The Venus Project and Zeitgeist Debunked
May.09, 2011 By: Davy in
Economics, Philosophy, VOTD, Videos, stefan molyneux
This post is going to be a collection of all the rebuttals to the fairytale nonsense that is The Venus Project (heavily advocated in the film Zeitgeist). Followers of this misguided movement seem to be many so having a single page to point them to rather than spending hours of your life going over economic theory from scratch should be a useful time saver.
Firstly, bitbutter addresses the main problems with the idea in a short succinct video:
Fringe Elements ongoing response:
Stefan Molyneux’s review of the Zeitgeist movie, followed by his subsequent response to Peter Joseph, finally finishing with a two hour debate he participated in with followers of the Venus Project:
Finally, Jacob Spinney’s challenge to The Venus Project:
May 9th, 2011 at 5:36 pm
Seen all of these but it’s great having them all in one place. Rather comprehensive :D
May 9th, 2011 at 11:30 pm
The zeitgeist movement is both uplifting and heartbreaking in my opinion. Uplifting in their basic questioning nature and heartbreaking in the cognitive dissonance right under their noses!
I have hope that the non-dogmatic followers will see it for what it is; then again, the youtube comments are never encouraging.
May 10th, 2011 at 8:41 am
To be honest, these videos were all a little OT and long. All the VP need is the Calculation Problem explained a lot better. I didn’t realise how badly they don’t get it, and none of these (excellent) videos actually reacted adequatally to the individual incorrect assertions.
I also find that nearly every one of their assertions can be destroyed by singular examples, as opposed to generalised reasoning. For example, they seem to think all production is consumer-driven garbage, they need the massive size of the Medical industry pointed out to them.
May 10th, 2011 at 9:34 am
The problem with this Zeitgheist movement is that you have to battle a extremely long spam text to discuss with them … I really get bored and don’t bother engaging with them.
May 10th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Sams, I agree. Hence this page ;)
James, did you see inside the human body? Those surgeons fixing up the kids made me so proud of the human race! Stuff like that should instantly shut the ‘consumer-driven-garbage’ types up.
May 10th, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Yeah, I watched it on iPlayer after seeing your Facebook comment (a pleasent change in my association with facebook!) – it was amazing. I recommend it to everyone.
May 11th, 2011 at 5:42 pm
“The Venus Project was founded on the idea that poverty is caused by the stifling of progress in technology, which itself is caused by the present world’s profit-driven economic system”
That says it all.
March 11th, 2012 at 11:02 am
I agree that central planning doesn’t work and surveys are not a good way to allocate resources, but it’s possible to build a “just in time” global system for all human needs (and wants) based in an automation of production of basic units, transportation and assembling of these basic units into what people want, when and where they want it with no human labour involved.
Plus when you are no longer using something, it can be allocated to another person, or reassembled into a different object.
This means that we don’t need “surveys about needs or wants”, but only a just in time system, and also means that there is no need for trading.
The previous is false if there is scarcity, but scarcity is a fallacy: there are enough resources and technology in the planet to fulfil all human needs and wants with no human labour. Ok, the population will grow and the last thing we want to do is cut people’s freedom to have kids… but why do we need to be stuck in this little blue planet?
Finally, I have to say that I completely agree with the liberal thinking, and with Von Mises, about government role. What we need instead of a government is information and an agreement on the ultimate objectives. We need a distributed system of sensors all over the world to track all the relevant parameters, and people could propose measures to take to achieve some agreed goals, and the system would mesure the feasability of them. There should be no place for political ‘resoning’ and corruption, and no way a mesure will be applied just because most people think that it will be good or even because they think it will give their political party more votes. What has to be agreed is the objectives and desires, the particular measures to achieve that have to be just calculated.
I agree with some of your observations about zeitgeist movie being too much demagogue at some points, but this is not the point: I think you are confusing Zeitgeist movement and Venus project: Zeitgeist just gives an incomplete and distorsioned view of the Venus project.
Guys, thanks for your critical thinking,
think out of the box!
David
April 10th, 2012 at 12:06 pm
In Bitbutter’s debunking he says that “needs” are not qualitatively different from “wants”. But there is a tremedous difference between something that I need to have because my survival depends on it and something I want to have because the pleasure zone in my brain tells me it would be nice to have it, or that I even “need” it. In useage we confuse want and need constantly. When I am thirsty and I say I “need” a beer it’s not any different from saying I want a beer, I’m just putting more emphasis on the desire. But the need there has very little to do with real necessity, what I am saying is that the pleasure zone in my brain is telling me that I need it. The same pleasure zone which creates addiction to things that we actually don’t need. If we look at Olds and Milners experiments on pressing the pleasure button in rat’s brains in the 1950s we’ll see how easy it is to make us desire something that is absolutely useless, even harmful and survival threatening.
April 26th, 2012 at 7:52 pm
These people have thought about it without thinking about it. So black and white and blind. Just blind. Research.