To every egocentric person here..Just read this...!!

1. How will abolishing scarcity solve all these global challenges?
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In order to understand this, let’s take look at a resource that is abundant: Oxygen! We do not hear of any crime because of lack of oxygen – no one tried to steal oxygen, no one tried to kill each other because they wanted more of oxygen, no one ever tried to cheat another off their supply of oxygen, no one complains to people with many children that they are using up too much oxygen, there is no jealousy arising out of oxygen, no one try’s to store oxygen for themselves and no one ever fears that oxygen might run out. If we closely look and all the challenges we face today, if we narrow down to the root-cause, we’ll find it is the lack of something or the other - In other words scarcity. Once we abolish scarcity we abolish the need for any kind of crime, corruption, war, mindless human labor, reason for a price tag, borders etc. We also free up the human mind which will be capable of much more technological breakthroughs and solutions, once they have time for themselves as they would not be spending their lives working for money.
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2. How will The Venus Project bring abundance?
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This will be done in three steps:-

Step 1 – Sharing Resources:

The first step to take in this direction is to declare all the earth’s resources as common heritage of all the earth’s people. No one individual or corporation will have exclusive rights to any of the earth’s resources. Neither will they need to. To give a very basic analogy, let us take the example of an online library. Once it is open for all and all books are available to everyone, we would save tremendous amounts of energy and resources and trees that would otherwise go into printing and distributing those books. People will have the option of printing small parts of certain books as they need it. Without a motive of profit, (as there is no need for ownership there is no need for profit) the knowledge in those books will be available for all without a price tag. If the same analogy is applied in our transportation systems, if a city is designed intelligently and vertical space is properly utilized, personal cars will not be required, instead, the same resources could go to highly efficient public transportation systems. Too see a design of such cities and transportation systems, click here. Thus by sharing resources and using them intelligently we’ll be able to provide adequately for everyone on earth. Technology today is making things smaller. If we think of the first computers that took up huge rooms and had limited computing capacities, and we compare them with modern day mobile phones we’ll see human ingenuity can wisely get a lot out of limited resources without giving up on functionality or luxury.

Every human being needs food, clothing, housing, medical care, education, entertainment, leisure time among others. Technology available today once unleashed without the restraints of profits can bring abundance in all these areas. Hydroponics, for example, could feed the world many times over in a fraction of space utilized today in agriculture. Technology also has the capability of discovering alternatives for resources or materials that are actually scarce.

Step 2 – Abolishing Borders

If you really think about it, we do not need those borders. They serve no purpose to the common man. To politicians and corporations may be, but not to the common man. Considering India’s defense budget is 1.4 trillion rupees compared to 200 billion rupees allocated towards health, and major deaths happening in the country is not in the borders – they are related to health it gives a clear indication as to what a waste those borders are. This is true for countries on both sides of every border. Once the borders are eliminated, all those resources of materials, time, energy, intellect could be directed towards creating housing, education, health, sanitation, transportation, entertainment and many other things that really matter. Borders only provide an excuse to kill one another in the name of defense or patriotism and people selling defense equipment and politicians who can make them a voting issue gain from them. They claim the lives of our loved ones who give up their lives protecting those borders.

Abolishing borders will also allow resources to be freely accessed and utilized and benefited from by everyone on earth and not only by those in the local areas. This is for everyone’s benefit, because if a nation has a lot of iron, it cannot survive on it alone. By sharing it with the rest of the world, everyone has access to what is needed. Technology is forcing us to become global citizens today, and the more we interact with others more we realize how similar we are in our day to day needs and challenges. We must realize, most issues today are global issues, for example if a neighboring country has an unstable government, and people there are deprived and starving there will be infiltration across the borders and there will be terrorists.

Step 3 – Technology & Automation

The rate at which technological breakthroughs are happening all over the world, once the limitations put by a price tag or profit are removed, human labor can be gradually phased out completely. Human labor is one major cause of price tags of products and services, besides how scarce the raw materials are and the energy consumed in making and distributing them. Today we have the technology to automate manufacturing and combined with advanced cybernation and software the whole process of procuring to manufacturing to distribution could be automated. This would truly set mankind free to live a fulfilled life without mindless labor or drudgery.

As far as energy is concerned once the same automation is applied to renewable resources like, tidal, wave, wind, solar or geothermal then price tags, debt, exchange and servitude would become obsolete as the very root – that is scarcity, has been abolished.

By combining the three steps mentioned above we will be able to abolish scarcity - the root to all evil on earth. Once everything is free then there would be no reason for theft, crime, or corruption. People will not need to be rich or powerful to live a happy and fulfilled life. Hence the need for politics or power struggles or power hoarding or greed will completely vanish. We will not need leaders to manage us or dictate how we live our lives. No one, after all, ever gets greedy about oxygen, although it is the most vital element to our survival. By using resources scientifically and responsibly everyone will be able to live a life of luxury that even a modern day billionaire may not be able to imagine.
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3. Do we have enough resources?
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There are more than enough resources to provide a very high standard of living for everyone on earth once ownership and hoarding by single entities, wasteful and destructive processes solely driven by profit which is a by-product of insecurities driven by scarcity are eliminated.
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4. Does this mean we will have to give up on our luxuries and manage with less?
o
On the contrary, in a resource based economy, life will be much more luxurious. To give an example the middle age kings had far less luxuries or entertainment compared to what a middle class person has today. Imagine going from one city to another in horseback. Imagine life without mobile phones, running water delivered right to our homes… This is because of technological breakthroughs. Besides even kings had insecurities those days, which will not be there in a resource based economy.
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5. If there is no price tag and everything is free, won’t people use up more resources and waste them?
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Do you take deeper breaths because oxygen is free? Would you eat twice if the food is free? Now take this same paradigm and apply it to everything else. If it was free would you really use up more, when you know whenever you need it or want it, it is available? On the contrary our current monetary system, uses up more resources and produces an insane amount of waste. For a company to make profit continuously, it has to design its products so that they break down after a point of time so more of its products are sold whether people need them or not. So they resort to advertizing
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6. If there’s no money, what incentive will people have?
o
The same incentive that Einstein had to invent… the same incentive that Picasso had to paint… the same incentive that a 4-year old possesses, in the free exploration of his world. Even adults, today, post all kinds of innovative ideas and inventions on the internet, for free. They have no other incentive except the desire to share a good thing. Human ingenuity, creativity, innovation and expertise will be the new incentives. As a species, our incentives were never money, power or property. They became so, in a monetary system that propagates scarcity, suffering and servitude. With RBE, humans will be free to develop their capabilities and contribute to society, for the good of all people.
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7. Some items will still be rare: How will there be abundance of those resources?
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A lot of the scarcity we know of today is perceived scarcity which corporations portray in order to increase the price. Oceans are virtually untapped and are huge reservoirs of minerals which have been washed down by rivers over billions of years. Mining them responsibly will clean up the oceans and at the same time provide resources for us to use. It is therefore important to catalogue all the earth’s natural resources in a worldwide survey. In a resource based economy, they will be constantly monitored and utilized based on the carrying capacity of Earth. However for those items, that are truly scarce, science and technology can develop alternatives before they run out.
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8. How long will this take? Will I see it in my lifetime?
o
That depends on how old you are now and of course what you do with the information you have gathered about The Venus Project. If you share it with people who do not know, and more and more people do the same, it can happen faster than you think. Today as on 22nd Jan 2010, there are 368,333 members worldwide in the zeitgeist movement and the numbers are growing exponentially. Considering the movement is only less than 3 years old, and the growth is exponential, it could definitely happen in your life time. Unfortunately it cannot be predicted as when exactly it will happen. But once the majority of the Earth’s population not only knows about it, and wants it to happen, given the Technology and Automation systems already existing with Humans, it could happen within a decade. So as you can see the most important activity right now is spreading this information to as many people as possible.
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9. What are the steps for this to be implemented?
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The first obvious step is awareness. This being a grass root movement on a global scale compounded by the fact that it will only work when majority of the earth’s people want it to happen, awareness is the most important step towards implementation. Of course we do not need everyone to join us at this stage, only a few can make a difference and the rest will join us along the way.

A simultaneous step is to gather and combine technology for a Resource Based Economy to operate seamlessly. Since, by the time everyone knows about this direction and wants this to happen, we would have globally connected to each other, then it would be a matter of planning the transition as a worldwide project, with various volunteer teams working on different directions. The resources, the technology, the people all exist even today, only they are stuck and left choking in the monetary system.

One more step for a Resource Based Economy to be implemented, is for the current monetary system to collapse. The monetary system fortunately or unfortunately is already on the verge of collapse although many may fail to see it. For a monetary system to work there has to be continuous consumption of goods and services and there has to be profit. Corporations are trying to cut costs through automation which will result in large scale unemployment and people’s purchasing power will decrease and the very products and services that were made cheap through automation will unfortunately not be affordable. The gap between the rich and poor will also increase resulting in poverty, crime, hunger and massive chaos.
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10. What about government? Who will make decisions if there are no borders?
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In a resource based economy, government will be through collective participation of the public, aided by advanced cybernation. A central cybernetic system will take into account information from all areas of the physical and social complex. It will monitor, compute and provide data, using advanced computing. Everyone will have access to this system. This will help eliminate decision-making on the basis of opinions, and will enable instead, decision-making based on science, logic and research. There will be no room for political opinions based on power or differential advantage. All conclusions will be drawn after considering the impacts on all aspects of life, environment, society, human factor, health, resource conservation and others. All solutions will first be tested before implementing on large scales. A cybernetic system will have the capability to balance multi-faceted criteria and compute massive amounts of information to arrive at holistic solutions, in a matter of seconds. No human can do that. It will be a central nervous system with a nerve center interconnecting the entire planet.
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11. Why not just get some honest people in politics instead of a government run through cybernation?
o
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even if we are able to find a self less person, chances of him or her surviving in politics is very rare, as the current corrupt system would not allow such a thing. If he or she somehow makes it to a position of power in a democracy, he or she will have very little impact alone when the rest of the system is corrupt. The only solution is a grass root movement that removes a small group of human beings from having access to power. It is not just the matter of their intent. They also lack the skills necessary to fix the world as we know it today. Most global problems are technical in nature. By making it political, we only end up treating symptoms, and causing more problems.
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12. How will we deal with crime or indecent human behavior?
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First of all, a Resource Based Economy eliminates the very need for crime. No one is born with hatred, corruption or evil – they pick these values up in their environment. By the removal of such values through education and practice, crimes will automatically decrease. As for the ones that do occur out of jealousy, greed or lust – such ‘criminals’ will be treated like patients, not prisoners. Medical and psychological research by experts will help cure the root of the person’s problem, not its symptoms.
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13. How will it be decided that who will get what and how much?
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Super computers will monitor the availability of resources and distribute them keeping in mind the carrying capacity of the planet and the people’s needs. In case a particular product is running short it will in advance either inform or make arrangements for alternates.
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14. How can we allow machines to run our lives?
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Machines are only there to aid. They will not be running our lives. A washing machine cleaning your clothes can only help you. It is no threat or is not running your life. It is just the matter of using machines to do the rest of the repeated and complicated work. Further if you are asking this question, also ask yourself this: who or what is running your life now? Unfortunately it is the money you earn or your income that is running your life. Only once the day to day work has been delegated to machines, human beings will be truly in control of their lives. Besides machines will perform better than humans once properly designed, without getting tired, without demanding a pay or asking for breaks.
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15. Who will do all the dirty work and unpleasant work?
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A lot of the dirty work can be removed at the design stage. The rest will be taken care by automation.
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16. How can we completely abolish human labor? That doesn’t seem possible.
o
Technology is abolishing human labor whether we like it or not. Most manufacturing processes are automated these days. Even the service sector is getting automated with more and more software applications. In an RBE such technology and those software applications will be available to all and the automation will happen much faster.
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17. Who will make the machines?
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We humans will make the machines. We’ll make factories that make the machines that will make the machines! Then we’ll automate those factories. The opportunities are limitless, when there are no constraints of scarcity.
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18. Who is funding the project?
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Most of the project is self funded by volunteers. There are no paid employees here so that largely reduces the need for funds.
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19. Why will the powerful politicians and corporations let this happen? Won’t they stop this movement?
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A grass root movement where everyone is participating is very difficult to stop especially when the powerful get their power from us. Besides, a Resource Base Economy will help those people as well. They won’t be left out. They would not have to worry about competition and would have a stress free life in such a society.
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20. What can I do?
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This is something that you have to come up with yourself. There are no leaders in this movement to dictate, what you should or should not do. If you make sure your understanding of the Zeitgeist movement is strong, you’ll arrive at decisions as to what you can do. Besides, if someone else told you what you can do or should do, then all you’d have is a job! Zeitgeist is a leaderless movement, by increasing your understanding and making constant efforts to improve it, you’ll be able to lead yourself. This is what makes this movement unique, unstoppable and indestructible.

http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.in/FAQ/


~JaZZy SaRaVaNa~