A self-taught futurist imagines a utopian world with no money, war, scarcity or property. Jacque Fresco considered himself beyond capitalism and communism, relying on technology, science, and resource management to create a perfect, cybernetically enhanced world. He was also pretty horny and claimed to have changed the minds of several Ku Klux Klan members about race. His ideas ended up being showcased at the United Nations.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 180 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Venus Project episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brokatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Frequently, this podcast covers dystopias, for obvious reasons.
And when utopias do come up, they tend to be demented, based around the public executions of one's enemies, and the revelation that they were all baby blood drinkers to begin with.
But today we're going to take a look at the utopian vision of Jacque Fresco, the man behind what he called the Venus Project.
And I'm sure Travis will not reveal anything weird about this self-taught futurist who died in 2017 at the ripe age of 101, and envisioned a new way to organize society, based on cybernetics, automation, and natural resource management.
I'm here to talk about a man with a vision.
That's the late Jacque Fresco.
He was a self-educated industrial engineer who envisioned a future without want, without war, and even without money.
A world in which there is no scarcity and no property.
A world in which all people are entitled to their fill of earth resources like clean air and water, arable land, education, healthcare, energy, and food.
A world in which technology and nature coexist to serve humanity.
A world so peaceful and beautiful that its inhabitants can't conceive of the misery, hate, and violence that we tolerate today.
Now, this sounds like an idealistic communist utopia, but Jacque Fresco rejected both communism and capitalism, claiming that they were economic systems based on scarcity.
Instead, he envisioned what he called a resource-based economy, which he said was based on abundance.
Before Fresco died in 2017, he spent most of his very long life developing the broad details of this futuristic vision.
What the cities would look like, What the houses would look like, how transportation would work, how to generate limitless clean energy for the entire world, and even what people would do with their time after scarcity is eliminated.
He even purchased a 22-acre estate in Venus, Florida, which he used to build his model home of the future and show off models and drawings of his ideas.
Along the way, he built up a stable of admirers, gave lectures all over the world, and was frequently interviewed by the media.
Now, what's really interesting to me about Jacque Fresco is that it sounds like he had the potential to become a cult leader.
It sounds like all of the elements are there.
He offered a utopian vision, he was a kooky outsider, he had followers who believed in his radical ideas, and he even bought a piece of property that he used to promote his ideas.
But somehow, miraculously, it never really came to that.
There's no evidence that I could find of people upending their lives or being the victim of undue influence in the service of the Venus Project.
So how did Jacque Fresco come to be the founder of The Venus Project?
He was born to a Jewish household in Harlem in 1917.
And this wasn't merely a Jewish household, it was a Sepharadic Jewish household.
And Sepharadic Jews are Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion from Spain after 1492.
Hundreds of thousands left Spain and settled in different parts of Europe and the Middle East.
Fresco's parents came from Istanbul and Haifa.
Instead of speaking Yiddish, his family spoke Ladino, which is Spanish with a little Hebrew thrown in.
This made him a minority of a minority in early 20th century America.
It's Ladinx.
So this kind of might help explain why he was so comfortable with his status as sort of an outsider.
His parents wanted him to be a sign painter like his uncle, but that did not interest him.
Instead, he was devoted to studying mathematics, conducting science experiments in the family bathroom, and building advanced models of ships and aircraft.
In an interview, he claimed that as a teenager, he once designed a safer kind of mechanical home fan, but his idea was stolen.
When I was about 13, one of my relatives stuck his hand into a metal fan while it was on.
This led me to design a fan with rubber, or fabric blades.
I submitted the design to some companies, but they showed no interest.
Shortly after that, the product came out on the market.
This was my introduction to the marketplace.
Despite Fresco's love of learning, he hated school and did not make it past elementary school.
it is. You're like, "I have a fantastic idea!" And they're like, "Eh, this'll never work."
And then they're like, "Hey, see what you can do with the fabric blades.
Rubber would be good too." Whatever.
Despite Fresco's love of learning, he hated school and did not make it past elementary school.
A childhood friend of Fresco's named Jack Catran later recalled Fresco's
attitude towards formal education.
It was all bullshit to him.
He had been put in the back of the class, where he spent all his time drawing cities of the future.
This was 100% me, by the way.
I would spend all of my time in elementary school drawing pictures of, like, elaborate mazes and cities and tunnel systems, like, in the back of my journal.
Yeah.
And then, a xenomorph enters the utopia.
Yeah, here's the progression.
And at first it was a giant squid, then it was a-- no, first it was a Ghostbuster, then
it was a Ninja Turtle, then it was a Xenomorph, but it's always been a giant squid.
Nice.
By Fresco's own telling, he had a rebellious and anti-nationalist streak.
Fresco remembers when he was in elementary school and had a teacher who wanted him to, quote, think American.
He says he responded this way.
I informed her that the beds we sleep in were designed in England.
The language that we speak is butchered English.
Our religion is imported.
And if it hadn't been for guys like Louis Pasteur, we wouldn't be here.
The Arabs gave us the electric battery.
The Phoenicians and Egyptians gave us much of good early science.
All the way down the line, we owe so much to many from so many different lands.
He says that when he was told to pledge allegiance to the flag of the US, he asked to pledge allegiance to the Earth and everyone on it instead.
King.
What a king!
That's amazing!
He rocks.
Fresco was sent to the principal's office and fortunately the principal was sympathetic to a student that had little patience for school.
He gave Fresco his own place to read whatever he wanted and even took him to Macy's department store to buy him tools and materials to work with.
During the Great Depression, Fresco dabbled in reading Marxist literature and hanging around communists, but he wound up rejecting Marxism.
And for some reason, he made this rejection known publicly during a meeting of communists.
Which, you know, went down as well as you might think it would.
Yeah, apparently he stood up and he was like, Marx was wrong!
And they were like, okay man, you gotta leave.
He, like, grabs a couple, like, cookies off the table, like, on the way out.
Who's coming with me?
No one?
Okay.
This incident was recounted in the 1998 memoir Fat Man on the Left, Four Decades in the Underground by the journalist Lionel Rolfe.
At one point during the Depression, Fresco had been attracted to the theories of Karl Marx.
But he finally decided, and was brave enough to declare as much at a public meeting of the Young Communist League, from which he was physically ejected, that Marx was all wrong.
Fresco felt that Marx was no longer accurate in talking about human labor being the source of all wealth.
For one day, Fresco said, machines would make human labor redundant.
It was a matter of simple physics.
A man working all day long is lucky to produce a third of a horsepower's worth of work.
Machines will one day do everything a man can do, only better, Fresco said.
Besides, he asked, what else was man but a rather inefficient machine at best?
Fresco spent many of the Depression years hoboing around on boxcars.
He later said that these lean times were formative for him.
I'm talking grapes of wrath.
I lived through that period.
And if you don't become social out of that, that's a condition that shaped my values, being hungry, on the road.
That's how I build my identity.
Those were social conditions that generated liberals.
They don't exist in our society anymore.
We're getting a bunch of meatheads because our society doesn't have the ingredients to generate sensitive people.
Now we are living in the tale of the Middle Ages, the land of the living dead.
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