Zeitgeist
Addendum
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Zeitgeist: Addendum - Part Three - Page 5
This is the fifth page of part three in my series of articles on Zeitgeist: Addendum. Please refer to the introduction if you were lead to this page.
[Jacque Fresco]
What is scarcity? Based on keeping products valuable. Slowing up production on oil raises the price. Maintaining scarcity of diamonds keeps the price high. They burn diamonds at the Kimberley diamond mines. They're made of carbon. It keeps the price up.
The burning temperature for diamonds is around 3,550° C (6,422°F). Kimberley doesn't burn their diamonds, but they do hold the outgoing stock to drive up prices however[14]. The cost of burning them would be more than it'd be worth just to hold them and drive up the price that way.
[Narration]
So then, what does it mean for society when scarcity, either produced naturally or through manipulation, is a beneficial condition for industry?
It means that sustainability and abundance will never ever occur in a profit system, for it simply goes against the very nature of the structure. Therefore, it is impossible to have a world without war or poverty, it is impossible to continually advance technology to its most efficient and productive states, and most dramatically, it is impossible to expect human beings to be behave in truly ethical or decent ways.
I think a better phrasing would be "it is impossible to most human beings to behave in a truly ethical or decent way." Because some people, likely due to parenting, insanity, or disorder will behave in unethical and indecent ways towards their fellow human beings. Though I do agree that the system does indeed play a large roll in shaping that kind of behavior, but the removal of said system would not solve all problems.
Human nature or human behavior?
[Jacque Fresco]
People use the word instinct because they can't account for the behavior. They sit back and they evaluate, with their lack of knowledge,
you know, and they say things like, "Humans are built a certain way, greed is natural
thing," as though they worked for years on it. And it's no more natural than wearing clothing.
[Roxanne Meadows]
What we want to do is to eliminate the causes of the problems. Eliminate the processes that produce greed and bigotry and prejudice and people taking advantage of one another, and elitism. Eliminating the need for prisons and welfare. We have always had these problems because we have always lived within scarcity and barter and monetary systems that produce scarcity.
I think most people want to get rid of those problems, but a lot of people fail to recognize that the source of the problem has to be eliminated; but a lot of people think it can be done through the free market.
[Jacque Fresco]
If you eradicate the conditions that generate what you call socially offensive behavior, it does not exist. A guy
says, "Well isn't that inborn"? No, it's not.
There's a decent amount of evidence to say some personality traits are genetic. For example twins separated at birth with often times have similar personalities, even if raised in two totally different environments. That's not to say environment doesn't play a roll, it definitely does, but to say no behavior at all is inborn is incorrect[15].
[Roxanne Meadows]
There is no human nature, there's human behavior, and that's always been changed throughout history. You're not born with bigotry and greed and corruption and hatred. You pick that up within the society.
It's true though that bigotry and hatred are learned concepts, especially towards minorities and so forth. As Noam Chomsky put it:
Our nature, the nature of humans allows all kinds of behavior. I mean every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint. Depends on all sorts of things[16].
[Jacque Fresco]
War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in a monetary system. That
is, there will be very little significant change. It's going to take the redesign of our culture, our values, and it has to be related to the carrying capacity of the earth. Not some human opinion or some politician's notions of the way the world ought to
be or some religious notions of the conduct of human affairs.
And that is what the Venus Project is about.
It's also what the Technocratic Movement is about.