Jacque Fresco Lecture Series 'Good and Evil' July 8, 1976
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[J. Fresco] Okay. I want to get into some aspects
of assembling ideas:
how the brain selects again from a wide variety of things;
how a decision is forced from a wide variety of events.
It works on the principle, getting back to the old principle
of the apple tree, or the cherry tree, that I talked about.
I mentioned that a person would have to have
information that runs a broad scale.
Now a person with just a few bits of information
has a simple decision-making system.
And the simplest decision-making system is 'yes' or 'no'
and computers work on that basis,
the early computers, on and on.
And 'Yes and no' was a game people used to play years ago.
"Do you live more than ten blocks [away]?" Remember that? "Yes."
And you go on "No." And then they pretty much pinpoint the situation.
"Do you like apples?" "No." And then yes, no,
and then they come down to the kind of food you like.
It's kind of a long drawn out process to arrive at something.
So, [for] a simple person, here, between good and evil,
the decisions don't have shades of gray in it.
Even the religious system doesn't have
a person that rides between good and evil.
They don't talk of percentages, you see? The center line.
The religious people want people to be good.
And 'good' would have to do with
being god-like, and good
would have to do with the intent of the person,
not what they seemingly do.
If you go out with a minister and you help people
and you carry the bags and all that,
he says "You're a very good person."
But when you're not with the minister you may not do those things,
So it's pretty hard to tell whether a person's good or bad
even in the minister's terms, if you follow that.
And if a person makes fast decisions...
I'll show you how a person makes fast decisions.
This is a brand new Rolls Royce.
And you look at it and the guy wants to sell it for 20 bucks.
Well people make a fast decision,
because the direction is obvious in relation to
all the other events that they know of:
they can sell it, they can do whatever they can do with it.
I also mentioned in the past, during World War II,
in the South Pacific. I don't know why they did this but they
brought some sewing machines there, for the natives.
And they showed them how to use it
and they had power trucks and all that.
And after the armies left,
some people came back about 10, 15 years later,
and they didn't see any of the sewing machines.
They used them for anchors.
Because they didn't have any power,
and they weren't foot-operated.
At least if they were foot-operated, it'd be pretty good.
So they ran into a problem of use,
putting the thing to use. What good is an electric bulb...
What good is an electric bulb if you don't have any power?
I guess you didn't, because in the early days
all electric bulbs had a little tit sticking out like that.
Did anyone ever see one of those?
Do you remember the early lamps? Anybody here?
Jeez, all these young people. You never saw one Joe?
[Joe] No. Edison's lamp - the original lamp - has got that tit on it.
- No, they've been like that for many many years.
When they manufactured the bulb, they pulled it off like that
and there was a little curly cue here, like a Rupert tear.
Then you stuck it under water and broke that tip off...
[Woman] Yeah, I did that...
- and it filled with water completely.
Nobody's ever done that here? Just you. All right.
This shows how young you people really are.
- And then you used it for a barometer.
- Yes. Do you remember that? - Yeah.
- There were just a lot of different things people used to do with that.
All right, here's your decision-making system.
Like I said before, good and evil, according to religious people,
and then the center line here,
they say "Well, that's where people are.
They're somewhere between that," and that isn't true.
On Wednesday they're over here,
and then on Thursday they may ship back over to that point.
And then Friday they go to confession
and they're back over to this point.
And so all between good and evil,
which is ridiculous. Because on the day you die,
if you're evil you go to hell.
And if you're good on the day you die, you go to heaven.
Now when is the judgment made? Over a period of time?
And it seems to me that any person with religious training
is good and evil, equally
(evil meaning against
the patterns established).
And if it's even, then the score is zero.
You don't go to heaven or hell, you go to limbo.
That's between systems.
In our system here, we don't use the term "good and evil."
We use the term[s]:
"Is the process more effective than the earlier process?"
"Is the system better than the earlier system?"
"Does it take less effort to operate?"
Okay. If you work as a systems person
(meaning working with mechanical things),
you can reduce a process considerably;
the complication of the process.
Behaviorally, you can't. Does anybody know why?
In technology you can. I can make a sewing machine work
very smooth, and very fast,
up to the point that a sewing machine can work.
After that- in other words, if a sewing machine does a certain job,
as the needle moves up and down at a certain rate,
if you have a rotary spot-welder on the sewing machine, a seam welder,
it'll weld as fast as that thing can rotate.
But if you have a series of pulsating laser beams that weld,
you can weld 90 miles per hour!
Do you think you know what I mean?
If you just scan it with a laser beam
you can weld the join without moving the fabric.
In other words, if you had
a skirt on some kind of a mandrel or a maniquet,
and you wanted to seam it right here,
you do it with a laser beam right down,
faster than you can say "Jack Rabbit."
The idea of decision-making...
The reason that it takes time (the decision)
is the wiring in the human body is- like I said before,
information moves through the body with the speed of light.
But what they call consciousness,
moves with the speed of a roach.
Because even though your brain signals move very very fast,
they would be moving so fast,
you wouldn't know what the hell you were thinking about.
So you slow it up.
In the real world, we slow things up.
We slow it up so badly, that if you say to a person
"What do you want to do today?"
and the person looks around, hems and haws
and says all kinds of things, and tries to package
what they'd like to do so you might do it for them.
A child- if you say "What do you want to do?"
he'd say "Whatever I want to do."
And [you] say "What would that take?"
He says "It would take enormous sums of money."
So, you say "Well, we're not going to do that."
"Then why do you ask me what I want to do?
Tell me what you permit me to do today."
This way, if people say "What would you like to do today?"
and the person says "Just hang all day from a platform."
Well first of all, I'm not going to do that.
We're not really concerned with what people would like to do.
It'd be very difficult
to come into a situation where there are people,
and you want to begin to make contact with the other person -
this is what they are trying to do all the time:
make contact with the other person
for a purpose. Isn't that awful?
There's no contact made with another person
unless there's a purpose. "Pardon me sir." "Yes?"
"How do you get to 5th and Main?"
So, any contact you make has a purpose.
Only normal people have lost that.
They don't know that they make contact with purpose,
or they don't want to believe it.
They say "Well I just...
just make contact to be friendly; that's the purpose."
But there's no such thing as contact without purpose.
You pick something up
because you're curious or you have need for it,
but there's nobody...
Sometimes a person will pick it up because it's there,
because of what some people call
surplus energy, or hyperactive.
Kids certainly will touch or pick up things.
But children brought up in a ball
don't pick up anything or touch anything.
Once they've touched the surface of the ball
and they find it to be fairly uniform, they may lean against it.
Their curiosity is diminished to zero in a gray ball.
But if the ball has no lighting in it,
then they go back into themselves.
Do you know what that means?
If you're put it in a gray ball and fed,
you go back into your-.... you dwell in here;
the stimulus comes from the inside out.
And that's what a dream is:
when you don't have any external stimulus.
A dream is the automatic traveling of the circuitry
to wherever the hell the potential is.
Sometimes this flares up and the signal goes there.
Then something else flares up,
Now here's what that means.
. . .