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If you install The Venus Project throughout the world
declare all the Earth's resources as the common heritage of all the world's people.
See, Mark Twain said, "There's not an acre of land on Earth
that belongs to its rightful owners."
So, over the years, powerful nations took land from others.
This includes the United States, Germany, France; they're all corrupt.
I'm sorry about that, but all nations are corrupt.
As long as you use money, you can pay off senators
the drug company can buy time
so you can't have decency and ethics in a corrupt world.
"But are you talking about a utopia?"
No. There's no such thing.
The reason there is no such thing as utopia is because
if you design the best building you know how to design
that's the best you know up to now.
With the advent of a new material, the city'll keep changing.
There's no best laptop. Next year there'll be smaller, lighter, wider range.
Cameras no longer use film.
So you can't design the best camera, you can only design the best that you know of up to now.
No utopias, no final frontiers.
"But for you, your vision of the future"
is always changing.
"But it's dependent on technology?"
Yes. Technology and knowledge in all fields.
Today, scientists are specialized in optics, another guy rockets
so the nation can use them anyway they want to.
In the future, people will be educated to be generalists, so no one can use you
to make weapons of destruction.
"But you look at some of your designs
some of your visions for the future and people say
"Yeah, look, it's like you might have seen in Popular Mechanics in the 50s.
You know, "This is what's going to be like in 1999."
No. It's nothing like that.
Hollywood shows you spaceships and people using laser weapons.
They take the same cowboys and Indians and put 'em in spaceships.
That is not the future, that's man's concept of this limited society
that doesn't teach you how to think and look ahead.
They teach you how to be a cameraman, auto mechanic, chemist, or a structural engineer
but they don't give you an overview of society.
"For people to embrace what you're talking about..."
Well, it's not my system really.
If we don't live in accordance with the nature of the Earth
if we don't live in accordance with the natural resources, we can't live.
You can't designate a population of 10 million without doing a study of the resources you have.
After you study, we have enough resources to support so many billions of people
and if you exceed that, you're going to have starvation, malnutrition, territorial disputes.
If you maintain a population in accordance with the carrying capacity of the Earth
no opinions of senators.
Politics was great, a hundred years ago.
Today, it's all obsolete.
"But aren't you really, you're talking revolution, because you're saying..."
No.
"When society breaks down..."
Technical revolution.
"Yeah, but when society breaks down, then they'll want to do it a different way."
I'm sorry about that, but it seems that conditions were so abusive, in some lands
that they put in socialism, communism, whatever, or fascism
that fits the conditions that people live under.
None of them are the solution.
All governments, all through history, have been corrupt.
"So, in that case, the rise of the Nazis in Germany was perfectly logical."
Was logical within their conditioning.
In other words, Hitler did not lead Germany that way
but what he spoke of was acceptable to the German people, obviously.
He was put there by German big business and industry
and the working man had no voice.
He thought he was a communist, a socialist.
Hitler's system would not have worked even if they'd won the war.
"You must know that people look at your concepts."
Yes, I heard.
"And with utmost respect Jacque, they will say, "You're a crazy old man."'
I understand that. This is not unusual.
Every move from women's rights to child labor, were fought with battles, all the time.
No new system ever came in smoothly.
Even in the army, the cavalry fought the war tanks.
When the war tanks came in, they fought the guided missile.
Now the guided missile people are fighting lasers from weapons in the sky.
Then they have a bomb called a "flicker bomb", so bright light goes on and off
it gives you an epileptic seizure and doesn't destroy the environment.
Now they're in control, but there's no limit to what man can do.
Man is the dumbest animal.
He pollutes the ocean, the air, the rivers, the atmosphere, and people.
Man, they put themselves on a pedestal, say "We're the highest form of life."
That's an ego trip. They're not. We're not civilized yet.
As long as you have prisons, police, armies, navies; we are not civilized.
Until the world learns to live together, constructively
that'll be the beginning of the scientific age.
We're not there yet.
During the time of the Wright Brothers
the scientists of the time were writing books as to why man can't fly
and the Wright Brothers didn't read those books
so they went right on and built the flying machine.
Goddard couldn't speak about rocketry in the scientific fields
'cause he'd be looked at as a quack.
So all through history, the scientists of the times, were saying how things could not progress.
"But, how do you convince people?"
I'm going to try to explain that.
"How do you convince them?"
First of all, no one has an opinion.
See, they bring you up where everyone should have a right to their own opinion.
If your sister lived across the way from me
and I see 10 guys coming out of her apartment
I can have all kinds of opinions.
The most difficult thing for people to say is "I don't know."
"Do you think a man'll ever get to the moon?"
"I don't know enough about rockets, or the prop.... I don't know."
But today, when people say, "Well, if you ask me, not in a thousand years."
I'm not interested in that.
What do you know about space travel? Machinery, rocketry? Nothing.
Then, I don't want to hear from you.
Do you understand? People just yack on about anything
if you give them all a right to their own opinion.
In the future, here's the way they'll talk
If they see an airplane without wings, in the future, they'll say
"How do you propose to lift off the ground without wings?"
Today they say, "It'll never fly, it doesn't have wings."
They have an opinion about everything, and that's dangerous.
That's why nations don't move forward.
"But, you look at you now, and you're touring around, you're talking to people."
Yes.
"What, for the next seven months you're gonna travel the world."
Yes.
"And you're 94 years old."
Yes.
"You haven't got anything better to do?"
No. Not now, I'm afraid of the direction that Man is taking.
We have bombs now that are like a thousand times greater than the one dropped on Hiroshima.
How stupid can you be? What can you accomplish with that?
The United States has 300 submarines, and according to the Navy
each one has more destructive power than all the wars in history.
What are you going to accomplish with that? A burnt-out radioactive planet?
You won the war?
What do you win?
It's much easier to bring the nations of the world together
not kill those that don't agree with you, bring them together.
If I took every soldier, I would educate them to be problem solvers, not killing machines.
If they draft you to serve, to put up your life for your country
they should conscript all the war industries
so no one makes a buck out of war. Then it's real.
You don't have that.
"What can one man do though?"
Talk to other people. If you like what The Venus Project stands for, talk to others.
If you do nothing, nothing will happen. I can assure you that.
I have no power, Roxanne has no power.
It's merely a presentation of a world without war, hunger, poverty, or job loss.
It's always been one person who comes up with new ideas
and when other people hear about it
then they work towards it and do what they can to make it happen.
But it's usually one person that's come up with different ideas.
"Do you see him as a genius?"
No, I see him as someone who's gone through certain things during his lifetime
and arrived at different conclusions.
His background was very different.
He worked in technology, he was a futurist
but most futurists don't talk about the future in terms of technology
they have wishes and aspirations, and hopes and dreams.
He can build these things technically.
He's worked with drug addicts, alcoholics, changed them.
He even joined the ***, he wanted to see if he could put his ideas to test.
He joined the Ku Klux *** in the United States, and changed them within a month and a half.
Then join the White Citizens Council and changed them.
It's not just coming out of his head saying, "I would like a different world."
He worked at it, and worked at people to change them.
"You joined the ***?"
- Ku Klux ***, years ago, and it was about 32 members.
So, I joined them by talking with...
First, that leader said to me, "What do you think of the Ku Klux ***?"
I said, "It's a great idea, but it doesn't go far enough."
Then they listen. But if you down it, they don't listen. You understand?
You have to learn different people's values and speak in their terms, not your terms.
If you speak ahead of the terms of people, they don't know what you're talking about.
So, in New York, I asked a question
"What are the most undeveloped people in the area?"
I got one consensus, they said, "The Arabs that live in Atlantic Avenue."
I said, "What makes you think they're backward?"
"They still believe the Earth is flat."
So I said, "I better try to turn them around because if I can't turn them around
how am I going to change the world?"
That's why I join the *** and the White Citizens Council.
So, I call the leader of the Arabs in that area and I said, "I would like to speak with you."
He said, "You are Arab?" That's all he can say.
I said, "Yes." - I'm not Arab.
So he said, "Where your father he born?"
I said, "Lebanon."
He said, "Very good, come and saw me;" means "Come and see me."
So I came to see him and I said, "Do you believe the world is round?"
"No."
So he said to me, "Do you believe...?"
I said, "No." He... "tut tut tut"
That means "It can't be."
Then he pointed to his head
he says, "If the world be round, man fall me down, all the water he fall me down."
Kept doing that.
So I said, "Boy, I got to get to this guy."
So I gave him a balloon which I brought with me and I rubbed it with fur.
I put cornflakes in his hand and told him to hold his hand away from the balloon.
You know what happens if you rub it?
All the cornflakes go up to the balloon.
And his jaw hit the pavement.
He said, "World he magnet?"
"Eeehh..."
"Aaaaahhh..."
And he explained that to all the other Arabs.
Took an hour and a half to turn them around by demonstration.
But if you use language, scientific centrifugal force, geomagnetic fields
they don't know what the hell you're talking about.
"Did you turn around the *** though?"
Oh yes. Do you want me to tell you how?
"Yeah."
Okay. It was a longer process.
What I did is I spoke to the leader only.
Took him to my lab, showed him a lot of interesting things
and he said in his southern accent
"Will you come on down to the *** meeting and talk to our boys?"
I said, "They wouldn't listen to me, Lou."
He said, "I'll get 'em to listen to you, 'cause what you say makes sense."
I showed him a lot of things he never knew existed.