badly forged iron looks strong but is brittle as a dried reed. You never understood. People cannot be forced to live to an ideal, they must be led. People are messy, and more complicated than your most profound calculations. You would build a perfect world, realising at the final moment that its greatest mar were the people living within it. Now you would destroy them to save your creation. You are a marmoreal god, 'Bo, a tomb lord.   Calliphone, from "Perturabo, Hammer of Olympia", by Guy Hayley Let's start with some quotes from the man itself: Ever notice that critics are the only people who refer to The Venus Project as a "utopia"? They sure do use that word a lot, but maybe not as often as Jacque Fresco... (1) "Any assumption of finality or utopia is really stupid because there's never been any evidence to show that a per

"Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain" Frederick Engels, Principles of Communism, Section 18 The Venus Project makes a big deal how it is an economic system that's unprecedented in the history of the world, and how it is totally not communist because Communism has "money, banks, armies, police, prisons, charismatic personalities, social stratification, and is managed by appointed leaders. 1 Also, "communism has no blueprint or methodology to carry out their ideals" 2 . and " most importantly, Communism did not eliminate SCARCITY nor did they have a blueprint or the methods for the production of abundance." 3 Well, that relies on the assumption, shared b

  And so the book became a kind of comedy, an unwitting comedy whose jokes don’t exist within the world of the story.  I want people to laugh (among other things) as they read it.  But I don’t want them to laugh comfortably, from a position of comfortable superiority, snickering at the deluded inhabitants of the past.  I want, I hope for, the nervous laughter of fellow-feeling.  We should laugh like what we are: people whom the observers of 2060 will be able to see are naively going about our business beneath our own monstrous overhang of consequences.  Whatever it is. 1 Francis Spufford, "Hindsight", a commentary on soviet cybernetics The Venus Project makes a big deal of how using cybernetics to organize ourselves is a revolutionary idea that has never been tried before. Actually a pretty old trick in new-ish clothing, that lived and fizzled away half a century ago. Cybernetics is an old thing, but it really took off with the best-s

Place where i can dump critiques and article relating to TVP, written by people much more eloquent than I. Critiques: http://skepticproject.com/articles/the-venus-flytrap/ https://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2015/02/designing-future-venus-project.html Confessions by former members and collaborators: http://www.auravana.com/conflict-resolution.html https://docs.google.com/document/d/10RfmnDINo4dk2aTRNFoM-i9j_bn7dZ73Z7qoAAo-M8Y/edit (Steven Black letter of resignation) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EG68qxbYPRWM7CUJmPeu_7si9rHXB-pSQMF9fYI7FuU/edit (Ritta Veijalainen letter of resignation) https://docs.google.com/document/d/18JZTpHmX5dvE_RvX8XRYv30G4qz8Be-xeK1DDt8PsDM/edit (Lucy Li letter of resignation) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R0yRP4eVHb4KnJMngyB5W9mmcqwHBHBlsozK97ZNWKc/edit (Roberto Simonovich letter of resignation) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uOPWBSNT0GVDHjn_6h6_r6y3YL_at22RXApIRc4itcg/edit (Venus Project response to the first 3. Make of it what y