Are any of you people members of the World Future Society?
I'm sure most of you've heard of Arthur C. Clarke.
Would you raise your hands? Good.
He said that if he wrote a book
that everybody enjoyed and understood
he said he wouldn't be saying anything new.
Think about that.
What I'm going to talk about is going to change some of your lives:
the way you look at yourself and the way you look at the world around you.
The subject matter is not the kind
you get from ordinary sources or books
so I would like your participation in an experiment.
Some of you might be able to tell what it is
that I draw on the board before I finish
and if you know what it is, interrupt, say "I got it!"
I'm going to start. Can all of you see the board?
I don't think I can make it with this.
Can all of you see the board? Can you hear me all right?
The minute you know what it is, interrupt.
(Audience member) Sinking ship, the Titanic.
- What is it? - Titanic. - OK, great.
If he didn't call that (remember, there's no ship there at all)
there were enough bits for his associative memory
to put that together. You know that's not a ship.
Now, what is this? Some of you older people might guess this.
(Audience member) - An alarm clock - Who did that?
You are amazing!
That's not an... Where's the alarm clock? Well, anyway
if she didn't call that, if she wasn't able to call that
I would have put the little legs on it, the clock, the hammer
everything until somebody called it.
Now, there is still some that cannot see the ship.
So I would have gone all along, put all the windows in Titanic
everything until somebody got up to said "Yeah, Titanic!"
This is an attempt to prove that all of us
are capable of making decisions and arriving at a conclusion
without all of the information prepared for us.
That is a unique quality in human beings: We can put things together.
We do not require the accumulation of a great deal of information.
In this system, if you understand the system quite well
who would you say, this is?
(Audience member) Lincoln? - Who said that?
Who said that? Someone said Lincoln.
I don't see Lincoln, but it is. It would have been Abraham Lincoln.
When I got through with it, I would have gone on with the beard and all the rest.
This is just to prove that people can put something together
and I'm going to try to explain to you
just what creative thinking really is.
I'm going to use old language, the language that I use
with people who are not familiar with this way of thinking.
The old language is that people can think and reason.
I do not believe that is possible.
I have many inventions. I've worked on many different things
but I don't believe that human beings can think or reason.
This is what I do believe. By the way, you don't have to accept anything I say.
During the question period, don't be polite!
Come at it from all angles. Break it down if you can.
This helps me and it helps you.
When I talk about thinking, reasoning and putting things together
we're talking about the forces that shape human behavior.
I believe that all human behavior is lawful
that the reactions and values that all people have
are perfectly lawful to the environment that they come from.
Every human being is perfectly well-adjusted
from where they are coming from
from their background and experience.
If you as a baby were raised by the Seminole Indians
you would behave (if you never saw anything else) like a Seminole Indian.
If you were brought up in any other Indian group
and you had feathers in your headgear
and you were dancing around the fire and I walked over and said
"That's ridiculous! Why are you dancing around the fire with the feathers?"
You don't take your hat, throw it on the ground and say
"I never thought about it that way." We can't do that.
We are victims of culture.
We look at the world with our background.
We have no other way of doing it.
Psychology is kind of a rudimentary form today
an attempt to grasp at the factors that shape human behavior
the facts that are responsible for the way we look at ourselves
other people and the way we behave or, if you wish, misbehave.
I don't believe that any human being misbehaves.
They use whatever tools they know of
whatever tools they're familiar with. Language is a tool.
If someone were to show you a picture of an airplane
(what appeared to be an airplane) without wings;
people look at it, they stand by and they say:
"It will never fly! " but they don't say "How do you propose
to lift off the ground without wings?"
That's the key to communication.
A very famous scientist
(deceased now) tried to get the government and people
to put up sufficient funds to monitor outer space
to try to make contact with extraterrestrial life.
I want to try to say this to you and think about what I say.
Toss it around. I'm using the old language
because you're not that familiar with these values.
If people, beings or things
can travel a hundred million light years
through time and space, they are not humanoid.
The storage system for water would occupy miles
and all of the facilities required by humans
would take up tremendous amounts of space
and require tremendous amounts of energy.
There are people that talk of flying saucers that land
here on Earth and they go to some farmer.
They take him into the saucer and they do all kinds of experiments on him.
First of all
people do not travel hundreds of millions of light years
to pick up some farmer and ask him what kind of suspenders he wears.
Carl Sagan wanted to communicate with extraterrestrials.
He hoped that they, in turn, would communicate with us.
Now you know, that Republicans can't communicate with Democrats.
You know that husbands and wives have difficulty in communicating.
Children and parents have difficulty because the language we use
was designed a long time ago.
It is inherently difficult to get ideas across
in the language that we use today.
However when engineers meet and talk
they speak a different language.
One engineer might present a very thin cable
and say "This can support 5,000 tons"
and the other engineer says "What's its tensile strength?"
He's given that information, then he puts it in a machine
and he snaps it to make sure that it holds to that.
When engineers design an airplane
they do all the calculations (this is a front view
a very rapid drawing of a front view of an airplane.)
They do all the rapid calculations and they figure
what that wing will be able to support.
After all their calculations and after they are certain
they then pile sandbags on the wing
until it breaks off, to make damn sure that it does the job.
That does not exist in everyday language.
In everyday language you don't have that ability.
When an engineer meets another engineer, he says
"I can illuminate an area with this tiny point of light
that has 50,000 square feet.
The engineer says "That's not possible! " he doesn't talk like that.
He says "How do you power that unit?
What kind of voltage does it take?
How do you illuminate that spot? " They ask questions.
The average person says "No, not in a thousand years..."
That's been around for a long time. That is a language of war
hatred, bigotry, prejudice:
the inability to ask questions.
We've got to be very careful about that.
At one lecture I remember at Princeton I was trying to say
that human beings cannot think or reason
(this was the psychology and sociology department).
One of the individuals stood up (one of the staff) and he said "All right
where did the camera come from? There were no cameras at one time.
Someone had to think about a camera.
it just doesn't come out of thin air!"
After doing a lot of work many years ago
in ancient Egypt
or if you have lived out in the country
if there was a hole in a barn wall
that was knocked out
the cows on the outside appeared on the wall of the barn upside down.
In Egypt, you went in this dome to see the upside down world.
There was a little hole here. Day light came in
and you saw people walking upside down on the wall.
How many of you have experienced that kind of phenomenon?
That is essentially the box hole camera.
A simple camera without a lens is just a little hole in a box.
Somebody said "How can I see that image?"
and they used a transparent membrane back here
and they could see the upside-down head, a person or cow
and they asked this question "If only I can retain that image."
That isn't the answer. That's just a question.
"I wonder how I could retain that image."
Years before that, the American Indians
and other primitives have taken tapper cloth
or they'd weave natural materials into a kind of fabric
and then they would take berry juices and dye it different colors.
Sometimes a leaf would fall upon that surface
and after the sun dried it, they had an image of the leaf.
So they began to use dyes from this background.
That all human beings, to understand me better
the first human being that jumped off a precipice with wings, he died.
His brother-in-law wrote "Next time, make the wings larger."
No one starts out right away and solves a problem
unless you have a tremendous background in many different areas.
The next guy that jumped off, he jumped off with larger wings.
He flew a little and then he went [wings collapse]
and the old fisherman said "You gotta brace them wings
like a boat, like a mast.
They're not going to hold! " So they braced them.
Then this individual jumped off the precipice.
He flew but hit a tree
and hurt his leg really badly.
His wife said "You know, John, a fish has a rudder."
Good point! And they stuck the rudder on the airplane.
No one ever sat down and invented a television set
an airplane, the electric light, wireless.
None of that came about by man walking in deep concentration
and then through some ethereal substance.
Bingo! The idea is formulated. It doesn't work that way.
It's hard work.
I make more mistakes than anybody I know
because I try more things.
There's nothing wrong with building something
and finding out that it doesn't work. This is where you get your experience.
There's nothing wrong with criticism.
I remember the first model airplanes I built
went nosing into the ground and I was ashamed of them
and a young engineer told me that my center of gravity had to be corrected;
that is, move the wing forward.
All of us stand on the shoulders of one another
and we shape the future.
Another question that was asked:
"Somebody had to invent the bow and arrow!
Somebody had to think of it! It didn't just come out of nowhere!"
I talked to many Indians and after talking to many Indians
this is what I found out:
Indians used to skin animals
(and this is a lousy drawing of the skin of an animal)
stretched out in the sun.
When the Indians got back
the skin was half the size. It shrunk and became thicker
and they didn't like that at all, so they cut leather into thin strips.
They took an existing frame and they tied that skin
to the frame (some of you may have seen this)
with lace of leather all around to prevent it from shrinking.
When they cut the strips of leather
and put them out in the sun, they shrunk and became fat and short
and they were displeased with that.
After many years, one Indian tied that strand of leather
to a piece of wood, a stick:
he split the top, tied a knot and tied the leather to the stick.
When he came back, hoping that it would dry and not shrink
the stick took this form; it was bent.
He plucked that; it went 'Bung!'
After many years, somebody took another piece of wood
put it in, pull the string and off it went.
"Well if man can't think or reason, where did the movie camera come from?
Somebody had to think of that! It doesn't exist out there."
Here's where it came from.
Thousands of years ago in China
they used to take a candle
and they'd take some bamboo paper at the time
put it in front of the candle and then they'd cut out
a little figurine of a human being and put the candle behind it.
As the candle undulated
the little person would dance and they'd play music.
That was the beginning. How did that happen?
Some guy had a candle and a piece of paper
and he just happened to be behind it
and his finger appeared to move on the screen
and so he extracted or built upon that phenomenon.
Then later something interesting occurred.
The Chinese used to
take these tremendous scrolls and open them up
while they then later taped or wired or used gut
and tied many pages together and built a kind of pad
but in order to get to a particular page
the Oriental would mark the corner of the page
so that they could find it with a symbol.
As you flipped through the pages fast
that little dot would jump all over the place.
Years later, an individual drew
various successive pictures of a bird in flight
and put them down on the corner of the paper and flipped it.
The little bird wings began to move up and down.
A Frenchman saw that
and he took little pieces of cardboard
and he put them in a circular pattern
(I'm going to try to get it down as clear as I can, quickly)
and he put a crank up here that you turned
and the little pictures would go around the circle.
The Chinese also had something like this. They had a bamboo interrupter
that would just hold the picture for a second, less than a second.
As you turned it, a man appeared to move across the screen.
The Frenchman machined that out of brass.
He did a beautiful job and when you turned the crank
the person walked with smoother motions
rather than these abrupt motions.
Edison saw that unit that the Frenchman designed
and he turned it into this position.
I guess I can't work with that microphone.
Can you hear me back there?
What happened is...
He turned it into a vertical position
and all the pictures
were set in a circular fashion.
You turned the crank here...
(Roxanne) Excuse me, they won't get the audio and the camera...
- I'm sorry - Why don't you just put it in your pocket or something?
- I'll try.
Thanks. Roxanne is my associate.
She works on all the buildings and all the things we've developed
in The Venus Project which I'll talk to you about later.
Edison purchased it, put a magnifying glass in front of it.
You put a nickel in, you turn the crank and you saw people moving;
a bunch of still photographs.
It was a long, slow process.
No individual invented the camera.
A little bit here, a little there, add it to that and eventually
the Wright Brothers read about experimental aircraft
where thousands of people died, trying to develop a flying machine.
After picking up bits of this information
(including man-carrying kites in China, thousands of years ago)
they built the first flying machine.
They were called 'The Father of Flight'. Again
there's no father of anything.
You may take an idea so far, you add to it and gradually, it's built up.
Genius! A genius is a person that has been exposed
to many different systems. Therefore, they can come up
with a wide range of solutions.
A man like Leonardo da Vinci:
You think that he just evolved out of nothing?
He spoke to people that were interested in mechanics in his time.
They gathered, they shared ideas, but you'll only hear of Da Vinci.
Unfortunately, guys like Nikola Tesla
Edison, all the great innovators of the past
have been influenced by other people.
The mythical structures that we build around inventors
that they inherit special abilities: They are geniuses
or they're in tune with the infinite mind
and the ideas somehow filter in.
This is a kind of nonsense.
It's the same story about "Is there intelligent life out there?"
The real question is "Is there intelligent life here?"
We don't think so, not yet.
I'm serious. I'm not kidding.
What is intelligence?
The ability to reason things out? You can't have that ability
unless you've had experience in particular areas.
An Eskimo never dreams
(I repeat this) of walking on a palm-fringed beach.
Can you understand that? It is not possible
unless he has seen motion pictures or something about the beach.
It is not possible for any human being to build a frame of reference
of any kind without experience.
I know where every invention I ever made came from.
I know the influence, the books I've read, the people I've known
everything that shaped those values.
Sometimes people say "When did you think of that wonderful idea?
It was February the 1st?" No.
It's cumulative bits of information
that we put together with experience.
All of the artificial structures and artificiality of all societies
they are all primitive today. They are all backward.
The very fact that we use political systems
the very fact that there are Democrats and Republicans
and notions about how the world ought to be governed.
Scientists could not do a thing with that.
If you want to put a man on the Moon, you have to know
what the distance is precisely.
You have to know how much material you're lifting up toward the Moon.
You have to know how much force a human body can stand.
To start with, they don't have that information
so they build special devices, a big centrifuge.
They put in a human being in it and whirl it around. They say
"How are you doing? " and the guy conks out
and they say "This is how fast you can rotate
certain groups of people. " They build data
and from that data, they plan the Moon voyage.
The question then is, what kind of world do we want?
How is it that we want our social system to operate?
What makes criminal behavior?
What are the factors that make a Jeffrey Dahmer?
I'm sure you know who that was. Before Jeffrey there was Albert Fish.
I don't know if any of you remember Albert Fish.
Albert Fish was a fine-looking gentleman.
He ate 45 children.
You wonder, how can anyone do that kind of thing?
I'm going to try to give you some idea of the background of Albert Fish.
When he was a youngster, about 10 years old
he was touching his private parts.
His mother was an old-time Baptist.
She'd say "You are going straight to hell. You will burn eternally!"
That kid, Albert Fish, stuck needles into his genitals
because he didn't want to burn in hell.
He took other children into empty lots and cut off
their private parts because he wanted to save them.
If you're brought up in a distorted environment
(which we all live in today) any judge
that wraps the gavel and says "30 years!"
is an ignoramus because he has no idea
of the factors that shape human behavior.
When you become aware... If you bring up a healthy boy
with about six women and one of the girls say
"Oh did I see the gorgeous hat!"
that boy will pick up the same mannerisms
same facial expressions and say "Oh, I just love that hat!"
because that's the environment. If you're brought up in Italy
you say "Hey, watsa matta he? You like or no like?".
In other words it depends on where we're brought up.
Did you know that Lincoln was Irish? It depends on your group
and the values that you exchange.
If you want a world without war
without hatred, crime and stupidity
it can be arranged
if you follow this bit.
If we consider at some time (which society will
at a later time, I hope it would be sooner)
that all of the Earth become the common heritage of all nations.
All of the resources of the Earth: the common heritage of all nations.
If you believe in God, if you understand the teachings of all religions
there are no property lines in heaven
no banks, no personal positions
in which one person is elevated above another
that if the Earth were common heritage of all nations
and all of the artificial boundaries removed that separate people
there would be no basis for war
no basis for armament.
The world you live in is an old world. Its language is old
its values are old and our institutions of education
fail to touch the social system. "You want to be careful, don't touch that!
This is an area that you don't want to get involved in."
In order for you to grow and make the world a better place
you have to face this situation.
I don't say that people are going to sit back and do that.
According to all historical records
no civilization (to my knowledge anyway)
has ever set out to plan the future:
exactly what we're going to do, how we're going to live
how we're going to work out transportation. No!
We just build highways all over the place. Although you go to school
and you learn something, you learn that a straight line
is the shortest distance between two given points.
Well look at a road map of the United States
and I think you'll find spaghetti all over the place.
Rarely do you see that.
Look at your cities, every building, a different size and shape;
this does not express individuality.
It's utter chaos.
At 4 o'clock, all the cars come out of this building
and they can't get across that bridge, so you've got to build another bridge.
You elect people to political office that are totally incompetent.
They are neurally bankrupt. I don't care whether you're Democrat or Republican.
They don't have the value system to solve these problems that exist.
They are not educated in that way.
They are brought up with a uniform set of values
and they go out into the world and this is the sad story of coming events.
There are computers today, there are machines in existence today
that can handle 500 trillion bits of information per second.
No human comes anywhere near that
and you think that in the next 15 or 20 years
there's going to be people in government? No way!
For example, if you took a group of computers
and arrange them in a special fashion
and ran the electrical tentacles
out to the agricultural belt
with probes into the soil
when the water table drops
that will turn on the pumps and bring the water into the area.
If the nutrients change, it would pump nutrients into the area.
What kind of world do you want?
I don't think any of you here, maybe a few of you might remember
when human beings used to operate elevators.
They turned a crank; they never quite got to the floor, up and down.
Finally, they became automated:
"Step back. It's a lovely day today! How are you, Mr. Jones?"
(if they scan your face) and they'll take you exactly to that floor.
After that comes the transveyor:
an elevator that moves up and down, sideways, in all directions.
You get on it and verbalize "I want to go to the art center
the music center" and it will take you there.
The kind of world you live in and the automobiles
that exist as transportation units are dangerous
because they have a bumper in front and one in the back.
I'm sure that if an extraterrestrial visited the Earth they'd say
"What are those shiny things in the front and back of the vehicles?"
"They're bumpers; they're there to prevent damage."
"Well, don't you ever hit on the side?
Why aren't there bumpers all around the car?"
Then they came with the airbag. They put an airbag in front of you.
If you get hit on the side, your head goes right through the glass.
The automobile companies had a long time
to solve those problems.
Then you see motorcycle policeman "Pull over!
What do you think you're doing?"
All you have to do in a car if you wanted to (I wouldn't do it
I wouldn't even put this in a car) is put a sort of kymograph
or a cylindrical recorder.
When you go through a 30 mph zone at 50 mph, it's recorded on there.
Every month you have to tear that strip out of your car
and mail it to the police department.
Though the police wouldn't like that
but how many violations do you think you'd have?
There are better ways than that.
You just make a car intelligent.
Here's what that means. How intelligent can machines be?
There's a little gadget called a pressure transducer.
If you squeeze it, it generates electricity.
So let's put one in each tire. Let's say that you kick the front right tire.
It goes to a recording that says "Ouch, my front right tire!"
Of course, if you kick any tire, it'll verbalize
but if you kick it hard it'll say "OUCH! My front right tire!"
If you kick it again it'll say "Who do you think you are?"
Do you want to give a machine feelings?
Do you want to give a machine compassion, love, warmth?
I'll tell you why they leave it out of machines: because it doesn't work.
Human emotions that you learn are the most significant
most important differences between men and machines.
Human emotion is a very touchy subject.
It's like racing your engine at a stop light.
It doesn't take you anywhere. It doesn't serve any purpose.
If you get a lump in your throat when you see hungry people, that's emotional
but when you get increase the agricultural yield per acre, that's caring
that's love. Love is transforming
all of the verbal and paper proclamations to a way of life.
The shameful thing about our century is that there was only one Edison
one Luis Pasteur, one Nikola Tesla, one Madame Curie.
We should have had thousands of them and we will
once we get rid of the artificial boundaries that separate people;
once we get rid of nationalism, patriotism...
Again, I do not mean to offend anybody.
All that I ask you to do is to think about this, toss it around
this is what The Venus Project advocates.
The Venus Project is a design for culture
in which we bridge the difference between all nations.
How is that done? By universal language, the blueprint.
If you open a blueprint in Japan, they know what you're talking about.
If you write a prescription for England, Japan, France
the pharmacologist understands that. There's no discrepancies.
There's no ambivalence "I wonder what he meant by that."
It's clear. The language we use daily is not.
The language of warmth and love are verbal excuses
and verbal outlets for some people
for avoiding their responsibility
to make the world a better place for everyone.
The smarter your kids are, the richer my life.
Every kid on a corner, shooting up drugs, going nowhere
you're going to have to pay for in the future.
Therefore, it is efficient and functionally selfish
to build a better world for everyone.
People come to me all time and they say
"Can you design a city with a wall high enough
so when the Y2K problems come or the system breaks down
or the banks fail, we will be protected?"
I say "Sure I can design that, but there are people that will drive by
with launching mechanisms right over your little wall."
There's no place you can hide.
We have 25 acres. People call it 'Eden 2'. It's beautiful
but if the bottom falls out of this culture
there will be people on my front gate with children:
"How about some food just for the kids? " The next day, 50 people.
Everything looks solid to you, everything looks solid and stable
and the future looks promising but here's the truth:
I have seen an XY plotter
(that is a machine that moves in three dimensions).
They put a scalpel in that machine
and an X-ray of a brain tumor.
This machine removed the brain tumor
on a cadaver in about 1/10th the time.
The doctors think "Just the industrial worker on the production line
he's on the way out, but not me, I can think."
Let me say this again, the typewriters that work to speech...
Today you talk to your computer and you get it typed
and also corrects your English, restructures your sentences
makes recommendations.
How much longer do you think people are going to be
in positions in industry and government
making their own decisions?
We don't believe that anyone ought to make decisions.
We believe that people ought to arrive at decisions.
Here's what that means:
You go across the country and pick up samples of the soil
from all over the nation. You bring it to central agriculture
analyze that soil, and then turn to the health department
and ask them what people need: manganese, whatever they need.
What is the soil good for? What should we grow?
Tomatoes and then rotate the crop, move to something else;
that's what I mean by surveying the conditions.
Not "what's your opinion?"
Democracy is a crude and vulgar system
and should have been phased out centuries ago
but we don't have enough outside points of view
on radio and television.
When I talked this way on the Larry King show, he said to me
"Just a minute, I depend on those people that you're attacking."
I wasn't attacking the automobile companies.
I just said that if you did that, it would be safer.
If you put proximity units on automobiles
(most of you have them in your home now, when you walk over the building
the light goes on, that's a proximity unit)
put that in your car and if you're backing up and a child is crawling behind you
it stops, no matter how much you step on the gas.
I don't want any signs 'Slippery when wet'.
I want an abrasive put in the highway and take that sign down
so it's not slippery when wet.
I don't want to say to kids "Stay away from drugs."
I want to make life so interesting for people
that they don't want drugs. They don't want to dull their senses.
They want to become keen and they want to become fully aware
(I'm using older language) and conscious of their surroundings.
It's painful to deaden your awareness when life is beautiful
when what you do goes out to people and makes their lives better.
In one session at Princeton, I changed the values of many people.
They walked out discussing this for years thereafter
and I still get letters today.
I went into an area of New York called 'Hell's Kitchen'.
The kids there were considered very bad.
The social worker used to wear a necktie and eyeglasses.
Anyone who wore eyeglasses when I was a kid was a sissy.
When you wear a necktie and a suit
and you're talking to these kids in rags in the slums
they look at you as an outsider. You're unacceptable to them.
I put a wire recorder out in the front office and
after the social worker talked to the young boy... By the way
they made guns out of water pipe in New York.
how many of you knew that? They didn't go and buy guns, they made them.
The social worker picked up the gun and said
"You're gonna take someone's eye out with it, wind up in state penitentiary
hurt your mother and father. Do you wanna to do that?"
The kid said nothing at all.
When the kid walks out I make a wire recording of the way
he talks to his friend "He's a jerk! " (The guy up front, the social worker.)
Then I walk over to the social worker "How did you make out with Johnny?"
"I had a good talk with the boy. I believe we established rapport."
"How do you know that? " He says "I felt it intuitively."
Then I played the tape (by the way, it was a wire recorder)
I played the tape of the kid's answers
and he says "That ungrateful so and so! " I said "No, no, just say
I don't know how to get to Johnny (I know how to get to Billy)
I tried 8 different methods, none of them worked."
I said "Watch what I do next week. " I walked in the office
picked up the gun and said "I understand you made this gun?"
"I told the guy I made it last week! " (this is New York City
I used to make recordings of this; I wanted to use it in a film later).
I picked up the gun, I'm looking at it and I'm shaking my head.
He said "What's a matter with it? " I said "Come here.
The damn pin is an 8th of an inch off center."
He says "Yeah!" I said "If you put a couple of washes on the side
you can move the pin right on center. " He says "Hey, do you work here?"
I said "What? With those jerks? Naah!"
"Can I bring my friends over to meet you?"
That's people like him with similar values.
Then you go to work in their terms, not your terms.
Real psychology has to be related to the real world.
Not theory, not lab experiments in schools
where you're not in touch with people, where you don't get the feel of people
where you don't get the sense
of their identification with the world around them.
I have changed many of those kids.
I've brought a gun in for them to look at and I said "I made this gun."
"Wow!" they said. "I sure would like to be able to make a gun like that."
I said "Well, I can help you do it. " "You can?
What do I have to do?" You have to learn how to draw a front view of a gun
a side view of a gun
(I know I'm going fast, making a lot of drawings).
You have to make three views to the gun so it can be made.
He says "I'm gonna learn to do that! " So I set him up on a drafting table
and I took him from guns to water skis, to other things.
Today, a lot of them are engineering draftsmen.
Because they told me that the kids only had an IQ of 24 or something
"You can't get to them."
I said to one of these kids with an IQ of 24
"Suppose you wanted to rob that jewelry store across the way
how would you go about it? Any way at all."
He said "I'd throw a bag of fecal matter in there.
The guy gets mad at my friend, he runs after him
and I clean off the counter. " That's where they live.
"And suppose you wanted to rob the 3rd story?
No ladders, no ropes, no weights
how would you get up to the 3rd story?"
After several days, one of the youngsters came up with a piece of wood:
(he didn't even know what a wedge was)
"Do you see that hunk of wood?
I could stick it in bricks and it gets tight
no matter how far the bricks are.
Then I can climb up the gutter (he didn't use that language
he used much stronger language)... I'd climb up the building
and take whatever I want to take. That's how I do it.'"
How do you give people an IQ test that comes from a different environment?
How do you know what they sense?
Do you think that the formalist who tries to structure the nature of intelligence
the nature of creativity without being creative can do it?
In order to teach children how to become creative
I make a Martian out of rubber with eyes on tentacles
and a pointed rear end.
They look at it and they think "Ugh!"
and I say to them "What good are four eyes on tentacles?"
Eventually [they said] "You can look at the back, front, side and the top at the same time!"
"And what if the guy had six arms?"
"He can shave, read a book, eat a doughnut and drink coffee"
instead of "Ugh!! " as we're brought up.
Have you met a Martian? They have an opening here.
They say "What's that? " Notice the attitude? "What is that?"
"If we eat anything that's bad for us
it's ejected right away. Not in your system!
It goes through your whole system."
You are taught in medical school how 'wonderful' the human body is.
How wonderful it is? This isn't true at all.
That you're indoctrinated to a set of values that are unreal.
In order for me to get these ideas out there
it's extremely difficult, because we need films
we need equipment in order to do that.
What The Venus Project has to offer is a way of life
without ambiguity, a language that has
a much more precise form of communication
to change the relationship between people
where the male and female are not given separate roles
where the female says "I want to be a biochemist or a physicist"
and she goes that way. When you hand a girl a doll
you're placing a set. You're beginning to manipulate people.
Everybody's afraid of controlling human behavior.
You're always controlling behavior! When you pick up your little girl
and say "Don't play with that little Lutheran boy across the way!"
or "Don't talk to that little Catholic girl across the way!"
you are always indoctrinating children:
"Who loves you more than anything in the world?"
"The candy store man. " "No, your mommy and your daddy."
Indoctrination continuously! Then all of us together sing
"We are free! We are free!"
Beware! Whenever you hear of freedom
and all that sort of thing, watch out.
A real free society, the closest I've ever come to it
was in Polynesia. I lived in the South Pacific islands for a while
and the natives gave me bananas, coconuts and all that. They were very generous
and they had no word for work. Would you believe that?
They went fishing all day, they played, they had luaus
and they said "Jacque, whatcha want?"
and I said "I would like an outrigger canoe" and they built one for me.
A few days after they brought it to my hut, I heard some rustling outside
and they were all carrying the canoe away. I said "What's going on?"
They said "You no use! " It's a different value system.
The men and women walked around nude on the island
when I got there, a long time ago
and I never saw a native poke another native:
"Hey, get a load of that chick! " None of that.
They looked at the eyes of women when they talked to them.
Never "Hey, look at that ," never at the legs.
The motion picture cameras and all your movie theaters are 'dolly up and down
the hindquarters' and you wonder why men are like that. They are not like that.
They are made like that by culture.
Then the missionaries arrive
and the little girls used to come to church, innocent, listening.
They put the t-shirts on them
and the girls had no idea why they were putting t-shirts on them.
"What's it for? " It's like me, covering your nose:
"You can't go in a room unless your nose is covered!"
Well, the girls cut two holes in the t-shirts and came to church.
We're dealing with many different cultures, subcultures and values.
Our culture, if we are to grow and build a civilization
worthy of humankind, we have to have a quantum jump
in the way we look at our world, people and ourselves.
The Venus Project is the redesign of a culture
in which the elements that comprise that culture are different.
For example, our cities are round, not because I like round cities.
The city is round, the center of the city has a socially integrated computer.
This may be a medical center; this might be an engineering center.
If you work in the medical center, you live in beautiful gardens
with running streams and waterfalls.
Every district is the same distance from the center.
There are no cars in the city. You get on a conveyor
and dial where you want to go to. There's no crime in the city.
Just before the public library in the United States
people said "You can't really do that.
The people never bring back the books; they'll keep them.
They won't return them! " All that was incorrect.
I want to build a library where any child can walk in, check out a camera
check out art materials, check out water skis.
Make things available [and] people don't steal.
No one's going to hit you on a head to take your watch off, if it's available.
"How are you going to pay for this central library
that gives children these things, for nothing?"
It costs about 50,000 bucks to keep a kid in jail one year.
An adult: 75,000 bucks a year.
Food, clothing, shelter, dental care...
Isn't it easier to do it in a different way?
I would love to go to Mexico and say "What's your problem?"
They'd say "Well señor, we don't have the modern machinery you have."
Give them modern machinery.
Build schools for them and they won't be coming over the border.
What makes them come over the border? Hunger, lack of employment.
They say "It's the god damn Mexicans. You know what they're like!"
It's nothing like that! Everything is shoved by something else.
You are told that a tree falls over.
You were told that a sailboat sails. A sailboat cannot sail
unless acted upon by a resident force called the wind.
A tree doesn't fall. If it rains and it's asymmetric
and the soil becomes loose, gravity does the rest.
The tree doesn't fall. Plants do not grow.
They require radiant energy, nutrients, water.
Stop any of those things and the plant stops.
Human beings are not self-operating entities.
We are operated by many resident forces.
Of course many of us are not aware of that. It looks like we're perfectly free
making our own decisions. "I know I think for myself.
I'm sure you do. " That's an illusion.
If you're brought up to believe in the Kennedy Rocker
and you want one for your home, it'll injure your back
distort your anatomy
"but Kennedy had one like that and I want one like that."
When you break the patterns
that have been established by existing society
you begin to move people in a new direction.
I admit I could get up here and give a very pleasant lecture
of how wonderful everything will be in the future:
a helicopter in every garage, a house in suburbia
another on the beach, maybe one in Hawaii
this is the future... That is not the future!
Those are the illusion generators and there are lots of them.
Dick Gregory once told me
that being Black and living in the South
he said "Whenever I was late for work, I couldn't run to the bus
because they would wonder what that blackie was up to, running."
In other words, we project our value system into others
we project characteristics into others.
We have to find out what we are really like.
Many people tell me they want to find themselves.
This is another ridiculous thing. Who you are going to find?
Some jerk at 18? And a different value system at 23?
You can never find yourself. If you read, keep up with new ideas
what 'self'? Your self of 20?
When I was 15, I was a jerk.
As time went on, I learned more about many different things
and knew how much I had to learn in order to move forward.
There is no 'finding yourself'.
People come over at me and say "I want to know how I relate to the cosmos."
We don't even know how a single cell splits
and they want to know how they relate to the cosmos.
What a bunch of verbal crap!
Really, it's meaningless.
I'm sorry that I only have one hour
to try to give you ideas along different lives.
Generally it takes seminars. It takes a lot of demonstration and films.
I didn't mean to offend any of you.
I hope that I didn't.
Thank you for your time.
[Applause]
(Audience member #1) I'm sure the audience has some questions? Fire away.
(Audience member #2) I teach middle school kids, and what do you see...
- I'm a little hard of hearing, I'm sorry about that.
- I teach middle school kids and I wondered... Some of your philosophies of education...
- OK, I got the point. For example in our city design we have big lakes.
We've made all these lakes. They exist. It's real.
We have modern structures there, all different.
Roxanne, my associate, said to me
"Jacque, I just don't want to draw pretty pictures of buildings
I want to build them. I want to make them. " She did all the cement work.
One day she came over and said "How about a swimming pool?"
She was with a girlfriend and I said "When are you girls are going to start?"
"We've never built a pool! " They built it in two weeks, a beautiful pool.
We'll show you pictures of it.
So we built a big lake in the city
and there's a hill in the middle of the lake about 80 feet up out of the water.
On top of the hill is a craft shop
where children can build anything they want to build
but in order to get there, you have to get in the boat and row it.
Instead of lining them up and saying "Come on, everybody together, forward, backward"
arrange the environment so you have to row to get to the hill.
You have to climb the hill to get to craft shop.
An automobile or anything you build will not go together
unless four children pick up the car and the others put the wheels on.
Instead of saying "I want you people to work together, cooperate
and stop fighting! " arrange things so that it works that way.
That's what nature does.
When a baby fox sees a porcupine
it says "What have we here? I don't know."
It gets closer to the porcupine and finally it gets a quill
and he stays away from the porcupine
If you raise your children and try to avoid
experiences that had hurt you
and you buy them every toy that they want
you produce a blob of jello.
Some degree of challenge, some degree of stress is necessary
so we build an environment (to try to answer your question)
where the elements so arranged, has to produce what you call, creativity.
Can I give you one more bit on that? All right.
Is there anyone else interested in creativity in children?
Would you raise your hands?
What we do is, I ask a child to make a drawing
anything they want to draw and this is what they usually do...
Can everybody see the blackboard? I'll draw it up here.
They draw something like this.
I'm talking about about 4 and 5-year olds.
Then they draw something like this.
Then most of them do something like this.
I'm sure you've all seen those drawings.
In fact, I'm sure many of you draw that way today.
The teacher gives them some crayons. They color it and she hangs it up.
"This is little Billy's drawing..."
but when she tells Billy that this is the way we spell 'cat'
Billy says "I see" and he comes back with something like this.
Can you see that? The teacher says "That's wrong! " That isn't wrong.
Most of it is appropriate. It's just this that we change.
So I say "Very close. We just substitute this
with something like this."
Then the child comes back again with something like this.
I say "Much closer, much better!
Only we turn this around so you can put the 'A' inside of it."
Say whatever you have to say to get the idea across.
Instead of saying "That isn't what I told you!"
You're just using that child as an outlet for insufficiency.
Then, I do this with the children. I have them draw the letter 'T'.
Then I say "Which one of these looks like a peach pit?"
The child generally picks this.
Those of you back there, I'm sure you can't see that.
The blackboard is fully cluttered.
and I don't have... Here, I'll try to clear the area
where most of you can see.
The child draws the letter 'T'.
He draws a peach pit in the middle.
Then he draws a peach pit here and one there
and he takes out the middle peach pit.
Then I say "What is this?"
They say "That's a bunch of birdies, flying! " I say "Good.
You move down a peach pit and a half
and draw the letter 'V' upside down"
and the child draws the letter 'V' upside down.
Then he draws a birdy
under the 'V' one peach pit down.
Then he joins another birdie to that
and a half round beneath that. One peach pit above
he does this. Then I say to the child "What is this?"
"That's a heart! " I say "Good. Half a heart
from the top of the eyebrow to the bottom of the nose.
They move from that
offensive drawing made by the child to this
in less than a half hour.
I'm talking about 5 and 6-year olds
moving into this realm, drawing sports cars, turning them around.
We give them crayon and chalk
because we want them to bring out their artistic ability.
You can't bring out anything if there's no basis or structure for it.
If you sit in the woods and meditate on your navel for 3 years
you'll have a tremendously clear picture of the navel and nothing more.
You have to work to get information. You have to arrange things
so that it generates what you call creativity.
A psychologist in one session said
"I know two children that came from the same environment.
If environment is everything, one turned out to be a gangster, the other a minister.
If environment is everything, how do you get those differences?"
The minute you pick up one child
and start playing with him and the other stands there with his lip out
you're making jealousy and envy.
There's no such thing as the same environment.
When I pick up my little girl, I pick up my older little boy.
You never work with one child
"Why can't you keep your area clean? Your brother does, all the time.
You leave all your things around... " When he trips and falls down the stairs
his brother smiles. An inhibited smile, but he does smile.
We build these artificialities in the world we live in today.
We've got to interfere and change things.
Those of you who would like to know more about The Venus Project
we have a video, a tape and a book introducing
the basic conceptual layout of what it's about.
Any other questions? I can't go into more detail. Yes?
(Audience member #2) I find your views about the future interesting
but how do you account for human nature?
How do I account for what? - Human nature.
Human nature is the way people
have found other people to behave over many long years.
They appeared to manifest greed, jealousy
envy, even animals. If you take a cat
and put it on your lap in the presence of the dog
the dog may growl.
That's why I mean by the nature of the beast.
So I said "Come on down to my lab in about a week."
I picked up my cat put it on my lap and the dog's tail starts wagging
because you reinforce the dog before you pick up the cat.
The cat is a threat to the dog's security.
The dog wants you to pet it, not the cat.
You give the dog these ambivalent feelings
but you can have 15 kids in the room without jealousy
without envy. It is not human nature
it's human behavior that's shaped by culture.
If you were brought up in China, years ago
you'd walk with your hands in your sleeves, shuffle and wear a long pigtail.
They say "Well, that's human nature. " It's not.
That's the influence of environment on your behavior.
Dancing is the same thing.
Dances change over a period of time. Music changes overtime.
There is really no human nature.
Think about it. Toss it around. There are varying degrees of human behavior.
If we wish to understand the factors that generate our value system
that generate the way we look at the world
we have to go back in time and study these things.
I'm sorry I can't go into much more detail
just a general overview of The Venus Project. Yes?
(Audience member #3) You mention a universal language. Are you speaking about Esperanto?
- No that wouldn't do. Or interlingua?
No that wouldn't do. The language has to have a physical reference.
That means that...
Suppose we took some tungsten
and hit it with high pitch sound.
Bouncing off that tungsten, a pattern occurred
on a screen that looked like that.
Now if this was the nickel, this was the iron
and we learned how to chart that pattern
when you wrote tungsten, you'd do this in the future
so it's always like chemistry, like a pharmacologist
reads a prescription (assuming the doctor's handwriting is good):
He looks at that prescription and picks up the same product.
We don't want individuality in that area.
We want uniformity.
Is there a place for individuality?
In the next few years, the word individuality
will go the way all the other crude and vulgar terms went.
Individuality... When you buy a Mercedes, if you can afford it
and you turn the key, you want it to start. Not sometimes, all the time.
When you turn, you want it to turn.
When you put the breaks on, you want it to stop.
It's called quality control.
Variations in human behavior
which we call individuality today
is poor quality control.
In the future, the question people will ask is: Then wouldn't everybody be uniform?
The question of uniformity is essentially this: They will uniformly
like anyone they meet. Uniformity: share ideas and resources.
Uniformity: share knowledge with everyone else.
Uniformity: courteous to everyone else.
That's the only kind of uniformity. As far as the accumulation of wealth
property and power, this would be considered part of the age
of the vulgarians. To us, this is all normal!
This is a thing to do: to become successful.
In my early days, I wanted to be successful
and a company came to me and said
"We have a bunch of Mexican and Indian women that sit at a conveyor belt.
They pick the black beans. They pick the white beans, throw them in another box"
and they said "Can you improve that?"
I said "How far do you want to go?
How many beans can you deliver? " What I did in the early days
is I built a big bicycle wheel with hollow spokes
that turned like an airplane propeller into a vat of beans
sucking up one bean to each vacuum tube.
Then there was a photoelectric cell here.
If the bean was black it tripped it with a wire.
As you sit and watch, those beans went up like this in a big vat
and in eight hours we did the work that 50 women
took three months to do.
I would like my machines to come in
but I would like them to get a shorter work day
an increase in purchasing power. If machines
don't improve the lives of people who work in automobile factories
if they're automated out of existence, so will you be
automated out of existence.
All of us can be automated out... Roxanne recently had some area...
She does architectural renderings and site plans.
There are machines that do that, some years ago, CAD.
There are machines today that make models.
If you take a vase, you put it on the table and it's scanned
they have a laser beam
that penetrates a fluid and solidifies that fluid
in the exact shape of that vase.
You can do in England, China, anywhere in the world.
I want to repeat this: Machines today (that is three months ago)
could handle 500 trillion bits of information per second.
I don't care how many humans you get together. There's no place
for human behavior in the next 20 years. There's no place
for human participation in the next 20 years, or maybe less.
No one can predict the future precisely.
I'm not gentle. I don't pull my punches, I can't afford it.
I respect you. I like you too much.
I would rather tell you things as they are
not generate additional illusions.