Jacque Fresco - New Zealand FULL TV Interview (25:04), April 2010

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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 Klan, he wanted to see if he could put his ideas to test.
He joined the Ku Klux Klan 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 Klan?"
- Ku Klux Klan, 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 Klan?"
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 Klan 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 Klan 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 Klan 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.
So he silenced them and I spoke to them a little bit.
Then I said, "Lou, you can look at a person and tell us all about him."
"How do you do that?"
He said, "Well, I didn't think I can teach you anything."
I said, "Well, if you can do that, tell me how it's done."
So, I brought some pictures down at the Klan meeting and projected them on the wall.
And Lou said, "He looks like a good man, a God fearing man, American veteran"
projecting his own values.
On the end of the picture, I pull down the bottom, it says
"Wanted by the FBI for subversive action against the United States."
When he used to speak, he just said anything
and the others, not knowing anything, shook their head.
This is the first time what he said didn't make sense, so his group started to laugh at him.
So I said to the guys, "Shut your mouth, 'cause Lou knows more about people than we do."
I had to defend him till the next film.
The next film was a record of a man talking in an oxford accent about aviation.
He said, "I see a skinny Englishman with a bald head and eyeglasses."
He's projecting his own values. Now then, 10 minutes later, the image comes on
it's a black guy, raised in England.
"It's a goddammed nigger talking like an Englishman!"
This is Lou's reaction, not my words.
And I said, "Lou, that guy was raised in a different environment."
If you took a black man and raised him in France
he'd speak like a Frenchman, if he was a baby.
If you raised him in Germany, he'd speak with a German accent.
He says, "You mean to say that a black man speaks that way because he's raised?"
Yes.
I said "Lou, if I took your kid and raised it in a Jewish family, he'd be a nice Jewish boy.
In a Nazi family, a nice Nazi."
People are not taught how to think, they reflect their culture.
Proof, that in Italy you talk with the hands.
"Mannaggia d'americano!," see?
You say, "Come ona, eat, it's a gooda food."
That's not you, that's the environment impinging upon you.
We don't teach children how to think.
"So, it's nurture versus nature, the grand debate?" Yeah.
Nature.
Environment shapes values, facial expressions.
If you were brought up in the deep South, you'll speak with a southern accent.
And if all you hear is "The dammed niggers are lazy, they don't do..."
If that's all you hear, that's what you reflect.
So you might say, "I'm goin' get me a nigger an' I goin' kick his ass."
Is that you, or a reflection of your culture? Think about it.
Always...
"If I was a serial killer..."
Oh, here's what makes a serial killer.
There was a guy named, in the early days
this guy, they believed, ate 45 children.
The public wanted to tear him to pieces
'cos the public looks at him as free will.
I look at it as indoctrination.
Now, what kind of indoctrination makes a serial killer?
So a psychiatrist named Wertham wrote a book called "Show of violence".
Most people never read it.
Essentially, here's the guts of it
When he was about eight years old, he was touching his private parts
and his mother was an old time Baptist.
She said, "You're gonna burn in Hell touching that part of your body!
You will burn eternally!"
She scared the hell out of the kid
and that evening the mother said, "He stuck needles into his genitals."
He didn't want to go to Hell, can you understand that?
So he used to go into the woods with minority children and try to cut their genitals off.
To save them from Hell.
What do you think a soldier is?
A guy that's shown motion pictures of a Japanese guy raping an American woman, pregnant.
And so the enlistment goes up.
So, people are taught to hate.
Before the war, remember, it was, "Pretty parasol and fan in far off Japan."
Now, "Slanty-eyed bastards."
The Germans are not people, they're "krauts".
All nations are corrupt, they all teach their people to hate; hatred and to be patriotic.
Einstein said, "Patriotism is a disease." It separates people.
-You're not born with bigotry, prejudice, anger or envy
that's nurtured, you experience that through your environment.
If you approached a head hunter in the Amazon and said
"Oh my God, don't you feel terrible? You have ten shrunken heads!"
He may say "Yes, my brother has twenty."
-Is he bad? No.
-So how, if we know what is...
I mean we can look at all the influences on society that are needed.
-They don't know how to do that today.
-And we come to what, we look at this vision that you have.
How, again, how do we get there?
Because a lot of people have no vested interest -I know.
-in abandoning the way things are done now.
-We want to make a major motion picture showing how we get from here to there.
It's not going to be smooth, there's going to be a lot of problems, a lot of assasinations.
This is normal to that much of a change if you want to bring.
But if you want to try to patch up the old system
it'll take many years and many wars. We don't have the time
if all nations are building nuclear weapons now, 'cos they don't trust each other.
-Is your life in danger?
-What's that? -"If you come up with something that's so radically..."
My life is always in danger. It's always been in danger.
I developed the first flying wing aircraft, I had nothing but trouble.
I worked on long hours of children working in factories and tried to stop that.
I'm 94 now. I do all I can do rather than fear death. I don't fear death.
I fear where man is going. The hell they can produce is unbelievable.
Because of human, not really human stupidity, they're not educated in our schools.
Our universities are better equipped than ever, and the wars are getting worse.
So, how can we be sane if the weapons are getting worse?
-"Roxanne, he doesn't worry about himself, but do you worry about him?
Because, the things he is talking about
breaking the natural order, don't they? The established order."
-We both are very afraid of where things are going out there
and if you sit back and do nothing, nothing will happen.
So, he's been working on a new approach all his life that nobody else is dealing with.
They're all trying to patch up this system
and it's this monetary system that creates the aberrant behavior
that creates the pollution
that creates the terrible situation between people and the environment.
So, if we sit back and do nothing, this'll continue to go right down into the ground.
And what it takes is introducing these new ideas.
People think in terms of socialism, communism, free-enterprise system, or fascism
nothing has been introduced.
So we want to show it in film to show people really just what type of future they can have
if they work together and create and make all the natural resources
as the common heritage of all the Earth's people.
This is the only way we'll go beyond what we are doing today.
Otherwise, there'll be more and more suffering
if we don't use the scientific method applied to the way we live.
"You will never stop, will you? You will never stop."
-The language we use today was designed hundreds of years ago.
That makes it impossible to talk to one another.
When you read the Bible, it's subject to interpretation.
People say, "Jesus meant this," "No, he meant that!"
So you got the Lutherans, Seventh-Day Adventists, Catholic.
So, we need a language that's not subject to interpretation; mathematics, chemistry.
When chemists talk to each other, it's not "I think you mean this."
When structural engineers build a bridge, they talk to each other and they understand exactly.
We need that in the common language, otherwise
when you talk to a person, I don't care if it's your wife or children
it goes through their head, comes out different as they think you mean it.
That's the danger of the world today.
So people say to you, "Have a nice weekend."
Why don't they say, "Have a nice life." Why just the weekend? 'Cause that's the normal.
See, they don't know what they are talking about, most people.
Now, how do I get up and turn them around?
By identifying with their values and gradually
as fast as I can, I'll take them into the new world.
-"You're sneaky."
-See, here's where people get mad at me.
They say, "You want to give people things for nothing."
I say, "If you're born in America and England and France
you got the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the electric light.
You didn't work on any of that. You got it for nothing. Does it hurt you? No!"
There's nothing wrong with having people access whatever they need without money.
We can turn out volumes of goods today with automation
and make it available to everybody.
That's the end of most crime. Most crime.
-"Could you ever see yourself stopping?"
"Stopping thinking, stopping advocating."
-Well, a brain disease, or aging maybe
might have a stroke and not be able to do it.
That's possible in this world.
But in the future I talk about, everyone is cared for, from babies to old age
and no one is in authority. We don't tell people how to live.
All the machines do is make goods available, transport it, they do not control people.
-"And that's possible?"
-Yes. It was posible in 1927.
-At the beginning of automation in fabrication.
-"But we're terrified of the machines taking over."
-That's because they take your job away.
See, in the future when a new machine comes in, we call the help in
say, "You used to work 8 hours a day, now it's 4.
You used to have a week-two weeks vacation a year.
Now it's six weeks to be with your family and all."
So machines are no longer used to aggrandize the powerful.
They can't lay you off. The machines are now operated for the benefit of all humanity.
There's no more separate nations with artificial boundaries.
If single nations control most of the resources, there's going to be trouble.
Has to be, continuously.
There'll always be war and rumors of war if you keep it this way.
It's only when the Earth is declared the common heritage of all the world's people
that's the end of territorial invasion.
If you don't understand that, I'm sorry, I'll give you all examples you want.
I know what makes those troubles. Some people do and say, "Oh, what can I do?
Do what you can. If you do nothing, nothing will happen.
Everybody that brought liberation to women's right, black rights, polish rights
it is not, that isn't what you want. All the people need the same things
Free access to the necessities of life. Otherwise, they suffer.
Now, what's so difficult about that?
-It's the movies that make people fearful of technology.
They really project the free-enterprise system into the future
and all these robots and technology are working against people.
That's what they do today.
So they are afraid of technology today with the bombs and the missiles and the war
and the technology that displaces people and they have no purchasing power
but that's not what a resource-based economy would do.
They'd use technology for the benefit of people and the environment.
-All over the world.
-"Finally, how achievable is this? If, if everything went according to plan..."
-According to Peter Joseph, who started The Zeitgeist Movement
he told me two months ago that 50 million people now know about The Venus Project
and are all working towards it.
So I have a whole pile of magazines, from all over the world
each one talks about The Venus Project positively.
-The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of The Venus Project.
After Peter Joseph did the film Zeitgeist Addendum, it became well-known all over the world.
And now there are chapters in almost every city in the U.S. and every country all over the world.
And they're working towards these ends.
They are talking to people, they are introducing it in their media
in their TV, in any way that they can.
It really depends on what people do to make this come about.
-We don't want to hurt anybody, or kill anybody
'cause we don't look down on anybody.
We look at them as victims of culture. It's not their fault.