Vitaly Khalyukov shamelessly dances on the bones of an old man.
It's not often that you get to execute a rotting corpse, but revolution requires radical measures. Jacques Fresco has been in the grave for a year now and, nevertheless, his followers are still smoking the sky with their sectarian statements, trying to drag other ignorant people into the whirlpool of madness. The energy they generate powers the Twitter of Sergei Panteleevich Mavrodi and digs the gardens at Kurginyan’s dacha.
So, are you sleeping, brother Jacques?
If anyone doesn’t know, this is a hundred-year-old grandfather who died last year. His main brainchild is the Venus Project. This is a model of a future society without money and with super technologies, which the mildest critics call utopian.
But this is just the tip. Get your tinfoil hats ready.
At first glance, everything is quite harmless. Turning on any video, you will see a charismatic old man who is campaigning for world peace, restoration of the environment and the rejection of elitism. It would seem that what's wrong with this? Well, someone would like to believe in a futuristic society with renewable resources and without government control. Please.
Unfortunately, this is not just a reason to laugh at anarcho-communists and disperse. Uncle Fresco needs to donate for all the promised miracles. And he will already take care of stopping wars, abolishing governments and abandoning the money-based economy. But specifics – who needs them?
One of my friends, who had a fairly successful underground establishment in Crimea, talks about points from “Venus” as obvious things.
But let's talk in detail.
Resource economy
If Lemon Fresco soda contains the taste of damned capitalism, then the kind bearded guy from the “Venus Project” preached typical Leninist communism, pathetically called “resource economics”. The essence couldn’t be more abstract: let’s give up money and build a paradise on Earth, where all resources will become the property of every person.
When sectarians start telling you that this is not communism, make them remember the slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Everything is the same here, only in a technological wrapper.
But let's not run ahead of the hyperloop. Suddenly there really is something in this. Okay, Jacque Fresco, we're listening. How will we achieve all this beauty and - most importantly - on what basis will we distribute resources?
It turns out that this guy built a supercomputer and wrote a special algorithm that will allow resources to be distributed fairly, in contrast to evil capitalism and the banking economy. But he won’t show it to us, because, well, the time just hasn’t come yet. He probably has thousands of reasons for this. Just know that the computer is there.
Personal life
Jacques Fresco was in official relationships twice. His first wife remained in Los Angeles after Jacques moved to Florida. The scientist lived with his second wife Patricia for several years on the Atlantic coast. The marriage produced two children - son Richard and daughter Bambi.
Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows
After his second divorce, Jacques Fresco never married again. Since 1976, Roxanne Meadows has become his assistant and colleague, who continues to be close to her idol to this day.
Refusal of money
Before moving to a resource economy, we need to abandon the money-oriented one. Sounds perfect if you're a hippie sophomore in college, but do you have any idea how difficult it is? Jacques Fresco apparently believed that once everyone in the world knew about the Venus Project and understood its importance, it would happen naturally.
But even if you are an idiot and think that giving up money is a good idea, you will have to try hard to explain exactly how the existing value system, states, etc. will collapse. When neo-Luddite Theodore Kaczynski mailed bombs, he developed a more consistent system. Only he believed that technology is evil, and Jacques Fresco fans rely on it as a deus ex machina. They are sure that capitalism will definitely collapse. And facts are for suckers, with them anyone can confirm their point.
Will the rich oppressors resist the change of system? No, because in the future science is magic. Just keep giving me money, okay?
Jacques Fresco - famous scientist
So, well, such an eminent and famous person will not lie to us. An acquaintance of mine, a fan of Jacques Fresco, tried for a long time to convince me that Fresco is a famous engineer who invented a bunch of useful things. In particular, when he was an aeronautical engineer at Douglas Aircraft.
The problem is that in the Western scientific community no one knows about the achievements of the scientist Jacques Fresco. He is known precisely thanks to the “Venus Project” and his lectures. But my friend assured me that this was a proven fact and he had seen the patent letters. "Where?" - I'm asking. "In a video by Jacques Fresco." The supercomputer and algorithm are located there. They will be pulled out of the hat when it comes time to allocate resources. Need I say anything else?
But any factual confirmation of what he is talking about, disassembled into numbers and diagrams, would increase confidence in him tenfold. It’s just that neither letters nor computers exist in nature.
Education
This activity interested the boy so much that he decided to become an aircraft engineer. In 1930, the Great Depression hit, and Jacques left home. He began to travel around the country by hitchhiking. At this time, the teenager became interested in the economic processes that caused such a decline. Jacques came to the conclusion that money is not needed to achieve a developed society. He shared his ideas with Albert Einstein, whose home he once visited. The conversation made a great impression on Fresco and left a certain imprint on the development of his ideas.
At the age of 18, Fresco began to design professionally, and his first significant work was the development of an aircraft fastening system and a new type of landing gear. In 1939, he got a job at Douglas Aircraft, from which he soon quit due to a number of disagreements with his superiors.
In addition to scientific activities, Jacques was interested in social service, and he worked for some time in a center for the rehabilitation of disadvantaged sections of the population. Realizing the futility of temporary help for alcoholics and drug addicts, Jacques quit. He came to the conclusion that it is necessary to eliminate the cause, not the effect. In the late 30s, Fresco went to the Tuamotu Islands to study the life of the aborigines.
During World War II, Jacques Fresco was drafted into the army. He was entrusted with the development of air carriers for the military needs of the state. Having made a number of promising discoveries, with the end of hostilities, the scientist retired to the reserve. Work in the militaristic industry contradicted his internal attitudes. Even then he began to think about changing the world order and eliminating any wars.
Jacques wondered: if the state spends 500 times more money on militarization than on the national economy, can such a society be called reasonable? The first tests of a nuclear bomb confirmed the absurdity of modern civilization in the eyes of a futurist.
Fuck the system!
Fresco's argumentation always resembled the theses of a teenage nerd who is against a system that he does not understand. We can listen to whining that everything is bad and corrupt. But Monsieur is a better populist than Navalny and Svetov, because his lustrations sounded truly scary.
“Lawyers in the future will be considered criminals, like all bankers and businessmen,” Jacques quote. No, man, that's how the economy works. For objective reasons. One of the arguments that I hear time after time from supporters of Jacques Fresco begins with the words: “Yes, this is a utopia.” But no, this is idiocy and misunderstanding of the simplest principles of human society. And yes, we know that the current system is flawed and terrible. It's just better not to offer it to some critics.
Fresco's scientific views and areas of interest
Fresco was interested in issues of holistic design, social engineering, and developed the problem of wise management of natural resources. Fresco's research interests focused on the issue of resource-based economics. According to the scientist, the path to a developed, stable society lies through the reasonable distribution of food, intellectual, and educational resources.
Modern journal for scientists
No, this is communism
If you happen to have read Lenin or even Žižek, then much of the Venus Project program will seem familiar to you. And unfulfilled forecasts about the collapse of the market economy, and dispossession, and the purple paradise of mutual aid at the end of the tunnel. Plus a little futurism and technocracy, where instead of factories and factories there are computers.
Let me remind you that Jacques Fresco was born in 1916 and the times of his stormy youth coincided with the heyday of leftist ideas. The fact that he, a novice engineer, became interested in these ideas is an absolutely normal story. It’s just that then he apparently caved in to the market and began milking shekels from gullible dreamers to create an obviously impossible dream.
It's funny that the Venus Project was never taken seriously by the communists themselves due to the lack of even a minimal plan for the transition from the existing system to the new one. All Jacques says is that it will take an “economic disaster” to make the transition happen. How and when is unknown, but money is transferred to the project here and now.
Scientific works and achievements
Since the late 40s, Fresco headed a research laboratory, where he lectured, designed, and acted as a scientific consultant. Since 1955, he moved to California, then to Miami, Florida. Here he participated in a design project for Alcoa and Major Realty.
Fresco outlined his extraordinary scientific views about the cybernetic community in the book “Looking Ahead,” which made him popular. Jacques Fresco dealt with issues of socio-cybernetics, later creating a corporation of the same name.
He attributed the reason for his excellent health and longevity to his positive perception of life. Jacques Fresco died in 2021 at the age of 101.
Financial stability of the enterprise and economic security strategy
Devil's Advocate
You know, I have been interested in the topic of sects for quite some time, and the ideologies of many of them contain at least a minimal level of specificity. For example, Seventh Day Adventists believe that the Second Coming will occur, if not today, then certainly tomorrow. And their entire value system is built around this. Jacques Fresco was always generous with examples when describing how poorly modern society is structured.
His main weapons are aphorisms and stories. The old man even had the audacity to say that people were being manipulated right during his combat NLP sessions.
What's the real plan?
Roughly speaking, there are four points here. And I practically don’t joke about them. Be afraid.
I. Raise money and build Jacques Fresco a luxurious house in Florida. This is the first phase. Seriously, he just happened to have a house there.
II. Make films to inform society. There are quite a lot of such films, but the most detailed of them is “Zeitgeist”. Asking people to be sure to buy and distribute these films. $30 for DVD please.
III. Build an experimental city to conduct social research there. Okay, Jacque Fresco is competent enough to build several buildings. But a social experiment of this scale is extremely doubtful. By the way, we have a separate fee for the construction of the city. I'll send you the details.
IV. Build a THEME PARK. We need money for construction and money for entry. Interactive screens will convincingly explain why giving us money is a good idea.
All these points are really included in the program of Jacques Fresco, and then only the fog of war.
What, Jacque Fresco? Is human behavior actually shaped by the environment? I would never have thought that the first sentence in the first class of sociology at any university would be such a revelation.
But when it comes to how to change all this, there are only abstract ideas and general phrases wrapped in dense rhetoric. However, Jacques' followers repeat the same phrases that he is doing all this for the benefit of humanity, he is a cool scientist and all that. In their eyes, he is practically a saint. Here's a perfect example.
In the post-war utopia of the 50s, Fresco, like many white men, was involved in various nationalist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. But in every biography of Jacques it is written that he studied their behavior and tried to convince them. I don’t presume to judge how it really happened, but such a fact in the biography would have destroyed any other person as a public figure. Unless, of course, he is the messiah.
Primary activity
More and more, he began to come to the idea of creating a symbiotic social order, which would organically include the coexistence of man and nature. Jacques the engineer was interested in the possibility of creating fully self-financing housing that could function autonomously, without consuming external power sources.
The first such project, which was created in collaboration with Earl Muntz, was the construction of a building made of a special aluminum structure. The show of the first eco-house was held at a Hollywood studio and brought a lot of revenue to its creators, which they spent on charity. But the US budget refused to provide financial support for the construction of such buildings, and the project remained unrealized.
Soon Jacques decides to create a Research Center, the main laboratories of which are located in Los Angeles. Fresco begins active teaching and inventive activities. After 5 years, his brainchild was declared bankrupt, and he went to the Atlantic coast in Miami.
Jacques chose sales psychology as his field of activity, and he began giving lectures on this topic. But his lack of higher education in this field of knowledge outraged the local intelligentsia, and Fresco was forced to stop this type of activity. He became actively involved in social work studying racist organizations from the inside.
Jacques Fresco continues to work on his eco-housing developments, which were called Project Americana. For the first time, the idea of a circular city appears, as well as new projects of prefabricated sandwich houses, photos and descriptions of which were published in leading scientific publications in North America. Fresco carried out his inventive activities on the basis of his own company, Jacque Fresco Enterprises, which was engaged in design work, in particular, the development of modern building structures made of aluminum.
At the age of 53, Jacques created his first scientific work, “Looking Ahead,” in which he summarized his experience in studying modern society and made a number of forecasts for the near future. Fresco very realistically described the society of the 21st century, in which the physical labor of a person will be replaced by the work of cybernetic machines. This will allow humanity to free up time for self-development and intellectual knowledge of the world. In his works, Jacques Fresco describes the ideal model of ancient Greek society, but in the realities of the future.
