I’ve been busy all my life, working on solutions to problems.
I’m a social engineer, and I try to improve the world I live in.
A social engineer is one who concerns himself with
social phenomenon; what makes people the way they are.
What are the conditions responsible for human behavior?
And how can society be rearranged
to function with minimum pain and war?
Poverty, hunger, unemployment: how can we eliminate that?
This is what a social engineer tries to minimize.
I did a lot of the groundwork to try to find out
what it is that shapes human behavior.
I try to remove the conditions that produce
serial killers, gangsters, thieves, murderers...
I try to remove the conditions responsible
for human and aberrant behavior.
My partner is Roxanne Meadows.
She works with me, and this is what we set out to build –
a research center here – to try to arrive at the best ways
for changing society, in the shortest time possible.
We try to build models of a city system, and try to modify it,
and bring it down and simplify it,
so that it can be built all over the world.
And we try to work out systems and communication
for changing people in the shortest possible time;
changing their mental set, and their values.
The Venus Project is a method of attaining sustainability
for all people by giving them pointers such as:
We must declare the Earth as the common heritage
of all the world’s people.
We must remove all the artificial boundaries that separate people.
We must make things available to people without money.
We must eliminate social elitism, technical or otherwise.
So I said “Let’s take care of everybody,”
the inventors, the designers, the engineers,
and the people themselves. Make things available to them,
and that will change their behavior.
We’re working in the wrong direction,
and all over the world societies are collapsing,
going bankrupt, not able to work things out,
because they use political methods,
which was good as I said a hundred years ago,
but they do not work today.
So they’re failing all over the world.
The people have to lose their homes, their jobs,
then they have to lose confidence in the people they elected.
Once that happens, they are open to new ideas.
“Oh, you’ll never see that, not in a thousand years.
You’re a dreamer, you’re a utopian!
You’re a goddamn communist!” Or you’re this or that.
I believe all things change.
Utopia is an impossible concept.
It assumes that you can design a city that’s good for all time.
You can’t do that. Everything changes.
That’s the only constant in nature, and that’s change.
I don’t believe that the cities of the future will be fixed.
They will undergo changes continuously.
I do not believe there are any final frontiers.
I believe that men and women will continue to invent
newer and better systems, and there’s no limit to what humans can do.
The pain of watching the way the world is moving,
and the directions of war, and human suffering,
and the loss of lives, and the destroying of cities,
all of that motivates me
to try to do a better job than what politicians
are trying to accomplish without knowledge.
If enough people work at what I talk about,
I believe we can change the world. If they do nothing
nothing will happen.
I can’t accept the world as it is today,
so I do everything I can to build a world of sustainability,
for all people - not any single nation.
I don’t hope to gain anything, I just hope to do the best I can,
and whatever happens, happens.
www.thevenusproject.com