Jacque Fresco-Transition, Changing People's Values, Advancing Education

Jacque talks about working with people and suggests ways to approach them in changing values.

You see? Okay.

- A lot of times you say that you feel that

economic collapse is the only way change is going to occur,

but what I try to tell people is that,

I was convinced, and Neal was convinced,

and a lot of other people are convinced just by the logic of the argument itself,

if we can tell a large number of people and convince a large number of people,

we could avoid this whole collapse,

and then make an intelligent, directional decision to go in that direction.

Boy, do you own any broadcasting companies?

- No, not yet.

Oh. I think it’s very hard to do for the average guy,

unless you are very wealthy, unless you can buy a broadcasting company

and get more time on the internet.

If you speak in terms that people will want to listen to,

like, you have to [use] the same sales pitch they use for other things.

You have to say “How would you like to live in a world without war?” and all that sort of thing.

“Well, that’s impossible, no. ” Give them answers to ‘the how’ you can do it.

And if there are enough people that understand what you're doing, we’ll have social change.

If there are not enough, or there’s been too much damage...

like a jew could never sell, raise money, at a Nazi meeting for the B’nai B’rith;

that’s a Jewish organization.

He can’t raise any money because they can’t hear him.

You can’t raise money to support radicals and communists at a Klan meeting.

You may raise a dime, but I doubt whether you’d raise any money there.

It isn't that... people are already indoctrinated,

and the brain associative system is there; it’s fixed.

And very few people would say “How would The Venus Project deal with this?”

or “How would it deal with… .” They get mad because it’s not a free enterprise system.

So they... In a free enterprise system, you say “If you nationalize everything you kill incentive.”

And then... And psychologists that do studies on cooperative systems

and sharing systems seem to find that the price/money system is the best.

And in [the] communist world they say sharing ideas is the best.

And it depends on the psychiatrist, where he was brought up.

And [if] a psychiatrist finds out that people should be free to pursue any direction they want to,

he’s not very popular. Is that clear?

People like to believe that they make free choices,

that they have the ability to think and reason.

You get up and tell them “You’re just a robot in a given culture”,

that is not something they’re willing to accept.
- Right.

Then you get up and say “After you kick the bucket, you rot away:

ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

They want to fly away to ‘happy land’, where everything is okay.

Don’t forget: you take away their religion, you take away their identity.

So, as you take away religion, you have to give them something else:

that we could attain immortality, if we wanted it,

to do research on what is aging.

I think I talked to you about plaque accumulating in the blood vessels

and the nutrients can't get out,

so you wrinkle; not because you’re getting old,

because the body is unable... the cells multiply for a certain period of time, then they stop.

We have to find out what the stop mechanism is.

That... Is immortality possible? Yes.

But I don't think people would be happy living a thousand years.

They’d be bored shitless, you know,

because you’d hear the same thing from other people:

“My wife just gave birth to a nice little girl”, and then [you’d hear that] for thousands of years, you know?

So I think that people will change in the future.

They will redesign the human body, put an eye in the back of the head

by new genetic engineering, not the stuff you have today.

But they’ll make us more sensitive,

and our brain will be made of tissue that can absorb certain things, fast;

you won’t have to read a book 4 or 5 times.

But if we don’t engineer ourselves we can’t keep up with technology.

If technology can handle, like I said, a thousand trillion bits per second.

Man will say “What do we have to do to keep up with it?”

And you’ll have to redesign the human system.

If they can only handle 7 channels at once that can’t keep up with technology.

In the future technology will be assigned decision making,

then management, then environmental care, you know,

it’ll manage agriculture and everything else.

It’ll tell you what’s best for you.

You sit in front of a computer, [and] you say “What should I study?”

And then it’ll ask you certain questions, and evaluate your answers,

and tell you what to study, what’s more appropriate for you.

People, in the beginning, will say “I'm not going to listen to a machine.”

When you can’t tell the difference whether you’re talking to a computer or a machine,

then it means you’ve attained that state.

But, you will have a machine-person that looks like a normal person.

Now, when he’d be a psychiatrist in the future,

and when you’d tell him your problems his eyebrows would move to the right angle and everything,

“Is that right? Your dad did that to you? How horrible!”

all the facial expressions that you need to understand.

“But, Fresco, that may not have that.”

But you can design machines [so] when a person says

“I come from the Arab world.”, it’ll talk to him in his terms, in his values,

with the same [facial expressions], and it’ll look like an Arab. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Because we are inclined not to listen to people that are not like us.

So, there’s a lot of problems up ahead. We’re not sane, yet.

None of us [are sane, yet] because we’re brought up in a given environment,

and we use the old language, I have to use it, to speak to people.

I can’t say “I’ll see you at sunrise”

because I know the Earth rotates in the direction of the sun; the sun doesn’t rise.

We haven’t changed and updated our language for hundreds of years.

So how can you expect to talk to people, or communicate,

if they haven’t updated their language?

If a guy says “It’s all within people. People are basically good, all they have to do is choose to be good.”

You know, “They’re basically good.” They‘re basically nothing.

They can kill people or not kill people.

It depends on the way you raise them. Does that make sense? - Yeah.

I don’t... People are not basically good or bad; they’re nothing.

They can be trained to kill Eskimos, or Jews, or Swedes, or anything.

- I’m trying to get to, I’m just trying to get to,...

I want to convince, and I want everybody out there, you know, to the camera to know

I want to work on things right now, I don't want to wait for a collapse, I think we should...

I don’t ask you to. Work on things!

- But what are we going to do right now? And how...

But, don’t use straight logic with people.

Try to find out where they’re at, and come at them as best you can utilizing their values.

And take it... Now you might meet some people that’ll take 4 years to change;

some, 20 years. Skip ‘em! Move on.

It doesn’t take everybody to make a wonderful world.

I would say all the technology that we have today

is probably based on the work of 50 people, not millions of people;

you don’t have to convince everybody.

You have to convince the upper middle class and the educated people,

if you... they’re more apt to understand it.

I don’t say they’re better; they’re more apt to understand it.

- Yeah. I don’t have a broadcasting station,

but if I can convince one broadcasting person to express (?) this message,

do you think there is possibility, [there is] hope, that we can reach enough people, reach the right people?

If you do that, and it doesn’t serve the interest of the broadcasting company

they have the power to ridicule you from a hundred of different points.

And you don’t meet your opposition on TV and have a one to one discussion.

They’ll have 20 people that are against you.

You know, it’s very difficult unless you control NBC.

I thought years ago the Russians should’ve bought NBC. Everything is for sale,

and they could’ve pitched if they wanted communism.

Everything in America is for sale, by the way.

We’re selling to the Spaniards many of our bridges,

did you know that, to Spain? Toll bridges.

So, the Spanish... Our government is selling bridges that the public paid for,

because they need money.

Well, pretty soon, they’ll sell the banks and other things,

and the country will belong to somebody else.

It’s almost that way now with China.

We own so much to China, and other countries that lend us money, that America is for sale.

It’s a monetary system, they don’t give a hoot about anything but sustaining their system.

The proof is that they gave the money to the people that created the problem,

and the banks, and industry, and General Motors.

So, they never asked the public what do you want.

[The] Public doesn’t know, what I should want, you know.

And this guy at this center, I don’t know if you ever heard if it,

the Center for the Preservation of Democratic institutions, in Santa Barbara...