Personal property

I've just been listening to Peter Joseph on Blogtalk radio, and one of the subjects he explored is psychology v logic. By way of example, he set up abolition of / deprivation from personal property as one of the straw men used against the RBE.

My thoughts here follow on from his, but are not what he said exactly; they combine some of the ideas expressed in his talk in a different way.

Personal property is sacrosanct in many people's views. Even in a work environment, with equipment allocated / issued by an employer, people can have a strong identification of something being theirs - can I borrow YOUR stapler.

It's quite hard to analyse; there's one element of identifing with a possession - a concept that car manufacturers like to play on, so that a possession is part of you or your personality, and the other element is securing access to the resource. (I'm settimg aside things of sentimental value, or yucky things like sharing a toothbrush).

Let's take a CD for example. Technologically, it's perfectly possible to listen to any piece of music (recording) anytime, anywhere. We don't technically need a CD. Somehow though, the desire to have instant access to a recording, plus the £ invested in it, plus the (at one time) technical need to physically have a CD, plus the emotional draw created by the packaging, plus the cultural norm of posessing / owning combine powerfully to make us defensive of our CD collection, and reluctant if not unable to boil this down to actually what we want (what service) from the CD.

Imagine this scaled up, though, to a motor vehicle or dwelling. Living in an RBE takes such a leap of imagination. It's hard to inagine a world where we can call up a pice of music on any device that's to hand, or find a sleeping place where we happen to be, or easily and comfortably get from where we are to wher we want to be without any hassle, so at the moment we tend to own (secure exclusive use of) devices / objects that render these services. Thus we have CDs we rarely play, cars that are mainly parked, and so on usque ad infinitem.

What's your idea, muertos?

http://muertos.blog.com/2010/10/23/seeing-like-a-state-why-zeitgeists-world-changing-visions-are-a-recipe-for-disaster/

J S Bach wrote Baroque music. J S Bach's music is brilliant. Therefore Baroque music is brilliant. Most people with even the most basic introduction can see that this logic is flawed. It is wrong to classify things and then assume that the class of things is homogenous / consistent. (If you do this with ethnicity you finish up with racism.)

This blogger muertos criticises a movement or style in architecture / planning called High Modernism (based on a book called Seeing Like a State). The designs for Brasilia were labelled High Modernism and were (the book argues - I don't know enough to give an opinion) not a success. Therefore, by muertos' logic, it appears, High Modernism was not a success.

He then goes on to label TVP/TZM as "High Modernism" (I assume he is referring to Jacque Fresco's designs for cities) and therefore TVP/TZM will fail and therefore are wrong and their ideas should not be tried.

This technique is usually applied using communism as the failed big idea.

I don't know if muertos shares the ideals of TZM/TVP, but I think not. He mocks TVP for being conspiracy theorists - in fact he writes "primarily aimed at spreading conspiracy theories". I'm not sure that he is misunderstanding; I think he is being rhetorical. He is apparently confusing (deliberately?) TVP with the first Zeigeist movie, which had a conspiracy theory section. It was making the point (rather over making it, I think) that institutions seek to preserve themselves and will stop at nothing to do achieve that end. By any reckoning, the consipracy theories in the first Zeitgeist Movie have nothing to do with Jacque's designs for cities.

I hink muertos doesn't share TVP/TZM's aims, because he opines that they are "at best, doomed never to get off the ground". I see no reason to express this pessimism  - at least not in these terms - if he wants them to succeed in their aims.

Now maybe there are lessons to be learnt from what happened with Brasilia that can be applied to Jacque's designs to improve them. Maybe Jacque has already considered this. I say this openly as I don't know enough about Brasilia or Seeing like a state to be able to agree/disagree.

Seeing like a state's general idea seems to be that top down planning fails through not taking into account the nuances / subtilties of activities that have been carried out organically from the bottom up. Important lesson, but how do we get sustainability and equality if we don't plan?

Muertos is guilty, I thnk, of protesting too much. His heading includes the phrase "recipe for disaster" and he calls TZM a "bizarre organization" and "a recipe for a catastrophe". I would prefer it if he made more constructive criticisms (and spare the rhetoric) because, as its tagline suggests, TVP wants to eradicate poverty and war. If muertos also wants to eradicate poverty and war, I for one welcome his contribution. For the record, I don't want to eradicate politics and money for any other reason than they seem to stand in the way of, or don't contribute to, or oppose the eradication of poverty and war.

Politicians and government

At this year's Zeitgeist Day (my third, unbelievably), there was some Q&A about the role of government in transitioning to an RBE. Some say we should try to get govenment on board, and others that that is far too optimistic as government is far too venal. For the moment, my thought is that we can't leave government to politicians.

On thetrain travelling home, I read an editorial by Jeremy O'Grady, editor-in-chief of The Week. It is apposite. He wrote: "democracies create all kinds of devices- elcctions every five years, First Past The Post, the European Court of Human Rights -  to ensure that the will of the people is not given too much of a look in. Whisper it quietly, but that's a good thing."

So there you have it - a news editor condoning constraints on democracy. Don't get me wrong, opinion, especially if uninformed, is worthless. It's just that we're played along, and given just enough input to the democratic process to make some people think that our input/opinion actually counts.

Future ICT

http://www.futurict.org.uk/ is the website of the UK hub of this "proposal"

'The FuturICT flagship proposal intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to. The FuturICT flagship proposal will produce historic breakthroughs and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict, including the financial crisis.'

Some of its ideas/plans are similar to those of The Venus Project.

Thrive movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8VSSu1iosI&feature=related

This film in 9 parts on Youtube starts of as what seems a rather schmaltzy pastoral as if it were going to be a "what an amazing world we live in" type document. It then ventures into a theory about the torus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus (ring doughnut shape) and its significance along with other shapes compunded from it, at all scales throughout the universe and time. Hidden code stuff. I wasn't sure about the significance or validity of it, but I'm no expert. The film culminates in standard theory about how the rich banking families are in ultimate control of society, via money, and suggests ways of breaking out of the control of this so-called new world order.

There's an interesting section about so-called free energy, which as far as I understand is inducing energy rom the earth's magnetic field.

In his what the world could be like conjecture at the end, the author posits monetary/financial reform - so less radical than TVP/TZM in that respect. Also he is influenced positively by Ludwig von Mises, which came as bit of a surprise as I was expecting the author to be more aligned with TZM/TVP in his position on that Austrian Economist, but my knowledge of von Mises is very scant, so I won't comment much further. The author accepts that we're all connected, but also agrees with von Mises that individual freedom is the way to a better society, and acting at a societal level has not worked / will not work.

The author says that the movie's statements are well-sourced, presumably on the website http://thrivemovement.com/ but I haven't followed this up.

A conversation with Jacque Fresco

http://www.createandshare.net/multimedia-documentaries/videos-consciousness/conversation-jacque-fresco.html

This is a god interview with Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project from 2004. He doesn't digress to much and in one case where he does, the interviewer  calmly aks him the same question again. It's  a good intro to TVP

Motivation; abundance

So a critcism of TVP/RBE is that people won't work without the motivation of money. Well we know this is not true of everyone at all times -  we know that people do voluntary work, give to charity, and undertake all kinds of recreational activities in their own time and often at their own expense. But there remains a logical possibility that there will be those who if given their fair share of the plantet's resources for nothing, will input nothing from their own resources to the maintenance of an environmentally sustainable, socially just and peaceful planet for the benefit of humanity.

To overcome this problem, basically everyone has to work. Access to resoures is tied to money and money to work. Therefore, it is in the workers' interests that there is work for them to do. Police need crime, doctors and nurses need people to be ill, firefighters need fires, and so on ad infinitum.

This artificially created need to work is supposed to capture those people who would not contribute without being rewarded, but how many of those people are doing work that is actually productive for society and the planet now? Some, like many people, may be doing a job because they have to, and some may be doing jobs that involve clearing up the mess created by the system - to quote my favourite example, they may be employed mitigating or solving the effects of smoking to counterbalance the cigarette promotion industry in which people are paid more the more people smoke. Or they may be doing "jobs" that are unequivocally anti-social, even by current standards - acquistive crime, drug dealing, or whatever.

So, the naysayers' claim is that we can't risk a moneyless society just in case there are enough people who currently do something socially productive but will stop if no longer paid to mean that the required human work in an RBE - work that is increasingly encroached upon by automation -  won't get done.

Well look. If we in fact found it to be a problem that the human work  needed to have a successful RBE was not being done because people felt there was nothing in it for them and were not motivated (even though they would benefit from the successful RBE), we could re-introduce money. We would see it though for what it is -  a claim on the planet's resources over and above one's fair share.

If there truly is abundance, this wouldn't make sense. It would surely be a rare person who would seek to deprive someone else of something of which there is plenty for all, just because s/he could.

So these are the  issues: Will there be motivation to do the human work that needs doing, and will there be abundance so that people will not try to reserve resources for themselves to the exclusion of other? Maybe this is a risky experiment, but I don't think it is. We can easily switch back to our current system if the RBE doesn't work, but if anyone can stand up and say that the financial collapse, war, starvation and servitude that the planet currently faces is clearly better, then I would like to hear their arguments.

A cult and a fetish

Critics of environmental sustainability often seem to portray it (negtively) as some kind of religious belief . I recently heard about something - economic growth probably - being "sacrificed on the altar of sustainability".

An article in The Week gives a precis of newspaper articles on energy reform, and most notably Matt Ridley in The Times refers to a 'carbon fetish'. He argues not only that the increased cost of using non renewable energy will destroy jobs, but that (as paraphrased by The Week I take it), 'energy is the elixir of economic growth'.


It is economic growth that is the cult and fetish here. We need energy and we need to conserve the energy we have, not use as much as possible to maintain 'economic growth'. And if we don't stop putting carbon into our atmosphere we are heading for climate catastrophe. Are we not prepared to "sacrifice" economic growth on the "altar" of our own survival as a species?

Let's set out the lie that continued economic growth is here again. We have limited, not unlimited resources. As we have limited resources, we need to conserve them if we wish to survive and prosper as a species. If we don't wish to survive as a species, we can carry on using resources as quickly as possible and lying to ourselves that they will never run out, or not caring on the basis that they won't run out in our lifetime. We can carry on competing for and fighting over the resources, making them more scarce and thereby getting more 'economic growth'.

It won't work

Critics of the RBE often produce "it won't work" type arguments, as if everything's fine now and there was no finacial meltdown, impending environmental disaster(s), starvation, war, etc. I sometimes wonder if they accept that these things are problems, and that we should look for solutions to them.

If everything was going pretty well, and we came along advocating tweaks, and people said that a tweak wouldn't work, and showed why, the objections migh make some sense, but at the moment it is like going to the doctor with a disease, and whatever the doctor suggests, opining "it won't work".

Perhaps people don't care about wars and starvation that don't directly affect them, but the enviromental catastrophes are eventually going to affect us all either directly, or when people start to move from affected areas. So people need a strategy for at least that.

On natural disaters, Brandy Hume (Take TVP challenge) points out that when individuals and goivernments collaborate to deal with the aftermath of a naural disaster, it is widely seen as good. TZM proposes coming together to face planetary problems before they occur (as far as possible). We're told it won't work, we're a cult, etc.

Population control

Somewhere on the internet some twit commented that TZM/TVP "boils down to ... population control". The vast majority of comments on discussion forums don't merit any response, and this glib and ill-thought out (un thought out) one doesn't either, but it's another in to explaining the tenets of TZM/TVP.

TZM/TVP point out the undisputable scientific fact that the earth has a carrying capacity. Undeniably, this is the limiting factor on the human population. We might not be able to enumerate this, but it is certainly there. We can keep using resources faster and faster, but we will reach this absolute limit.

TZM/TVP say that the only sensible response to this is to use the resources efficiently, to give us the maximum chance of true prosperity as a species.

As to population control, what do you call starvation in the third world while in the first world people die of lifestyle diseases such as those related to obesity? What do you call sending young men (mainly) to death in wars? What do you call leaving curable diseases uncured to preserve financial profit? TZM/TVP calls to an end to all population control, but accepts that there are natural limits.

jericomovie

Have a look at jericomovies contributions on Youtube about the Venus Project. Nothing fancy, but well explained and wry. He starts from standard economics ideas and argues and explains his way to TVP ideas. He has three episodes, I believe - I'm looking forward to the 4th.

I also listened to one critique of his "Supply and demand" episode, but I must say I thought it largely added to what he said.

Military Industrial Complex

Maybe there is such a thing as a just war and maybe some of the war aims of conflicts in recent years were valid. The fact that just war might be possible should not cloud our views of the military industrial complex. This posting was provoked by the film "Why we fight" one of 57 videos recommended by v-radio, an internet radio station dedicated to spreading the word about TVP/TZM. The film is a bit plodding (IMHO) at the start, but persevere, because the intensity builds towards the end.

It features the nauseating collaboration between arms manufacturers and government, but in a profit driven world people must have jobs, making weapons is a job and weapons must be sold to get money to pay the workers. The  companies must make a profit and war - frankly - brings profit as it consumes weapons.

Another pericope in the film was about an articulate, intelligent 23 year old man who was joining the army as he couldn't get a job elsewhere. He also admired the tech. Middle aged women arms factory workers were also featured, torn between their need to have a job and their distaste at making weapons to kill people.

Part of the lie we are told is that the technology is super accurate and gets its targets without killing innocents nearby. The tech plainly is technically impressive and we should lament that the skill and resources that go into building this stuff is not be diverted to constructive end. It isn't surprising that manufacturers over egg the capability of what they are selling, and this is no different. The fact that we see the exaggerated claims as news is a feature of how the military-industrial complex pervades. But these weapons aren't as accurate as is made out, as we know from the pain wracked faces or corpses of "non combatants" on our screens.

As public sector cuts bite deep, many people look to military spending and argue that resources should be diverted. The arguments against are either along the "protecting freedom" lines - no-one can disagree with protecting freedom, or along the lines of just war, and removing nasty rulers from power. So we might feel a bit guilty as if we didn't really want freedom or a world free of nasty dictators. I'm also a bit conflicted around poppy day. Were those who fought / died freedom fighters fending off fascism, or were they suckers in the military industrial complex, or both. I'm moved by the ceremonies at the Menin Gate and by the last post and reveille on Remembrance Sunday, but I wonder if this is all part of the enormous commercial (advert) for the military industrial complex. Death or injury working for a company should merit compensation from that company, rather than a few quid in a poppy sellers tin. I accept that people think they are fighting for their country or a just cause, and (perhaps) that to some extent they actually are, but the profit motive is what has turned the whole thing into an industry. If the industry can get the country on board, why wouldn't it?

Barter and profit

One criticism levelled at TVP/TZM ideas (by people not familiar enough with the ideas) is that without money we would have to return to barter. They have apparently missed the point that if there is abundance, there won't be any need for trade, nor will it be possible. If there's more than enough tomatoes (say) for everyone's need, why would anyone need to trade anything for them? It is only in scarcity that the profit system can operate, so it creates it where it does not exist.

Can we have abundance in all necessities? TZM/TVP says we can. Obviously, we could stop creating artificial scarcity so that we can monetize things, but to do that we'd have to stop putting profit at the top of our list of priorities.

Profit; Democracy

A key point made by Jacque Fresco and others is that companies/corporations have a legal duty to maximise profit. In the 1920s productivity had become so high that it would have been possible to increase wages and reduce working hours and thus have a higher standard of living, but this would have been at the expense of profit. To 'solve' this problem, consumerism was developed, using advertising to persuade us to buy the stuff that was being produced, so that profit could be maintained.

Early advertising was product centred - it was informative about the product, but as it developed, it started more and more to tap into actual human desires, by depicting healthy, happy, leisured people using the product being sold, or depicted alongside the product at advertisement level. Thus the psychology is that the product the viewer sees depicted will bring, or help bring, the health and contentment that is portrayed by the people in the advert.

If companies and corporations were legally bound to maximise the fulfillment of human need, things would look very different - not to say better, so why did profit win out - it seems illogical?

Well, those in positions of power did not want ordinary people to have more leisure time as a benefit of increased productivity, as this would give them time to think, become better educated, and potentially threaten the positions of the rich/powerful. This would lead towards true democracy, instead of the limited, circumscribed democracy that we have now, which works on the basis that ordinary people should not directly participate in decision making as they are insufficiently intelligent/educated to do so meaningfully. Many critics of the current system would of course point out that the best education is reserved for those with wealth to pay for it and therefore the people in power are creating the problem that the limitation on democracy is apparently aimed at solving.

TVP/TZM does not take such a high view of democracy as some critics of our current system do. They do see education as extremely important, and done properly, education would help people to make informed decisions, thus removing one of the objections to untrammelled democracy. But as Peter Joseph points out, nature is not a democracy: there is no point voting against an earthquake. TVP/TZM argues that opinion is pretty much meaningless in the face of scientifically acquired knowledge. Expansion of that idea is for another posting.

Anarchy, Marxism, RBE

http://erispandora.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/marxism-2-0-the-dangers-of-the-venus-project/

I've been debating with an anarchist blogger who says that TVP/RBE is Marxism - you can see the exchange through the above link.

I'm only interested in whether the aims of TVP/RBE are desirable and achievable. Labels don't really help. The writer has a tendency to claim that the RBE has certain attributes that s/he finds undesirable, and claims that proponents of RBE actually welcome those attributes. The other possibilities are that our system does not have those attributes, or that it does but we don't find them desirable (in which case we would seek to remove them). And of course there could be a straightforward disagreement over the desirability of the attribute.